My job exposes me to a large variety of computing systems and I regularly use Mac, Windows and Linux desktops. My main desktop environment at home and work has been Debian GNU/Linux for over 10 years. However every now and then I take a little "holiday" and use something else for a few weeks. Often I'm spurred on by some niggle or other on the GNOME desktop, or burn-out with whatever the current contentious issue of the moment is in Debian. Usually I switched to Windows and I used it as an excuse to play some computer games. Last November I had just such an excuse to take a holiday but this time I opted to go for Mac. I had a back-log of Mac issues to investigate at work anyway. I haven't looked back. It appears I have switched for good. I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but I couldn't quite get the words right. I doubted I could express my frustrations in a constructive, helpful way, even if I think that my experiences are useful and my discoveries valuable, perhaps I would put them across in a way that seemed inciteful rather than insightful. I wasn't sure anyone cared. Certainly the GNOME community doesn't seem interested in feedback. I turns out that one person that doesn't care is me: I didn't realise just how broken the F/OSS desktop is. The straw that broke the camel's back was the file manager replacing type-ahead find with a search but (to seemlessly switch metaphor) it turns out I'd been cut a thousand times already. I'm not just on the other side of the fence, I'm several fields away. Sometimes community people write about their concerns with whether they're going in the right direction, or how to tell the difference between legitimate complaints, trolls and whiners. When I look at conferences now, the sea of Thinkpads was replaced with a sea of Apple Macs a long time ago now, and the Thinkpads haven't come back. I'd suggest: don't worry about the whiners. Worry about the leavers. What does this mean for my Debian involvement? Well, you can't help but have noticed that I've done very little this year. I've written nearly exclusively about music so far. the good news is: I still regularly use Debian, and I still intend to stay involved, just not on the desktop. I'm essentially only maintaining two packages now, lhasa and squishyball. I might pick up a few more (possibly archivemail if the situation doesn't improve) but I'm happy with a low package load; I'd like to make sure the ones I do maintain are maintained well. The sum of all my Debian efforts this year have been to get these two (or three) ship-shape. I have a bunch of other things I'd like to achieve in Debian which are not packages, and a larger package load would just distract from them. (We really are too package-oriented in Debian).

Vangelis' soundtrack for the movie Blade Runner is one of my favourite film soundtracks. Its troubled history is reasonably well documented on Wikipedia . At the time of writing, that article doesn't mention the recent 2013 reissue which was remastered and released on Vinyl, and possibly SACD too. Last year I spotted this record and bought it for a friend's birthday. In the year since I've eventually gave into temptation and bought another copy for myself. This was a little unfortunate in terms of timing as my record player has been packed away for two months pending a house move. I did manage to test it out on a Numark PT-01 but it really needs a proper setup to do it justice. In the mean time, one can watch a video of someone else's copy playing: In related news, I've recently enjoyed the BBC's adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as part of their "Dangerous Visions" series. Much like the film, the play elides a lot of material from the book; including Deckard's wife and (more sadly) the entire Buster Friendly / Mercer side-story. However it retains the second police station, which (to me) was the key, classic Dick "What-the..." moment in the novel.

I stumbled across this whilst packing up my 7" records. It's one of my favourite 'features' on a blank side.

I spent the bank holiday weekend mostly in Manchester with my brother and a couple of friends, mostly to see Nine Inch Nails perform, but also to enjoy the pleasures of the city. We arrived on the Sunday and after checking in headed out to get some food. I'd booked us a table at the historic Marble Arch - the pub which gives its name to the parent company Marble Beers - and produce my most favourite ales. Whenever a Marble beer ends up as a guest at one of the Newcastle real ale pubs a friend of mine (who is much more on top of this stuff than I am) lets me know and we stop off for a few. Invariably there's a crowd of a dozen or so Manchester expats in bar when we do. I reserved our table over twitter, which is a bit of a novelty for me. My two friends are ale skeptics but - due to lack of choice - we all ended up sampling the Chocolate Marble and the Ginger 5.1, which went down a storm. They are possibly converts now. There was an Earl Grey IPA too, which was nice but a bit on the strong side for sessioning. The gig was great - I prefer club gigs to arena gigs but the sound techs for NIN know what they are doing and the mix was great. The visuals were stunning too. Highlights for me were "The Great Destroyer" - in particular the extended, improvised 5 minute glitch-meltdown coda; the slow build of "Eraser" and "The Day The World Went Away" - played faithfully to the CD mix rather than the traditional extended live arrangement. I miss the former live arrangement, which includes a drawn out drum-backed finish, but this arrangement had a lot of force, with all four of the band bashing guitars into a pummelling wall of sound. I've heard that at least one person has taped the show and it turns out recordings have just recently surfaced for the two club gigs my brother and I attended back in 2005 and 2007 - meaning there are now widely available, high quality ROIO copies for every NIN gig I've ever been to. Afterwards we tried to find a decent club. Manchester is a lot larger than my native city and there's plenty of places to go, if you know where they are. We had originally planned to visit The Factory on Charles Street, but we didn't believe it was open on the Sunday. The Factory is Peter Hook's (formerly of Joy Division/New Order) club - occupying the former office spaces of Factory records. I've chanced in there once before as it's right across the road from the Lass O' Gowrie pub, which is the haunt of choice for HE/tech people whenever we're in Manchester for conferences. Instead we gravitated towards Dry Bar on Oldham street. By coincidence this place also has historic ties to Factory Records. However the doormen wouldn't let us in! Finally we landed at a place which had one name on the door and a different name on the inside (Jack's). Like the aformentioned Lass O' Gowrie and perhaps half of all pubs and clubs in Manchester, the place is decked out as a shrine to the former musical giants of the City, with framed pictures of Mark E Smith, the Ha ienda again, the Stone Roses in their boy-band-looks hay day, John Peel (champion of many of them) and of course Tony Wilson. I can't help but wonder whether people who live here get royally sick of that. This place served some delicious albeit clich -titled Cocktails and played a pretty good set - the obligatory Madchester throwback interlude was followed by a chunk of Northern Soul and a couple of early Rap classics. Setlist wise it was pretty much identical to that of Foundation in Newcastle, 12 years ago, no doubt because Foundation was cribbing heavily from the Ha ienda in the first place. Monday was dedicated to exploring and shopping. Top of my list of places to go was my pilgrimage venue Vinyl Exchange. Whilst waiting for it to open we rolled around in Affleck's Palace, which turned out to have a small record stall within. After Vinyl Exchange we chanced across another record store right across the road - Picadilly Records - which happens to be larger and focuses more on new releases. It didn't take long before we found another small, DIY record shop, then another. We tried out the Fopp branch here - more Vinyl; then Urban Outfitters - more; then an Oxfam branch - even more. I actually got Vinyl snow blind at this point. I've been controlling myself admirably and only picked up a couple of bits and pieces. My best find was Fad Gadget's sophmore album "Incontinent".

2013 is nearly all finished up and so I thought I'd spend a little time writing up what was noteable in the last twelve months. When I did so I found an unfinished draft from the year before. It would be a shame for it to go to waste, so here it is. 2012 was an interesting year in many respects with personal highs and lows. Every year I see a lots of "round-up"-style blog posts on the web, titled things like "2012 in music", which attempt to summarize the highlights of the year in that particular context. Here's JWZ's effort, for example. Often they are prefixed with statements like "2012 was a strong year for music" or whatever. For me, 2012 was not a particularly great year. I discovered quite a lot of stuff that I love that was new to me, but not new in any other sense. In Music, there were a bunch of come-back albums that made the headlines. I picked up both of Orbital's Wonky and Brian Eno's Lux (debatably a comeback: his first ambient record since 1983, his first solo effort since 2005, but his fourth collaborative effort on Warp in the naughties). I've enjoyed them both, but I've already forgotten Wonky and I still haven't fully embraced Lux (and On Land has not been knocked from the top spot when I want to listen to ambience.) There was also Throbbing Gristle's (or X-TG) final effort, a semi/post-TG, partly posthumous double-album swan song effort which, even more than Lux, I still haven't fully digested. In all honesty I think it was eclipsed by the surprise one-off release of a live recording of a TG side project featuring Nik Void of Factory Floor: Carter Tutti Void's Transverse, which is excellent. Ostensibly a four-track release, there's a studio excerpt V4 studio (Slap 1) which is available from (at least) Amazon. There's also a much more obscure fifth "unreleased" track cruX which I managed to "buy" from one of the web shops for zero cost. The other big musical surprise for me last year was Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. I knew nothing of BJH, although it turns out I've heard some of her singles repeatedly on Radio 6, but her band's guitarist Ed Blazey and his partner lived in the flat below me briefly. In that time I managed to get to the pub with him just once, but he kindly gave me a copy of their album on 12" afterwards. It reminds me a bit of Goldfrapp circa "Seventh Tree": I really like it and I'm looking forward to whatever they do next. Reznor's How To Destroy Angels squeezed out An Omen EP which failed to set my world on fire as a coherent collection, despite a few strong songs individually. In movies, sadly once again I'd say most of the things I recall seeing would be "also rans". Prometheus was a disappointment, although I will probably rewatch it in 2D at least once. The final Batman was fun although not groundbreaking to me and it didn't surpass Ledger's efforts in The Dark Knight. Inception remains my favourite Nolan by a long shot. Looper is perhaps the stand-out, not least because it came from nowhere and I managed to avoid any hype. In games, I moaned about having moaning about too many games, most of which are much older than 2012. I started Borderlands 2 after enjoying Borderlands (disqualified on age grounds) but to this day haven't persued it much further. I mostly played the two similar meta-games: The Playstation Plus download free games in a fixed time period and the more sporadic but bountiful humble bundle whack-a-mole. More on these another time. In reading, as is typical I mostly read stuff that was not written in 2012. Of that which was, Charles Stross's The Apocalypse Codex was an improvement over The Fuller Memorandum which I did not enjoy much, but in general I'm finding I much prefer Stross's older work to his newer; David Byrne's How Music Works was my first (and currently last) Google Books ebook purchase, and I read it entirely on a Nexus 7. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but the experience has not made a convert of me away from paper. He leans heavily on his own experiences which is inevitable but fortunately they are wide and numerous. Iain Banks' Stonemouth was an enjoyable romp around a fictional Scottish town (one which, I am reliably informed, is incredibly realistical rendered). One of his "mainstream" novels, It avoided a particular plot pattern that I've grown to dread with Banks, much to my suprise (and pleasure). Finally, the stand-out pleasant surprise novel of the year was Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth. With a plot device not unlike Banks' Transition or Stross's Family Trade series, the pair managed to write a journey-book capturing the sense-of-wonder that these multiverse plots are good for. (Or perhaps I have a weakness for them). It's hard to find the lines between Baxter and Pratchett's writing, but the debatably-reincarnated Tibetan Monk-cum-Artificial Intelligence 'Lobsang' must surely be Pratchett's. Pratchett managed to squeeze out another non-Discworld novel (Dodger) as well as a long-overdue short story collection, although I haven't read either of them yet. On to 2013's write-up...

I've written before of how much I liked the British SF magazine Interzone. Sadly I decided not to renew my subscription last year, as the focus of my reading has been changing and I've not had enough time to keep on top of it. (This is a consequence of my experiment with goodreads, and I'll write more about that sometime.) Back in October 2012 TTA Press reformatted both Interzone and its sister publication Black Static into a half-size, semi-hard backed shape. The size is similar to the US stalwards Analog and Asimov's, but the cover is harder and glossier and it has a flat spine. I really like the new look, and it's a bit of a shame I didn't complete at least a calendar year's worth of them. I will probably pick up the odd issue now and then, when a name I recognise catches my eye. Perhaps one day I'll have the time and inclination to read short fiction regularly again. I'd still wholeheartedly recommend it (and Black Static) if short fiction is your thing.

Recently, North Tyneside Council circulated the beginnings of a regional development plan. This consisted of a detailed map of the borough, complete with various areas marked out as sites for potential housing development. Included amongst the sites for potential development was Whitley Bay Ice Rink and the surrounding leisure facilities: a football pitch, a cricket pitch, and more. Whitley Bay Ice Rink has been a fixture in the cultural history of the region and it would be a terrible shame if it were to close. Many people seemed to agree: a petition calling for the site to be excluded from the plan received over 7,000 signatures. Residents were also able to write comments on the plan itself. The specific paragraph for the Ice Rink had attracted over 100 comments when I looked at it on the last day that comments were open. I hurredly put together one of my own:

Whitley Bay Ice Rink is about to celebrate it s 60th birthday as both a key part of the history and culture of the borough and a unique leisure facility in the wider area. Sadly the Rink has seemed, historically, to be somewhat neglected, rather like the other large cultural landmark in the region - Whitley Bay s Spanish City and Dome. I argue you should no sooner consider closing or redeveloping the Rink site than the Dome itself. Rather, both should be cherished and invested in, particularly if (as rumoured) the current owners are keen to retire or pass it on. In recognising the need to increase the amount of housing in the area, one should consider what facilities will be available to the new residents within the region. Removing facilities to provide housing is slaying the golden goose. Whitley Bay Ice Rink is one of the few rinks left in the country and the nearest permanent ice rink within 30 miles. Ice skating has become a fond and lasting memory for many of the adults who have grown up in the region, many of whom enjoy or look forward to their own children experiencing it. I look forward to taking my niece and nephew there, when they are old enough, as well as my own future children. It is a traditional spot for School trips; the sports teams operating from the rink have a proud history and fearsome reputation. It s an attraction for the large numbers of University students that travel to the two nearest Universities. The borough is blighted with rotting seaside hotels which (following the recent development of the Idols site) should be converted into attractive flat or maisonette housing as a priority.

I read a lot this year - I'll write more about that and reflections on goodreads in another post - but most of the things I read weren't published in 2013. (I should also write a bit about my thoughts on e-readers). However, it seems I have enough to write about 2013's novels to make a round-up post worthwhile, so here we go. This year, crime author Robert Galbraith published his first novel The Cuckoo's Calling. I'd never have heard of it if Galbraith was not outed as an alias for Joanne "JK" Rowling. Clues that Rowling was working on a detective story exist as early as a Guardian preview article in 2012 for her last novel, The Casual Vacancy. Further hints, for me, that this was no first-time author were the taglines from Ian Rankin and Val McDermid on the cover, writers of a calibre I'd be surprised a new author could attract. However I don't know whether they were on the pre-unveiling cover or not. Rowling was upset be outed, having enjoyed the freedom to write without the baggage of expectation that she is subject to. I hope she's pleased: prior to her unmasking the novel was warmly received by the (admittedly relatively small) number of people who read it. And a very good novel it is too. It starts with a genre clich of a grizzled, meloncholy detective, Mr. Cormoran Strike, in an upstairs office with a neon light flickering through the window, but fleshes the story out both forwards - a client, a mysterious death - and backwards - how did Mr. Strike end up in that upstairs office - living out of it, no less? As is traditional for the genre there's a very clever twist. What I really enjoyed about Cormoran Strike was Galbraith/Rowling moving quickly from Chandler-esque everyman to a well fleshed-out, complex protagonist, intertwining the development of the character with the unfolding of the wider plot. I'm looking forward to the sequel, expected in 2014. A second surprise favourite this year was Lauren Beukes' time-tripping crime story The Shining Girls. A monsterous murder of women somehow finds a room in Chicago that lets him travel through time (or perhaps the room finds him). He uses this facility to stalk and murder a set of Shining Girls: women who, for one reason or another, literally 'shine' in his perception of them. One such woman survives his first attack and decides to try and find out who attacked her, and why. The crimes are described in a brutal fashion which - from a distance - resemble the sometimes glorified violence for which crime fiction is sometimes criticised, but the focus of the story is very much on the victims: they are fully fleshed out characters and each death is felt by the reader as a genuine tragedy. I discovered Beukes when her earlier novel Zoo City was included in a Humble eBook bundle. On reading The Shining Girls I felt that the novel deserved to be more widely known than I would expect it to be trapped in the ghetto of genre fiction, so I was pleased to discover that the very mainstream Richard and Judy Book Club discovered it. In established author news, Terry Pratchett, having adopted speech recognition for writing (to combat his debilitating Alzheimer's) has seemingly managed to accelerate his rate of production and squeezed out at least two this year: The Long War with Stephen Baxter is the sequel to 2012's The Long Earth which I very much enjoyed, but it really felt like "difficult second novel" to me. Hopefully there'll be a third. Raising Steam, the 40th Discworld novel, was an enjoyable romp around the concept of steam trains, featuring the relatively new Moist von Lipwig who has managed to become one of my favourite Discworld characters. I can't think of much more to say about the novel, really. It's a Discworld novel, probably not the best introduction to the series for a new reader, but will give a reader familiar with the franchise everything they expect, and possibly no more. Iain Banks sadly died this year, shortly after the publication of his last novel, The Quarry. It's sat on my hardback shelf for the time being. I couldn't bring myself to read it in 2013. I did read his last SF offering from the year prior, The Hydrogen Sonata. Sadly, yet coincidentally, both of these books examine the nature of living and dying, The Quarry in particular from the point of view of a terminal cancer sufferer. I have a small backlog of unread Banks fiction which I want to take my time over with. Finally, whilst not really a book, I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC's 2013 adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Natalie Dormer wrote a piece on the making of the drama which should serve as a good introduction. At the time of writing, most of the programmes have disappeared from iPlayer, but I would be surprised if this wasn't released commercially at some point.

A nice view at work this morning.

In April this year, Iain Banks announced that he had inoperable cancer. At the time I was reading what became his last Culture novel, "The Hydrogen Sonata". Banks died shortly afterwards in June. I came across this passage in "The Hydrogen Sonata" which struck me as poignant:

Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter. However, just having done more of it than someone else doesn't really make much difference.

Much belated RIP, Iain Banks.

I got married! Sarah and I tied the knot on the 10th August this year. We married in a registry office where we live and had an evening reception on Tynemouth beach. A fantastic time was had by all. We honeymooned in Sorrento, Italy, which was fantastic. We spent one day visiting Pompeii (my fourth visit: about 6 hours on our feet this time, and we walked from one side right to the other); another day in Herculaneum (my second visit); one day visiting the village near where we were staying, where we visited a local food festival and bought the nicest Marmelade I've ever tasted; a few day and evenings in Sorrento town itself; but most of the time we just relaxed, swam, snoozed, read.

For some reason I've always hated the layout of Office Suite tools such as LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office (I seem to find the Ribbon interface nicer than what has gone before, although I can't put my finger on why.) I always find the sheer quantity of UI in these programs have a real negative impact on creativity. I still haven't found anything as inspirational as a blank sheet of paper (or perhaps more accurately, less demotivating than a blank sheet of paper.) I've tried disabling and removing bits in the past, but I've never ended up with something I was happy with. Recently I tried attaching one of the two standard toolbars vertically, instead of horizontally. Surprisingly to me, the result feels a lot nicer. There's still some way to go, though. focuswriter is pretty good but I like to have some graphical features. By analogy when I write on paper it's not always straight lines of words, but sometimes bubbles, arrows, lines, strikethroughs, etc. At least I can get bullet points by remembering the write X compose key sequence (alt gr, dot, equals)

Wow, my first "Debian day" in 2013, but it's a bit of a misnomer because I didn't do any Debian work tonight. I spent some time poking at geary, Yorba's new email client which looks promising. I haven't managed to get it working much, though. Someone packaged an old version in Debian but it wouldn't work with either my home or my work IMAP/SMTP servers for various reasons. I did get a git checkout to build in March or April but that stopped working on Debian when they dropped "Precise" support (It seems they were backporting various GIR/Webkit bits and pieces into their own code and didn't want to carry that around any more). They've currently got a fundraiser going, they're aiming for $100k and (at the time of writing) need half of that with only 10 hours to go. Recently I've also been trying to fix a rockbox bug on Sansa Fuze v1 which really cripples writing onto the Fuze. The original firmware does not support microsd capacities >32G which rules it out for me. Sadly the v1 version of the Fuze is uncommon enough that I don't think this bug is getting much attention. My investigations have been limited to fairly dumb bisect-like approaches, combined with lots of writing onto a microsd card (which will probably be killed dead by all this). My initial attempts at a bisect have failed as it turns out the problem is the inverse of a regression: it bizarrely seems as if the bug was fixed in a version-branch, rather than stopped working in one, so it has never been squashed in the main branch at all. Furthermore, the commit that seems to fix the problem is a totally benign version bump, and almost certainly hasn't fixed the bug. So with sufficient further testing I'll probably just prove that this bug has never been fixed. It might be time to switch tack and look into diagnosing the bug rather than trying to side-step it. Or perhaps just spend 15 on a Sansa Clip Zip and forget all about the Fuze v1. Either way I hope someone releases a 128G microsd card this year! Every now and then I wonder whether it would make sense to package rockbox in Debian in some way. Probably not.

Recently, I've been using awk in shell scripts more and more often. When I saw Thomas' Blog I reeled a bit from of the make/shell quoted within. (Sorry Thomas! It's still a thought provoking blog post):

DEBVERS         ?= $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog   sed -n -e 's/^Version: //p')
VERSION         ?= $(shell echo '$(DEBVERS)'   sed -e 's/^[\[:digit:]]*://' -e 's/[-].*//')
DEBFLAVOR       ?= $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog   grep -E ^Distribution:   cut -d" " -f2)
DEBPKGNAME      ?= $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog   grep -E ^Source:   cut -d" " -f2)
DEBIAN_BRANCH   ?= $(shell cat debian/gbp.conf   grep debian-branch   cut -d'=' -f2   awk ' print $1 ')
GIT_TAG         ?= $(shell echo '$(VERSION)'   sed -e 's/~/_/')

I couldn't help but re-write it to be more efficient (and in the case of DEBIAN_BRANCH, more correct):

DEBVERS        := $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog   awk '/^Version:/  print $$2 ')
VERSION        := $(shell echo '$(DEBVERS)'   sed -e 's/^[0-9]*://' -e 's/-.*//')
DEBFLAVOR      := $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog   awk '/^Distribution:/  print $$2 ')
DEBPKGNAME     := $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog   awk '/^Source:/  print $$2 ')
DEBIAN_BRANCH  := $(shell awk 'BEGIN FS="[= ]+"  /debian-branch/  print $$2 ' debian/gbp.conf)
GIT_TAG        := $(subst ~,_,$(VERSION))

Last year, I failed to write and mention that I'd joined the Council of the Free/Libre Open-Source Software UK group FLOSS UK, formerly known as the UK UNIX User's Group (UKUUG). As a council-member, I helped to organise the recent Large Installation Systems Administration conference that took place in my native Newcastle, UK. Five years ago I gave a talk at the (then) UKUUG Linux conference in Manchester, 2008, about documentation for sysadmins, using ikiwiki. I recently noticed that I hadn't put the abstract or slides up here, so now I have.

With GNOME 3, if you want to override a setting with a new site default, assuming your app has been updated to use the new gsettings API and doesn't still use the old gconf one, the best guide on what to do is still Ross Burton's blog post from two years ago, although you can find most of what you need to know buried deep in the GSettings C API specification, which is not the first place I would have looked (lesson learned!) Note: In this context I'm in the role of systems administrator, rather than distributor/vendor or software author. Whereas you are generally advised to use gsettings itself and not poke at the backend (dconf for Linux), the documentation seems to point sysadmins towards dconf hackery rather than gsettings. However gsettings worked for me, and I got nowhere with dconf direct. Some caveats worth knowing about:

• Throughout the GNOME documentation and tools, "schema", "key" and "path" are used nearly interchangeably to mean roughly the same thing. (I think a path describes a key within a schema, to be precise.)
• schemas/keys/paths "must start with and end with a forward slash character", except when they mustn't, such as in override files, where you must use a dot, and you don't prefix or suffix the schema/key/path with dots. In fact the command line gsettings tool only accepts dotted schemas, not slash-separated ones.
• Sometimes, people choose XML, and save themselves the trouble of writing a custom parser, but at the expense of ease for humans having to read or write files. gsettings uses XML for schema files, but a separate ini-style format for override files. Everybody wins?
• glib-compile-schemas requires a path argument, so all your schema and override files must be in the same place. Sites have to lump stuff into /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas alongside distribution files, rather than separated out to (say) /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas.
• It's quite possible to get an override file past glib-compile-schemas which non-the-less is broken. The result is gsettings clients, including the gsettings binary itself, complaining and then segfaulting. Do not rely on glib-compile-schemas to ensure compliant override files.
• glib-compile-schemas would appear to read override files in native byte order, so make sure you name your override so that it sorts after any distribution-provided overrides. E.g., 20_my_gnome-shell.gschema.override to sort after 10_gnome-shell.gschema.override.

Today I had to create 40 guest accounts on our 70-seat Linux cluster, including randomly generate passwords, set up persistent storage on our NFS server, etc.; quickly. As a nice-to-have I also wanted to add some application icons to the GNOME 3 "Favourite Apps" menu for the guests. Would you like to guess which of those jobs was the easier of the two?

The classic procmail recipe for (reasonably) safe automatic mailing list filtering is

:0
* ^List-Id:[^<]+<\/[a-z0-9-.]+
$MAILDIR/MATCH/

This relies on mailing lists being configured such that the first part of the ID, up to the first dot, is a good identifier for the list. this is not always the case (*.lists.fedoraproject.org, I'm looking at you). Removing the dot from the expression above means you end up with unambiguous, albeit long, folder names (devel.lists.fedoraproject.org). If you access this mail over IMAP, you have another problem: the dots create a nested folder heirarchy that probably doesn't make any sense (devel lists fedoraproject org). It's possible to change the configuration of IMAP clients and servers to use a different delimiter, but this is not an oft travelled road, and I don't feel like finding the pot holes. Better to substitute the dot for something else. I'd recommend an ASCII character, Unicode seems to throw up a whole bunch of client problems. Here's a variation that solves the problem:

:0
* ^List-Id:[^<]+<\/[a-z0-9-.]+
 
  :0
  subst=  echo "$MATCH"   tr . :
  :0
  $MAILDIR/$subst/
 

At the cost of elegance, you can add rules to give friendlier names to lists from folks who have well-defined list-ids (integration left as an exercise to the reader):

:0
* ^List-Id:.*debian.*lists\.debian\.org
subst=  echo "$MATCH"   sed 's/\([A-Za-z0-9-]\+\)\..*/\1/'

Finally, there are some "lists" you probably don't want to file in their own individual folders. Inject these into the top-most rule:

* ! ^List-Id.*groups\.facebook\.com

Finally thanks to Brett for showing me some exim filter snippets that would let me implement the above in a (slightly) nicer looking way. Sadly I think I'm stuck with procmail for some other features I use, but it's been a while since I looked.

I wrote that I would double-check how secure the module selection and downloading is in Puppet. Well, puppet module resolves, fetches and downloads unsigned tarballs from a HTTP source and unpacks them without any verification whatsoever. Related: I've been looking at rpm/yum GPG behaviour. rpm supports checking the signature of RPMs as a separate operation from installing them. You can't ask it to not install a package if the signature is absent or not correct. yum is better when dealing with repositories. It can be told to check the GPG signature on all RPMs both globally (the [main] section of yum.conf) and on a per-repository basis. GPG signature checking can be disabled on the command line with --nogpgcheck. It cannot be selectively enabled on the command line. However, yum install can install local RPMs and RPMs on web servers as well as from repositories. In both of these cases, it will not check the GPG signature at all, no matter what you've put in your yum.conf. Finally, even if all the above worked properly, the GPG keys published by Fedora have almost no public signatures (none at all for EPEL), so neither you nor I could establish a trust path to them. Luckily I can establish a trust path to the RH security key.

Over the last few days I've done quite a lot of work to try and get our puppet configuration up to modern best practises. The Puppet Labs folks strongly encourage you to make as much use of puppet modules as possible. A puppet module gathers together puppet manifests, facter facts and other bits and pieces into a reusable component that you could potentially share with others. Many modules (of very mixed quality) are available on the web, in particular at github and via Puppet Lab's own Forge. Since version 2.7.14, the puppet command-line tool has built-in support for managing modules:

# puppet module list
/etc/puppet/modules
  auth (???)
  interfaces (???)
 
# puppet module install puppetlabs-apt
 

However, they have not provided support for managing modules in puppet manifests themselves. This strikes me as a bit odd: the whole point of using puppet to manage your machines is to capture the configuration in one place. If your configuration depends on a collection of modules and module versions, you'd ideally record that in the puppet configuration itself. Otherwise building a new puppet master is a mixture of manually installing modules and setting it up as a client of your existing master. Other people to the rescue: Ryan Coleman (and Pieter van de Bruggen) have written puppet_module_provider which does exactly this. (Note that they both work for Puppet Labs). Now I can define which modules and what versions are necessary:

class puppetmaster  
   
  module   'rcoleman/puppet_module': ensure => '0.0.3',  
  module   'puppetlabs/firewall':    ensure => '0.0.4',  
  module   'puppetlabs/lvm':         ensure => '0.1.1',  
  module   'puppetlabs/ntp':         ensure => '0.2.0',  
   

I've decided to pin specific versions given the highly variable nature of module quality. There's no guarantee of backwards compatibility except by reputation of the publisher. The puppetlabs modules are likely to be of higher quality than average, so over time I'll probably gain confidence to change the specific versioning to 'latest' or similar. I also want to double-check how secure the module selection and downloading is (whether it's over HTTPS or cryptographic signatures are checked etc.)

On Friday, I uploaded an initial package for squishyball to Debian experimental. It's now in the NEW queue. squishyball is a command-line tool to help you compare two audio files. It supports basic A/B testing, A/B/X testing and X/X/Y ("triangle") tests to help rule out various selection, confirmation and ordering biases. I'm using it to figure out the optimal lossy audio codec and bitrate to encode my music collection with. It can be a little fiddly to use if you also use pulseaudio. I specify a specific ALSA device via -d, identified via aplay -L, and keep alsamixer running in a separate window to adjust volume if necessary, since GNOME's volume control shortcuts effect the pulseaudio mixers only. This way I can use headphones via the onboard analog stereo output and leave my desktop session configured to use HDMI output. For the time being, I've disabled support for the OPUS audio format. This is to prevent squishyball (GPL) from linking against libssl, which is pulled in by libopusfile. A future version of the package might manage to make this work.