I came across a folder with the most unexpected treasure trove: The text for my first ever public speech! (and some related materials)
In 1985, being nine years old, I went to the IDESE school, to learn Logo. I found my diploma over ten years ago and blogged about it in this same space. Of course, I don't expect any of you to remember what I wrote twelve years ago about a (then) twenty years old piece of paper! I add to this very old stuff about Gunnar the four pages describing my game, Evitamono ("Avoid the monkey", approximately). I still remember the game quite vividly, including traumatic issues which were quite common back then; I wrote that the sprites were accidentally deleted twice and the game once . I remember several of my peers telling about such experiences. Well, that is good if you account for the second system syndrome! I also found the amazing course material for how to program sound and graphics in the C64 BASIC. That was a course taken by ten year old kids. Kids that understood that you had to write [255,129,165,244,219,165,0,102] (see pages 3-5) into a memory location starting at 53248 to redefine a character so it looked as the graphic element you wanted. Of course, it was done with a set of POKEs, as everything in C64. Or that you could program sound by setting the seven SID registers for each of the three voices containing low frequency, high frequency, low pulse, high pulse, wave control, wave length, wave amplitude in memory locations 54272 through 54292... And so on and on and on... And as a proof that I did take the course: ...I don't think I could make most of my current BSc students make sense out of what is in the manual. But, being a kid in the 1980s, that was the only way to get a computer to do what you wanted. Yay for primitivity! :-D

Attachment	Size
Speech for "Evitamono"	1.29 MB
Coursee material for sound and graphics programming in C64 BASIC	15.82 MB
Proof that I was there!	4.86 MB

An image speaks for a thousand words...

And our translation project is worth several thousand words!
I am very happy and surprised to say we have surpassed the 50% mark of the Made with Creative Commons translation project. We have translated 666 out of 1210 strings (yay for 3v1l numbers)!
I have to really thank Weblate for hosting us and allowing for collaboration to happen there. And, of course, I have to thank the people that have jumped on board and helped the translation We are over half way there! Lets keep pushing!



PS - If you want to join the project, just get in Weblate and start translating right away, either to Spanish or other languages! (Polish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokm l are on their way) If you translate into Spanish, *please* read and abide by the specific Spanish translation guidelines.

Ohai, I have recently started to serve as a Feature Editor for the ACM XRDS magazine. As such, I was also invited to post some general blog posts on XRDS blog And I just started yesterday by posting about DebConf. I'm not going to pull (or mention) each of my posts in my main blog, nor will I syndicate it to Planet Debian (where most of my readership comes from), although I did add it to my dlvr.it account (that relays my posts to Twitter and Facebook, for those of you that care about said services). This mention is a one-off thing. So, if you want to see yet another post explaining what is DebConf and what is Debian to the wider public, well... That's what I came up with :)

Ohai, I have recently started to serve as a Feature Editor for the ACM XRDS magazine. As such, I was also invited to post some general blog posts on XRDS blog And I just started yesterday by posting about DebConf. I'm not going to pull (or mention) each of my posts in my main blog, nor will I syndicate it to Planet Debian (where most of my readership comes from), although I did add it to my dlvr.it account (that relays my posts to Twitter and Facebook, for those of you that care about said services). This mention is a one-off thing. So, if you want to see yet another post explaining what is DebConf and what is Debian to the wider public, well... Thate's what I came up with :) [Update]: Of course, I wanted to thank Aigars Mahinovs for the photos I used on that post. Have you looked at them all? I spent a moste enjoyable time going through them :-]

I have been in Montreal only for a day. Yesterday night, I left DebConf just after I finished presenting the Continuous Key-Signing Party introduction to go out with a long-time friend from Mexico and his family. We went to the Mont Royal park, from where you can have a beautiful city view: What I was most amazed of as a Mexico City dweller is of the sky, of the air... Not just in this picture, but as we arrived, or later when a full moon rose. This city has beautiful air, and a very beautiful view. We later went for dinner to a place I heartfully recommend to other non-vegetarian attendees: Portuguese-style grill. Delicious. Of course, were I to go past it, I'd just drive on (as it had a very long queue waiting to enter). The secret: Do your request on the phone. Make a short queue to pick it up. Have somebody in the group wait for a table, or eat at the nearby Parc Lafontaine. And... Thoroughly enjoy :-) Anyway, I'm leaving for the venue, about to use the Bixi service for the first time. See you guys soon! (if you are at DebConf17, of course. And you should all be here!)

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Montreal1.jpeg	112.83 KB
Montreal2.jpeg	118.2 KB
Poule.jpeg	118.85 KB

I ran my little analysis program written last year to provide a nice map on the DebConf17 key signing party, based on the . What will you find if you go there?

• A list of all the people that will take part of the KSP
• Your key's situation relative to the KSP keyring

As an example, here is my location on the map (click on the graph to enlarge): Its main use? It will help you find what clusters are you better linked with - And who you have not cross-signed with. Some people have signed you but you didn't sign them? Or the other way around? Whom should you approach to make the keyring better connected? Can you spot some attendees who are islands and can get some help getting better connected to our keyring? Please go ahead and do it! PS There are four keys that are mentioned in the DebConf17 Keysigning Party Names file I used to build this from: 0xE8446B4AC8C77261, 0x485E1BD3AE76CB72, 0x4618E4C700000173, E267B052364F028D. The public keyserver network does not know about them. If you control one of those keys and you want me to run my script again to include it, please send it to the keyservers and mail me. If your key is not in the keyservers, nobody will be able to sign it!

(image shamelessly copied from Noodles' Emptiness) This year I will only make it to DebConf, not to DebCamp. But, still, I am very very happy and excited as the travel date looms nearer! I have ordered some of the delicacies for the Cheese and Wine party, signed up for the public bicycle system of Montreal, and done a fair share of work with the Content Team; finally today we sent out the announcement for the schedule of talks. Of course, there are several issues yet to fix, and a lot of things to do before traveling... But, no doubt about this: It will be an intense week! Oh, one more thing while we are at it: The schedule as it was published today does not really look like we have organized stuff into tracks But we have! This will be soon fixed, adding some color-coding to make tracks clearer on the schedule. This year, I pushed for the Content Team to recover the notion of tracks as an organizative measure, and as something that delivers value to DebConf as a whole. Several months ago, I created a Wiki page for the DebConf tracks, asking interested people to sign up for them. We currently have the following tracks registered:

Blends

Andreas Tille

Debian Science

Michael Banck

Cloud and containers

Luca Filipozzi

Embedded

Pending

Systems administration, automation and orchestation

Pending

Security

Gunnar Wolf

We have two tracks still needing a track coordinator. Do note that most of the tasks mentioned by the Wiki have already been carried out; what a track coordinator will now do is to serve as some sort of moderator, maybe a recurring talkmeister, ensuring continuity and probably providing for some commentary, giving some unity to its sessions. So, the responsibilities for a track coordinator right now are quite similar to what is expected for video team volunteers but to a set of contiguous sessions. If you are interested in being the track coordinator/moderator for Embedded or for Systems administration, automation and orchestation or even to share the job with any of the other, registered, coordinators, please speak up! Mail content@debconf.org and update the table in the Wiki page. See you very soon in Montreal!

I got several interesting and useful replies, both via the blog and by personal email, to my two previous posts where I mentioned I would be starting a translation of the Made With Creative Commons book. It is my pleasure to say: Welcome everybody, come and share the joy of work! Some weeks ago, our project was accepted as part of Hosted Weblate, lowering the bar for any interested potential contributor. So, whoever wants to be a part of this: You just have to log in to Weblate (or create an account if needed), and start working! What is our current status? Amazingly better than anything I have exepcted: Not only we have made great progress in Spanish, reaching >28% of translated source strings, but also other people have started translating into Norwegian Bokm l (hi Petter!) and Dutch (hats off to Heimen Stoffels!). So far, Spanish (where Leo Arias and myself are working) is most active, but anything can happen. I still want to work a bit on the initial, pre-po4a text filtering, as there are a small number of issues to fix. But they are few and easy to spot, your translations will not be hampered much when I solve the missing pieces. So, go ahead and get to work! :-D Oh, and if you translate sizeable amounts of work into Spanish: As my university wants to publish (in paper) the resulting works, we would be most grateful if you can fill in the (needless! But still, they ask me to do this...) authorization for your work to be a part of a printed book.

Some days ago, I blogged asking for pointers to get started with the translation of Made with Creative Commons. Thank you all for your pointers and ideas! To the people that answered via private mail, via IRC, via comments on the blog. We have made quite a bit of progress so far; I want to test some things before actually sending a call for help. What do we have?

Git repository set up

I had already set up a repository at GitLab; right now, the contents are far from useful, they merely document what I have done so far. I have started talking with my Costa Rican friend Leo Arias, who is also interested in putting some muscle behind this translation, and we are both the admins to this project.

Talked with the authors

Sarah is quite enthusiastic about us making this! I asked her to hold a little bit before officially announcing there is work ongoing... I want to get bits of infrastructure ironed out first. Important Talking with her, she discussed the tools they used for authoring the book. It made me less of a purist :) Instead of starting from something "pristine", our master source will be the PDF export of the Google Docs document.

Markdown conversion

Given that translation tools work over the bits of plaintext, we want to work with the "plainest" rendition of the document, which is Markdown. I found that Pandoc does a very good approximation to what we need (that is, introduces very little "ugly" markup elements). Converting the ODT into Markdown is as easy as:
$ pandoc -f odt MadewithCreativeCommonsmostup-to-dateversion.odt -t markdown > MadewithCreativeCommonsmostup-to-dateversion.md
Of course, I want to fine-tune this as much as possible.

Producing a translatable .po file

I have used Gettext to translate user interfaces; it is a tool very well crafted for that task. Translating a book is quite different: How and where does it break and join? How are paragraphs "strung" together into chapters, parts, a book? That's a task for PO 4 Anything (po4a). As simple as this:
po4a-gettextize -f text -m MadewithCreativeCommonsmostup-to-dateversion.md -p MadewithCreativeCommonsmostup-to-dateversion.po -M utf-8
I tested the resulting file with my good ol' trusty poedit, and it works... Very nicely!

What is left to do?

• I made an account and asked for hosting at Weblate. I have not discussed this with Leo, so I hope he will agree ;-) Weblate is a Web-based infrastructure for collaborative text translation, provided by Debian's Michal iha . It integrates nicely with version control systems, preserves credit for each translated string (and I understand, but might be mistaken, that it understands the role of "editors", so that Leo and I will be able to do QA on the translation done by whoever joins us, trying to have a homogeneous-sounding result. I hope the project is approved for Weblate soon!
• Work on reconstructing the book. One thing is to deconstruct, find paragraphs, turn them into translatable strings... And a very different one is to build a book again from there! I have talked with some people to help me get this in shape. It is basically just configuring Pandoc But as I have never done that, any help will be most, most welcome!
• Setting translation policies. What kind of language will we use? How will we refer to English names and terms? All that important stuff to give proper quality to our work
• Of course, the long work itself: Performing the translations

Dear Lazyweb, About a week ago, I learnt about the release of an interesting book by the fine people at Creative Commons: Made with Creative Commons. The book itself is, of course, CC BY-SA-licensed. I downloaded it and started reading right away. Some minutes later, I ordered a dead-tree copy, which arrived a couple of days ago. (I'm linking to the publisher's page, but bought it from Amazon M xico... Shipping it from Denmark would not have been as cheap and fast, I guess). Anyway, given my workplace, given the community I know, given I know something like this is much needed... I will start a Spanish translation of the content. There are at least two other people interested in participating, and I haven't yet publicized my intentions (this is the first public statement about it). So, dear Lazyweb: What I need is a good framework for doing this. I started by creating a Git repository, and we were discussing to translate to Markdown (to later format according to the desired output) but then I thought... If we want the translation to be updateable, and to be able to properly accept other people's work, maybe a better format is warranted? So, my current idea is to create a Markdown version for the English original, and find a way to shoehorn^Wseparate it by paragraphs and feed it to Gettext, which is the best translation framework I have used (but is meant for code translation, not for full-text)... Dear lazyweb: What tools do you recommend me to use? Quite important to me: Are they Free tools? Are they easy to use by third-parties, maybe incorporating work via Git? Or, at least, via a Web front-end that allows me as a project lead to review and approve/fix/reject strings? Thanks, lazyweb!

I travelled (for three days only!) to Argentina, to be a part of the Open Source Symposium 2017, a co-located event of the International Conference on Software Engineering.

This is, all in all, an interesting although small conference We are around 30 people in the room. This is a quite unusual conference for me, as this is among the first "formal" academic conference I am part of. Sessions have so far been quite interesting.
What am I linking to from this image? Of course, the proceedings! They managed to publish the proceedings via the "formal" academic channels (a nice hard-cover Springer volume) under an Open Access license (which is sadly not usual, and is unbelievably expensive). So, you can download the full proceedings, or article by article, in EPUB or in PDF...
...Which is very very nice :)
Previous editions of this symposium have also their respective proceedings available, but AFAICT they have not been downloadable.
So, get the book; it provides very interesant and original insights into our community seen from several quite novel angles!

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oss2017_cover.png	84.47 KB

I am starting a work with the students of LIDSOL (Laboratorio de Investigaci n y Desarrollo de Software Libre, Free Software Research and Development Laboratory) of the Engineering Faculty of UNAM:

We want to dig into the technical and social implications of mechanisms that provide for anonymous, private usage of the network. We will have our first formal work session this Wednesday, for which we have invited several interesting people to join the discussion and help provide a path for our oncoming work. Our invited and confirmed guests are, in alphabetical order:

• Salvador Alc ntar (Wikimedia M xico)
• Sandino Araico (1101)
• Gina Gallegos (ESIME Culhuac n)
• Juliana Guerra (Derechos Digitales)
• Jacobo N jera (Enjambre Digital)
• Ra l Ornelas (Instituto de Investigaciones Econ micas)

As well as LIDSOL's own teachers and students.
This first session is mostly exploratory, we should keep notes and decide which directions to pursue to begin with. Do note that by "research" we are starting from the undergraduate student level Not that we want to start by changing the world. But we do want to empower the students who have joined our laboratory to change themselves and change the world. Of course, helping such goals via the knowledge and involvement of projects (not just the tools!) such as Tor.

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday April 30 and Saturday May 6 2017: Past and upcoming events Between May 5th-7th the Reproducible Builds Hackathon 2017 took place in Hamburg, Germany. On May 6th Mattia Rizzolo gave a talk on Reproducible Builds at DUCC-IT 17 in Vicenza, Italy. On May 13th Chris Lamb will give a talk on Reproducible Builds at OSCAL 2017 in Tirana, Albania. Media coverage

• Gunnar Wolf published an article in Spanish entitled "Construcciones Reproducibles".

Toolchain development and fixes

• Ximin updated his R patch to fix a few FTBFS and now we have 463/478 reproducible R packages. For more details, see his detailed write-up on this blog.
• Holger rebuilt dpkg, gcc-6 and r-base for our experimental toolchain for unstable on arm64, i386 and armhf.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Chris Lamb:

• #861608 filed against sbt.
• #861672 filed against libwibble.
• #861756 filed against pd-pdstring.
• #861770 filed against fbreader.
• #861773 filed against armagetronad.
• #861893 filed against ironic.
• #861896 filed against manila.
• #861955 filed against canna.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 93 package reviews have been added, 12 have been updated and 98 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. The following issues have been added:

• timestamps_in_cbd_files_generated_by_canna_mkbindic toolchain issue.
• timestamps_in_manpages_created_by_libwibble toolchain issue

2 issue types have been updated:

• Add patch for timestamps_in_manpages_created_by_libwibble
• Add patch for timestamps_in_cbd_files_generated_by_canna_mkbindic

The following issues have been removed:

• disorderfs_sensitive
• nondeterministic_ordering_in_desktop_files_by_python_sugar3
• randomness_in_swf_files_generated_by_as3compile
• valac_permutes_get_type_calls
• docbook_to_man_one_byte_delta
• ghc_captures_build_path_via_tempdir
• dict_ordering_in_python_alabaster_sphinx_theme_extra_nav_links
• gpg_keyring_magic_bytes_differ
• varnish_vmodtool_random_file_id
• random_order_in_lua_version_substvar
• unsorted_lua_versions_in_control
• nondeterminstic_ordering_in_gsettings_glib_enums_xml
• random_order_in_init_py_generated_by_python-genpy
• randomness_in_r_rdb_rds_databases
• undeterministic_symlinking_by_rdfind
• random_order_in_ruby_rdoc_indices
• random_order_in_dh_haskell_substvars
• plist_weirdness
• randomness_in_python_setuptools_install_files_txt
• fileorder_in_gemspec_files_list
• timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_reportlab
• method_may_never_be_called_in_documentation_generated_by_javadoc
• randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_yardoc
• random_ordering_in_pom
• random_anchor_names_generated_by_docbook_to_man
• random_order_in_static_library_by_icmake
• ftbfs_due_to_libtool
• postgres_9.5_transition

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Chris Lamb (3)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Refactor Presenter to a singleton manager
  • Drop passing has_differences around, fixing an issue with generating files called '-'
  • Prevent abstraction-level violation by defining visual diff support on the Presenter classes.
  • Split output and configuration of presenters.
  • Refactor html and text presenters so they fit the same Presenter interface.

strip-nondeterminism development

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • make get_normalizer_by_name O(1)
  • only call get_normalizer_by_name once

---

This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen and Ximin Luo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

There is a thorny topic we have been discussing in nonpublic channels (say, the debian-private mailing list... It is impossible to call it a private list if it has close to a thousand subscribers, but it sometimes deals with sensitive material) for the last week. We have finally confirmation that we can bring this topic out to the open, and I expect several Debian people to talk about this. Besides, this information is now repeated all over the public Internet, so I'm not revealing anything sensitive. Oh, and there is a statement regarding Dmitry Bogatov published by the Tor project But I'll get to Tor soon. One week ago, the 25-year old mathematician and Debian Maintainer Dmitry Bogatov was arrested, accused of organizing riots and calling for terrorist activities. Every evidence so far points to the fact that Dmitry is not guilty of what he is charged of He was filmed at different places at the times where the calls for terrorism happened. It seems that Dmitry was arrested because he runs a Tor exit node. I don't know the current situation in Russia, nor his political leanings But I do know what a Tor exit node looks like. I even had one at home for a short while. What is Tor? It is a network overlay, meant for people to hide where they come from or who they are. Why? There are many reasons Uninformed people will talk about the evil wrongdoers (starting the list of course with the drug sellers or child porn distributors). People who have taken their time to understand what this is about will rather talk about people for whom free speech is not a given; journalists, political activists, whistleblowers. And also, about regular people Many among us have taken the habit of doing some of our Web surfing using Tor (probably via the very fine and interesting TAILS distribution The Amnesiac Incognito Live System), just to increase the entropy, and just because we can, because we want to preserve the freedom to be anonymous before it's taken away from us. There are many types of nodes in Tor; most of them are just regular users or bridges that forward traffic, helping Tor's anonymization. Exit nodes, where packets leave the Tor network and enter the regular Internet, are much scarcer Partly because they can be quite problematic to people hosting them. But, yes, Tor needs more exit nodes, not just for bandwidth sake, but because the more exit nodes there are, the harder it is for a hostile third party to monitor a sizable number of them for activity (and break the anonymization). I am coincidentially starting a project with a group of students of my Faculty (we want to breathe life again into LIDSOL - Laboratorio de Investigaci n y Desarrollo de Software Libre). As we are just starting, they are documenting some technical and social aspects of the need for privacy and how Tor works; I expect them to publish their findings in El Nigromante soon (which means... what? ), but definitively, part of what we want to do is to set up a Tor exit node at the university Well documented and with enough academic justification to avoid our network operation area ordering us to shut it down. Lets see what happens :) Anyway, all in all Dmitry is in for a heavy time. He has been detained pre-trial at least until June, and he faces quite serious charges. He has done a lot of good, specialized work for the whole world to benefit. So, given I cannot do more, I'm just speaking my mind here in this space. [Update] Dmitry's case has been covered in LWN. There is also a statement concerning the arrest of Dmitry Bogatov by the Debian project. This case is also covered at The Register.

People that know me know that I do whatever I can in order to avoid watching videos online if there's any other way to get to the content. It may be that I'm too old-fashioned, or that I have low attention and prefer to use a media where I can quickly scroll up and down a paragraph, or that I feel the time between bits of content is just a useless transition or whatever... But I bit. And I loved it. A couple of days ago, OS News featured a post titled From the AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System. It links to a couple of videos in AT&T's Youtube channel. I watched
AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System, an amazing historic evidence: A 27 minute long documentary produced in 1981 covering... What is Unix. Why Unix is so unique, useful and friendly. What's the big deal about it? That this document shows first-hand that we are not repeating myths we came up with along the way: The same principles of process composition, of simplicity and robustness, but spoken directly by many core actors of the era Brian Kernighan (who drove a great deal of the technical explanation), Alfred Aho, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson... And several more I didn't actually catch the names of. Of course, the video includes casual shots of life at AT&T, including lots of terminals (even some of which are quite similar to the first ones I used here in Mexico, of course), then-amazing color animation videos showing the state of the art of computer video 35 years ago... A delightful way to lose half an hour of productivity. And a bit of material that will surely find its way into my classes for some future semester :) [ps] Yes, I don't watch videos in Youtube. I don't want to enable its dirty Javascript. So, of course, I use the great Youtube-dl tool. I cannot share the video file itself here due to Youtube's service terms, but Youtube-dl is legal and free.

Dear lazyweb, I am trying to get a good way to present the categorization of several cases studied with a fitting graph. I am rating several vulnerabilities / failures according to James Cebula et. al.'s paper, A taxonomy of Operational Cyber Security Risks; this is a somewhat deep taxonomy, with 57 end items, but organized in a three levels deep hierarchy. Copying a table from the cited paper (click to display it full-sized): My categorization is binary: I care only whether it falls within a given category or not. My first stab at this was to represent each case using a star or radar graph. As an example: As you can see, to a "bare" star graph, I added a background color for each top-level category (blue for actions of people, green for systems and technology failures), red for failed internal processes and gray for external events), and printed out only the labels for the second level categories; for an accurate reading of the graphs, you have to refer to the table and count bars. And, yes, according to the Engineering Statistics Handbook:

Star plots are helpful for small-to-moderate-sized multivariate data sets. Their primary weakness is that their effectiveness is limited to data sets with less than a few hundred points. After that, they tend to be overwhelming.

I strongly agree with the above statement And stating that "a few hundred points" can be understood is even an overstatement. 50 points are just too much. Now, trying to increase usability for this graph, I came across the Sunburst diagram. One of the proponents for this diagram, John Stasko, has written quite a bit about it. Now... How to create my beautiful Sunburst diagram? That's a tougher one. Even though the page I linked to in the (great!) Data visualization catalogue presents even some free-as-in-software tools to do this... They are Javascript projects that will render their beautiful plots (even including an animation)... To the browser. I need them for a static (i.e. to be printed) document. Yes, I can screenshot and all, but I want them to be automatically generated, so I can review and regenerate them all automatically. Oh, I could just write JSON and use SaaS sites such as Aculocity to do the heavy-lifting, but if you know me, you will understand why I don't want to. So... I set out to find a Gunnar-approved way to display the information I need. Now, as the Protovis documentation says, an icicle is simply a sunburst transformed from polar to cartesian coordinates... But I came to a similar conclusion: The tools I found are not what I need. OK, but an icicle graph seems much simpler to produce I fired up my Emacs, and started writing using Ruby, RMagick and RVG... I decided to try a different way. This is my result so far: So... What do you think? Does this look right to you? Clearer than the previous one? Worst? Do you have any idea on how I could make this better? Oh... You want to tell me there is something odd about it? Well, yes, of course! I still need to tweak it quite a bit. Would you believe me if I told you this is not really a left-to-right icicle graph, but rather a strangely formatted Graphviz non-directed graph using the dot formatter? I can assure you you don't want to look at my Graphviz sources... But in case you insist... Take them and laugh. Or cry. Of course, this file comes from a hand-crafted template, but has some autogenerated bits to it. I have still to tweak it quite a bit to correct several of its usability shortcomings, but at least it looks somewhat like what I want to achieve. Anyway, I started out by making a "dear lazyweb" question. So, here it goes: Do you think I'm using the right visualization for my data? Do you have any better suggestions, either of a graph or of a graph-generating tool? Thanks! [update] Thanks for the first pointer, Lazyweb! I found a beautiful solution; we will see if it is what I need or not (it is too space-greedy to be readable... But I will check it out more thoroughly). It lays out much better than anything I can spew out by myself Writing it as a mindmap using TikZ directly from within LaTeX, I get the following result:

Once again, I'm making an announcement mainly for my local circle of friends and (gasp!) followers. For those of you over 100Km away from Mexico City, please disregard this message. Back in July 2015, and after two years of hard work, my university finished the publishing step of my second book. This is a textbook for the subject I teach at Computer Engineering: Operating Systems Fundamentals. The book is, from its inception, fully available online under a permissive (CC-BY) license. One of the books aimed contributions is to present a text natively written in Spanish. Besides, our goal (I coordinated a team of authors, working with two colleagues from Rosario, Argentina, and one from Cauca, Colombia) was to provide a book students can easily and legally share with no legal issues. I have got many good reviews so far, and after teaching based on it for four years (while working on it and after its publication), I can attest the material is light enough to fit in a Bachelors level degree, while it's deep enough to make our students sweat healthily ;-) Anyway: I have been scheduled to present the book at my university's main book show, 38 Feria Internacional del Libro del Palacio de Miner a this Saturday, 2017.03.04 16:00; Sal n Manuel Tols . What's even better: This time, I won't be preparing a speech! The book will be presented by my two very good friends, Jos Mar a Serralde and Rolando Cedillo. Both of them are clever, witty, fun, and a real honor to work with. Of course, having them present our book is more than a double honor. So, everybody who can make it: FIL Miner a is always great and fun. Come share the love! Come have a book! Or, at least, have a good time and a nice chat with us!

Very strange. Verrrry strange. Yesterday I wrote a blog post on spam stuff that has been hitting my mailbox. Nothing too deep, just me scratching my head. Coincidentally (I guess/hope), I have been getting messages via my Bitlbee to one of my Jabber accounts, offering me ransomware services. I am reproducing it here, omitting of course everything I can recognize as their brand names related URLs (as I'm not going to promote the 3vi1-doers). I'm reproducing this whole as I'm sure the information will be interesting for some.

*BRAND* Ransomware - The Most Advanced and Customisable you've Ever Seen
Conquer your Independence with *BRAND* Ransomware Full Lifetime License!
* UNIQUE FEATURES
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I think I can comment on this with my students. Hopefully, this is interesting to others.
Now... I had never received Jabber-spam before. This message has been sent to me 14 times in the last 24 hours (all from different JIDs, all unknown to me). I hope this does not last forever :-/ Otherwise, I will have to learn more on how to configure Bitlbee to ignore contacts not known to me. Grrr...

I know spam is spam is spam, and I know trying to figure out any logic underneath it is a lost cause. However... I am curious. Many spam subjects are seemingly random, designed to convey whatever "information" they contain and fool spam filters. I understand that. Many spam subjects are time-related. As an example, in the last months there has been a surge of spam mentioning Donald Trump. I am thankful: Very easy to filter out, even before it reaches spamassassin. Of course, spam will find thousands of ways to talk about sex; cialis/viagra sellers, escort services, and a long list of WTF. However... Tactical flashlights. Bright enough to blind a bear. WTF I mean... Truly. Really. WTF What does that mean? Why is that even a topic? Who is interested in anything like that? How often does the average person go camping in the woods? Why do we need to worry about stupid bears attacking us? Why would a bear attack me? The list of WTF questions could go on forever. What am I missing? What does "tactical flashlight" mean that I just fail to grasp? Has this appeared in your spam?

$ sudo apt install khal
 
Unpacking khal (0.8.4-3) ...
 
$ (echo 1;echo 0;echo y;echo 0; echo y; echo n; echo y; echo y)    khal configure
 
Do you want to write the config to /home/user/.config/khal/khal.conf? (Choosing  No  will abort) [y/N]: Successfully wrote configuration to /home/user/.config/khal/khal.conf
$ wget https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debconf-data/dc17.git/plain/misc/until-dc17.ics
 
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 6120 (6.0K) [text/plain]
Saving to:  until-dc17.ics 
 
$ khal import --batch -a private until-dc17.ics
$ khal agenda --days 14
Today:
16:30-17:30: DebConf Weekly Meeting  
27-02-2017
16:30-17:30: DebConf Weekly Meeting  

khal is available in stretch and newer and is probably best run from cron piping into '/usr/bin/mail' Thanks to Gunnar Wolf for figuring it all out.