Search Results: "jones"

12 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 48 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 20th and March 26th: Toolchain fixes Daniel Kahn Gillmor worked on removing build path from build symbols submitting a patch adding -fdebug-prefix-map to clang to match GCC, another patch against gcc-5 to backport the removal of -fdebug-prefix-map from DW_AT_producer, and finally by proposing the addition of a normalizedebugpath to the reproducible feature set of dpkg-buildflags that would use -fdebug-prefix-map to replace the current directory with . using -fdebug-prefix-map. Sergey Poznyakoff merged the --clamp-mtime option so that it will be featured in the next Tar release. This option is likely to be used by dpkg-deb to implement deterministic mtimes for packaged files. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: augeas, gmtkbabel, ktikz, octave-control, octave-general, octave-image, octave-ltfat, octave-miscellaneous, octave-mpi, octave-nurbs, octave-octcdf, octave-sockets, octave-strings, openlayers, python-structlog, signond. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: tests.reproducible-builds.org i386 build nodes have been setup by converting 2 of the 4 amd64 nodes to i386. (h01ger) Package reviews 92 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 31 updated in the previous week. New issues: timestamps_generated_by_xbean_spring, timestamps_generated_by_mangosdk_spiprocessor. Chris Lamb filed 7 FTBFS bugs. Misc. On March 20th, Chris Lamb gave a talk at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore. The very same day, but a few timezones apart, h01ger did a presentation at LibrePlanet 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seven GSoC/Outreachy applications were made by potential interns to work on various aspects of the reproducible builds effort. On top of interacting with several applicants, prospective mentors gathered to review the applications.

27 March 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 48 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 20th and March 26th:

Toolchain fixes
  • Sebastian Ramacher uploaded breathe/4.2.0-1 which makes its output deterministic. Original patch by Chris Lamb, merged uptream.
  • Rafael Laboissiere uploaded octave/4.0.1-1 which allows packages to be built in place and avoid unreproducible builds due to temporary build directories appearing in the .oct files.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor worked on removing build path from build symbols submitting a patch adding -fdebug-prefix-map to clang to match GCC, another patch against gcc-5 to backport the removal of -fdebug-prefix-map from DW_AT_producer, and finally by proposing the addition of a normalizedebugpath to the reproducible feature set of dpkg-buildflags that would use -fdebug-prefix-map to replace the current directory with . using -fdebug-prefix-map. As succesful result of lobbying at LibrePlanet 2016, the --clamp-mtime option will be featured in the next Tar release. This option is likely to be used by dpkg-deb to implement deterministic mtimes for packaged files.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: augeas, gmtkbabel, ktikz, octave-control, octave-general, octave-image, octave-ltfat, octave-miscellaneous, octave-mpi, octave-nurbs, octave-octcdf, octave-sockets, octave-strings, openlayers, python-structlog, signond. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #818742 on milkytracker by Reiner Herrmann: sorts the list of source files.
  • #818752 on tcl8.4 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818753 on tk8.6 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818754 on tk8.5 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818755 on tk8.4 by Reiner Herrmann: sort source files using C locale.
  • #818952 on marionnet by ceridwen: dummy out build date and uname to make build reproducible.
  • #819334 on avahi by Reiner Herrmann: ship upstream changelog instead of the one generated by gettextize (although duplicate of #804141 by Santiago Vila).

tests.reproducible-builds.org i386 build nodes have been setup by converting 2 of the 4 amd64 nodes to i386. (h01ger)

Package reviews 92 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 31 updated in the previous week. New issues: timestamps_generated_by_xbean_spring, timestamps_generated_by_mangosdk_spiprocessor. Chris Lamb filed 7 FTBFS bugs.

Misc. On March 20th, Chris Lamb gave a talk at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore. The very same day, but a few timezones apart, h01ger did a presentation at LibrePlanet 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seven GSoC/Outreachy applications were made by potential interns to work on various aspects of the reproducible builds effort. On top of interacting with several applicants, prospective mentors gathered to review the applications. Huge thanks to Linda Naeun Lee for the new hackergotchi visible on Planet Debian.

27 January 2016

Jonas Smedegaard: BOSS - Barath Operating System Solutions

Siri and I are on a journey through India and Nepal, with the aim of learning about needs of Debian derivatives, to improve Debian and encourage closer integration.

C-DAC and BOSS Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is a large organization serving country- and state-level institutions in India, with offices and training facilities several major cities. In Chennai, C-DAC has a staff of 25 developers working full time on Barath Operating System Solutions (BOSS). BOSS is a Debian derivative with several flavors - a desktop for use at primary schools (EduBOSS), a desktop for governmental offices (BOSS), and a range of server-oriented use cases using same core as the desktops with various (non-packaged) code and configuration on top. The core common to all BOSS flavors is a derivative of Debian. Major work has been in strengthening localization and related code - including the development of a font covering all officially supported indic scripts, tuning input methods configuration, and bugfixing LibreOffice handling of complex scripts. All that work is all passed directly to upstream code projects (some still show as derived work until sifting down again into Debian). Besides locale derivations, BOSS currently includes 11 packages not yet in Debian - a mixture of package dependencies, branding data and configuration tweaks. Seems most if not all can fit into Debian with a bit of restructuring work.

small computers As some of you know, I always had a special interest in low-resource (yet general purpose) computers (partly driven by my lack of money to spend on shinier hardware), and since ~2009 particularly in ARM-based computers. After 4 days of meetings and discussion with C-DAC, - literally few minutes before departure - I casually mentioned my interest in small computers, and much to my surprise it turned out that C-DAC also works on that, just didn't get around to mention it yet at the Debian wiki page. C-DAC have worked for a year on tuning BOSS to work on the Vidyut laptop (successor to the Aakash tablet). All except builtin camera is allegedly working. C-DAC is also looking into Olimex boards - my favorites - possibly for use with small server setups but our time was up, we had to leave for our train to Pune, so details on that we will have to figure out through mail.

collaboration In the past, C-DAC have kept in touch with their users through BOSS-specific places like a dedicated IRC channel. Recent changes in management style at the development office have caused less attention available to that communication, however. C-DAC have politely offered their code changes upstram for years, but maybe "too polite": Maybe they have offered only polished fixes, being less loud about "interesting problems". I suggested, as way to improve while limiting (ideally avoiding) extra work, is to mentally take a step up the stream: Treat BOSS not as a derivative but a subset of Debian itself, hang out and discuss issues and ideas at debian irc channels, and maintain your packages directly in Debian. Only parts unfit for Debian - secret stuff done for India military, and dirty configuration hacks not yet possible within Debian Policy - really need to be kept away from Debian. C-DAC agreed, and Debian now has a BOSS team! Anyone interested to follow BOSS as a Debian blend, and perhaps even contribute with opinions and/or code, is quite welcome to join the newly created mailinglist on Debian Alioth: https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/boss-devel. Our meetings with BOSS developers have been very pleasant. Even those working at the top of cloud or big data stacks - furthest away from our mindset of tightly "locking down" all parts as packages - were patient with us. Thanks in particular to Prema S and Prathibha B, working on packaging of BOSS for the past 5+ years, and both likely to enter the Debian New Maintainer Queue before long :-)

Jonas Smedegaard: India 2015

Siri and I are now three weeks into our two months journey, by train through India and by bus in Nepal. During my Asia 2011 journey I promised myself (and Chandan) that next visit to India would be together with Siri. Here we are, few hours away from next 20 hour train ride towards Hyderabad in South India, both with running noses from a cold week in Nepal. Theme of our trip is Debian Pure Blends. More specifically, we will meet with distribution developers and designers to try understand why they fork from (other forks of) Debian, and how Debian might improve to better serve them - ideally be able to fully contain such projects within Debian itself. Distributions we will look into - some more detailed than others - include Thanks to the organizations and individuals hosting us on our journey.

21 January 2016

Jonas Smedegaard: IT@school

Siri and I are on a journey through India and Nepal, with the aim of learning about needs of Debian derivatives, to improve Debian and encourage closer integration.

Distribution IT@school is a distribution originally based on Debian, later rebased on Ubuntu. Next release will possibly again be a direct derivative of Debian, or maybe even - time will tell - a Debian pure blend.

Aim is education As its name indicates, IT@school is targeted at schools: The system is used in 8th - 10th grades of most (or all?) public primary schools in Kerala, Together with KEK members Anto and Fayad, Siri and I met with former and current key participants in the project where we learned about its history and current status, and discussed some differences between Ubuntu and Debian. IT@school has a strong emphasis on the educational aspect, arguably setting it apart from Skolelinux/DebianEdu which emphasizes the technical aspect of relieving teachers from admin tasks. In the early years of deployment the project faced many hardware issues - e.g. in getting sound cards to work. This was seen not as problems but as beneficial learning for the teachers facing those issues. Kerala public school system has set the standard for other states in India, but sadly political support within the state has been weak in recent years. It is hoped that next election - this April - will bring a positive change.

School book IT@school is accompagnied by a school book written specifically for use of the included tools. No explicit license is applied to the book (which means it defaults to classic copyright). Possibly it will get Creative Commons licensed. If the school book gets a DFSG-free license, several collaboration opportunities emerge: Currently the book is drafted in LibreOffice but then - due to state procedures - finalized with PageMaker. Would be interesting to setup an alternate process using only Free tools - either with Scribus or XeLaTeX. An important detail here is to ensure that the process supports malayalam script.

Curriculum Work is in progress mapping FLOSS tools to the state curriculum. I recommended to share that work publicly with a Free license, to encourage comparisons across countries, and invite collaboration e.g. with Skolelunux/DebianEdu.

Blend for SBCs Some Kerala higher education schools (sorry, don't remember which) have bought some thousands of RaspberryPi2. I suggested to create a Debian Blend for SBCs (Single Board Computers) - we will see what comes of that idea

Blend for education I also suggested to make a Debian blend around IT@school distribution itself, with its strong focus on educational content - i.e. not just as addon to technical tools but the primary purpose pulling in tools as needed.

11 January 2016

Norbert Preining: 10 years TeX Live in Debian

I recently dug through my history of involvement with TeX (Live), and found out that in January there are a lot of anniversaries I should celebrate: 14 years ago I started building binaries for TeX Live, 11 years ago I proposed the packaging TeX Live for Debian, 10 years ago the TeX Live packages entered Debian. There are other things to celebrate next year (2017), namely the 10 year anniversary of the (not so new anymore) infrastructure in short tlmgr of TeX Live packaging, but this will come later. In this blog post I want to concentrate on my involvement in TeX Live and Debian. TeX Live/Debian Those of you not interested in boring and melancholic look-back onto history can safely skip reading this one. For those a bit interested in the history of TeX in Debian, please read on. Debian releases and TeX systems The TeX system of choice has been for long years teTeX, curated by Thomas Esser. Digging through the Debian Archive and combining it with changelog entries as well as personal experiences since I joined Debian, here is a time line of TeX in Debian, all to my best knowledge.
Date Version Name teTeX/TeX Live Maintainers
1993-96 <1 ? ? Christoph Martin
6/1996 1.1 Buzz ?
12/1996 1.2 Rec ?
6/1997 1.3 Bo teTeX 0.4
7/1998 2.0 Ham teTeX 0.9
3/1999 2.1 Slink teTeX 0.9.9N
8/2000 2.2 Potato teTeX 1.0
7/2002 3.0 Woody teTeX 1.0
6/2005 3.1 Sarge teTeX 2.0 Atsuhito Kohda
4/2007 4.0 Etch teTeX 3.0, TeX Live 2005 Frank K ster, NP
2/2009 5.0 Lenny TeX Live 2007 NP
2/2011 6.0 Squeeze TeX Live 2009
5/2013 7.0 Whezzy TeX Live 2012
4/2015 8.0 Jessie TeX Live 2014
??? ??? Stretch TeX Live 2015
The history of TeX in Debian is thus split more or less in 10 years teTeX, and 10 years TeX Live. While I cannot check back to the origins, my guesses are that already in the very first releases (te)TeX was included. The first release I can confirm (via the Debian archive) shipping teTeX is the release Bo (June 1997). Maintainership during the first 10 years showed some fluctuation: The first years/releases (till about 2002) were dominated by Christoph Martin with Adrian Bunk and few others, who did most packaging work on teTeX version 1. After this Atsuhito Kohda with help from Hilmar Preusse and some people brought teTeX up to version 2, and from 2004 to 2007 Frank K ster, again with help of Hilmar Preusse and some other, took over most of the work on teTeX. Other names appearing throughout the changelog are (incomplete list) Julian Gilbey, Ralf Stubner, LaMont Jones, and C.M Connelly (and many more bug-reporters and fixers). Looking at the above table I have to mention the incredible amount of work that both Atsuhito Kohda and Frank K ster have put into the teTeX packages, and many of their contributions have been carried over into the TeX Live packages. While there haven t been many releases during their maintainership, their work has inspired and supported the packaging of TeX Live to a huge extend. Start of TeX Live I got involved in TeX Live back in 2002 when I started building binaries for the alpha-linux architecture. I can t remember when I first had the idea to package TeX Live for Debian, but here is a time line from my first email to the Debian Developers mailing list concerning TeX Live, to the first accepted upload:
Date Subject/Link Comment
2005-01-11 binaries for different architectures in debian packages The first question concerning packaging TeX Live, about including pre-built binaries
2005-01-25 Debian-TeXlive Proposal II A better proposal, but still including pre-built binaries
2005-05-17 Proposal for a tex-base package Proposal for tex-base, later tex-common, as basis for both teTeX and TeX live packages
2015-06-10 Bug#312897: ITP: texlive ITP bug for TeX Live
2005-09-17 Re: Take over of texinfo/info packages Taking over texinfo which was somehow orphaned started here
2005-11-28 Re: texlive-basic_2005-1_i386.changes REJECTED My answer to the rejection by ftp-master of the first upload. This email sparked a long discussion about packaging and helped improve the naming of packages (but not really the packaging itself).
2006-01-12 Upload of TeX Live 2005-1 to Debian The first successful upload
2006-01-22 Accepted texlive-base 2005-1 (source all) TeX Live packages accepted into Debian/experimental
One can see from the first emails that at that time I didn t have any idea about Debian packaging and proposed to ship the binaries built within the TeX Live system on Debian. What followed was first a long discussion about whether there is any need for just another TeX system. The then maintainer Frank K ster took a clear stance in favor of including TeX Live, and after several rounds of proposals, tests, rejections and improvements, the first successful upload of TeX Live packages to Debian/experimental happened on 12 January 2006, so exactly 10 years ago. Packaging Right from the beginning I used a meta-packaging approach. That is, instead of working directly with the source packages, I wrote (Perl) scripts that generated the source packages from a set of directives. There were several reasons why I choose to introduce this extra layer: Till now I am not 100% sure whether it was the best idea, but the scripts remain in place till now, only adapted to the new packaging paradigm in TeX Live (without xml) and adding new functionality. This allows me to just kick off one script that does do all the work, including building .orig.tar.gz, source packages, binary packages. For those interested to follow the frantic activity during the first years, there is a file CHANGES.packaging which for the years from 2005 to 2011 documents very extensively the changes I made in these years. I don t want to count the hours the went into all this Development over the years TeX Live 2005 was just another TeX system but not the preferred one in Debian Etch and beyond. But then in May 2006, Thomas Esser announced the end of development of teTeX, which cleared the path for TeX Live as main TeX system in Debian (and the world!). The next release of Debian, Lenny (1/2009), already carried only TeX Live. Unfortunately it was only TeX Live 2007 and not 2008, mostly due to me having been involved in rewriting the upstream infrastructure based on Debian package files instead of the notorious xml files. This took quite a lot of attention and time from Debian away to upstream development, but this will be discussed in a different post. Similarly, the release of TeX Live included in Debian Squeeze (released 2/2011) was only TeX Live 2009 (instead of 2010), but since then (Wheezy and Jessie) the releases of TeX Live in Debian were always the latest released ones. Current status Since about 2013 I am trying to keep a regular schedule of new TeX Live packages every month. These helps me to keep up with the changes in upstream packaging and reduces the load of packaging a new release of TeX Live. It also bring to users of unstable and testing a very up-to-date TeX system, where packages at most lack 1 month of behind the TeX Live net updates. Future As most of the readers here know, besides caring for TeX (Live) and related packages in Debian, I am also responsible for the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr) and most of upstream s infrastructure including network distribution. Thus, my (spare, outside work) time needs to be distributed between all these projects (and some others) which leaves less and less time for Debian packaging. Fortunately the packaging is in a state that making regular updates once a month is less of a burden, since most steps are automatized. What is still a bit of a struggle is adapting the binary package (src:texlive-bin) to new releases. But also this has become simpler due to less invasive changes over the years. All in all, I don t have many plans for TeX Live in Debian besides keeping the current system running as it is. Search for and advise to future maintainers and collaborators I would be more than happy if new collaborators appear, with fresh ideas and some spare time. Unfortunately, my experience over these 10 years with people showing up and proposing changes (anyone remembers the guy proposing a complete rewrite in ML or so?) is that nobody really wants to invest time and energy, but search for quick solutions. This is not something that will work with a package like TeX Live, sized of several gigabyte (the biggest in the Debian archive), and complicated inner workings. I advise everyone being interested in helping to package TeX Live for Debian, to first install normal TeX Live from TUG, get used to what actions happen during updates (format rebuilds, hyphenation patters, map file updates). One does not need to have a perfect understanding of what exactly happens down there in the guts (I didn t have in the beginning, either), but if you want to help packaging and never heard about what format dumps or map files are, then this might be a slight obstacle. Conclusion TeX Live is the only TeX system in wide use across lots of architectures and operating systems, and the only comparable system, MikTeX, is Windows specific (also there are traces of ports to Unix). Backed by all the big user groups of TeX, TeX Live will remain the prime choice for the foreseeable future, and thus also TeX Live in Debian.

22 December 2015

Jonas Smedegaard: Hamara Linux

Siri and I are on a journey through India and Nepal, with the aim of learning about needs of Debian derivatives, to improve Debian and encourage closer integration.

Distribution Hamara Linux is a distribution based on Trisquel, hence descending from Debian via Ubuntu. Next release will be a direct derivative of Debian. We recommended to package missing parts for Debian itself, even if Hamara needs them faster than deemed "stable" in Debian. ITP bugreports is since filed for theme and install routine.

Visual design Hamara Linux ships with a coherent visual style, covering widget theme, install routine, boot and login, and a range of wallpapers. Siri has begun comparing widget theme against Debian. We might try distill diffs for each Debian Ubuntu Trisquel Hamara derivation.

System contents and setup Hamara Linux comes in two flavors: Hamara Namaste with a GNOME desktop, and Hamara Sugam with an Lxde desktop. I have begun decomposing the package sets into classes for Boxer, at the same time extending Boxer.

21 December 2015

Jonas Smedegaard: SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE

# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc. # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package. # FIRST AUTHOR , YEAR. # #, fuzzy msgid "" msgstr "" "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n" "POT-Creation-Date: 2015-12-21 15:00+0100\n" "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n" "Last-Translator: FULL NAME \n" "Language-Team: LANGUAGE \n" "Language: \n" "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n" #. type: Title # #, no-wrap msgid "I want your input" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "You want to share an opinion with me, or raise a question?" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "Great, please do: I love exchanging opinions and ideas." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "You can [contact me discretely][]. Please consider, however, to speak in " "public instead, allowing others to benefit from our exchange." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "Don't worry if it is interesting to others - the World is big and someone " "somewhere always cares!" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "[contact me discretely]:" msgstr "" #. type: Title ## #, no-wrap msgid "Email - encourages reflection" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "Post to a public mailinglist." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "If uncertain that I am subscribed to the list, or if you want my special " "attention (but think twice if that's really needed!), add my [private " "mail](mailto:dr@jones.dk) as cc." msgstr "" #. type: Title ## #, no-wrap msgid "Chat - more casual" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "I am also [reachable via chat][]. Chat is nice for shorter " "questions/comments, and when you need to discuss what you want to say at " "all." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "[reachable via chat]:" msgstr "" #. type: Title ## #, no-wrap msgid "Blog - best for reuse" msgstr ""

Jonas Smedegaard: SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE

# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc. # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package. # FIRST AUTHOR , YEAR. # #, fuzzy msgid "" msgstr "" "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n" "POT-Creation-Date: 2015-12-21 15:00+0100\n" "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n" "Last-Translator: FULL NAME \n" "Language-Team: LANGUAGE \n" "Language: \n" "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n" #. type: Title # #, no-wrap msgid "issues handling issues" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "I get lots of emails, some of which are "issues": Friends, colleagues, " "clients and machines tell me about stuff that is broken. and ask for new " "features." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "I currently handle issues somewhat like this:" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "[[!graph src="""\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" "rankdir=LR\n" "inbox [label="incoming mails"]\n" "todobox [label="mail threads about issues"]\n" "issueboxes [label="issue-mails grouped by project" style=dotted]\n" "solve [label="fix issue"]\n" "archivebox [label="archived mails"]\n" "inbox -> todobox\n" "todobox -> issueboxes [style=dotted]\n" "todobox -> solve\n" "todobox -> archivebox\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "FIXME: Describe graf in steps." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "The idea was to organize issues in queues per project, but organizing emails " "requires understanding them, and that takes time: Too often I end up " "skipping that task, leading to weak overview of pending issues." msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "Here's" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" "rankdir=LR\n" "inbox [label="incoming mails"]\n" "todobox [label="mail threads about issues"]\n" "new [label="unprocessed issues"]\n" "open [label="open issues"]\n" "solve [label="fix issue"]\n" "inbox -> todobox -> archivebox\n" "todobox -> new -> open\n" "open -> solve\n" "open -> done\n" msgstr ""

8 August 2015

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.1.0: Even more repository support

drat and double drat A new version 0.1.0 of the drat package arrived on CRAN today. Its name stands for drat R Archive Template, and it helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages, and is finding increasing by other projects. This version 0.1.0 builds on the previous releases and now adds complete support for binaries for both Windows and OS X. This builds on what had been added in the previous release 0.0.4. This and other new features are listed below: Also of note: The rOpenSci project now uses drat to distribute their code, and Carl Boettiger has written a nice blog post about it. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page.

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

27 March 2015

Olivier Berger: New short paper : Designing a virtual laboratory for a relational database MOOC with Vagrant, Debian, etc.

Here s a short preview of our latest accepted paper (to appear at CSEDU 2015), about the construction of VMs for the Relational Database MOOC using Vagrant, Debian, PostgreSQL (previous post), etc. :

Designing a virtual laboratory for a relational database MOOC Olivier Berger, J Paul Gibson, Claire Lecocq and Christian Bac Keywords: Remote Learning, Virtualization, Open Education Resources, MOOC, Vagrant Abstract: Technical advances in machine and system virtualization are creating opportunities for remote learning to provide significantly better support for active education approaches. Students now, in general, have personal computers that are powerful enough to support virtualization of operating systems and networks. As a conse- quence, it is now possible to provide remote learners with a common, standard, virtual laboratory and learning environment, independent of the different types of physical machines on which they work. This greatly enhances the opportunity for producing re-usable teaching materials that are actually re-used. However, configuring and installing such virtual laboratories is technically challenging for teachers and students. We report on our experience of building a virtual machine (VM) laboratory for a MOOC on relational databases. The architecture of our virtual machine is described in detail, and we evaluate the benefits of using the Vagrant tool for building and delivering the VM. TOC :
  • Introduction
    • A brief history of distance learning
    • Virtualization : the challenges
    • The design problem
  • The virtualization requirements
    • Scenario-based requirements
    • Related work on requirements
    • Scalability of existing approaches
  • The MOOC laboratory
    • Exercises and lab tools
    • From requirements to design
  • Making the VM as a Vagrant box
    • Portability issues
    • Delivery through Internet
    • Security
    • Availability of the box sources
  • Validation
    • Reliability Issues with VirtualBox
    • Student feedback and evaluation
  • Future work
    • Laboratory monitoring
    • More modular VMs
  • Conclusions
Bibliography
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    Recommendations for the design and deployment of MOOCs: Insights about the MOOC digital education of the future deployed in Mir adaX.
    In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality, TEEM 14, pages 403-408, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
  • Armbrust et al., 2010
    Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., Lee, G., Patterson, D., Rabkin, A., Stoica, I., and Zaharia, M. (2010).
    A view of cloud computing.
    Commun. ACM, 53:50-58.
  • Billingsley and Steel, 2014
    Billingsley, W. and Steel, J. R. (2014).
    Towards a supercollaborative software engineering MOOC.
    In Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 283-286. ACM.
  • Brown and Duguid, 1996
    Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (1996).
    Universities in the digital age.
    Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 28(4):11-19.
  • Bullers et al., 2006
    Bullers, Jr., W. I., Burd, S., and Seazzu, A. F. (2006).
    Virtual machines an idea whose time has returned: Application to network, security, and database courses.
    SIGCSE Bull., 38(1):102-106.
  • Chen and Noble, 2001
    Chen, P. M. and Noble, B. D. (2001).
    When virtual is better than real [operating system relocation to virtual machines].
    In Hot Topics in Operating Systems, 2001. Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on, pages 133-138. IEEE.
  • Cooper, 2005
    Cooper, M. (2005).
    Remote laboratories in teaching and learning-issues impinging on widespread adoption in science and engineering education.
    International Journal of Online Engineering (iJOE), 1(1).
  • Cormier, 2014
    Cormier, D. (2014).
    Rhizo14-the MOOC that community built.
    INNOQUAL-International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning, 2(3).
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    Dougiamas, M. and Taylor, P. (2003).
    Moodle: Using learning communities to create an open source course management system.
    In World conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications, pages 171-178.
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    Gomes, L. and Bogosyan, S. (2009).
    Current trends in remote laboratories.
    Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on, 56(12):4744-4756.
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    Hashimoto, M. (2013).
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    Jones, M. and Winne, P. H. (2012).
    Adaptive Learning Environments: Foundations and Frontiers.
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    Lowe, D. (2014).
    MOOLs: Massive open online laboratories: An analysis of scale and feasibility.
    In Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation (REV), 2014 11th International Conference on, pages 1-6. IEEE.
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    Ma, J. and Nickerson, J. V. (2006).
    Hands-on, simulated, and remote laboratories: A comparative literature review.
    ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 38(3):7.
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    Pearson, S. (2013).
    Privacy, security and trust in cloud computing.
    In Privacy and Security for Cloud Computing, pages 3-42. Springer.
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    Prince, M. (2004).
    Does active learning work? A review of the research.
    Journal of engineering education, 93(3):223-231.
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    Romero-Zaldivar, V.-A., Pardo, A., Burgos, D., and Delgado Kloos, C. (2012).
    Monitoring student progress using virtual appliances: A case study.
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    Open learning, 15(3):267-285.
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    Remote laboratories and reusable learning objects in a distance learning context.
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    Yeung, H., Lowe, D. B., and Murray, S. (2010).
    Interoperability of remote laboratories systems.
    iJOE, 6(S1):71-80.

25 March 2015

Francois Marier: Keeping up with noisy blog aggregators using PlanetFilter

I follow a few blog aggregators (or "planets") and it's always a struggle to keep up with the amount of posts that some of these get. The best strategy I have found so far to is to filter them so that I remove the blogs I am not interested in, which is why I wrote PlanetFilter.

Other options In my opinion, the first step in starting a new free software project should be to look for a reason not to do it :) So I started by looking for another approach and by asking people around me how they dealt with the firehoses that are Planet Debian and Planet Mozilla. It seems like a lot of people choose to "randomly sample" planet feeds and only read a fraction of the posts that are sent through there. Personally however, I find there are a lot of authors whose posts I never want to miss so this option doesn't work for me. A better option that other people have suggested is to avoid subscribing to the planet feeds, but rather to subscribe to each of the author feeds separately and prune them as you go. Unfortunately, this whitelist approach is a high maintenance one since planets constantly add and remove feeds. I decided that I wanted to follow a blacklist approach instead.

PlanetFilter PlanetFilter is a local application that you can configure to fetch your favorite planets and filter the posts you see. If you get it via Debian or Ubuntu, it comes with a cronjob that looks at all configuration files in /etc/planetfilter.d/ and outputs filtered feeds in /var/cache/planetfilter/. You can either:
  • add file:///var/cache/planetfilter/planetname.xml to your local feed reader
  • serve it locally (e.g. http://localhost/planetname.xml) using a webserver, or
  • host it on a server somewhere on the Internet.
The software will fetch new posts every hour and overwrite the local copy of each feed. A basic configuration file looks like this: 
[feed]
url = http://planet.debian.org/atom.xml
[blacklist]

Filters There are currently two ways of filtering posts out. The main one is by author name: 
[blacklist]
authors =
  Alice Jones
  John Doe
and the other one is by title: 
[blacklist]
titles =
  This week in review
  Wednesday meeting for
In both cases, if a blog entry contains one of the blacklisted authors or titles, it will be discarded from the generated feed.

Tor support Since blog updates happen asynchronously in the background, they can work very well over Tor. In order to set that up in the Debian version of planetfilter:
  1. Install the tor and polipo packages.
  2. Set the following in /etc/polipo/config: 
     proxyAddress = "127.0.0.1"
 proxyPort = 8008
 allowedClients = 127.0.0.1
 allowedPorts = 1-65535
 proxyName = "localhost"
 cacheIsShared = false
 socksParentProxy = "localhost:9050"
 socksProxyType = socks5
 chunkHighMark = 67108864
 diskCacheRoot = ""
 localDocumentRoot = ""
 disableLocalInterface = true
 disableConfiguration = true
 dnsQueryIPv6 = no
 dnsUseGethostbyname = yes
 disableVia = true
 censoredHeaders = from,accept-language,x-pad,link
 censorReferer = maybe
  3. Tell planetfilter to use the polipo proxy by adding the following to /etc/default/planetfilter: 
     export http_proxy="localhost:8008"
 export https_proxy="localhost:8008"

Bugs and suggestions The source code is available on repo.or.cz. I've been using this for over a month and it's been working quite well for me. If you give it a go and run into any problems, please file a bug! I'm also interested in any suggestions you may have.

21 December 2014

Steve McIntyre: UEFI Debian installer work for Jessie, part 2

A month ago , I wrote about my plans for improved (U)EFI support in Jessie. It's about time I gave an update on progress! I spoke about adding support for installing grub-efi into the removable media path (#746662). That went into Debian's grub packages already, but there were a couple of bugs. First of all, the code could end up prompting people about EFI questions even when they didn't have any grub-efi packages installed. Doh! (#773004). Then there was an unexpected bug with case-insensitive file name handling on FAT/VFAT filesystems (#773092). I've posted (and tested!) patches to fix both, hopefully in an upload any day now. Next, I mentioned getting i386 UEFI support going again. This is a major feature that a lot of people have been asking for. It's also going to involve quite a bit of effort... Our existing (amd64) UEFI-capable images in Debian use the standard x86 El Torito CD boot method, with two boot images provided. One of these images gives us the traditional isolinux BIOS-boot support. The second option is an alternate El Torito image, including at a 64-bit version of grub-efi. For most machines, this works just fine - the BIOS or UEFI firmware will automatically pick the correct image and everybody's happy. This even works on our multi-arch i386/amd64 CDs and DVDs - isolinux will boot either kernel from the first El Torito image, or the alternate UEFI image is amd64 only. However, I can now see that there's been a long-standing issue with those multi-arch images, and it's to do with Macs. On the advice of Matthew Garrett, I've borrowed an old 32-bit Intel Mac to help testing, and it's quite instructive in terms of buggy firmware! The firmware on older 32-bit Intel Macs crashes hard when it detects more than one El Torito boot image, and I've now seen this happen myself. I've not had any bug reports about this, so I can only assume that we haven't had many users try that image. As far as I can tell, they've been using the normal i386 images in BIOS boot mode, and then struggling to get bootloaders working afterwards. There are a number of different posts on the net explaining how to do that. That's OK, but... If I now start adding 32-bit UEFI support to our standard set of i386 images, this will prevent users of old Macs from installing Debian. I could just say "screw it" and decide to not support those users at all, but that's not a very nice thing to do. If we want to continue to support them and add 32-bit UEFI support, I'll have to add another flavour of i386 image, either a "Mac special" or a "32-bit UEFI special". I'm not keen on doing that if I could avoid it, but the two options are mutually exclusive. Given the Mac problem is only on older hardware which (hopefully!) will be dying out, I'll probably pick that one as the special-case CD, and I'll make an extra netinst flavour only for those users to boot off. So, I've started playing with i386 UEFI stuff in the last couple of weeks too. I almost immediately found some showstopper behaviour bugs in the i386 versions of efivar and efibootmgr (#773412 and #773007), but I've debugged these with our Debian maintainer (Jared Dominguez) and the upstream developer (Peter Jones) and fixes should be in Jessie very soon. As I mentioned last month, the machines that most people have been requesting support for are the latest Bay Trail-based laptops and tablets. There are using 64-bit Intel Atom CPUs, but crippled with 32-bit UEFI firmware with no BIOS compatibility mode. This makes for some interesting issues. It's probably impossible to get a true answer why these machines are so broken by design, but there are several rumours. As far as I can see, most of these machines seem to ship with a limited version of 32-bit Windows 8.1. 32-bit Windows is smaller than 64-bit Windows, so fits much better in limited on-board storage space. But 32-bit Windows won't boot from 64-bit UEFI, so the firmware needed buggering to match. Ugh! To support these Bay Trail machines properly, we'll want to add a 32-bit UEFI installation option to our 64-bit images. I can tweak our CDs so that both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of grub-efi are included, and the on-board UEFI will load the right one needed. Then I'll need to make sure that all the 64-bit images also include grub-efi-ia32-bin from now on. With some extra logic, we'll need to remember that these new machines need that package installing instead of grub-efi-amd64-bin. It shouldn't be too hard, but let's see! :-) So, I've been out and bought one of these machines, an Asus X205TA. Lucas agreed that Debian will reimburse me (thanks!), so I'm not stuck with spending my own money on an otherwise unwanted machine! I can see via Google that none of the mainstream Linux distros support the Bay Trail machines fully yet, so there's not a lot of documentation yet. Initial boot on the new machine was easy using a quick-hack i386 UEFI image on USB, but from there everything went downhill quickly. I'll need to investigate some more, but the laptop's own keyboard and trackpad are not detected by the installer system. Neither is its built-in WiFi. Yay! I had to go and dig out a USB hub to connect the installer image USB key, a keyboard, mouse and a USB hard drive to the machine, as it only has 2 USB ports. I've taken a complete backup of the on-board 32GB flash before I start experimenting, so I can restore the machine back to its virgin state for future testing. I guess I now have a project to keep me busy over Christmas...! In other news, we've been continuing work on UEFI support for and within the new arm64 port. My ARM/Linaro colleague Leif Lindholm has been back-porting upstream kernel features and bug fixes to make d-i work, and filing Debian bugs when silly things break on arm64 because people don't think about other architectures (e.g #773311, doh!). As there are more and more people interested in (U)EFI support these days, I've also proposed that we create a new debian-efi mailing list to help focus discussion. See #773327 and follow up there if you think you'd use the list too! You can help! Same as 2 years ago, I'll need help testing some of these images. For the 32-bit UEFI support, I now have some relevant hardware myself, but testing on other machines too will be very important! I'll start pushing unofficial Jessie EFI test images shortly - watch this space.

6 September 2014

Joachim Breitner: ICFP 2014

Another on-my-the-journey-back blog post; this time from the Frankfurt Airport Train Station my flight was delayed (if I knew that I could have watched the remaining Lightning Talks), and so was my train, but despite 5min of running through the Airport just not enough. And now that the free 30 Minutes of Railway Station Internet are used up, I have nothing else to do but blog... Last week I was attending ICFP 2014 in Gothenburg, followed by the Haskell Symposium and the Haskell Implementors Workshop. The justification to attend was the paper on Safe Coercions (joint work with Richard Eisenberg, Simon Peyton Jones and Stephanie Weirich), although Richard got to hold the talk, and did so quite well. So I got to leisurely attend the talks, while fighting the jet-lag that I brought from Portland. There were as expected quite a few interesting talks. Among them the first keynote, Kathleen Fisher on the need for formal methods in cars and toy-quadcopters and unmanned battle helicopters, which made me conclude that my Isabelle skills might eventually become relevant in practical applications. And did you know that if someone gains access to your car s electronics, they can make the seat belt pull you back hard? Stefanie Weirich s keynote (and the subsequent related talks by Jan Stolarek and Richard Eisenberg) on what a dependently typed Haskell would look like and what we could use it for was mouth-watering. I am a bit worried that Haskell will be become a bit obscure for newcomers and people that simply don t want to think about types too much, on the other hand it seems that Haskell as we know it will always stay there, just as a subset of the language. Similarly interesting were refinement types for Haskell (talks by Niki Vazou and by Eric Seidel), in the form of LiquidTypes, something that I have not paid attention to yet. It seems to be a good way for more high assurance in Haskell code. Finally, the Haskell Implementors Workshop had a truckload of exciting developments in and around Haskell: More on GHCJS, Partial type signatures, interactive type-driven development like we know it from Agda, the new Haskell module system and amazing user-defined error messages the latter unfortunately only in Helium, at least for now. But it s not the case that I only sat and listened. During the Haskell Implementors Workshop I held a talk Contributing to GHC with a live demo of me fixing a (tiny) bug in GHC, with the aim of getting more people to hack on GHC (slides, video). The main message here is that it is not that big of deal. And despite me not actually saying much interesting in the talk, I got good feedback afterwards. So if it now actually motivates someone to contribute to GHC, I m even more happier. And then there is of course the Hallway Track. I discussed the issues with fusing a left fold (unfortunately, without a great solution). In order to tackle this problem more systematically, John Wiegley and I created the beginning of a List Fusion Lab , i.e. a bunch of list benchmark and the possibility to compare various implementations (e.g. with different RULES) and various compilers. With that we can hopefully better assess the effect of a change to the list functions. PS: The next train is now also delayed, so I ll likely miss my tram and arrive home even later... PPS: I really have to update my 10 year old picture on my homepage (or redesign it completely). Quite a few people knew my name, but expected someone with shoulder-long hair... PPPS: Haskell is really becoming mainstream: I just talked to a randomly chosen person (the boy sitting next to me in the train), and he is a Haskell enthusiast, building a structured editor for Haskell together with his brother. And all that as a 12th-grader...

4 July 2014

Paul Tagliamonte: Apple Hardware: Part II

A few interesting things happened after I got a macbook air.

Firstly, I got a lot of shit from my peers and friends about it. This was funny to me, nothing really bothered me about it, but I can see this becoming really tiresome at events like hackathons or conferences.

As a byproduct, there s a strong feeling in the hardcore F/OSS world that Apple hardware is the incarnation of evil.

As a result of both of the above, hardcore F/OSS (and Distro hackers) don t buy apple hardware.

Therefore, GNU/Linux is complete garbage on Apple hardware. Apple s firmware bugs don t help, but we re BAD.

Some might ask why this is a big deal. The fact is, this is one of the most used platforms for Open Source development (note I used that term exactly).

Are we to damn these users to a nonfree OS because we want to maintain our purity?

I had to give back my Air, but I still have a Mac Mini that i ve been using for testing bugs on OSX in code I have. Very soon, my Mac Mini will be used to help fix the common bugs in the install process.

Some things you can do:

29 May 2014

Russell Coker: Links May 2014

Charmian Gooch gave an interesting TED talk about her efforts to fight organised crime and corruption by prohibiting anonymous companies [1]. The idea of a company is to protect the owner from unlimited liability not to protect them from law enforcement. Dr Nerdlove has an insightful article about sexual harassment in geek culture [2]. Rebecca Rose wrote an insightful article for Jezebel about the worse bullying advice ever, her summary is that it should be called Ways We Can Get You Goddamn Kids to Act So We Never Have to Deal With Your Problems Ever [3]. In the wake of the Heardbleed bug Imperial Violet wrote an informative article explaining why revocation checks isn t the solution [4]. Martin Lukacs and Shiri Pasternak wrote an insightful article about the Canadian government s attempts to stop Canadian aboriginies from exercising their legal rights [5]. I bet that the Australian government is doing the same things. Nelson Groom wrote an interesting interview with Norrie May Welby, the first recognised agender person in Australia [6]. Marriage equality is bound to happen soon in Australia, now that the government officially recognises non-binary gender people it can t refuse them the right to get married and therefore the straight/gay marriage distinction isn t relevant. BDA Technology has an interesting article on choosing fonts to make text more readable for dyslexic people [7]. Eamon Waterford wrote an informative article for the ABC about how early-intervention social policies save significant amounts of tax money [8]. Conservatives claim to want to save money and try to cut such programs which costs everyone in the long term. Greta Christina wrote an insightful article for Salon about why religious people want atheists to lie and pretend to believe [9]. Chris Mooney wrote an informative URL about a machine to test whether someone is liberal or conservative [10]. Paul Rosenberg wrote an informative article on the link between conservatism, evil, and psychopathy [11]. The next logical step is to treat conservatism as a mental health problem. Sociological Images has an interesting article by Jay Livingston about the hypocrisy of conservative tax policies [12]. Scientific American reprinted an article from The Conversation by Elaine McKewon about the climate deniers who intimidated a journal into retracting an article about their belief in conspiracy theories [13]. It seems obvious that the climate deniers are the ones who conspire. Ben Caldecott wrote an interesting article for the ABC about the fossil fuel divestment campaign [14]. It seems that this is getting some success already, as renewable energy will soon be cheaper than coal power this could kill off coal. Mark Taylor wrote an interesting blog post titled Observations of an Internet Middleman about the operations of Level3 and Internet peering [15]. He explains how monopoly Telcos throttle their customers Internet access. Matt Savoy wrote an informative and disturbing article about the fact that US cops are twice as likely to beat their wives as the general population [16]. Apparently the police hierarchy aren t interested in prosecuting such crimes. Paul Rosenberg wrote an insightful article about mythos vs logos and the conservative approach to relity [17]. One interesting point he makes is that white men (and members of privileged groups generally) fear a loss of status more than more realistic concerns (such as global warming). Nick wrote an interesting blog post about using GPG encrypted email on an Android phone [18]. I should get this going on my phone.
Related posts:
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13 May 2014

Vasudev Kamath: Enabling DNSSEC for copyninja.info

Recently I've been seeing lot of posts about DNSSEC on Internet and I thought I should configure my domain to be secured by DNSSEC. copyninja.info domain is now secured with DNSSEC you can verify this by DNSSEC analyzer by Verisign and DNSViz online tool or by installing DNSSEC validator addon for your browser. There are good amount of tutorials and guides available to enable DNSSEC for your domain, still I want to note down steps I followed to here for the record (of course it will be helpful for me if I forget it ;-)) First step will be installing bind9 and dnssec-tools package, if you use aptitude installing dnssec-tools will pull down the bind9 unless you have configured aptitude to not install the Recommends. Next setting up the zone file for your domain, for this first make a copy of /etc/bind/db.local as /etc/bind/db.example.com, replace example.com with your domain name. Now you need to add your zone records to the zone file. Next edit the /etc/bind/named.conf.local file and add following lines 
zone "example.com"  
    type master;
    file "/etc/bind/db.copyninja.info";
    allow-transfer  secondary; ;
 ;
Here replace secondary with your secondary DNS servers, if you don't have one you can ommit this but its always recommended to have secondary DNS servers for a zone, in cases when primary fails. After this we need to enable DNSSEC on bind, this is done by editing the file /etc/bind/named.conf.options. Add following lines into options section. 
dnssec-validation yes;
dnssec-enable yes;
dnssec-lookaside auto;
A more explanation on this can be found on Linux Journal article. Now its time to create DNSSEC keys and sign your zone, more about different DNSSEC keys and records can be found in the Linux Journal Article on implementation. I used zonesigner utility from dnssec-tools which does job of signing and including KSK and ZSK keys into bind configuration which otherwise should be done manually. Here is the command line I used for generating keys, thanks to Jonas for this. 
mkdir -p /etc/bind/keys
zonesigner -algorithm RSASHA256 -keydirectory /etc/bind/keys\
       -dsdir /etc/bind/keys -archivedir /etc/bind/keys/archive \
       /etc/bind/db.example.com
Here we store our keys into /etc/bind/keys directory, and use RSASHA256 algorithm for key generation which is more stronger than the default used RSASHA1 (atleast thats what Jonas told me). This will create ZSK and KSK for the signing zone and creates a signed zone file db.example.com.signed in same directory as original zone file. Now all you need to do is replace the zone file from db.example.com to db.example.com.signed in file directive with your named.conf.local file.
Note that this keys expire after 30 days so you need to resign your zone before 30 days. For resigning just run zonesigner from /etc/bind/keys. You can setup cron job to do this periodically.
zonesigner -zone example.com /path/to/db.example.com
Our signed zone is ready but we are not done yet! For DNSSEC to work others should trust your signed record for this you need to register your public keys with registrar for your domain and this can be done via your domain provider (in my case this is Gandi). You need to check your domain name providers documentation on how to do this. For Gandi users there is a nice documentation.

9 May 2014

Joachim Breitner: Going to TFP 2014

Near the end of my internship with Simon Peyton Jones at MSR Cambridge I tackled the problem that foldl is not a good consumer in the sense of list fusion, as the resulting code compiles quite badly. I found an analysis that would allow GHC to safely do the required transformation to fix this in the common case; I dubbed this analysis Call Arity. The code is in GHC master (but not in 7.8), and I get to present at the Trends in Functional Programming conference in Soesterburg in 2 weeks. If you are curious you can either look at the code in CallArity.hs or the submitted paper, which yet has to go through the formal post-conference peer review in order to be officially accepted. If you are going to TFP as well and want to get your GPG key signed, just talk to me there!

31 March 2014

Russell Coker: Links March 2014

Typing Animal wrote an interesting article about the dangers of stainless steel in a medical environment [1]. Apparently silver and copper are best due to the oligodynamic effect. Instead of stainless steel drinking bottles they should sell silver plated drinking bottles for kids, I m sure that lots of parents would pay extra for that. Mark Kendall gave an interesting TED talk about a replacement for the hypodermic syringe in vaccinations [2]. His invention can reduce the cost of immunisation while increasing the effectiveness and avoiding problems with people who have a needle phobia. The TED blog has an interesting interview with Will Potter about the use of the war on terror to silence journalists and the invention of the term eco terrorism for non-violent people who are politically active [3]. The TED blog has an interesting article by Kate Torgovnick May about designing products for sustainability [4]. It links to an insightful TED talk by Leyla Acaroglu about some of the complex issues related to sustainability [5]. Manoush Zomorodi wrote an informative article about How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40% [6]. Slate has an interesting article by Jamelle Bouie showing the way that support for capital punishment in the US is linked to racism [7]. The Southern California Public Radio blog has an interesting article by Josie Huang about Suey Park and her success in using twitter to oppose racism [8]. Andrew Solomon wrote an insightful interview with the father of Adam Lanza for the New Yorker [9]. Waleed Aly wrote an insightful article about George Brandis attempt to change the Racial Discrimination Act specifically to allow Andrew Bolt to be racist [10]. He describes it as the whitest piece of proposed legislation I ve encountered which is significant in a country with as much racism as Australia. Really we need stronger laws against racism, there should be no right to be bigoted. A German Court has ruled that non commercial licenses don t permit non-commercial organisations to re-publish material [11]. This seems bogus to me, I d be happy to have my non-commercial licensed work published by a non-commercial publishing organisation just as long as they don t run adverts on the page. Professors Woolley and Malone wrote an interesting article about their research into group performance, apparently having more women in a group improves the collective intelligence of a group, but having smarter men in the group doesn t [12]. Susie Hill wrote an article about the SPARX computer game that is designed to treat adolescent depression [13]. They are working on a rainbow edition for GLBT kids and a version for Maoris. Unfortunately their web site is down right now and the version at archive.org says that it s currently only available to participants in a clinical trial. Tim Chevalier wrote an insightful article explaining why people who campaign against equality shouldn t be given senior positions in corporations [14]. Zeynep Tufekci wrote an insightful article about how French High Theory and Dr. Seuss can help explain gender problems in geek communities [15]. Hannah Levintova wrote an informative article for Mother Jones about how the US based hate group the World Congress of Families incites homophobic violence in Russia [16]. Josh Sanburn wrote an article for Time about people in the Deep South who claim to be Christian giving away guns to encourage people to attend church [17]. This is the same part of the world where people who claimed to be Christian used their religion as an excuse for supporting slavery. I m quitting bourbon, too much evil comes from that part of the world and I m not buying anything that comes from there.
Related posts:
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  2. Links February 2014 The Economist has an interesting and informative article about the...
  3. Links January 2014 Fast Coexist has an interesting article about the art that...

8 February 2014

Vasudev Kamath: Friendica instance on my VPS is down

I started running Friendica instance on my VPS. With help of Jonas Smedegaard I managed to run Friendica in a uWSGI container. The site was running at samsargika.copyninja.info and is no longer accessible. Since VPS itself was running Debian Wheezy I couldn't run uWSGI with PHP support on it. (support for PHP in uWSGI landed after Wheezy). But Jonas was kind enough for me to provide a backported version. Recently Wheezy got a security update for PHP and thats where all the problem started. The backported uwsgi-plugin-php was not recompiled to use security updated PHP and I couldn't upgrade the things. After few days I noticed first freeze on my VPS and I had to reboot the VPS to get it online again. The fact I noticed was uWSGI being killed due to a OOM in syslog but I didn't explore much and consulted Jonas to get a updated uWSGI. But that didn't happen as Jonas himself is facing some problem with uWSGI builds. While again checking with aptitude for upgrade I accidentally confirmed removal of uwsgi-plugin-php for getting security updates :-/. But nothing happened to my running service as upgrade of libs in Debian doesn't cause the restart of all services which are using that lib (desired effect is restart of service but I don't know the side affects involved). Second freeze happened yesterday and on the reboot uwsgi-plugin-php was missing there by taking my Friendica instance down. More closer investigation showed the same OOM but this time I noticed each OOM occurred just after cronjob was running poller.php a script which is actually causing all federation in Friendica. So it was clear there is something wrong either in poller.php or in my setup which was making it eat memory and freeze my VPS. But I also found some stupidity I did during configuration which Jonas also pointed me out.
  1. Installing cronjob inside crontab rather than cron.d
  2. Installing poller.php crontab for root user :-/
I basically violated the basic rule by running a unsafe script as root user, good that script didn't do some crazy stuff. So even though my instance went down I learnt my lessons
  1. Don't ever ever ever run a unsafe script as root that too through cron
  2. Sandbox the unsafe script so it can be killed on time rather than it taking the whole system down.
  3. PHP is not really secure, if it was secure there wouldn't be security updates and atleast my site would be still running :-D
So I now need to wait till Jonas get me new shiny backported uWSGI linked against new PHP on Wheezy and till that time I need to explore on how I can sandbox the poller.php script.

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