Debian LTS October was the sixth month I contributed to Debian LTS under the Freexian umbrella. In total I spent four hours working on:

• krb5: I applied patches for CVE-2015-2697 and CVE-2015-2695. The DLA-340-1 was released on November though since one of the patches was incomplete.

Besides that I did CVE triaging of 16 CVEs to check if and how they affect oldoldstable security as part of my LTS front desk work. I also added some very basic indentation support to our CVE/list Emacs major-mode on non LTS time. Other Debian stuff

• I've released git-buildpackage 0.7.0 with lots of updates, most notably more complete rpm support, a git-pbuilder update and documentation updates. This release has patches from 9 different contributors, thanks a lot!
• Uploaded libvirt 1.2.21~rc1 to experimental, submitted a patch to fix running autopkg tests in pbuilder (#802379) and fixed RC bug #802281 in Icedove.
• I've updated cl2vcs, a CGI to link commit IDs in the debian/changelog to the VCS, to 0.0.4 fixing some bugs that showed up after I updated the hosting machine to Jessie as well as support for the [commitid1,commitd2,commit3,...] format when grouping commits. (SSL certificate of the server is CAcert signed)
• At Halloween five Debian aficionados met for Hacking Erpel 1 (aka HEPL1) in Erpel (link goes to German Wikipedia) between Bonn and Koblenz. Some details are here. We're aiming for more of these events on a more frequent basis (HEPL0 being back in 2013) so if you're somewhere from that area and want to join us next time just subscribe to the new mailing list (in German, SSL certificate of the server is CAcert signed).

Today is the last day of my stay here in Edinburgh. I have already packed most of my things and am saying goodbye at work and at home today. I have almost finalised my internship report which I hopefully will finish this afternoon. With that finished, my work here is done. Tomorrow at 7:00 I will take the bus to the airport, check-in and depart at 9:25 (EasyJet flight 6921) and arrive at 12:00 on Schiphol Airport. I want to thank everyone for the great time I had here. Fairouz Kamareddine and Rob Nederpelt for arranging this internship, their supervision and guidance. My colleagues Manuel and Krzysztof for the productive and fun times we had. My “lunch friends”: Gonzalo, Manuel, Simone, Laurent, and more for the many laughs and discussions during lunch. My parents and friends for visiting me here and being interested in all my stories. I am ready to go home and would like to. But I also would like to stay here as well. Maybe, in the future I will be back… MathLang is not finished just yet :-).

The past few days I have been accumulating knowledge. I have encountered quite some new concepts and stuff they use here, but also old knowledge had to be refreshed. I have looked again at XML technologies as W3c XML Schema, RelaxNG, XSLT and XML in general. I had to dive into OCaml since that’s the main language used here. Fortunately I can make use of my past Haskell experience there. So now I have yet a new language to add to my used-programming-languages list. I have used my webspace provided by MACS to set up a page about all my internship work related stuff. It gave me another opportunity to make use of webgen again, what a great tool! Simple text files in a directory structure are converted to a site with such ease. A title, menu and navigation bar, all done automatically and it’s all static HTML in a nice XHTML 1.1 compliant package. MathLang I have read all the available presentations and papers on MathLang that I could find. At the TU/e I was taught the Weak-Type Theory by professor Nederpelt (which is a basis for this mathematical language), so I have some background in this area. I’ve tried to write a page about what MathLang is. I’ll probably have to improve the descriptions and make the whole thing clearer. The Plan My first task will be to write a MathLang-Core concrete syntax compiler that can generate the still to be defined XML format. The AST used in this compiling process should also be prepared so that the MathLang type checker can run on it. Once the compiling to XML is done, I might be able to use XSLT to transform it back to the original syntax, hence proving the equivalence of the two syntaxes. For monitoring my progress, see my online log.

I have fixed my Hobix setup, so I can write again. There was some problem/incompatibility with the new Ruby 1.8.3 in sid concerning the YAML implementation. A lot has happened in the past 7 weeks so I don’t know really where to start. I think I’ll start with the current hot item in my life: the internship that I am arranging. I’m planning to visit Scotland, Edinburgh in particular. There, at the Heriot-Watt University I will work on MathLang under the supervision of Fairouz Kamareddine (in Scotland) and Rob Nederpelt (here at the TU/e). MathLang is a mathematical language that will provide support for checking well-formedness and allow for better formalisation while also being usable in the digital world. What my exact assignment will be, I do not know yet, I will hear the specifics soon. For now I know that it has something to do with LaTeX, TeXmacs and Guile GNOME implementation-wise. I really am excited about going there for three months already, but there is still a lot of stuff to arrange, both financially and formally. I received an extra scholarship today from a faculty institute which helps a lot in the financial department. Now, if I could just have all the form stuff done, I am ready for the local long-term holiday arranging kinda stuff :). Stay tuned…