Welcome to the November 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).

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Reproducible Builds Summit 2023 Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany! Amazingly, the agenda and all notes from all sessions are all online many thanks to everyone who wrote notes from the sessions. As a followup on one idea, started at the summit, Alexander Couzens and Holger Levsen started work on a cache (or tailored front-end) for the snapshot.debian.org service. The general idea is that, when rebuilding Debian, you do not actually need the whole ~140TB of data from snapshot.debian.org; rather, only a very small subset of the packages are ever used for for building. It turns out, for amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, riscv64 and s390 for Debian trixie, unstable and experimental, this is only around 500GB ie. less than 1%. Although the new service not yet ready for usage, it has already provided a promising outlook in this regard. More information is available on https://rebuilder-snapshot.debian.net and we hope that this service becomes usable in the coming weeks. The adjacent picture shows a sticky note authored by Jan-Benedict Glaw at the summit in Hamburg, confirming Holger Levsen s theory that rebuilding all Debian packages needs a very small subset of packages, the text states that 69,200 packages (in Debian sid) list 24,850 packages in their .buildinfo files, in 8,0200 variations. This little piece of paper was the beginning of rebuilder-snapshot and is a direct outcome of the summit! The Reproducible Builds team would like to thank our event sponsors who include Mullvad VPN, openSUSE, Debian, Software Freedom Conservancy, Allotropia and Aspiration Tech.

Beyond Trusting FOSS presentation at SeaGL On November 4th, Vagrant Cascadian presented Beyond Trusting FOSS at SeaGL in Seattle, WA in the United States. Founded in 2013, SeaGL is a free, grassroots technical summit dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about free source software, hardware and culture. The summary of Vagrant s talk mentions that it will:

[ ] introduce the concepts of Reproducible Builds, including best practices for developing and releasing software, the tools available to help diagnose issues, and touch on progress towards solving decades-old deeply pervasive fundamental security issues Learn how to verify and demonstrate trust, rather than simply hoping everything is OK!

Germane to the contents of the talk, the slides for Vagrant s talk can be built reproducibly, resulting in a PDF with a SHA1 of cfde2f8a0b7e6ec9b85377eeac0661d728b70f34 when built on Debian bookworm and c21fab273232c550ce822c4b0d9988e6c49aa2c3 on Debian sid at the time of writing.

Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar have published an article in a Special Issue of the IEEE s Security & Privacy magazine. Entitled A Viewpoint on Human Factors in Software Supply Chain Security: A Research Agenda, the paper justifies the need for reproducible builds to reach developers and end-users specifically, and furthermore points out some under-researched topics that we have seen mentioned in interviews. An author pre-print of the article is available in PDF form.

Community updates On our mailing list this month:

• Julien Lepiller mentioned that they were interested in translating our website, and provided offered GNU Guix s translation framework (Weblate) as a potential model to emulate.
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted a positive LibreOffice success story documenting that, after some work:

  [ ] today I hold in my hands the first two bit-identical LibreOffice rpm packages. And this is the success I wanted to share with you all today [and] it makes me feel as if we can solve anything.

• kpcyrd reported on their excellent results with making esp32c3 microcontroller firmware reproducible with Rust, repro-env and Arch Linux:

  I chose the esp32c3 [board] because it has good Rust support from the esp-rs project, and you can get a dev board for about 6-8 . To document my build environment I used repro-env together with Arch Linux because its archive is very reliable and contains all the different Rust development tools I needed.

• Separate to their work on LibreOffice however, Bernhard M. Wiedemann also requested assistance with a number of packages that so far refuse to build reproducibly. He writes that the common theme around them is that they use scheme or lisp to produce binaries with a dump command and hopes that someone may be able to help.
• Finally, Fay Stegerman regrettably reports that she will no longer be able to work on Android reproducible builds nor update the Reproducible Builds community with the status of reproducibility within F-Droid.

openSUSE updates Bernhard M. Wiedemann has created a wiki page outlining an proposal to create a general-purpose Linux distribution which consists of 100% bit-reproducible packages albeit minus the embedded signature within RPM files. It would be based on openSUSE Tumbleweed or, if available, its Slowroll-variant. In addition, Bernhard posted another monthly update for his work elsewhere in openSUSE.

Reproducibility-related changes in Debian As recently reported in the most recent Debian Developer News, Paul Gevers has integrated a package s reproducibility status into the way Debian migrates packages into the next stable release. For the amd64, arm64, i386 and armhf architectures, data is collected from the Reproducible Builds testing framework is collected by this migration software even though, at the time of writing, it neither causes nor migration bonuses nor blocks migration. Indeed, the information only results are visible on Britney s excuses as well as on individual packages pages on tracker.debian.org.

Ubuntu Launchpad now supports .buildinfo files Back in 2017, Steve Langasek filed a bug against Ubuntu s Launchpad code hosting platform to report that .changes files (artifacts of building Ubuntu and Debian packages) reference .buildinfo files that aren t actually exposed by Launchpad itself. This was causing issues when attempting to process .changes files with tools such as Lintian. However, it was noticed last month that, in early August of this year, Simon Quigley had resolved this issue, and .buildinfo files are now available from the Launchpad system.

PHP reproducibility updates There have been two updates from the PHP programming language this month. Firstly, the widely-deployed PHPUnit framework for the PHP programming language have recently released version 10.5.0, which introduces the inclusion of a composer.lock file, ensuring total reproducibility of the shipped binary file. Further details and the discussion that went into their particular implementation can be found on the associated GitHub pull request. In addition, the presentation Leveraging Nix in the PHP ecosystem has been given in late October at the PHP International Conference in Munich by Pol Dellaiera. While the video replay is not yet available, the (reproducible) presentation slides and speaker notes are available.

diffoscope changes diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues. This month, Chris Lamb made a number of changes, including:

• Improving DOS/MBR extraction by adding support for 7z. [ ]
• Adding a missing RequiredToolNotFound import. [ ]
• As a UI/UX improvement, try and avoid printing an extended traceback if diffoscope runs out of memory. [ ]
• Mark diffoscope as stable on PyPI.org. [ ]
• Uploading version 252 to Debian unstable. [ ]

Website updates A huge number of notes were added to our website that were taken at our recent Reproducible Builds Summit held between October 31st and November 2nd in Hamburg, Germany. In particular, a big thanks to Arnout Engelen, Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Daan De Meyer, Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras, Holger Levsen and Orhun Parmaks z. In addition to this, a number of other changes were made, including:

• Chris Lamb migrated the website s homepage to a hero image [ ], improved the documentation related to SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and CMake [ ], added iomart (ne Bytemark) and DigitalOcean to our sponsors page [ ] and dropped an unnecessary link on some horizontal navigation buttons [ ].
• Holger Levsen also made a large number of notes pages from our 2022 summit in Venice [ ], migrated the website s syntax highlighter from [Pygments]https://pygments.org/() to Rouge [ ], fixed some grammar on our donate page [ ][ ][ ] and did a lot of updates to the Hamburg Summit s general information page [ ][ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • amber-cli (date-related issue)
  • bin86 (FTBFS-2038)
  • buildah (timestamp)
  • colord (CPU)
  • google-noto-fonts (file modification issue)
  • grub2 (directory-related metadata)
  • guile-fibers (parallelism issue)
  • guile-newt (parallelism issue)
  • gutenprint (embedded date/hostname)
  • hub (random build path)
  • ipxe (nondeterministic behavoiour)
  • joker / joker
  • kopete (undefined behaviour)
  • kraft (embedde hostname)
  • libcamera (signature)
  • libguestfs (embeds build host file)
  • llvm (toolchain/Rust-related issue)
  • nfdump (date-related issue)
  • ovmf (unknown cause)
  • quazip (missing fonts)
  • rdflib (nondeterminstic behaviour)
  • rpm (toolchain)
  • tigervnc (embedded an RSA signature)
  • whatsie (date-related issue)
  • xen (time-related issue)
• Cathy Hu:
  • policycoreutils (sort-related issue)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1055919 filed against python-ansible-pygments.
  • #1055920 filed against bidict.
  • #1056117 filed against meson.
  • #1056118 filed against radsecproxy.
  • #1056119 filed against taffybar.
  • #1056398 filed against php-doc.
  • #1056571 filed against pelican.
  • #1056572 filed against maildir-utils.
  • #1056573 filed against openmrac-data.
  • #1056649 filed against vectorscan.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1055969 filed against kuttypy.

Reproducibility testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Track packages marked as Priority: important in a new package set. [ ][ ]
  • Stop scheduling packages that fail to build from source in bookworm [ ] and bullseye. [ ].
  • Add old releases dashboard link in web navigation. [ ]
  • Permit re-run of the pool_buildinfos script to be re-run for a specific year. [ ]
  • Grant jbglaw access to the osuosl4 node [ ][ ] along with lynxis [ ].
  • Increase RAM on the amd64 Ionos builders from 48 GiB to 64 GiB; thanks IONOS! [ ]
  • Move buster to archived suites. [ ][ ]
  • Reduce the number of arm64 architecture workers from 24 to 16 in order to improve stability [ ], reduce the workers for amd64 from 32 to 28 and, for i386, reduce from 12 down to 8 [ ].
  • Show the entire build history of each Debian package. [ ]
  • Stop scheduling already tested package/version combinations in Debian bookworm. [ ]
• Snapshot service for rebuilders
  • Add an HTTP-based API endpoint. [ ][ ]
  • Add a Gunicorn instance to serve the HTTP API. [ ]
  • Add an NGINX config [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• System-health:
  • Detect failures due to HTTP 503 Service Unavailable errors. [ ]
  • Detect failures to update package sets. [ ]
  • Detect unmet dependencies. (This usually occurs with builds of Debian live-build.) [ ]
• Misc-related changes:
  • do install systemd-ommd on jenkins. [ ]
  • fix harmless typo in squid.conf for codethink04. [ ]
  • fixup: reproducible Debian: add gunicorn service to serve /api for rebuilder-snapshot.d.o. [ ]
  • Increase codethink04 s Squid cache_dir size setting to 16 GiB. [ ]
  • Don t install systemd-oomd as it unfortunately kills sshd [ ]
  • Use debootstrap from backports when commisioning nodes. [ ]
  • Add the live_build_debian_stretch_gnome, debsums-tests_buster and debsums-tests_buster jobs to the zombie list. [ ][ ]
  • Run jekyll build with the --watch argument when building the Reproducible Builds website. [ ]
  • Misc node maintenance. [ ][ ][ ]

Other changes were made as well, however, including Mattia Rizzolo fixing rc.local s Bash syntax so it can actually run [ ], commenting away some file cleanup code that is (potentially) deleting too much [ ] and fixing the html_brekages page for Debian package builds [ ]. Finally, diagnosed and submitted a patch to add a AddEncoding gzip .gz line to the tests.reproducible-builds.org Apache configuration so that Gzip files aren t re-compressed as Gzip which some clients can t deal with (as well as being a waste of time). [ ]

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If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
• Mastodon: @reproducible_builds
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds

Curiosity I guess this would be common to most of us. While I grew up, right from the childhood itself, the sky was always an intriguing view. The Stars, the Moon, the Eclipses; were all fascinating. As a child, in my region, religion and culture; the mythology also built up stories around it. Lunar Eclipses have a story of its own. During Solar Eclipses, parents still insist that we do not go out. And to be done with the food eating before/after the eclipse. Then there s the Hindu Astrology part, which claims its own theories and drags in mythology along. For example, you ll still find the Hindu Astrology making recommendations to follow certain practices with the planets, to get auspicious personal results. As far as I know, other religions too have similar beliefs about the planets. As a child, we are told the Moon to be addressed as an Uncle ( ). There s also a rhyme around it, that many of us must have heard. And if you look at our god, Lord Mahadev, he s got a crescent on his head

Lord Mahadev

Reality Fast-forward to today, as I grew, so did some of my understanding. It is fascinating how mankind has achieved so much understanding of our surrounding. You could go through the documentaries on Mars Exploration, for example; to see how the rovers are providing invaluable data. As a mere individual, there s a limit to what one can achieve. But the questions flow in free.

• Is there life beyond us
• What s out there in the sky
• Why is all this the way it is

Hobby The very first step, for me, for every such curiosity, has been to do the ground work, with the resources I have. To study on the subject. I have done this all my life. For example, I started into the Software domain as: A curiosity => A Hobby => A profession Same was the case with some of the other hobbies, equally difficult as Astronomy, that I developed a liking for. Just did the ground work, studied on those topics and then applied the knowledge to further improve it and build up some experience. And star gazing came in no different. As a complete noob, had to start with the A B C on the subject of Astronomy. Familiarize myself with the usual terms. As so on PS: Do keep in mind that not all hobbies have a successful end. For example, I always craved to be good with graphic designing, image processing and the likes, where I ve always failed. Never was able to keep myself motivated enough. Similar was my experience when trying to learn playing a musical instrument. Just didn t work out for me, then. There s also a phase in it, where you fail and then learn from the failures and proceed further, and then eventually succeed. But we all like to talk about the successes. :-)

Astronomy So far, my impression has been that this topic/domain will not suit most of the people. While the initial attraction may be strong, given the complexity and perseverance that Astronomy requires, most people would lose interest in it very soon. Then there s the realization factor. If one goes with an expectation to get quick results, they may get disappointed. It isn t like a point and shoot device that d give you results on the spot. There s also the expectation side of things. If you are a person more accustomed to taking pretty selfies, which always come right because the phone manufacturer does heavy processing on the images to ensure that you get to see the pretty fake self, for the most of the times; then star gazing with telescopes could be a frustrating experience altogether. What you get to see in the images on the internet will be very different than what you d be able to see with your eyes and your basic telescope. There s also the cost aspect. The more powerful (and expensive) your telescope, the better your view. And all things aside, it still may get you lose interest, after you ve done all the ground work and spent a good chunk of money on it. Simply because the object you are gazing at is more a still image, which can quickly get boring for many. On the other hand, if none of the things obstruct, then the domain of Astronomy can be quite fascinating. It is a continuous learning domain (reminds me of CI in our software field these days). It is just the beginning for us here, and we hope to have a lasting experience in it.

The Internet I have been indebted to the internet right from the beginning. The internet is what helped me be able to achieve all I wanted. It is one field with no boundaries. If there is a will, there is a way; and often times, the internet is the way.

• I learnt computers over the internet.
• Learnt more about gardening and plants over the internet
• Learnt more about fish care-taking over the internet

And many many more things. Some of the communities over the internet are a great way to participation. They bridge the age gap, the regional gap and many more. For my Astronomy need, I was glad to see so many active communities, with great participants, on the internet.

Telescope While there are multiple options to start star gazing, I chose to start with a telescope. But as someone completely new to this domain, there was a long way to go. And to add to that, the real life: work + family I spent a good 12+ months reading up on the different types of telescopes, what they are, their differences, their costs, their practical availability etc. The good thing is that the market has offerings for everything. From a very basic binocular to a fully automatic Maksutov-Cassegrain scope. It all would depend on your budget.

Automatic vs Manual To make it easy for the users, the market has multiple options in the offering. One could opt-in for a cheap, basic and manually operated telescope; which would require the user to do a lot of ground study. On the other hand, users also have the option of automatic telescopes which do the hard work of locating and tracking the planetary objects. Either option aside, the end result of how much you ll be able to observe the sky, still depends on many many more factors: Enthusiasm over time, Light Pollution, Clear Skies, Timing etc. PS: The planetary objects move at a steady pace. Objects you lock into your view now will be gone out of the FOV in just a matter of minutes.

My Telescope After spending so much of the time reading up on types of telescopes, my conclusion was that a scope with high aperture and focal length was the way to go forward. This made me shorten the list to Dobsonians. But the Dobsonians aren t a very cheap telescope, whether manual or automatic. My final decision made me acquire a 6" Dobsonian Telescope. It is a Newtonian Reflecting Telescope with a 1200mm focal length and 150mm diameter. Another thing about this subject is that most of the stuff you do in Astronomy; right from the telescope selection, to installation, to star gazing; most of it is DIY, so your mileage may vary with the end result and experience. For me, installation wasn t very difficult. I was able to assemble the base Dobsonian mount and the scope in around 2 hours. But the installation manual, I had been provided with, was very brief. I ended up with one module in the mount wrongly fit, which I was able to fix later, with the help of online forums.

Dobsonian Mount

In this image you can see that the side facing out, where the handle will go, is wrong. If fit this way, the handle will not withstand any weight at all.

Correct Panel Side

The right fix of the handle base board. In this image, the handle is on the other side that I m holding. Because the initial fit put in some damage to the engineered wood, I fixed it up by sealing with some adhesive. With that, this is what my final telescope looks like.

Final Telescope

Clear Skies While the telescope was ready, the skies were not. For almost next 10 days, we had no clear skies at all. All I could do was wait. Wait so much that I had forgotten to check on the skies. Luckily, my wife noticed clear skies this week for a single day. Clear enough that we could try out our telescope for the very first time.

Me posing for a shot

Telescope As I said earlier, in my opinion, it takes a lot of patience and perseverance on this subject. And most of the things here are DIY. To start with, we targeted the Moon. Because it is easy. I pointed the scope to the moon, then looked into the finder scope to center it, and then looked through the eyepiece. And blank. Nothing out there. Turns out, the finder scope and the viewer s angle weren t aligned. This is common and the first DIY step, when you plan to use your telescope for viewing. Since our first attempt was unplanned and just random because we luckily spotted that the skies were clear, we weren t prepared for this. Lucky enough, mapping the difference in the alignment, in the head, is not very difficult. After a couple of minutes, I could make out the point in the finder scope, where the object if projected, would show proper in the viewer. With that done, it was just mesmerizing to see the Moon, in a bit more detail, than what I ve seen all these years of my life.

Moon

Moon

Moon

Moon

The images are not exactly what we saw with our eyes. The view was much more vivid than these pictures. But as a first timer, I really wanted to capture this first moment of a closer view of the Moon. In the whole process; that of ground work studying about telescopes, installation of the telescope, astronomy basics and many other things; the most difficult part in this entire journey, was to point my phone to the viewing eyepiece, to get a shot of the object. This requirement just introduced me to astrophotography. And then, Dobsonians aren t the best model for astrophotography, to what I ve learnt so far. Hopefully, I ll find my ways to do some DIY astrophotography with the tools I have. Or extend my arsenal over time. But overall, we ve been very pleased with the subject of Astronomy. It is a different feel altogether and we re glad to have forayed into it.

Since the release of xf86-video-intel 2.99.912 a month ago several enhancements and fixes in xf86-video-intel git piled up. Again testing is very much appreciated: xserver-xorg-video-intel packages.

Some projects tend to like to abstract everything - KDE, I am looking at your developer base, see phonon for a very misguided effort. While abstracting config files like elektra tries to do looks like a laudable goal, it can't cover all of them plus is a maintenance nightmare.
Adding a crappy^Wbloated c++ layer in order not to prompt user is definitely using the wrong tool at hands. It seems this year again Debian choose super boring Google summer subjects, while Linaro let the students do cool stuff. BTW git implemented all kind of merge strategies, that would be the first place to look at and merge into dpkg.

With the release of xf86-video-intel 2.99.912 good sna support is expected for several generation of Intel devices. Again testing is very much appreciated: xserver-xorg-video-intel packages.

Since the release of xf86-video-intel 2.99.911 lots of changes landed in upstream git. Hence for better Haswell support it was decided to use latest git. Again testing is appreciated (positive tests known on Haswell-ULT HD 4400 and Haswell HD Graphics 5000): xserver-xorg-video-intel packages.

The new xf86-input-synaptics 1.8 release is available in experimental. It supports the new Lenovo *40 series and the cute Carbon X1 thingy. Testing is appreciated, as this might soon move to unstable: xerver-xorg-input-synaptics packages.

Paperscape visualizes all the arXiv papers. The arXiv is a pioneer in Open Data publishing from 1991 and started by Paul Ginsparg for high energy physicists (hep). It soon extended to most physicists. According to it's importance (citation) each paper has a certain radius and the citations also link the papers to their position in the map. In addition there are helpful overall topics and one can click once zoomed in on each paper to know all the authors and the title. The colors correspond to each arXiv section.

Noticed with a lot of happiness today that Gnome extensions list a new one showing weather information. (:

A bizarre closed user-tracking schism is rebased from shaky grounds to an unexisting target. It is sad to see this continous decline due to unchallenged decisions.

Update: I apologise for spamming all the nice people on Planet Debian with this unrelated post in foreign language it got mis-tagged and (although I tried classifying it correctly and removing it from the separate Debian-only RSS feed going to the Debian Planet) Planet software just keeps it around until admins get a spare moment to remove it manually. The basic idea of the post is that there is a e-government service by the Latvian government that provides any citizen a way to check what their pension would be, but it is kinda useless, because it calculates what you pension would be if you decided to retire right now. So in the post below I provide a few simple steps on how to estimate what the real pension could be (in todays currency values) if a person kept paying into the system at the same rate until the normal retirement age. Latvija.lv ir r ks savas n kotnes pensijas prognoz anai, ta u tas ir, maigi izsakoties, bezj dz gs tiem, kas nepl no iet pensij tuv k gada laik . tri apskatoties atteic gos likumus un noteikumus es nonacu pie lietder g kas metodes. Vispirms m s varam dro i ignor t pensiju indeks ciju un visas ar to saist t s pensiju kapit la p rr in anas vai iemaksu palielin anos ir skaidrs, ka gadiem ejot uz priek u b s kaut k ds infl cijas procents, kura d palielin sies algas, palielin sies iemaksas pensiju kapit l un tiks p rr in tas vis das izmaksas, ta u t pati infl cija tie i ietekm s ar to cik v rt gs b s katrs gala pensijas lats taj br d , kad pensija tiks sa emta, l dz ar to infl cijas efekts tiek neitraliz ts, ja m s v rt jam gala ciparu br a cenu kontekst t.i. ja gal san ks, ka pensija b s 400Ls, tad to vai tas ir daudz vai maz j dom br a cen s, nevis m inot izdom t k das b cenas p c 30 gadiem. To visu emot v r pensijas apr ins stipri vienk r ojas:

1. Pa emam atskaiti no t Latvija.lv pakalpojuma. Tas mums dos uz o br di uzkr to pensijas kapit lu (U) un aptuvenu ciparu par to k ds ir kapit la ikgad jais piaugums (P)
2. Apr inam cik v l gadi ir paliku i l dz pension an s vecumam (t) t.i. l dz 62 gadiem. Es pat r in tos ar to, ka ap to laiku m r a vecums jau b s 65.
3. Sar inam to cik b s aptuvenais pensijas kapit ls pension anas vecuma, ja m s turpinam iemaksas k tagad K = U + ( P * t )
4. Apr inam k da san k ikm ne a pensija no da pensijas kapit la Pensija = K / G / 12, kur G ir emts no pension an s vecumam atbilsto s rindi as MK noteikumos, piem ram 62 gadiem tas ir 18.43

Piez me: G ir statisti u apr in ta prognoze par to cik vid ji gadus Latvijas iedz vot ji nodz vo ja vi i ir sasniegu i attiec go pension an s vecumu, t.i. t ir prognoze par to cik gadus vid ji jums b s tas prieks baud t pensiju. Ja rezult ts san k par k mazs, tad j em v r , ka summa neiek auj dividendes no 2 un 3 pensijas l me a, kas p ris gadu desmitu laik var b t t ri iespaid gs. Da as prognozes ir t das, ka 2ais un 3ais pensijas l menis kop var tu dod v l aptuveni t du pa u pensiju kl t k 1ais l menis. Ta u tas ir stipri atkar gs no fondu tirgus ilglaic gas dinamikas. Man to visu apr inot san k ap 400 Ls pensijas prognoze. Ja piepild s paredz jumi par 2o un 3o pensijas l meni, tad, ja es iedom jos sevi tagad k pension ru ar 600-800 Ls pensiju zin nav ne vainas.

The words "quantum leap" lead to the second misconception that changes of said physical system are instantaneous, which is obviously wrong. Unnamed ten year Debian dude, please take a physics 101: The photon of the LASER comes from a stimulated emission, which is a transition between different states.

According to the release manager of Ubuntu the 10.12 release features the most minimal improvements: ''Doing is a quantum leap from imagining. Anyone having a minimal quantum physics exposure should be aware that a quantum leap is a very tiny leap. So according to the paraphrased intro this release should not even contain 'stable updates?!

The new klibc features fixes for latest 3.6 Linux, dash sync and arm fixes. For details see the longer story on: klibc 2.0.2 release announcement or klibc git repository.

1.5M CPU hours runs on the Vienna Scientific Cluster by my 3D+3V hard expanding loops code. It is simulating the Chromo-Weibel instability of a non-Abelian plasma in an 1d expanding background to account for the expansion of a Quark-Gluon plasma fireball in a heavy ion collision. The code is parallellised using Open MPI and one single run roughly needs 0.5TB memory to hold all the needed 5-dimensional matrices and ~ 72h to complete. The resulting heavy operation is of course matrix multiplication of those physical and auxilliary fields. I tried to use git-annex on the resulting physical fields data output of ~ 150Gb and 300k files. Currently I do prefer git itself for it's speed and it only doubles the amounted space. I'm thrilled to see that git annex is still considering this "semi-extreme" usecase of lots of data files as it would help collaborators to have partial checkouts for laptop usage and quick checks. As the git-annex kickstarter is a rocket, i'd add my wish to see the current symlink mess go: desymlink git-annex. Now it is the time to properly analyse all this data and get the full 3d paper follow up on Instabilities of an anisotropically expanding non-Abelian plasma: 1D+3V discretized hard-loop simulations (previous paper) out maybe soon. (;

The new klibc features prominently the merged stdio branch (causing the version bump). The buffered I/0 allows a faster fstype and thus faster boot. Plus klibc gained the support of several stream I/O functions, for details see the longer story on: klibc 2.0 release announcement or klibc git repository. The dhcp cmd ipconfig can now generate enough info for a proper lease file too and got fixed concerning the min length of it's replies. Google sponsored the /etc/fstab or cmdline boot mounting in kinit. 2.0 is shipping several arch fixes including i386 signal fixes, m68 support, s390x, sh4 compile fixes. There is still portability work todo: #439181 ia64 shared lib buggy (longdated unresolved ia64 mystery), #634890 amrhf all binaries segfault (maybe signal related), status on parisc is unknown, avr32 patch is untested (might as well just merge) and sh4 SIGILL. We got nice arch testcoverage thanks to mksh testsuite and working mksh klibc support. We are confident of this release on all this archs: alpha, armel, m68k, mips, ppc, ppc64, sparc, s390, s390x and x86. (:

The Gnome shell is a great step. Finally the Linux default Desktop is not only useful (as Gnome 2.X used to be), but also stylish and modern. It's a different kind of desktop, which seems to irk desktop habits of some peoples. I'm proud to show it off. This happened for the last time years ago while doing some funny config quirks of fvwm. Gnome 3.x is cool. (: Also the customisability via all the extensions is fun. What I do miss is the gnome weather (There used to be an incarnation with plenty of geographical sites, which got somehow got axed later.) and more packaged extensions for out of the box deployments (wish #661782). I seem to be too lunatic to find session settings in "System Settings" for having startup applications run or the used applications reopened (please yes evince show the same pdfs). The other minor critic is that "System Settings" is quite empty, but has on each system a funny advertisement for "Wacom Tablets". Ah and after a myriad of suspends and network-manager stops/restarts gnome-shell likes to segfault, which is no nuisance as it restarts.

On my new particle physics blog (yupie to ikiwiki, thanks joey) posted some recollection of a fine, productive and busy Paris research visit to the Ecole Polytechnique. The feed agregegator for particle physics blogs got relaunched too that automn. In case you are interested in particle physics this should keep any reader updated on the Higgs hunt, black holes searches, fundamental interactions and much more.

Let's start that a new meme on planet, haven't seen one for a while. The Austrian president starts the relaunched web presence with a "Putin" style parachute jump.

 lynx -dump -head http://www.bundespraesident.at/ 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 08:42:35 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3-7+squeeze3

So apparently the used typo3 installation is newer, but the used OS for the Austrian presidential web site is: Debian Squeeze.

Every once in a while I try out latest Debian/sid Maxima as it sees continuous development: Maxima git repo. Todays failure is an integral given at the Bloc course "Aspects of QCD at Finite Density". It is an exercise to calculate following simple integral that should just give a Bessel function:

(%i3) integrate(exp(z*cos(t))*cos(a*t), t, 0, %pi);
                           %pi
                          /
                          [               cos(t) z
(%o3)                     I    cos(a t) %e         dt
                          ]
                          /
                           0

As usual the result it returns is the integral itself.. :/ So yes indeed Maxima is nice for simple undergrads calculation: Maximum Calculus with Maxima, but unfortunately don't expect much for more complex problems. The result is the partition function of the chiral perturbation theory in the simple setup of equal quark masses and one quark flavour family. Sadly Integrals returning Bessel functions seem to regularly fail.