Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously or accidentally during this compilation process. As part of this project I wrote a script to determine which packages installed on your system are "reproducible" or not: Whether a package is "reproducible" or not is determined by querying the Debian Reproducible Builds testing framework. The --raw command-line argument lets you play with the data in more detail. For example, you can see who maintains your unreproducible packages: reproducible-check is available in devscripts since version 2.17.10, which landed in Debian unstable on 14th September 2017.

MeteoSurf is a free multi-source weather forecasting App designed to provide wind and wave conditions of the Mediterranean Sea. It is an application for smartphones and tablets, built as a Progressive Web App able to supply detailed and updated maps and data showing heights of sea waves (and other information) in the Central Mediterranean. It is mainly targeted for surfers and wind-surfers but anyone who needs to know the sea conditions will take advantage from this app.

Data can be displayed as animated graphical maps, or as detailed table data. The maps refer to the whole Mediterranean Sea, while the table data is able to provide specific information for any of the major surf spots in the Med.

As of current version, MeteoSurf shows data collecting them from 3 different forecasting systems Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]

Within the next three years, more than seven billion people and businesses will be connected to the Internet. During this time of dramatic increases in access to the Internet, networks have seen an interesting proliferation of systems for digital identity management (i.e. our SPID in Italy). But what is really meant by digital identity ? All these systems are implemented in order to have the utmost certainty that the data entered by the subscriber (address, name, birth, telephone, email, etc.) is directly coincident with that of the physical person. In other words, data are certified to be identical to those of the user; there is a perfect overlap between the digital page and the authentic user certificate: an idem , that is, an identity.

This identity is our personal records reflected on the net, nothing more than that. Obviously, this data needs to be appropriately protected from malicious attacks by means of strict privacy rules, as it contains so-called sensitive information, but this data itself is not sufficiently interesting for the commercial market, except for statistical purposes on homogeneous population groups. What may be a real goldmine for the web company is another type of information: user s ipseity. It is important to immediately remove the strong semantic ambiguity that weighs on the notion of identity. There are two distinct meanings <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

Octagonal Well in the Cloister of Giuliano da Sangallo, Faculty of Engineering,
Via Eudossiana, Rome

In the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers , Thomas Mann states, Deep is the well of the past... . Sometimes this well is bottomless and it may appear far away and passed, yet all of our actions and everyday decisions come to life by its contents. It is the fundamental substrate, the raw material from which to draw the basic connections of our creativity. The image of the well, used by Thomas Mann, is very significant. In symbolism, the well is the place where you take contact with the deep self and where to get water that gives life. The ancient times remind us of the socializing role of the well, invested with an aura of sacredness, where sharing with others took place. It was <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

There is an empty chair at the conference table of business professionals, a not assigned place that increasingly demands for the presence of a new type of integration manager. The demands for an ever-increasing specialization, imposed by the modern world, are bringing out with great emphasis the need for an interdisciplinary professional who understands the demands of specialists and who is able to coordinate and to link actions and decisions. This need, often still ignored, is a direct result of the growing complexity of the modern world and the fast communications inside the network.

Complexity is undoubtedly the most suitable paradigm to characterize the historical and social model of today s world, in which the interactions and connections between the various areas now form an inextricable network of relations. Since the 60s and 70s a large group of scholars including the chemist Ilya Prigogine and the physicist Murray Gell-Mann began to study what would become a true Science of Complexity.

Yet this is not an entirely new concept: the term means composed of several parts connected to each other and dependent on each other , exactly as reality, nature, society, and the environment around us. A complex mode of thought integrates and considers all contexts, interconnections, interrelationships between the different realities as part of the vision.

What is professionalism? And who are professionals? What can define a professional? < > <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

Is Erwin Schr dinger s wave function which did in the atomic and subatomic world an operation altogether similar to the one performed by Newton in the macroscopic world an objective reality or just a subjective knowledge? Physicists, philosophers and epistemologist have debated at length on this matter. In 1960, theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner has proposed that the observer s consciousness is the dividing line that triggers the collapse of the wave function[1], and this theory was later taken up and developed in recent years. The rules of quantum mechanics are correct but there is only one system which may be treated with quantum mechanics, namely the entire material world. There exist external observers which cannot be treated within quantum mechanics, namely human (and perhaps animal) minds, which perform measurements on the brain causing wave function collapse [2]. The English mathematical physicist and philosopher of science Roger Penrose developed the hypothesis called Orch-OR (Orchestrated objective reduction) according to which consciousness originates from processes within neurons, rather than from the connections between neurons (the conventional view). The mechanism is believed to be a quantum physical process called objective reduction which is orchestrated by the molecular structures of the microtubules of brain cells (which constitute the cytoskeleton of the cells themselves). Together with the physician Stuart Hameroff, Penrose has suggested a direct relationship between the quantum vibrations of microtubules and the formation of consciousness.

<Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

In the perennial search of the meaning of life and the fundamental laws that govern nature, man was always faced for millennia with the mysterious concept of emptiness. What is emptiness? Does it really exist in nature? Is emptiness the non-being, as theorized by Parmenides?

Until the early years of the last century, technology had not yet been able to equip scientists with the necessary tools to investigate the innermost structure of matter, so the concept of emptiness was always faced with insights and metaphors that led, over the centuries, to a broad philosophical debate.

For the ancient atomist Greek philosophers, the existence of emptiness was not only possible but had become a necessity, becoming the ontological principle for the existence of being: for them, actually, the emptiness that permeates the atoms is what allows movement.

<Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 28 and Saturday September 3 2016: Media coverage Antonio Terceiro blogged about testing build reprodubility with debrepro . GSoC and Outreachy updates The next round is being planned now: see their page with a timeline and participating organizations listing. Maybe you want to participate this time? Then please reach out to us as soon as possible! Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following packages have addressed reproducibility issues in other packages:

• ruby-ronn/0.7.3-5 by Antonio Terceiro, original patch by Chris Lamb.

The following updated packages have become reproducible in our current test setup after being fixed:

• check-all-the-things/2016.09.03 by Paul Wise, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• e2fsprogs/1.43.2-2 by Theodore Y. Ts'o.
• gnupg1/1.4.21-1 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor, #834755 by Chris Lamb.
• gnupg2/2.1.15-2 by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• inform6-compiler/6.33-2 by Ben Finney.
• libhat-trie/0.0~git25f9e946-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• mrd6/0.9.6-13 by Thomas Preud'homme, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• safecat/1.13-3 by Teemu Hukkanen, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• shibboleth-sp2/2.6.0+dfsg1-1 by Ferenc W gner.
• sweethome3d-furniture-editor/1.15-2 by Markus Koschany, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• traceroute/1:2.1.0-2 by Laszlo Boszormenyi, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• wise/2.4.1-19 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• xmltooling/1.6.0-2 by Ferenc W gner.

The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out yet. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.)

• comitup/0.5-1 by David Steele.
• dita-ot/1.5.3-2 by Mathieu Malaterre.
• dput/0.10.2 by Ben Finney.
• gnome-settings-daemon/3.21.90-2 by Michael Biebl.
• libkf5kipi/4:16.08.0-1 by Pino Toscano.
• libmpc/2:0.1~r475-2 by James Cowgill.
• taurus/4.0.1+dfsg-1 by Picca Fr d ric-Emmanuel.
• tcpwatch-httpproxy/1.3.1-2 by Toni Mueller.

The following 4 packages were not changed, but have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies:

• djangorestframework
• roarplaylistd
• zope-maildrophost
• zope-replacesupport

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

• amanda/1:3.3.9-1 by Jose M Calhariz.
• dispcalgui/3.1.6.0-2 by Christian Marillat, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• fastqtl/2.184+dfsg-4 by Dylan A ssi.
• grass/7.0.5~rc1-1~exp1 by Bas Couwenberg.
• kdevplatform/5.0-1 by Pino Toscano, original patch by Scarlett Clark.
• leveldb/1.19-1 by Alessio Treglia.
• libdevel-cover-perl/1.23-2 by gregor herrmann, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• linux/4.7.2-1 by Ben Hutchings, #830268 by Reiner Herrmann.
• lmms/1.1.3-4 by Javier Serrano.
• mayavi2/4.4.3-2.2 by Anton Gladky.
• opensaml2/2.6.0-2 by Ferenc W gner.
• perl/5.22.2-4 by Dominic Hargreaves, original patch and original patch by Chris Lamb.
• radare2/0.10.5+dfsg-1 by Sebastian Reichel, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• splint/3.1.2.dfsg1-3 by Rapha l Hertzog, original patch by Chris Lamb.

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

• #835673 filed against dacs by Chris Lamb.
• #835805 filed against dh-python by Chris Lamb.
• #835985 filed against nmh by Chris Lamb.
• #836609 filed against nostalgy by Chris Lamb.
• #835807 filed against pygtksourceview by Chris Lamb.
• #836004 filed against python-gflags by Chris Lamb.
• #835816 filed against rt-extension-customfieldsonupdate by Chris Lamb.
• #835834 filed against ruby-compass by Chris Lamb.
• #836605 filed against torque by Chris Lamb.
• #833176 filed against trafficserver by Reiner Herrmann.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 706 package reviews have been added, 22 have been updated and 16 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 5 issue types have been added:

• timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_ocamldoc
• timestamp_in_enc_files_added_by_texlive_fontinst
• cython_captures_build_path
• timestamps_in_perllocal_pod_manpages_generated_by_perl_extutils_mm_unix
• uname_output_in_python_debugging_symbols_caused_by_sysconfig_getplatform

1 issue type has been updated:

• timestamp_in_enc_files_added_by_texlive_fontinst

Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by:

• Chris Lamb (8)
• Lucas Nussbaum (3)

diffoscope development diffoscope development on the next version (60) continued in git, taking in contributions from:

• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Better and more thorough testing
  • Improvements to packaging
  • Improvements to the ppu comparator

strip-nondeterminism development Mattia Rizzolo uploaded strip-nondeterminism 0.023-2~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports. A new version of strip-nondeterminism 0.024-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Chris Lamb:
  • Improve code quality of zip, jar, ar, png processors
• AYANOKOUZI, Ryuunosuke:
  • Preserve file attribute information of target file (#836075)

Holger added jobs on jenkins.debian.net to run testsuites on every commit. There is one job for the master branch and one for the other branches. disorderfs development Holger added jobs on jenkins.debian.net to run testsuites on every commit. There is one job for the master branch and one for the other branches. tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian: We now vary the GECOS records of the two build users. Thanks to Paul Wise for providing the patch. Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

For centuries man has hunted, he brought the animals to pasture, cultivated fields and sailed the seas without any kind of tool to measure time. Back then, the time was not measured, but only estimated with vague approximation and its pace was enough to dictate the steps of the day and the life of man. Subsequently, for many centuries, hourglasses accompanied the civilization with the slow flow of their sand grains. About hourglasses, Ernst Junger writes in Das Sanduhrbuch 1954 (no English translation): This small mountain, formed by all the moments lost that fell on each other, it could be understood as a comforting sign that the time disappears but does not fade. It grows in depth . For the philosophers of ancient Greece, the time was just a way to measure how things move in everyday life and in any case there was a clear distinction between quantitative time (Kronos) and qualitative time (Kair s). According to Parmenides, time is guise, because its existence <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

There once was a Kingdom strongly United, built on the honours of the people of Wessex, of Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia who knew how to deal with the invasion of the Vikings from the east and of Normans from the south, to come to unify the territory under an umbrella of common intents. Today, however, 48% of them, while keeping solid traditions, still know how to look forward to the future, joining horizons and commercial developments along with the rest of Europe. The remaining 52%, however, look back and can not see anything in front of them if not a desire of isolation, breaking the European dream born on the shores of Ventotene island in 1944 by Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Ursula Hirschmann through the Manifesto for a free and united Europe . An incurable fracture in the country was born in a referendum on 23 June, in which just over half of the population asked to terminate his marriage to the great European family, bringing the UK back by 43 years of history. <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

Children can use their imagination better than us because they are (still) immediately in contact with the Whole and they represent the most pristine prototype of the human being. From birth and for the first years of life, the child is the mirror of our species, who carries in himself the primary elements and the roots of evolution, without conditions or interference.

When then education begins, especially school, his imagination is restrained and limited, everything is being done to concentrate his interests only for what is real and to let him leave the world of fantasy. In the first drawing exercises to which the children are subjected at school, their imagination or the appearance of how they perceive some elements of nature are discarded; the drawing that best fit to a photographic vision of reality is rewarded, inhibiting their own imaginative potential from the very beginning, in favour of a more reassuring homologation <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

The accelerated world of the Western or Westernized countries seems to be fed by an insidious food, which generates a kind of psychological dependence: anxiety. The economy of global markets cannot help it, it has a structural need of it to feed their iron logic of survival. The anxiety generated in the masses of consumers and in market competitors is crucial for Companies fighting each other and now they can only live if men are projected to objective targets continuously moving forward, without ever allowing them to achieve a stable destination.

The consumer is thus constantly maintained in a state of perpetual breathlessness, always looking for the fresh air of liberation that could eventually reduce his tension. It is a state of anxiety caused by false needs generated by advertising campaigns whose primary purpose is to create a need, to interpret to their advantage a still confused psychological demand leading to the destination decided by the market <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

The paths of life to guide us towards the knowledge are many and a straight; well-defined line does not always represent them. Among these, the theory of Fuzzy Logic can help us to better understand some of the methods that maybe for too long we have lost the habit to use, if not even forgotten, because of the residuals of the positivist scientism.

Brief mathematical introduction

All the elements making up the majority of the categories of everyday life (feelings, emotions, opinions, values, quality, etc.) cannot be defined in a unique or exact way. Let s try to define an event that causes severe pain: a hammer blow on the finger? The loss of a loved one? Tooth extraction? It is evident that the answer can vary in a very consistent way, based on the subjectivity of the individual, the environment, boundary conditions and the general context. This is because the Strong Pain is a fuzzy set (which we will call SP), characterized by a function of degree of membership which maps the elements of a universe in a real continuous interval between 0 and 1. In practical terms

<Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

A constant demand for creativity is raising from every corner of the Western world, from any business sector or professional activity, by individual or communities. This term is used everywhere, even in advertising to attract the attention of consumers: as a thirsty wanderer lost in the desert sand, the need for creativity seems to be the source of an oasis of salvation. Julien Ries anthropological research showed us that, already more than two million years ago, Homo Habilis looks like Symbolicus, with aesthetic sensibility, sense of symmetry and consciousness of creativity. Gilbert Durand confirms that the specific activity of man, the identity card of Homo Sapiens, is the symbolic activity, an essential part of his creativity. Then, man is creative at the moment when his first activates his imaginative feature. So we can ask ourselves, how did we miss the creativity of man, of which so much we feel the need, or at least where is it hiding now? But above all which kind of creativity are we talking about? <Read More >

The binary code, although necessary for major social and technological developments, is annihilating the Homo Technologicus, stifling his innate freedom for analog connections.

The first widespread use of the binary code was the Morse code alphabet. For decades, this communication system allowed to transmit information over long distances, between ships in the ocean and the mainland, between one continent and another, and today its use is still active in emergency situations. In its disarming simplicity (connect or interrupt two electrical wires), this system proved to be the shortest way to transcribe an alphabet.

Then, the Boolean algebra (binary) represented the language of communication between humans and computers, enabling the translation of instructions and commands towards the processing unit (microprocessor / CPU). This determined the Big Bang of the computers and the technological era

<Read More...>

As well as the simple reading of a musical score is sufficient to an experienced musician to recognize the most velvety harmonic variations of an orchestral piece, so the apparent coldness of a fragment of program code can stimulate emotions of ecstatic contemplation in the developer.

Don t be misled by the simplicity of the laconic definition of the code as a sequence of instructions to be given to a computer to solve a specific problem. Generally, a problem has multiple solutions, the most simple and fast to implement, the most economical from the point of view of machine cycles or memory, the elegant solution and the makeshift one.

However, there is always a poetic solution, the one that has a particular and unusual beauty and that is always generated by the inexhaustible forge of the human intuition .

[Read More ]

A problem of interpretation?

December 14th, 1900 is known as the date of birth of quantum physics. In fact, that day Max Planck presented his report to the German Physical Society in Berlin, in which he argued that the exchange of energy in the phenomena of emission and absorption of electromagnetic radiation occurs in discrete form, not in continuous form as claimed by electromagnetic classic theory.

It was like opening a door to a new universe, that of subatomic particles. In a few decades it was learned that the basis of the strength of the real world around us (people, objects, plants, animals, etc.) is a joyful swarm of tiny particles distributed in clouds of probability, essentially surrounded by empty space. A shocking and apparently incomprehensible reality for the man of the 900: how could that still solid rock actually contain billions of microscopic objects in motion?

With the passing of the years, the road was covered deeper and deeper, revealing ever smaller particles for which new unknown names were coined: Leptons, Gluons, Quarks, Neutrinos, Fermions, Bosons, and so on until

<Read More >

They are filling old bottles with new wine! This is what the physicist Werner Heisenberg heard exclaiming by his friend and colleague Wolfgang Pauli who, criticizing the approach of the scientists of the time, believed that they had been forcibly glued the notion of quantum on the old theory of the planetary-model of Bohr s atom. Faced with the huge questions introduced by quantum physics, Pauli instead began to observe the new findings from a different point of view, from a new level of reality without the constraints imposed by previous theories.

Newton himself, once he theorized the law of the gravitational field, failing to place it in any of the physical realities of the time, he merely

<Read More...>

List all posts by Authors, nested Categories and Titles is a WordPress Plugin I wrote to fix a menu issue I had during a complex website development. It has been included in the official WordPress Plugin repository. The Plugin is particularly suitable to all multi-nested categories and multi-authors websites handling a large number of posts and complex nested category layout (i.e.: academic papers, newpapers articles, etc). This plugin allows the user to place a shortcode into any page and get rid of a long and nested menu/submenu to show all site s posts. A selector in the page will allow the reader to select grouping by Category/Author/Title. You can also manage to install a tab plugin (i.e.: Tabby Responsive Tabs) and arrange each group on its specific tab. Output grouped by Category will look like:

CAT1
    post1                       AUTHOR
    SUBCAT1
        post2                   AUTHOR
        post3                   AUTHOR
        SUBCAT2
            post4               AUTHOR
            ...
            ...

while in the Author grouping mode, it is:

AUTHOR1
  post1               [CATEGORY]
  post2               [CATEGORY]
AUTHOR2
  post1               [CATEGORY]
  post2               [CATEGORY]
.....

The plugin installs a new menu ACT List Shortcodes in Admin->Tools. The tool is a helper to automatically generate the required shortcode. It will parse the options and display the string to be copied and pasted into any page. The Plugin is holding a GPL2 license and it can be downloaded from its page on WP Plugins.

The elections for the new OpenStack board are coming closer
and this time the Open Source community has a great
opportunity of representation: Giuseppe Patern is standing as a candidate for the board.
Although Giuseppe is considered by HP and Forrester Research
among the top talented consultants in the world,
Gippa (as he s largely known in the industry) is still one of us ,
a nerd that grew up with a keyboard on his hands.
As he s one of the candidates of the OpenStack board,
Fabio Marzocca wishing to know more has interviewed him.

[FM] The hard question. You re a techie. Why the hell are you running for the board?

[GP] This is indeed a good question It all started as a challenge from some clients and friends that are working in the OpenStack project. The truth is that the board and most of the management of the foundation are from vendors. I m not questioning here if they do a good job or not, it is very likely that they tend to protect their own interests. In my opinion it lacks some community spirit that have fostered Linux development such as Debian and Ubuntu. That s why I m running for it, to bring the community where it should be.

[FM] Back to Debian and Ubuntu, could you tell us your story with Linux?

[GP] I discovered Linux in 1994, but only in 1996 things were serious. By the time I just finished high school and I applied for a job in a local Internet Service Provider. At 15 years I was well known in the local community as I was installing and maintaining several BBSes, so it wasn t hard to get the job. I can say it was love at first sight. I started with Slackware (was the first distro), but I moved into redhat first and then debian. When I was working for the IBM Linux Technology Center, I was in charge of helping porting Linux to PowerPC and backporting LVM to make it similar to AIX. Sun was also a good playground as they acquired Cobalt, a hardware appliance based on debian. Then I shifted more towards Enterprise Linux adoption with 6 years in RedHat and then I went to Canonical. I was happy to go back to Debian and Ubuntu community, because I still believe that Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) were the real spirit of a Linux community.

[FM] Another hard question. We know you re somehow involved in the rebellion of Devuan.org. What is your opinion about systemd?

[GP] Let me tell you that it s not totally black/white and let s see the two sides here. Something like systemd was indeed needed. Each distro has its own way of init ing the system and for a package maintainer or commercial software maker, maintaining different init behaviour is insane. And as an init replacement it totally makes sense. However, IMHO systemd went too far away, incorporating into its code something that should not happen. A DHCP client into an init system, seriously? I doubt it was in the spirit of the Unix and Linux system
However, in the real world of pets vs cattle , where application matters more than systems, having a systemd as it is, doesn t change that much.

[FM] OpenStack was incubated in Ubuntu and the roots are quite clear. Is there something else that you would like to see from Debian and Ubuntu in OpenStack?

[GP] Stability, if I can name just one. Currently OpenStack is released every 6 months, which was probably the best choice to speed up the development. However, this is now becoming a weakness, as enterprise customers can t upgrade their critical infrastructures every 6 months. Traditionally Debian is maniacally focused on given a bullet-proof distribution, this is something that in my opinion is missing from OpenStack.

[FM] Gippa, tell us just 2 or 3 topics you will bring to action in case of election

[GP] I d like to introduce an OpenStack LTS process, following the Ubuntu approach: while releasing every 6 months is fair enough for development and testing environments, having a stable release every 2-3 years can give enterprise customers the peace of mind they need while running production environments.
I d also love to see a consolidation of the core (Nova/Neutron/Cinder/Swift): vendors and developers are introducing new features and projects while I d love to see for example- a more stable and scalable Neutron and a more stable connection to Oslo (in particular rabbitmq).
In general, I would encourage more attention to who is actually deploying, integrating and using OpenStack every day. I would also try to foster the ecosystem of ISVs in order to release and certify their software for OpenStack. And last but not least- to see interoperation between regional datacenters: I dream of a world where companies in a given territory can work together , and this is only possible through standards. I hope that OpenStack can represent this standard.

[FM] When are the elections and how can we vote?

[GP] Individual Member Director elections for the 2016 Board will be held online from Monday January 11, 2016 to Friday January 15, 2016. More informations on the website.