Search Results: "mario"

19 June 2021

Chris Lamb: *Raiders of the Lost Ark*: 40 Years On

"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."
The cinema was a rare and expensive treat in my youth, so I first came across Raiders of the Lost Ark by recording it from television onto a poor quality VHS. I only mention this as it meant I watched a slightly different film to the one intended, as my copy somehow missed off the first 10 minutes. For those not as intimately familiar with the film as me, this is just in time to see a Belloq demand Dr. Jones hand over the Peruvian head (see above), just in time to learn that Indy loathes snakes, and just in time to see the inadvertent reproduction of two Europeans squabbling over the spoils of a foreign land. What this truncation did to my interpretation of the film (released thirty years ago today on June 19th 1981) is interesting to explore. Without Jones' physical and moral traits being demonstrated on-screen (as well as missing the weighing the gold head and the rollercoaster boulder scene), it actually made the idea of 'Indiana Jones' even more of a mythical archetype. The film wisely withholds Jones' backstory, but my directors cut deprived him of even more, and counterintuitively imbued him with even more of a legendary hue as the elision made his qualities an assumption beyond question. Indiana Jones, if you can excuse the clich , needed no introduction at all. Good artists copy, great artists steal. And oh boy, does Raiders steal. I've watched this film about twenty times over the past two decades and it's now firmly entered into my personal canon. But watching it on its thirtieth anniversary was different not least because I could situate it in a broader cinematic context. For example, I now see the Gestapo officer in Major Strasser from Casablanca (1942), in fact just as I can with many of Raiders' other orientalist tendencies: not only in its breezy depictions of backwards sand people, but also of North Africa as an entrep t and playground for a certain kind of Western gangster. The opening as well, set in an equally reductionist pseudo-Peru, now feels like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) but without, of course, any self-conscious colonial critique.
The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.
I can now also appreciate some of the finer edges that make this film just so much damn fun to watch. For instance, the comic book conceit that Jones and Belloq are a 'shadowy reflection' of one other and that they need 'only a nudge' to make one like the other. As is the idea that Belloq seems to be actually enjoying being evil. I also spotted Jones rejecting the martini on the plane. This feels less like a comment on corrupting effect of alcohol (he drinks rather heavily elsewhere in the film), but rather a subtle distancing from James Bond. This feels especially important given that the action-packed cold open is, let us be honest for a second, ripped straight from the 007 franchise. John William's soundtracks are always worth mentioning. The corny Raiders March does almost nothing for me, but the highly-underrated 'Ark theme' certainly does. I delight in its allusions to Gregorian chant, the diabolus in musica and the Hungarian minor scale, fusing the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity (the stacked thirds, get it?), the ars antiqua of the Middle Ages with an 'exotic' twist that the Russian Five associated with central European Judaism.
The best use of the ark leitmotif is, of course, when it is opened. Here, Indy and Marion are saved by not opening their eyes whilst the 'High Priest' Belloq and the rest of the Nazis are all melted away. I'm no Biblical scholar, but I'm almost certain they were alluding to Leviticus 16:2 here:
The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.
But would it be too much of a stretch to also see the myth of Orpheus and Eurydices too? Orpheus's wife would only be saved from the underworld if he did not turn around until he came to his own house. But he turned round to look at his wife, and she instantly slipped back into the depths:
For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.
Perhaps not, given that Marion and the ark are not lost in quite the same way. But whilst touching on gender, it was interesting to update my view of archaeologist Ren Belloq. To countermand his slight queer coding (a trope of Disney villains such as Scar, Jafar, Cruella, etc.), there is a rather clumsy subplot involving Belloq repeatedly (and half-heartedly) failing to seduce Marion. This disavows any idea that Belloq isn't firmly heterosexual, essential for the film's mainstream audience, but it is especially important in Raiders because, if we recall the relationship between Belloq and Jones: 'it would take only a nudge to make you like me'. (This would definitely put a new slant on 'Top men'.)
However, my favourite moment is where the Nazis place the ark in a crate in order to transport it to the deserted island. On route, the swastikas on the side of the crate spontaneously burn away, and a disturbing noise is heard in the background. This short scene has always fascinated me, partly because it's the first time in the film that the power of the ark is demonstrated first-hand but also because gives the object an other-worldly nature that, to the best of my knowledge, has no parallel in the rest of cinema. Still, I had always assumed that the Aak disfigured the swastikas because of their association with the Nazis, interpreting the act as God's condemnation of the Third Reich. But now I catch myself wondering whether the ark would have disfigured any iconography as a matter of principle or whether their treatment was specific to the swastika. We later get a partial answer to this question, as the 'US Army' inscriptions in the Citizen Kane warehouse remain untouched. Far from being an insignificant concern, the filmmakers appear to have wandered into a highly-contested theological debate. As in, if the burning of the swastika is God's moral judgement of the Nazi regime, then God is clearly both willing and able to intervene in human affairs. So why did he not, to put it mildly, prevent Auschwitz? From this perspective, Spielberg appears to be limbering up for some of the academic critiques surrounding Holocaust representations that will follow Schindler's List (1993). Given my nostalgic and somewhat ironic attachment to Raiders, it will always be difficult for me to objectively appraise the film. Even so, it feels like it is underpinned by an earnest attempt to entertain the viewer, largely absent in the affected cynicism of contemporary cinema. And when considered in the totality of Hollywood's output, its tonal and technical flaws are not actually that bad or at least Marion's muddled characterisation and its breezy chauvinism (for example) clearly have far worse examples. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film in 2021 is that it hasn't changed that much at all. It spawned one good sequel (The Last Crusade), one bad one (The Temple of Doom), and one hardly worth mentioning at all, yet these adventures haven't affected the original Raiders in any meaningful way. In fact, if anything has affected the original text it is, once again, George Lucas himself, as knowing the impending backlash around the Star Wars prequels adds an inadvertent paratext to all his earlier works. Yet in a 1978 discussion prior to the creation of Raiders, you can get a keen sense of how Lucas' childlike enthusiasm will always result in something either extremely good or something extremely bad somehow no middle ground is quite possible. Yes, it's easy to rubbish his initial ideas 'We'll call him Indiana Smith! but hasn't Lucas actually captured the essence of a heroic 'Americana' here, and that the final result is simply a difference of degree, not kind?

Chris Lamb: Raiders of the Lost Ark: 40 Years On

"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."
The cinema was a rare and expensive treat in my youth, so I first came across Raiders of the Lost Ark by recording it from television onto a poor quality VHS. I only mention this as it meant I watched a slightly different film to the one intended, as my copy somehow missed off the first 10 minutes. For those not as intimately familiar with the film as me, this is just in time to see a Belloq demand Dr. Jones hand over the Peruvian head (see above), just in time to learn that Indy loathes snakes, and just in time to see the inadvertent reproduction of two Europeans squabbling over the spoils of a foreign land. What this truncation did to my interpretation of the film (released thirty years ago today on June 19th 1981) is interesting to explore. Without Jones' physical and moral traits being demonstrated on-screen (as well as missing the weighing the gold head and the rollercoaster boulder scene), it actually made the idea of 'Indiana Jones' even more of a mythical archetype. The film wisely withholds Jones' backstory, but my directors cut deprived him of even more, and counterintuitively imbued him with even more of a legendary hue as the elision made his qualities an assumption beyond question. Indiana Jones, if you can excuse the clich , needed no introduction at all. Good artists copy, great artists steal. And oh boy, does Raiders steal. I've watched this film about twenty times over the past two decades and it's now firmly entered into my personal canon. But watching it on its thirtieth anniversary was different not least because I could situate it in a broader cinematic context. For example, I now see the Gestapo officer in Major Strasser from Casablanca (1942), in fact just as I can with many of Raiders' other orientalist tendencies: not only in its breezy depictions of backwards sand people, but also of North Africa as an entrep t and playground for a certain kind of Western gangster. The opening as well, set in an equally reductionist pseudo-Peru, now feels like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) but without, of course, any self-conscious colonial critique.
The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.
I can now also appreciate some of the finer edges that make this film just so much damn fun to watch. For instance, the comic book conceit that Jones and Belloq are a 'shadowy reflection' of one other and that they need 'only a nudge' to make one like the other. As is the idea that Belloq seems to be actually enjoying being evil. I also spotted Jones rejecting the martini on the plane. This feels less like a comment on corrupting effect of alcohol (he drinks rather heavily elsewhere in the film), but rather a subtle distancing from James Bond. This feels especially important given that the action-packed cold open is, let us be honest for a second, ripped straight from the 007 franchise. John William's soundtracks are always worth mentioning. The corny Raiders March does almost nothing for me, but the highly-underrated 'Ark theme' certainly does. I delight in its allusions to Gregorian chant, the diabolus in musica and the Hungarian minor scale, fusing the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity (the stacked thirds, get it?), the ars antiqua of the Middle Ages with an 'exotic' twist that the Russian Five associated with central European Judaism.
The best use of the ark leitmotif is, of course, when it is opened. Here, Indy and Marion are saved by not opening their eyes whilst the 'High Priest' Belloq and the rest of the Nazis are all melted away. I'm no Biblical scholar, but I'm almost certain they were alluding to Leviticus 16:2 here:
The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.
But would it be too much of a stretch to also see the myth of Orpheus and Eurydices too? Orpheus's wife would only be saved from the underworld if he did not turn around until he came to his own house. But he turned round to look at his wife, and she instantly slipped back into the depths:
For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.
Perhaps not, given that Marion and the ark are not lost in quite the same way. But whilst touching on gender, it was interesting to update my view of archaeologist Ren Belloq. To countermand his slight queer coding (a trope of Disney villains such as Scar, Jafar, Cruella, etc.), there is a rather clumsy subplot involving Belloq repeatedly (and half-heartedly) failing to seduce Marion. This disavows any idea that Belloq isn't firmly heterosexual, essential for the film's mainstream audience, but it is especially important in Raiders because, if we recall the relationship between Belloq and Jones: 'it would take only a nudge to make you like me'. (This would definitely put a new slant on 'Top men'.)
However, my favourite moment is where the Nazis place the ark in a crate in order to transport it to the deserted island. On route, the swastikas on the side of the crate spontaneously burn away, and a disturbing noise is heard in the background. This short scene has always fascinated me, partly because it's the first time in the film that the power of the ark is demonstrated first-hand but also because gives the object an other-worldly nature that, to the best of my knowledge, has no parallel in the rest of cinema. Still, I had always assumed that the Aak disfigured the swastikas because of their association with the Nazis, interpreting the act as God's condemnation of the Third Reich. But now I catch myself wondering whether the ark would have disfigured any iconography as a matter of principle or whether their treatment was specific to the swastika. We later get a partial answer to this question, as the 'US Army' inscriptions in the Citizen Kane warehouse remain untouched. Far from being an insignificant concern, the filmmakers appear to have wandered into a highly-contested theological debate. As in, if the burning of the swastika is God's moral judgement of the Nazi regime, then God is clearly both willing and able to intervene in human affairs. So why did he not, to put it mildly, prevent Auschwitz? From this perspective, Spielberg appears to be limbering up for some of the academic critiques surrounding Holocaust representations that will follow Schindler's List (1993). Given my nostalgic and somewhat ironic attachment to Raiders, it will always be difficult for me to objectively appraise the film. Even so, it feels like it is underpinned by an earnest attempt to entertain the viewer, largely absent in the affected cynicism of contemporary cinema. And when considered in the totality of Hollywood's output, its tonal and technical flaws are not actually that bad or at least Marion's muddled characterisation and its breezy chauvinism (for example) clearly have far worse examples. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film in 2021 is that it hasn't changed that much at all. It spawned one good sequel (The Last Crusade), one bad one (The Temple of Doom), and one hardly worth mentioning at all, yet these adventures haven't affected the original Raiders in any meaningful way. In fact, if anything has affected the original text it is, once again, George Lucas himself, as knowing the impending backlash around the Star Wars prequels adds an inadvertent paratext to all his earlier works. Yet in a 1978 discussion prior to the creation of Raiders, you can get a keen sense of how Lucas' childlike enthusiasm will always result in something either extremely good or something extremely bad somehow no middle ground is quite possible. Yes, it's easy to rubbish his initial ideas 'We'll call him Indiana Smith! but hasn't Lucas actually captured the essence of a heroic 'Americana' here, and that the final result is simply a difference of degree, not kind?

23 December 2020

John Goerzen: O, Sunlight!

O, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth. Roman Payne
There is much beauty in this world, much hope, much life. All we need to do is pause, breathe, and take a moment to see it. It might be as simple as the gift of sunlight. I hope you all have moments of sunlight and delight each day. Marion County, KS, April 2013

30 September 2020

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities September 2020

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors The gensim, cython-blis, python-preshed, pytest-rerunfailures, morfessor, nmslib, visdom and pyemd work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

7 April 2020

Steve Kemp: A busy few days

Over the past few weeks things have been pretty hectic. Since I'm not working at the moment I'm mostly doing childcare instead. I need a break, now and again, so I've been sending our child to p iv koti two days a week with him home the rest of the time. I love taking care of the child, because he's seriously awesome, but it's a hell of a lot of work when most of our usual escapes are unavailable. For example we can't go to the (awesome) Helsinki Central Library as that is closed. Instead of doing things outdoors we've been baking bread together, painting, listening to music and similar. He's a big fan of any music with drums and shouting, so we've been listening to Rammstein, The Prodigy, and as much Queen as I can slip in without him complaining ("more bang bang!"). I've also signed up for some courses at the Helsinki open university, including Devops with Docker so perhaps I have a future career working with computers? I'm hazy. Finally I saw a fun post the other day on reddit asking about the creation of a DSL for server-setup. I wrote a reply which basically said two things: Anyway I had an idea of just expressing things in a simple fashion, borrowing Puppet syntax (which I guess is just Ruby hash literals). So a module to do stuff with files would just look like this: 
file   name   => "This is my rule",
       target => "/tmp/blah",
       ensure => "absent"
The next thing to do is to allow that to notify another rule, when it results in a change. So you add in: 
notify => "Name of rule"
# or
notify => [ "Name of rule", "Name of another rule" ]
You could also express dependencies the other way round: 
shell   name => "Do stuff",
        command => "wc -l /etc/passwd > /tmp/foo",
        requires => [ "Rule 1", "Rule 2"]
Anyway the end result is a simple syntax which allows you to do things; I wrote a file to allow me to take a clean system and configure it to run a simple golang application in an hour or so. The downside? Well the obvious one is that there's no support for setting up cron jobs, setting up docker images, MySQL usernames/passwords, etc. Just a core set of primitives. Adding new things is easy, but also an endless job. So I added the ability to run external/binary plugins stored outside the project. To support that is simple with the syntax we have: All good. People can write modules, if they like, and they can do that in any language they like. Fun times. We'll call it marionette since it's all puppet-inspired: And that concludes this irregular update.

28 March 2020

Jonathan Dowland: Nintendo Switch - Virtua Racing

Screenshot of Virtua Racing
I don't play many video games any more, and I certainly don't consider myself a gamer. If I have time and brain power, I like to write code or work on my PhD; if I don't have brain power I read, watch movies or TV. However last Summer, lured by the launch titles Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I bought a Nintendo Switch. I've actually played some games on it now, although I surprised myself by playing lesser-known and indie titles rather than the AAA names. My favourite games are ones I can pick up and play for 5-10 minutes at a time without losing time to tutorials, introductory videos, and other such nonsense. I thought I'd recommend some games. First up, Virtua Racing. I actually bought this for the office Switch before I had my own. It's re-release of the 1992 arcade racer. I have fond memories of Arcades in the 90s (although I don't think I played this game). It's conceptually simple: three tracks, few options (you can choose manual or automatic transmission). But there's some hidden depth in there: it models slipstream, tyre wear and other effects. The fun of it for me is trying to beat my personal best and that of my colleagues. But I haven't actually placed above 3rd on the intermediate course or even finished the advanced one, so despite its simplicity, there's plenty of mileage in it for me. It also looks great, rending at a smooth 60fps. The large untextured polygons were once a design decision due to the limitations of the hardware in 1992 and are now an in-fashion aesthetic.

13 August 2017

Mike Gabriel: @DebConf17: Work for Debian and FLOSS I got done during DebCamp and DebConf... and Beyond...

People I Met and will Remember Topics I have worked on Talks and BoFs Packages Uploaded to Debian unstable Packages Uploaded to Debian NEW I also looked into lightdm-webkit2-greeter, but upstream is in the middle of a transition from Gtk3 to Qt5, so this has been suspended for now. Packages Uploaded to oldstable-/stable-proposed-updates or -security Other Package related Stuff Thanks to Everyone Making This Event Possible A big thanks to everyone who made it possible for me to attend this event!!!

7 August 2017

Mario Lang: If your software should be cross platform and accessible, forget about Qt

A few years ago, I started to write software which primary audience is going to be blind musicians. I did a small presentation of the UI at DebConf15. Most of the functionality is in a compiler-alike backend. But eventually, I wanted to create a user interface to improve the interactive experience. So, the problem again: which toolkit to choose which would be accessible on most platforms? Last time I needed to solve a similar problem, I used Java/Swing. This has its problems, but it actually works on Windows, Linux and (supposedly) Mac. This time around, my implementation language is C++, so Swing didn't look that interesting. It appears there is not much that fullfils these requirements. Qt looked like it could. But since I had my bad experiences already with Qt claiming accessibility they really never implemented, I was at least a bit cautious. Around 10 years ago, when Qt 4 was released, I found that the documentation claimed that Qt4 was accessible on Linux, but it really never was until a very late 4.x release. This information was a blatant lie, trying to lure uninformed programmers into using Qt, much to the disservice of their disabled users. If you ask a random blind Windows user who knows a bit about toolkits, they will readily tell you that they hate every app written in Qt. With this knowledge, and the spirit of "We can change the world" I wrote a private mail to the person responsible for maintaining Qt accessibility. I explained to them that I am about to choose Qt as the UI platform for my program, and that my primary audience is users that rely on Accessibility. I also explained that cross-platform support (esp. good support on Windows) is a necessary requirement for my project. I basically got a nice marketing speak answer back, but when I read it back then, I didn't fully realize that just yet. The tone basicallly: "No problem. Qt works on Linux, Mac and Windows, and if you find any problems, just report them to us and we are going to fix them." Well, I was aware that I am not a paying customer of Qt Company, so the promise above is probbably a bit vague (I thought), but still, it sounded quite encouraging. So off I went, and started to learn enough Qt to implement the simple user interface I wanted. First tests on Linux seemed to work, that is nice. After a while, I started to test on Windows. And BANG, of course, there is a "hidden" problem. The most wide-spread (commercial) screen reader used by most blind people somehow does not see the content of text entry widgets. This was and still is a major problem for my project. I have a number of text entry fields in my UI. Actually, the main part of the UI is a simple editor, so you might see the problem already. So some more testing was done, just to realize that yes, text entry fields indeed do not work with the most widely used screen reader on Windows. While other screen readers seemed to work (NVDA) it is simply not feasable to ask my future users to switch to a different screen reader just for a single program. So I either needed to get JAWS fixed, or drop Qt. Well, after a lot of testing, I ended up submitting a bug to the Qt tracker. That was a little over a year ago. The turnaround time of private mail was definitely faster. And now I get a reply to my bug explaining that JAWS was never a priority, still is not, and that my problem will probably go away after a rewrite which has no deadline yet. Why did I expect this already? At least now I know why no blind users wants to have any Qt on their machines. If you want to write cross-platform accessible software: You definitely should not use Qt. And no other Free Software toolkit for that matter, because they basically all dont give a shit about accessibility on non-Linux platforms. Yes, GTK has a Windows port, but that isn't accessible at all. Yes, wxWindows has a Windows port, but that has problems with, guess what, text entry fields (at least last time I checked). Free Software is NOT about Accessibility or equality. I see evidence for that claim since more then 15 years now. It is about coolness, self-staging, scratch-your-own-itchness and things like that. When Debian released Jessie, I was told that something like Accessibility is not important enough to delay the release. If GNOME just broke all the help system by switching to not-yet-accessible webkit, that is just bad luck, I was told. But it is outside of the abilities of package maintainers to ensure that what we ship is accessible. I hereby officially give up. And I admit my own stupidity. Sorry for claiming Free Software would be a good thing for the world. It is definitely not for my kin. If Free Software ever takes over, the blind will be unable to use their computers. Don't get me wrong. I love my command-line. But as the well-known saying goes: "Free Software will be ready for the desktop user, perhaps, next year?" The scratch-your-own-itch philosophy simply doesn't work together with a broad list of user requirements. If you want to support users with disabilities, you probably should not rely on hippie coders right now. I repeat: If you want to write compliant software, that would be also useable to people with disabilities, you can not use Qt. For now, you will need to write a native UI for every platform you want to support. Oh, and do not believe Qt Company marketing texts, your users will suffer if you do.

25 March 2017

Urvika Gola: Speaking at FOSSASIA 17 Seasons of Debian : Summer of Code & Winter of Outreachy

I got an amazing chance to speak at FOSSASIA 2017 held at Singapore on Seasons of Debian Summer of Code and Winter of Outreachy . I gave a combined talk with my co-speaker Pranav Jain, who contributed to Debian through GSoC. We talked about two major open source initiatives Outreachy and Google Summer of Code and the work we did on a common project Lumicall under Debian. WhatsApp Image 2017-03-23 at 11.32.33 PM The excitement started even before the first day! On 16th March, there was a speakers meetup at Microsoft office in Singapore. There, I got the chance to connect with other speakers and learn about their work The meetup was concluded by Microsoft Office tour! As a student it was very exciting to see first hand the office of a company that I had only dreamt of being at. On 17th March, i.e the first day of the three days long conference, I met Hong Phuc Dang, Founder of FOSSASIA. She is very kind and just talking to her just made me cheerful!
Meeting so many great developers from different organizations was exciting. On 18th March, was the day of our talk! I was a bit nervous to speak in front of amazing developers but, that s how you grow Our talk was preceded by a lovely introduction by Mario Behling. WhatsApp Image 2017-03-25 at 2.32.01 PM.jpeg I talked about how Outreachy Programme has made a significant impact in increasing the participation of women in Open Source, with one such woman being me I also talked about Android Programming concepts which I used in while adding new features into Lumicall. Pranav talked about Debian Organization and how to get started with GSoC by sharing his journey! After our talk, students approached us asking questions about how to participate in Outreachy and GsOC. I felt that a lot more students were receptive to knowing about this new opportunity. Our own talk was part of the mini DebConf track. Under this track, there were two other amazing sessions namely, Debian The best Linux distribution and Open Build Service in Debian . The variety of experiences I gained from FOSSASIA was very diverse. I learned how to speak at a huge platform, learned from other interesting talks, share ideas with smart developers and saw an exciting venue and wonderful city! I would not be able to experience this without the continuous support of Debian and Outreachy !

10 March 2017

Jonathan Dowland: Nintendo NES Classic Mini

After months of trying, I've finally got my hands on a Nintendo NES Classic Mini. It's everything I wish retropie was: simple, reliable, plug-and-play gaming. I didn't have a NES at the time, so the games are all mostly new to me (although I'm familiar with things like Super Mario Brothers).
NES classic and 8bitdo peripherals NES classic and 8bitdo peripherals
The two main complaints about the NES classic are the very short controller cable and the need to press the "reset" button on the main unit to dip in and out of games. Both are addressed by the excellent 8bitdo Retro Receiver for NES Classic bundle. You get a bluetooth dongle that plugs into the classic and a separate wireless controller. The controller is a replica of the original NES controller. However, they've added another two buttons on the right-hand side alongside the original "A" and "B", and two discrete shoulder buttons which serve as turbo-repeat versions of "A" and "B". The extra red buttons make it look less authentic which is a bit of a shame, and are not immediately useful on the NES classic (but more on that in a minute). With the 8bitdo controller, you can remotely activate the Reset button by pressing "Down" and "Select" at the same time. Therefore the whole thing can be played from the comfort of my sofa. That's basically enough for me, for now, but in the future if I want to expand the functionality of the classic, it's possible to mod it. A hack called "Hakchi2" lets you install additional NES ROMs; install retroarch-based emulator cores and thus play SNES, Megadrive, N64 (etc. etc.) games; as well as other hacks like adding "down+select" Reset support to the wired controller. If you were playing non-NES games on the classic, then the extra buttons on the 8bitdo become useful.

8 January 2017

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2016)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

20 December 2016

Mario Lang: Squarepusher's Shobaleader One

I recently was lucky enough to see one of my long-time favourite drum and bass artists live! Squarepusher! I know and love his music since the late 90s. My girlfriend got us tickets for the Shobaleader One performance at Progy & Bess in Vienna. It was fantastic! 90 minutes of high energy jazz. As a personal memory, I captured one of my favourite Squarepusher tracks, Cooper's World. This is another case of #unseenphotography. While I am usually not very much into jazz, I like this fusion of dnb and jazz very much.

Mario Lang: Upgrading GlusterFS from Wheezy to Stretch

We are about to upgrade one of our GlusterFS-based storage systems at work. Fortunately, I was worrying about the upgrade procedure for the Debian packages not being tested by the maintainers. It turns out I was right. Simply upgrading the packages without manual intervention will apparently render your GlusterFS server unusable.
Basic setup I have only tested the most basic distributed GlusterFS setup. No replication whatsoever. We have two GlusterFS servers, storage1 and storage2. A peering between both has been established, and a very basic volume has been configured: 
storage1:~# gluster
gluster> peer status
Number of Peers: 1
Hostname: storage2
Uuid: 2d22cc13-2252-4cf1-bfe9-3d27fa2fbc29
State: Peer in Cluster (Connected)
gluster> volume create data storage1:/srv/data storage2:/srv/data
...
gluster> volume start data
...
gluster> volume info
Volume Name: data
Type: Distribute
Volume ID: e2bd5767-4b33-4e57-9320-91ca76f52d56
Status: Started
Number of Bricks: 2
Transport-type: tcp
Bricks:
Brick1: storage1:/srv/data
Brick2: storage2:/srv/data
For the test setup, I populated the volume with a number of files.
Upgrading from Wheezy to Jessie To be save, stop the volume before you begin with the package upgrade: 
gluster> volume stop data
And now perform your dist-upgrade. After the upgrade, you will have to perform two manual clean ups. Both actions have to be performed on all storage servers.
/etc/glusterd is now /var/lib/glusterd The package maintainers have apparently neglected to take care of this one. You manually need to copy the old configuration files over. 
storage1:~# cd /var/lib/glusterd && cp -r /etc/glusterd/* .
Put volume-id in extended attribute GlusterFS 3.5 requires the volume-id in an extended directory attribute. This is also not automatically handled during package upgrade. 
storage1:~# vol=data
storage1:~# volid=$(grep volume-id /var/lib/glusterd/vols/$vol/info   cut -d= -f2   sed 's/-//g')
storage1:~# setfattr -n trusted.glusterfs.volume-id -v 0x$volid /srv/data
With these two steps performed on all GlusterFS servers, you should now be able to start and mount your volume again in Debian Jessie. Do not forget to explicitly stop the volume again before continueing with the next upgrade step.
Upgrading from Jessie to Stretch After you have dist-upgraded to Stretch, there is yet another manual step you have to take to convert the volume metadata to the new layout in GlusterFS 3.8. Make sure you have stopped your volumes and the GlusterFS server. 
storage1:~# service glusterfs-server stop
Now run the following command: 
storage1:~# glusterd --xlator-option *.upgrade=on -N
Now you should be ready to start your volume again: 
storage1:~# service glusterfs-server start
storage1:~# gluster
gluster> volume start data
And mount it: 
client:~# mount -t glusterfs storage1:/data /mnt
You should now be running GlusterFS 3.8 and your files should still all be there.

8 November 2016

Jonathan Carter: A few impressions of DebConf 16 in Cape Town

DebConf16 Group Photo

DebConf16 Group Photo by Jurie Senekal.

DebConf16 Firstly, thanks to everyone who came out and added their own uniqueness and expertise to the pool. The feedback received so far has been very positive and I feel that the few problems we did experience was dealt with very efficiently. Having a DebConf in your hometown is a great experience, consider a bid for hosting a DebConf in your city! DebConf16 Open Festival (5 August) The Open Festival (usually Debian Open Day) turned out pretty good. It was a collection of talks, a job fair, and some demos of what can be done with Debian. I particularly liked Hetzner s stand. I got to show off some 20 year old+ Super Mario skills and they had some fun brain teasers as well. It s really great to see a job stand that s so interactive and I think many companies can learn from them. The demo that probably drew the most attention was from my friend Georg who demoed some LulzBot Mini 3D Printers. They really seem to love Debian which is great! DebConf (6 August to 12 August) If I try to write up all my thoughts and feeling about DC16, I ll never get this post finished. Instead, here as some tweets from DebConf that other have written:


Day Trip We had 3 day trips: Brought to you by
orga

DebConf16 Orga Team.

See you in Montr al! DebConf17 dates: The DC17 sponsorship brochure contains a good deal of information, please share it with anyone who might be interested in sponsoring DebConf! Media

6 July 2016

Mike Gabriel: [Arctica Project] Release of nx-libs (version 3.5.99.0)

Introduction NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a network, especially a slow one. NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in 2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name "nx-libs". History Until January 2015, nx-libs was more mainly a redistribution approach of the original NX (v3) software. We (we as in mainly a group of X2Go developers) kept changes applied to the original NoMachine sources as minimal as possible. We also kept the original files and folders structure. Patches had been maintained via the quilt utility on top of a Git repository, the patches had always been kept separate. That was the 3.5.0.x series of nx-libs. In January 2015, the characteristics of nx-libs as maintained by the X2Go project between 2011 and 2015 changed. A decision was reached: This effort is now about to be released as "nx-libs 3.6.0.0". Contributors Since 2011, the nx-libs code base has to a great extent been maintained in the context of the X2Go Project [1]. Qindel Group joining in... In 2014, developers from the Qindel Group [2] joined the nx-libs maintenance. They found X2Go's work on nx-libs and suggested joining forces as best as possible on hacking nx-libs. The Arctica Project comming up... Starting in January 2015, the development on the 3.6.x branch of the project was moved into a new project called the Arctica Project [3]. Development Funding by Qindel In September 2015, a funding project was set up at Qindel. Since then, the Qindel group greatly supports the development of nx-libs 3.6.x monetarily and with provided man power. The funding project officially is a cooperation between Qindel and DAS-NETZWERKTEAM (business run by Mike Gabriel, long term maintainer of nx-libs). The funding is split into two subprojects and lasts until August 2017: The current nx-libs development effort is coordinated in the context of the Arctica Project (by Mike Gabriel), with use cases in Arctica, X2Go and TheQVD (VDI product worked on at Qindel) in mind. People involved There are various people involved in nx-libs 3.6.x maintenance and development, some of them shall be explicitly named here (in alphabetical order of surnames): Some other people have contributed, but have left the project already. Thanks for your work on nx-libs: A big thanks to everyone involved!!! Special thanks go to Stefan Baur for employing Mihai Moldovan and handling all the bureaucracy, so that Mihai can work on this project and get funded for his work. Achievements of nx-libs 3.5.99.0 We are very close to our self-defined release goal 3.6.0. The below tasks have already been (+/-) completed for version 3.5.99.0: In a previous blog post [4], the code reduction in nx-libs has already been discussed. With this announcement, we want to give a status update about our effort of shrinking the nx-libs code base: 
    [mike@minobo nx-libs (3.6.x)]$ cloc --match-f '.*\.(c cpp h)' .
        1896 text files.
        1896 unique files.                                          
        7430 files ignored.
    http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=5.88 s (307.3 files/s, 143310.5 lines/s)
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Language                     files          blank        comment           code
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    C                              958          68574          74891         419638
    C/C++ Header                   730          25683          33957         130418
    C++                            120          17007          11721          61292
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SUM:                          1808         111264         120569         611348
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The previous statistics had these sums in the last line. First the nx-libs 3.5.0.x code tree (where we came from): 
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SUM:                          5614         329279         382337        1757743
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Then the nx-libs 3.6.x status as it was on May 9th 2016: 
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SUM:                          1922         118581         126783         662635
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another 50.000 lines of code have been removed over the past two months. Work pending for the final 3.6.0 release goal Known Issues There are several open issues on the nx-libs Github project space, see https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/issues. Testing the nx-libs 3.5.99.0 We are currently working on provisioning release builds and nightly builds of nx-libs for various recent Linux distributions. Please stay tuned and watch Mike Gabriel's blog [5]. We already have nightly builds of nx-libs for Debian and Ubuntu [6], but there are more to come soon. Until now, please use the build recipes provided in the README.md file of the nx-libs source tree [7]. References

12 June 2016

Mario Lang: A Raspberry Pi Zero in a Handy Tech Active Star 40 Braille Display

TL;DR: I put a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, a Bluetooth USB dongle, and the required adapter cable into my new Handy Tech Active Star 40 braille display. An internal USB port provides the power. This has transformed my braille display into an ARM-based, monitorless, Linux laptop that has a keyboard and a braille display. It can be charged/powered via USB so it can also be run from a power bank or a solar charger, thus potentially being able to run for days, rather than just hours, without needing a standard wall-jack. [picture: a Raspberry Pi Zero embedded within an Active Star 40] [picture: a braille display with a keyboard on top and a Raspberry Pi Zero inside]
Some Background on Braille Display Form Factors Braille displays come in various sizes. There are models tailored for desktop use (with 60 cells or more), models tailored for portable use with a laptop (usually with 40 cells), and, nowadays, there are even models tailored for on-the-go use with a smartphone or similar (with something like 14 or 18 cells). Back in the old days, braille displays were rather massive. A 40-cell braille display was typically about the size of a 13" laptop. In modern times, manufacturers have managed to reduce the size of the internals such that a 40-cell display can be placed in front of a laptop or keyboard instead of placing the laptop on top of the braille display. While this is a nice achievement, I personally haven't found it to be very convenient because you now have to place two physically separate devices on your lap. It's OK if you have a real desk, but, at least in my opinion, if you try to use your laptop as its name suggests, it's actually inconvenient to use a small form factor, 40-cell display. For this reason, I've been waiting for a long-promised new model in the Handy Tech Star series. In 2002, they released the Handy Tech Braille Star 40, which is a 40-cell braille display with enough space to put a laptop directly on top of it. To accommodate larger laptop models, they even built in a little platform at the back that can be pulled out to effectively enlarge the top surface. Handy Tech has now released a new model, the Active Star 40, that has essentially the same layout but modernized internals. [picture: a plain Active Star 40] You can still pull out the little platform to increase the space that can be used to put something on top. [picture: an Active Star 40 with extended platform and a laptop on top] But, most conveniently, they've designed in an empty compartment, roughly the size of a modern smartphone, beneath the platform. The original idea was to actually put a smartphone inside, but this has turned out (at least to me) to not be very feasible. Fortunately, they thought about the need for electricity and added a Micro USB cable terminating within the newly created, empty compartment. My first idea was to put a conventional Raspberry Pi inside. When I received the braille display, however, we immediately noticed that a standard-sized rpi is roughly 3mm too high to fit into the empty compartment. Fortunately, though, a co-worker noticed that the Raspberry Pi Zero was available for order. The Raspberry Pi Zero is a lot thinner, and fits perfectly inside (actually, I think there's enough space for two, or even three, of them). So we ordered one, along with some accessories like a 64GB SDHC card, a Bluetooth dongle, and a Micro USB adapter cable. The hardware arrived a few days later, and was immediately bootstrapped with the assistance of very helpful friends. It works like a charm!
Technical Details The backside of the Handy Tech Active Star 40 features two USB host ports that can be used to connect devices such as a keyboard. A small form-factor, USB keyboard with a magnetic clip-on is included. When a USB keyboard is connected, and when the display is used via Bluetooth, the braille display firmware additionally offers the Bluetooth HID profile, and key press/release events received via the USB port are passed through to it. I use the Bluetooth dongle for all my communication needs. Most importantly, BRLTTY is used as a console screen reader. It talks to the braille display via Bluetooth (more precisely, via an RFCOMM channel). The keyboard connects through to Linux via the Bluetooth HID profile. Now, all that is left is network connectivity. To keep the energy consumption as low as possible, I decided to go for Bluetooth PAN. It appears that the tethering mode of my mobile phone works (albeit with a quirk), so I can actually access the internet as long as I have cell phone reception. Additionally, I configured a Bluetooth PAN access point on my desktop machines at home and at work, so I can easily (and somewhat more reliably) get IP connectivity for the rpi when I'm near one of these machines. I plan to configure a classic Raspberry Pi as a mobile Bluetooth access point. It would essentially function as a Bluetooth to ethernet adapter, and should allow me to have network connectivity in places where I don't want to use my phone.
BlueZ 5 and PAN It was a bit challenging to figure out how to actually configure Bluetooth PAN with BlueZ 5. I found the bt-pan python script (see below) to be the only way so far to configure PAN without a GUI. It handles both ends of a PAN network, configuring a server and a client. Once instructed to do so (via D-Bus) in client mode, BlueZ will create a new network device - bnep0 - once a connection to a server has been established. Typically, DHCP is used to assign IP addresses for these interfaces. In server mode, BlueZ needs to know the name of a bridge device to which it can add a slave device for each incoming client connection. Configuring an address for the bridge device, as well as running a DHCP server + IP Masquerading on the bridge, is usually all you need to do.
A Bluetooth PAN Access Point with Systemd I'm using systemd-networkd to configure the bridge device. /etc/systemd/network/pan.netdev: 
[NetDev]
Name=pan
Kind=bridge
ForwardDelaySec=0
/etc/systemd/network/pan.network: 
[Match]
Name=pan
[Network]
Address=0.0.0.0/24
DHCPServer=yes
IPMasquerade=yes
Now, BlueZ needs to be told to configure a NAP profile. To my surprise, there seems to be no way to do this with stock BlueZ 5.36 utilities. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Luckily, I found a very nice blog post, as well as an accommodating Python script that performs the required D-Bus calls. For convenience, I use a Systemd service to invoke the script and to ensure that its dependencies are met. /etc/systemd/system/pan.service: 
[Unit]
Description=Bluetooth Personal Area Network
After=bluetooth.service systemd-networkd.service
Requires=systemd-networkd.service
PartOf=bluetooth.service
[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/pan
[Install]
WantedBy=bluetooth.target
/usr/local/sbin/pan: 
#!/bin/sh
# Ugly hack to work around #787480
iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
exec /usr/local/sbin/bt-pan --systemd --debug server pan
This last file wouldn't be necessary if IPMasquerade= were supported in Debian right now (see #787480). After the obligatory systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl restart systemd-networkd, you can start your Bluetooth Personal Area Network with systemctl start pan.
Bluetooth PAN Client with Systemd Configuring the client is also quite easy to do with Systemd. /etc/systemd/network/pan-client.network: 
[Match]
Name=bnep*
[Network]
DHCP=yes
/etc/systemd/system/pan@.service: 
[Unit]
Description=Bluetooth Personal Area Network client
[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/bt-pan --debug --systemd client %I --wait
Now, after the usual configuration reloading, you should be able to connect to a specific Bluetooth access point with: 
systemctl start pan@00:11:22:33:44:55
Pairing via the Command Line Of course, the server and client-side service configuration require a pre-existing pairing between the server and each of its clients. On the server, start bluetoothctl and issue the following commands: 
power on
agent on
default-agent
scan on
scan off
pair XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
trust XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Once you've set scan mode to on, wait a few seconds until you see the device you're looking for scroll by. Note its device address, and use it for the pair and (optional) trust commands. On the client, the sequence is essentially the same except that you don't need to issue the trust command. The server needs to trust a client in order to accept NAP profile connections from it without waiting for manual confirmation by the user. I'm actually not sure if this is the optimal sequence of commands. It might be enough to just pair the client with the server and issue the trust command on the server, but I haven't tried this yet.
Enabling Use of the Bluetooth HID Profile Essentially the same as above also needs to be done in order to use the Bluetooth HID profile of the Active Star 40 on Linux. However, instead of agent on, you need to issue the command agent KeyboardOnly. This explicitly tells bluetoothctl that you're specifically looking for a HID profile.
Configuring Bluetooth via the Command Line Feels Vague While I'm very happy that I actually managed to set all of this up, I must admit that the command-line interface to BlueZ feels a bit incomplete and confusing. I initially thought that agents were only for PIN code entry. Now that I've discovered that "agent KeyboardOnly" is used to enable the HID profile, I'm not sure anymore. I'm surprised that I needed to grab a script from a random git repository in order to be able to set up PAN. I remember, with earlier version of BlueZ, that there was a tool called pand that you could use to do all of this from the command-line. I don't seem to see anything like that for BlueZ 5 anymore. Maybe I'm missing something obvious?
Performance The data rate is roughly 120kB/s, which I consider acceptable for such a low power solution. The 1GHz ARM CPU actually feels sufficiently fast for a console/text-mode person like me. I'll rarely be using much more than ssh and emacs on it anyway.
Console fonts and screen dimensions The default dimensions of the framebuffer on the Raspberry Pi Zero are a bit unexpectedly strange. fbset reports that the screen dimension is 656x416 pixels (of course, no monitor connected). With a typical console font of 8x16, I got 82 columns and 26 lines. With a 40 cell braille display, the 82 columns are very inconvenient. Additionally, as a braille user, I would like to be able to view Unicode braille characters in addition to the normal charset on the console. Fortunately, Linux supports 512 glyphs, while most console fonts do only provide 256. console-setup can load and combine two 256-glyph fonts at once. So I added the following to /etc/default/console-setup to make the text console a lot more friendly to braille users: 
SCREEN_WIDTH=80
SCREEN_HEIGHT=25
FONT="Lat15-Terminus16.psf.gz brl-16x8.psf"

Note

You need console-braille installed for brl-16x8.psf to be available.

Further Projects There's a 3.5mm audio jack inside the braille display as well. Unfortunately, there are no converters from Mini-HDMI to 3.5mm audio that I know of. It would be very nice to be able to use the sound card that is already built into the Raspberry Pi Zero, but, unfortunately, this doesn't seem possible at the moment. Alternatively, I'm looking at using a Micro USB OTG hub and an additional USB audio adapter to get sound from the Raspberry Pi Zero to the braille display's speakers. Unfortunately, the two USB audio adapters I've tried so far have run hot for some unknown reason. So I have to find some other chipset to see if the problem goes away. A little nuisance, currently, is that you need to manually power off the Raspberry, wait a few seconds, and then power down the braille display. Turning the braille display off cuts power delivery via the internal USB port. If this is accidentally done too soon then the Raspberry Pi Zero is shut down ungracefully (which is probably not the best way to do it). We're looking into connecting a small, buffering battery to the GPIO pins of the rpi, and into notifying the rpi when external power has dropped. A graceful, software-initiated shutdown can then be performed. You can think of it as being like a mini UPS for Micro USB.
The image If you are a happy owner of a Handy Tech Active Star 40 and would like to do something similar, I am happy to share my current (Raspbian Stretch based) image. In fact, if there is enough interest by other blind users, we might even consider putting a kit together that makes it as easy as possible for you to get started. Let me know if this could be of interest to you.
Thanks Thanks to Dave Mielke for reviewing the text of this posting. Thanks to Simon Kainz for making the photos for this article. And I owe a big thank you to my co-workers at Graz University of Technology who have helped me a lot to bootstrap really quickly into the rpi world.
P.S. My first tweet about this topic is just five days ago, and apart from the soundcard not working yet, I feel like the project is already almost complete! By the way, I am editing the final version of this blog posting from my newly created monitorless ARM-based Linux laptop via an ssh connection to my home machine.

30 May 2016

Steve Kemp: A mixed weekend

This past seven days have been a little mixed: Finally I spent the tail end of the weekend being a little red, sore, and itchy. . I figured this was a surprising outbreak of Dyshidrosis on my hands, and eczema on my body. Instead I received a diagnosis of Scarlet Fever. So now I feel somewhat Dickensian! Apparently this infection is on the rise!

9 May 2016

Mike Gabriel: Recent progress in NXv3 development

This is to give a comprehensive overview on the recent progress made in NXv3 (aka nx-libs) development. The upstream sources of nx-libs can be found at / viewed on / cloned from Github:
https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs A great portion of the current work is sponsored by the Qindel Group [1] in Spain (QINDEL FORMACI N Y SERVICIOS, S.L.). Thanks for making this possible. Planned release date: 2nd July, 2016 We aim at releasing a completely tidied up nx-libs code tree versioned 3.6.0 on July 2nd, 2016. There is still a whole bunch of work to do for this, but I am positive that we can make this release date. Goals of our Efforts There are basically two major goals for spending a considerable amount of time, money and energy on NXv3 hacking: The efforts undertaken always have the various existing use cases in mind (esp. the framework of the coming-up Arctica Project, TheQVD and X2Go). Overview on Recent Development Progress General Code Cleanups Making this beast maintainable means first of all: identifying code redundancies, unused code passages, etc. and remove them. This is where we came from (NoMachine's NX 3.5.x, including nxcomp, nxcompext, nxcompshad, nx-X11 and nxagent): 1,757,743 lines of C/C++ code. 
[mike@minobo nx-libs.35 (3.5.0.x)]$ cloc --match-f '.*\.(c cpp h)$' .
    5624 text files.
    5614 unique files.                                          
    2701 files ignored.
http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=18.59 s (302.0 files/s, 132847.4 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C                             3134         231180         252893        1326393
C/C++ Header                  2274          78062         116132         349743
C++                            206          20037          13312          81607
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          5614         329279         382337        1757743
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On the current 3.6.x branch of nx-libs (at commit 6c6b6b9), this is where we are now: 662,635 lines of C/C++ code, amount of code reduced to a third of the original code lines. 
[mike@minobo nx-libs (3.6.x)]$ cloc --match-f '.*\.(c cpp h)' .
    2012 text files.
    2011 unique files.                                          
    1898 files ignored.
http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=5.63 s (341.5 files/s, 161351.5 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C                             1015          74605          81625         463244
C/C++ Header                   785          26992          34354         138063
C++                            122          16984          10804          61328
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          1922         118581         126783         662635
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The latest development branch currently has these statistics: 619,353 lines of C/C++ code, another 40,000 lines could be dropped. 
[mike@minobo nx-libs (pr/libnx-xext-drop-unused-extensions)]$ cloc --match-f '.*\.(c cpp h)' .
    1932 text files.
    1931 unique files.                                          
    1898 files ignored.
http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.60  T=5.66 s (325.4 files/s, 150598.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C                              983          69474          77186         426564
C/C++ Header                   738          25616          33048         131599
C++                            121          16984          10802          61190
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                          1842         112074         121036         619353
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dropping various libNX_X* shared libraries (and using X.org shared client libraries instead) At first, various bundled libraries could be dropped from the nx-X11 code tree. Secondly, several of the bundled X.org libraries could be dropped, because we managed to build against those libraries as provided system-wide. Then, and this undertaking is much trickier, we could drop nearly all Xlib extension libraries that are used by nxagent with its role of being an X11 client. We could sucessfully drop these Xlib extension libraries from nx-X11, because we managed to build nxagent against the matching libraries in X.org: libNX_Xdmcp, libNX_Xfixes, libNX_XComposite, libNX_Xdamage, libNX_Xtst, libNX_Xinerama, libNX_Xfont, libNX_xkbui, and various others. All these droppings happened without a loss of functionality. However, some shared X client libraries are not easy to remove without loss of functionality, or rather not removable at all. Dropping libNX_Xrender We recently dropped libNX_Xrender [2] and now build nxagent against X.org's libXrender. However, this cost us a compression feature in NX. The libNX_Xrender code has passages that do zero padding of the unused memory portions in non-32bit-depth glyphs (the NX_RENDER_CLEANUP feature). However, we have hope for being able to reintroduce that feature again later, but current efforts [3] still fail at run-time. Dropping libNX_Xext is not possible... ...the libNX_Xext / Xserver Xext code has been cleaned up instead. Quite an amount of research and testing has been spent on removing the libNX_Xext library from the build workflow of nxagent. However, it seems that building against X.org's libXext will require us to update the Xext part of the nxagent Xserver at the same time. While taking this deep look into Xext code, we dropped various Xext extensions from the nx-X11 Xserver code. The extensions that got dropped [5] are all extensions that already have been dropped from X.org's Xserver code, as well. Further investigation, however, showed, that actually the only used client side extension code from libNX_Xext is the XShape extension. Thus, all other client side extension got dropped now in a very recent pull request [4]. Dropping libNX_X11 not easy, research summary given here For the sake of dropping the Xlib library bundled with nx-libs, we have attempted at writing a shared library called libNX_Xproxy. This library is supposed to contain a subset of the NXtrans related Xlib code that NoMachine patched into X.org's libX11 (and libxtrans). Results of this undertaking [6] so far: Over the weekend, I thought this all through once more and I am pretty sure right now, that we can actually make libNX_Xproxy work and drop all of libNX_X11 from nx-libs soon. Although we have to port (i.e. copy) various functions related to the NX transport from libNX_X11 into libNX_Xproxy, this change will allow us to drop all Xlib drawing routines and use those provided by X.org's Xlib shared library directly. Composite extension backport in nxagent to version 0.4 Mihai Moldovan looked at what it needs to make the Composite extension functional in nxagent. Unfortunately, the exact answer cannot be given, yet. As a start, Mihai backported latest Composite extension (v0.4) code from X.org's Xserver into the nxagent Xserver [7]. The currently shipped Composite extension version in nxagent is v0.2. Work on the NX Compression shared library (aka nxcomp v3) Fernando Carvajal and Salvador Fandi o from the Qindel Group [1] filed three pull requests against the nxcomp part of nx-libs recently, two of them have been code cleanups (done by Fernando), the third one is a feature enhancement regarding channels in nxcomp (provided by Salva). Protocol clean-up: drop pre-3.5 support With the release of nx-libs 3.6.x, we will drop support for nxcomp versions earlier than 3.5. Thus, if you are still on nxcomp 3.4, be prepared for upgrading at least to version 3.5.x. The code removal had been issued as pull request #111 ("Remove compatibility code for nxcomp before 3.5.0") [8]. The PR has already been reviewed and merged. Fernando filed another code cleanup PR (#119 [9]) against nx-libs that also already got merged into the 3.6.x branch. UNIX Socket Support for Channels The nxcomp library (and thus, nxproxy) provides a feature called "channels". Channels in nxcomp can be used for forwarding traffic between NX client side and the NX server side (along the graphical X11 transport that nxcomp is designed for). Until version 3.5.x, nxcomp was only able to use local TCP sockets for providing / connecting to channel endpoints. We consider local TCP sockets as insecure and aim at adding UNIX file socket support to nxcomp whereever a connection is established. Salva provided a patch against nxcomp that provides UNIX socket support to channel endpoints. The initial use case for this patch is: connect to client side pulseaudio socket file and avoid enabling the TCP listening socket in pulseaudio. The traffic then is channeled to the server side, so that pulse clients can connect to a UNIX socket file rather than to a local TCP port. The channel support patch has already been reviewed and merged into the 3.6.x branch of nx-libs. Rebasing nxagent against latest X.org Ulrich Sibiller spent a considerable amount of time and energy on providing a build chain that allows building nxagent against a modularized X.org 7.0 (rather than against the monolithic build tree of X.org 6.9, like we still do in nx-libs 3.6.x). We plan to adapt and minimize this build workflow for nx-libs 3.7.x (scheduled for summer 2017). A short howto that shows how to build nxagent with that new workflow will be posted on this blog within the next days. So stay tuned. Further work accomplished Quite a lot of code cleanup PRs have been filed by myself against nx-libs. Most of them target at removal of unnecessary code from the nx-X11 Xserver code base and the nxagent DDX: The third one (PR #120) in the list requires some detailled explanation: We discovered that nxagent ships overrides some symbols from the original Xserver code base. These overrides are induced by copies of some files from some Xserver sub-directory placed into the hw/nxagent/ DDX path. All those files' names match the pattern NX*.c. These copies of code are done in a way that the C compiler suppresses throwing its 'symbol "" redefined: first defined in ""; redefined in ""' errors. The approach taken, however, requires to have quite a few 10.000 lines of redundant code in hw/nxagent/NX*.c that also gets shipped in some Xserver sub-directory (mostly dix/ and render/). With pull request #120, we have identified all code passages in hw/nxagent/NX*.c that must be considered as NX'ish. We differentiated the NX'ish functions from functions that never got changed by NoMachine when developing nxagent. I then came up with four different approaches ([13,14,15,16]) of dropping redundant code from those hw/nxagent/NX*.c files. We (Mihai Moldovan and myself) discussed the various approaches and favoured the disable-Xserver-code-and-include-into-NX*.c variant [14] over the others for the following reasons: In the long run, the Xserver portion of the patches provided via this pull request #120 are required to be upstreamed into X.org's Xserver. The discussion around this will be started when we fully dive into rebasing nxagent's Xserver code base against latest X.org Xserver. Tasks ahead before the 3.6.x Release Various tasks we face before 3.6.x can be released. Here is a probably incomplete list: Tasks ahead after the 3.6.x Release (i.e., for 3.7.x) Here is an even rougher and probably highly incomplete list for tasks after the 3.6.x release: Credits Some people have to be named here that give their heart and love to this project. Thank you guys for supporting the development efforts around nx-libs and the Arctica Project: Thanks to Nico Arenas Alonso from and on behalf of the Qindel Group for coordinating the current funding project around nx-libs. Thanks to Ulrich Sibiller for giving a great amount of spare time to working on the nxagent-rebase-against-X.org effort. Thanks to Mihai Moldovan for doing endless code reviews and being available for contracted work via BAUR-ITCS UG [17] on NXv3, as well. Thanks to Mario Becroft for providing a patch that allows us to hook into nxagent X11 sessions with VNC and have the session fully available over VNC while the NX transport is in suspended state. Also Mario is pouring some fancy UDP ideas into the re-invention of remote desktop computing process performed in the Arctica Project. Mario has been an NX supporter for years, I am glad to have him still around after so many years (although he was close to abandoning NX usage at least once). Thanks to Fernando Carvajal from Qindel (until April 2016) for cleaning up nxcomp code. Thanks to Orion Poplawski from the Fedora Project for working on the first bundled libraries removal patches and being a resource on RPM packaging. Thanks to my friend Lee for working behind the scenes on the Arctica Core code and constantly pouring various of his ideas into my head. Thanks for regularly reminding me on benchmarking things.
Folks, thanks to all of you for all your various efforts on this huge beast of software. You are a great resource of expertise and it's a pleasure and honour working with you all.
New Faces Last but not least, I'd like to let everyone know that the Qindel Group sponsors another developer joining in on NXv3 development: Vadim Troshchinskiy (aka vatral on Github). Vadim has worked on NXv3 before and we are looking forward to having him and his skills in the team soon (probably end of May 2016). Welcome on board of the team, Vadim.
[1] http://www.qindel.com
[2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/93
[3] https://github.com/sunweaver/nx-libs/commit/be41bde7efc46582b442706dfb85...
[4] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/121
[5] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/106
[6] https://github.com/sunweaver/nx-libs/tree/wip/libnx-x11-full-removal
[7] https://github.com/sunweaver/nx-libs/tree/pr/composite-0_4
[8] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/111
[9] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/119
[10] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/102
[11] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/106
[12] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/pull/120
[13] https://github.com/sunweaver/nx-libs/commit/9692e6a7045b3ab5cb0daaed187e... (include NX'ish code into Xserver)
[14] https://github.com/sunweaver/nx-libs/commit/3d359bfc2b6d021c1ae9c6e19e96... (include Xserver code into NX*.c)
[15] https://github.com/sunweaver/nx-libs/commit/af72ee5624a15d21c610528e37b6... (use weak symbols and non-static symbols)
[16] https://github.com/sunweaver/nx-libs/commit/7205bb8848c49ee3e78a82fde906... (override symbols with interceptions)
[17] http://www.baur-itcs.de/20-x2go/20-x2gosupport/

21 April 2016

Mario Lang: Scraping the web with Python and XQuery

During a JAWS for Windows training, I was introduced to the Research It feature of that screen reader. Research It is a quick way to utilize web scraping to make working with complex web pages easier. It is about extracting specific information from a website that does not offer an API. For instance, look up a word in an online dictionary, or quickly check the status of a delivery. Strictly speaking, this feature does not belong in a screen reader, but it is a very helpful tool to have at your fingertips. Research It uses XQuery (actually, XQilla) to do all the heavy lifting. This also means that the Research It Rulesets are theoretically also useable on other platforms. I was immediately hooked, because I always had a love for XPath. Looking at XQuery code is totally self-explanatory for me. I just like the syntax and semantics. So I immediately checked out XQilla on Debian, and found #821329 and #821330, which were promptly fixed by Tommi Vainikainen, thanks to him for the really quick response! Unfortunately, making xqilla:parse-html available and upgrading to the latest upstream version is not enough to use XQilla on Linux with the typical webpages out there. Xerces-C++, which is what XQilla uses to fetch web resources, does not support HTTPS URLs at the moment. I filed #821380 to ask for HTTPS support in Xerces-C to be enabled by default. And even with HTTPS support enabled in Xerces-C, the xqilla:parse-html function (which is based on HTML Tidy) fails for a lot of real-world webpages I tried. Manually upgrading the six year old version of HTML Tidy in Debian to the latest from GitHub (tidy-html5, #810951) did not help a lot either.
Python to the rescue XQuery is still a very nice language for extracting information from markup documents. XQilla just has a bit of a hard time dealing with the typical HTML documents out there. After all, it was designed to deal with well-formed XML documents. So I decided to build myself a little wrapper around XQilla which fetches the web resources with the Python Requests package, and cleans the HTML document with BeautifulSoup (which uses lxml to do HTML parsing). The output of BeautifulSoup can apparently be passed to XQilla as the context document. This is a fairly crazy hack, but it works quite reliably so far. Here is how one of my web scraping rules looks like: 
from click import argument, group
@group()
def xq():
  """Web scraping for command-line users."""
  pass
@xq.group('github.com')
def github():
  """Quick access to github.com."""
  pass
@github.command('code_search')
@argument('language')
@argument('query')
def github_code_search(language, query):
  """Search for source code."""
  scrape(get='https://github.com/search',
         params= 'l': language, 'q': query, 'type': 'code' )
The function scrape automatically determines the XQuery filename according to the callers function name. Here is how github_code_search.xq looks like: 
declare function local:source-lines($table as node()*) as xs:string*
 
  for $tr in $table/tr return normalize-space(data($tr))
 ;
let $results := html//div[@id="code_search_results"]/div[@class="code-list"]
for $div in $results/div
let $repo := data($div/p/a[1])
let $file := data($div/p/a[2])
let $link := resolve-uri(data($div/p/a[2]/@href))
return (concat($repo, ": ", $file), $link, local:source-lines($div//table),
        "---------------------------------------------------------------")
That is all I need to implement a custom web scraping rule. A few lines of Python to specify how and where to fetch the website from. And a XQuery file that specifies how to mangle the document content. And thanks to the Python click package, the various entry points of my web scraping script can easily be called from the command-line. Here is a sample invokation: 
fx:~/xq% ./xq.py github.com
Usage: xq.py github.com [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...
  Quick access to github.com.
Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.
Commands:
  code_search  Search for source code.
fx:~/xq% ./xq.py github.com code_search Pascal '"debian/rules"'
prof7bit/LazPackager: frmlazpackageroptionsdeb.pas
https://github.com/prof7bit/LazPackager/blob/cc3e35e9bae0c5a582b0b301dcbb38047fba2ad9/frmlazpackageroptionsdeb.pas
230 procedure TFDebianOptions.BtnPreviewRulesClick(Sender: TObject);
231 begin
232 ShowPreview('debian/rules', EdRules.Text);
233 end;
234
235 procedure TFDebianOptions.BtnPreviewChangelogClick(Sender: TObject);
---------------------------------------------------------------
prof7bit/LazPackager: lazpackagerdebian.pas
https://github.com/prof7bit/LazPackager/blob/cc3e35e9bae0c5a582b0b301dcbb38047fba2ad9/lazpackagerdebian.pas
205 + 'mv ../rules debian/' + LF
206 + 'chmod +x debian/rules' + LF
207 + 'mv ../changelog debian/' + LF
208 + 'mv ../copyright debian/' + LF
---------------------------------------------------------------
For the impatient, here is the implementation of scrape: 
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from bs4.element import Doctype, ResultSet
from inspect import currentframe
from itertools import chain
from os import path
from os.path import abspath, dirname
from subprocess import PIPE, run
from tempfile import NamedTemporaryFile
import requests
def scrape(get=None, post=None, find_all=None,
           xquery_name=None, xquery_vars= , **kwargs):
  """Execute a XQuery file.
  When either get or post is specified, fetch the resource and run it through
  BeautifulSoup, passing it as context to the XQuery.
  If find_all is given, wrap the result of executing find_all on
  the BeautifulSoup in an artificial HTML body.
  If xquery_name is not specified, the callers function name is used.
  xquery_name combined with extension ".xq" is searched in the directory
  where this Python script resides and executed with XQilla.
  kwargs are passed to get or post calls.  Typical extra keywords would be:
  params -- To pass extra parameters to the URL.
  data -- For HTTP POST.
  """
  response = None
  url = None
  context = None
  if get is not None:
    response = requests.get(get, **kwargs)
  elif post is not None:
    response = requests.post(post, **kwargs)
  if response is not None:
    response.raise_for_status()
    context = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'lxml')
    dtd = next(context.descendants)
    if type(dtd) is Doctype:
      dtd.extract()
    if find_all is not None:
      context = context.find_all(find_all)
    url = response.url
  if xquery_name is None:
    xquery_name = currentframe().f_back.f_code.co_name
  cmd = ['xqilla']
  if context is not None:
    if type(context) is BeautifulSoup:
      soup = context
      context = NamedTemporaryFile(mode='w')
      print(soup, file=context)
      cmd.extend(['-i', context.name])
    elif isinstance(context, list) or isinstance(context, ResultSet):
      tags = context
      context = NamedTemporaryFile(mode='w')
      print('<html><body>', file=context)
      for item in tags: print(item, file=context)
      print('</body></html>', file=context)
      context.flush()
      cmd.extend(['-i', context.name])
  cmd.extend(chain.from_iterable(['-v', k, v] for k, v in xquery_vars.items()))
  if url is not None:
    cmd.extend(['-b', url])
  cmd.append(abspath(path.join(dirname(__file__), xquery_name + ".xq")))
  output = run(cmd, stdout=PIPE).stdout.decode('utf-8')
  if type(context) is NamedTemporaryFile: context.close()
  print(output, end='')
The full source for xq can be found on GitHub. The project is just two days old, so I have only implemented three scraping rules as of now. However, adding new rules has been made deliberately easy, so that I can just write up a few lines of code whenever I find something on the web which I'd like to scrape on the command-line. If you find this "framework" useful, make sure to share your insights with me. And if you impelement your own scraping rules for a public service, consider sharing that as well. If you have an comments or questions, send me mail. Oh, and by the way, I am now also on Twitter as @blindbird23.

20 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 51 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between April 10th and April 16th 2016: Toolchain fixes Antoine Beaupr suggested that gitpkg stops recording timestamps when creating upstream archives. Antoine Beaupr also pointed out that git-buildpackage diverges from the default gzip settings which is a problem for reproducibly recreating released tarballs which were made using the defaults. Alexis Bienven e submitted a patch extending sphinx SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH support to copyright year. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: atinject-jsr330, avis, brailleutils, charactermanaj, classycle, commons-io, commons-javaflow, commons-jci, gap-radiroot, jebl2, jetty, libcommons-el-java, libcommons-jxpath-java, libjackson-json-java, libjogl2-java, libmicroba-java, libproxool-java, libregexp-java, mobile-atlas-creator, octave-econometrics, octave-linear-algebra, octave-odepkg, octave-optiminterp, rapidsvn, remotetea, ruby-rinku, tachyon, xhtmlrenderer. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: diffoscope development Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek noted in #820631 that diffoscope doesn't work properly when a file contains several cpio archives. Package reviews 21 reviews have been added, 14 updated and 22 removed in this week. New issue found: timestamps_in_htm_by_gap. Chris Lamb reported 10 new FTBFS issues. Misc. The video and the slides from the talk "Reproducible builds ecosystem" at LibrePlanet 2016 have been published now. This week's edition was written by Lunar and Holger Levsen. h01ger automated the maintenance and publishing of this weekly newsletter via git.

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