As many of you know (where "you" is "people reading this who actually know who I am), I come from a secular Jewish family. Although we have some religious (even very religious) relatives, neither my parents nor my grandparents were religious ever. Not that spirituality wasn't important to them My grandparents both went deep into understanding by and for themselves the different spiritual issues that came to their mind, and that's one of the traits I most remember about them while I was growing up. But formal, organized religion was never much welcome in the family; again, each of us had their own ways to concile our needs and fears with what we thought, read and understood. This week is the Jewish celebration of Passover, or Pesaj as we call it (for which Passover is a direct translation, as Pesaj refers to the act of the angel of death passing over the houses of the sons of Israel during the tenth plague in Egypt; in Spanish, the name would be Pascua, which rather refers to the ritual sacrifice of a lamb that was done in the days of the great temple)... Anyway, I like giving context to what I write, but it always takes me off the main topic I want to share. Back to my family. I am a third-generation member of the Hashomer Hatzair zionist socialist youth movement; my grandmother was among the early Hashomer Hatzair members in Poland in the 1920s, both my parents were active in the Mexico ken in the 1950s-1960s (in fact, they met and first interacted there), and I was a member from 1984 until 1996. It was also thanks to Hashomer that my wife and I met, and if my children get to have any kind of Jewish contact in their lifes, I hope it will be through Hashomer as well. Hashomer is a secular, nationalist movement. A youth movement with over a century of history might seem like a contradiction. Over the years, of course, it has changed many details, but as far as I know, the essence is still there, and I hope it will continue to be so for good: Helping shape integral people, with identification with Judaism as a nation and not as a religion; keeping our cultural traits, but interpreting them liberally, and aligned with a view towards the common good Socialism, no matter how the concept seems pass nowadays. Colectivism. Inclusion. Peaceful coexistence with our neighbours. Acceptance of the different. I could write pages on how I learnt about each of them during my years in Hashomer, how such concepts striked me as completely different as what the broader Jewish community I grew up in understood and related to them... But again, I am steering off the topic I want to pursue. Every year, we used to have a third Seder (that is, a third Passover ceremony) at Hashomer. A third one, because as tradition mandates two ceremonies to be held outside Israel, and a movement comprised of people aged between 7 and 21, having a seder competing with the familiar one would not be too successful, we held a celebration on a following day. But it would never be the same as the "formal" Pesaj: For the Seder, the Jewish tradition mandates following the Hagada The Seder always follows a predetermined order (literally, Seder means order), and the Hagad (which means both legend and a story that is spoken; you can find full Hagadot online if you want to see what rites are followed; I found a seemingly well done, modern, Hebrew and English version, a more traditional one, in Hebrew and Spanish, and Wikipedia has a description including its parts and rites) is, quite understandably, full with religious words, praises for God, and... Well, many things that are not in line with Hashomer's values. How could we be a secular movement and have a big celebration full with praises for God? How could we yearn for life in the kibbutz distance from the true agricultural meaning of the celebration? The members of Hashomer Hatzair repeatedly took on the task (or, as many would see it, the heresy) of adapting the Hagada to follow their worldview, updated it for the twentieth century, had it more palatable for our peculiarities. Yesterday, when we had our Seder, I saw my father still has together with the other, more traditional Hagadot we use two copies of the Hagad he used at Hashomer Hatzair's third Seder. And they are not only beautiful works showing what they, as very young activists thought and made solemn, but over time, they are becoming historic items by themselves (one when my parents were still young janijim, in 1956, and one when they were starting to have responsabilities and were non-formal teachers or path-showers, madrijim, in 1959). He also had a copy of the Hagad we used in the 1980s when I was at Hashomer; this last one was (sadly?) not done by us as members of Hashomer, but prepared by a larger group between Hashomer Hatzair and the Mexican friends of Israeli's associated left wing party, Mapam. This last one, I don't know which year it was prepared and published on, but I remember following it in our ceremony. So, I asked him to borrow me the three little books, almost leaflets, and scanned them to be put online. Of course, there is no formal licensing information in them, much less explicit authorship information, but they are meant to be shared So I took the liberty of uploading them to the Internet Archive, tagging them as CC-0 licensed. And if you are interested in them, flowing over and back between Spanish and Hebrew, with many beautiful texts adapted for them from various sources, illustrated by our own with the usual heroic, socialist-inspired style, and lovingly hand-reproduced using the adequate technology for their day... Here they are:

• Hagada de Pesaj 1956, Hashomer Hatzair M xico
• Hagada de Pesaj 1959, Hashomer Hatzair M xico
• Hagada de Pesaj, Hashomer Hatzair y MAPAM M xico

I really enjoyed the time I took scanning and forming them, reading some passages, imagining ourselves and my parents as youngsters, remembering the beautiful work we did at such a great organization. I hope this brings this joy to others like it did to me. , . Once shomer, always shomer.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between February 21th and February 27th:

Toolchain fixes Didier Raboud uploaded pyppd/1.0.2-4 which makes PPD generation deterministic. Emmanuel Bourg uploaded plexus-maven-plugin/1.3.8-10 which sorts the components in the components.xml files generated by the plugin. Guillem Jover has implemented stable ordering for members of the control archives in .debs. Chris Lamb submitted another patch to improve reproducibility of files generated by cython.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: dctrl-tools, debian-edu, dvdwizard, dymo-cups-drivers, ekg2, epson-inkjet-printer-escpr, expeyes, fades, foomatic-db, galternatives, gnuradio, gpodder, gutenprint icewm, invesalius, jodconverter-cli latex-mk, libiio, libimobiledevice, libmcrypt, libopendbx, lives, lttnganalyses, m2300w, microdc2, navit, po4a, ptouch-driver, pxljr, tasksel, tilda, vdr-plugin-infosatepg, xaos. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• afterstep/2.2.12-7 by Robert Luberda.
• arachne-pnr/0~20150927gitefdb026-2 uploaded by Ruben Undheim, patch by Dhole.
• astroquery/0.3.1+dfsg-2 by Vincent Prat.
• compton-conf/0.1.0+20151226-2 uploaded by Alf Gaida, original patch by Dhole.
• disque/1.0~rc1-5 uploaded by Chris Lamb, issue identified by Reiner Herrmann.
• foo2zjs/20151024dfsg0-2 by Didier Raboud.
• gnugo/3.8-9 uploaded by Martin A. Godisch, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• hplip/3.16.2+repack0-4 by Didier Raboud.
• ibus-braille/0.1.2.99+git1.a95477d-4 by Samuel Thibault.
• iputils/3:20150815-1 by Noah Meyerhans, original patch by Juan Picca.
• jimtcl/0.76-2 by Didier Raboud.
• jodconverter/2.2.2-8 uploaded by Samuel Thibault, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• jts/1.14+ds-1~exp1 by Bas Couwenberg.
• loadlin/1.6f-5 by Samuel Thibault.
• lximage-qt/0.4.0+20160108-3 by ChangZhuo Chen ( ), patch by Dhole.
• modello/1.8.3-2 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• obconf-qt/0.9.0+20151227-2 uploaded by Alf Gaida, original patch by Dhole.
• pcmanfm-qt/0.10.1-2 uploaded by Alf Gaida, original patch by Dhole.
• pnm2ppa/1.13-7 by Didier Raboud.
• screengrab/1.95+20160128-2 uploaded by Alf Gaida, original patch by Dhole.
• sip4/4.17+dfsg-2 uploaded by Scott Kitterman, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• spades/3.7.0+dfsg-1 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• sphinxtrain/1.0.8+5prealpha-4 by Samuel Thibault.
• tcsh/6.18.01-5 uploaded by Thomas Lange, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• ubertooth/2015.09.R2-4 by Ruben Undheim.
• watchdog/5.15-1 by Michael Meskes.
• xfonts-a12k12/1-12 uploaded by Nobuhiro Iwamatsu, original patch by Chris Lamb.

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

• gridsite/2.2.6-2 by Mattias Ellert.
• gsoap/2.8.28-2 by Mattias Ellert.
• natbraille/2.0rc3-3 by Samuel Thibault.
• pairs/4:15.04.3-1 uploaded by Maximiliano Curia, original patch by Scarlett Clark.

tests.reproducible-builds.org The reproducibly tests for Debian now vary the provider of /bin/sh between bash and dash. (Reiner Herrmann)

diffoscope development diffoscope version 50 was released on February 27th. It adds a new comparator for PostScript files, makes the directory tests pass on slower hardware, and line ordering variations in .deb md5sums files will not be hidden anymore. Version 51 uploaded the next day re-added test data missing from the previous tarball. diffoscope is looking for a new primary maintainer.

Package reviews 87 reviews have been removed, 61 added and 43 updated in the previous week. New issues: captures_shell_variable_in_autofoo_script, varying_ordering_in_data_tar_gz_or_control_tar_gz. 30 new FTBFS have been reported by Chris Lamb, Antonio Terceiro, Aaron M. Ucko, Michael Tautschnig, and Tobias Frost.

Misc. The release team reported on their discussion about the topic of rebuilding all of Stretch to make it self-contained (in respect to reproducibility). Christian Boltz is hoping someone could talk about reproducible builds at the openSUSE conference happening June 22nd-26th in N rnberg, Germany.

Since moving to Japan, I got more and more interested in history, especially the recent history of the 20th century. The book I just finished, Ian Buruma (Wiki, home page) Wages of Guilt Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Independent, NYRB), has been a revelation for me. As an Austrian living in Japan, I am experiencing the discrepancy between these two countries with respect to their treatment of war legacy practically daily, and many of my blog entries revolve around the topic of Japanese non-reconciliation.

Willy Brandt went down on his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, after a functioning democracy had been established in the Federal Republic of Germany, not before. But Japan, shielded from the evil world, has grown into an Oskar Matzerath: opportunistic, stunted, and haunted by demons, which it tries to ignore by burying them in the sand, like Oskar s drum.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Clearing Up the Ruins

The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma s book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.

This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Romance of the Ruins

Only thinking about giving a halfway full account of this book is something impossible for me. The sheer amount of information, both on the German and Japanese side, is impressive. His incredible background (studies of Chinese literature and Japanese movie!) and long years as journalist, editor, etc, enriches the book with facets normally not available: In particular his knowledge of both the German and Japanese movie history, and the reflection of history in movies, were complete new aspects for me (see my recent post (in Japanese)). The book is comprised of four parts: The first with the chapters War Against the West and Romance of the Ruins; the second with the chapters Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nanking; the third with History on Trial, Textbook Resistance, and Memorials, Museums, and Monuments; and the last part with A Normal Country, Two Normal Towns, and Clearing Up the Ruins. Let us look at the chapters in turn:

• War Against the West
  This chapter sets the stage in two parts, Bonn and Tokyo, by comparing the reaction in these countries to the Iraq war. The German Betroffenheit (To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment.) as the core of German post-war politics, literature, and media is introduced. On the Japanese side the difficult and diverse situation and attitudes towards the Iraq (and other) wars, as well as the necessary bits of post-war history and development of the Japanese constitution.

  What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations.

• Romance of the Ruins
  This chapter focuses on the war and immediate post-war period with references to the specific literature and movies emerging out of the circumstances of destroyed countries who have lost the war.

  Hitler s doom and the emperor s speech, the end of one symbol and the odd continuity of another. Whatever their symbolic differences, both would be associated forever with ruins ruined cities, ruined people, ruined ideals.

• Auschwitz
  The psychological construction of war memorials in both Germanies, which focuses on the religious aspects, is discussed, followed by an excursion through post-war German literature and the long-term ignorance of anything related to the Holocaust.

  Here the past had fossilized into something monumental or, as Adorno would have put it, museal.

• Hiroshima Paralleling the previous chapter, Hiroshima introduces the simplistic and reduced focus of the Hiroshima memorials, mostly ignoring the foreign victims, many of them being Koreans forced to work in Japan, and concentrating on the Japanese martyrdom. Focusing on the atomic bomb event everything else is removed from the field of view.

  The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral. If this is true of Auschwitz, it is even more true of Hiroshima. The irony is that while there can be no justification for Auschwitz unless one believes in Hitler s murderous ideology, the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.

• Nanking
  The history and aftermath, as well as the attempts of rejection and refutation of the Nanking massacre are described. The Tokyo Trials and their critique by governmental scholars are touched, as well as bit of fresh air blowing through the Japanese society after the death of Hirohito, which lead to the publication of the records of Nanking by Azuma Shiro .

  Yet the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.

• History on Trial
  One of the central chapters in my opinion. It discusses and compares the two post-war trials: The Nurnberg trials in Germany and the Tokyo trials in Japan. In both cases the juridical value is questioned, focusing on the winner-looser situation of post-war times.

  The Nuremberg trials were to be a history lesson, then, as well as a symbolic punishment of the German people a moral history lesson cloaked in all the ceremonial trappings of due legal process. They were the closest that man, or at least the men belonging to the victorious powers, could come to dispensing divine justice.

  Also, the differences in war trials in East and West Germany is compared. The East Germany Waldheimer trials, as well as the thorough purge of Nazis from East German jurisdiction and politics, which was in stark contrast to both West German s very restricted trials, as well as Japan s absolute non-purge of criminals.

  As long as the emperor lived, Japanese would have trouble being honest about the past. For he had been formally responsible for everything, and by holding him responsible for nothing, everybody was absolved, except, of course, for a number of military and civilian scapegoats, Officers and Outlaws, who fell victim to victors justice.

• Textbook Resistance This chapter compares the representation of war and post-war times in the textbooks in West and East Germany and Japan. The interesting case of Ienaga Saburo and the year-long trials (1965-1993) around his history textbook are recounted. The ministry of education had forced a redaction of his history textbook to conform with the revisionist view onto history, deleting most passages that are critical of the Japanese position during the first half of the 20th century. This was one of the very few cases in Japanese post-war history where someone stood up against this revisionist view.

  The judges and some of the counsel for the ministry sat back with their eyes closed, in deep concentration, or fast asleep. Perhaps they were bored, because they had heard it all before. Perhaps they thought it was a pointless exercise, since they knew already how the case would end. But it was not a pointless exercise. For Ienaga Saburo had kept alive a vital debate for twenty-seven years. One cussed schoolteacher and several hundred supporters at the courthouse might not seem much, but it was enough to show that, this time, someone was fighting back.

• Memorials, Museums, and Monuments
  This chapter returns to war memorials: The change of meaning from post WW-1, which were memorials, to post WW-2 ones which became warning monuments, indicating the shift of attention and evaluation of war history in Germany. In contrast to this, Japan s quasi non-existence of war museums till the late 90ies, as well as the existence of the Yasukuni shrine honoring and celebrating besides other several A-class war criminals as deities.

  The tragedy is not just that the suicide pilots died young. Soldiers (and civilians) do that in wars everywhere. What is so awful about the memory of their deaths is the cloying sentimentality that was meant to justify their self-immolation. There is no reason to suppose they didn t believe in the patriotic gush about cherry blossoms and sacrifice, no matter how conventional it was at the time. Which was exactly the point: they were made to rejoice in their own death. It was the exploitation of their youthful idealism that made it such a wicked enterprise. And this point is still completely missed at the Peace Museum today.

• A Normal Country This chapter discusses the slow normalization of post-war situation after the 90ies, and all the hurdles that needed to be overcome: In the case of Germany the speech of Philipp Jenninger, then president of the Bundestag, is recounted. 50 years after the Kristallnacht he tried to give a speech of historicization , only to be find himself shunned and expelled due to the lack of Betroffenheit.

  It was not an ignoble enterprise, but he should have recognized that Historisierung, even forty-three years after the war, was still a highly risky business. For a normal society, a society not haunted by ghosts, cannot be achieved by normalizing history, or by waving cross and garlic. More the other way around: when society has become sufficiently open and free to look back, from the point of view neither of the victim nor of the criminal, but of the critic, only then will the ghosts be laid to rest.

  On the Japanese side the case of Motoshima Hitoshi , who dared to question Hirohito:

  Forty-three years have passed since the end of the war, and I think we have had enough chance to reflect on the nature of that war. From reading various accounts from abroad and having been a soldier myself, involved in military education, I do believe that the emperor bore responsibility for the war.

  which led to hitherto unseen of demonstration of extreme-right-wing groups issuing death treats that lead to a failed assassination of Motoshima, all under the completely complacent Japanese police and politics letting the right-wingers play their game.

  By breaking a Japanese taboo, Motoshima struck a blow for a more open, more normal political society, and very nearly lost his life. Jenninger, I like to think, wanted to strike a blow for the same, but failed, and lost his job. Perhaps he wasn t up to the task. Or perhaps even West Germany was not yet normal enough to hear his message.

• Two Normal Towns This chapter focuses on two rare cases of civil courage and political commitment: Anja Rosmus, who stepped forth as school child to rewrite the history of Passau. She unveiled the truth about deep involvement into the NS crimes of many inhabitants of Passau, a fact that was up to then covered up and purged from knowledge. She, too, received many death threads, including nailing a killed cat onto her door. The response of the head of the tourist office in Passau, Gottfried Dominik, speaks about the very peculiar attitude:

  I asked him again about the local camp and the small hidden memorial. Dominik showed signs of distress. It was difficult, he admitted, very difficult. I know what you mean. But let me give you my personal opinion. When you have a crippled arm, you don t really want to show it around. It was a low point in our history, back then. But it was only twelve years in thousands of years of history. And so people tend to hide it, just as a person with a crippled arm is not likely to wear a short-sleeved shirt.

  A similar incident is recounted on the Japanese side, the Hanaoka incident (detailed article) and its unveiling by Nozoe Kenji, where 800 Chinese slave workers, after escaping from a forced-work camp for the Kajima Corporation, where rabbit-hunted down and slaughtered. He, too, got death threats, and was virtually expelled from his home area because he dared to publish his findings.

  I think it is this basic distrust, this refusal to be told what to think by authorities, this cussed insistence on asking questions, on hearing the truth, that binds together Nozoe, Rosmus, and others like them. There are not many such people in Japan, or anywhere else for that matter. And I suspect they are not much liked wherever they live.

• Clearing Up the Ruins The last chapter tries to round up all the previous chapters, and look into the most recent history and near future. While not completely pessimistic with respect to Japan, the final chapter leaves clear statements on the current state of Japanese society and politics:

  The state was run by virtually the same bureaucracy that ran the Japanese empire, and the electoral system was rigged to help the same corrupt conservative party to stay in power for almost forty years. This arrangement suited the United States, as well as Japanese bureaucrats, LDP politicians, and the large industrial combines, for it ensured that Japan remained a rich and stable ally against Communism. But it also helped to stifle public debate and stopped the Japanese from growing up politically.

  His description of current Japanese society, written in 1995, is still hauntingly true in 2016:

  There is something intensely irritating about the infantilism of postwar Japanese culture: the ubiquitous chirping voices of women pretending to be girls; the Disneylandish architecture of Japanese main streets, where everything is reduced to a sugary cuteness; the screeching television talents rolling about and carrying on like kindergarten clowns; the armies of blue-suited salarymen straphanging on the subway trains, reading boys comics, the maudlin love for old school songs and cuddly mama-sans.

The boook somehow left me with a bleak impression of Japanese post-war times as well as Japanese future. Having read other books about the political ignorance in Japan (Norma Field s In the realm of a dying emperor, or the Chibana history), Buruma s characterization of Japanese politics is striking. He couldn t foresee the recent changes in legislation pushed through by the Abe government actually breaking the constitution, or the rewriting of history currently going on with respect to comfort women and Nanking. But reading his statement about Article Nine of the constitution and looking at the changes in political attitude, I am scared about where Japan is heading to:

The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre. The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
Ian Buruma, Wages of Guilt, Nanking

While there are signs of resistance in the streets of Japan (Okinawa and the Hanako bay, the demonstrations against secrecy law and reversion of the constitution), we are still to see a change influenced by the people in a country ruled and distributed by oligarchs. I don t think there will be another Nanking Massacre in the near future, but Buruma s books shows that we are heading back to a nationalistic regime similar to pre-war times, just covered with a democratic veil to distract critics.

---

I close with several other quotes from the book that caught my attention: In the preface and introduction:

[ ] mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.

The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany.

In Romance of the Ruins:

The point of all this is that Ikeda s promise of riches was the final stage of what came to be known as the reverse course, the turn away from a leftist, pacifist, neutral Japan a Japan that would never again be involved in any wars, that would resist any form of imperialism, that had, in short, turned its back for good on its bloody past. The Double Your Incomes policy was a deliberate ploy to draw public attention away from constitutional issues.

In Hiroshima:

The citizens of Hiroshima were indeed victims, primarily of their own military rulers. But when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an Aggressors Corner was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.

The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the flow of history .

In Nanking, by the governmental pseudo-historian Tanaka:

Unlike in Europe or China, writes Tanaka, you won t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan. This is because the Japanese have a different sense of values from the Chinese or the Westerners.

In History on Trial:

In 1950, Becker wrote that few things have done more to hinder true historical self-knowledge in Germany than the war crimes trials. He stuck to this belief. Becker must be taken seriously, for he is not a right-wing apologist for the Nazi past, but an eminent liberal.

There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a military campaign, not a planned genocide of a people that included the country s own citizens. And besides, those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as logs ) carried out by Unit 731 in Manchuria, were passed over during the Tokyo trial. The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731 of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors responsible were allowed to go free in exchange for their data.

Some Japanese have suggested that they should have conducted their own war crimes trials. The historian Hata Ikuhiko thought the Japanese leaders should have been tried according to existing Japanese laws, either in military or in civil courts. The Japanese judges, he believed, might well have been more severe than the Allied tribunal in Tokyo. And the consequences would have been healthier. If found guilty, the spirits of the defendants would not have ended up being enshrined at Yasukuni. The Tokyo trial, he said, purified the crimes of the accused and turned them into martyrs. If they had been tried in domestic courts, there is a good chance the real criminals would have been flushed out.

After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.

Emperor Hirohito was not Hitler; Hitler was no mere Shrine. But the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hider s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.

Emperor Hirohito, the shadowy figure who changed after the war from navy uniforms to gray suits, was not personally comparable to Hitler, but his psychological role was remarkably similar.

In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history. For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.

In Memorials, Museums, and Monuments:

If one disregards, for a moment, the differences in style between Shinto and Christianity, the Yasukuni Shrine, with its relics, its sacred ground, its bronze paeans to noble sacrifice, is not so very different from many European memorials after World War I. By and large, World War II memorials in Europe and the United States (though not the Soviet Union) no longer glorify the sacrifice of the fallen soldier. The sacrificial cult and the romantic elevation of war to a higher spiritual plane no longer seemed appropriate after Auschwitz. The Christian knight, bearing the cross of king and country, was not resurrected. But in Japan, where the war was still truly a war (not a Holocaust), and the symbolism still redolent of religious exultation, such shrines as Yasukuni still carry the torch of nineteenth-century nationalism. Hence the image of the nation owing its restoration to the sacrifice of fallen soldiers.

In A Normal Country:

The mayor received a letter from a Shinto priest in which the priest pointed out that it was un-Japanese to demand any more moral responsibility from the emperor than he had already taken. Had the emperor not demonstrated his deep sorrow every year, on the anniversary of Japan s surrender? Besides, he wrote, it was wrong to have spoken about the emperor in such a manner, even as the entire nation was deeply worried about his health. Then he came to the main point: It is a common error among Christians and people with Western inclinations, including so-called intellectuals, to fail to grasp that Western societies and Japanese society are based on fundamentally different religious concepts . . . Forgetting this premise, they attempt to place a Western structure on a Japanese foundation. I think this kind of mistake explains the demand for the emperor to bear full responsibility.

In Two Normal Towns:

The bust of the man caught my attention, but not because it was in any way unusual; such busts of prominent local figures can be seen everywhere in Japan. This one, however, was particularly grandiose. Smiling across the yard, with a look of deep satisfaction over his many achievements, was Hatazawa Kyoichi. His various functions and titles were inscribed below his bust. He had been an important provincial bureaucrat, a pillar of the sumo wrestling establishment, a member of various Olympic committees, and the recipient of some of the highest honors in Japan. The song engraved on the smooth stone was composed in praise of his rich life. There was just one small gap in Hatazawa s life story as related on his monument: the years from 1941 to 1945 were missing. Yet he had not been idle then, for he was the man in charge of labor at the Hanaoka mines.

In Clearing Up the Ruins:

But the question in American minds was understandable: could one trust a nation whose official spokesmen still refused to admit that their country had been responsible for starting a war? In these Japanese evasions there was something of the petulant child, stamping its foot, shouting that it had done nothing wrong, because everybody did it.

Japan seems at times not so much a nation of twelve-year-olds, to repeat General MacArthur s phrase, as a nation of people longing to be twelve-year-olds, or even younger, to be at that golden age when everything was secure and responsibility and conformity were not yet required.

For General MacArthur was right: in 1945, the Japanese people were political children. Until then, they had been forced into a position of complete submission to a state run by authoritarian bureaucrats and military men, and to a religious cult whose high priest was also formally chief of the armed forces and supreme monarch of the empire.

I saw Jew S ss that same year, at a screening for students of the film academy in Berlin. This showing, too, was followed by a discussion. The students, mostly from western Germany, but some from the east, were in their early twenties. They were dressed in the international uniform of jeans, anoraks, and work shirts. The professor was a man in his forties, a 68er named Karsten Witte. He began the discussion by saying that he wanted the students to concentrate on the aesthetics of the film more than the story. To describe the propaganda, he said, would simply be banal: We all know the what, so let s talk about the how. I thought of my fellow students at the film school in Tokyo more than fifteen years before. How many of them knew the what of the Japanese war in Asia.

I'm often using jenkins-job-builder to automatically create jenkins jobs since writing them in YAML is more comfortable then doing large amounts of jobs in the GUI, it serves consistency and helps automation. For views and build pipelines I so far resorted to other tools (like templates in the config management tool at use) but now there's jenkins-job-builder-addons by jimbydamonk. Creating a delivery pipeline view and the "All" view then gets as simple as:

- job:
    name: MyApp
    project-type: folder
    views:
      - delivery_pipeline:
          filter-executors: false
          filter-queue: false
          folder: true
          components:
            - name: Deploy
              first-job: app-deploy-test
          name: myapp-deploy-pipeline
          build-view-title: "MyApp Deploy Pipeline"
          number-of-pipelines: 3
          show-aggregated-pipeline: true
          number-of-columns: 1
          sorting: none
          show-avatars: false
          update-interval: 1
          allow-manual-triggers: true
          show-total-buildtime: true
          allow-rebuild: true
          allow-pipeline-start: true
      - all:
         folder: true
         name: All

This also uses the folder plugin to make sure the views end up in separate files. It currently needs a slightly patched jenkins-job-builder with this patch applied. Putting this here since I hit jenkins-job-builder-addons mostly by accident. Once jenkins-job-builder catched up I'll look into packaging this for Debian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few days ago, the French equivalent of Hacker News, called "Le Journal du Hacker", interviewed me about my work on OpenStack, my job at Red Hat and my self-published book The Hacker's Guide to Python. I've spent some time translating it into English so you can read it if you don't understand French! I hope you'll enjoy it.

Hi Julien, and thanks for participating in this interview for the Journal du Hacker. For our readers who don't know you, can you introduce you briefly?

You're welcome! My name is Julien, I'm 31 years old, and I live in Paris. I now have been developing free software for around fifteen years. I had the pleasure to work (among other things) on Debian, Emacs and awesome these last years, and more recently on OpenStack. Since a few months now, I work at Red Hat, as a Principal Software Engineer on OpenStack. I am in charge of doing upstream development for that cloud-computing platform, mainly around the Ceilometer, Aodh and Gnocchi projects.

Being myself a system architect, I follow your work in OpenStack since a while. It's uncommon to have the point of view of someone as implied as you are. Can you give us a summary of the state of the project, and then detail your activities in this project?

The OpenStack project has grown and changed a lot since I started 4 years ago. It started as a few projects providing the basics, like Nova (compute), Swift (object storage), Cinder (volume), Keystone (identity) or even Neutron (network) who are basis for a cloud-computing platform, and finally became composed of a lot more projects. For a while, the inclusion of projects was the subject of a strict review from the technical committee. But since a few months, the rules have been relaxed, and we see a lot more projects connected to cloud-computing joining us. As far as I'm concerned, I've started with a few others people the Ceilometer project in 2012, devoted to handling metrics of OpenStack platforms. Our goal is to be able to collect all the metrics and record them to analyze them later. We also have a module providing the ability to trigger actions on threshold crossing (alarm). The project grew in a monolithic way, and in a linear way for the number of contributors, during the first two years. I was the PTL (Project Technical Leader) for a year. This leader position asks for a lot of time for bureaucratic things and people management, so I decided to leave my spot in order to be able to spend more time solving the technical challenges that Ceilometer offered. I've started the Gnocchi project in 2014. The first stable version (1.0.0) was released a few months ago. It's a timeseries database offering a REST API and a strong ability to scale. It was a necessary development to solve the problems tied to the large amount of metrics created by a cloud-computing platform, where tens of thousands of virtual machines have to be metered as often as possible. This project works as a standalone deployment or with the rest of OpenStack. More recently, I've started Aodh, the result of moving out the code and features of Ceilometer related to threshold action triggering (alarming). That's the logical suite to what we started with Gnocchi. It means Ceilometer is to be split into independent modules that can work together with or without OpenStack. It seems to me that the features provided by Ceilometer, Aodh and Gnocchi can also be interesting for operators running more classical infrastructures. That's why I've pushed the projects into that direction, and also to have a more service-oriented architecture (SOA)

I'd like to stop for a moment on Ceilometer. I think that this solution was very expected, especially by the cloud-computing providers using OpenStack for billing resources sold to their customers. I remember reading a blog post where you were talking about the high-speed construction of this brick, and features that were not supposed to be there. Nowadays, with Gnocchi and Aodh, what is the quality of the brick Ceilometer and the programs it relies on?

Indeed, one of the first use-case for Ceilometer was tied to the ability to get metrics to feed a billing tool. That's now a reached goal since we have billing tools for OpenStack using Ceilometer, such as CloudKitty. However, other use-cases appeared rapidly, such as the ability to trigger alarms. This feature was necessary, for example, to implement the auto-scaling feature that Heat needed. At the time, for technical and political reasons, it was not possible to implement this feature in a new project, and the functionality ended up in Ceilometer, since it was using the metrics collected and stored by Ceilometer itself. Though, like I said, this feature is now in its own project, Aodh. The alarm feature is used since a few cycles in production, and the Aodh project brings new features on the table. It allows to trigger threshold actions and is one of the few solutions able to work at high scale with several thousands of alarms. It's impossible to make Nagios run with millions of instances to fetch metrics and triggers alarms. Ceilometer and Aodh can do that easily on a few tens of nodes automatically. On the other side, Ceilometer has been for a long time painted as slow and complicated to use, because its metrics storage system was by default using MongoDB. Clearly, the data structure model picked was not optimal for what the users were doing with the data. That's why I started Gnocchi last year, which is perfectly designed for this use case. It allows linear access time to metrics (O(1) complexity) and fast access time to the resources data via an index. Today, with 3 projects having their own perimeter of features defined and which can work together Ceilometer, Aodh and Gnocchi finally erased the biggest problems and defects of the initial project.

To end with OpenStack, one last question. You're a Python developer for a long time and a fervent user of software testing and test-driven development. Several of your blogs posts point how important their usage are. Can you tell us more about the usage of tests in OpenStack, and the test prerequisites to contribute to OpenStack?

I don't know any project that is as tested on every layer as OpenStack is. At the start of the project, there was a vague test coverage, made of a few unit tests. For each release, a bunch of new features were provided, and you had to keep your fingers crossed to have them working. That's already almost unacceptable. But the big issue was that there was also a lot of regressions, et things that were working were not anymore. It was often corner cases that developers forgot about that stopped working. Then the project decided to change its policy and started to refuse all patches new features or bug fix that would not implement a minimal set of unit tests, proving the patch would work. Quickly, regressions were history, and the number of bugs largely reduced months after months. Then came the functional tests, with the Tempest project, which runs a test battery on a complete OpenStack deployment. OpenStack now possesses a complete test infrastructure, with operators hired full-time to maintain them. The developers have to write the test, and the operators maintain an architecture based on Gerrit, Zuul, and Jenkins, which runs the test battery of each project for each patch sent. Indeed, for each version of a patch sent, a full OpenStack is deployed into a virtual machine, and a battery of thousands of unit and functional tests is run to check that no regressions are possible. To contribute to OpenStack, you need to know how to write a unit test the policy on functional tests is laxer. The tools used are standard Python tools, unittest for the framework and tox to run a virtual environment (venv) and run them. It's also possible to use DevStack to deploy an OpenStack platform on a virtual machine and run functional tests. However, since the project infrastructure also do that when a patch is submitted, it's not mandatory to do that yourself locally.

The tools and tests you write for OpenStack are written in Python, a language which is very popular today. You seem to like it more than you have to, since you wrote a book about it, The Hacker's Guide to Python, that I really enjoyed. Can you explain what brought you to Python, the main strong points you attribute to this language (quickly) and how you went from developer to author?

I stumbled upon Python by chance, around 2005. I don't remember how I hear about it, but I bought a first book to discover it and started toying with that language. At that time, I didn't find any project to contribute to or to start. My first project with Python was rebuildd for Debian in 2007, a bit later. I like Python for its simplicity, its object orientation rather clean, its easiness to be deployed and its rich open source ecosystem. Once you get the basics, it's very easy to evolve and to use it for anything, because the ecosystem makes it easy to find libraries to solve any kind of problem. I became an author by chance, writing blog posts from time to time about Python. I finally realized that after a few years studying Python internals (CPython), I learned a lot of things. While writing a post about the differences between method types in Python which is still one of the most read post on my blog I realized that a lot of things that seemed obvious to me where not for other developers. I wrote that initial post after thousands of hours spent doing code reviews on OpenStack. I, therefore, decided to note all the developers pain points and to write a book about that. A compilation of what years of experience taught me and taught to the other developers I decided to interview in the book.

I've been very interested by the publication of your book, for the subject itself, but also the process you chose. You self-published the book, which seems very relevant nowadays. Is that a choice from the start? Did you look for an editor? Can you tell use more about that?

I've been lucky to find out about others self-published authors, such as Nathan Barry who even wrote a book on that subject, called Authority. That's what convinced me it was possible and gave me hints for that project. I've started to write in August 2013, and I ran the firs interviews with other developers at that time. I started to write the table of contents and then filled the pages with what I knew and what I wanted to share. I manage to finish the book around January 2014. The proof-reading took more time than I expected, so the book was only released in March 2014. I wrote a complete report on that on my blog, where I explain the full process in detail, from writing to launching. I did not look for editors though I've been proposed some. The idea of self-publishing really convince me, so I decided to go on my own, and I have no regret. It's true that you have to wear two hats at the same time and handle a lot more things, but with a minimal audience and some help from the Internet, anything's possible! I've been reached by two editors since then, a Chinese and Korean one. I gave them rights to translate and publish the books in their countries, so you can buy the Chinese and Korean version of the first edition of the book out there. Seeing how successful it was, I decided to launch a second edition in Mai 2015, and it's likely that a third edition will be released in 2016.

Nowadays, you work for Red Hat, a company that represents the success of using Free Software as a commercial business model. This company fascinates a lot in our community. What can you say about your employer from your point of view?

It only has been a year since I joined Red Hat (when they bought eNovance), so my experience is quite recent. Though, Red Hat is really a special company on every level. It's hard to see from the outside how open it is, and how it works. It's really close to and it really looks like an open source project. For more details, you should read The Open Organization, a book wrote by Jim Whitehurst (CEO of Red Hat), which he just published. It describes perfectly how Red Hat works. To summarize, meritocracy and the lack of organization in silos is what makes Red Hat a strong organization and puts them as one of the most innovative company. In the end, I'm lucky enough to be autonomous for the project I work on with my team around OpenStack, and I can spend 100% working upstream and enhance the Python ecosystem.

Wow, it's been quite a long time since I've posted something here. Everything is going well -- I'm just very, very engrossed with the new job, since I'm still in exponential ramp-up mode. It's lasting for longer than I expected, although my expectations didn't have much basis since this is the first time I've started a new job in 17 years. I'm feeling more and more capable every day, but the combination of a very heavily social learning process, a lot of new technical areas to learn, and not having taken a vacation since last June means that my weekends are spent just passively watching things and zoning. Not sure yet how long that will last, and I don't want to make any predictions, although I do have my first significant vacation coming up next month. Anyway, book reading and buying has continued, although I'm again far behind on writing reviews. With luck, I'll be writing one of those (for posting later) right after writing this post. Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow (non-fiction)
Elizabeth Bear Karen Memory (sff)
Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (sff)
Fred Clark The Anti-Christ Handbook (non-fiction)
Charles de Lint The Very Best of Charles de Lint (sff)
S.L. Huang A Neurological Study on the Effects... (sff)
S.L. Huang Half Life (sff)
Kameron Hurley The Mirror Empire (sff)
Sophie Lack Dissonance (sff)
Sophie Lack Imbalance (sff)
Susan R. Matthews An Exchange of Hostages (sff)
Kaoru Mori A Bride's Story #1 (graphic novel)
Donald Shoup The High Cost of Free Parking (non-fiction)
Jo Walton The Just City (sff) Pretty nice variety of different stuff from a huge variety of recommendation sources. I've already read the Chambers (and can recommend it). A review will be forthcoming.

Release 0.6.7 of digest package is now on CRAN and in Debian. Jim Hester was at it again and added murmurHash. I cleaned up several sets of pedantic warnings in some of the source files, updated the test reference out, and that forms version 0.6.7. CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version.

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

A new release 0.6.6 of the digest package is now on CRAN and in Debian. This release brings the xxHash non-cryptographic hash function by Yann Collet, thanks to several pull requests by Jim Hester. After the upload of version 0.6.5 we uncovered another lovely non-standardness of Windoze: you cannot format unsigned long long via printf() format strings. Great. Luckily Jim found a quick (and portable) fix via the inttypes.h header, and that went into the 0.6.6 release. The release also contains an earlier extension for hmac() to also cover crc32 hashes, kindly provided by Suchen Jin. I also made a number of small internal changes such as

• switching (compiled) function registration to package load via a the useDynLib() declaration in NAMESPACE,
• (finally!!) formating code to proper four-space indentation,
• adding some documentation around Jim's pull request, and
• adding a few GPL copyright headers.

CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version.

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

Following the lead of my dear friend Daniel and his fantastic and addictive Summing up series, here s a link pack of recent stuff I read around the web. Link pack is definitely a terrible name, but I m working on it.

---

How to Silence Negative Thinking
On how to avoid the pitfall of being a Negatron and not an Optimist Prime. You might be your own worst enemy and you might not even know it:

Psychologists use the term automatic negative thoughts to describe the ideas that pop into our heads uninvited, like burglars, and leave behind a mess of uncomfortable emotions. In the 1960s, one of the founders of cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck, concluded that ANTs sabotage our best self, and lead to a vicious circle of misery: creating a general mindset that is variously unhappy or anxious or angry (take your pick) and which is (therefore) all the more likely to generate new ANTs. We get stuck in the same old neural pathways, having the same negative thoughts again and again.

Meet Harlem s Official Street Photographer
A man goes around Harlem with his camera, looking to give instead of taking. Makes you think about your approach to people and photography, things can be simpler. Kinda like Humans of New York, but in Harlem. And grittier, and on film but as touching, or more:

I tell people that my camera is a healing mechanism, Allah says. Let me photograph it and take it away from you.

What Happens When We Let Industry and Government Collect All the Data They Want
Why having nothing to hide is not about the now, but about the later. It s not that someone is going to judge for pushing every detail of your life to Twitter and Instagram, it s just that something you do might be illegal a few years later:

There was a time when it was essentially illegal to be gay. There was a time when it was legal to own people and illegal for them to run away. Sometimes, society gets it wrong. And it s not just nameless bureaucrats; it s men like Thomas Jefferson. When that happens, strong privacy protections including collection controls that let people pick who gets their data, and when allow the persecuted and unpopular to survive.

The Sex-Abuse Scandal Plaguing USA Swimming
Abusive coaches and a bullying culture in sports training are the perfect storm for damaging children. And it s amazing the extent to which a corporation or institution is willing to look the other way, as long as they save face. Very long piece, but intriguing to read. What Cities Would Look Like if Lit Only by the Stars
Thierry Cohen goes around the world and builds beautiful and realistic composite images of how would big cities look like if lit only by stars. The original page has some more cities: Villes teintes (Darkened Cities). On Muppets & Merchandise: How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business
Lessons from how Jim Henson managed to juggle both art and business without selling out for the wrong reasons. Really interesting, and reminds you to put Henson in perspective as a very smart man who managed to convince everyone to give him money for playing with muppets. The linked video on How the Muppet Show is Made is also cool. Made me curious enough to get the book. Barbie, Remixed: I (really!) can be a computer engineer
Mattel launched the most misguided book about empowering Barbie to be anything but a computer engineer in a book about being a computer engineer. The internet did not disappoint and fixed the problem within hours. There s now even an app for that (includes user submitted pages).

A few months ago I was showing my friend Bruno Souza the work I had been doing with my childhood friend and robotics genius, David Hanson. I had been watching what David was going through in his process of creating life-like robots with the limited industrial software available for motor control. I had suggested to David that binding motors to Blender control structures was a genuinely viable possibility. David talked with his forward looking CEO, Jong Lee, and they were gracious enough to invite me to Hong Kong to make this exciting idea a reality. Working closely the HRI team (Vytas, Gabrielos, Fabien and Davide) with David s friend and collaborators at OpenCog (Ben Goertzel, Mandeep, David, Jamie, Alex and Samuel) a month long creative hack-fest yielded pretty amazing results. Bruno is an avid puppeteer, a global organizer of java user groups and creator of Juggy the Java Finch, mascot of Java users and user groups everywhere. We started talking about how cool it would be to have a robot version of Juggy. When I was in China I had spent a little time playing with Mark Tilden s RSMedia and various versions of David s hobby servo based emotive heads. Bruno and I did a little research into the ROS Java bindings for the Robot Operating System and decided that if we could make that part of the picture we had a great and fun idea for a JavaOne talk. Hunting and gathering I tracked down a fairly priced RSMedia in Alaska, Bruno put a pair of rubber Juggy puppet heads in the mail and we were on our way.
We had decided that we wanted RoboJuggy to be able to run about untethered and the new RaspberryPi B+ seemed like the perfect low power brain to make that happen. I like the Debian based Raspbian distributions but had lately started using the netinst Pi images. These get your Pi up and running in about 15 minutes with a nicely minimalistic install instead of a pile of dependencies you probably don t need. I d recommend anyone interested I m duplicating our work to stay their journey there: Raspbian UA Net Installer Robots seem like an embedded application but ROS only ships packages for Ubuntu. I was pleasantly surprised that there are very good instructions for building ROS from source on the Pi. I ended up following these instructions: Setting up ROS Hydro on the Raspberry Pi Building from source means that all your install ends up being isolated (in ROS speak) and your file locations and build instructions end up being subtly current. As explained in the linked article, this process is also very time consuming. One thing I would recommend once you get past this step is to use the UNIX dd command to back up your entire SD card to a desktop. This way if you make a mess of things in later steps you can restore your install to a pristine Raspbian+ROS install. If your SD drive was on /dev/sdb you might use something like this to do the job:

sudo dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdb   gzip > /home/your_username/image date +%d%m%y .gz

Getting Java in the mix Once you have your Pi all set up with minimal Raspbian and ROS you are going to want a Java VM. The Pi runs the ARM CPU so you need the corresponding version of Java. I tried getting things going initially with OpenJDK and I had some issues with that. I will work on resolving that in the future because I would like to have a 100% Free Software kit for this but since this was for JavaOne I also wanted JDK8, which isn t available in Debian yet. So, I downloaded the Oracle JDK8 package for ARM. Java 8 JDK for ARM At this point you are ready to start installing the ROS Java packages. I m pretty sure the way I did this initially is wrong but I was trying to reconcile the two install procedures for ROS Java and ROS Hydro for Raspberry Pi. I started by following these directions for ROS Java but with a few exceptions (you have to click the install from source link in the page to see the right stuff: Installing ROS Java on Hydro Now these instructions are good but this is a Pi running Debian and not an Ubuntu install. You won t run the apt-get package commands because those tools were already installed in your earlier steps. Also, this creates its own workspace and we really want these packages all in one workspace. You can apparently chain workspaces in ROS but I didn t understand this well enough to get it working so what I did was this:

> mkdir -p ~/rosjava 
> wstool init -j4 ~/rosjava/src https://raw.github.com/rosjava/rosjava/hydro/rosjava.rosinstall
> source ~/ros_catkin_ws/install_isolated/setup.bash > cd ~/rosjava # Make sure we've got all rosdeps and msg packages.
> rosdep update 
> rosdep install --from-paths src -i -y

and then copied the sources installed into ~/rosjava/src into my main ~/ros_catkin_ws/src. Once those were copied over I was able to run a standard build.

> catkin_make_isolated --install

Like the main ROS install this process will take a little while. The Java gradle builds take an especially long time. One thing I would recommend to speed up your workflow is to have an x86 Debian install (native desktop, QEMU instance, docker, whatever) and do these same build from source installs there. This will let you try your steps out on a much faster system before you try them out in the Pi. That can be a big time saver. Putting together the pieces Around this time my RSMedia had finally showed up from Alaska. At first I thought I had a broken unit because it would power up, complain about not passing system tests and then shut back down. It turns out that if you just put the D batteries in and miss the four AAs that it will kind of pretend to be working so watch for that mistake. Here is a picture of the RSMedia when it first came out of the box: Other parts were starting to roll in as well. The rubber puppet heads had made their way through Brazilian customs and my Pololu Mini Maestro 24 had also shown up as well as the my servo motors and pan and tilt camera rig. I had previously bought a set of 10 motors for goofing around so I bought the pan and tilt rig by itself for about $5(!) but you can buy a complete set for around $25 from a number of EBay stores. Complete pan and tilt rig with motors for $25 A bit more about the Pololu. This astonishing little motor controller costs about $25 and gives you control of 24 motors with an easy to use and high level serial API. It is probably also possible to control these servos directly from the Pi and eliminate this board but that will be genuinely difficult because of the real-time timing issues. For $25 this thing is a real gem and you won t regret buying it. Now it was time to start dissecting the RSMedia and getting control of its brain. Unfortunately a lot of great information about the RSMedia has floated away since it was in its heyday 5 years ago but there is still some solid information out there that we need to round up and preserve. A great resource is the SourceForge based website here at http://rsmediadevkit.sourceforge.net. That site has links to a number of useful sites. You will definitely want to check out their wiki. To disassemble the RSMedia I followed their instructions. I will say, it would be smart to take more pictures as you are going because they don t take as many as they should. I took pictures of each board and its associated connections as dismantled the unit and that helped me get things back together later. Another important note is that if all you want to do is solder onto the control board and not replace the head then its feasible to solder the board in place without completely disassembling the unit. Here are some photos of the dis-assembly: Now I also had to start adjusting the puppet head, building an armature for the motors to control it and hooking it into the robot. I need to take some more photos of the actual armature. I like to use cardboard for this kind of stuff because it is so fast to work with and relatively strong. One trick I have also learned about cardboard is that if you get something going with it and you need it to be a little more production strength you can paint it down with fiberglass resin from your local auto store. Once it dries it becomes incredibly tough because it soaks through the fibers of the cardboard and hardens around them. You will want to do this in a well ventilated area but its a great way to build super tough prototypes. Another prototyping trick I can suggest is using a combination of Velcro and zipties to hook things together. The result is surprisingly strong and still easy to take apart if things aren t working out. Velcro self-adhesive pads stick to rubber like magic and that is actually how I hooked the jaw servo onto the mask. You can see me torturing its first initial connection here: Since the puppet head had come all the way from Brazil I decided to cook some chicken hearts in the churrascaria style while I worked on them in the garage. This may sound gross but I m telling you, you need to try it! I soaked mine in soy sauce, Sriracha and chinese cooking wine. Delicious but I digress. As I was eating my chicken hearts I was also connecting the pan and tilt armature onto the puppet s jaw and eye assembly. It took me most of the evening to get all this going but by about one in the morning things were starting to look good! I only had a few days left to hack things together before JavaOne and things were starting to get tight. I had so much to do and had also started to run into some nasty surprises with the ROS Java control software. It turns out that ROS Java is less than friendly with ROS message structures that are not built in . I had tried to follow the provided instructions but was not (and still have not) been able to get that working. Using unofficial messages with ROS Java I still needed to get control of the RSMedia. Doing that required the delicate operation of soldering to its control board. On the board there are a set of pins that provide a serial interface to the ARM based embedded Linux computer that controls the robot. To do that I followed these excellent instructions: Connecting to the RSMedia Linux Console Port After some sweaty time bent over a magnifying glass I had success: I had previously purchased the USB-TTL232 accessory described in the article from Dallas awesome Tanner Electronics store in Dallas. If you are a geek I would recommend that you go there and say hi to its proprietor (and walking encyclopedia of electronics knowledge) Jim Tanner. It was very gratifying when I started a copy of minicom, set it to 115200, N, 8, 1, plugged in the serial widget to the RSMedia and booted it up. I was greeted with a clearly recognizable Linux startup and console prompt. At first I thought I had done something wrong because I couldn t get it to respond to commands but I quickly realized I had flow control turned on. Once turned off I was able to navigate around the file system, execute commands and have some fun. A little research and I found this useful resource which let me get all kinds of body movements going: A collection of useful commands for the RSMedia At this point, I had a usable set of controls for the body as well as the neck armature. I had a controller running the industry s latest and greatest robotics framework that could run on the RSMedia without being tethered to power and I had most of a connection to Java going. Now I just had to get all those pieces working together. The only problem is that time was running out and I only had a couple of days until my talk and still had to pack and square things away at work. The last day was spent doing things that I wouldn t be able to do on the road. My brother Erik (and fantastic artist) came over to help paint up the juggy head and fix the eyeball armature. He used a mix of oil paint, rubber cement which stuck to the mask beautifully. I bought battery packs for the USB Pi power and the 6v motor control and integrated them into a box that could sit below the neck armature. I fixed up a cloth neck sleeve that could cover everything. Luckily during all this my beautiful and ever so supportive girlfriend Becca had helped me get packed or I probably wouldn t have made it out the door. Welcome to San Francisco THIS ARTICLE IS STILL BEING WRITTEN

Before I start a short listing of (some of) the stuff I did during Debconf 14, I d like to say how much I enjoyed everyone there. You guys (all of you, really!) are just awesome, and it s always a real pleasure to see you all, each time. Anyway, here s a bits of the stuff I did. 1/ packaging of Google Cloud Engine client tools. Thanks to the presence of Eric and Jimmy, I was able to finish the work I started at Debconf 13 last year. All python modules are packaged and uploaded. Only the final client (the gcloud command line utility) isn t uploaded, even though it s already packaged. The reason is that this client downloads stuff from internet, so I need to get the full, bundled, version of it, to avoid this. Eric gave me the link, I just didn t have time to finish it yet. Though the (unfinished) package is already in the Git in Alioth. 2/ Tasksel talks We discussed improvements in Tasksel both during the conference, and later (in front of beers ). I was able to add a custom task on a modified version of the Tasksel package for my own use. I volunteered myself for adding a more task option in Tasksel for Jessie+1 because I really would like to see this feature, and nobody raised hand, but honestly, I have no idea how to do it, and therefore, I m not sure I ll be able to do so. We ll see Anyway, before this happen, we must make sure that we know what kind of tasks we want in this more tasks screen, otherwise it d be useless work for nothing. Therefore, I have setup a wiki page. Please edit the page and drop your ideas there. I ve already added entries for desktops and Debian blends, but I m sure there s more that we could add. 3/ Custom Debian CD I started experimentation on building my own Debian Wheezy CD image (well, DVD, since the resulting image is nearly 2GB). This was fun, but I am still having the issue that the installer fails to install Dash, so the CD is still unusable. I ll try to debug it. Oh I nearly forgot of course , the ISO image aims at including all OpenStack Icehouce packages backported to Wheezy, and the goal was to include the above custom Tasksel task, with an OpenStack proxy node task, and a OpenStack compute task. Let s hope I can figure out what the issue is, and finally release it. 4/ OpenStack talk Nothing special to say, just watch the video. I hope my talk was interesting enough. Of course, after watching myself, I hate everything I see, and would like to correct so many mistakes, but that s the usual, I guess. 5/ Some RC fixing Thanks to the nice work of our DPL rebuilding all the archive, I had to fix a couple of FTBFS issues on my own packages. 3 of them have been easy to fix (2 missing build-dependencies which I missed because my automated build environment has them by default, and a unit test failure), I still don t understand what s going on with Ceilometer. I also NMU-ed transmission (switching from 2.82 to 2.84, as upstream had the bugfix, and current maintainer was not responsive) which was the last blocker for the miniupnpc transition to Jessie. After the 5 days delay of the upload, it went in Sid, then migrated to Jessie, together with the miniupnpc library. I also fixed a trivial RC bug with python3-webob. 6/ Python team meeting It was nice to see everyone, and hopefully, we ll soon implement what we discussed. I hope to start migrating some of my OpenStack dependencies to the team once we move to Git (though please don t expect this to happen before the Juno release, which keeps me very busy these days). There s probably more stuff which I did during Debconf 14 (hacking or otherwise), but either it s not worth sharing, or I can t remember :)

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

A common theme over the last few decades was that we could afford to simply sit back and let computer (hardware) engineers take care of increases in computing speed thanks to Moore's law. That same line of thought now frequently points out that we are getting closer and closer to the physical limits of what Moore's law can do for us. So the new best hope is (and has been) parallel processing. Even our smartphones have multiple cores, and most if not all retail PCs now possess two, four or more cores. Real computers, aka somewhat decent servers, can be had with 24, 32 or more cores as well, and all that is before we even consider GPU coprocessors or other upcoming changes. And sometimes our tasks are embarassingly simple as is the case with many data-parallel jobs: we can use higher-level operations such as those offered by the base R package parallel to spawn multiple processing tasks and gather the results. I covered all this in some detail in previous talks on High Performance Computing with R (and you can also consult the Task View on High Performance Computing with R which I edit). But sometimes we can't use data-parallel approaches. Hence we have to redo our algorithms. Which is really hard. R itself has been relying on the (fairly mature) OpenMP standard for some of its operations. Luke Tierney's (awesome) keynote in May at our (sixth) R/Finance conference mentioned some of the issues related to OpenMP. One which matters is that OpenMP works really well on Linux, and either not so well (Windows) or not at all (OS X, due the usual issue with the gcc/clang switch enforced by Applem but the good news is that the OpenMP toolchain is expected to make it to OS X is some more performant form "soon"). R is still expected to make wider use of OpenMP in future versions. Another tool which has been around for a few years, and which can be considered to be equally mature is the Intel Threaded Building Blocks library, or TBB. JJ recently started to wrap this up for use by R. The first approach resulted in a (now superseded, see below) package TBB. But hardware and OS issues bite once again, as the Intel TBB is not really building that well for the Windows toolchain used by R (and based on MinGW). (And yes, there are two more options. But Boost Threads requires linking which precludes easy use as e.g. via our BH package. And C++11 with its threads library (based on Boost Threads) is not yet as widely available as R and Rcpp which means that it is not a real deployment option yet.) Now, JJ, being as awesome as he is, went back to the drawing board and integrated a second threading toolkit: TinyThread++, a small header-only library without further dependencies. Not as feature-rich as Intel Threaded Building Blocks, but at least available everywhere. So a new package RcppParallel, so far only on GitHub, wraps around both TinyThread++ and Intel Threaded Building Blocks and offers a consistent interface available on all platforms used by R. Better still, JJ also authored several pieces demonstrating this new package for the Rcpp Gallery:

• A parallel matrix transformation
• A parallel vector summation
• A parallel inner product
• Parallel Distance Matrix Calculation with RcppParallel

All four are interesting and demonstrate different aspects of parallel computing via RcppParallel. But the last article is key. Based on a question by Jim Bullard, and then written with Jim, it shows how a particular matrix distance metric (which is missing from R) can be implemented in a serial manner in both R, and also via Rcpp. The key implementation, however, uses both Rcpp and RcppParallel and thereby achieves a truly impressive speed gain as the gains from using compiled code (via Rcpp) and from using a parallel algorithm (via RcppParallel) are multiplicative! Between JJ's and my four-core machines the gain was between 200 and 300 fold---which is rather considerable. For kicks, I also used a much bigger machine at work which came in at an even larger speed gain (but gains become clearly sublinear as the number of cores increases; there are however some tuning parameters). So these are exciting times. I am sure there will be lots more to come. For now, head over to the RcppParallel package and start playing. Further contributions to the Rcpp Gallery are not only welcome but strongly encouraged.

Jim has been busy as part of the procps-ng team that looks after top. Basically all the changes you find in top from around 2.7 or so are by him. Not satisfied enough with fixing top, making it faster and showing more fields, he has given us CPU and memory graphs. He also thinks I don t have enough colours (or as he would put it colors) on my top output so I ve posted what the new top looks like for me so you can see the graphs and he can see my colours. I think it is both colourful and useful addition. The colours have been available for a while now and the graphs will appear in the next upstream release of procps-ng.

Today I attended the Don't Spy On Us campaign's Day Of Action at Shoreditch Town Hall in London. I'm not sure how much actual action there was, but the talking was interesting. Retrospective Day of Action drinking game: drink every time you hear the phrase "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." The spooks have a really good marketing department. I don't write a lot on the internet any more - something I regret, actually. It can't even be because there are alternative places I am writing, because over the last couple of years I have been closing most of my social media accounts. I just share much less of myself online. On the internet, nothing is ephemeral. Bruce Schneier says so. Choose your words carefully. The thing about blogging is that it's so public. It's often tied to the writer's real-life identity. One of the valuable things about social media services is that they supposedly let you restrict who can read your words - the trade-off being that you must also grant access to advertisers, spies, cybercriminals... Most memorable moments of the day:

• Alan Rusbridger contrasting how he felt as a journalist working on the Snowden stories when in the US versus the UK - when in the UK, it's like "you know something bad is going to happen".
• Being asked to leave a tiny meeting room, in order that I could show my ticket for the next talk, only to retake the seat where I had left my bag. Go bureaucracy!
• Shami Chakrabarti leaving in her sunglasses like a rockstar.

In general, there were lots of famous people walking around as if they were normal. I was in the same room as Cory Doctorow, Jimmy Wales and Bruce Schneier at the same time. Ahem, action (mostly for UK citizens):

• Sign the petition.
• Join the various groups who organized today (Open Rights Group, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Privacy International, Article 19, English PEN).
• Ask to meet your MP to talk about privacy at their next surgery - you can phone the House of Commons.