I have been using the awesome window manager for 10 years. It is a
tiling window manager, configurable and extendable with the
Lua language. Using a general-purpose programming language to
configure every aspect is a double-edged sword. Due to laziness and
the apparent difficulty of adapting my configuration about 3000 lines to newer releases, I was stuck with the 3.4
version, whose last release is from 2013.
It was time for a rewrite. Instead, I have switched to the i3 window
manager, lured by the possibility to migrate to Wayland and
Sway later with minimal pain. Using an embedded interpreter for
configuration is not as important to me as it was in the past: it
brings both complexity and brittleness.
Dual screen desktop running i3, Emacs, some terminals, including a Quake console, Firefox, Polybar as the status bar, and Dunst as the notification daemon.
The window manager is only one part of a desktop environment. There
are several options for the other components. I am also introducing
them in this post.
i3: the window manageri3 aims to be a minimal tiling window manager. Its documentation
can be read from top to bottom in less than an hour. i3 organize
windows in a tree. Each non-leaf node contains one or several
windows and has an orientation and a layout. This information
arbitrates the window positions. i3 features three layouts: split,
stacking, and tabbed. They are demonstrated in the below screenshot:
Demonstration of the layouts available in i3. The main container is split horizontally. The first child is split vertically. The second one is tabbed. The last one is stacking.
Tree representation of the previous screenshot.
Most of the other tiling window managers, including the awesome
window manager, use predefined layouts. They usually feature a large
area for the main window and another area divided among the remaining
windows. These layouts can be tuned a bit, but you mostly stick to a
couple of them. When a new window is added, the behavior is quite
predictable. Moreover, you can cycle through the various windows
without thinking too much as they are ordered.
i3 is more flexible with its ability to build any layout on the fly,
it can feel quite overwhelming as you need to visualize the tree in
your head. At first, it is not unusual to find yourself with a complex
tree with many useless nested containers. Moreover, you have to
navigate windows using directions. It takes some time to get used to.
I set up a split layout for Emacs and a few terminals, but most of the
other workspaces are using a tabbed layout. I don t use the stacking
layout. You can find many scripts trying to emulate other tiling
window managers but I did try to get my setup pristine of these
tentatives and get a chance to familiarize myself. i3 can also save
and restore layouts, which is quite a powerful feature.
My configuration is quite similar to the default one and has
less than 200 lines.
i3 companion: the missing bitsi3 philosophy is to keep a minimal core and let the user implements
missing features using the IPC protocol:
Do not add further complexity when it can be avoided. We are
generally happy with the feature set of i3 and instead focus on
fixing bugs and maintaining it for stability. New features will
therefore only be considered if the benefit outweighs the additional
complexity, and we encourage users to implement features using the
IPC whenever possible.
Introduction to the i3 window manager
While this is not as powerful as an embedded language, it is enough
for many cases. Moreover, as high-level features may be opinionated,
delegating them to small, loosely coupled pieces of code keeps them
more maintainable. Libraries exist for this purpose in several
languages. Users have published many scripts to extend i3:
automatic layout and window promotion to mimic the behavior
of other tiling window managers, window swallowing to put a new
app on top of the terminal launching it, and cycling between
windows with Alt+Tab.
Instead of maintaining a script for each feature, I have centralized
everything into a single Python process,
i3-companion using asyncio and the
i3ipc-python library. Each feature is self-contained into a
function. It implements the following components:
make a workspace exclusive to an application
When a workspace contains Emacs or Firefox, I would like other
applications to move to another workspace, except for the terminal
which is allowed to intrude into any workspace. The
workspace_exclusive() function monitors new windows and moves them
if needed to an empty workspace or to one with the same application
already running.
implement a Quake console
The quake_console() function implements a drop-down console
available from any workspace. It can be toggled with
Mod+. This is implemented as a scratchpad
window.
back and forth workspace switching on the same output
With the workspace back_and_forth command, we can ask i3 to
switch to the previous workspace. However, this feature is not
restricted to the current output. I prefer to have one keybinding to
switch to the workspace on the next output and one keybinding to
switch to the previous workspace on the same output. This behavior
is implemented in the previous_workspace() function by keeping a
per-output history of the focused workspaces.
create a new empty workspace or move a window to an empty workspace
To create a new empty workspace or move a window to an empty
workspace, you have to locate a free slot and use workspace number
4 or move container to workspace number 4. The new_workspace()
function finds a free number and use it as the target workspace.
restart some services on output change
When adding or removing an output, some actions need to be executed:
refresh the wallpaper, restart some components unable to adapt their
configuration on their own, etc. i3 triggers an event for this
purpose. The output_update() function also takes an extra step to
coalesce multiple consecutive events and to check if there is a real
change with the low-level library xcffib.
I will detail the other features as this post goes on. On the
technical side, each function is decorated with the events it should
react to:
@on(CommandEvent("previous-workspace"),I3Event.WORKSPACE_FOCUS)asyncdefprevious_workspace(i3,event):"""Go to previous workspace on the same output."""
The CommandEvent() event class is my way to send a command to the
companion, using either i3-msg -t send_tick or binding a key to a
nop command. The latter is used to avoid spawning a shell and a
i3-msg process just to send a message. The companion listens to
binding events and checks if this is a nop command.
bindsym $mod+Tab nop "previous-workspace"
There are other decorators to avoid code duplication: @debounce() to
coalesce multiple consecutive calls, @static() to define a static
variable, and @retry() to retry a function on failure. The whole
script is a bit more than 1000 lines. I think this is
worth a read as I am quite happy with the result.
dunst: the notification daemon
Unlike the awesome window manager, i3 does not come with a built-in
notification system. Dunst is a lightweight notification daemon. I
am running a modified version with HiDPI support for X11 and
recursive icon lookup. The i3 companion has a helper function,
notify(), to send notifications using DBus. container_info() and
workspace_info() uses it to display information about the container
or the tree for a workspace.
Notification showing i3 s tree for a workspace
polybar: the status bari3 bundles i3bar, a versatile status bar, but I have opted for
Polybar. A wrapper script runs one instance for
each monitor.
The first module is the built-in support for i3 workspaces. To not
have to remember which application is running in a workspace, the i3
companion renames workspaces to include an icon for each application.
This is done in the workspace_rename() function. The icons are from
the Font Awesome project. I maintain a mapping between applications
and icons. This is a bit cumbersome but it looks great.
i3 workspaces in Polybar
For CPU, memory, brightness, battery, disk, and audio volume, I am
relying on the built-in modules. Polybar s wrapper script generates the list of filesystems to monitor and they get only
displayed when available space is low. The battery widget turns red
and blinks slowly when running out of power. Check my Polybar
configuration for more details.
Polybar displaying various information: CPU usage, memory usage, screen brightness, battery status, Bluetooth status (with a connected headset), network status (connected to a wireless network and to a VPN), notification status, and speaker volume.
For Bluetooh, network, and notification statuses, I am using Polybar s
ipc module: the next version of Polybar can receive
an arbitrary text on an IPC socket. The module is defined with a
single hook to be executed at the start to restore the latest status.
It can be updated with polybar-msg action "#network.send.XXXX". In
the i3 companion, the @polybar() decorator takes the string
returned by a function and pushes the update through the IPC socket.
The i3 companion reacts to DBus signals to update the Bluetooth and
network icons. The @on() decorator accepts a DBusSignal() object:
@on(StartEvent,DBusSignal(path="/org/bluez",interface="org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties",member="PropertiesChanged",signature="sa sv as",onlyif=lambdaargs:(args[0]=="org.bluez.Device1"and"Connected"inargs[1]orargs[0]=="org.bluez.Adapter1"and"Powered"inargs[1]),),)@retry(2)@debounce(0.2)@polybar("bluetooth")asyncdefbluetooth_status(i3,event,*args):"""Update bluetooth status for Polybar."""
The middle of the bar is occupied by the date and a weather forecast.
The latest also uses the IPC mechanism, but the source is a Python
script triggered by a timer.
Current date and weather forecast for the day in Polybar. The data is retrieved with the OpenWeather API.
I don t use the system tray integrated with Polybar. The embedded
icons usually look horrible and they all behave differently. A few
years back, Gnome has removed the system tray. Most of the
problems are fixed by the DBus-based Status Notifier Item
protocol also known as Application Indicators or Ayatana
Indicators for GNOME. However, Polybar does not support this
protocol. In the i3 companion, The implementation of Bluetooth
and network icons, including displaying notifications on change, takes
about 200 lines. I got to learn a bit about how DBus works and I get exactly
the info I want.
picom: the compositor
I like having slightly transparent backgrounds for terminals and to
reduce the opacity of unfocused windows. This requires a
compositor.1picom is a lightweight compositor. It works
well for me, but it may need some tweaking depending on your graphic
card.2 Unlike the awesome window manager, i3 does not handle
transparency, so the compositor needs to decide by itself the opacity
of each window. Check my configuration for details.
systemd: the service manager
I use systemd to start i3 and the various services around it. My
xsession script only sets some environment variables and lets
systemd handles everything else. Have a look at this article from
Micha G ral for the rationale. Notably, each component can be
easily restarted and their logs are not mangled inside the
~/.xsession-errors file.3
I am using a two-stage setup: i3.service depends on
xsession.target to start services before
i3:
rofi: the application launcherRofi is an application launcher. Its appearance can be customized
through a CSS-like language and it comes with several themes. Have a
look at my configuration for mine.
Rofi as an application launcher
It can also act as a generic menu application. I have a script
to control a media player and another one to
select the wifi network. It is quite a flexible
application.
Rofi to select a wireless network
xss-lock and i3lock: the screen lockeri3lock is a simple screen locker. xss-lock invokes it reliably
on inactivity or before a system suspend. For inactivity, it uses the
XScreenSaver events. The delay is configured using the xset s
command. The locker can be invoked immediately with xset s activate.
X11 applications know how to prevent the screen saver from running. I
have also developed a small dimmer application that is executed 20
seconds before the locker to give me a chance to move the mouse if I
am not away.4 Have a look at my configuration
script.
Demonstration of xss-lock, xss-dimmer and i3lock with a 4 speedup.
The remaining components
autorandr is a tool to detect the connected display, match them
against a set of profiles, and configure them with xrandr.
inputplug executes a script for each new mouse and keyboard
plugged. This is quite useful to load the appropriate the keyboard
map. See my configuration.
xsettingsd provides settings to X11 applications, not unlike
xrdb but it notifies applications for changes. The main use is
to configure the Gtk and DPI settings. See my article on HiDPI
support on Linux with X11.
Redshift adjusts the color temperature of the screen according
to the time of day.
maim is a utility to take screenshots. I use Prt Scn
to trigger a screenshot of a window or a specific area and
Mod+Prt Scn to capture the whole desktop to a
file. Check the helper script for details.
I have a collection of wallpapers I rotate every hour. A
script selects them using advanced machine learning
algorithms and stitches them together on multi-screen setups. The
selected wallpaper is reused by i3lock.
Apart from the eye candy, a compositor also helps to get
tear-free video playbacks.
My configuration works with both Haswell (2014) and Whiskey
Lake (2018) Intel GPUs. It also works with AMD GPU based on the
Polaris chipset (2017).
You cannot manage two different displays this way e.g.
:0 and :1. In the first implementation, I did try to
parametrize each service with the associated display, but this is
useless: there is only one DBus user session and many services
rely on it. For example, you cannot run two notification daemons.
I have only discovered later that XSecureLock ships
such a dimmer with a similar implementation. But mine has a cool
countdown!
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
In July, we put aside 2400 EUR to fund Debian projects. We haven t received proposals of projects to fund in the last months, so we have scheduled a discussion during Debconf to try to to figure out why that is and how we can fix that. Join us on August 26th at 16:00 UTC on this link.
We are pleased to announce that Jeremiah Foster will help out to make this initiative a success : he can help Debian members to come up with solid proposals, he can look for people willing to do the work once the project has been formalized and approved, and he will make sure that the project implementation keeps on track when the actual work has begun.
We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS contributors
In July, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 5.0h (out of 7h assigned and 3h remaining), thus carrying over 5h to August.
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 39.75h assigned plus 11h from June), thus is carrying over 50.75h for August.
Holger Levsen s work was coordinating/managing the LTS team, he did 3.5h (out of 12h assigned) and gave back 8.5h to the pool.
Markus Koschany did 30h (out of 30h assigned and 30h from June), thus carrying over 30h to August.
Ola Lundqvist did nothing (out of 12h assigned plus 20h from June), thus is carrying over 32h for August.
Roberto C. S nchez did 13.5h (out of 32h assigned and 20h from June), and gave back 38.5h to the pool.
Evolution of the situation
In July we released 30 DLAs. Also we were glad to welcome Neil Williams and Lee Garrett who became active contributors.
The security tracker currently lists 63 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 17 packages needing an update.
We would like to thank Holger Levsen for the years of work where he managed/coordinated the paid LTS contributors. Jeremiah Foster will take over his duties.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
BBI Kenya and live Supreme Court streaming on YT
The last few weeks have been unrelenting as all sorts of news have been coming in, mostly about the downturn in the Economy, Islamophobia in India on the rise, Covid, and electioneering. However, in the last few days, Kenya surpassed India in live-streaming proceeds in a Court of Appeals about BBI or Building Bridges Initiative. A background filler article on the topic can be found in BBC. The live-streaming was done via YT and if wants to they can start from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQzpmVKvro
One can also subscribe to K24TV which took the initiative of sharing the proceedings with people worldwide. If K24TV continues to share SC proceedings of Kenya, that would add to the soft power of Kenya. I will not go into the details of the case as Gautam Bhatia who has been following the goings-on in Kenya is a far better authority on the subject. In fact, just recently he shared about another Kenyan judgment from a trial which can be seen here. He has shared the proceedings and some hot takes on the Twitter thread started by him. Probably after a couple of weeks or more when he has processed what all has happened there, he may also share some nuances although many of his thoughts would probably go to his book on Comparative Constitutional Law which he hopes to publish maybe in 2021/2022 or whenever he can. Such televised proceedings are sure to alleviate the standing of Kenya internationally. There has been a proposal to do similar broadcasts by India but with surveillance built-in, so they know who is watching. The problems with the architecture and the surveillance built-in have been shared by Srinivas Kodali or DigitalDutta quite a few times, but that probably is a story for another day.
Uttar Pradesh Population Control BillHindus comprise 83% of Indian couples with more than two child children
The U.P. Population Bill came and it came with lot of prejudices. One of the prejudices is the idea that Muslims create or procreate to have the most children. Even with data is presented as shared above from NFHS National Family Health Survey which is supposed to carry our surveys every few years did the last one around 4 years back. The analysis from it has been instrumental not only in preparing graphs as above but also sharing about what sort of death toll must have been in rural India. And as somebody who have had the opportunity in the past, can vouch that you need to be extremely lucky if something happens to you when you are in a rural area.
Even in places like Bodh Gaya (have been there) where millions of tourists come as it is one of the places not to be missed on the Buddhism tourist circuit, the medical facilities are pretty underwhelming. I am not citing it simply because there are too many such newspaper reports from even before the pandemic, and both the State and the Central Govt. response has been dismal. Just a few months back, they were recalled. There were reports of votes being bought at INR 1000/- (around $14) and a bottle or two of liquor. There used to be a time when election monitoring whether national or state used to be a thing, and you had LTO s (Long-time Observers) and STO s (Short-Term Observers) to make sure that the election has been neutral. This has been on the decline in this regime, but that probably is for another time altogether. Although, have to point out the article which I had shared a few months ago on the private healthcare model is flawed especially for rural areas. Instead of going for cheap, telemedicine centers that run some version of a Linux distro. And can provide a variety of services, I know Kerala and Tamil Nadu from South India have experimented in past but such engagements need to be scaled up. This probably will come to know when the next time I visit those places (sadly due to the virus, not anytime soonish.:( ) .
Going back to the original topic, though, I had shared Hans Rosling s famous Ted talk on population growth which shows that even countries which we would not normally associate with family planning for e.g. the middle-east and Africa have also been falling quite rapidly. Of course, when people have deeply held prejudices, then it is difficult. Even when sharing China as to how they had to let go of their old policy in 2016 as they had the thing for leftover men . I also shared the powerful movie So Long my Son. I even shared how in Haryana women were and are trafficked and have been an issue for centuries but as neither suits the RW propaganda, they simply refuse to engage. They are more repulsed by people who publish this news rather than those who are actually practicing it, as that is culture . There is also teenage pregnancy, female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, etc., etc. It is just all too horrible to contemplate.
Personal anecdote I know a couple, or they used to be a couple, where the gentleman wanted to have a male child. It was only after they got an autistic child, they got their DNA tested and came to know that the gentleman had a genetic problem. He again forced and had another child, and that too turned out to be autistic. Finally, he left the wife and the children, divorced them and lived with another woman. Almost a decade of the wife s life was ruined. The wife before marriage was a gifted programmer employed at IBM. This was an arranged marriage. After this, if you are thinking of marrying, apart from doing astrology charts, also look up DNA compatibility charts. Far better than ruining yours or the women s life. Both the children whom I loved are now in heaven, god bless them
If one wants to, one can read a bit more about the Uttar Pradesh Population bill here. The sad part is that the systems which need fixing, nobody wants to fix. The reason being simple. If you get good health service by public sector, who will go to the private sector. In Europe, AFAIK they have the best medical bang for the money. Even the U.S. looks at Europe and hopes it had the systems that Europe has but that again is probably for another day.
South Africa and India long-lost brothers.
As had shared before, after the 2016 South African Debconf convention, I had been following South Africa. I was happy when FeesMustFall worked and in 2017 the then ANC president Zuma declared it in late 2017. I am sure that people who have been regular visitors to this blog know how my position is on student loans. They also must be knowing that even in U.S. till the 1970s it had free education all the way to be a lawyer and getting a lawyer license. It is only when people like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and others from the civil rights movement came out as a major force that the capitalists started imposing fees. They wanted people who could be sold to corporate slavery, and they won. Just last week, Biden took some steps and canceled student loans and is working on steps towards broad debt forgiveness.
Interestingly, NASA has an affirmative diversity program for people from diverse backgrounds, where a couple of UC (Upper Caste) women got the job. While they got the job, the RW (Right-Wing) was overjoyed as they got jobs on merit . Later, it was found that both the women were the third or fourth generation of immigrants in U.S.
NASA Federal Equal Opportunity Policy Directive NPD 3713 2H
Going back to the original question and topic, while there has been a concerning spate of violence, some calling it the worst sort of violence not witnessed since 1994. The problem, as ascertained in that article, is the same as here in India or elsewhere.
Those, again, who have been on my blog know that merit 90% of the time is a function of privilege and there is a vast amount of academic literature which supports that.
If, for a moment, you look at the data that is shared in the graph above which shows that 83% of Hindus and 13% of Muslims have more than 2 children, what does it show, it shows that 83+13 = 96% of the population is living in insecurity. The 5% are the ones who have actually consolidated more power during this regime rule in India. Similarly, from what I understood living in Cape Town for about a month, it is the Dutch Afrikaans as they like to call themselves and the immigrants who come from abroad who have enjoyed the fruits of tourism and money and power while the rest of the country is dying due to poverty. It is the same there, it is the same here. Corruption is also rampant in both countries, and the judiciary is virtually absent from both communities in India and SA. Interestingly, South Africa and India have been at loggerheads, but I suspect that is more due to the money and lobbying power by the Dutch. Usually, those who have money power, do get laws and even press on their side, and it is usually the ruling party in power. I cannot help but share about the Gupta brothers and their corruption as I came to know about it in 2016. And as have shared that I m related to Gupta s on my mother s side, not those specific ones but Gupta as a clan. The history of the Gupta dynasty does go back to the 3rd-4th century.
Equally interesting have been Sonali Ranade s series of articles which she wrote in National Herald, the latest on exports which is actually the key to taking India out of poverty rather than anything else. While in other countries Exporters are given all sort of subsidies, here it is being worked as how to give them less. This was in Economic times hardly a week back Export incentive schemes being reduced
I can t imagine the incredible stupidity done by the Finance Minister. And then in an attempt to prove that, they will attempt to present a rosy picture with numbers that have nothing to do with reality.
Interestingly enough, India at one time was a major exporter of apples, especially from Kashmir. Now instead of exporting, we are importing them from Afghanistan as well as Belgium and now even from the UK. Those who might not want to use the Twitter link could use this article. Of course, what India got out of this trade deal is not known. One can see that the UK got the better deal from this. Instead of investing in our own capacity expansion, we are investing in increasing the capacity of others. This is at the time when due to fuel price hike (Central taxes 66%) demand is completely flat. And this is when our own CEA (Chief Economic Adviser) tells us that growth will be at the most 6-7% and that too in 2023-2024 while currently, the inflation rate is around 12%. Is it then any wonder that almost 70% are living on Govt. ration and people in the streets of Kolkata, Assam, and other places have to sell kidneys to make sure they have some money for their kids for tomorrow. Now I have nothing against the UK but trade negotiation is an art. Sadly, this has been going on for the last few years. The politicians in India fool the public by always telling of future trade deals. Sadly, as any businessman knows, once you have compromised, you always have to compromise. And the more you compromise, the more you weaken the hand for any future trade deals. IIT pupil tries to sell kidney to repay loan, but no takers for Dalit organ.
The above was from yesterday s Times of India. Just goes to show how much people are suffering. There have been reports in vernacular papers of quite a few people from across regions and communities are doing this so they can live without pain a bit.
Almost all the time, the politicians are saved as only few understand international trade, the diplomacy and the surrounding geopolitics around it. And this sadly, is as much to do with basic education as much as it is to any other factor
Suli Deals
About a month back on the holy day of Ramzan or Ramadan as it is known in the west, which is beloved by Muslims, a couple of Muslim women were targeted and virtually auctioned. Soon, there was a flood and a GitHub repository was created where hundreds of Muslim women, especially those who have a voice and fearlessly talk about their understanding about issues and things, were being virtually auctioned. One week after the FIR was put up, to date none of the people mentioned in the FIR have been arrested. In fact, just yesterday, there was an open letter which was published by livelaw. I have saved a copy on WordPress just in case something does go wrong. Other than the disgust we feel, can t say much as no action being taken by GOI and police.
IT Rules 2021 and Big Media
After almost a year of sleeping when most activists were screaming hoarsely about how the new IT rules are dangerous for one and all, big media finally woke up a few weeks back and listed a writ petition in Madras High Court of the same. Although to be frank, the real writ petition was filed In February 2021, classical singer, performer T.M. Krishna in Madras High Court. Again, a copy of the writ petition, I have hosted on WordPress. On 23rd June 2021, a group of 13 media outlets and a journalist have challenged the IT Rules, 2021.
The Contention came from Digital News Publishers Association which is made up of the following news companies: ABP Network Private Limited, Amar Ujala Limited, DB Corp Limited, Express Network Pvt Ltd, HT Digital Streams Limited, IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd, Jagran Prakashan Limited, Lokmat Media Private Limited, NDTV Convergence Limited, TV Today Network Limited, The Malayala Manorama Co (P) Ltd, Times Internet Limited, and Ushodaya Enterprises Private Limited. All the above are heavyweights in the markets where they operate. The reason being simple, when these media organizations came into being, the idea was to have self-regulation, which by and large has worked. Now, the present Govt. wants each news item to be okayed by them before publication. This is nothing but blatant misuse of power and an attempt at censorship. In fact, the Tamil Nadu BJP president himself made a promise of the same. And of course, what is true and what is a lie, only GOI knows and will decide for the rest of the country. If somebody remembers Joseph Goebbels at this stage, it is merely a coincidence. Anyways, 3 days ago Supreme Court on 14th July the Honorable Supreme Court asked the Madras High Court to transfer all the petitions to SC. This, the Madras High Court denied as cited/shared by Meera Emmanuel, a reporter who works with barandbench. The Court says nothing doing, let this happen and then the SC can entertain the motion of doing it that level. At the same time, they would have the benefit of Madras High Court opinion as well. It gave the center two weeks to file a reply. So, either of end-week of July or latest by August first week, we might be able to read the Center s reply on the same. The SC could do a forceful intervention, but it would lead to similar outrage as has been witnessed in the past when a judge commented that if the SC has to do it all, then why do we need the High Courts, district courts etc. let all the solutions come from SC itself. This was, admittedly, frustration on the part of the judge, but due in part to the needless intervention of SC time and time again. But the concerns had been felt around all the different courts in the country.
Sedition Law
A couple of days ago, the Supreme Court under the guidance of Honorable CJI NV Ramanna, entertained the PIL filed by Maj Gen S G Vombatkere (Retd.) which asked simply that the sedition law which was used in the colonial times by the British to quell dissent by Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak during the Indian freedom struggle. A good background filler article can be found on MSN which tells about some recent cases but more importantly how historically the sedition law was used to quell dissent during India s Independence. Another article on MSN actually elaborates on the PIL filed by Maj Gen S. G. Vombatkere. Another article on MSN tells how sedition law has been challenged and changed in 10 odd countries. I find it equally sad and equally hilarious that the Indian media whose job is to share news and opinion on this topic is being instead of being shared more by MSN. Although, I would be bereft of my duty if I did not share the editorial on the same topic by the Hindu and Deccan Chronicle. Also, an interesting question to ask is, are there only 10 countries in the world that have sedition laws? AFAIK, there are roughly 200 odd countries as recognized by WTO. If 190 odd countries do not have sedition laws, it also tells a lot about them and a lot about the remaining 10. Also, it came to light that police are still filing laws under sec66A which was declared null and void a few years ago. It was replaced with section 124A if memory serves right and it has more checks and balances.
Danish Siddiqui, Pulitzer award-winning and death in Afghanistan
Before I start with Danish Siddiqui, let me share an anecdote that I think I have shared on the blog years ago about how photojournalists are. Again, those who know me and those who follow me know how much I am mad both about trains and planes (civil aviation). A few months back, I had shared a blog post about some of the biggest railway systems in the world which shows that privatization of Railways doesn t necessarily lead to up-gradation of services but definitely leads to an increase in tariff/fares. Just had a conversation couple of days ago on Twitter and realized that need to also put a blog post about civil aviation in India and the problems it faces, but I digress.
This was about a gentleman who wanted to take a photo of a particular train coming out of a valley at a certain tunnel at two different heights, one from below and one from above the train. This was several years ago, and while I did share that award-winning photograph then, it probably would take me quite a bit of time and effort to again look it up on my blog and share.
The logistics though were far more interesting and intricate than I had first even thought of. We came around a couple of days before the train was supposed to pass that tunnel and the valley. More than half a dozen or maybe more shots were taken throughout the day by the cameras. The idea was to see how much light was being captured by the cameras and how much exposure was to be given so that the picture isn t whitened out or is too black.
Weather is the strangest of foes for a photojournalist or even photographers, and the more you are in nature, the more unpredictable it is and can be. We were also at a certain height, so care had to be taken in case light rainfall happens or dew falls, both not good for digital cameras.
And dew is something which will happen regardless of what you want. So while the two days our gentleman cameraman fiddled with the settings to figure out correct exposure settings, we had one other gentleman who was supposed to take the train from an earlier station and apprise us if the train was late or not.
The most ideal time would be at 0600 hrs. When the train would enter the tunnel and come out and the mixture of early morning sun rays, dew, the flowers in the valley, and the train would give a beautiful effect. We could stretch it to maybe 0700 hrs.
Anything after that would just be useless, as it wouldn t have the same effect. And of all this depended on nature. If the skies were to remain too dark, nothing we could do about it, if the dewdrops didn t fall it would all be over.
On the day of the shoot, we were told by our compatriot that the train was late by half an hour. We sank a little on hearing that news. Although Photoshop and others can do touch-ups, most professionals like to take as authentic a snap as possible. Everything had been set up to perfection. The wide-angle lenses on both the cameras with protections were set up. The tension you could cut with a knife. While we had a light breakfast, I took a bit more and went in the woods to shit and basically not be there. This was too tensed up for me. Returned an hour to find everybody in a good mood. Apparently, the shoot went well. One of the two captured it for good enough. Now, this is and was in a benign environment where the only foe was the environment. A bad shot would have meant another week in the valley, something which I was not looking forward to. Those who have lived with photographers and photojournalists know how self-involved they can be in their craft, while how grumpy they can be if they had a bad shoot. For those, who don t know, it is challenging to be friends with such people for a long time. I wish they would scream more at nature and let out the frustrations they have after a bad shoot. But again, this is in a very safe environment.
Now let s cut to Danish Siddiqui and the kind of photojournalism he followed. He followed a much more riskier sort of photojournalism than the one described above. Krittivas Mukherjee in his Twitter thread shared how reporters in most advanced countries are trained in multiple areas, from risk assessment to how to behave in case you are kidnapped, are in riots, hostage situations, etc. They are also trained in all sorts of medical training from treating gunshot wounds, CPR, and other survival methods. They are supposed to carry medical equipment along with their photography equipment. Sadly, these concepts are unknown in India. And even then they get killed. Sadly, he attributes his death to the thrill of taking an exclusive photograph. And the gentleman s bio reads that he is a diplomat. Talk about tone-deafness
On another completely different level was Karen Hao who was full of empathy as she shared the humility, grace, warmth and kinship she describes in her interaction with the photojournalist. His body of work can be seen via his ted talk in 2020 where he shared a brief collage of his works. Latest, though in a turnaround, the Taliban have claimed no involvement in the death of photojournalist Danish Siddiqui. This could be in part to show the Taliban in a more favorable light as they do and would want to be showcased as progressive, even though they are forcing that all women within a certain age become concubines or marry the fighters and killing the minority Hazaras or doing vile deeds with them. Meanwhile, statements made by Hillary Clinton almost a decade, 12 years ago have come back into circulation which stated how the U.S. itself created the Taliban to thwart the Soviet Union and once that job was finished, forgot all about it. And then in 2001, it landed back in Afghanistan while the real terrorists were Saudi. To date, not all documents of 9/11 are in the public domain. One can find more information of the same here. This is gonna take probably another few years before Saudi Arabia s whole role in the September 11 attacks will be known.
Last but not the least, came to know about the Pegasus spyware and how many prominent people in some nations were targeted, including in mine India. Will not talk more as it s already a big blog post and Pegasus revelations need an article on its own.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
In June, we put aside 5775 EUR to fund Debian projects for which we re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS contributors
In June, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 18.0h (out of 14h assigned and 19h from May), thus carrying over 15h to July.
Utkarsh Gupta did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 40h assigned), thus is carrying over 40h for July.
Evolution of the situation
In June we released 30 DLAs. As already written last month we are looking for a Debian LTS project manager and team coordinator. Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested!
The security tracker currently lists 41 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 23 packages needing an update.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
In May, we again put aside 2100 EUR to fund Debian projects. There was no proposals for new projects received, thus we re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Please do not hesitate to submit a proposal, if there is a project that could benefit from the funding!
We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS contributors
In May, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 14h assigned and 12h from April), thus carrying over 19h to June.
Evolution of the situation
In May we released 33 DLAs and mostly skipped our public IRC meeting and the end of the month. In June we ll have another team meeting using video as lined out on our LTS meeting page. Also, two months ago we announced that Holger would step back from his coordinator role and today we are announcing that he is back for the time being, until a new coordinator is found. Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested!
The security tracker currently lists 41 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 21 packages needing an update.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
I recently bought a couple of PowerEdge T320 servers, so now to learn about setting them up. They are a little newer than the R710 I recently setup (which had iDRAC version 6), they have iDRAC version 7.
RAM Speed
One system has a E5-2440 CPU with 2*16G DDR3 DIMMs and a Memtest86+ speed of 13,043MB/s, the other is essentially identical but with a E5-2430 CPU and 4*16G DDR3 DIMMs and a Memtest86+ speed of 8,270MB/s. I had expected that more DIMMs means better RAM performance but this isn t what happened. I firstly upgraded the BIOS, as I expected it didn t make a difference but it s a good thing to try first.
On the E5-2430 I tried removing a DIMM after it was pointed out on Facebook that the CPU has 3 memory channels (here s a link to a great site with information on that CPU and many others [1]). When I did that I was prompted to disable advanced ECC (which treats pairs of DIMMs as a single unit for ECC allowing correcting more than 1 bit errors) and I had to move the 3 remaining DIMMS to different slots. That improved the performance to 13,497MB/s. I then put the spare DIMM into the E5-2440 system and the performance increased to 13,793MB/s, when I installed 4 DIMMs in the E5-2440 system the performance remained at 13,793MB/s and the E5-2430 went down to 12,643MB/s.
This is a good result for me, I now have the most RAM and fastest RAM configuration in the system with the fastest CPU. I ll sell the other one to someone who doesn t need so much RAM or performance (it will be really good for a small office mail server and NAS).
Firmware Update
BIOS
The first issue is updating the BIOS, unfortunately the first link I found to the Dell web site didn t have a link to download the Linux installer. It offered a Windows binary, an EFI program, and a DOS binary. I m not about to install Windows if there is any other option and EFI is somewhat annoying, so that leaves DOS. The first Google result for installing FreeDOS advised using unetbootin , that didn t work at all for me (created a USB image that the Dell BIOS didn t recognise as bootable) and even if it did it wouldn t have been a good solution.
I went to the FreeDOS download page [2] and got the Lite USB zip file. That contained FD12LITE.img which I could just dd to a USB stick. I then used fdisk to create a second 32MB partition, used mkfs.fat to format it, and then copied the BIOS image file to it. I booted the USB stick and then ran the BIOS update program from drive D:. After the BIOS update this became the first system I ve seen get a totally green result from spectre-meltdown-checker !
I found the link to the Linux installer for the new Dell BIOS afterwards, but it was still good to play with FreeDOS.
PERC Driver
I probably didn t really need to update the PERC (PowerEdge Raid Controller) firmware as I m just going to run it in JBOD mode. But it was easy to do, a simple bash shell script to update it.
Here are the perccli commands needed to access disks, it s all hot-plug so you can insert disks and do all this without a reboot:
# show overview
perccli show
# show controller 0 details
perccli /c0 show all
# show controller 0 info with less detail
perccli /c0 show
# clear all "foreign" RAID members
perccli /c0 /fall delete
# add a vd (RAID) of level RAID0 (r0) with the drive 32:0 (enclosure:slot from above command)
perccli /c0 add vd r0 drives=32:0
The perccli /c0 show command gives the following summary of disk ( PD in perccli terminology) information amongst other information. The EID is the enclosure, Slt is the slot (IE the bay you plug the disk into) and the DID is the disk identifier (not sure what happens if you have multiple enclosures). The allocation of device names (sda, sdb, etc) will be in order of EID:Slt or DID at boot time, and any drives added at run time will get the next letters available.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EID:Slt DID State DG Size Intf Med SED PI SeSz Model Sp
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
32:0 0 Onln 0 465.25 GB SATA SSD Y N 512B Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB U
32:1 1 Onln 1 465.25 GB SATA SSD Y N 512B Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB U
32:3 3 Onln 2 3.637 TB SATA HDD N N 512B ST4000DM000-1F2168 U
32:4 4 Onln 3 3.637 TB SATA HDD N N 512B WDC WD40EURX-64WRWY0 U
32:5 5 Onln 5 278.875 GB SAS HDD Y N 512B ST300MM0026 U
32:6 6 Onln 6 558.375 GB SAS HDD N N 512B AL13SXL600N U
32:7 7 Onln 4 3.637 TB SATA HDD N N 512B ST4000DM000-1F2168 U
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The PERC controller is a MegaRAID with possibly some minor changes, there are reports of Linux MegaRAID management utilities working on it for similar functionality to perccli. The version of MegaRAID utilities I tried didn t work on my PERC hardware. The smartctl utility works on those disks if you tell it you have a MegaRAID controller (so obviously there s enough similarity that some MegaRAID utilities will work). Here are example smartctl commands for the first and last disks on my system. Note that the disk device node doesn t matter as all device nodes associated with the PERC/MegaRAID are equal for smartctl.
# get model number etc on DID 0 (Samsung SSD)
smartctl -d megaraid,0 -i /dev/sda
# get all the basic information on DID 0
smartctl -d megaraid,0 -a /dev/sda
# get model number etc on DID 7 (Seagate 4TB disk)
smartctl -d megaraid,7 -i /dev/sda
# exactly the same output as the previous command
smartctl -d megaraid,7 -i /dev/sdc
I have uploaded etbemon version 1.3.5-6 to Debian which has support for monitoring smartctl status of MegaRAID devices and NVMe devices.
IDRAC
To update IDRAC on Linux there s a bash script with the firmware in the same file (binary stuff at the end of a shell script). To make things a little more exciting the script insists that rpm be available (running apt install rpm fixes that for a Debian system). It also creates and runs other shell scripts which start with #!/bin/sh but depend on bash syntax. So I had to make /bin/sh a symlink to /bin/bash. You know you need this if you see errors like typeset: not found and [: -eq: unexpected operator and then the system reboots. Dell people, please test your scripts on dash (the Debian /bin/sh) or just specify #!/bin/bash.
If the IDRAC update works it will take about 8 minutes.
Lifecycle Controller
The Lifecycle Controller is apparently for installing OS and firmware updates. I use Linux tools to update Linux and I generally don t plan to update the firmware after deployment (although I could do so from Linux if needed). So it doesn t seem to offer anything useful to me.
Setting Up IDRAC
For extra excitement I decided to try to setup IDRAC from the Linux command-line. To install the RAC setup tool you run apt install srvadmin-idracadm7 libargtable2-0 (because srvadmin-idracadm7 doesn t have the right dependencies).
# srvadmin-idracadm7 is missing a dependency
apt install srvadmin-idracadm7 libargtable2-0
# set the IP address, netmask, and gatewat for IDRAC
idracadm7 setniccfg -s 192.168.0.2 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1
# put my name on the front panel LCD
idracadm7 set System.LCD.UserDefinedString "Russell Coker"
Conclusion
This is a very nice deskside workstation/server. It s extremely quiet with hardly any fan noise and the case is strong enough to contain the noise of hard drives. When running with 3* 3.5 SATA disks and 2*10k 2.5 SAS disks on a wooden floor it wasn t annoyingly loud. Without the SAS disks it was as quiet as you can expect any PC to be, definitely not the volume you expect from a serious server! I bought the T320 systems loaded with SAS disks which made them quite loud, I immediately put the disks on ebay and installed SATA SSDs and hard drives which gives me more performance and more space than the SAS disks with less cost and almost no noise.
8*3.5 drive bays gives room for expansion. I currently have 2*SATA SSDs and 3*SATA disks, the SSDs are for the root filesystem (including /home) and the disks are for a separate filesystem for large files.
The Great Electric Airplane Race
It took me quite sometime to write as have been depressed about things. Then a few days back saw Nova s The Great Electric Airplane Race. While it was fabulous and a pleasure to see and know that there are more than 200 odd startups who are in the race of making an electric airplane which works and has FAA certification. I was disappointed though that there no coverage of any University projects.
From what little I know, almost all advanced materials which U.S. had made has been first researched in mostly Universities and when it is close to fruition then either spin-off as a startup or give to some commercial organization/venture to make it scalable and profitable. If they had, I am sure more people could be convinced to join sciences and engineering in college. I actually do want to come to this as part of both general medicine and vaccine development in U.S. but will come later. The idea that industry works alone should be discouraged, but that perhaps may require another article to articulate why I believe so.
Medical Device Ventilators in India
Before the pandemic, probably most didn t know what a ventilator is and was, at least I didn t, although I probably used it during my somewhat brief hospital stay a couple of years ago. It entered into the Indian twitter lexicon more so in the second wave as the number of people who got infected became more and more and the ventilators which were serving them became less and less just due to sheer mismatch of numbers and requirements.
Rich countries donated/gifted ventilators to India on which GOI put GST of 28%. Apparently, they are a luxury item, just like my hearing aid.
Last week Delhi High Court passed a judgement that imposition of GST should not be on a gift like ventilators or oxygenators. The order can be found here. Even without reading the judgement the shout from the right was judicial activism while after reading it is a good judgement which touches on several points. The first, in itself, stating the dichotomy that if a commercial organization wanted to import a ventilator or an oxygenator the IGST payable is nil while for an individual it is 12%. The State (here State refers to State Government in this case Gujarat Govt.) did reduce the IGST for state from 12% to NIL IGST for federal states but that to till only 30.06.2021. No relief to individuals on that account.
The Court also made use of Mr. Arvind Datar, as Amicus Curiae or friend of court. The petitioner, an 85-year-old gentleman who has put it up has put broad assertions under Article 21 (right to live) and the court in its wisdom also added Article 14 which enshrines equality of everyone before law.
The Amicus Curiae, as his duty, guided the court into how the IGST law works and shared a brief history of the law and the changes happening before and after it. During his submissions, he also shared the Mega Exemption Notification no. 50/2017 under which several items are there which are exempted from putting IGST. The Amicus Curiae did note that such exemptions were also there before Mega Exemption Notification had come into play.
However, DGFT (Directorate General of Foreign Trade) on 30-04-2021 issued notification No. 4/2015-2020 through which oxygenators had been exempted from Custom Duty/BCD (Basic Customs Duty. In another notification on no. 30/2021 dated 01.05.2021 it reduced IGST from 28% to 12% for personal use. If however the oxygenator was procured by a canalizing agency (bodies such as State Trading Corporation of India (STC) or/and Metals and Minerals Corporation (MMTC) and such are defined as canalising agents) then it will be fully exempted from paying any sort of IGST, albeit subject to certain conditions. What the conditions are were not shared in the open court.
The Amicus Curiae further observed that it is contrary to practice where both BCD and IGST has been exempted for canalising agents and others, some IGST has to be paid for personal use. To share within the narrow boundaries of the topic, he shared entry no. 607A of General Exemption no.190 where duty and IGST in case of life-saving drugs are zero provided the life-saving drugs imported have been provided by zero cost from an overseas supplier for personal use.
He further shared that the oxygen generator would fall in the same entry of 607A as it fulfills all the criteria as shared for life-saving medicines and devices. He also used the help of Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940 which provides such a relief.
The Amicus Curiae further noted that GOI amended its foreign trade policy (2015-2020) via notification no.4/2015-2020, dated 30.04.2021, issued by DGFT where Rakhi and life-saving drugs for personal use has been exempted from BCD till 30-07-2021. No reason not to give the same exemption to oxygenators which fulfill the same thing.
The Amicus Curiae, further observes that there are exceptional circumstances provisions as adverted to in sub-section (2) of Section 25 of the Customs Act, whereby Covid-19 which is known and labelled as a pandemic where the distinctions between the two classes of individuals or agencies do not make any sense. While he did make the observation that exemption from duty is not a right, in the light of the pandemic and Article 14, it does not make sense to have distinctions between the two classes of importers.
He further shared from Circular no. 9/2014-Customs, dated 19.08.2014 by CBEC (Central Board of Excise and Customs) which gave broad exemptions under Section 25 (2) of the same act in respect of goods and services imported for safety and rehabilitation of people suffering and effected by natural disasters and epidemics.
He further submits that the impugned notification is irrational as there is no intelligible differentia rule applied or observed in classifying the import of oxygen concentrators into two categories. One, by the State and its agencies; and the other, by an individual for personal use by way of gift. So there was an absence of adequate determining principle . To bolster his argument, he shared the judgements of
a) Union of India vs. N.S. Rathnam & Sons, (2015) 10 SCC 681 (N.S. Ratnams and Sons Case)
b) Shayara Bano vs. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1 (Shayara Bano Case)
The Amicus Curiae also rightly observed that the right to life also encompasses within it, the right to health. You cannot have one without the other and within that is the right to have affordable treatment. He further stated that the state does not only have a duty but a positive obligation is cast upon it to ensure that the citizen s health is secured. He again cited Navtej Singh Johars vs Union of India (Navtej Singh Johar Case) in defence of right to life. Mr. Datar also shared that unlike in normal circumstances, it is and should be enough to show distinct and noticeable burdensomeness which is directly attributable to the impugned/questionable tax. The gentleman cited Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Private Limited vs. Union of India, (1985) 1 SCC 641 (Indian Express case) 1985 which shared both about Article 19 (1) (a) and Article 21.
Bloggers note At this juncture, I should point out which I am sharing the judgement and I would be sharing only the Amicus Curiae POV and then the judge s final observations. While I was reading it, I was stuck by the fact that the Amicus Curiae had cited 4 cases till now, 3 of them are pretty well known both in the legal fraternity and even among public at large. Another 3 which have been shared below which are also of great significance. Hence, felt the need to share the whole judgement.
The Amicus Curiae further observed that this tax would have to be disproportionately will have to be paid by the old and the infirm, and they might find it difficult to pay the amounts needed to pay the customs duty/IGST as well as find the agent to pay in this pandemic.
Blogger Note The situation with the elderly is something like this. Now there are a few things to note, only Central Govt. employees and pensioners get pensions which has been freezed since last year. The rest of the elderly population does not. The rate of interest has fallen to record lows from 5-6% in savings interest rate to 2% and on Fixed Deposits at 4.9% while the nominal inflation rate has up by 6% while CPI and real inflation rates are and would be much more. And this is when there is absolutely no demand in the economy. To add to all this, RBI shared a couple of months ago that fraud of 5 trillion rupees has been committed between 2015 and 2019 in banks. And this is different from the number of record NPA s that have been both in Public and Private Sector banks. To get out of this, the banks have squeezed their customers and are squeezing as well as asking GOI for bailouts. How much GOI is responsible for the frauds as well as NPA s would probably require its own space. And even now, RBI and banks have made heavy provisions as lockdowns are still a facet and are supposed to remain a facet till the end of the year or even next year (all depending upon when we get the vaccine).
The Amicus Curiae further argued that the ventilators which are available locally are of bad quality. The result of all this has resulted in a huge amount of unsurmountable pressure on hospitals which they are unable to overcome. Therefore, the levy of IGST on oxygenators has direct impact on health of the citizen. So the examination of the law should not be by what intention it was but how it is affecting citizen rights now. For this he shared R.C.Cooper vs Union of India (another famous case R.C. Cooper vs Union of India) especially paragraph 49 and Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Association of India vs. Union of India, (1989) at paragraph 46 (Federation of Hotel Case)
Mr. Datar further shared the Supreme Court order dated 18.12.2020, passed in Suo Moto Writ Petition(Civil) No.7/2020, to buttress the plea that the right to health includes the right to affordable treatment.
Blogger s Note For those, who don t know Suo Moto is when the Court, whether Supreme Court or the High Courts take up a matter for public good. It could be in anything, law and order, Banking, Finance, Public Health etc. etc. This was the norm before 2014. The excesses of the executive were curtailed by both the Higher and the lower Judiciary. That is and was the reason that Judiciary is and was known as the third pillar of Indian democracy. A good characterization of Suo Moto can be found here.
Before ending his submission, the learned Amicus Curiae also shared Jeeja Ghosh vs. Union of India, (2016) (Jeeja Ghosh Case, an outstanding case as it deals with people with disabilities and their rights and the observations made by the Division Bench of Hon ble Mr. Justice A. K. Sikri as well as Hon ble Mr. Justice R. K. Agrawal.)
After Amicus Curiae completed his submissions, it was the turn of Mr. Sudhir Nandrajog, and he adopted the arguments and submissions made by the Amicus Curiae. The gentleman reiterated the facts of the case and how the impugned notification was violative of both Article 14 and 21 of the Indian Constitution.
Blogger s Note The High Court s judgement which shows all the above arguments by the Amicus Curiae and the petitioner s lawyer also shared the State s view. It is only on page 24, where the Delhi High Court starts to share its own observations on the arguments of both sides.
Judgement continued The first observation that the Court makes is that while the petitioner demonstrated that the impugned tax imposition would have a distinct and noticeable burdensomeness while the State did not state or share in any way how much of a loss it would incur if such a tax were let go and how much additional work would have to be done in order to receive this specific tax. It didn t need to do something which is down the wire or mathematically precise, but it didn t even care to show even theoretically how many people will be affected by the above. The counter-affidavit by the State is silent on the whole issue.
The Court also contended that the State failed to prove how collecting IGST from the concerned individuals would help in fighting coronavirus in any substantial manner for the public at large. The High Court shared observations from the Navtej Singh Johar case where it is observed that the State has both negative and positive obligations to ensure that its citizens are able to enjoy the right to health.
The High Court further made the point that no respectable person does like to be turned into a charity case. If the State contends that those who obey the law should pay the taxes then it is also obligatory on the state s part to lessen exactions such as taxes at the very least in times of war, famine, floods, epidemics and pandemics. Such an approach would lead a person to live a life of dignity which is part of Article 21 of the Constitution.
Another point that was made by the State that only the GST council is able to make any changes as regards to exemptions rather than the State were found to be false as the State had made some exemptions without going to the GST council using its own powers under Section 25 of the Customs Act.
The Court also points out that it does send a discriminatory pattern when somebody like petitioner has to pay the tax for personal use while those who are buying it for commercial use do not have to pay the tax.
The Court agreed of the view of the Amicus Curiae, Mr. Datar that oxygenator should be taxed at NIL rate at IGST as it is part of life-saving drugs and oxygenator fits the bill as medical equipment as it is used in the treatment, mitigation and prevention of spread of Coronavirus. Mr. Datar also did show that oxygenator is placed at the same level as other life-saving drugs. The Court felt further emboldened as the observations by Supreme Court in State of Andhra Pradesh vs. Linde India Limited, 2020 ( State of Andhra Pradesh vs Linde Ltd.)
The Court further shared many subsequent notifications from the State and various press releases by the State itself which does make the Court s point that oxygenators indeed are drugs as defined in the court case above. The State should have it as part of notification 190. This would preserve the start of the notification date from 03.05.2021 and the state would not have to issue a new notification.
The Court further went to postulate that any persons similar to the petitioner could avail of the same, if they furnish a letter of undertaking to an officer designated by the State that the medical equipment would not be put to commercial use. Till the state does not do that, in the interim the importer could give the same undertaking to Joint Secretary, Customs or their nominee can hand over the same to custom officer.
The Court also shared that it does not disagree with the State s arguments but the challenges which have arisen are in a unique time period/circumstances, so they are basing their judgement based on how the situation is.
The Court also mentioned an order given by Supreme Court Diary No. 10669/2020 passed on 20.03.2020 where SC has taken pains to understand the issues faced by the citizens. The court also mentioned the Small Scale Industrial Manufactures Association Case (both of these cases I don t know) .
So in conclusion, the Court holds the imposition of IGST on oxygenator which are imported by individuals as gifts from their relatives as unconstitutional. They also shared that any taxes taken by GOI in above scenario have to be returned. The relief to the state is they will not have to pay interest cost on the same.
To check misuse of the same, the petitioner or people who are in similar circumstances would have to give a letter of undertaking to an officer designated by the State within 7 days of the state notifying the patient or anybody authorized by him/her to act on their behalf to share the letter of undertaking with the State. And till the State doesn t provide an officer, the above will continue.
Hence, both the writ petition and the pending application are disposed off.
The Registry is directed to release any money deposited by the petitioner along with any interest occurred on it (if any) .
At the end they record appreciation of Mr. Arvind Datar, Mr. Zoheb Hossain, Mr. Sudhir Nandrajog as well as Mr. Siddharth Bambha. It is only due to their assistance that the court could reach the conclusion it did.
For Delhi High Court
RAJIV SHAKDHER, J.
TALWANT SINGH, J.
May 21, 2020
Blogger s Observations Now, after the verdict GOI does have few choices, either accept the verdict or appeal in the SC. A third choice is to make a committee and come to the same conclusions via the committee. GOI has done something similar in the past. If that happens and the same conclusions are reached as before, then the aggrieved may have no choice but to appear in the highest court of law. And this will put the aggrieved at a much more vulnerable place than before as SC court fees, lawyer fees etc. are quite high compared to High Courts. So, there is a possibility that the petitioner may not even approach unless and until some non-profit (NGO) does decide to fight and put it up as common cause or something similar.
There is another judgement that I will share, probably tomorrow. Thankfully, that one is pretty short compared to this one. So it should be far more easier to read. FWIW, I did learn about the whole freeenode stuff and many channels who have shifted from freenode to libera. I will share my own experience of the same but that probably will take a day or two.
Zeeshan of IYC (India Youth Congress) along with Salman Khan s non-profit Being Human getting oxygenators
The above picture of Zeeshan. There have been a whole team of Indian Youth Congress workers (main opposition party to the ruling party) who have doing lot of relief effort. They have been buying Oxygenators from abroad with help of Being Human Foundation started by Salman Khan, an actor who works in A-grade movies in Bollywood.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
In April, we put aside 5775 EUR to fund Debian projects. There was no proposals for new projects received, thus we re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Please do not hesitate to submit a proposal, if there is a project that could benefit from the funding!
Debian LTS contributors
In April, 11 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 14.0h (out of 14h assigned and 12h from March), thus carrying over 12h to May.
Evolution of the situation
In April we released 33 DLAs and held a LTS team meeting using video conferencing.
The security tracker currently lists 53 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 26 packages needing an update.
We are please to welcome VyOS as a new gold sponsor!
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
In March, we put aside 3225 EUR to fund Debian projects but sadly nobody picked up anything, so this one of the many reasons Raphael posted as series of blog posts titled Challenging times for Freexian , posted in 4 parts on the last two days of March and the first two of April. [Part one, two, three and four]
So we re still looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article!
Debian LTS contributors
In March, 11 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 9.0h (out of 9h assigned and 12h from February), thus carrying over 12h to April.
Evolution of the situation
In March we released 28 DLAs and held our second LTS team meeting for 2021 on IRC, with the next public IRC meeting coming up at the end of May.
At that meeting Holger announced that after 2.5 years he wanted to step back from his role helping Rapha l in coordinating/managing the LTS team. We would like to thank Holger for his continuous work on Debian LTS (which goes back to 2014) and are happy to report that we already found a successor which we will introduce in the upcoming April report from Freexian.
Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. For a last time, please contact Holger if you are interested!
The security tracker currently lists 42 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 28 packages needing an update.
We are also pleased to report that we got 4 new sponsors over the last 2 months : thanks to sipgate GmbH, OVH US LLC, Tilburg University and Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble !
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Back in 2019, The Cure released a double-video-album featuring two live shows
from 2018, their 40th anniversary concert at Hyde Park (which I
attended) and
their experimental "Curaetion" show from the Meltdown festival a few weeks
earier.
Rumours that there would be a release had been circulating since the gig
itself, where video director Tim Pope was spotted filming the gig (sporting
a tee shirt reading "Yes I'm Filming. No I don't know when you'll see it.").
Earlier in 2019 the "Anniversary" half had a limited run in cinemas, but
the home video release was not officially revealed until much later, and the
inclusion of Curaetion an unexpected bonus.
'deluxe' releases
The release is available in several configurations. The "standard" issue is
a two-DVD (or Blu Ray) set in a hard-book case, with some liner notes in the
middle. A "deluxe" issue is a roughly twice-as-large boxed set containing
the two video discs and two CD-audio discs of the shows.
When it comes to deluxe editions, I would historically have been the perfect
"mark", but I've had some bad experiences with other releases (this is a story
for another blog post), so for this release I pre-ordered the standard BR
edition. Right up until release, I wondered whether I should have made the
other choice. Eventually, pictures of other people's Deluxe Editions started
to circulate, and I was re-assured that I made the right call. The larger box
is just something harder to store, the larger booklet is an exact reproduction
of the smaller, standard edition liner notes, which are not really notable.
The shows
I think the shows are great. The Hyde Park show is a fairly standard "best of"
setlist, and my enjoyment of it might be coloured by having been at the show
and having fond memories of it. But it's a great performance and very well
captured, so I think there's something for people who like the Cure but weren't
there to enjoy too.
I wasn't at the Meltdown show. The setlist for that one is much more esoteric,
and it's lovely to have renditions of songs that are rarely performed live
(And: across the two sets you get If Only Tonight We Could Sleep twice).
Getting the audio
I knew in advance that I would likely listen to the shows more often than watch
them, so the CDs in the Deluxe set would have been useful for that, but I was
fairly sure the audio mix would be the same as on the video discs, so I could
just extract that. I was half-right: the BR set (at least) has 5.1 surround and
separate lossless stereo mixes, but they have been mastered quite differently
to the CD audio, which appears to be brick-wall mastered, to such an extent
that the audio distorts quite noticeably in a few places. The BR audio does not
seem to suffer from the same problems.
Getting the audio off the discs was interesting. On Linux, the tool of choice
for decoding encrypted Blu Rays is libaacs, which requires a list of Blu Ray
keys which you must source separately. With my BR drive I was not able to
decode the discs using the keys I could find online. However, the separate tool
MakeMKVwas able to decode them. I don't know exactly how but I speculate
that MakeMKV contains some leaked hardware player keys that are not in more
general circulation.
Once I had decoded copies of the two videos, the trusty tool ffmpeg is able
to easily extract the PCM stereo audio track. Unfortunately it cannot, in one
go, split the audio track at the chapter boundary points. This is easy to
script around: one ffmpeg invocation to get the chapter offsets, then some
scripting to turn that into seek and duration command-line arguments for
further ffmpeg invocations. For space reasons, I opted to transcode to FLAC
at the same time as extracting each track. I hit an interesting (although not
fatal) problem: the time taken to extract each track got progressively slower,
almost as if ffmpeg was transcoding the entire audio track up to the point
specified as the offset to start extracting from.
If I wanted to answer categorically whether the BR audio was preferable, I
would need to perform a double-blind listening test, using a tool such as
squishyball. I certainly can't
be bothered: the BR audio is fine for me.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
In February, we put aside 5475 EUR to fund Debian projects.
The first project from this initiative was finished and thus Carles Pina was able to issue the first invoice!
We are looking forward to receive more projects from various
Debian teams and contributors. Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS contributors
In February, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 19.0h (out of 7h assigned and 12h from January).
Ben Hutchings did 19h (out of 16h assigned and 15.25h from January), thus carrying over 12.25h to March.
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not report back about their work so for now we assume they did nothing (out of 28h assigned plus 35.5h from January), thus is carrying over 63.5h for March.
Holger Levsen did 6h coordinating/managing the LTS team.
Evolution of the situation
In February we released 28 DLAs (including one regression update) and we held an internal team meeting using video chat. Finally, as every month we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested!
The security tracker currently lists 46 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 34 packages needing an update.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Ash is an Aurora Company indenture working as a salvage pilot in the
wreckage of the Battle of Tribulation. She's been on the crew of the
Twenty-Five and indentured to Aurora for about a year. Before
that, she was an indenture in the mines of Bittersweet, where her fianc
died in an attack from the alien Vai and where she contracted the
celestium poisoning that's slowly killing her. Her only hope for
treatment is to work off her indenture and become a corporate citizen, a
hope that is doomed if Aurora discovers her illness. Oh, and she's in
love with the citizen captain of the Twenty-Five, a relationship
that's a bad idea for multiple reasons and which the captain has already
cut off.
This is the hopeful, optimistic part of the book, before things start
getting grim.
The setting of Architects of Memory is a horrifying future of
corporate slavery and caste systems that has run head-long into aliens.
The Vai released mysterious and beautiful weapons that kill humans
horribly and were wreaking havoc on the corporate ships, but then the Vai
retreated in the midst of their victory. The Twenty-Five is
salvaging useful equipment and undetonated Vai ordnance off the dead hulk
of the Aurora ship London when corporate tells them that the
London may be hiding a more potent secret: a captured Vai weapon
that may be the reason the Vai fled.
I was tempted into reading this because the plot is full of elements I
usually like: a tight-knit spaceship crew, alien first contact full of
mysterious discoveries, corporate skulduggery, and anti-corporate
protagonists. However, I like those plot elements when they support a
story about overthrowing oppression and improving the universe. This
book, instead, is one escalating nightmare after another.
Ash starts the book sick but functional and spends much of the book
developing multiple forms of brain damage. She's not alone; the same fate
awaits several other likable characters. The secret weapon has horrible
effects while also being something more terrible than a weapon. The
corporations have an iron and apparently inescapable grip on humanity,
with no sign of even the possibility of rebellion, and force indentures to
cooperate with their slavery in ways that even the protagonists can't
shake. And I haven't even mentioned the organ harvesting and medical
experiments. The plot is a spiral between humans doing awful things to
aliens and then doing even more awful things to other humans.
I don't want to spoil the ending, but I will say that it was far less
emotionally satisfying than I needed. I'm not sure this was intentional;
there are some indications that Osborne meant for it to be partly
cathartic for the characters. But not only didn't it work for me at all,
it emphasized my feelings about the hopelessness and futility of the
setting. If a book is going to put me through that amount of character
pain and fear, I need a correspondingly significant triumph at the end.
If that doesn't bother you as much as it does me, this book does have
merits. The descriptions of salvage on a disabled starship are vivid and
memorable and a nice change of pace from the normal military or scientific
space stories. Salvage involves being careful, methodical, and precise in
the face of tense situations; combined with the eerie feeling of
battlefield remnants, it's an evocative scene. The Vai devices are
satisfyingly alien, hitting a good balance between sinister and exotically
beautiful. The Vai themselves, once we finally learn something about
them, are even better: a truly alien form of life at the very edge of
mutual understanding. There was the right amount of inter-corporate
skulduggery, with enough factions for some tense complexity and
double-crossing, but not so many that I lost track. And there is some
enjoyably tense drama near the climax.
Unfortunately, the unremitting horrors were too much for me. They're also
too much for the characters, who oscillate between desperate action and
psychological meltdowns that become more frequent and more urgently
described as one gets farther into the book. Osborne starts the book with
the characters already so miserable that this constant raising of the
stakes became overwrought and exhausting for me. By the end of the book,
the descriptions of the mental state of the characters felt like an
endless, incoherent scream of pain. Combine that with a lot of body
horror, physical and mental illness, carefully-described war crimes, and
gruesome death, and I hit mental overload.
This is not the type of science fiction novel (thankfully getting rarer)
in which the author thinks any of these things are okay. Osborne is
clearly on the side of her characters and considers the events of this
story as horrible as I do. I think her goal was to tell a story about
ethics and courage in the face of atrocities and overwhelming odds, and
maybe another reader would find that. For me, it was lost in the
darkness.
Architects of Memory reaches a definite conclusion but doesn't
resolve some major plot elements. It's followed by Engines of
Oblivion, which might, based on the back-cover text, be more optimistic?
I don't think I have it in me to find out, though.
Rating: 4 out of 10
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
In January, we put aside 2175 EUR to fund Debian projects.
As part of this Carles Pina i Estany started to work on
better no-dsa support for the PTS
which recently resulted in two
mergerequests which will hopefully be deployed soon.
We re looking forward to receive more projects from various
Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS contributors
In January, 13 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 9.0h (out of 14h assigned and 7h from December), thus carrying over 12h to February.
Adrian Bunk did 14h (out of 26h assigned), thus carrying over 12h to February, which he then gave back.
Ben Hutchings did 0.25h (out of 7h assigned and 8.5h from December), thus carrying over 15.25h to February.
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 26h assigned plus 9.5h from December), thus is carrying over 35.5h for February.
Holger Levsen did 6.5h coordinating/managing the LTS team..
Markus Koschany did 36.75h (out of 26h assigned and 10.75h from December).
Ola Lundqvist did 2.5h (out of 10.5h assigned and 11.5h from December) and gave back 9.5 hours, thus carrying over 10h to February.
Roberto C. S nchez did 6h (out of 26h assigned), thus carrying over 20h to February, which he then gave back.
Evolution of the situation
In January we released 28 DLAs
and held our first
LTS team meeting for 2021 on IRC, with the next public IRC meeting coming up at the end of March.
During that meeting Utkarsh shared that after he rolled out the python-certbot update (on December 8th 2020) the maintainer told him: I just checked with Let s Encrypt, and the stats show that you just saved 142,500 people from having their certificates start failing next month. I didn t know LTS was still that used!
Finally, we would like to welcome sipgate GmbH as a new silver sponsor. Also remember that we are constantly looking
for new contributors. Please contact Holger
if you are interested.
The security tracker currently lists 43 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 23 packages needing an update.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.
Debian project funding
In December, we put aside 2100 EUR to fund Debian projects. The first project proposal (a tracker.debian.org improvement for the security team) was received and quickly approved by the paid contributors, then we opened a request for bids and the bid winner was announced today (it was easy, we had only one candidate). Hopefully this first project will be completed until our next report.
We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS contributors
In December, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 14h assigned), thus carrying over 7h to January.
Ben Hutchings did 16.5h (out of 16h assigned and 9h from November), thus carrying over 8.5h to January.
Evolution of the situation
December was a quiet month as we didn t have a team meeting nor any other unusual activity and we released 43 DLAs.
The security tracker currently lists 30 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 25 packages needing an update.
This month we are pleased to welcome Deveryware as new sponsor!
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
In 2020, I finished and reviewed 42 books, two more than 2019 (although I
had finished but not reviewed two books at the end of 2019, so the total
is even more similar than that). This is the best year for reading in
terms of book count since 2012, despite being seriously distracted by a
new job, a pandemic, and US political meltdowns. Those distractions do
show up in the drop in page count.
If it weren't for the pandemic, the count would have been higher. Just as
I got into a rhythm of reading while I exercised, gyms became a bad idea
for the rest of the year. Treadmills are good for reading; long walks
around the neighborhood not so much. That time went to podcasts instead,
which I'm not too sad about but which don't prompt reviews.
Finding the mental space and energy to write reviews proved as much of a
challenge as finding time to read this year, and I once again had to do
some catch-up at the end of the year. To the extent that I have goals for
2021, it's to tighten up the elapsed time between finishing a book and
writing a review so that the reviews don't pile up.
I read one book this year that I rated 10 out of 10: Michael Lewis's
The Fifth Risk,
which is partly about the US presidential transition and is really about
what the US government does and what sort of people make careers in civil
service. This book is brilliant, fascinating, and surprisingly touching,
and I wish it were four times as long. If anything, it's even more
relevant today as we enter another transition than it was when Lewis wrote
it or when I read it.
There were so many 9 out of 10 ratings this year that it's hard to know
where to start. I read the last Murderbot novella by Martha Wells
(Exit Strategy) and
then the first Murderbot novel
(Network Effect),
both of which were everything I was hoping for. Murderbot's sarcastic
first-person voice continues to be a delight, and I expect Network
Effect to take home several 2021 awards. I'm eagerly awaiting the next
novel, Fugitive Telemetry, currently scheduled for the end of
April, 2021.
Also on the fiction side were Alix E. Harrow's wonderful debut novel
The Ten Thousand Doors
of January, a fierce novel about family and claiming power that will
hopefully win the 2020 Mythopoeic
Award (which was delayed by the pandemic), and TJ Klune's heart-warming
The House in the
Cerulean Sea, my feel-good novel of the year. Finally, Tamsyn Muir's
Gideon the Ninth and
Harrow the Ninth
were a glorious mess in places, but I had more fun reading and discussing
those books than I've had with any novel in a very long time.
On the non-fiction side, Tressie McMillan Cottom's
Thick is the best
collection of sociology that I've read. It's not easy reading, but that
book gave me a new-found appreciation and understanding of sociology and
what it's trying to accomplish. Gretchen McCulloch's
Because Internet is
much easier reading but similarly perspective-enhancing, helping me
understand (among other things) how choice of punctuation and
capitalization expands the dynamic range of meaning in informal text
conversation. Finally, Nick Pettigrew's
Anti-Social is a
funny, enlightening, and sobering look at the process of addressing
low-level unwanted behavior that's directly relevant to the current
conflicts over the role of policing in society.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
Individual reports
In November, 239.25 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available:
Evolution of the situation
In November we held the last
LTS team meeting for 2020 on IRC, with the next one coming up at the end of January.
We announced a new formalized initiative for
Funding Debian projects with money from Freexian s LTS service.
Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking
for new contributors. Please contact Holger
if you are interested!
We re also glad to welcome two new sponsors, Moxa, a device manufacturer, and a French research lab (Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod).
The security tracker currently lists 37 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 40 packages needing an update.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
Individual reports
In October, 221.50 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 16.0h (out of 14h assigned and 2h from September).
Adrian Bunk did 7h (out of 20.75h assigned and 5.75h from September), thus carrying over 19.5h to November.
Ben Hutchings did 11.5h (out of 6.25h assigned and 9.75h from September), thus carrying over 4.5h to November.
Evolution of the situation
October was a regular LTS month with a LTS team meeting done via video chat
thus there s no log to be shared.
After more than five years of contributing to LTS (and ELTS), Mike Gabriel announced
that he founded a new company called Frei(e)
Software GmbH and thus would leave us to concentrate on this new endeavor.
Best of luck with that, Mike!
So, once again, this is a good moment to remind that we are constantly looking
for new contributors. Please contact Holger
if you are interested!
The security tracker currently lists 42 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 39 packages needing an update.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
Individual reports
In September, 208.25 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available:
Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 14h assigned), thus carrying over 2h to October.
Adrian Bunk did 14h (out of 19.75h assigned), thus carrying over 5.75h to October.
Ben Hutchings did 8.25h (out of 16h assigned and 9.75h from August), but gave back 7.75h, thus carrying over 9.75h to October.
Utkarsh Gupta did 8.75h (out of 19.75h assigned), while he already anticipated the remaining 11h in August.
Evolution of the situation
September was a regular LTS month with an
IRC meeting.
The security tracker currently lists 45 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 48 packages needing an update.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
When building route filters with bgpq4 or bgpq3, the speed of
rr.ntt.net or whois.radb.net can be a bottleneck. Updating many
filters may take several tens of minutes, depending on the load:
$time bgpq4 -h whois.radb.net AS-HURRICANE wc -l
9098691.96s user 0.15s system 2% cpu 1:17.64 total$time bgpq4 -h rr.ntt.net AS-HURRICANE wc -l
9278651.86s user 0.08s system 12% cpu 14.098 total
A possible solution is to run your own IRRd instance in your
network, mirroring the main routing registries. A close
alternative is to bundle IRRd with all the data in a
ready-to-use Docker image. This also has the advantage of easy
integration into a Docker-based CI/CD pipeline.
$ git clone https://github.com/vincentbernat/irrd-legacy.git -b blade/master
$cd irrd-legacy
$ docker build . -t irrd-snapshot:latest
[ ]Successfully built 58c3e83a1d18Successfully tagged irrd-snapshot:latest$ docker container run --rm --detach --publish=43:43 irrd-snapshot
4879cfe7413075a0c217089dcac91ed356424c6b88808d8fcb01dc00eafcc8c7$time bgpq4 -h localhost AS-HURRICANE wc -l
9041371.72s user 0.11s system 96% cpu 1.881 total
assembling the final container with the result of the two previous stages.
The second stage fetches the databases used by rr.ntt.net:
NTTCOM, RADB, RIPE, ALTDB, BELL, LEVEL3, RGNET, APNIC, JPIRR, ARIN,
BBOI, TC, AFRINIC, ARIN-WHOIS, and REGISTROBR. However, it misses
RPKI.2 Feel free to adapt!
The image can be scheduled to be rebuilt daily or weekly, depending on
your needs. The repository includes a .gitlab-ci.yaml
file automating the build and triggering the compilation
of all filters by your CI/CD upon success.
Instead of using the latest version of IRRd, the image
relies on an older version that does not require a PostgreSQL
instance and uses flat files instead.
Unlike the others, the RPKI database is built from the
published RPKI ROAs. They can be retrieved with rpki-client and
transformed into RPSL objects to be imported in IRRd.
I have just updated the BIOS on a Dell PowerEdge T110 II. The process isn t too difficult, Google for the machine name and BIOS, download a shell script encoded firmware image and GPG signature, then run the script on the system in question.
One problem is that the Dell GPG key isn t signed by anyone. How hard would it be to get a few well connected people in the Linux community to sign the key used for signing Linux scripts for updating the BIOS? I would be surprised if Dell doesn t employ a few people who are well connected in the Linux community, they should just ask all employees to sign such GPG keys! Failing that there are plenty of other options. I d be happy to sign the Dell key if contacted by someone who can prove that they are a responsible person in Dell. If I could phone Dell corporate and ask for the engineering department and then have someone tell me the GPG fingerprint I ll sign the key and that problem will be partially solved (my key is well connected but you need more than one signature).
The next issue is how to determine that a BIOS update works. What you really don t want is to have a BIOS update fail and brick your system! So the Linux update process loads the image into something (special firmware RAM maybe) and then reboots the system and the reboot then does a critical part of the update. If the reboot doesn t work then you end up with the old version of the BIOS. This is overall a good thing.
The PowerEdge T110 II is a workstation with an NVidia video card (I tried an ATI card but that wouldn t boot for unknown reasons). The Nouveau driver has some issues. One thing I have done to work around some Nouveau issues is to create a file ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/nouveau-broken.sh (for KDE sessions) with the following contents:
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1
I previously wrote about using this just for Kmail to stop it crashing [1]. But after doing that I still had other problems with video and disabling all GL on the NVidia card was necessary.
The latest problem I ve had is that even when using that configuration things don t go well. When I run the reboot command I end up with a kernel message about the GPU not responding and then it doesn t reboot. That means that the BIOS update doesn t apply, a hard reboot signals to the system that the new BIOS wasn t good and I end up with the old BIOS again. I discovered that disabling sddm (the latest xdm program in Debian) from starting on boot meant that a reboot command would work. Then I ran the BIOS update script and it s reboot command worked and gave a successful BIOS update.
So I ve gone from a 2013 BIOS to a 2018 BIOS! The update list says that some CVEs have been addressed, but the spectre-meltdown-checker doesn t report any fewer vulnerabilities.
Dual screen desktop running i3, Emacs, some terminals, including a Quake console, Firefox, Polybar as the status bar, and Dunst as the notification daemon.
Demonstration of the layouts available in i3. The main container is split horizontally. The first child is split vertically. The second one is tabbed. The last one is stacking.
Tree representation of the previous screenshot.
Notification showing i3 s tree for a workspace
i3 workspaces in Polybar
Polybar displaying various information: CPU usage, memory usage, screen brightness, battery status, Bluetooth status (with a connected headset), network status (connected to a wireless network and to a VPN), notification status, and speaker volume.
Current date and weather forecast for the day in Polybar. The data is retrieved with the OpenWeather API.
Rofi as an application launcher
Rofi to select a wireless network
Hindus comprise 83% of Indian couples with more than two child children
If one wants to, one can read a bit more about the Uttar Pradesh Population bill 
Zeeshan of IYC (India Youth Congress) along with Salman Khan s non-profit Being Human getting oxygenators 
Back in 2019, The Cure released a double-video-album featuring two live shows
from 2018, their 