Search Results: "josh"

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2016 Call for Papers

Earlier today, Josh sent the text below in this message to the R-SIG-Finance list as the very first heads-up concerning the 2016 edition of our successful R/Finance series. We are once again very excited about our conference, thrilled about upcoming keynotes (some of which are confirmed and some of which are in the works), and hope that many R / Finance users will not only join us in Chicago in May 2016 -- but also submit an exciting proposal. So read on below, and see you in Chicago in May!

Call for Papers R/Finance 2016: Applied Finance with R
May 20 and 21, 2016
University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA The eight annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held on May 20 and 21, 2016, in Chicago, IL, USA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, market microstructure, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management, portfolio construction, and trading. Over the past seven years, R/Finance has included attendees from around the world. It has featured presentations from prominent academics and practitioners, and we anticipate another exciting line-up for 2016. We invite you to submit complete papers in pdf format for consideration. We will also consider one-page abstracts (in txt or pdf format) although more complete papers are preferred. We welcome submissions for both full talks and abbreviated "lightning talks." Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. All slides will be made publicly available at conference time. Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany the slides. Data sets should also be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to presenters who have released R packages. The conference will award two (or more) $1000 prizes for best papers. A submission must be a full paper to be eligible for a best paper award. Extended abstracts, even if a full paper is provided by conference time, are not eligible for a best paper award. Financial assistance for travel and accommodation may be available to presenters, however requests must be made at the time of submission. Assistance will be granted at the discretion of the conference committee. Please make your submission online at this link. The submission deadline is January 29, 2016. Submitters will be notified via email by February 29, 2016 of acceptance, presentation length, and financial assistance (if requested). Additional details will be announced via the R/Finance conference website as they become available. Information on previous years' presenters and their presentations are also at the conference website. For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson,
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

Daniel Pocock: Want to be selected for Google Summer of Code 2016?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2015/17-29

after the release is before the release. or: long time no RC bug report. after the jessie release I spent most of my Debian time on work in the Debian Perl Group. we tried to get down the list of new upstream releases (from over 500 to currently 379; unfortunately the CPAN never sleeps), we were & still are busy preparing for the Perl 5.22 transition (e.g. we uploaded something between 300 & 400 packages to deal with Module::Build & CGI.pm being removed from perl core; only team-maintained packages so far), & we had a pleasant & productive sprint in Barcelona in May. & I also tried to fix some of the RC bugs in our packages which popped up over the previous months. yesterday & today I finally found some time to help with the GCC 5 transition, mostly by making QA or Non-Maintainer Uploads with patches that already were in the BTS. a big thanks especially to the team at HP which provided a couple dozens patches! & here's the list of RC bugs I've worked on in the last 3 months:

~~#752026~~ libpdl-stats-perl: "libpdl-stats-perl: FTBFS on arm*"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#755961~~ autounit: "FTBFS with clang instead of gcc"
apply patch from Alexander <sanek23994@gmail.com>, QA upload
~~#755963~~ clearsilver: "FTBFS with clang instead of gcc"
apply patch from Alexander <sanek23994@gmail.com>, upload to DELAYED/5
#777776 src:apron: "apron: ftbfs with GCC-5"
tag as unreproducible
~~#777780~~ src:asmon: "asmon: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Martin Michlmayr, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777783~~ src:atftp: "atftp: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Martin Michlmayr, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777797~~ src:bbrun: "bbrun: ftbfs with GCC-5"
add patch to build with "-std=gnu89", upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777806~~ src:booth: "booth: ftbfs with GCC-5"
tag as unreproducible
~~#777808~~ src:bwm-ng: "bwm-ng: ftbfs with GCC-5"
merge patch from Ubuntu, and build with "-std=gnu89", upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777831~~ src:deborphan: "deborphan: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Jakub Wilk, upload to DELAYED/5, then rescheduled to 0-day with maintainer's permission
~~#777835~~ src:dsbltesters: "dsbltesters: ftbfs with GCC-5"
tag as unreproducible
~~#777853~~ src:flow-tools: "flow-tools: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Alexander Balderson, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777880~~ src:gnac: "gnac: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Greg Pearson, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777881~~ src:gngb: "gngb: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Greg Pearson, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777895~~ src:haildb: "haildb: ftbfs with GCC-5"
tag as unreproducible
~~#777902~~ src:hfsplus: "hfsplus: ftbfs with GCC-5"
merge patch from Ubuntu, QA upload
~~#777903~~ src:hugs98: "hugs98: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Elizabeth J Dall, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777965~~ src:libpam-chroot: "libpam-chroot: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Linn Crosetto, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#777975~~ src:libssh: "libssh: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778009~~ src:mknbi: "mknbi: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Matthias Klose, QA upload
~~#778020~~ src:mz: "mz: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Joshua Gadeken, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778051~~ src:overgod: "overgod: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Nicholas Luedtke, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778056~~ src:pads: "pads: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Andrew Patterson, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778121~~ src:sks-ecc: "sks-ecc: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Brett Johnson, QA upload
~~#778129~~ src:squeak-plugins-scratch: "squeak-plugins-scratch: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Brett Johnson, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778137~~ src:tabble: "tabble: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from David S. Roth, QA upload
~~#778146~~ src:tinyscheme: "tinyscheme: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Nicholas Luedtke, upload to DELAYED/5
#778148 src:trafficserver: "trafficserver: ftbfs with GCC-5"
lower severity
~~#778151~~ src:tuxonice-userui: "tuxonice-userui: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Nicholas Luedtke, upload to DELAYED/5, later sponsor maintainer upload
~~#778152~~ src:uaputl: "uaputl: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Brett Johnson, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778153~~ src:udftools: "udftools: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Jakub Wilk, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778159~~ src:uswsusp: "uswsusp: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Andrew James, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778167~~ src:weplab: "weplab: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Elizabeth J Dall, QA upload
~~#778171~~ src:wmmon: "wmmon: ftbfs with GCC-5"
add patch to build with "-std=gnu89", upload to DELAYED/5
~~#778173~~ src:wmressel: "wmressel: ftbfs with GCC-5"
apply patch from Elizabeth J Dall, upload to DELAYED/5
~~#780199~~ src:redhat-cluster: "redhat-cluster: FTBFS in unstable - error: conflicting types for 'int64_t'"
apply patch from Michael Tautschnig, upload to DELAYED/2, then rescheduled by maintainer
~~#783899~~ liblog-any-perl: "liblog-any-perl, liblog-any-adapter-perl: File conflict when being installed together"
add Breaks/Replaces/Provides (pkg-perl)
~~#784844~~ libmousex-getopt-perl: "libmousex-getopt-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#785020~~ libmoosex-getopt-perl: "libmoosex-getopt-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#785158~~ libnet-ssleay-perl: "libnet-ssleay-perl: FTBFS: Your vendor has not defined SSLeay macro LIBRESSL_VERSION_NUMBER"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#785229~~ sqitch: "sqitch: FTBFS: new warnings"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#785232~~ libdist-zilla-plugin-requiresexternal-perl: "libdist-zilla-plugin-requiresexternal-perl: FTBFS: More than one plan found in TAP output"
make tests non-verbose (pkg-perl)
~~#785659~~ libdist-zilla-perl: "libdist-zilla-perl: FTBFS: t/plugins/testrelease.t failure"
make tests non-verbose (pkg-perl)
~~#786447~~ libcgi-application-plugin-authentication-perl: "libcgi-application-plugin-authentication-perl FTBFS in unstable"
add patch from Micah Gersten/Ubuntu (pkg-perl)
~~#786591~~ libtext-quoted-perl: "libtext-quoted-perl: broken by libtext-autoformat-perl changes"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#786667~~ libcatalyst-plugin-authentication-credential-openid-perl: "libcatalyst-plugin-authentication-credential-openid-perl: FTBFS: Bareword "use_test_base" not allowed"
patch Makefile.PL (pkg-perl)
~~#788350~~ libhttp-proxy-perl: "FTBFS - proxy tests"
add patch, improved from CPAN RT (pkg-perl)
~~#789141~~ src:libdancer2-perl: "libdancer2-perl: FTBFS with Plack >= 1.0036: t/classes/Dancer2-Core-Response/new_from.t"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#789669~~ src:starlet: "starlet: FTBFS with Plack 1.0036"
add patch for test compatibility with newer Plack (pkg-perl)
~~#789838~~ src:starman: "starman: FTBFS with Plack 1.0036"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#791493~~ libpadre-plugin-datawalker-perl: "libpadre-plugin-datawalker-perl: missing dependency on padre"
add missing dependency (pkg-perl)
~~#791510~~ libcatalyst-authentication-credential-authen-simple-perl: "libcatalyst-authentication-credential-authen-simple-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Test/Exception.pm in @INC"
add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
~~#791512~~ libcatalyst-plugin-cache-store-fastmmap-perl: "libcatalyst-plugin-cache-store-fastmmap-perl: FTBFS: Can't locate Test/Exception.pm in @INC"
add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
~~#791709~~ libjson-perl: "libjson-perl: FTBFS: Recursive inheritance detected"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#792063~~ src:libmath-mpfr-perl: "FTBFS: lngamma_bug.t and test1.t fail"
upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
~~#792844~~ libatombus-perl: "libatombus-perl: ships usr/share/man/man3/README.3pm.gz"
don't install README manpage (pkg-perl)
~~#792845~~ libclang-perl: "libclang-perl: ships usr/share/man/man3/README.3pm.gz"
don't install README POD/manpage (pkg-perl)

Sven Hoexter: RMS, free software and where I fail the goal

You might have already read this comment by RMS in the Guardian. That comment and a recent discussion about the relevance of GPL changes post GPLv2 made me think again about the battle RMS started to fight. While some think RMS should "retire", at least I still fail on my personal goal to not depend on non-free software and services. So for me this battle is far from over, and here is my personal list of "non-free debt" I've to pay off. general purpose systems aka your computer Looking at the increasing list of firmware blobs required to use a GPU, wireless chipsets and more and more wired NICs, the situation seems to be worse then in the late 90s. Back then the primary issue was finding supported hardware, but the driver was free. Nowadays even the open sourced firmware often requires obscure patched compilers to build. If I look at this stuff I think the OpenBSD project got that right with the more radical position. Oh and then there is CPU microcode. I'm not yet sure what to think about it, but in the end it's software and it's not open source. So it's non-free software running on my system. Maybe my memory is blurred due to the fact, that the seperation of firmware from the Linux kernel, and proper firmware loading got implemented only years later. I remember the discussion about the pwc driver and its removal from Linux. Maybe the situation wasn't better at that time but the firmware was just hidden inside the Linux driver code? On my system at work I've to add the Flash plugin to the list due to my latest test with Prezi which I'll touch later. I also own a few Humble Indie bundles. I played parts of Osmos after a recommendation by Joey Hess, I later finished to play through Limbo and I got pretty far with Machinarium on a Windows system I still had at that time. I also tried a few others but never got far or soon lost interest. Another thing I can not really get rid of is unrar because of stuff I need to pull from xda-developer links just to keep a cell phone running. Update: Josh Triplett pointed out that there is unar available in the Debian archive. And indeed that one works on the rar file I just extracted. Android ecosystem I will soon get rid of a stock S3 mini and try to replace it with a moto g loaded with CyanogenMod. That leaves me with a working phone with a OS that just works because of a shitload of non-free blobs. The time and work required to get there is another story. Among others you need a new bootloader that requires a newer fastboot compared to what we have in Jessie, and later you also need the newer adb to be able to sideload the CM image. There I gave in and just downloaded the pre build SDK from Google. And there you've another binary I did not even try to build from source. Same for the CM image itself, though that's not that much different from using a GNU/Linux distribution if you ignore the trust issues. It's hard to trust the phone I've build that way, but it's the best I can get at the moment with at least some bigger chunks of free software inside. So let's move to the applications on the phone. I do not use GooglePlay, so I rely on f-droid and freeware I can download directly from the vendor.

AndFTP: best sftp client I could find so far
Threema: a bit (a single one) more trustworthy then WhatsApp, they started around the company of Michael Kasper
Wunderlist: well done shared shopping list, also non-free webservice
Opera: the compression proxy is awesome, also kind of a non-free webservice

"Cloud" services This category mixes a lot with the stuff listed above, most of them are not only an application, in fact Threema and Wunderlist are useless without the backend service. And Opera is just degraded to a browser - and to be replaced with Firefox - if you discount the compression proxy. The other big addition in this category is Prezi. We tried it out at work after it got into my focus due to a post by Dave Aitel. It's kind of the poster child of non-freeness. It requires a non-free, unstable, insecure and half way deprecated browser plugin to work, you can not download your result in a useful format, you've to buy storage for your presentation at this one vendor, you've to pay if you want to keep your presentation private. It's the perfect lockin situation. But still it's very convenient, prevents a lot of common mistakes you can make when you create a presentation and they invented a new concept of presenting. I know about impress.js(hosted on a non-free platform by the way, but at least you can export it from there) and I also know about hovercraft. I'm impressed by them, but it's still not close to the ease of use of Prezi. So here you can also very prominently see the cost of free and non-free software. Invest the time and write something cool with CSS3 and impress.js or pay Prezi to just klick yourself through. To add something about the instability - I had to use a windows laptop for presenting with Prezi because the Flash plugin on Jessie crashed in the presentation mode, I did not yet check the latest Flash update. I guess that did not make the situation worse, it already is horrible. Update: Daniel Kahn Gillmore pointed out that you can combine inkscape with sozi, though the Debian package is in desperate need for an active maintainer, see also #692989. I also use kind of database services like duden.de and dict.cc. When I was younger you bought such things printed on dead trees but they did not update very well. Thinking a bit further, a Certification Authority is not only questionable due to the whole trust issue, they also provide OCSP responder as kind of a web service. And I've already had the experience what the internet looks like when the OCSP systems of GlobalSign failed. So there is still a lot to fight for and a lot of "personal non-free debt" to pay off.

Julien Danjou: The Hacker's Guide to Python, 2nd edition!

A year passed since the first release of The Hacker's Guide to Python in March 2014. A few hundreds copies have been distributed so far, and the feedback is wonderful! I already wrote extensively about the making of that book last year, and I cannot emphasize enough how this adventure has been amazing so far. That's why I decided a few months ago to update the guide and add some new content. So let's talk about what's new in this second edition of the book! First, I obviously fixed a few things. I had some reports about small mistakes and typos which I applied as I received them. Not a lot fortunately, but it's still better to have fewer errors in a book, right? Then, I updated some of the content. Things changed since I wrote the first chapters of that guide 18 months ago. Therefore I had to rewrite some of the sections and take into account new software or libraries that were released. At last, I decided to enhance the book with one more interview. I've requested my fellow OpenStack developer Joshua Harlow, who is leading a few interesting Python projects, to join the long list of interviewees in the book. I hope you'll enjoy it! If you didn't get the book yet, go check it out and use the coupon THGTP2LAUNCH to get 20% off during the next 48 hours!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2015 Open for Registration

The annoucement below just went to the R-SIG-Finance list. More information is as usual at the R / Finance page.

Registration for R/Finance 2015 is now open! The conference will take place on May 29 and 30, at UIC in Chicago. Building on the success of the previous conferences in 2009-2014, we expect more than 250 attendees from around the world. R users from industry, academia, and government will joining 30+ presenters covering all areas of finance with R. We are very excited about the four keynote presentations given by Emanuel Derman, Louis Marascio, Alexander McNeil, and Rishi Narang.
The conference agenda (currently) includes 18 full presentations and 19 shorter "lightning talks". As in previous years, several (optional) pre-conference seminars are offered on Friday morning. There is also an (optional) conference dinner at The Terrace at Trump Hotel. Overlooking the Chicago river and skyline, it is a perfect venue to continue conversations while dining and drinking. Registration information and agenda details can be found on the conference website as they are being finalized.
Registration is also available directly at the registration page. We would to thank our 2015 sponsors for the continued support enabling us to host such an exciting conference: International Center for Futures and Derivatives at UIC Revolution Analytics
MS-Computational Finance and Risk Management at University of Washington Ketchum Trading
OneMarketData
RStudio
SYMMS On behalf of the committee and sponsors, we look forward to seeing you in Chicago! For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson,
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

See you in Chicago in May!

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

Jaldhar Vyas: Mini-Debconf Mumbai 2015

Last weekend I went to Mumbai to attend the Mini-Debconf held at IIT-Bombay. These are my impressions of the trip. Arrival and Impressions of Mumbai Getting there was a quite an adventure in itself. Unlike during my ill-fated attempt to visit a Debian event in Kerala last year when a bureaucratic snafu left me unable to get a visa, the organizers started the process much earlier at their end this time and with proper permissions. Yet in India, the wheels only turn as fast as they want to turn so despite their efforts, it was only literally at the last minute that I actually managed to secure my visa. I should note however that Indian government has done a lot to improve the process compared to the hell I remember from, say, a decade ago. It's fairly straightforward for tourist visas now and I trust they will get around to doing the same for conference visas in the fullness of time. I didn't want to commit to buying a plane ticket until I had the visa so I became concerned that the only flights left would be either really expensive or on the type of airline that flies you over Syria or under the Indian Ocean. I lucked out and got a good price on a Swiss Air flight, not non-stop but you can't have everything. So Thursday afternoon I set off for JFK. With only one small suitcase getting there by subway was no problem and I arrived and checked in with plenty of time. Even TSA passed me through with only a minimal amount of indignity. The first leg of my journey took me to Zurich in about eight hours. We were only in Zurich for an hour and then (by now Friday) it was another 9 hours to Mumbai. Friday was Safala Ekadashi but owing to the necessity of staying hydrated on a long flight I drank a lot of water and ate some fruit which I don't normally do on a fasting day. It was tolerable but not too pleasant; I definitely want to try and make travel plans to avoid such situations in the future. Friday evening local time I got to Mumbai. Chhattrapati Shivaji airport has improved a lot since I saw t last and now has all the amenities an international traveller needs including unrestricted free wifi (Zurich airport are you taking notes?) But here my first ominous piece of bad luck began. No sign of my suitcase. Happily some asking around revealed that it had somehow gotten on some earlier Swiss Air flight instead of the one I was on and was actually waiting for me. I got outside and Debian Developer Praveen Arimbrathodiyil was waiting to pick me up. Normally I don't lke staying in Mumbai very much even though I have relatives there but that's because we usually went during July-August the monsoon season when Mumbai reverts back to the swampy archipelago it was originally built on. This time the weather was nice, cold by local standards, but lovely and spring-like to someone from snowy New Jersey. There have been a lot of improvements to the road infrastructure and people are actually obeying the traffic laws. (Within reason of course. Whether or not a family of six can arrange themselves on one Bajaj scooter is no business of the cops.) The Hotel Tuliip (yes, two i's. Manager didn't know why.) Residency where I was to stay while not quite a five star establishment was adequate for my needs with a bed, hot water shower, and air conditioning. And a TV which to the bellhops great confusion I did not want turned on. (He asked about five times.) There was no Internet access per se but the manager offered to hook up a wireless router to a cable. Which on closer inspection turned out to have been severed at the base. He assured me it would be fixed tomorrow so I didn't complain and decided to do something more productive thank checking my email like sleeping. The next day I woke up in total darkness. Apparently there had been some kind of power problem during the night which tripped a fuse or something. A call to the front desk got them to fix that and then the second piece of bad luck happened. I plugged my Thinkpad in and woke it up from hibernation and a minute later there was a loud pop from the power adapter. Note I have a travel international plug adapter with surge protector so nothing bad ought to have happened but the laptop would on turning on display the message "critical low battery error" and immediately power off. I was unable to google what that meant without Internet access but I decided not to panic and continue getting ready. I would have plenty of opportunity to troubleshoot at the conference venue. Or so I thought... I took an autorickshaw to IIT. There also there have been positive improvements. Being quite obviously a foreigner I was fully prepared to be taken along the "scenic route." But now there are fair zones and the rickshaws all have (tamperproof!) digital fare meters so I was deposited at the main gate without fuss. After reading a board with a scary list of dos and don'ts I presented myself at security only to be inexplicably waved through without a second glance. Later I found out they've abandoned all the security theatre but not got around to updating the signs yet. Mumbai is one of the biggest, densely populated cities in the world but the IIT campus is an oasis of tranquility on the shores of Lake Powai. It's a lot bigger than it looked on the map so I had to wander around a bit before I reached the conference venue but I did make for the official registration time. Registration I was happy to meet several old friends (Such as Kartik Mistry and Kumar Appiah who along with Praveen and myself were the other DDs there,) people who I've corresponded with but never met, and many new people. I'm told 200+ people registered altogether. Most seemed to be students from IIT and elsewhere in Mumbai but there were also some Debian enthusiasts from further afield and most hearteningly some "civilians" who wanted to know what this was all about. With the help of a borrowed Thinkpad adapter I got my laptop running again. (Thankfully, despite the error message, the battery itself was unharmed.) However, my streak of bad luck was not yet over. It was that very weekend that IIT had a freak campus-wide network outage something that had never happened before. And as the presentation for the talk I was to give had apparently been open when I hibernated my laptop the night before, the sudden forced shutdown had trashed the file. (ls showed it as 0 length. An fsck didn't help.) I possibly had a backup on my server but with no Internet access I had no way to retrieve it. I still remained cool. The talk was scheduled for the second day so I could recover it at the hotel. Keynotes Professor Kannan Maudgalya of the FOSSEE (Free and Open Source Software for Education) Project which is part of the central government Ministry for Human Resource Development spoke about various activities of his project. Of particular interest to us are:

A scheme to get labs and college engineering/computer science departments off proprietary software by helping them identify relevant free software (writing it if necessary.) and helping them transition to it. Similarly getting curricula away from textbooks that use proprietary software by rewriting exercises to use free equivalents.
A series of videos for self-instruction kind of like Khan Academy but geared to the challenges of being used in places where there might not be a net connection or even a trained teacher.
The Vidyut tablet. A very low cost (~5000 Rupees) ARM-based netbook that runs Linux or Android software. You may have heard about earlier plans for a cheap tablet like this. Vidyut is the next generation correcting some flaws in previous attempts. Not only the software but the hardware is free too. It is currently running a stripped down version of Ubuntu but there was a request to port it to Debian and I'm happy to report several Debian users have accepted the challenge.

FOSSEE is well funded, backed by the government and has enthusiastic staff so we should be seeing a lot more from them in the future. Veteran Free Software activist Venky Hariharan spoke about his experiences in lobbying the government on tech issues. He noted that there has been a sea change in attitudes towards Linux and Open source in the bureacracy of late. Several states have been aggressively mandating the use of it as have several national ministries and agencies. We the community can provide a valuable service by helping them in the transition. They also need to be educated on how to work with the community (contributing changes back, not working behind closed doors etc.) Debian History and Debian Cycle Shirish Agarwal spoke about the Debian philosophy and foundational documents such as the social contract and DFSG and how the release cycle works. Nothing new to an experienced user but informative to the newcomers in the audience and sparked some questions and discussion. Keysigning One of my main missions in attending was to help get as many isolated people as possible into the web of trust. Unfortunately the keysigning was not adequately publicized and few people were ready. I would have led them through the process of creating a new key there and then but with the lack of connectivity that idea had to be abandoned. I did manage to sign about 8-10 keys during other times. Future Directions for Debian-IN BOF I led this one. Lots of spirited discussion and I found feedback from new users in particular to be very helpful. Some take aways are:

Some people said it is hard to find concise, easily digestible information about what Debian can do. (I.e. Can I surf the web? Can I play a certain game? etc.) Debian-IN's web presence in particular needs a lot of improvement. We should also consider other channels such as a facebook page. A volunteer stepped up to look into these issues.
Along these lines it was felt that we cannot just wait for people to come to us, we should do more outreach. I pointed out that one group that we need to reach out more to is the Debian Project at large. We need to do more publicity in debian-project, DWN, Planet etc. to let everyone know whats going on in India. I also felt that we have a strong base amongst CS/engineering students but should do more to attract other demographics.
Debian events have suffered from organizational problems. Partly this is because the people involved are not professional event planners. They are learning how to do it which is an ongoing process and execution is improving with each iteration so no worries there but problems also arise because Debian-IN is dependent on other entities for many things and those entities do not always have, shall we say, the same sense of urgency. Therefore we need legal standing of our own for accepting donations, inviting foreign guests etc. This doesn't necessarily have to be a separate organization. Affiliating with an existing group is an option providing they share our ideology. Swathanthra Malayalam Computing was one suggestion.
There is still not much Debian presence in the North and East of India. (Which includes large cities like Delhi and Kolkata.) Unfortunately until we can find volunteers in those areas to take the lead on organizing something there is not a lot we can do to rectify the situation.
We must have Debian-IN t-shirts.

Lil' Debi Kumar Sukhani was a Debian GSoC student and his project which he demonstrated was to be able to install Debian on an Android phone. Why would you want to do this? Apart from the evergreen "Because I can", you can run server software such as sshd on your phone or even use it as an ARM development board. Unfortunately my phone uses Blackberry 10 OS which can run android apps (emulated under QNX) but wouldn't be able to use this. When I get a real Android phone I will try it out. Debian on ARM Siji Sunny gave this talk which was geared more towards hardware types which I am not but one thing I learned was thee difference between all the different ARM subarchitectures. I knew Siji first from a previous incarnation when he worked at CDAC with the late and much lamented Prof. R.K. Joshi. We had a long conversation about those days. Prof. Joshi/CDAC had developed an Indic rendering system called Indix which alas became the Betamax to Pango's VHS but he was also very involved in other Indic computing issues such as working with the Unicode Consortium and the preseration of Sanskrit manuscripts which is also an interest of mine. One good thing that cameout of Indix was some rather nice fonts. I had thought they were still buried in the dungeons of CDAC but apparently they were freed at one point. That's one more thing for me to look into. Evening/Next morning< My cousin met me and we had a leisurely dinner together. It was quite late by the time I got back to the hotel. FOSSEE had kindly lent me one of their tablets (which incidently are powerful enough to run LibreOffice comfortably.) so I thought I might be able to quickly redo my presentation before bedtime. Well, wouldn't you know it the wifi was not fixed. As I should have guessed but all the progress I'd had made me giddily optimistic. There was an option of trying to find an Internet cafe in a commercial area 15-20 minutes walk away. If this had been Gujarat I would have tried it but although I can more or less understand Hindi I can barely put together two sentences and Marathi I don't know at all. So I gave up that idea. I redid the slides from memory as best I could and went to sleep. In the morning I checked out and ferried myself and my suitcase via rickshaw back to the IIT campus. This time I got the driver to take me all the way in to the conference venue. Prof. Maudgalya kindly offered to let me keep the tablet to develop stuff on. I respectfully had to decline because although I love to collect bits of tech the fact it is it would have just gathered dust and ought to go to someone who can make a real contribution with it. I transferred my files to a USB key and borrowed a loaner laptop for my talk. Debian Packaging Workshop While waiting to do my talk I sat in on a workshop Praveen ran taking participants through the whole process of creating a Debian package (a ruby gem was the example.) He's done this before so it was a good presentation and well attended but the lack of connectivity did put a damper on things. Ask Me Anything It turned out the schedule had to be shuffled a bit so my talk was moved later from the announced time. A few people had already showed up so I took some random questions about Debian from them instead. GNOME Shell Accessibility With Orca Krishnakant Mane is remarkable. Although he is blind, he is a developer and a major contributor to Open Source projects. He talked about the Accessibility features of GNOME and compared them (favorably I might add) with proprietary screen readers. Not a subject that's directly useful to me but I found it interesting nonetheless. Rust: The memory safe language Manish Goregaokar talked about one of the new fad programming languages that have gotten a lot of buzz lately. This one is backed by Mozilla and it's interesting enough but I'll stick with C++ and Perl until one of the new ones "wins." Building a Mail Server With Debian Finally I got to give my talk and, yup, the video out on my borrowed laptop was incompatible with the projector. A slight delay to transfer everything to another laptop and I was able to begin. I talked about setting up BIND, postfix, and of course dovecot along with spamassassin, clamav etc. It turned out I had more than enough material and I went atleast 30 minutes over time and even then I had to rush at the end. People said they liked it so I'm happy. The End I gave the concluding remarks. Various people were thanked (including myself) mementos were given and pictures were taken. Despite a few mishaps I enjoyed myself and I am glad I attended. The level of enthusiasm was very high and lessons were learned so the next Debian-IN event should be even better. My departing flight wasn't due to leave until 1:20AM so I killed a few hours with my family before the flight. Once again I was stopping in Zurich, this time for most of a day. The last of my blunders was not to take my coat out of my suitcase and the temperature outside was 29F so I had to spend that whole time enjoing the (not so) many charms of Zurich airport. Atleast the second flight took me to Newark instead of JFK so I was able to get home a little earlier on Monday evening, exhausted but happy I made the trip.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2015 Call for Papers

Earlier today, Josh send the text below to the R-SIG-Finance list, and I updated the R/Finance website, including its Call for Papers page, accordingly. We are once again very excited about our conference, thrilled about the four confirmed keynotes, and hope that many R / Finance users will not only join us in Chicago in May 2015 -- but also submit an exciting proposal. So read on below, and see you in Chicago in May! Call for Papers: R/Finance 2015: Applied Finance with R
May 29 and 30, 2015
University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA
The seventh annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held on May 29 and 30, 2015 in Chicago, IL, USA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, market microstructure, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management, portfolio construction, and trading. Over the past six years, R/Finance has included attendees from around the world. It has featured presentations from prominent academics and practitioners, and we anticipate another exciting line-up for 2015. This year will include invited keynote presentations by Emanuel Derman, Louis Marascio, Alexander McNeil, and Rishi Narang. We invite you to submit complete papers in pdf format for consideration. We will also consider one-page abstracts (in txt or pdf format) although more complete papers are preferred. We welcome submissions for both full talks and abbreviated "lightning talks." Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. All slides will be made publicly available at conference time. Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany the slides. Data sets should also be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to presenters who have released R packages. The conference will award two (or more) $1000 prizes for best papers. A submission must be a full paper to be eligible for a best paper award. Extended abstracts, even if a full paper is provided by conference time, are not eligible for a best paper award. Financial assistance for travel and accommodation may be available to presenters, however requests must be made at the time of submission. Assistance will be granted at the discretion of the conference committee. Please make your submission online at this link. The submission deadline is January 31, 2015. Submitters will be notified via email by February 28, 2015 of acceptance, presentation length, and financial assistance (if requested). Additional details will be announced via the R/Finance conference website as they become available. Information on previous years' presenters and their presentations are also at the conference website. For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson, Dale Rosenthal,
Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

Daniel Pocock: Want to be selected for Google Summer of Code 2015?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Updated list of upcoming Rcpp talks and workshops

This is an updated version of an earlier post in March. A number of talks about Rcpp are scheduled over the next couple of months:

On Wednesday May 14 I will be speaking at the Chicago R Users Group meeting charmingly titled Warm Up for R/Finance, along with fellow R/Finance organizer Josh Ulrich, fellow R/Finance regular Kent Hosxey as well as Cliff Clive. I will talk about Redis and my rather recent nascent RcppRedis package.
Our sixth international conference R/Finance will take place May 16 and 17, 2014, at UIC in Chicago. See the current agenda for details of the program---which once again will be preceded by one-hour workshops. And as in the past, I will offer a one-hour gentle introduction to Rcpp. This workshop requires registration and a fee, and registraion will close shortly. I will also present a short lightning talk about the RcppRedis package as part of the conference proper.
A few days later, on May 20, 2014, I will present a one-hour webinar which is part of a series organized by Ray DiGiacomo and the Orange County R Users Group. See this page for details and registration information; the talk itself will be free of charge.
Later in the month, on May 30, 2014, I will give a talk / guest lecture about Rcpp and RcppArmadillo and over in Economics at the University of Chicago. I reckon that this event is not open to anybody not part of U of C.
Another three-hour tutorial is scheduled for the tutorial day preceding useR! 2014 at UCLA in early July. This tutorial will also require registration as part of the annual useR! conference. I am very honoured to have been asked to give one of the invited keynotes at useR! 2014. The talk may (or may not) cover at least some aspects of Rcpp. As my talk proposal about the recent RcppZiggurat package for faster Normal RNGs was accepted, I will also give a regular conference talk.

So the month of June remains pretty open. If someone wants me to talk somewhere else, preferably on a Saturday, feel free to get in touch.

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

Axel Beckert: GNU Screen 4.2.0 in Debian Experimental

About a month ago, on 20th of March, GNU Screen had its 27th anniversary. A few days ago, Amadeusz S awi ski, GNU Screen s new primary upstream maintainer, released the status quo of Screen development as version 4.2.0 (probably to distinguish it from all those 4.1.0 labeled development snapshots floating around in most Linux distributions nowadays). I did something similar and uploaded the status quo of Debian s screen package in git as 4.1.0~20120320gitdb59704-10 to Debian Sid shortly afterwards. That upload should hit Jessie soon, too, resolving the following two issues also in Testing:

#740301: proper systemd support Thanks Josh Triplett for his help!
#735554: fix for multiuser usage Thanks Martin von Wittich for spotting this issue!

That way I could decouple these packaging fixes/features from the new upstream release which I uploaded to Debian Experimental for now. Testers for the 4.2.0-1 package are very welcome! Oh, and by the way, that upstream comment (or ArchLinux s according announcement) about broken backwards compatibility with attaching to running sessions started with older Screen releases doesn t affected Debian since that has been fixed in Debian already with the package which is in Wheezy. (Thanks again Julien Cristau for the patch back then!) While there are bigger long-term plans at upstream, Amadeusz is already working on the next 4.x release (probably named 4.2.1) which will likely incorporate some of the patches floating around in the Linux distributions packages. At least SuSE and Debian offered their patches explicitly for upstream inclusion. So far already two patches found in the Debian packages have been obsoleted by upstream git commits after the 4.2.0 release. Yay!

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.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2014 Open for Registration

The annoucement below just went to the R-SIG-Finance list. More information is as usual at the R / Finance page:

Now open for registrations: R / Finance 2014: Applied Finance with R
May 16 and 17, 2014
Chicago, IL, USA
The registration for R/Finance 2014 -- which will take place May 16 and 17 in Chicago -- is now open! Building on the success of the previous conferences in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, we expect around 300 attendees from around the world. R users from industry, academia, and government will joining 30+ presenters covering all areas of finance with R. We are very excited about the four keynotes by Bill Cleveland, Alexios Ghalanos, Bob McDonald and Luke Tierney. The main agenda (currently) includes sixteen full presentations and twenty-one shorter "lightning talks". We are also excited to offer four optional pre-conference seminars on Friday morning. To celebrate the sixth year of the conference in style, the dinner will be returning to The Terrace of the Trump Hotel. Overlooking the Chicago River and skyline, it is a perfect venue to continue conversations while dining and drinking. More details of the agenda are available at:

http://www.RinFinance.com/agenda/

Registration information is available at

http://www.RinFinance.com/register/

and can also be directly accessed by going to

http://www.regonline.com/RFinance2014

We would to thank our 2014 Sponsors for the continued support enabling us to host such an exciting conference:

International Center for Futures and Derivatives at UIC Revolution Analytics
MS-Computational Finance at University of Washington OneMarketData
RStudio

On behalf of the committee and sponsors, we look forward to seeing you in Chicago!

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson,
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

See you in Chicago in May!

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

Enrico Zini: terminal-emulators

Quest for a terminal emulator The requirements I need a terminal emulator. This is a checklist of the features that I need:

Foreground colour: #aaaaaa.
Background colour: black.
"Linux console" colour palette.
Font: Monospace-10.
Alt+Fnn to directly switch to one of the first 12 terminals, like in the Linux console.
F11 to toggle fullscreen.
Alt+'+', Alt+'-', Alt+'0' to control font sizes.
All other keybindings disabled, so that terminal programs are free to use them.
I occasionally need to switch to black-on-white for presentations.
Tabs.
When I open a new tab it needs to contain a shell opened inside the same directory of the last tab I was in. The way I normally start working is something like: cd workdir; x-terminal-emulator -e vim todolist and then I start opening new tabs.
I need -e to work. In fact, I need the terminal to work as x-terminal-emulator -e cmd args...
I need to conveniently pick a URL in a terminal and open it in Chromium, and not any other browser. Even better, open it in x-www-browser

My experience is that getting all of this to work is not being as easy as it seems, so I'm creating this page to track progress. gnome-terminal I've been happily using this for years, and it did everything I needed, until some months ago it started to open new tabs in the terminal's working directory instead of the last tab's working directory. This is a big point of frustration for me. It also started opening https urls with Firefox, although the preferred browser was Chromium. There seemed to be no way to control it: I looked for firefox or iceweasel in all gconf and dconf settings and found nothing. The browser issue was fixed by accident when I used Xfce4's settings application to change the browser from Chromium to Firefox and then back to Chromium. update, thanks to Mathieu Parent, Josh Triplett, Peter De Wachter, Julien Cristau, and Charles Plessy: It is also possible to restore the "new tab opened inside the same directory of the last tab I was in" behaviour, by enabling "run command as a login shell" so that /etc/profile.d/vte.sh is run (thanks Mathieu Parent for the link). That in turn spawned extra cleanup work in my .bashrc/.bash_profile/.profile setup, which has been randomly evolving since even before my first Debian "buzz" system. I found that it was setting PROMPT_COMMAND to something else to set the terminal title, conflicting with what vte.sh wants to do. With regards to loading /etc/profile.d/vte.sh by default, Peter De Watcher sent pointers to relevant bugs: here, here, and here. An alternative strategy is to work using the prompt rather than PROMPT_COMMAND; an example is in Josh Triplett's .bashrc from git://joshtriplett.org/git/home. Josh Triplett also said:

To fix the browser launched for URLs, you either need to use a desktop environment following GNOME's mechanism for setting the default browser, or edit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list and make sure x-scheme-handler/http, x-scheme-handler/https, and x-scheme-handler/ftp are set to your preferred browser's desktop file basename under [Added Associations].

All my issues with gnome-terminal are now gone and I'm only too happy to go back to it. rxvt-unicode-256color urxvt took some work. This is where I got with configuration:

URxvt.font: xft:Monospace-10:antialias=true
URxvt.foreground: #aaaaaa
URxvt.background: black
URxvt.scrollBar_right: true
URxvt.cursorBlink: true
URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher,tabbedex
URxvt.url-launcher: /usr/bin/x-www-browser
URxvt.matcher.button: 1
URxvt.perl-lib: /home/enrico/.urxvt/perl
URxvt.color0: black
URxvt.color1: #aa0000
URxvt.color2: #00aa00umask
URxvt.color3: #aa5500
URxvt.color4: #0000aa
URxvt.color5: #aa00aa
URxvt.color6: #00aaaa
URxvt.color7: #aaaaaa
URxvt.color8: #555555
URxvt.color9: #ff5555
URxvt.color10: #55ff55
URxvt.color11: #ffff55
URxvt.color12: #5555ff
URxvt.color13: #ff55ff
URxvt.color14: #55ffff
URxvt.color15: #ffffff

I got all of the tab behaviour that I need by "customizing" the tab script (yuck github

). Missing

Bold fonts only work if I set TERM=rxvt
The implementation for opening a new tab in the directory of the current tab is rather fragile.
Resizing the terminal window causes an annoying flicker

sakura Configuration is in .config/sakura/sakura.conf and these bits help:

colorset1_fore=rgb(170,170,170)
colorset1_back=rgb(0,0,0)
colorset1_opacity=99
colorset2_fore=rgb(0,0,0)
colorset2_back=rgb(254,254,254)
colorset2_opacity=99
font=Monospace 10
show_always_first_tab=No
scrollbar=false
fullscreen_key=F11
palette=linux

Missing

Alt+Fnn to directly switch to one of the first 12 terminals, like in the Linux console. Sakura hardcodes using numbers for switching, and only allows to change the modifier.
Alt+'+', Alt+'-', Alt+'0' to control font sizes.
Tabs are huge and take way too much screen space.

lxterminal Configuration is in .config/lxterminal/lxterminal.conf and this is relevant to me:

[general]
fontname=DejaVu Sans Mono 10
fgcolor=#aaaaaaaaaaaa
disallowbold=false
cursorblinks=true
tabpos=top
hidescrollbar=false
hidemenubar=true
hideclosebutton=true
disablef10=true
disablealt=true

Also, to open a url directly you control+click it. Missing

Alt+Fnn to directly switch to one of the first 12 terminals, like in the Linux console.
F11 to toggle fullscreen.
Alt+'+', Alt+'-', Alt+'0' to control font sizes.
I occasionally need to switch to black-on-white for presentations: this is inconvenient, as it requires to set foreground and background separately each time.

terminator Configuration is in .config/terminator/config and this is relevant to me:

[global_config]
  use_custom_url_handler = True
  custom_url_handler = x-www-browser
  inactive_color_offset = 1.0
[keybindings]
  close_term = None
  close_window = None
  copy = None
  cycle_next = None
  cycle_prev = None
  go_down = None
  go_next = None
  go_prev = None
  go_up = None
  group_all = None
  group_tab = None
  hide_window = None
  move_tab_left = None
  move_tab_right = None
  new_tab = None
  new_terminator = None
  new_window = None
  next_tab = None
  paste = None
  prev_tab = None
  reset_clear = None
  reset = None
  resize_down = None
  resize_left = None
  resize_right = None
  resize_up = None
  rotate_ccw = None
  rotate_cw = None
  scaled_zoom = None
  search = None
  split_horiz = None
  split_vert = None
  switch_to_tab_1 = <Alt>F1
  switch_to_tab_2 = <Alt>F2
  switch_to_tab_3 = <Alt>F3
  switch_to_tab_4 = <Alt>F4
  switch_to_tab_5 = <Alt>F5
  switch_to_tab_6 = <Alt>F6
  switch_to_tab_7 = <Alt>F7
  switch_to_tab_8 = <Alt>F8
  switch_to_tab_9 = <Alt>F9
  switch_to_tab_10 = <Alt>F10
  toggle_scrollbar = None
  toggle_zoom = None
  ungroup_all = None
  ungroup_tab = None
[profiles]
  <span class="createlink">default</span>
    palette = "#000000:#aa0000:#00aa00:#aa5500:#0000aa:#aa00aa:#00aaaa:#aaaaaa:#555555:#ff5555:#55ff55:#ffff55:#5555ff:#ff55ff:#55ffff:#ffffff"
    copy_on_selection = True
    icon_bell = False
    background_image = None
    show_titlebar = False

Missing

I need -e to work. In fact, I need the terminal to work as x-terminal-emulator -e cmd args.... #734655 but should be fixed soon
New windows start with the title bar visible, even if I configured it not to show. It disappears as soon as the window gets focused, causing the terminal contents to resize. It is just a glitch, but oh so annoying!

update: Richard Hartmann pointed out that terminator's upstream maintainer now changed after the old one didn't have time any more, and it should have a release with a ton of improvements anytime soon. xfce4-terminal Configuration is in .config/xfce4/terminal, and this is relevant to me: terminalrc:

[Configuration]
FontName=Monospace 10
MiscAlwaysShowTabs=FALSE
MiscBell=FALSE
MiscBordersDefault=TRUE
MiscCursorBlinks=FALSE
MiscCursorShape=TERMINAL_CURSOR_SHAPE_BLOCK
MiscDefaultGeometry=80x24
MiscInheritGeometry=FALSE
MiscMenubarDefault=FALSE
MiscMouseAutohide=FALSE
MiscToolbarDefault=FALSE
MiscConfirmClose=TRUE
MiscCycleTabs=TRUE
MiscTabCloseButtons=TRUE
MiscTabCloseMiddleClick=TRUE
MiscTabPosition=GTK_POS_TOP
MiscHighlightUrls=TRUE
ShortcutsNoMenukey=TRUE
ShortcutsNoMnemonics=TRUE
ColorForeground=#aaaaaaaaaaaa

accels.scm:

(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-1" "<Alt>F1")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-2" "<Alt>F2")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-3" "<Alt>F3")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-4" "<Alt>F4")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-5" "<Alt>F5")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-6" "<Alt>F6")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-7" "<Alt>F7")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-8" "<Alt>F8")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-9" "<Alt>F9")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-10" "<Alt>F10")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-11" "<Alt>F11")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/terminal-window/goto-tab-12" "<Alt>F12")

update: Yves-Alexis Perez points out that to disable the F1 for help in the terminal, you need to remove the accelerator. I tried this and this and didn't have success, but I confess I did not dig too much into it. Although xfce4-terminal -e does not work as I expect, xfce4-terminal registers a wrapper for x-terminal-emulator that does the right thing with respect to -e (also thanks Yves-Alexis Perez). Missing

Alt+'+', Alt+'-', Alt+'0' to control font sizes.
All other keybindings disabled, so that terminal programs are free to use them. I could not find a way to disable F1 for help.
I occasionally need to switch to black-on-white for presentations. I can switch to a "Black on white" preset, but there is no "Gray on black" to switch back to. I can switch back to "White on black", but then I need to manually set the text colour to #aaaaaa. update: Yves-Alexis Perez found that you can add presets to .local/share/colorthemes taking examples from /usr/share/xfce4/terminal/colorschemes; next time I consider switching to xfce4-terminal I'll try that.

roxterm Configuration is in .config/roxterm.sourceforge.net/ split in several files corresponding to profiles. This is a reasonable starting point for me: Profiles/Default:

[roxterm profile]
colour_scheme=Default
disable_menu_access=1
disable_menu_shortcuts=1
disable_tab_menu_shortcuts=0
tab_close_btn=0
hide_menubar=1
always_show_tabs=0

Colours/Default:

[roxterm colour scheme]
0=#000000000000
1=#aaaa00000000
2=#0000aaaa0000
3=#aaaa55550000
4=#00000000aaaa
5=#aaaa0000aaaa
6=#0000aaaaaaaa
7=#aaaaaaaaaaaa
8=#555555555555
9=#ffff55555555
10=#5555ffff5555
11=#ffffffff5555
12=#55555555ffff
13=#ffff5555ffff
14=#5555ffffffff
15=#ffffffffffff
palette_size=16
foreground=#aaaaaaaaaaaa
background=#000000000000
cursor=#cccccccccccc
bold=
dim=

Shortcuts/Default:

[roxterm shortcuts scheme]
File/New Window=
File/New Tab=
File/Close Window=
File/Close Tab=
Tabs/Previous Tab=
Tabs/Next Tab=
Edit/Copy=
Edit/Paste=
View/Zoom In=<Control>plus
View/Zoom Out=<Control>minus
View/Normal Size=<Control>0
View/Full Screen=F11
View/Scroll Up One Line=
View/Scroll Down One Line=
Help/Help=
Edit/Copy & Paste=
Search/Find...=
Search/Find Next=
Search/Find Previous=
File/New Window With Profile/Default=
File/New Tab With Profile/Default=
Tabs/Select_Tab_0=<Alt>F1
Tabs/Select_Tab_1=<Alt>F2
Tabs/Select_Tab_2=<Alt>F3
Tabs/Select_Tab_3=<Alt>F4
Tabs/Select_Tab_4=<Alt>F5
Tabs/Select_Tab_5=<Alt>F6
Tabs/Select_Tab_6=<Alt>F7
Tabs/Select_Tab_7=<Alt>F8
Tabs/Select_Tab_8=<Alt>F9
Tabs/Select_Tab_9=<Alt>F9
Tabs/Select_Tab_10=<Alt>F10
Tabs/Select_Tab_11=<Alt>F11
Tabs/Select_Tab_12=<Alt>F12

Global:

[roxterm options]
edit_shortcuts=0
prefer_dark_theme=1
colour_scheme=Default
warn_close=1

Missing Nothing of my initial requirements seems to be missing, really, so I'm sticking to it for a while to see what happens. The first itch to scratch is that when the menubar is hidden, the popup menu becomes the entire menubar contents, which does not fit the general use case to have a contextual menu with the most common shortcuts. I'll just declare it useless and get myself used to some new hotkey for starting a new terminal. update: after fixing my issues with gnome-terminal I've switched back to gnome-terminal: its interface feels less clunky as I'm already used to it. Other references Guillem Jover made a similar analysis in 2009, it can be found here. Thomas Koch mentioned that termit should be able to do all I need, and is scriptable in Lua. I like the sound of that, and it's definitely one I should look next time I find myself shopping for terminal emulators.

Russ Allbery: More on displaying files with head

That was fun! Since my previous entry on using head to display the contents of several files in a form that's easy to cut and paste, multiple people have sent elaborations or related tricks. It seemed like it would be a good idea to post a roundup, since I learned a bunch. Multiple people (I think Josh Triplett was the first) pointed out that one can avoid having to pick a sufficiently large value of -n by instead using:

    head -n -0 *.install

With GNU head at least, a negative number says to print out all lines of the file except that many at the end, so -0 displays the whole file, regardless of size. Unfortunately, while this works anywhere that I am likely to run it, it's not specified by POSIX, while the original is. Another variation, pointed out by Buck Huppmann, is:

    tail -n +0 *.install

The +0 syntax is required by POSIX, unlike the -0 syntax for head... but unfortunately POSIX doesn't require that tail supports multiple files and the headers, although it does for head. Buck also pointed out that including the -v flag will always force the header even if there's only one file, which is useful. (Although be warned that -v isn't a POSIX-recognized flag.) Markus Raab also pointed out the xsel utility, which I'd heard of but hadn't ever used. If the goal is to cut and paste the output, using:

    head -v -n -0 *.install   xsel -i

avoids the cut part by dumping the result directly into the X selection. Buck pointed out xclip, which does the same thing. Both can be used with the -o flag inside an editor to paste as well if you don't want to reach for a mouse. In vi :r !xclip -o, and in Emacs, C-u M-! xclip -o. Finally, Guillem Jover metioned that:

    grep . *.install

does sort of the same thing with a different output format that may be more useful depending on what you're doing. (I find it less human-readable but more machine-parsable.)

Andrew Pollock: [life] Six years without Joshua

I think of Joshua often, and wonder how life might be different were he with us today. The long day of his delivery is one of the most poignant memories that I will carry with me forever. This year is the first year I've been back in Australia for Father's Day. Father's Day in the US is in June, so it's never really been the constant reminder that it will be back here (although I guess it'll vary year to year). The US Labor Day long weekend tended to be the trigger holiday for me. It's also the first year I've been separated, so this Father's Day was particularly difficult for me, but I found I enjoyed the day with Zoe all the more for it. Now that I'm no longer in the US, I miss seeing Eric and Katie's daughter, as she was my physical yardstick of how big Joshua would be today.

Russell Coker: Links July 2013

Wayne Mcgregor gave an interesting TED talk about the creative processes of a choreographer [1]. The dancing in this talk is really good. Melissa McEwan wrote an interesting article on whether being an ally to members of a disadvantaged group is a state or a process [2]. It seems to me that the word ally is a problem here, maybe a word like supporter would be more useful. Ken Murray wrote an insightful article How Doctors Die about the end of life choices that people with medical experience make [3]. He makes a good case for rejecting the type of treatment which has a low probability of success and a certainty of lowering the quality of life. It would be good if health insurance offered patients with terminal illness an option of $1000 per day party funds if they chose to reject the expensive and painful methods that might extend their life, that might even save enough money to allow cheaper health insurance! Rick Falkvinge wrote an interesting post about the copyright to translations of the Bible [4]. I used to think that copyright issues with religious works was only a problem with cults Joshua Foer wrote an interesting article for the New Yorker about the invention of the language Quijada which is designed for maximum precision [5]. It also has a lot of background information on constructed languages and the way that they are used.

Matt Zimmerman: Liberty and justice for all, but not in equal measure

As Americans we might like to believe that the US legal system is intended to protect all of our citizens. Unfortunately, it doesn t protect us all equally, and in fact disproportionately fails to protect the most vulnerable. We re surrounded by instances of injustice related to gender, race and other axes of social privilege, and the machinations of law are not exempt. The state of Florida has recently provided an especially stark example in the application of its self-defense laws in two cases: Marissa Alexander and George Zimmerman. This example is notable because although there were many similarities between the cases, the outcomes were very different. Alexander s case was tried in May 2012 , Zimmerman s in July 2013, both prosecuted by Florida state s attorney Angela Corey. Both cases involved the use of firearms which were legally purchased and carried, and their owners were trained in their use. Both prosecutions cast the defendant as the aggressor, who could have avoided the confrontation. Both of the encounters were with unarmed persons. Both defenses were based on Florida self-defense laws, which include stand your ground laws justifying the use of deadly force without the obligation to retreat. Both shooters admitted to firing a single shot with the intent of defending themselves. Beyond those similarities, each case had its own unique circumstances.

The events of Alexander s case took place in her home. Her altercation was with her husband, Rico Gray Sr., who was under a restraining order following a conviction for domestic battery which put Alexander in the hospital. After Gray threatened to kill her, Alexander retrieved a handgun from her car, returned to confront him, firing once. She was arrested and charged the same day. She had had no prior criminal record. A jury deliberated for just 12 minutes before convicting her. A judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison, in accord with mandatory minimums specified by law. Gray, previously sentenced to probation for his earlier conviction, remains free.

Zimmerman s shot was fired in his neighborhood, in an altercation with a teenager, Trayvon Martin, who was a guest in the community and walking by himself. The two were not acquainted. Zimmerman called police from his car, claiming that Martin appeared suspicious, and began to follow him. Some of the facts of their encounter remain in dispute, but that Zimmerman fired his gun is not in question. Afterward, Zimmerman was detained by police, questioned and released the same night without being arrested or charged. Following a public outcry, a new investigation was launched and two months later he was arrested and charged. He had been previously arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer, but the charges were later dropped. After 16 hours of deliberation, the jury found Zimmerman not guilty, and he is free today. The most striking difference between the two cases is where each defendant aimed their gun: George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in the chest and killed him, while Marissa Alexander fired at a wall and injured no one. Alexander, a black woman, is in prison for scaring her abusive husband away, while Zimmerman, who killed a young black man, walks free. Alexander and Martin s families have lost a mother and a son. The outcomes for the people involved in these cases could not be more different. Regardless of the merits of the relevant laws themselves, their radically unequal application is deeply troubling. What does this tell us about the relative value of these human lives, as weighed by the judicial system?

The Florida criminal justice system has sent two clear messages today. One is that if women who are victims of domestic violence try to protect themselves, the Stand Your Ground Law will not apply to them. [...] The second message is that if you are black, the system will treat you differently. - U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown

References

Russ Allbery: Review: The Making of the Indebted Man

Review: The Making of the Indebted Man, by Maurizio Lazzarato

Translator:	Joshua David Jordan
Publisher:	Semiotext(e)
Copyright:	2011, 2012
Printing:	2012
ISBN:	1-58435-115-2
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	199

This is a continuation of my effort to catch up on Marxist thought while pondering workplace governance, this time following the recommendations of a friend after a related conversation (about pension systems and basic income guarantee in a Usenet group Usenet isn't dead yet). As opposed to Democracy at Work, which is a popularization, The Making of the Indebted Man has more of the density of a scholarly text. The version I'm reading is also in translation, which I suspect makes it even harder going in places. The basic thesis, though, is clear: debt is far more central to the way that we construct not only economic systems but social systems and even internal models of our own nature than is often realized. We prefer to think of societies as structured around mutual exchange, but in practice they're more often constructed around concepts of debt and credit that have been fully internalized and used to construct a moral code for a responsible debtor. And this is not a neutral construction; rather, it is a key support mechanism of capitalism and of the financial and economic status quo, used (both intentionally and accidentally) to reduce uncertainty and to support exploitation and economic domination. This is one of those perspectives that didn't occur to me prior to reading this book but which is startlingly obvious in retrospect. Once Lazzarato starts pointing it out, the prevelance and universality of debt as a basic structure of social and economic life is striking. The creditor and debtor concept extends not just to obvious examples, such as consumer credit or mortgages, but also to education (via student loans), law enforcement ("pay one's debt to society"), employment (most employers, particularly during economic downturns, have successfully inverted the natural direction of the creditor relationship and have made employees feel in debt to the employer for having a job), and social services (unemployment and welfare benefits come with significant, if often unstated, debt-like requirements). Debt is also the great leveller. It now cuts across race, gender, and social class. Apart from a small handful of extremely rich individuals and corporations, Lazzarato claims, convincingly, that nearly everyone is enmeshed to some extent in a network of debt, or at least in in attitudes and moral pressures of a debtor. Nor is this a static situation. The role of debt in our social lives seems to be constantly increasing. The past fifteen years in particular have seen drastic increases in debt during a debt-funded economic boom combined with debt-funded asset bubbles. Even after the financial collapse, much of that growth of debt persists. Lazzarato, probably in part because he's Italian, focuses on national debt (more on that in a moment); as an American, I'd identify student loan debt as a more compelling example in the United States. Other countries probably have their own examples. For a system to be this widespread, it must serve some social purpose. Lazzarato sees it as an instrument of control. Debt has been very effectively built up as a moral obligation, and (unlike a society of mutual support) it's a very one-sided moral obligation that strongly favors existing power. The debtor is held to a tight moral standard of repayment of debts, and is morally condemned by all of society, including their peers, for a failure to repay. But there is little or no corresponding moral pressure on the creditor: perhaps a half-hearted dislike of high interest rates or occasional pressure to not change previously agreed terms, but nothing like the moral pressure applied to the debtor. To be a creditor is to have an agreed-upon, one-sided right to dictate to the debtor the terms on which they must conduct a portion of their life, and the larger the debt, the larger the portion. The debtor is expected to realign their life, at least in part, around paying off the debt, including choice of profession, decisions about when to quit a job, about how to prioritize personal spending, and so forth. This is all so automatic and so deeply ingrained that, even while writing this, I'm nodding along and thinking "well, of course." Lazzarato offers an opportunity to take a step back and think about the implications, particularly of the deeply one-sided web of obligations this creates. A Marxist analysis adds another level of consideration. One of the basic questions of Marxist thought is why workers put up with exploitation by capitalists. In a Marxist analysis, workers provide the productive output of society, which is then redirected and controlled by a relatively small capitalists. The workers massively outnumber the capitalists. Why would they be content for this situation to continue? Marx, of course, thought they wouldn't be, that the periodic crises of capitalism would eventually result in a socialist revolution by the workers. But by and large this hasn't happened. Why? Lazzarato offers debt as a partial explanation. The profits redirected by capitalists are returned to workers to some extent, but as debt rather than payment. This allows workers to participate to some extent in the growth of societal wealth from constantly increasing productivity, while simultaneously entangling workers in a system of moral control. Company stores, starvation wages, and other confiscatory practices are clear mechanisms of external control that provoke directed outrage. Debt is something that the debtor has nominally agreed to (however much the situation is manipulated to make that agreement almost inevitable), and to which attaches a deep tradition of moral responsibility. The worker has respected grounds on which to object to inequitable treatment; the debtor is wholly responsible for repayment, and is rarely considered to have grounds to complain about the debt. Most of the historical attempts to balance those scales, such as laws and religious rules against usury or the historical Jewish rule of Jubilee, have fallen by the wayside. This is a rather extended summary of what I got out of the book. I'm doing that in part because the book itself is somewhat heavy going. Lazzarato makes extensive use of specialized terms (often not defined) and fills the book with references to other works without much in the way of useful summary. It's the sort of book where, if you're not already well-versed in the field, you may need to just keep reading through some passages to find a point of reference that makes the argument retroactively make sense. I had a particular difficulty with "subjectivation," a term that Wikipedia tells me is from the writings of Michel Foucault (a major source for this book), which Lazzarato uses extensively but never adequately defines. Some external research indicates that this is a very difficult term to define, which explains why I was never quite comfortable with my understanding. I think Lazzarato is using it to get at the process of internalization of the morality of debt and the way that a debt society forces individuals into a mode of economic individualism in which many of their personal choices are bent towards making themselves better (more reliable, more trustworthy) debtors. But I'm not completely sure. There are also places in which I think Lazzarato takes his argument too far, although one of those, I think, reflects a difference in national economic status. He makes quite a lot of national debt in this book, placing it in the universal position of the overarching debt that turns every citizen into a debtor even if they've avoided other debts. This is possibly true in countries whose national debts are held in other currencies, or in countries like Italy that are part of the Euro (which, if one is not Germany or France, amounts to much the same thing). It's a dubious assertion for countries like the UK, Japan, or the United States, where the national debt is held in their own free-floating currency and is largely owed domestically, and partly plays into some frustratingly incorrect political rhetoric. One of the key dynamics of debt, namely the extreme power imbalance between debtor and creditor, is missing in countries with sovereign debt in their own currency, since those countries can always (if they're willing to pay the inflation price) simply print money to pay off national debt. Creditors know this, and therefore interest rates are much lower, the amount of leverage the creditor has is quite limited, and the sorts of debt crises seen in Italy and elsewhere in the Euro periphery are not seen. Lazzarato is understandably writing from the Italian perspective, but I think he weakens his argument by lumping national debt so completely into the same category as the other types of exploitative debt he discusses. The principle does feel universal to me, but the best examples of debt vary by country, so one has to be careful about generalizing specific examples. Another place where I simply disagree with his conclusions is around some of the more dramatic presentations of subjectivation. Lazzarato talks, at one point, about how debt reduces debtors to mechanical components, and uses as an example an ATM machine, which he portrays as uniquely dehumanizing through the mechanical process that someone has to follow to withdraw money. There may be some point here about the dehumanization of debt and its subsumption into the foundation of day-to-day social interaction, but he lost me entirely with the unwarranted technophobia of the specific example. The idea that machines and automation make us less human is an old argument that's orthogonal to the thrust of his argument. It reminded me of old contentions that human relationships made on-line aren't real, which is nonsense. Overall, this is a fascinating and insightful discussion hampered by a difficult and sometimes overly elliptical presentation, a bit too much drama and grand theorizing, and a few poor choices of examples. I found the basic idea extremely valuable, but the amount of work required to extract it occasionally irritating. (This could be partly due to the limits of translation, but I suspect most of the difficulty was present in the original.) I'm not sure that I would recommend the book, but I definitely recommend considering the underlying ideas. Debt now works alongside the employment relationship as a primary means of reinforcing economic and social control and hierarchy. This is likely via accidental development rather than any grand plan, but it's now being actively exploited by the creditors of society, large corporations most notably. Viewed in that light, the explosive growth of student loan debt in the United States is particularly frightening. After Lazzarato's extensive examination of the distortive effects of permanent debt, not just on economics and society but on our own conceptions of our selves and our duties and roles in life, the idea of trapping a generation in debt from the moment of their financial independence is deeply troubling, even nauseating. Rating: 6 out of 10

Russell Coker: Links May 2013

Cameron Russell (who works as an underwear model) gave an interesting TED talk about beauty [1]. Ben Goldacre gave an interesting and energetic TED talk about bad science in medicine [2]. A lot of the material is aimed at non-experts, so this is a good talk to forward to your less scientific friends. Lev wrote a useful description of how to disable JavaScript from one site without disabling it from all sites which was inspired by Snopes [3]. This may be useful some time. Russ Allbery wrote an interesting post about work and success titled The Why? of Work [4]. Russ makes lots of good points and I m not going to summarise them (read the article, it s worth it). There is one point I disagree with, he says You are probably not going to change the world . The fact is that I ve observed Russ changing the world, he doesn t appear to have done anything that will get him an entry in a history book but he s done a lot of good work in Debian (a project that IS changing the world) and his insightful blog posts and comments on mailing lists influence many people. I believe that most people should think of changing the world as a group project where they are likely to be one of thousands or millions who are involved, then you can be part of changing the world every day. James Morrison wrote an insightful blog post about what he calls Penance driven development [5]. The basic concept of doing something good to make up for something you did which has a bad result (even if the bad result was inadvertent) is probably something that most people do to some extent, but formalising it in the context of software development work is a cencept I haven t seen described before. A 9yo boy named Caine created his own games arcade out of cardboard, when the filmmaker Nirvan Mullick saw it he created a short movie about it and promoted a flash mob event to play games at the arcade [6]. They also created the Imagination Foundation to encourage kids to create things from cardboard [7]. Tanguy Ortolo describes how to use the UDF filesystem instead of FAT for USB devices [8]. This allows you to create files larger than 2G while still allowing the device to be used on Windows systems. I ll keep using BTRFS for most of my USB sticks though. Bruce Schneier gave an informative TED talk about security models [9]. Probably most people who read my blog already have a good knowledge of most of the topics he covers. I think that the best use of this video is to educate less technical people you know. Blaine Harden gave an informative and disturbing TED talk about the concentration camps in North Korea [10]. At the end he points out the difficult task of helping people recover from their totalitarian government that will follow the fall of North Korea. Bruce Schneier has an interesting blog post about the use of a motherboard BMC controller (IPMI and similar) to compromise a server [11]. Also some business class desktop systems and laptops have similar functionality. Russ Allbery wrote an insightful article about the failures of consensus decision-making [12]. He compares the Wikipedia and Debian methods so his article is also informative for people who are interested in learning about those projects. The TED blog has a useful reference article with 10 places anyone can learn to code [13]. Racialicious has an interesting article about the people who take offense when it s pointed out that they have offended someone else [14]. Nick Selby wrote an interesting article criticising the Symantic response to the NYT getting hacked and also criticises anti-viru software in general [15]. He raises the point that most of us already know, anti-virus software doesn t do much good. Securing Windows networks is a losing game. Joshua Brindle wrote an interesting blog post about security on mobile phones and the attempts to use hypervisors for separating data of different levels [16]. He gives lots of useful background information about how to design and implement phone based systems.

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