While I try to minimize Politics and Economics as much as I can on this blog, it sometimes surfaces. It is possible that some people may benefit or at least be aware. A bit of background is necessary before I jump into the intricacies of the Maharashtra Real Estate Rules and Regulation Draft Rules 2016 (RERA) . Since ever, but more prominently since 2007/8 potential homeowners from across the country have been suffering at the hands of the builder/promoter for number of years. While it would be wrong to paint all the Real Estate Developers and Builders as cheats (we as in all tenants and homeowners hope there are good ones out there) many Real Estate Builders and promoters have cheated homeowners of their hard-earned money. This has also lessened the secondary (resale) market and tenants like me have to fight over morsels as supply is tight. There were two broad ways in which the cheating is/was done a. Take deposits and run away i.e. fly by night operators Here the only option for a homeowner is to file an FIR (First Information Report) and hope the culprits are caught. 99% of the time the builder/promoter goes somewhere abroad and the potential home buyers/home-owners are left holding the can. This is usually done by small real estate promoters and builders. b. The big boys would take all or most money of the project, may register or not register the flat in your name, either build a quarter or half-finished building and then make excuses. There are some who do not even build. The money given is used by the builder/developer either for his own needs or using that money in some high-profile project which is expensive and may have huge returns. They know that home-owners can t do anything, at the most go to the court which will take more than a decade or two during which time the developer would have interest-free income and do whatever he wants to do. One of the bigger stories which came up this year was when the Indian Cricket Captain, M.S. Dhoni (cricket is a religion in India, and the cricketers gods for millions of Indians) had to end his brand engagement and ambassadorship from Amrapali Housing Group. Apparently, his wife Sakshi was on the Board of directors at Amrapali Housing and had to resign The Government knew of such issues and had been working since last few years. Under the present Government, a Model Agreement and a Model Real Estate Rules and Regulation Bill was passed on 31st March and came into force on 1st May 2016. India, similar to the U.S. and U.K. follows a federal structure. While I have shared this before, most of the laws in India fall in either of three lists, Central List, Concurrent Lists and State Lists. Housing for instance, is a state subject so any laws concerning housing has to be made by the state legislature. Having a statutory requirement to put the bill in 6 months from 1st of May, the Government of Maharashtra chose to put the draft rules in public domain on 12th December 2016, about 10 days ago and there were efforts to let it remain low-key so people do not object as we are still in the throes of demonetisation. By law they should have given 30 days for people to raise objections and give suggestions. The State Government too could have easily asked an extension and as both the State and the Centre are of the same Political Party they would have easily got it. With that, below is the e-mail I sent to suggesstionsonrera@maharashtra.gov.in Sub Some suggestions for RERA biggest suggestion, need to give more time study the implications for house-owners. Respected Sir/Madame, I will be publishing the below mail as a public letter on my blog as well. I am writing as a citizen, a voter, a potential home owner, currently a tenant . If houses supply is not in time, it is us, the tenants who have the most to lose as we have to fight over whatever is in the market. I do also hope to be a home buyer at some point in time so these rules would affect me also somewhere in the hazy future. I came to know through the media that Maharashtra Govt. recently introduced draft rules for RERA Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 . I hope to impress upon you that these proposed Rules and Regulations need to be thoroughly revised and new draft rules shared with the public at large with proper announcement in all newspapers and proper time ( more than a month ) to study and give replies on the said matter. My suggestions and complaints are as under a. The first complaint and suggestion is that the date between the draft regulations and suggestions being invited by members of public is and was too little 12 December 2016 23 December 2016 (only 11 days) for almost 90 pages of Government rules and regulations which needs multiple rounds of re-reading to understand the implications of the draft rules . Add to that unlike the Central Building Legislation, Model Agreement which was prepared by Centre and also given wide publicity, the Maharashtra Govt. didn t do any such publicity to bring it to the
notice of the people. b. I ask where was the hurry to publish these draft rules now when everybody is suffering through the result of cash-crunch on top of other things. If the said draft rules were put up in January 2017, I am sure more people would have responded to the draft rules. Ir raises suspicion in the mind of everybody the timing of sharing the draft rules and the limited time given to people to respond. E.g. When TRAI (Telephone Regulatory Authority of India) asked for suggestion it gives more than a month, and something like housing which is an existential question for everybody, i.e. the poor, the middle and the rich, you have given pretty less time. While I could change my telephone service providers at a moment s notice without huge loss, the same cannot be said either for a house owner (in case of builder) or a tenant as well. This is just not done. c. The documents are at https://housing.maharashtra.gov.in/sitemap/housing/Rera_rules.htm under different sub-headings while the correct structure of the documents can be found at nared s site
http://naredco.in/notifications.asp . At the very least, the documents should have been in proper order. Coming to some of the salient points raised both in the media and elsewhere 1. On page 6 of Part IV-A Ext1.pdf you have written Explanation.-The registration of a real estate project shall not be required,- (i) for the purpose of any renovations or repair or redevelopment which does not involve marketing, advertisement, selling or new allotment of any apartment , plot or building as the case may be under
the real estate project; RERA draft rules What it means is that the house owner and by the same stroke the tenant would have absolutely no voice to oppose any changes made to the structure at any point of time after the building is built. This means the builder is free to build 12-14-16 even 20 stories building when the original plans were for 6-8-10. This rule gives the builder to do free for all till the building doesn t get converted into a society, a process which does and can take years to happen. 2. A builder has to take innumerable permissions from different authorities at each and every stage till possession of a said property isn t handed over to a home buyer and by its extension to the tenant. Now any one of these authorities could sit on the papers and there is no accountability of by when papers would be passed under a competent authority s desk. There was a wide belief that there would be some
rules and regulations framed in this regard but the draft rules are silent on the subject matter. 3. In Draft rule 5. page 8 of Part IV-A Ext1.pdf you write Withdrawal of amounts deposited in separate account.-(1) With regard to the withdrawal of amounts deposited under sub-clause (D) of clause (l) of sub-section (2) of section 4, the following provisions shall apply:- (i) For new projects which will be registered after commencement. Deposit in the escrow account is from now onwards. So what happens to the projects which are ongoing at the moment, either at the registration stage or at building stage, thousands of potential house owners would be left to fend for themselves. There needs to be some recourse for them as well. 3b. Another suggestion is that the house-owners are duly informed when promoters/builders are taking money from the bank and should have the authority to see that proper documents and procedure was followed. It is possible that unscrupulous elements may either bypass it or give some different documents which are not in knowledge of the house-owner, thus defeating the purpose of the escrow account itself. 4. On page 44 of Pt.IV-A Ext.161 in the Model Agreement to be entered
between the Promoter and the Alottee you have mentioned (i)The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee one Apartment No. .. of the type .. of carpet area admeasuring .. sq. metres on floor in the building __________along with (hereinafter referred to as the Apartment ) as shown in the Floor plan thereof hereto annexed and marked Annexures C
for the consideration of Rs. . including Rs. . being the proportionate price of the common areas and facilities appurtenant to the premises, the nature, extent and description of the common/limited common areas and facilities which are more particularly described in the Second Schedule annexed herewith. (the price of the Apartment including the proportionate price of the limited common areas and facilities and parking spaces should be shown separately). (ii) The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee garage bearing Nos ____ situated at _______ Basement and/or stilt and /or ____podium being
constructed in the layout for the consideration of Rs. ____________/- (iii) The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee Car parking spaces bearing Nos ____ situated at _______ Basement and/or stilt and /or ____podium and/or open parking space, being constructed in the layout for the
consideration of Rs. ____________/-. The total aggregate consideration amount for the apartment including garages/car parking spaces is
thus Rs.______/- Draft rules. What has been done here is the parking space has been divorced from sale of the flat . It is against natural justice, logic, common sense as well-known precedents in jurisprudence (i.e. law) In September 2010, the bench of Justices R M Lodha and A K Patnaik had ruled in a judgement stating developers cannot sell parking spaces as independent real-estate units. The court ruled that parking areas are common areas and facilities . This was on behalf of a precedent in Mumbai High Court as well. http://www.reinventingparking.org/2010/09/important-parking-ruling-by-indias.html This has been reiterated again and again in courts as well as consumer
forums http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Cant-charge-flat-buyer-extra-for-parking-slot/articleshow/22475233.cms and has been the norm in several Apartment Acts over multiple states http://apartmentadda.com/blog/2015/02/19/rules-pertaining-to-parking-spaces-in-apartment-complexes/ 5. In case of dispute, the case will high court which is inundated by huge number of pending cases. As recently as August 2016 there was a news item in Indian Express which talks about the spike in pending cases. Putting a case in the high court will weigh heavily on the homeowner, financially and
mentally http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/more-cases-and-increased-staff-strength-putting-pressure-on-bombay-high-court-building-2964796/ It may be better to use the services of National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission'(NCDRC) where there is possibility of quicker justice and quick resolution. There is possibility of group actions taking place which will reduce duplicity of work on behalf of the petitioners. 6. There is neither any clarity, incentive or punitive action against the promoter/builder if s/he delay conveyance to the society in order to get any future developmental and FSI rights. To delay handing over conveyance, the builders delay completion of the last building in a said project. there should be both a compensatory and punitive actions taken against the builder if he is unable to prove any genuine cause for the same. 7. There needs to be the provision with regard to need for developers to make public disclosures pertaining to building approvals. This while I had shared above needs to be explicitly mentioned so house-owners know the promoter/builder are on the right path. 8. There needs to be a provision that prohibits refusal to sell property to any person on the basis of his/her religion, marital status or dietary preferences. 9. There is lot of ambiguity if criminal proceedings can be initiated against a promoter/developer if s/he fails to deliver the flat on time. The developer should be criminally liable if he doesn t give the flat with all the amenities, fixtures and anything which was on agreement signed by both parties and for which the payment has been given in
full at time of possession of a flat. 10. Penalties for the promoter/builder is capped at 10% in case of any wrong-doing. Apart from proving the charge, the onus of which would lie on the house-owner, capping it at 10% is similar to A teacher telling a naughty student, do whatever you want to do, I am only going to hit you 5 times. Such a drafting encourages the Promoter/builder to play mischief. The builder knows his exposure is pretty limited. Liability is limited so he will try to get with whatever he can. Having a high penalty clause will deter him. 11. There was talk and shown in the Center s model agreement the precedent of providing names, addresses and contact details of other allot-tees or home-owners of a building that would have multiple dwelling units . This is nowhere either in the agreement or mentioned anywhere else in the four documents. 12. An addition to the above would be that the details provided should be correct and updated as per the records maintained by the Promoter/builder. 13. Today, there is no way for a potential house-owner to know if the builder had broken any norms or has any cases in court pending against him. There should be a way for the potential house-owner to find out. 14. A builder can terminate a flat purchase agreement by giving just a week s notice on email to the buyer who defaults on an instalment. But the developer can refund the money without interest to the
purchaser at leisure, within six months.Under MOFA (the earlier rules), the developer could cancel the agreement after giving a 15 days notice, and the builder could resell the flat only after refunding money to the original buyer. Under the new draft rules, a builder can immediately sell the flat after terminating the agreement. 15. The new draft rules say a buyer must pay 30% of the total cost while signing the agreement and 45% when the plinth of the building is constructed. The earlier state law stipulated 20% payment when the
agreement is signed with the developer. 16. The Central model agreement and rules proposed a fee of INR Rs 1,000 for filing complaints before housing authority; the state draft has proposed to hike this fee to Rs INR Rs. 10,000/- 17. Reading the Central Model Agreement, key disclosures under Section 4 (2)and Rule 3 (2) of the Central Model Rules have been excluded to be put up on the website of the Authority. These included carpet area of flat, encumbrance certificate (this would have disclosed encumbrances in respect of the land where the real estate project is proposed to be undertaken), copy of the legal title report and sanctioned plan of the building. Due to this house-owner would always be in dark and assume that everything is alright. There have been multiple instances of this over years Some examples http://www.deccanchronicle.com/140920/nation-current-affairs/article/builder-encroaches-%E2%80%98raja-kaluve%E2%80%99 http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/surat-builder-grabs-tribal-land-using-fake-documents/ http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/bmtf-books-exmayor-wife-for-grabbing-ca-site/article7397062.ece http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thane/24-acre-ambernath-plot-usurped-with-fake-docus/articleshow/55654139.cms 18. The Central rule requires a builder to submit an annual report including profit and loss account, balance sheet, cash flow statement, directors report and auditors report for the preceding three financial years, among other things. However, the Maharashtra draft rules are silent on such a requirement. While the above is what I could perceive in the limited amount I came to know. This should be enough to convince that more needs to be done from the house-owner s side. Update Just saw Quint s Op-Ed goes in more detail.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Draft Rules for Real Estate Rules and Regulation (2016), #hurry, #Name, #Response, Amrapali Group, Contact details of other hom-owners in a scheme., M.S. Dhoni

Debian LTS November marked the nineteenth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. I had 7 hours allocated which I used completely by:

• Being at LTS frontdesk twice (at the beginning and end of November) triaging about ~30 CVEs.
• Preparing and releasing DLA-698-1 for QEMU fixing 9 CVEs
• Putting out DLA-699-1 for xen, the acutal xen update was prepared by Bastian Blank

Other Debian stuff

• Usual bunch of libvirt and related uploads (osinfo-db-tools, libvirt-python, libosinfo)
• Sponsored svn2git upload
• Uploaded git-buildpackage 0.8.7 to unstable (list of changes)

Some other Free Software activites

• Created foreman_influxdb: a plugin to forward foreman metrics to influxdb
• Released of first version of ldapsp: a Foreman realm smartproxy to create arbitrary LDAP entries
• Fixed updating compute resources in ansible-module-foreman
• Fixed a bug in fog-vsphere that would make massive parallel vm creation in Foreman fail
• Helped to update influxdb-rails so the gem is compatible with influxdb-ruby again.

There has been a great deal of comment among my friends recently about a particularly British cookery program called "The Great British Bake Off". There has been some controversy as the program is moving from the BBC to a commercial broadcaster.

Part of this discussion comes from all the presenters, excepting Paul Hollywood, declining to sign with the new broadcaster and partly because of speculation the BBC might continue with a similar format show with a new name.

Rob Kendrick provided the start to this conversation by passing on a satirical link suggesting Samuel L Jackson might host "cakes on a plane"

This caused a large number of suggestions for alternate names which I will be reporting but Rob Kendrick, Vivek Das Mohapatra, Colin Watson, Jonathan McDowell, Oki Kuma, Dan Alderman, Dagfinn Ilmari Manns ke, Lesley Mitchell and Daniel Silverstone are the ones to blame.

• Strictly come baking
• Stars and their pies
• Baking with the stars
• Bake/Off.
• Blind Cake
• Cake or no cake?
• The cake is a lie
• Bake That.
• Bake Me On
• Bake On Me
• Bakin' Stevens.
• The Winner Bakes It All
• Bakerloo
• Bake Five
• Every breath you bake
• Every bread you bake
• Unbake my heart
• Knead and let prove
• Bake me up before you go-go
• I want to bake free
• Another bake bites the dust
• Cinnamon whorl is not enough
• The pie who loved me
• The yeast you can do.
• Total collapse of the tart
• Bake and deliver
• You Gotta Bake
• Bake's Seven
• Natural Born Bakers
• Bake It Or Leaven It
• Driving the last pikelet
• Pie crust on the dancefloor
• Tomorrow never pies
• Murder on the pie crust
• The pie who came in from the cold.
• You only bake twice (Every body has to make one sweet and one savoury dish).

So that is our list, anyone else got better ideas?

I am happy to announce the release of OASIS v0.4.7. OASIS is a tool to help OCaml developers to integrate configure, build and install systems in their projects. It should help to create standard entry points in the source code build system, allowing external tools to analyse projects easily. This tool is freely inspired by Cabal which is the same kind of tool for Haskell. You can find the new release here and the changelog here. More information about OASIS in general on the OASIS website. Pull request for inclusion in OPAM is pending. Here is a quick summary of the important changes:

• Drop support for OASISFormat 0.2 and 0.1.
• New plugin "omake" to support build, doc and install actions.
• Improve automatic tests (Travis CI and AppVeyor)
• Trim down the dependencies (removed ocaml-gettext, camlp4, ocaml-data-notation)

Features:

• findlib_directory (beta): to install libraries in sub-directories of findlib.
• findlib_extra_files (beta): to install extra files with ocamlfind.
• source_patterns (alpha): to provide module to source file mapping.

This version contains a lot of changes and is the achievement of a huge amount of work. The addition of OMake as a plugin is a huge progress. The overall work has been targeted at making OASIS more library like. This is still a work in progress but we made some clear improvement by getting rid of various side effect (like the requirement of using "chdir" to handle the "-C", which leads to propage ~ctxt everywhere and design OASISFileSystem). I would like to thanks again the contributor for this release: Spiros Eliopoulos, Paul Snively, Jeremie Dimino, Christopher Zimmermann, Christophe Troestler, Max Mouratov, Jacques-Pascal Deplaix, Geoff Shannon, Simon Cruanes, Vladimir Brankov, Gabriel Radanne, Evgenii Lepikhin, Petter Urkedal, Gerd Stolpmann and Anton Bachin.

A (forced) relaxation week This was an interesting week, much more so than I expected. The start of the week was the usual: on Monday a run, although at an easier pace after Sunday's longer indoor bike ride, on Tuesday a 30Km outside bike ride (flat, on road, with a mountain bike so not fast at all). On Wednesday however, I had a planned "intervention" at my dentist bone reconstruction (or regeneration, not sure what the right term is for the implantation of scaffolding). The dentist told me I won't be allowed to do sports, especially in the first few days after the procedure, so I knew I will have to take it easy; easy bike rides are fine, but not anything more (e.g. especially not running). The procedure went well and after that I went to work (the dentist looked at me in a funny way when I mentioned I'm not going home but instead back to work). There was a bit of pain a couple of hours after the local anaesthesia went away, but the painkillers did work, so I was able to function somewhat OK. Laughing was the only thing that caused pain, so I tried to be very serious; didn't work well On Thursday morning however, I did feel funny and when I looked into the mirror, I got a shock. The affected side of my face was heavily swollen, and I was feeling as bad as I looked. I had a followup checkup at the dentist, so I went there, and they told me Oh, this is normal. Bone reconstruction is much more difficult on the body as opposed to extraction, since the body actually has to rebuild stuff, instead of just healing the wound. And yes, you should just go back home and take the day off! . OK, logically that explanation makes sense, but my dental extraction had a very predictable pain/recovery curve (spike right at the extraction, plateau for that day, then slow recovery that went to faster recovery after a few days). This procedure was very different, with the first day easy, and the second day much worse. The dentist continued Oh, and by the way, expect this to be worse in the morning, as the body can work all night; also, this should go away by itself over the weekend, so let's meet again on Monday. At this point I realised than I'm not allowed to do sports is not by doctor's orders, but rather my condition doesn't allow me to do sport . Sad panda Friday was even worse; my face was swollen in a different way, such that I looked even more like a monster from the Witcher games. I had to stay at home again, not being able to do much, as the painkillers I got were mostly ineffective. From my usual ~10K steps a day (or more if I run), my Friday was a paltry sub-2K step day. The only thing I was able to do was watch anime. I found Log Horizon to be a pretty interesting anime, much more so than what the synopsis said; the ramification on politics and how to interaction between the two cultures unfolded was much more in-depth than I presumed. Didn't finish it yet, so this is a partial but very strong recommendation for it. Besides watching stuff, I also went to the shop to buy some food, which turned out to be an excuse for "junk food foraging!". The pain took my willpower away and instead of the planned and short grocery list, I found myself with lots of chocolate and ice cream on my hands. Funny how the brain works On Saturday I was a bit better; the swelling went partially away, so if you squinted you could pretend I look my normal-ugly, not the monster-ugly from before. I was able to go outside of the house, do some shopping, etc. so I was able to go back to a ~9K steps day. I also stopped taking painkillers since anyway they weren't of much help, and kept myself entertained with movies and other stuff (cough cough Grim Dawn , since it's a mindless click-kill-loot-repeat ARPG that one can play even when only partially functional). Today (Sunday) was swelling was slightly worse; however, I was feeling well enough to try to go back on the bike trainer (the first three days of "no sports" were over), and planned to do a slow/relaxing one hour Zwift ride. Right, as all the people who ever tried this, it works as long as only fast people overtake you (since you can't catch them anyway), or as long as you don't get to sprint sections. I did slightly improve my Watopia 300m sprint personal record (29.20s 28.29s), which was good enough. After the first lap I took it easier as in had to, since I was not really in shape. I was in any case very glad about ending my 4 days long break from sports! So, my dentist was right indeed. The swelling did by and large clear up over the weekend (although I'll have to see how tomorrow will be), and was also right about how much more difficult this was. On one hand makes sense (growing bone does sound complex), on the other hand, I couldn't imagine that the body works so hard that it puts you out. The dentist was however slightly wrong with the you should not do any strenuous activity, especially in the first three days ; they should have said, ha ha, you'll be flat out for the first days, take it easy and enjoy the painkillers instead. Looking forward now to get back into my regular routine; relaxation is good, but only when done by choice like most things in life

I wrote recently about using git-annex for encrypted sync, but due to a number of issues with it, I ve opted to switch to Syncthing. I d been using git-annex with real but noncritical data. Among the first issues I noticed was occasional but persistent high CPU usage spikes, which once started, would persist apparently forever. I had an issue where git-annex tried to replace files I d removed from its repo with broken symlinks, but the real final straw was a number of issues with the gcrypt remote repos. git-remote-gcrypt appears to have a number of issues with possible race conditions on the remote, and at least one of them somehow caused encrypted data to appear in a packfile on a remote repo. Why there was data in a packfile there, I don t know, since git-annex is supposed to keep the data out of packfiles. Anyhow, git-annex is still an awesome tool with a lot of use cases, but I m concluding that live sync to an encrypted git remote isn t quite there yet enough for me. So I looked for alternatives. My main criteria were supporting live sync (via inotify or similar) and not requiring the files to be stored unencrypted on a remote system (my local systems all use LUKS). I found Syncthing met these requirements. Syncthing is pretty interesting in that, like git-annex, it doesn t require a centralized server at all. Rather, it forms basically a mesh between your devices. Its concept is somewhat similar to the proprietary Bittorrent Sync basically, all the nodes communicate about what files and chunks of files they have, and the changes that are made, and immediately propagate as much as possible. Unlike, say, Dropbox or Owncloud, Syncthing can actually support simultaneous downloads from multiple remotes for optimum performance when there are many changes. Combined with syncthing-inotify or syncthing-gtk, it has immediate detection of changes and therefore very quick propagation of them. Syncthing is particularly adept at figuring out ways for the nodes to communicate with each other. It begins by broadcasting on the local network, so known nearby nodes can be found directly. The Syncthing folks also run a discovery server (though you can use your own if you prefer) that lets nodes find each other on the Internet. Syncthing will attempt to use UPnP to configure firewalls to let it out, but if that fails, the last resort is a traffic relay server again, a number of volunteers host these online, but you can run your own if you prefer. Each node in Syncthing has an RSA keypair, and what amounts to part of the public key is used as a globally unique node ID. The initial link between nodes is accomplished by pasting the globally unique ID from one node into the add node screen on the other; the user of the first node then must accept the request, and from that point on, syncing can proceed. The data is all transmitted encrypted, of course, so interception will not cause data to be revealed. Really my only complaint about Syncthing so far is that, although it binds to localhost, the web GUI does not require authentication by default. There is an ITP open for Syncthing in Debian, but until then, their apt repo works fine. For syncthing-gtk, the trusty version of the webupd8 PPD works in Jessie (though be sure to pin it to a low priority if you don t want it replacing some unrelated Debian packages).

wlc 0.3, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. This is probably first release which is worth using so it's probably also worth of bigger announcement. It is built on API introduced in Weblate 2.6 and still being in development. Several commands from wlc will not work properly if executed against Weblate 2.6, first fully supported version will be 2.7 (current git is okay as well, it is now running on both demo and hosting servers). How to use it? First you will probably want to store the credentials, so that your requests are authenticated (you can do unauthenticated requests as well, but obviously only read only and on public objects), so lets create ~/.config/weblate:

[weblate]
url = https://hosted.weblate.org/api/
[keys]
https://hosted.weblate.org/api/ = APIKEY

Now you can do basic commands:

$ wlc show weblate/master/cs
...
last_author: Michal  iha 
last_change: 2016-05-13T15:59:25
revision: 62f038bb0bfe360494fb8dee30fd9d34133a8663
share_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/weblate/cs/
total: 1361
total_words: 6144
translate_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/translate/weblate/master/cs/
translated: 1361
translated_percent: 100.0
translated_words: 6144
url: https://hosted.weblate.org/api/translations/weblate/master/cs/
web_url: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/weblate/master/cs/

You can find more examples in wlc documentation.

Filed under: Debian English phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments

Here is my monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

• Submitted a number of pull requests to the Ansible sever configuration tool:
  • Add the ability to specify the --allow-unauthenticated to APT. (#2023)
  • Ignore EPIPE when flushing standard input and output to avoid unnecessary and ugly tracebacks. (#14774)
  • Add an option for ansible-playbook to exit with an error if no plays were matched. (#14742)
• Various improvements to django-slack, a library to easily post messages to the Slack group-messaging utility from projects using the Django web development framework:
  • Merged a patch from Joshua Blum to update the logging integration documentation. (#39)
  • Fixed an issue when rendering various exceptions would in themselves raise an exception. (#40)
  • Improved and merged a patch from Patrick Cloke to actually allow settings to be overriden using the @override_settings decorator. (#37)
• Updated local-debian-mirror, a package that attempts to make it easy to maintain a partial local mirror of the Debian archive:
  • Added an option to exclude DEP-11 files. (ee03b21)
  • Added an option to exclude Translation-* files. (28bbf34)
  • Corrected the phrasing of the debconf prompt to not ask a direct question to appease Lintian. (13fccc7b)
• Updated django-keyerror a library to post exceptions to the KeyError.com error tracking service to support pushing tracebacks from the Celery queue processor using the task_failure signal. (#1)
• Submitted a number of pull requests for django-zebra, a collection of utilities that make it easier to integrate the Stripe payment processor and the Django web development framework:
  • Add the ability to test an incoming Stripe webhook. (#44)
  • Prefer @require_POST over an explicit check in the view. (#43)
  • Move away from the deprecated django.conf.urls.patterns method. (#45)
• Updated django-template-tests, a tool to perform simple static analysis on Django templates prior to production to improve the robustness of dynamic test generation. (e98f9fc)
• Fixed django-force-logout a library to allow administrators to log user's out of Django projects to not require a custom JSON serialiser. (c0e5d64)
• Corrected the documentation for travis.debian.net my hosted script to easily test and build Debian packages on the Travis CI continuous integration platform to reflect the actual default mirror. (4c862f0)
• Blogged about generating dynamic Python tests using metaclasses.

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The last two major autopkgtest releases (3.18 from November, and 3.19 fresh from yesterday) bring some new features that are worth spreading. New LXD virtualization backend 3.19 debuts the new adt-virt-lxd virtualization backend. In case you missed it, LXD is an API/CLI layer on top of LXC which introduces proper image management, seamlessly use images and containers on remote locations, intelligently caching them locally, automatically configure performant storage backends like zfs or btrfs, and just generally feels really clean and much simpler to use than the classic LXC. Setting it up is not complicated at all. Install the lxd package (possibly from the backports PPA if you are on 14.04 LTS), and add your user to the lxd group. Then you can add the standard LXD image server with

  lxc remote add lco https://images.linuxcontainers.org:8443

and use the image to run e. g. the libpng test from the archive:

  adt-run libpng --- lxd lco:ubuntu/trusty/i386
  adt-run libpng --- lxd lco:debian/sid/amd64

The adt-virt-lxd.1 manpage explains this in more detail, also how to use this to run tests in a container on a remote host (how cool is that!), and how to build local images with the usual autopkgtest customizations/optimizations using adt-build-lxd. I have btrfs running on my laptop, and LXD/autopkgtest automatically use that, so the performance really rocks. Kudos to St phane, Serge, Tycho, and the other LXD authors! The motivation for writing this was to make it possible to move our armhf testing into the cloud (which for $REASONS requires remote containers), but I now have a feeling that soon this will completely replace the existing adt-virt-lxc virt backend, as its much nicer to use. It is covered by the same regression tests as the LXC runner, and from the perspective of package tests that you run in it it should behave very similar to LXC. The one problem I m aware of is that autopkgtest-reboot-prepare is broken, but hardly anything is using that yet. This is a bit complicated to fix, but I expect it will be in the next few weeks. MaaS setup script While most tests are not particularly sensitive about which kind of hardware/platform they run on, low-level software like the Linux kernel, GL libraries, X.org drivers, or Mir very much are. There is a plan for extending our automatic tests to real hardware for these packages, and being able to run autopkgtests on real iron is one important piece of that puzzle. MaaS (Metal as a Service) provides just that it manages a set of machines and provides an API for installing, talking to, and releasing them. The new maas autopkgtest ssh setup script (for the adt-virt-ssh backend) brings together autopkgtest and real hardware. Once you have a MaaS setup, get your API key from the web UI, then you can run a test like this:

  adt-run libpng --- ssh -s maas -- \
     --acquire "arch=amd64 tags=touchscreen" -r wily \
     http://my.maas.server/MAAS 123DEADBEEF:APIkey

The required arguments are the MaaS URL and the API key. Without any further options you will get any available machine installed with the default release. But usually you want to select a particular one by architecture and/or tags, and install a particular distro release, which you can do with the -r/--release and --acquire options. Note that this is not wired into Ubuntu s production CI environment, but it will be. Selectively using packages from -proposed Up until a few weeks ago, autopkgtest runs in the CI environment were always seeing/using the entirety of -proposed. This often led to lockups where an application foo and one of its dependencies libbar got a new version in -proposed at the same time, and on test regressions it was not clear at all whose fault it was. This often led to perfectly good packages being stuck in -proposed for a long time, and a lot of manual investigation about root causes. . These days we are using a more fine-grained approach: A test run is now specific for a trigger , that is, the new package in -proposed (e. g. a new version of libbar) that caused the test (e. g. for foo ) to run. autopkgtest sets up apt pinning so that only the binary packages for the trigger come from -proposed, the rest from -release. This provides much better isolation between the mush of often hundreds of packages that get synced or uploaded every day. This new behaviour is controlled by an extension of the --apt-pocket option. So you can say

  adt-run --apt-pocket=proposed=src:foo,libbar1,libbar-data ...

and then only the binaries from the foo source, libbar1, and libbar-data will come from -proposed, everything else from -release. Caveat:Unfortunately apt s pinning is rather limited. As soon as any of the explicitly listed packages depends on a package or version that is only available in -proposed, apt falls over and refuses the installation instead of taking the required dependencies from -proposed as well. In that case, adt-run falls back to the previous behaviour of using no pinning at all. (This unfortunately got worse with apt 1.1, bug report to be done). But it s still helpful in many cases that don t involve library transitions or other package sets that need to land in lockstep. Unified testbed setup script There is a number of changes that need to be made to testbeds so that tests can run with maximum performance (like running dpkg through eatmydata, disabling apt translations, or automatically using the host s apt-cacher-ng), reliable apt sources, and in a minimal environment (to detect missing dependencies and avoid interference from unrelated services these days the standard cloud images have a lot of unnecessary fat). There is also a choice whether to apply these only once (every day) to an autopkgtest specific base image, or on the fly to the current ephemeral testbed for every test run (via --setup-commands). Over time this led to quite a lot of code duplication between adt-setup-vm, adt-build-lxc, the new adt-build-lxd, cloud-vm-setup, and create-nova-image-new-release. I now cleaned this up, and there is now just a single setup-commands/setup-testbed script which works for all kinds of testbeds (LXC, LXD, QEMU images, cloud instances) and both for preparing an image with adt-buildvm-ubuntu-cloud, adt-build-lx[cd] or nova, and with preparing just the current ephemeral testbed via --setup-commands. While this is mostly an internal refactorization, it does impact users who previously used the adt-setup-vm script for e. g. building Debian images with vmdebootstrap. This script is now gone, and the generic setup-testbed entirely replaces it. Misc Aside from the above, every new version has a handful of bug fixes and minor improvements, see the git log for details. As always, if you are interested in helping out or contributing a new feature, don t hesitate to contact me or file a bug report.

https://github.com/microg http://o9i.de/2015/10/23/howto-gmscore.html https://github.com/JavaJens/TextSecure https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/

Debian LTS October was the sixth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent four hours working on:

• krb5: I applied patches for CVE-2015-2697 and CVE-2015-2695. The DLA-340-1 was released on November though since one of the patches was incomplete.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 16 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work. I also added some very basic indentation support to our CVE/list Emacs major-mode on non LTS time. Other Debian stuff

• I've released git-buildpackage 0.7.0 with lots of updates, most notably more complete rpm support, a git-pbuilder update and documentation updates. This release has patches from 9 different contributors, thanks a lot!
• Uploaded libvirt 1.2.21~rc1 to experimental, submitted a patch to fix running autopkg tests in pbuilder (#802379) and fixed RC bug #802281 in Icedove.
• I've updated cl2vcs, a CGI to link commit IDs in the debian/changelog to the VCS, to 0.0.4 fixing some bugs that showed up after I updated the hosting machine to Jessie as well as support for the [commitid1,commitd2,commit3,...] format when grouping commits. (SSL certificate of the server is CAcert signed)
• At Halloween five Debian aficionados met for Hacking Erpel 1 (aka HEPL1) in Erpel (link goes to German Wikipedia) between Bonn and Koblenz. Some details are here. We're aiming for more of these events on a more frequent basis (HEPL0 being back in 2013) so if you're somewhere from that area and want to join us next time just subscribe to the new mailing list (in German, SSL certificate of the server is CAcert signed).

This is the fourth part in a series of articles about SRE, based on the talk I gave in the Romanian Association for Better Software. Previous articles can be found here: part 1, part 2, and part 3. As a side note, I am writing this from Heathrow Airport, about to board my plane to EZE. Buenos Aires, here I come!

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So, what does SRE actually do? Enough about how to keep the holy wars under control and how to get work away from Ops. Let's talk about some of the things that SRE does. Obviously, SRE runs your service, performing all the traditional SysAdmin duties needed for your cat pictures to reach their consumers: provisioning, configuration, resource allocation, etc. They use specialised tools to monitor the service, and get alerted as soon as a problem is detected. They are also the ones waking up to fix your bugs in the middle of the night. But that is not the whole story: reliability is not only impacted by new launches. Suddenly usage grows, hardware fails, networks lose packets, solar flares flip your bits... When working at scale, things are going to break more often than not. You want these breakages to affect your availability as little as possible, there are three strategies you can apply to this end: minimise the impact of each failure, recover quickly, and avoid repetition. And of course, the best strategy of them all: preventing outages from happening at all.

Minimizing the impact of failures A single failure that takes the whole service down will affect severely your availability, so the first strategy as an SRE is to make sure your service is fragmented and distributed across what is called "failure domains". If the data center catches fire, you are going to have a bad day, but it is a lot better if only a fraction of your users depend on that one data center, while the others keep happily browsing cat pictures. SREs spend a lot of their time planning and deploying systems that span the globe to maximise redundancy while keeping latencies at reasonable levels.

Recovering quickly Many times, retrying after a failure is actually the best option. So another strategy is to automatically restart in milliseconds any piece of your system that fails. This way, less users are affected, while a human has time to investigate and fix the real problem. If a human needs to intervene, it is crucial that they get notified as fast as possible, and that they have quick access to all the information that is needed to solve the problem: detailed documentation of the production environment, meaningful and extensive monitoring, play-books1, etc. After all, at 2 AM you probably don't remember in which country the database shard lives, or what were the series of commands to redirect all the traffic to a different location. Implementing monitoring and automated alerts, writing documentation and play-books, and practising for disaster are other areas where SREs devote much effort.

Avoiding repetition Outages happen, pages ring, problems get fixed, but it should always be a chance for learning and improving. A page should require a human to think about a problem and find a solution. If the same problem keeps appearing, the human is not needed any more: the problem needs to be fixed at the root. Another key aspect of dealing with incidents is to write post-mortems2. Every incident should have one, and these should be tools for learning, not finger-pointing. Post-mortems can be an excellent tool, if people are honest about their mistakes, they are not used to blame other people, and issues are followed up by bug reports and discussions.

Preventing outages Of course nobody can prevent hard drives from failing, but there are certain classes of outages that can be forecasted with careful analysis. Usage spikes can bring a service down, but an SRE team will ensure that the systems are load-tested at higher-than-normal rates. They could also be prepared to quickly scale the service, provided the monitoring system will alert as soon as a certain threshold is reached. Monitoring is actually the key part in this: measuring relevant metrics for all the components of a system, and following their trends over time, SREs can completely avoid many outages: latencies growing out of acceptable bounds, disks filling up, progressive degradation of components, are all examples of typical problems automatically monitored (and alerted on) in an SRE team.

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This is getting pretty long, so the next post will be the last one of these series, with some extra tips from SRE experience that I am sure can be applied in many places.

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1. A play-book is a document containing critical information needed when dealing with a specific alert: possible causes, hints for troubleshooting, links to more documentation. Some monitoring systems will automatically add a play-book URL to every alert sent, and you should be doing it too.
2. Similarly to their real-life counterparts, a post-mortem is the process of examining a dead body (the outage), gutting it out and trying to understand what caused its demise.

Comment

Inspired by Rapha l Hertzog, here is a monthly update covering a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world:

• Added support for --allow-unauthenticated in Ansible's apt module. (#2023)
• A proposal to change the nouns displayed in the Tails boot menu. (post)
• A trivial change to the Tails packaging to use dpkg's --show-field option over manual invokations to sed. (post)
• Added rudimentary netsplit support and Debian packaging to the stravabot IRC bot.
• Helped Andrew Velis towards supporting custom message attachments and endpoint URLs in django-slack as well as merged two documentation updates (#7 & #8).
• A trivial change to disque's documentation regarding web addresses. (#125)
• Updated youtube-upload's documentation to suggest using Debian packages over pip. (#59)
• Added support to to Strava Enhancement Suite for pre-populating fields on "Manual Upload" from GET parameters. (diff)
• Blogged about "joining" strings in POSIX shell.

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Debian LTS August was the fourth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent four hours working on:

• pykerberors: Fixed a regression in DLA-265-1 affecting the default parameters of checkPassword(). This resulted in DLA-265-2.
• wordpress: Craig Small updated wordpress to fix CVE-2015-2213 CVE-2015-5622 CVE-2015-5731 CVE-2015-5732 and CVE-2015-5734. I did some testing and released DLA-294-1.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 9 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work. Debconf 15 was a great opportunity to meet some of the other LTS contributors in person and to work on some of my packages: Git-buildpackage git-buildpackage gained buildpackage-rpm based on the work by Markus Lehtonnen and merging of mock support is hopefully around the corner. Debconf had two gbp skill shares hosted by dkg and a BoF by myself. A summary is here. Integration with dgit as (discussed with Ian) looks doable and I have parts of that on my todo list as well. Among other things gbp import-orig gained a --merge-mode option so you can replace the upstream branches verbatim on your packaging branch but keep the contents of the debian/ directory. Libvirt I prepared an update for libvirt in Jessie fixing a crasher bug, QEMU error reporting. apparmor support now works out of the box in Jessie (thanks to intrigeri and Felix Geyer for that). Speaking of apparmor I learned enough at Debconf to use this now by default so we hopefully see less breackage in this area when new libvirt versions hit the archive. The bug count wen't down quiet a bit and we have a new version of virt-manager in unstable now as well. As usual I prepared the RC candidates of libvirt 1.2.19 in experimental and 1.2.19 final is now in unstable.

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

• Brendan O'Dea uploaded help2man/1.47.1 which adds support setting SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for the date for the generated pages.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven-debian-helper/1.6.12 which sets the locale to en_US when generating the javadoc.
• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded javatools/0.51 which sets the locale to en_US when generating the javadoc.
• Joachim Breitner uploaded haskell-devscripts/0.9.10 which will always run sorts in LC_ALL=C.

Andreas Henriksson has improved Johannes Schauer initial patch for pbuilder adding support for build profiles. Packages fixed The following 12 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: collabtive, eric, file-rc, form-history-control, freehep-chartableconverter-plugin , jenkins-winstone, junit, librelaxng-datatype-java, libwildmagic, lightbeam, puppet-lint, tabble. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• acorn/0.12.0-1 uploaded by Bas Couwenberg, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• avarice/2.13+svn347-3 by Tobias Frost.
• br.ispell/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• cpp-netlib/0.11.1+dfsg1-3 by Ximin Luo.
• device3dfx/2013.08.08-3 by Guillem Jover.
• dnsmasq/2.73-1 uploaded by Simon Kelley, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• eigen3/3.2.5-4 by Anton Gladky.
• eo-spell/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• espa-nol/3.0~beta4-19 by Agustin Martin Domingo.
• firejail/0.9.26-1 by Reiner Herrmann.
• gcc-mingw-w64/15.2 by Stephen Kitt.
• geoip-database/20150616-1 uploaded by Patrick Matth i, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• ikiwiki-hosting/0.20150614 by Simon McVittie.
• inkscape/0.91-5 by Mattia Rizzolo.
• jtreg/4.1-b12-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• libfile-scan-perl/1.43-3 uploaded by gregor herrmann, original patch by Niko Tyno.
• libgpiv/0.6.1-4.2 by akira.
• libnet-twitter-lite-perl/0.12006-4 by Niko Tyni.
• mingw-w64/4.0.2-5 by Stephen Kitt.
• oslo.messaging/1.8.3-3 uploaded by Thomas Goirand, original patch by Juan Picca.
• seabios/1.8.2-1 by Michael Tokarev. Suggested fix by Lunar based on recent upstream changes.
• thuban/1.2.2-7 uploaded by Bas Couwenberg, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• tiptop/2.2-3 by Tomasz Buchert.
• ucl/1.03+repack-3 by Robert Luberda.

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

• amsynth/1.5.1-2 uploaded by Alessio Treglia, original patch by Dhole.
• brickos/0.9.0.dfsg-12 uploaded by Michael Tautschnig, original patch by akira.
• cucumber/2.0.0-1 by C dric Boutillier; currently FTBFS.
• netbeans/8.0.2+dfsg1-2 by Markus Koschany.
• pyopencl/2015.1-2 uploaded by Tomasz Rybak, original patch by Tomasz Rybak.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #788747 on 0xffff by Dhole: allow embedded timestamp to be set externally and set it to the time of the debian/changelog.
• #788752 on analog by Dhole: allow embedded timestamp to be set externally and set it to the time of the debian/changelog.
• #788757 on jacktrip by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #788868 on apophenia by akira: remove $date from the documentation footer.
• #788920 on orthanc by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #788955 on rivet by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789040 on liblo by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789049 on mpqc by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789071 on libxkbcommon by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789073 on libxr by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789076 on lvtk by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789087 on lmdb by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.
• #789184 on openigtlink by akira: remove $datetime from the documentation footer.
• #789264 on openscenegraph by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.
• #789308 on trigger-rally-data by Mattia Rizzolo: call dh_fixperms even when overriding dh_fixperms.
• #789396 on libsidplayfp by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789399 on psocksxx by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789405 on qdjango by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789406 on qof by akira: set HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO in Doxygen configuration.
• #789428 on qsapecng by akira: pass HTML_TIMESTAMP=NO to Doxygen.

reproducible.debian.net Bugs with the ftbfs usertag are now visible on the bug graphs. This explain the recent spike. (h01ger) Andreas Beckmann suggested a way to test building packages using the funny paths that one can get when they contain the full Debian package version string. debbindiff development Lunar started an important refactoring introducing abstactions for containers and files in order to make file type identification more flexible, enabling fuzzy matching, and allowing parallel processing. Documentation update Ximin Luo detailed the proposal to standardize environment variables to pass a reference source date to tools that needs one (e.g. documentation generator). Package reviews 41 obsolete reviews have been removed, 168 added and 36 updated this week. Some more issues affecting packages failing to build from source have been identified. Meetings Minutes have been posted for Tuesday June 16th meeting. The next meeting is scheduled Tuesday June 23rd at 17:00 UTC. Presentations Lunar presented the project in French during Pas Sage en Seine in Paris. Video and slides are available.

Last week I was in Vancouver, BC for the OpenStack Summit, discussing the new Liberty version that will be released in 6 months. I've attended the summit mainly to discuss and follow-up new developments on Ceilometer, Gnocchi and Oslo. It has been a pretty good week and we were able to discuss and plan a few interesting things. Ops feedback We had half a dozen Ceilometer sessions, and the first one was dedicated to getting feedbacks from operators using Ceilometer. We had a few operators present, and a few of the Ceilometer team. We had constructive discussion, and my feeling is that operators struggles with 2 things so far: scaling Ceilometer storage and having Ceilometer not killing the rest of OpenStack. We discussed the first point as being addressed by Gnocchi, and I presented a bit Gnocchi itself, as well as how and why it will fix the storage scalability issue operators encountered so far. Ceilometer putting down the OpenStack installation is more interesting problem. Ceilometer pollsters request information from Nova, Glance to gather statistics. Until Kilo, Ceilometer used to do that regularly and at fixed interval, causing high pike load in OpenStack. With the introduction of jitter in Kilo, this should be less of a problem. However, Ceilometer hits various endpoints in OpenStack that are poorly designed, and hitting those endpoints of Nova or other components triggers a lot of load on the platform. Unfortunately, this makes operators blame Ceilometer rather than blaming the components being guilty of poor designs. We'd like to push forward improving these components, but it's probably going to take a long time. Componentisation When I started the Gnocchi project last year, I pretty soon realized that we would be able to split Ceilometer itself in different smaller components that could work independently, while being able to leverage each others. For example, Gnocchi can run standalone and store your metrics even if you don't use Ceilometer nor even OpenStack itself. My fellow developer Chris Dent had the same idea about splitting Ceilometer a few months ago and drafted a proposal. The idea is to have Ceilometer split in different parts that people could assemble together or run on their owns. Interestingly enough, we had three 40 minutes sessions planned to talk and debate about this division of Ceilometer, though we all agreed in 5 minutes that this was the good thing to do. Five more minutes later, we agreed on which part to split. The rest of the time was allocated to discuss various details of that split, and I engaged to start doing the work with Ceilometer alarming subsystem. I wrote a specification on the plane bringing me to Vancouver, that should be approved pretty soon now. I already started doing the implementation work. So fingers crossed, Ceilometer should have a new components in Liberty handling alarming on its own. This would allow users for example to only deploys Gnocchi and Ceilometer alarm. They would be able to feed data to Gnocchi using their own system, and build alarms using Ceilometer alarm subsystem relying on Gnocchi's data. Gnocchi We didn't have a Gnocchi dedicated slot mainly because I indicated I didn't feel we needed one. We anyway discussed a few points around coffee, and I've been able to draw a few new ideas and changes I'd like to see in Gnocchi. Mainly changing the API contract to be more asynchronously so we can support InfluxDB more correctly, and improve Carbonara (the library we created to manipulate timeseries) based drivers to be faster. All of those should plus a few Oslo tasks I'd like to tackle should keep me busy for the next cycle!

It's time once again for the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge but I've decided to try and force some discipline on myself and not participate until I actually complete one of my earlier entries into a properly playable game. I did have some fun thinking of names though.

• Fifty Shades of Grue
• The Intothegroundening
• Game of Spiky Chairs

You may use them in your own entry free of charge.

I haven't blogged for a long time, but I've decided that I'm going to try to write again, at least about technical stuff. My plan was to blog about the projects I've been working on lately, the main one being the setup of the latest version of Kolab with the systems we already have at work, but I'll do that on the next days. Today I'm just going to make a list of the tools I use on a daily basis and my plans to start using additional ones in the near future. Shells, Terminals and Text Editors I do almost all my work on Z Shell sessions running inside tmux; for terminal emulation I use gnome-terminal on X, VX ConnectBot on Android systems and iTerm2 on Mac OS X. For text editing I've been using Vim for a long time (even on Mobile devices) and while I'm aware I don't know half of the things it can do, what I know is good enough for my day to day needs. In the past I also used Emacs as a programming editor and my main tool to write HTML, SGML and XML, but since I haven't really needed an IDE for a long time and I mainly use Lightweight Markup Languages I haven't used it for a long time (I briefly tried to use Org mode, but for some reason I ended up leaving it). Documentation formats and tools Since a long time ago I've been an advocate of Lightweight Markup Languages; I started to use LaTeX and Lout, then moved to SGML/XML formats (LinuxDoc and DocBook) and finally moved to plain text based formats. I started using Wiki formats (parsewiki) and soon moved to reStructuredText; I also use other markup languages like Markdown (for this blog, aka ikiwiki) and tried MultiMarkdown to replace reStructuredText for general use, but as I never liked Markdown syntax I didn't liked an extended version of it. While I've been using ReStructuredText for a long time, I recently found Asciidoctor and the Asciidoc format and I guess I'll be using it instead of rst whenever I can (I still need to try the slide backends and conversions to ODT, but if that works I guess I'll write all my new documents using Asciidoc). Programming languages I'm not a developer, but I read and patch a lot of free software code written on a lot of different programming languages (I wouldn't be able to write whole programs on most of them, but thanks to Stack Overflow I'm usually able to fix what I need). Anyway, I'm able to program in some languages; I write a lot of shell scripts and I go for Python and C when I need something more complicated. On the near future I plan to read about javascript programming and nodejs (I'll probably need it at work) and I already started looking at Haskell (I guess it was time to learn about functional programming and after reading about it, it looks like haskell is the way to go for me). Version Control For a long time I've been a Subversion user, at least for my own projects, but seems that everything has moved to git now and I finally started to use it (I even opened a github account) and plan to move all my personal subversion repositories at home and at work to git, including the move of all my debian packages from svn-buildpackage to git-buildpackage. Further Reading With the previous plans in mind, I've started reading a couple of interesting books:

• Learn You a Haskell by Miran Lipova a (http://learnyouahaskell.com/)
• Pro Git written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub (http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2)

Now I just need to get enough time to finish reading them ... ;)

I have released whatmaps 0.0.9 a tool to check which processes map shared objects of a certain package. It can integrate into apt to automatically restart services after a security upgrade. This release fixes the integration with recent systemd (as in Debian Jessie), makes logging more consistent and eases integration into downstream distributions. It's available in Debian Sid and Jessie and will show up in Wheezy-backports soon. This blog is flattr enabled.

To keep up with GNOMEs schedule I've released krb5-auth-dialog 3.15.4. The changes of 3.15.1 and 3.15.4 include among updated translations, the replacement of deprecated GTK+ widgets, minor UI cleanups and bug fixes a header bar fix that makes us only use header bar buttons iff the desktop environment has them enabled: This makes krb5-auth-dialog better ingtegrated into other desktops again thanks to mclasen's awesome work. This blog is flattr enabled.