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 Sims. This was the time where I bought my first Pentium. I had never played a game which had you building stuff, designing stuff, no violence and the whole idea used to be about balancing priorities of trying to get new stuff, go to work, maintain relationships and still make sure you are eating, sleeping, have a good time. While I might have spent probably something close to 500 odd hours in the game or even more so, I spent the least amount of time in building the house. It used to be 4 4 when starting (you don t have much of in-game money and other stuff you wanted to buy as well) to 8 8 or at the very grand 12 12. It was only the first time I spent time trying to figure out where the bathroom should be, where the kitchen should, where the bedroom should be and after that I could do that blind-folded. The idea behind my house-design used to be simplicity, efficient (for my character). I used to see other people s grand creations of their houses and couldn t understand why they made such big houses. Now few days back, I saw few episodes of a game called Stranded Deep . The story, plot is simple. You, the player are going in a chartered plane and suddenly lightning strikes ( game trope as today s aircrafts are much better able to deal with lightning strikes) and our hero or heroine washes up on a beach with raft with the barest of possessions. Now the whole game is based upon him/her trying to survive, once you get the hang of the basic mechanics and you know what is to be done, you can do it. The only thing the game doesn t have is farming but as the game has unlimited procedural world, you just paddle or with boat motor go island hopping and take all that what you need. What was interesting to me was seeing a gamer putting so much time and passion in making a house. When I was looking at that video, I realized that maybe because I live in a dense environment, even the designs we make either of houses or anything else is more to try to get more and more people rather than making sure that people are happy which leads to my next sharing. Couple of days back, I read Virali Modi s account of how she was molested three times when trying to use Indian Railways. She made a petition on change.org While I do condemn the molestation as it s an affront against individual rights, freedom, liberty, free movement, dignity. Few of the root causes as pointed out by her, for instance the inability or non-preference to give differently-abled people the right to board first as well as awaiting to see that everybody s boarded properly before starting the train are the most minimum steps that Indian Railways could take without spending even a paise. The same could be told/shared about sensitizing people, although I have an idea of why does Indian Railway not employ women porters or women attendants for precisely this job. I accompanied a blind gentleman friend few times on Indian Railways and let me tell you, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences. The bogies which is given to them is similar or even less than what you see in unreserved compartments. The toilets were/are smelly, the gap between the station and the train was/is considerable for everybody from blind people, differently-abled people, elderly people as well. This is one of the causes of accidents which happen almost every day on Indian Railways. I also learnt that especially for blind people they are looking for a sort of low-frequency whistle/noise which tells them the disabled coupe/bogie/coach will come at a specific spot in the Station. In a platform which could have anything between 1500-2000 people navigating it wouldn t be easy. I don t know about other places but Indian Railway Stations need to learn a lot to make it a space for differently abled to navigate by themselves. Pune Station operates (originating or passing through) around 200 odd trains, with exceptions of all the specials and weekly trains that ply through, adding those would probably another 5-10 trains to the mix. Each train carries anywhere between 750-1000 odd people so roughly anywhere between 15-20 million pass through Pune Railway Station daily. Even if we take conservative estimates of around 5% of the public commuting from Pune, it would mean around 750,000 people travelling daily. Pune Railway Station has 6 stations and if I spread them equally it would come to around 100,000 people on one platform in 24 hours. Divide that equally by 24 hours and it comes to 4,160 people per hour. Now you take those figures and you see the Pune platforms are under severe pressure. I have normalized many figures. For instance, just like airports, even in railways, there are specific timings where more trains come and go. From morning 0500 hrs to late night 2300 hrs. there would be lot many trains, whereas the graveyard shifts would have windows where maintenance of tracks and personnel takes place. I dunno if people can comprehend 4000 odd people on the platform. Add to that you usually arrive at least an hour or two before a train departs even if you are a healthy person as Indian Railways has a habit of changing platforms of trains at the last minute. So if you a differently abled person with some luggage for a long-distance train, the problems just multiply. See drag accidents because of gap between railway bogies and platforms. The width of the entrance to the bogie is probably between 30-40 inches but the design is such that 5-10 inches are taken on each side. I remembered the last year, our current Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi had launched Accessible Campaign with great fanfare and we didn t hear anything much after that. Unfortunately, the site itself has latency and accessibility issues, besides not giving any real advice even if a person wants to know what building norms should one follow if one wants to make an area accessible. This was easily seen by last year s audit in Delhi as well as other places. A couple of web-searches later, I landed up at a Canadian site to have some idea about the width of the wheelchair itself as well as additional room to manoeuvre. Unfortunately, the best or the most modern coaches/bogies that Indian Railways has to offer are the LHB Bogies/Coaches. Now while the Coaches/Bogies by themselves are a big improvement from the ICF Coaches which we still have and use, if you read the advice and directions shared on the Canadian site, the coaches are far from satisfactory for people who are wheel-chair bound. According to Government s own census records, 0.6% of the population have movement issues. Getting all the differently-abled people together, it comes between 2, 2.5% of the population which is quite a bit. If 2-3 people out of every 100 people are differently-abled then we need to figure out something for them.While I don t have any ideas as to how we could improve the surroundings, it is clear that we need the change. While I was thinking,dreaming,understanding some of the nuances inadvertently, my attention/memories shifted to my toilet experiences at both Mumbai and the Doha Airport. As had shared then, had been pleasantly surprised to see that both in Mumbai Airport as well as the Doha Airport, the toilets were pretty wide, a part of me was happy and a part of me was seeing the added space as wastefulness. With the understanding of needs of differently-abled people it started to make whole lot of sense. I don t remember if I had shared then or not. Although am left wondering where they go for loo in the aircraft. The regular toilets are a tight fit for obese people, I am guessing aircrafts have toilets for differently-abled people as well. Looking back at last year s conference, we had 2-3 differently-abled people. I am just guessing that it wouldn t have been a pleasant experience for them. For instance, where we were staying, at UCT it had stairs, no lifts so by default they probably were on ground-floor. Then where we were staying and where most of the talks were about a few hundred metres away and the shortest distance were by stairs, the round-about way was by road but had vehicles around so probably not safe that way as well. I am guessing they had to be dependant on other people to figure out things. There were so many places where there were stairs and no ramps and even if there were ramps they were probably a bit more than the 1:12 which is the advice given. I have heard that this year s venue is also a bit challenging in terms of accessibility for differently-abled people. I am clueless as to did differently-able find debconf16 in terms of accessibility or not ? A related query to that one, if a Debconf s final report mentions issues with accessibility, do the venues make any changes so that at some future date, differently-abled people would have a better time. I know of Indian institutions reluctance to change, to do expenditure, dunno how western countries do it. Any ideas, comments are welcome.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #386, #accessibility, #air-travel, #Computers, #differently-abled, #Railways, gaming

Dear Friends, I have shared a few times that I had a privileged childhood. I never had led a hand-to-mouth existence but more than that I was privileged to have made the acquaintance of Jaipur wale Mausaji while I was very young. I have been called miserly by my cousin sisters whenever they write letters to me and I don t answer simply because whatever I feel for them, words feel inadequate and meaningless. The same thing applies in this as well. I am sharing few bits here as there are too many memories of a golden past which will not let me go till I have shared a few of them. First let me start by sharing the relation I had with him. By relation he was my mother s-sister s husband. In English, he would probably be termed as Maternal Uncle although he was much more than that. My one of the first remembrances of him was during Madhu Didi s Shaadi (marriage). Madhu Didi is uncle s daughter and I would have been a impish 4-5 year old at the time. This was the first time I was gonna be part of The Great North Indian Wedding and I didn t know what was in store for me as I had grown in Pune. I remember finishing my semester tests and mummy taking me to Pune Station. I was just excited that I would be travelling somewhere and had no clue what would be happening. We landed in Agra, took another train and landed in Jaipur in the middle of the night at their home at Sangram Colony. While I had known few of the cousins, I was stumped to see so many cousins jumping out of everywhere. The look on my face was one of stupefaction and surprise . The only thing which would closely resemble that would be Bilbo s 111st Birthday party in Lord of the Rings (Part 1). In fact, by a curious quirk/twist of fate, I came to know of a Naniji or somebody like that who by relation was far elder to me, while she was either my age or below my age. As was customary, had to bow down sheepishly. As a somewhat alone boy, to be thrown in this rambunctious bunch and be the babe in the woods, I was quickly chopped and eaten up but had no complaints. I would get into trouble onto a drop of a hat. While Mausiji would threaten me, Mausaji would almost always defend me. While Mausiji could see through me, the twinkle in Mausaji s eyes used to tell me that while he knew what I was upto, for reasons unknown, he would always defend me. Mausaji s Sangram Colony s house became my cricket ground, football ground and all and any ground to play and be. Mausaji and his brothers used to live near each other and the lane they had, had hardly any vehicles on it, so all the cousins could play all they want with me being the longest, perhaps unconsciously trying either to make for lost time or knowing/unknowing this was too good to last. Today s Pokemon generation might not be able to get it but that s alright. They also had a beautiful garden where Mausiji used to grow vegetables. While playing, we sometimes used to hurt her veggies (unconsciously) or just have shower with the garden hose. Mausaji used to enjoy seeing our antics. One of the relatives even had a dog who used to join in the fun sometimes. When mummy and Mausiji expressed concern about the dog biting, Mausaji would gently brush it aside. One of the other things in Didi s marriage is we got a whole lot of sweets. While Mausiji tried to keep us in check with sweets, both Manish Bhaiya and Mausaji used to secrete sweets from time to time. When I was hungry and used to steal food (can t wait till the appointed time) either Bhaiya or Mausaji would help me with the condition I would have to take the blame if and when we got caught as we invariably did. Mausaji s house had a basement where all the secreted sweets and food used to get in. Both me and Manish Bhaiya would be there and we would have a riot in ourselves. We would enjoy the adrenaline when we were stealing the food. As I was pretty young, I was crazy about the Tom and Jerry cartoons that used to come on Television that time. I and Bhaiya used to act like Jerry and/or his cronies while Mausiji would invariably be the Tom with Mausaji all-knowing about it but acting as a mere bystander. I remember him egging me for many of the antics I would do and get in trouble in but as shared would also be defended by him. The basement was also when I was becoming a teenager where Manish Bhaiya showed me his collection and we had a heart-to-heart about birds and bees. While whatever little I had known till that time was from school-friends and my peers at school and I didn t know what was right or wrong. Bhaiya clarified lot of things, concepts which I was either clueless or confused about. When I look back now, it is possible that Mausaji might have instructed Bhaiya to be my tutor as I used to be somewhat angry and lash out by the confusing times. As we used to go there for part of holidays, I remember doing all sorts of antics to make sure I would get an extra day, an extra hour to be there. I never used to understand why we had to go to meet the other relatives when all the fun I could have was right there only, couldn t Mummy know/see that I used to enjoy the most here. Mausaji was a clothier as we understand the term today and a gentleman to the core. He was the co-owner of Rajputana Cloth Store in Jaipur. Many VIP s as well as regular people used to visit him for getting clothes designed and stitched under his watchful eyes. I never saw him raise his voice against any of the personnel working under him and used to be a thorough gentleman to one and all. Later, as I grew up I came to know and see that people would phone up and just ask him to do the needful. He would get the right cloth, stitch it right and people used to trust him for that. He was such an expert on cloth and type of clothes, that by mere touch he could talk/share about what sort of cloth it is. One of his passions was driving and from the money he had saved, he had got an Ambassador Car. Every day or every other day or whenever he felt like it, he used to take either the gang or me with mummy or me with anybody else. Each ride used to be an adventure in itself, with a start beginning and an end. I always used to watch out for the car-rides as I knew we would get sweets or something as well as he would regale us with stories about a place here and there. There was a childlike curiosity and interest in him which was infectious to one and all. The only weakness that he had was he liked to drink wine once in a while. When I was a kid, I was never able to give him company, only few years back, for the first time I was able to share wine with him which was also a memory I treasure. Those who know him closely knew the many up and downs that he went through, but as a gentleman he never let on the hurts he had or didn t curse his fate or anything else that we do when things go bad from our perspective. While there is much to write about him, it will not accomplish anything that is not known about him. I ll add with the private joke that was between him and me. When I was little, I used to call him Mausaji, Samosaji for a) I liked Samosa and b) Samosa has a bit thick skin outside and underneath it s all gravy. In reality though, he was butter all the way. I miss you Mausaji and wish I could turn the clock back and come with Mummy to visit both Mausiji and you. I hope your new journey takes you to even further heights than this life. Savouring the memories mummy and I, hope we meet you again in some new Avataar
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #antics, #growing up, #holidays, #Manish Bhiaya, #Mausaji, #Sangram Colony

As you may already know, next DebConf will be held at Coll ge de Maisonneuve in Montreal from August 6 to August 12, 2017. We are already thinking about the conference schedule, and the content team is open to suggestions for invited speakers. Priority will be given to speakers who are not regular DebConf attendees, who are more likely to bring diverse viewpoints to the conference. Please keep in mind that some speakers may have very busy schedules and need to be booked far in advance. So, we would like to start inviting speakers in the middle of September 2016. If you would like to suggest a speaker to invite, please follow the procedure described on the Inviting Speakers page of the DebConf wiki.
DebConf17 team

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between December 20th to December 26th: Toolchain fixes Mattia Rizzolo rebased our experimental versions of debhelper (twice!) and dpkg on top of the latest releases. Reiner Herrmann submited a patch for mozilla-devscripts to sort the file list in generated preferences.js files. To be able to lift the restriction that packages must be built in the same path, translation support for the __FILE__ C pre-processor macro would also be required. Joerg Sonnenberger submitted a patch back in 2010 that would still be useful today. Chris Lamb started work on providing a deterministic mode for debootstrap. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: bouncycastle, cairo-dock-plug-ins, darktable, gshare, libgpod, pafy, ruby-redis-namespace, ruby-rouge, sparkleshare. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• a7xpg/0.11.dfsg1-9 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• at/3.1.18-1 uploaded by Laurent Bigonville, original patch by Reiner Herrmann, merged by Jose M Calhariz.
• bibtool/2.61+ds-2 by Jerome Benoit.
• bup/0.27-2 uploaded by Robert Edmonds, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• deja-dup/34.1-1 uploaded by Laurent Bigonville, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• gauche-gl/0.6-1 by NIIBE Yutaka.
• ifupdown/0.8 uploaded by Guus Sliepen, original patch by Lunar.
• jing-trang/20131210+dfsg+1-4 by Samuel Thibault.
• libp11/0.3.0-2 by Eric Dorland.
• pdns/4.0.0~alpha1-1 by Christian Hofstaedtler.
• pdns-recursor/4.0.0~alpha1-1 by Christian Hofstaedtler.
• qupzilla/1.8.9~dfsg1-1 uploaded by Georges Khaznadar, fixed upstream.
• ros-genpy/0.5.7-4 uploaded by Jochen Sprickerhof, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• signify/1.14-3 by Mattia Rizzolo, obsoleting patches submitted by Chris Lamb and akira.
• sleepyhead/0.9.8-2 by Sergio Durigan Junior.
• texi2html/1.82+dfsg1-5 by Mattia Rizzolo, previous patch by Juan Picca.
• titanion/0.3.dfsg1-6 by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• tj3/3.5.0-3 uploaded by Vincent Bernat, original patch by Vincent Bernat.
• vcsh/1.20151229-1 by Richard Hartmann.
• waitress/0.8.10-1 uploaded by Andrew Shadura, original patch by Juan Picca.
• xtel/3.3.0-19 by Samuel Thibault.

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

• kmod/22-1 uploaded by Marco d'Itri, original patch by Lunar.
• libgcrypt20/1.6.4-4 by Andreas Metzler.
• loadlin/1.6f-4 uploaded by Samuel Thibault, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• pathological/1.1.3-13 uploaded by Markus Koschany, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• yacas/1.3.6-1) uploaded by Muammar El Khatib, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

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

• #808459 on pywavelets by Chris Lamb: add support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH in the documentation generator.
• #808652 on nexuiz-data by Reiner Herrmann: sorts with the locale set to C.
• #808667 on libmouse-perl by Reiner Herrmann: sorts the list of filenames to be embedded.
• #808679 on libcorelinux by Reiner Herrmann: sort the list of files in the generated Makefile.
• #808711 on ca-certificates by Reiner Herrmann: sort the list of certificates before it is embedded.

reproducible.debian.net Statistics for package sets are now visible for the armhf architecture. (h01ger) The second build now has a longer timeout (18 hours) than the first build (12 hours). This should prevent wasting resources when a machine is loaded. (h01ger) Builds of Arch Linux packages are now done using a tmpfs. (h01ger) 200 GiB have been added to jenkins.debian.net (thanks to ProfitBricks!) to make room for new jobs. The current count is at 962 and growing! diffoscope development Aside from some minor bugs that have been fixed, a one-line change made huge memory (and time) savings as the output of transformation tool is now streamed line by line instead of loaded entirely in memory at once. disorderfs development Andrew Ayer released disorderfs version 0.4.2-1 on December 22th. It fixes a memory corruption error when processing command line arguments that could cause command line options to be ignored. Documentation update Many small improvements for the documentation on reproducible-builds.org sent by Georg Koppen were merged. Package reviews 666 (!) reviews have been removed, 189 added and 162 updated in the previous week. 151 new fail to build from source reports have been made by Chris West, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo, and Niko Tyni. New issues identified: unsorted_filelist_in_xul_ext_preferences, nondeterminstic_output_generated_by_moarvm. Misc. Steven Chamberlain drew our attention to one analysis of the Juniper ScreenOS Authentication Backdoor: Whilst this may have been added in source code, it was well-disguised in the disassembly and just 7 instructions long. I thought this was a good example of the current state-of-the-art, and why we'd like our binaries and eventually, installer and VM images reproducible IMHO. Joanna Rutkowska has mentioned possible ways for Qubes to become reproducible on their development mailing-list.

So, Sony caved in (according to Rob Lowe) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar (according to Newt Gingrich). It should not surprise anyone, after the whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing the secret services to spy on its own population. No one in their right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so by the president of the United States of America. If the capabilities are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are being used to bring Sony on its knees. I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice. There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever tax haven Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its income. :)

So, Sony caved in (according to Rob Lowe) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar (according to Newt Gingrich). It should not surprise anyone, after the whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing the secret services to spy on its own population. No one in their right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so by the president of the United States of America. If the capabilities are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are being used to bring Sony on its knees. I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to loose its next cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities (and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice. There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever tax haven Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its income. :)

We have had terrible months in Mexico; I don't know how much has appeared about our country in the international media. The last incidents started on the last days of September, when 43 students at a school for rural teachers were forcefully disappeared (in our Latin American countries, this means they were taken by force and no authority can yet prove whether they are alive or dead; forceful disappearance is one of the saddest and most recognized traits of the brutal military dictatorships South America had in the 1970s) in the Iguala region (Guerrero state, South of the country) and three were killed on site. An Army regiment was stationed few blocks from there and refused to help. And yes, we live in a country where (incredibly) this news by themselves would not seem so unheard of... But in this case, there is ample evidence they were taken by the local police forces, not by a gang of (assumed) wrongdoers. And they were handed over to a very violent gang afterwards. Several weeks later, with far from a thorough investigation, we were told they were killed, burnt and thrown to a river. The Iguala city major ran away, and was later captured, but it's not clear why he was captured at two different places. The Guerrero state governor resigned and a new governor was appointed. But this was not the result of a single person behaving far from what their voters would expect It's a symptom of a broken society where policemen will kill when so ordered, where military personnel will look away when pointed out to the obvious, where the drug dealers have captured vast regions of the country where are stronger than the formal powers. And then, instead of dealing with the issue personally as everybody would expect, the president goes on a commercial mission to China. Oh, to fix some issues with a building company. That coincidentally or not was selling a super-luxury house to his wife. A house that she, several days later, decided to sell because it was tarnishing her family's honor and image. And while the president is in China, the person who dealt with the social pressure and told us about the probable (but not proven!) horrible crime where the "bad guys" for some strange and yet unknown reason (even with tens of them captured already) decided to kill and burn and dissolve and disappear 43 future rural teachers presents his version, and finishes his speech saying that "I'm already tired of this topic". Of course, our University is known for its solidarity with social causes; students in our different schools are the first activists in many protests, and we have had a very tense time as the protests are at home here at the university. This last weekend, supposed policemen entered our main campus with a stupid, unbelievable argument (they were looking for a phone reported as stolen three days earlier), get into an argument with some students, and end up firing shots at the students; one of them was wounded in the leg. And the university is now almost under siege: There are policemen surrounding us. We are working as usual, and will most likely finish the semester with normality, but the intimidation (in a country where seeing a policeman is practically never a good sign) is strong. And... Oh, I could go on a lot. Things feel really desperate and out of place. Today I will join probably tens or hundreds of thousands of Mexicans sick of this simulation, sick of this violence, in a demonstration downtown. What will this achieve? Very little, if anything at all. But we cannot just sit here watching how things go from bad to worse. I do not accept to live in a state of exception. So, this picture is just right: A bit over a month ago, two dear friends from Guadalajara city came, and we had a nice walk in the University. Our national university is not only huge, it's also beautiful and loaded with sights. And being so close to home, it's our favorite place to go with friends to show around. This is a fragment of the beautiful mural in the Central Library. And, yes, the University stands for "Viva M xico". And the university stands for "Peace". And we need it all. Desperately.

Dear all, we are proud to announce the 3.0 release of the Shogun Machine-Learning Toolbox. This release features the incredible projects of our 8 hard-working Google Summer of Code students. In addition, you get other cool new features as well as lots of internal improvements, bugfixes, and documentation improvements. To speak in numbers, we got more than 2000 commits changing almost 400000 lines in more than 7000 files and increased the number of unit tests from 50 to 600. This is the largest release that Shogun ever had! Please visit http://shogun-toolbox.org/ to obtain Shogun. News Here is a brief description of what is new, starting with the GSoC projects, which deserve most fame:

• Gaussian Process classification by Roman Votjakov
• Structured Output Learning of graph models by Shell Hu
• Estimators for log-determinants of large sparse matrices by Soumyajit De
• Feature Hashing and random kitchen sinks by Evangelos Anagnostopoulos
• Independent Component Analysis by Kevin Hughes
• A web-based demo framework by Liu Zhengyang
• Metric learning with large margin nearest neighbours by Fernando Iglesias
• Native support for various popular file formats by Evgeniy Andreev

Screenshots Everyone likes screenshots. Well, we have got something better! All of the above projects (and more) are now documented in the form of IPython notebooks, combining machine learning fundamentals, code, and plots. Those are a great looking way that we chose to document our framework from now on. Have a look at them and feel free to submit your use case as a notebook! The web-demo framework has been integrated into our website, go check them out. Other changes We finally moved to the Shogun build process to CMake. Through GSoC, added a general clone and equals methods to all Shogun objects, and added automagic unit-testing for serialisation and clone/equals for all classes. Other new features include multiclass LDA, and probability outputs for multiclass SVMs. For the full list, see the NEWS. Workshop Videos and slides In case you missed the first Shogun workshop that we organised in Berlin last July, all of the talks have been put online. Shogun in the Cloud As setting up the right environment for shogun and installing it was always one of the biggest problems for the users (hence the switching to CMake), we have created a sandbox where you can try out shogun on your own without installing shogun on your system! Basically it's a web-service which give you access to your own ipython notebook server with all the shogun notebooks. Of course you are more than welcome to create and share your own notebooks using this service! *NOTE*: This is a courtesy service created by Shogun Toolbox developers, hence if you like it please consider some form of donation to the project so that we can keep up this service running for you. Try shogun in the cloud. Thanks The release has been made possible by the hard work of all of our GSoC students, see list above. Thanks also to Thoralf Klein and Bj rn Esser for the load of great contributions. Last but not least, thanks to all the people who use Shogun and provide feedback. S ren Sonnenburg on behalf of the Shogun team (+ Viktor Gal, Sergey Lisitsyn, Heiko Strathmann and Fernando Iglesias)

Shogun goes cloud. Try out http://cloud.shogun-toolbox.org to interactively play with machine learning algorithms or try any of the interactive demos. The SHOGUN Machine Learning Toolbox is a collection of algorithms designed for unified learning for a broad range of feature types and learning settings, like classification, regression, or explorative data analysis. For more information visit http://www.shogun-toolbox.org.

Dear all, we are excited that the first Shogun workshop, July 12-14 in Berlin, is getting closer. Thanks to all the people that signed up -- we are sure it will be a packed and inspiring weekend! We have finalized the schedule for Friday, July 12, taking place at the C-Base (see description below [1]). After an intro where everyone gets to know each other and where we introduce ourselves, Shogun, and Machine Learning in general, there will be some tutorials by Shogun developers. In addition, we will have discussions about various topics and various coffee breaks and lunch. Finally, we will enjoy a summer's evening in Berlin. On Saturday and Sunday, July 13-14 there will be hands on sessions at the Technical University Berlin [2], where developers are around for more close up discussions and practical guidance. Bring your Laptop if you want to try things. See the final schedule for more details [1]. We plan to do video recordings of all lectures and will have a live stream [3]. See you there! The Shogun-Team

• [0] c-base, Rungestra e 20, 10179 Berlin, Germany
• [1] Workshop Program
• [2] TU-Berlin Room MAR 0.001
• [3] Live Stream

It has been a while since my last English Debian Edu and Skolelinux interview last November. But the developers and translators are still pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators in the project, C dric Boutillier. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics. I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby packaging, publicity and translation. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project? I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of the Debian Edu manual for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the manual. I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was. What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided by GOsa . What pleased me also was the fact that among the software installed by default, there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages, to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and artistic skills with music (Ardour, Audacity) and movies/animation (I was especially thinking of Stopmotion). I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on #debian-edu. Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this beautiful project. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the fact that it provides a solution ready to use. I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection of educational free software. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel. One can find support from a company by looking at the wiki dokumentation, where some countries already have a number of companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However, for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some support for Debian Edu as well. Which free software do you use daily? I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am also using the mathematical software Scilab and Sage (built from source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet). Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and statistics? I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our university, we use both R and Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For geometry, there are nice programs:

• drgeo and kig to do constructions in planar geometry
• kali to discover symmetry groups (the so-called wallpapers and frieze groups), although the interface looks a bit old.

I like also cantor, which provides a uniform interface to SciLab, Sage, Octave, etc... Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? My suggestions would be to

• advertise the reduction of costs when free software is used.
• communicate about the quality of free software projects, using well known examples like Firefox, ThunderBird and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.
• advertise the living and strong community around the project.
• show that it is not more difficult to use than any other system.

Almost a month has passed since SHOGUN has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013. Student application deadline was today (May 6) and shogun received 57 proposals from 52 students. This is quite some increase compared to 2012 (48 applications from 38 students). What is interesting though is that it didn't look that good in the very beginning (see the figure below): Comparing this to 2012, this curve is much more flat in the beginning but exponentially increasing towards the end. Why is that? We didn't change the way we engaged with students (even though we tried to improve the instructions and added lots of entrance tagged tasks to github issues). We still require patches to be submitted to even be considered. So it is similarly tough to get into gsoc 2013 with us as it was in the previous year. What is interesting though is that various organizations complained about a slow uptake in the beginning. And it turns out that google did limit the number of student applications from 20 (last year) to 5 (in 2013). This might explain the shape of the curve: Students are more cautious to apply but once the deadline is near the apply to the maximum of 5 to improve their chances. This goes hand-in-hand with the observation that the quality of newly submitted student applications tends to decrease towards the deadline. So did this new limit hurt? To the contrary! In the end the quality of proposals increased a lot and we were able to even way before the student application deadline start to score/rank students. We are happy to have many very strong candidates this year again. Lets hope we get enough slots to accommodate all of the excellent students and then lets start the fun :)

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Shogun Machine Learning Workshop, Berlin, Germany, July 12-14, 2013 Data Science, Big-Data are omnipresent terms documenting the need for automated tools to analyze the ever growing wealth of data. To this end we invite practitioners, researchers and students to participate in the first Shogun machine learning workshop. While the workshop is centered around the development and use of the shogun machine learning toolbox, it will also feature general machine learning subjects. General Information The workshop will include:

• A general introduction to machine learning held by Gunnar Raetsch.
• Introductory talks about e.g. Dimension reduction techniques, Kernel-statistical testing, Gaussian Processes, Structured Output learning.
• Contributed talks and a poster session, and a poster-spotlight.
• A discussion panel
• A hands on session on July 13-14

Do not miss the chance to familiarize yourself with the shogun machine learning toolbox for solving various data analysis tasks and to talk to their authors and contributors. The program of the workshop will cover from basic to advanced topics in machine learning and how to approach them using Shogun, which makes it suitable for anyone, no matter if you are a senior researcher or practitioner with many year's of experience, or a junior student willing to discover much more. Interested? A tentative schedule is available at http://shogun-toolbox.org/page/Events/workshop2013_program. Call for contributions The organizing committee is seeking workshop contributions. The committee will select several submitted contributions for 15-minute talks and poster presentations. The accepted contributions will also be published on the workshop web site. Amongst other topics, we encourage submission that

• are applications / publications utilizing Shogun
• are highly relevant to practitioners in the field
• are of broad general interest
• are extensions to Shogun

Submission Guidelines Send an abstract of your talk/contribution to shogun-workshop2013@shogun-toolbox.org before June 1. Notifications will be given on June 7. Registration Workshop registration is free of charge. However, only a limited number of seats is available. First-come, first-served! Register by filling out the registration form. Location and Timeline The main workshop will take place at c-base Berlin (http://c-base.org/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-base) on July 12. It is followed by additional 2-day hands-on sessions held at TU Berlin on July 13-14. About the Shogun machine learning toolbox Shogun is designed for unified large-scale learning for a broad range of feature types and learning settings, like classification, regression, or explorative data analysis. Further information is available at http://www.shogun-toolbox.org.

We are happy to announce that the shogun machine learning toolbox will participate in this years google summer of code :-) SHOGUN is designed for unified large-scale learning for a broad range of feature types and learning settings, like classification, regression, or exploratory data analysis. In case you are a talented student interested in implementing and learning about machine learning algorithms - we are looking for you! We have collected a number of ideas [1] that we consider worthwhile implementing. And don't forget to apply [2]!

[1] http://shogun-toolbox.org/page/Events/gsoc2013_ideas

[2] http://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/shogun

We have just released shogun 2.1.0. This release contains over 800 commits since 2.0.0 with a load of bugfixes, new features and improvements (see the changelog for details) that make Shogun more efficient, robust and versatile. In particular, Christian Montanari developed a first alpha version of a perl modular interface, Heiko Strathmann did add Linear Time MMD on Streaming Data, Viktor Gal wrote a new structured output solver and Sergey Lisitsyn added support for tapkee - a dimension reduction framework. Read more at http://www.shogun-toolbox.org

Shogun Toolbox Days 2013 - Give Your Data a Treat Dear all, save the date - July 12, 2013! we just received confirmation from the c-base crew [1], [2] - the first shogun machine learning toolbox workshop will take place at c-base this Summer July 12 in Berlin! Anyone interested in participating / this event / or interested in helping to organize it - please talk to us on IRC or post on the mailinglist...

Review: Regenesis, by C.J. Cherryh

Series:	Cyteen #2
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	January 2009
ISBN:	0-7564-0592-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	682

Regenesis is a direct sequel to Cyteen, picking up very shortly after the end of that book and featuring all of the same characters. It would be absolutely pointless to read this book without first reading Cyteen; all of the emotional resonance and world-building that make Regensis work are done there, and you will almost certainly know whether you want to read it after reading the first book. Besides, Cyteen is one of the best SF novels ever written and not the novel to skip. Because this is such a direct sequel, it's impossible to provide a good description of Regenesis without spoiling at least characters and general plot developments from Cyteen. So stop reading here if you've not yet read the previous book. I've had this book for a while, and re-read Cyteen in anticipation of reading it, but I've been nervous about it. One of the best parts of Cyteen is that Cherryh didn't belabor the ending, and I wasn't sure what part of the plot could be reasonably extended. Making me more nervous was the back-cover text that framed the novel as an investigation of who actually killed the first Ari, a question that was fairly firmly in the past by the end of Cyteen and that neither I nor the characters had much interest in answering. Cyteen was also a magical blend of sympathetic characters, taut tension, complex plotting, and wonderful catharsis, the sort of lightning in a bottle that can rarely be caught twice. I need not have worried. If someone had told me that Regenesis was another 700 pages of my favorite section of Cyteen, I would have been dubious. But that's exactly what it is. And the characters only care about Ari's murderer because it comes up, fairly late in the novel, as a clue in another problem. Ari, and Justin, are back in the safe laboratory environment of Reseune, safe now that politics are not trying to kill or control them. Yanni has taken over administration. There is a general truce, and even some deeper agreement. Everyone can take a breath and relax, albeit with the presence of Justin's father Jordan as an ongoing irritant and hostile factor. But broader Union politics are not as stable: there is an election in progress for the Defense councilor that may break the tenuous majority in favor of Reseune and the Science Directorate, Yanni is working out a compromise to gain more support by turning a terraforming project loose on a remote world, and Ari isn't sure she likes that Eversnow idea at all. Then, just as things seem to be turning Reseune's way, politics and interpersonal relationships abruptly deteriorate, tensions with Jordan sharply worsen, and there may be moles in Reseune's iron-clad security. Navigating the crisis while keeping her chosen family safe will once again tax all of Ari's abilities. The third section of Cyteen, where Ari finally has the tools to take fate into her own hands and starts playing everyone off against each other, is one of my favorite sections of any book. If it was yours as well, Regenesis is another 700 pages of exactly that. As an extension and revisiting, it does lose a bit of immediacy and surprise from the original, and Regenesis is much less concerned with the larger questions of azi society, the nature of thought and personality, loyalty and authority, and the best model for the development of human civilization. It's somewhat less far-thinking and more of a political thriller. But it's a political thriller that recaptures much of the drama and tension of Cyteen and is full of exceptionally smart and paranoid people thinking through all angles of a problem, working fast on their feet, and successfully navigating tricky and treacherous political landscapes. And, like Cyteen but unlike others of Cherryh's novels I've read, it's a novel about empowerment, about seizing control of one's surroundings and effectively using all of the capability and leverage at one's fingertips. That gives it a thrilling catharsis that's almost as good as Cyteen. It's also, like its predecessor, a surprisingly authoritarian novel. I think it's in that, more than anything else in these books, that one sees the impact of the azi. Regenesis makes it clear that the story is set, not in a typical society, but inside a sort of corporation, with an essentially hierarchical governance structure. There are other SF novels set within corporations (Solitaire comes to mind), but normally they follow peons or at best mid-level personnel or field agents, or otherwise take the viewpoint of the employees or the exploited. When they follow the corporate leaders, the focus usually isn't down inside the organization, but out into the world, with the corporation as silent resources on which the protagonist can draw. Regenesis is much more of a balance. It's about decisions of the future of humanity that characters feel they can make undemocratically (in part because they or their predecessors have effectively engineered the opinions of the democratic population), but it's also about how one manages a top-down organization. And, most vitally, how one secures it. Reseune is, as in the previous novel, a paranoid's suspicions come true; everyone is out to get everyone else, or at least might be, and the level of omnipresent security and threat forces a close parsing of alliances and motivations that elevates loyalty to the greatest virtue. In Cyteen, we had long enough with Ari to see the basic shape of her personality and her slight divergences from her predecessor, but her actions are mostly driven by necessity. Regenesis gives us more of a picture of what she's like when her actions aren't forced, and here I think Cherryh manages a masterpiece of subtle characterization. Ari has diverged substantially from her predecessor without necessarily realizing it, but in ways that are firmly grounded in the differences she found or created between her life and the first Ari's. Specifically, she has friends, confidents, and a community, which combined with past trauma has made her fiercely, powerfully protective, and it's that protective instinct that weaves the plot together. It's probably the most significant way in which so much of the events of Cyteen and Regenesis are driven by people's varying reactions to trauma. If you, like me, loved the last third of Cyteen, read this, because Regenesis is more of exactly that. Cherryh finds new politics, new challenges, and a new and original plot within the same world and with the same characters, but it has the same feel of maneuvering, analysis, and decisive action. You will, as with Cyteen have to be comfortable with pages of internal monologue from really smart people thinking through all sides of a problem. If you didn't like that in the previous book, avoid this one; if you loved it, here's the sequel you didn't know you were waiting for. Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Peacekeeper, by Laura E. Reeve

Series:	Major Ariane Kedros #1
Publisher:	Roc
Copyright:	December 2008
ISBN:	0-451-46245-9
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	324

Ariane Kedros is a pilot of a second-wave prospecting ship. Second-wave prospectors are the first explorers into new systems after slower-than-light generation ships haul in the beacons that add them to the FTL network. She's also a reserve major in the Consortium military, which is a point of ongoing tension with her business partner and employer. She disappears on missions for the intelligence branch that she can't talk about, and usually ends up drinking herself into a stupor when she returns. In actuality, Kedros is not her real name. It's a fake identity given her after the last war, a war in which humans detonated a temporal distortion warhead for the first time and possibly destroyed an entire solar system. Kedros was part of the team that launched the bomb and is, according to the Terran Expansion League (the other side of the all-human conflict), a war criminal. She's in the equivalent of a witness protection program, as are all the other people involved in the act. But someone has broken their cover and is picking them off, one by one, and her latest secret mission from the Consortium is to protect another member of the group. Peacekeeper is Reeve's first novel, and unfortunately this shows badly at the start of the book. The writing is choppy and awkward, the paragraph breaks are a bit off, and the sentence structure kept making my teeth itch. I'm not a good enough technical critic to put a finger on what's wrong, but the writing doesn't flow. I also found myself anticipating and completing sentences in my head, which is a sign of too many low-level cliches. A few dozen pages into the book, the writing was bothering me, I hadn't warmed to any of the characters, and I wasn't sure I was going to like it. Ariane grew on me, though, particularly once she got into her mission and started balancing a cover assignment and her actual work. She's hurt, suffering from what's probably post-traumatic stress disorder and self-medicating with alcohol, but she's smart and competent and the plot is sufficiently tricky to provide a lot of meat. Not only is someone after her old team, but she and her partner discovered something potentially major on their last trip, an old friend of her partner has been murdered, the Consortium and the Terrans are negotiating a peace treaty, and all this is happening under the watchful eye of a superior alien race. The Minoans are probably Reeve's best creation here (if a little too similar to Vorlons at times). They're absolutely neutral, but they do not want humanity messing with temporal distortion weapons and are trying to nudge (or push) the humans into peace and disarmament. They are sticklers for not imposing their cultural practices on others, attempting to judge humanity solely by its own rules, but they're utterly literal-minded about rules. They expect everyone to follow any stated rules exactly and to the letter, making them excellent but frustrating overseers of disarmament treaties. They also have a fascinating tendency to interact with people in roles rather than as individuals. This is clearly the first book in an ongoing series, and a lot of the setup is not resolved here. We get only glimpses of what Ariane and her partner may have found, and only a few interactions with the Minoans, while Ariane tracks down who is responsible for killing her former team. There's a bit too much torture for my taste, and the subplot of Ariane's struggle with alcoholism wasn't really what I wanted to read about, but the writing seemed to get substantially better and the plot kept me turning the pages. There's a quality to military SF written by people who have actually been in the military that I find hard to describe but that helps a book tremendously. It didn't surprise me at all to learn that Reeve served in the US Air Force, since Peacekeeper has that quality. It's less about technical accuracy and more about a feel, a sense of what it's like to be inside a military routine and interacting with other military personnel. The culture feels coherent, despite not being described in detail. I think it makes for good SF in general, since it conveys to someone like me (who has never been in the military) a semi-alien but completely coherent culture. It certainly improves this book; in general, I thought Reeve's military characters were more interesting and more believable than her non-military characters. With the rocky beginning, the unpolished writing, and a villain who wasn't entirely satisfactory, I can't quite recommend Peacekeeper, but it's not a bad read. I'm not sure if I'll pick up the sequels, but I did leave it curious about the unresolved plot threads and willing to learn more about Reeve's world. Followed by Vigilante. Rating: 6 out of 10

Christian Widmer gave a talk about the shogun machine learning toolbox version 2.0 at PyData NYC 2012. His talk is finally available as a video online.