Search Results: "tao"

7 December 2013

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R and Big Data at Big Data Summit at UI Research Park

I spent yesterday at the very enjoyable Big Data Summit held at the University of Illinois Research Park at the edge of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. campus. My (short) presentation was part of a panel session on R and Big Data which Doug Simpson of the UIUC Statistics department had put together very well. We heard from a vendor / technology provider with Christopher Nguyen from Adatao talking about their "Big R", from industry with Andy Stevens talking about a number of some real-life challenges with big data at John Deere, from academia with Jonathon Greenberg talking about R and HPC for geospatial research and I added a few short comments and links about R, HPC and Rcpp. My few slides are now up on my talks / presentations page. Overall, a good day with a number of interesting presentations and of course a number of engaging hallway discussions.

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

3 August 2013

Paul Tagliamonte: Hy: The survival guide

One of my new favorite languages is a peppy little lisp called hy. I like it a lot since it's a result of a hilarious idea I had while talking with some coworkers over mexican food. Since I'm the most experienced Hypster on the planet, I figured I should write a survival guide. This will go a lot easier if you already know Lisp, but you can get away with quite a bit of Python. The Tao of Hy We don't have many rules (yet), but we do have quite a bit of philosophy. The collective Hyve Mind has spent quite a bit of time working out Hy's internals, and we do spend a bit of time looking at how the language feels . The following is a brief list of some of the design decisions we've picked out.
  1. Look like a lisp, DTRT with it (e.g. dashes turn to underscores, earmuffs turn to all-caps.)
  2. We're still Python. Most of the internals translate 1:1 to Python internals.
  3. Use unicode everywhere.
  4. Tests or it doesn't exist.
  5. Fix the bad decisions in Python 2 when we can (see true_division)
  6. When in doubt, defer to Python.
  7. If you're still unsure, defer to Clojure
  8. If you're even more unsure, you're fucked (see also: defer to Common Lisp)
Naturally, this doesn't cover everything, but if you can drop into that mindset, things start to make quite a bit of sense. The Style of Hy Although I am perhaps the least qualified person to do so (I still don't write idiomatic Lisp all the time), I'm going to set up a few ground-rules when it comes to idiomatic Hy code. We borrow quite a bit of syntax from Common Lisp and Clojure, so again, feel free to defer to either if you're not working on Hy internals. I prefer the Clojure Style Guidelines myself. As such, these are what we will defer to in the case that the Hy style is undefined. Clojure-isms Hy has quite a few Clojure-isms that I rather prefer, such as the threading macro, and dot-notation (for accessing methods on an Object), which I would rather see used throught the hylands. 
;; good:
(with [fd (open "/etc/passwd")]
    (print (.readlines fd)))
;; bad:
(with [fd (open "/etc/passwd")]
    (print (fd.readlines)))
Some other hy devs very much disagree, and there's nothing syntactically invalid about the latter, and it will continue to be supported (in fact, it makes some things easier!), but it will not be considered for Hy internal code. We also very much encourage use of the threading macro throughout code where it makes sense. 
;; good:
(import [sh [cat grep]])
(-> (cat "/usr/share/dict/words") (grep "-E" "tag$"))
;; bad:
(import [sh [cat grep]])
(grep (cat "/usr/share/dict/words") "-E" "tag$")
However, do use it when it helps aid in clarity, like all things, there are cases where it makes a mess out of something that ought to not be futzed with. Python-isms In addition to stealing quite a bit of syntax from Clojure, I'm going to take a few Python rules from PEP8 that apply to Hy as well. These are taken because PEP8 is a really great set of rules, and Hy code ends up pretty, well, Pythonic. The following are a collection of Pythonic rules that explicitly apply to Hy code. Trailing spaces is a huge one. Never ever ever shall it be OK to have trailing spaces on internal Hy code. For they suck. As with Python, you shall always double-space module-level definitions if seperated with a newline. All public functions must always contain docstrings. Inline comments shall be two spaces from the end of the code, if they are inline comments. They must always have a space between the comment character and the start of the comment. Hy-isms Indentation shall be two spaces, except where matching the indentation of the previous line. 
;; good (and prefered):
(defn fib [n]
  (if (<= n 2)
      n
      (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
;; still OK:
(defn fib [n]
  (if (<= n 2) n (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
;; still OK:
(defn fib [n]
  (if (<= n 2)
    n
    (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
;; Stupid as hell
(defn fib [n]
    (if (<= n 2)
            n
      (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
Parens must never be alone, sad, all by their lonesome on their own line. 
;; good (and prefered):
(defn fib [n]
  (if (<= n 2)
      n
      (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))
;; Stupid as hell
(defn fib [n] 
    (if (<= n 2)
      n
      (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))
    )
)  ; GAH, BURN IT WITH FIRE
Don't use S-Expression syntax where vector syntax is really required. For instance, the fact that: 
;; bad (and evil)
(defn foo (x) (print x))
(foo 1)
works is just because the compiler isn't overly strict. In reality, the correct syntax in places such as this is: 
;; good (and prefered):
(defn foo [x] (print x))
(foo 1)
Notice This guide is, above all, a guide. This is also only truely binding for working on Hy code internally. This post is also super subject to change in the future, whenever I can be bothered to ensure that we have more of the de facto rules written down.

24 January 2013

Gunnar Wolf: The joys of Internet The Bolivarian dream

Oh, the joys of the Internet. A Mexican and an Argentinian listening to a Spanish cantaor singing Mexican music for an Argentinian audience, remembering a Costa Rican woman. What? Regina and me are finally back home in Mexico, after a month (me) and six weeks (her) of vacations in Argentina. And this week, in the city of Cosqu n (C rdoba, Argentina), they celebrate most important Argentinian folkloric festival. The Cosqu n Festival can be followed live on the TV P blica website. Right now, while I finish writing a short article and Regina fights her way to learn some of the GNOME 3 tricks, we are following Cosqu n. Among many great Argentinian folklorists, they invited a Spanish cantaor, David Palomar, who is remembering Chabela Vargas, a great singer, born in Costa Rica, but who became famous in Mexico, singing very heartfelt Mexican music, and deceased earlier this year. Trivia: Q: What do Mexico, Argentina and Spain have in common (besides a language that can be almost-understood)? A: They all have a city called C rdoba.

2 November 2012

Bastian Venthur: Introducing The Art of Asking

Since October 2011 my flatmate and I where quite busy realizing a little pet project of ours called The Art of Asking. The ultimate goal is to visualize the world s opinion in an intuitive fashion and make it easy for everyone to play around with the data. The idea behind The Art of Asking is that users submit interesting questions which are answered by users around the world. But instead of showing only the boring result, we want to provide interesting insights and statistics about the answers given. For now the users can see the results of the question visualized by geographical regions. For example on the page for the question How are you today? you can see the interactive map with the pie chart. The map shows the average/dominating answer for each continent encoded by color, and the pie chart the distribution of the different answers for that region. If you move the mouse over a continent the pie chart updates and shows the distribution of answers for that continent. You can also click to zoom into the map to see the same for countries and regions. This allows you to investigate how the answers are distributed around the world. This is already quite nice and fancy to play around with, but of course we want much more. Right now we re working on a feature which will users allow to combine two arbitrary questions and see how the answers are related. This doesn t sound like much, but it is very addictive to crawl through the list of questions and find interesting correlations. Here is a little plot how it could look like (the data is from the actual data base of answers). For each possible combination of answers it shows the percentage of people who answered in that combination. Of course those plots only make sense when enough users answered for both questions you want to compare which is right now not very often the case, so I guess we ll roll out that feature sometime later when we have more data. But we have lots of ideas and are working on further ways to investigate the answers. Obviously one low hanging fruit for example would be the distribution of the answers over time. We ve been working for over a year now on this project in our spare time and we built it more or less from scratch. I wrote a small WSGI framework in Python and on top of that the WSGI application which runs the site. We use MongoDB for the storage of the data, uWSGI and nginx for the server, Jinja2 and Bootstrap for the HTML and D3.js for the visualization of the data, where Maci did a wonderful job realizing the interactive map and charts. We re running this site since July 2012 now and are already quite satisfied with the number of users, and the quality of the questions. But of course we could always use more (especially more answers). So if you want to try it out, go to theartofasking.com and fill out the blank spots on the map! We re happy about every answer and question we can get and are eager to hear your suggestions.

28 July 2012

John Goerzen: How to get started programming?

I have been asked for advice from several people recently on how to get started programming, or how to further develop a nascent interest in coding or software engineering. The people asking the questions range in age from about 10 years old to older than me. These are people that, for various reasons, are not very easily able to take computer science courses right now. One would think that, since I ve been doing this for somewhere around a quarter century (oh I do feel old now), that I d be ready to offer up some great advice. And offer some suggestions I have. But I m not convinced they re good ones. I have two main tensions. The first is that I, like many in the communities I tend to hang out in such as Debian s, have a personality that leads me to take a deep dive into details of anything that holds my interest. Whether it s Linux, Haskell, or amateur radio, I want to do more than skim the surface if I m having fun with it. Many people are not like that. They may have a lot of fun programming in Visual Basic, not really caring that other languages are out there. Or some people are not like this yet. I feel unqualified to provide good advice to people that are different from me in that way. To put it a different way: most people don t want to wait 4 years to be useful, and want to start out right away and get better over time (and I was the same way too.) The second is related. I learned programming at a time when, other than BASIC, interpreted languages were not really available to me. (Yes, they were available, but not to me.) I cut my teeth on BASIC, Pascal, and C. Although I rarely use C anymore, I can still drop into it at a moment s notice and be perfectly comfortable. I feel it was a fundamentally valuable experience, and that it would be very hard to become a great programmer without ever having lived and breathed something like C, where memory and pointers must be managed manually. Having said that, it is probably possible to become a good coder without ever having touched C. Here, then, is an edited version of some rambly advice I sent to someone recently, where learning OOP was particularly mentioned. I would welcome your comments and suggestions. I may point people that ask to this post in the future. For simply learning how to write code, Dive Into Python has long been a decent resource, though it may assume more experience than some have. I haven t read them myself, but I ve also heard good things about the How to Think Like a Computer Scientist series from Green Tea Press. They re all available as free PDF downloads, too! Eric S. Raymond s The Art of Unix Programming is another work I ve heard good things about, despite having never read it myself. A quick glance at the table of contents makes me think that even if people don t wind up working on Unix, the lessons and philosophy should be informative. It seems that many Computer Science programs are using Java for the core of their instruction, or even almost exclusively. Whether that is good or bad, I m not completely sure. It certainly gets people into OOP more deeply, but I m a right tool for the job kind of person. Despite the hype, OO like everything else isn t the right tool for every job. It is fine for people to dive straight into OO and become good programmers/engineers. However, I think it would be difficult to become a great programmer/engineer without ever having a solid understanding of a more low-level language, such as C in particular. I did my CS work when it was mostly based in C, and am glad for it. If someone never has to manage memory or pointers, I suspect they will be at a disadvantage in the long run for not being able to understand or work with the system at a more fundamental level. If a person knows C, plus some concepts of OO and Functional Programming (FP), it should be easy to pick up just about any other language out there. I used to think Python was a great first language, but during the 2.x series they added so much fluff and so many special cases that I m less enthusiastic now, though I don t know how much of that got cleaned up in 3.x. I am not too keen on Java as a first language, because too many things that should be simple aren t. I have a fondness for Haskell, and its close relationship to mathematics could make it a great first language or maybe a poor one, depending on your perspective. One other thing I think it s important for good programmers to have experience with all three major models of programming (procedural, OO, functional.) Even if a person winds up working mostly in one universe, knowledge of and experience with the others is important and informative and, in my experience, leads to better algorithms and architecture all around.

30 April 2011

Thomas Girard: ACE+TAO Debian packaging moved to git

We recently converted Debian ACE+TAO package repository from Subversion to git. This was a long and interesting process; I learned a lot on git in the course. I had been using git for a while for other packages: BOUML, dwarves and GNU Smalltalk. But I did not really get it. A preliminary study led by Pau[1] showed that out of the following three tools: the last one was giving results that look better.
The conversion svn-all-fast-export requires physical access to the repo, so the Alioth SVN repo was copied on my machine svn-pkg-ace/ before running the tool: 
svn-all-fast-export --identity-map authors.txt --rules pkg-ace.rules svn-pkg-ace
Here's the content of the pkg-ace.rules configuration file that was used: 
create repository pkg-ace
end repository
match /trunk/
  repository pkg-ace
  branch master
end match
match /(branches tags)/([^/]+)/
  repository pkg-ace
  branch \2
end match
The author mapping file authors.txt being: 
markos = Konstantinos Margaritis <email-hidden>
mbrudka-guest = Marek Brudka <email-hidden>
pgquiles-guest = Pau Garcia i Quiles <email-hidden>
tgg = Thomas Girard <email-hidden>
tgg-guest = Thomas Girard <email-hidden>
The tool sample configuration file merged-branches-tags.rules recommends to post-process tags, which are just a branch in SVN. That's why the configuration file above treats branches as tags. The conversion was indeed fast: less than 1 minute.
Post-conversion observations Invoking gitk --all in the converted repo revealed different kind of issues:

  • svn tags as branches: http://thomas.g.girard.free.fr/ACE/tags-as-branches.png Branches are marked with green rectangles, and tags with yellow arrows. What we have here (expected given our configuration of the tool) are branches (e.g. 5.4.7-5) corresponding to tags, and tags matching the SVN tagging commit (e.g. backups/5.4.7-5@224). We'll review and fix this.

  • merged code that did not appear as such: http://thomas.g.girard.free.fr/ACE/missing-merge-metadata.png Branches that were not merged using svn merge look like they were not merged at all.

  • commits with wrong author: http://thomas.g.girard.free.fr/ACE/wrong-author.png Before being in SVN, the repository was stored in CVS. When it was imported into SVN, no special attention was given to the commit author. Hence I got credited for changes I did not write.

  • obsolete branches: http://thomas.g.girard.free.fr/ACE/obsolete-branches.png The tool leaves all branches, including removed ones (with tag on their end) so that you can decide what to do with them.

  • missing merges: http://thomas.g.girard.free.fr/ACE/missing-merge.png The branch 5.4.7-12 was never merged into the trunk!

Learning git Based on observations above, I realized my limited knowledge won't do to complete the conversion and clean the repository. There are tons of documentation on git out there, and you can find a lot of links from the git documentation page. Here's the one I've used:
The Git Object Model It's described with pictures here. You really need to understand this if you haven't already. Once you do, you understand that git is built bottom-up: the plumbing then the porcelain. If you can't find the tool you need, it's easy to write it.
git fast-import The Migrating to Git chapter explains how you can use the git fast-import tool to manually import anything into git. I've used it to create tags with dates in the past, slightly changing the Custom Importer example in the book: 
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#
# retag.rb
#
# Small script to create an annotated tag, specifying commiter as well as
# date, and tag comment.
#
# Based on Scott Chacon "Custom Importer" example.
#
# Arguments:
#  $1 -- tag name
#  $2 -- sha-1 revision to tag
#  $3 -- committer in the form First Last <email>
#  $4 -- date to use in the form YYYY/MM/DD_HH:MM:SS

def help
  puts "Usage: retag <tag> <sha1sum> <committer> <date> <comment>"
  puts "Creates a annotated tag with name <tag> for commit <sha1sum>, using "
  puts "given <committer>, <date> and <comment>"
  puts "The output should be piped to git fast-import"
end
def to_date(datetime)
  (date, time) = datetime.split('_')
  (year, month, day) = date.split('/')
  (hour, minute, second) = time.split(':')
  return Time.local(year, month, day, hour, minute, second).to_i
end
def generate_tag(tag, sha1hash, committer, date, message)
  puts "tag # tag "
  puts "from # sha1hash "
  puts "tagger # committer  # date  +0000"
  print "data # message.size \n# message "
end
if ARGV.length != 5
  help
  exit 1
else
  (tag, sha1sum, committer, date, message) = ARGV
  generate_tag(tag, sha1sum, committer, to_date(date), message)
end
graft points (graft means greffe in French) Because of missing svn:mergeinfo some changes appear unmerged. To fix this there are graft points: they override git idea of parents of a commit. To create a graft point, assuming 6a6d48814d0746fa4c9f6869bd8d5c3bc3af8242 is the commit you want to change, currently with a single parent 898ad49b61d4d8d5dc4072351037e2c8ade1ab68, but containing changes from commit 11cf74d4aa996ffed7c07157fe0780ec2224c73e: 
me@mymachine$ echo 6a6d48814d0746fa4c9f6869bd8d5c3bc3af8242 11cf74d4aa996ffed7c07157fe0780ec2224c73e 898ad49b61d4d8d5dc4072351037e2c8ade1ab68 >> .git/info/grafts
git filter-branch git filter-branch allows you to completely rewrite history of a git branch, changing or dropping commits while traversing the branch. As an additional benefit, this tool use graft points and make them permanent. In other words: after running git filter-branch you can remove .git/info/grafts file. I've used it to rewrite author of a given set of commits, using a hack on top of Chris Johnsen script: 
#!/bin/sh

br="HEAD"
TARG_NAME="Raphael Bossek"
TARG_EMAIL="hidden"
export TARG_NAME TARG_EMAIL
filt='
    if test "$GIT_COMMIT" = 546db1966133737930350a098057c4d563b1acdf -o \
            "$GIT_COMMIT" = 23419dde50662852cfbd2edde9468beb29a9ddcc; then
        if test -n "$TARG_EMAIL"; then
            GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$TARG_EMAIL"
            export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
        else
            unset GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
        fi
        if test -n "$TARG_NAME"; then
            GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$TARG_NAME"
            export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
        else
            unset GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
        fi
    fi
'
git filter-branch $force --tag-name-filter cat --env-filter "$filt" -- $br
(Script edited here; there were much more commits written by Raphael.)

Important

It's important to realize that the whole selected branch history is rewritten, so all objects id will change. You should not do this if you already published your repository.

The --tag-name-filter cat argument ensures our tags are copied during the traversal; otherwise they would be untouched, and hence not available in the new history.

Hint

Once git filter-branch completes you get a new history, as well as a new original ref to ease comparison. It is highly recommended to check the result of the rewrite before removing original. To shrink the repo after this, git clone the rewritten repo with file:// syntax -- git-filter-branch says it all.

Cleaning up the repo To recap, here's how the ACE+TAO git repo was changed after conversion:

  1. Add graft points where needed.

  2. Clean tags and branches. Using git tag -d, git branch -d and the Ruby script above it was possible to recreate tags. During this I was also able to add missing tags, and remove some SVN errors I did -- like committing in a branch created under tags/.

  3. Remove obsolete branches.

  4. Merge missing pieces. There were just two missing debian/changelog entries. I did this before git filter-branch because I did not find a way to use the tool correctly with multiple heads.

  5. Fix commit author where needed. Using the shell script above Raphael is now correctly credited for his work.

That's it. The ACE+TAO git repository for Debian packages is alive at http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-ace/pkg-ace.git;a=summary.
[1]http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-ace-devel/2011-March/002421.html
[2]available in Debian as svn-all-fast-export

29 March 2011

Ingo Juergensmann: KDE - Login Problems with kdm on Unstable

Some days ago I upgraded my Sid system and when I restarted my X session the other day, I wasn't able to successfully login to KDE via kdm anymore. I'm getting some errors in ~/.xsession-errors:
kdeinit4: preparing to launch /usr/bin/knotify4
Connecting to deprecated signal QDBusConnectionInterface::serviceOwnerChanged(QString,QString,QString)knotify(16474) KNotify::event: 1 ref= 0
QMetaObject::invokeMethod: No such method KUniqueApplication::loadCommandLineOptionsForNewInstance()kdeinit4: preparing to launch /usr/bin/plasma-desktop
kded4: Fatal IO error: client killedkdeinit4: Fatal IO error: client killed
kdeinit4: sending SIGHUP to children.
klauncher: Exiting on signal 1
At the user/password prompt of kdm I can login, the KDE splash screen appears and then, suddenly, the connection fails and I'm back at the kdm login again. I tried to look for already existing bug reports, but KDE is quite large and with many programs. Are there any pointers for a bug report or even a solution/fix for the problem, dear LazyWeb? UPDATE 21:51:
Sune suggests in the comments that it might be a Xorg problem. I've attached a xorg.txt logfile to this post. As you can see, there's a backtrace because of a sig11 error. Funny enough, when I connect via remote X from my OSX I can login into KDE, although there are visual errors. Xorg is working fine on the local server with Gnome, though. So, for me it seems related to either KDE or maybe Compiz. UPDATE 2011-03-30:
Problem solved! LL hinted in the comments to reinstall the Nvidia driver and now it works again! Thanks! :-)

21 April 2010

Jan Hauke Rahm: Mini DebConf 2010 Berlin. See you there?

Hi everyone!Mini DebConf 2010 Berlin - I'm attending I hope you all have already seen at least parts of our preparation for a Mini DebConf in Berlin this year. There are various posts on planet, some mails on -project and -events-eu and as I saw just today even identi.ca is not spared. If you haven t heard of it, this is your chance. Every year the LinuxTag (Linux day) is a four-day event in Berlin, Germany, likely comparable to other OpenSource events. It provides talks, discussion and a lot of booths of various Free Software projects. This year s LinuxTag will be on June 9th till 12th. Since it s held on a huge fairground, we were able to get quite some piece of it for our own use. We will have two areas, one for talks, the other as a hack lab and use right the middle of the LinuxTag for the Mini DebConf: June 10th and 11th with the hack lab open all through the night of course. Finding sponsors was the hardest deal in the beginning and we re not done with it yet. We got enough money, though, to make the decision and we still hope to get everything covered. Luckily we also have hardware sponsors and help on various issues we would not be able to deal with on our own. What s still missing, is you! :) The schedule for the talks is almost full, yet the hack lab could need more man power. Our idea is since we will be in freeze by then, right? to do a BSP incl. help for newbies. That means we will not only try to help users, we also would like to teach how to squash bugs and thus attract possible maintainers and other contributors. All that of course only works if we are enough people there. Now I understand this might seem to be only attractive to german developers as most of the talks will be held in german. But I strongly believe we can deal with it if you don t speak german. :) And at least on the first day of the event, you can meet our new DPL zack who will have the pleasure to provide the opening talk. Yay! Having said all this, you are more than invited to attend and help. Find more info (and a way to offer help) in the debconf wiki and enjoy more press announcements within the next few weeks. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-LT-Berlin/2010 On OFTC: 
/join #debian-miniconf-berlin

Jan Hauke Rahm: Mini DebConf 2010 Berlin. See you there?

Hi everyone!Mini DebConf 2010 Berlin - I'm attending I hope you all have already seen at least parts of our preparation for a Mini DebConf in Berlin this year. There are various posts on planet, some mails on -project and -events-eu and as I saw just today even identi.ca is not spared. If you haven t heard of it, this is your chance. Every year the LinuxTag (Linux day) is a four-day event in Berlin, Germany, likely comparable to other OpenSource events. It provides talks, discussion and a lot of booths of various Free Software projects. This year s LinuxTag will be on June 9th till 12th. Since it s held on a huge fairground, we were able to get quite some piece of it for our own use. We will have two areas, one for talks, the other as a hack lab and use right the middle of the LinuxTag for the Mini DebConf: June 10th and 11th with the hack lab open all through the night of course. Finding sponsors was the hardest deal in the beginning and we re not done with it yet. We got enough money, though, to make the decision and we still hope to get everything covered. Luckily we also have hardware sponsors and help on various issues we would not be able to deal with on our own. What s still missing, is you! :) The schedule for the talks is almost full, yet the hack lab could need more man power. Our idea is since we will be in freeze by then, right? to do a BSP incl. help for newbies. That means we will not only try to help users, we also would like to teach how to squash bugs and thus attract possible maintainers and other contributors. All that of course only works if we are enough people there. Now I understand this might seem to be only attractive to german developers as most of the talks will be held in german. But I strongly believe we can deal with it if you don t speak german. :) And at least on the first day of the event, you can meet our new DPL zack who will have the pleasure to provide the opening talk. Yay! Having said all this, you are more than invited to attend and help. Find more info (and a way to offer help) in the debconf wiki and enjoy more press announcements within the next few weeks. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-LT-Berlin/2010 On OFTC: 
/join #debian-miniconf-berlin

7 March 2010

Thorsten Glaser: CLT 2010

Quite surprisingly, I ll attend the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2010 in Eastern Germany. This is a happenstance, I managed to get fast transportation (via my boss) and accomodation (in a hotel). I will try to help staffing the booth of Debian this time (so I cannot be called Traitor any longer). Schedule, due to the spontaneousness of this, no, though. I may not even be there on Sunday, dunno No RCBD (or night) though, some real life and a new release (with fix of an FTBFS-on-hurd-i386 bug) though:
RMD160 (/MirOS/dist/mir/makefs/makefs-20100306.tar.gz) = f65bd8ef5cf3306a9112587dd4915b6255e479fe
This version pulls in NetBSD changes (Acorn Archimedes support, for one), but I ve also coded support for boot-info-table (J rg compatible), as well as setting the PVD dates (used by GNU GRUB 2 for UUID s). On MirBSD, cdio(1) can now be used to burn (TAO) and blank (quick) CD-RW media (I backported some OpenBSD changes) too.

6 May 2009

Tiago Bortoletto Vaz: Homage to Augusto Boal


The 9 may, 2009 at 20:00 UTC, the Center of The Theater of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro will pay homage to Augusto Boal. There will be a live video and audio streaming available at: http://aovivo.pontaodaeco.org:8000/homenagemboal.ogg.m3u It s recommended using the free software VLC to watch it: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ There will also be an IRC chat room open for everyone in FreeNode, channel #homenagemboal. Posted in english Tagged: augusto boal, theater, theater of the oppressed

14 September 2008

Neil Williams: oh dear - aspire one mail

Linpus Lite (or maybe just aspire one mail) is only going to last a few more days on this aspire1, it's beginning to annoy me:
Update
sylpheed has now replaced aspire mail. OK, I still use aspire mail for calendar and addressbook stuff (for now), but sylpheed is a much better email client.

  1. aspire one mail has no GnuPG support

  2. aspire one mail has no non-HTML composition support. No, really, it doesn't even send plain text alongside the HTML. email sent from the aspire to myself comes in as an attachment in other email clients! (i.e. spam)


So, I would have to investigate a different email client but then there are niggles with Linpus itself:
  1. the aspire default kernel build lacks the pl2303 kernel module so that I can't use the aspire to control my balloon3 board over usb serial

  2. intermittent problem with network manager forgetting WPA passphrases


Testing continues - probably resulting in installing Lenny at the end of this week. Some of these things might be fixable using pages like taoofmac and Reg Hardware.
Unfortunately, the problem with usbserial means that I'll have to take two laptops if I want to demonstrate the balloon3 board in places.
I also don't seem to be able to locate any copyright files which makes me nervous. Maybe it's just a lack of knowledge of Fedora (at least not since FC5).

31 August 2008

Russell Coker: Links August 2008

Michael Janke is writing a series of posts about estimating availability of systems, here is a link to the introduction [1]. He covers lots of things that people often miss (such as cooling). If you aren’t about to implement a system for reliability then it’s an interesting read. If you are about to implement a system where reliability is required and you have control of the system (not paying someone else to run it and hope for the best) then it’s an essential read. It will probably also be good to give this URL to managers who make decisions about such things. Interesting summary of the connections between the Iraq war and the oil industry in the Reid Report [2]. The suggestion made by one of the sources she cites is that the intention of the war was to reduce the supply of Iraqi oil to increase prices. Sam Varghese has written an essay about this which summarises where the Iraqi oil goes [3]. It seems that half of Iraq’s oil goes to US military use, the other half is used domestically, and some oil is imported as well! So because of the US occupation the country with the second largest known oil reserves is importing petroleum products! If the US military was to cease operations world-wide then the oil price would drop significantly, this doesn’t just mean the occupation of Iraq and the various actions in South America, but also the bases in Germany and Japan. Interesting paper by Alexander Sotirov and Mark Dowd about Bypassing Browser Memory Protection in Windows [4]. This paper is good for people who are interested in computer security but don’t generally use Windows (such as me), if you want to learn about the latest things happening in Windows land then this is a good place to start. A well researched article by Rick Moen about the unintended effects of anti-gay-marriage laws [5]. Maybe some of the “conservatives” who advocate such laws should get themselves and their spouses tested. It would be amusing if someone like Rush Limbaugh turned out to be involved in a “gay marriage”. What Sysadmins should know about exposure to hazardous materials [6]. High-level overview of the issues, probably a good start for some google searches to get the details. Diamond John McCain is an interesting blog about the 73 year old (who was born in Panama) candidate in the US presidential election [7]. Update: Corrected my statement about Iraq’s oil reserves based on a comment by Sam.

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11 June 2008

Yves-Alexis Perez: French taxes declaration

(this is an english repost from the original french one, for planet debian) Ok, this is just a procedure, which worked for me, for french taxes declaration. The french governement only allows on Linux configurations with i386 architectures, and firefox. This solutions works (at the date of the post) on a Debian Sid amd64, but should work on every x86/amd64 Debian, because we use a clean i386 chroot. Let's go:

# get the packages
corsac@hidalgo: sudo aptitude -R install cdebootstrap chroot

# create the i386 chroot:
corsac@hidalgo: sudo cdebootstrap -a i386 sid chroot http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian

# bind-mount /tmp for Xorg in the chroot:
corsac@hidalgo: sudo mount -o bind /tmp debian/chroot/tmp

# Entering chroot:
corsac@hidalgo: sudo chroot debian/chroot /bin/bash

# configure apt:
root: echo "deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ sid main contrib non-free" > /etc/apt/sources.list
root: aptitude update

# installing packages:
root: aptitude -R install iceweasel sun-java5-plugin

# no need to run iceweasel as root:
root: adduser corsac

# done for inside the chroot We now need two things in the chroot:

 corsac@hidalgo: cp ~/.Xauthority debian/chroot/home/corsac/ Time to re-enter the chroot:

corsac@hidalgo: sudo chroot debian/chroot /bin/bash

root: su - corsac

# we export the DISPLAY to use host X
corsac: export DISPLAY=:0.0

# ready to go
corsac: iceweasel Now you should be able to go to the website and declare. No need for symbolic link or LD_LIBRARY_PATH hack. I failed to use sun-java6-plugin. Don't hesitate to purge your chroot and restart from a clean one. You can also clean the folder where the shared lib is stored, in ~/.TaoUSign. Hope that helps.

7 February 2008

Alastair McKinstry: Irish Elections 2007: Now What?

Well, the people have spoken, now the airwaves are full of puzzled politicans and pundits trying to decide what they said. The outcome was a suprise, especially in Galway West (where I live), for which I'm annoyed; as I said before, a poll would have been useful. Niall O'Brolch in, said in the last poll in March to be likely to take a seat, came fairly off the mark, unfortunately. Quick summary: The Irish Parliament (the D il) has 166 seats, so the majority is 83 (I seat goes to the Chair or Ceann Comhairle). In recent years, majorities of one or two seats are normal, so we all wait for the final seats to be decided before really knowing the outcome: The Bookmakers paid out for Bertie Ahern being the next Taoiseach by 9.30 AM yesterday, though technically the numbers could still add up for the alternative, Enda Kenny. We might not know until next week.

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24 August 2007

Clint Adams: Volta, ick

There's this Brit named Steve. Steve loves strip clubs. Now, being a Londoner, he has the requisite interest in talk of sex, boozing, and sport, three topics that bore me numb, but I have only ever seen Steve get truly excited about two things in life. The first is the culture of strip clubs, best exemplified by a sex act Steve calls (complete with pantomime) feeding the pony . The other has to do with Ali G. Steve (remember Steve?) is tickled pink that people wanted to sue Sacha Baron Cohen for racism but could not, for since he is a Jew, he is incapable of bigotry. This made no sense to me, but after witnessing the insanity of the UK legal system, I see no reason to doubt it. I am standing up to my nipples in salt water. I saw someone who looked remarkably like Steve yelling with a mildly impressive accent but poor grammar. I knew it wasn't Steve because he wasn't being tailed by an Eastender shouting blimey . I am standing up to my neck in salt water. J rg points out the reasoning for why normal peon developers don't have access to NEW. This makes perfect sense once you realize that each member of the ftp team is both a citizen and resident of the United States of America. The sea is rough. It is difficult to keep the laptop dry, and, well, the Piers Anthony book in my other hand is going to smell like ocean for weeks. That's precisely why I brought it, though; it would take extreme effort to keep it from getting wet. As it stands, or as I stand, there are three options available to me. I can retreat to the beach, where I will be mostly safe from the water. You could call this turning tail and running, or you could call it mastering my environment. It's all in the marketing. I'm going to succumb to this option anyway, and now is not the time for it. So I could also keep doing what I'm doing, keeping my head and laptop and book above water by expending near-constant effort. It's a little easier than in Puerto Rico at the place some random passerby kindly informed me that i was going to die a horrible death just like the 12 other people who had died in that spot that year. In essence though, it's like the futility of continuing living when you're surrounded by INTPs. Then there's the most appealing option: to be as the reed in some Taoist metaphor. I can just let go, and let the tides have their way with me, coolly caressing my face, washing over me, drenching my book, short-circuiting my keyboard, and filling my lungs with plant matter and some kind of 0.479M NaCl solution. My lungs see a problem with this otherwise-logically-sound philosophy. There's an old Middle Eastern proverb that goes something like Be as the date palm, above the spites. When she is hit with a rock, she strikes back with her sweetest fruits. Disthrust! Dilute! Disthrust! There may have been some corruption in the intermediate language.

3 August 2007

Biella Coleman: Puerto Rican Folk Music

The downside of NYC is that it is pricey but the upside is that there are a lot of free events to balance out the equation. Last night, I went to one of such free events at Lincoln center to see one of my favorite Puerto Rican folk singers, Roy Brown who was opening for Arlo Guthrie During Roy Brown’s last song, he called out another folk singer who I had never heard of Tao Rodriguez-Seeger to join him and I think that was probably one of my favorite songs of the night. Tao who comes from a family of folk singer types, usually performs with The Mammals and less frequently with The Anarchist Orchestra. His voice, at least in Spanish, is resounding and overpowering yet at the same time sports a certain type of gentle softness. It is striking and beautiful. If you like folk music, in English or Spanish, I would check him out. Here is a clip of a song recorded with Tito Auger and Roy Brown and a link to their recent complilation CD.

20 July 2007

Thomas Girard: ACE+TAO 5.5.9+1.5.9

I've just uploaded ACE+TAO packages into experimental. The packages are now in NEW, but you can get them from there.

27 May 2007

Andrew Pollock: [tech] Finding out just how hot the linen cupboard is...

I decided to move the old 1-RU Pentium III server (the thing providing all the storage for my MythTV box via ATAoE) from under the bed in the spare room to the linen cupboard. It had a brief stop in the wardrobe in the spare room, but it didn't really help with the noise. Sarah was a concerned about the heat in the linen cupboard, as this is where the patch panel is, so caesar is already in here, along with an Ethernet switch, an ADSL modem, a wireless access point, and the Vonage ATA. There's a lot of DC plug packs generating heat, so it was a reasonable concern. I figured in this day and age, someone must make some sort of USB temperature sensor, and after some searching around, I discovered the DLP-TEMP-G, which seemed to be about the right price, doing what I wanted. I'm going to say the web page was a bit ambiguous, but it was probably just late at night, because I read the bottom as having the option to buy it from Mouser, or via PayPal directly with DLP Design. So I went down the latter path, because I generally prefer to deal directly with the manufacturer. Turns out what I was actually ordering was just a "Test Application", so that email I'd received the day after I placed my order for two units was all I was going to get. I figured this out after a week or so of wondering when it was going to arrive. They were really good about it, and refunded me my $40, even though I'd received said software, and I placed a new order with Mouser for what I really wanted. Now this time, I just didn't read things thoroughly enough, although I'll still say that things were a little ambiguously worded. The page I've linked to above does say "DLP-TEMP-G and 1 DS18B20 sensor $25.00", but when reading datasheet, it goes on about three sensors, and coming with one that isn't soldered on so that you can optionally run a cable between it and the board. I somehow interpreted this as meaning there were two sensors on the board, and one loose. Not the case. The board supports having up to three DS18B20 sensors attached to it, however you please. It comes with one unattached. In hindsight, why would you want two temperature sensors directly on the board? So the moral of this story is I just can't read. Anyway, I got home from Santa Monica last night, and the goods had finally turned up, so I had a play. The DS18B20 just looks like a transistor. I initially ignored it, and just shoved the USB board in caesar, and it happily recognised it 
usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 8
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for FTDI USB Serial Device
ftdi_sio 1-1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Detected FT232BM
usb 1-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new driver ftdi_sio
drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: v1.4.3:USB FTDI Serial Converters Driver
I then fooled around with minicom, and discovered that the little transistor thing I'd been ignoring was indeed the temperature sensor, as I got a reading of zero back (when using this program I found on the 'net). So I went to bed, and this morning did a bit of messing around with the sensor, and with a bit of creative bending, I've got it sitting in the S1 holes without requiring any soldering. It tells me the linen cupboard is about 44 degrees Celsius. Warm, but I don't think it's in any immediate danger of bursting into flames. Wouldn't surprise me if some of the gear in there isn't too keen about the temperature though. At least we won't have to worry about mold. Next step is to convince cacti to graph it, and nagios to monitor it, and we're in business. Here's a little Python program I knocked up to grab the temperature. pyserial is nice. Read on, Macduff!

26 May 2007

Alastair McKinstry: Irish Elections 2007: Now What?

Well, the people have spoken, now the airwaves are full of puzzled politicans and pundits trying to decide what they said. The outcome was a suprise, especially in Galway West (where I live), for which I'm annoyed; as I said before, a poll would have been useful. Niall O'Brolch in, said in the last poll in March to be likely to take a seat, came fairly off the mark, unfortunately. Quick summary: The Irish Parliament (the D il) has 166 seats, so the majority is 83 (I seat goes to the Chair or Ceann Comhairle). In recent years, majorities of one or two seats are normal, so we all wait for the final seats to be decided before really knowing the outcome: The Bookmakers paid out for Bertie Ahern being the next Taoiseach by 9.30 AM yesterday, though technically the numbers could still add up for the alternative, Enda Kenny. We might not know until next week.

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