Dirk Eddelbuettel: binb 0.0.6: Small enhancements
The sixth release of the binb package is now on CRAN. binb regroups four rather nice themes for writing LaTeX Beamer presentations much more easily in (R)Markdown. As a teaser, a quick demo combining all four themes follows; documentation and examples are in the package.
Via two contributed PRs, this releases adds titlepage support via the YAML header for Metropolis, and suppresses nags about the changed natbib default. A little polish on the README and Travis rounds everything off.
CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments, please use the issue tracker at GitHub. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.Changes in binb version 0.0.6 (2020-06-10)
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Some people believe that automatic contact tracing apps will
help contain the Coronavirus epidemic. They won t.
Sorry to bring the bad news, but IT and mobile phones and artificial
intelligence will not solve every problem.
In my opinion, those that promise to solve these things with
artificial intelligence / mobile phones / apps / your-favorite-buzzword
are at least overly optimistic and blinder Aktionismus (*),
if not naive, detachted from reality,
or fraudsters that just want to get some funding.
(*) there does not seem to be an English word for this doing something
just for the sake of doing something, without thinking about whether it makes sense to do so
Here are the reasons why it will not work:
A new firmware for the Kobo ebook reader came out and I adjusted the mega update pack to use it. According to the comments in the 
A unit is a part of your program you can test in isolation. You write
unit tests to test all aspects of it that you care about. If all your
unit tests pass, you should know that your unit works well.
Integration tests are for testing that when your various well-tested,
high quality units are combined, integrated, they work together.
Integration tests test the integration, not the individual units.
You could think of building a car. Your units are the ball bearings,
axles, wheels, brakes, etc. Your unit tests for the ball bearings
might test, for example, that they can handle a billion rotations, at
various temperatures, etc. Your integration test would assume the ball
bearings work, and should instead test that the ball bearings are
installed in the right way so that the car, as whole, can run a
kilometers, and accelerate and brake every kilometer, uses only so
much fuel, produces only so much pollution, and doesn't kill
passengers in case of a crash.
Wishing all Debian people a prosperous and auspicious Gujarati new year (V.S. 2074 called Saumya.)
This year fireworks became legal for the first time in New Jersey. Not that it ever stopped us before but it is nice to see the government stop meddling for no reason. (
Although you can only see sparklers in the picture above, we got enough armament to make 
This semester I am taking JPN 530, Haruki Murakami and the Literature
of Modern Japan . My department are letting me count it for the
Philosophy Ph.D., and in fact my supervisor is joining me for the
class. I have no idea what the actual class sessions will be
like first one this afternoon and I m anxious about writing a
literature term paper. But I already know that my weekends this
semester are going to be great because I ll be reading Murakami s
novels.
What s particularly wonderful about this, and what I wanted to write
about, is how nourishing I find reading literary fiction to be. For
example, this weekend I read
In the coming weeks and months I intend to write a mini series about packaging Java software for Debian. The following article basically starts in the middle of this journey because the PDFsam upgrade is still fresh in my mind. It requires some preexisting knowledge about build tools like Maven and some Java terminology. But do not fear. Hopefully it will make sense in the end when all pieces fall into place.
A month ago I decided to upgrade 
Ok, what is happening here? First you can choose a source and binary package name. Then disable the tests and don t run javadoc to create the documentation. This will simplify things a little. Tests and javadoc settings can be added later. Choose the version you want to package and then you can basically follow the default recommendations and confirm them by hitting the Enter key. Throughout the project we choose to transform the upstream version with the symbolic debian version. Remember that Java/Maven is version-centric. This will ensure that our Maven dependencies are always satisfied later and we can simply upgrade our Maven libraries and don t have to change the versions by hand in various pom.xml files; maven-debian-helper will automatically transform them for us to debian . Enable all modules. If you choose not to, you can select each module individually. Note that later on some of the required build-dependencies cannot be found because they are either not installed (libjmagick6-java) or they cannot be found in Debian s Maven repository under /usr/share/maven-repo. You can fix this by entering a substitution rule or, as I did in this case, you can just ignore these artifacts for now. They will be added to maven.IgnoreRules. In order to successfully compile your program you have to remove them from this file later again, create the correct substitution rule in maven.rules and add the missing build-dependencies to debian/control. For now we just want to quickly create our initial debian directory.
If everything went as planned a complete debian directory should be visible in your root directory. The only thing left is to fix the substitution rule for the Servlet API 3.1. Add libservlet3.1-java to Build-Depends and the following rule to maven.rules:
You can just use an asterisk to match any value. Every value can be substituted. This is necessary when the value of upstream s pom.xml file differs from Debian s system packages. This happens frequently for API packages which are uploaded to Maven Central multiple times under a different groupId/artifactId but provide the same features. In this case the Twelvemonkeys pom requires an older API version but Debian is already at version 3.1. Note that we require a strict version number in this case because libservlet3.1-java does not use a symbolic debian version since we provide more than one Servlet API in the archive and this measure prevents conflicts.
Thanks for reading this far. More articles about Java packaging will follow in the near future and hopefully they will clarify some terms and topics which could only be briefly mentioned in this post.
Enable 
This collection of short stories is a consequent deconstruction of happiness, love, everything we believe to make our lives worthwhile. The protagonists are idealistic students loosing their faith, office ladies on aberrations, drunkards, movie directors, the usual mixture. But the topic remains constant the unfulfilled search for happiness and love.
Around 2 decades back and a bit more I was introduced to computers. The top-line was 386DX which was mainly used as fat servers and some lucky institutions had the 386SX where IF we were lucky we could be able to play some games on it. I was pretty bad at Prince of Persia or most of the games of the era as most of the games depended on lightning reflexes which I didn t possess. Then 1997 happened and I was introduced to GNU/Linux but my love of/for games still continued even though I was bad at most of them. The only saving grace was turn-based RPG s (role-playing games) which didn t have permadeath, so you could plan your next move. Sometimes a wrong decision would lead to getting a place from where it was impossible to move further. As the decision was taken far far break which lead to the tangent, the only recourse was to replay the game which eventually lead to giving most of those kind of games.
Then in/around 2000 Maxis came out with 
