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. 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.
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.
I would personally like to thank the Debian kernel developers, specifically Ben Hutchings, Maximilian Attems, Dann Frazier, Bastian Blank, and Moritz Muehlenhoff. They went above and beyond what any "normal" developer would have done, ferreting patches out of the kernel.org releases and the different vendor kernels and bug tracking systems, backporting them to the 2.6.32 kernel, testing, and then forwarding them on to me. Their dedication to their user community is amazing for such a "volunteer" group of developers. I firmly believe that without their help, the 2.6.32 kernel would not have been the success that it was. The users of Red Hat and SuSE products owe them a great debt. Buy them a beer the next time you see them, they more than deserve it.I'll take good care of following his wise advice. Please do the same.
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.
We all love stats, don t we? So, here we go!
Let s start with a graph:
It shows the number of packages in the NEW queue since last year. You can see a big drop during April 2011, and a reasonably low rate during the last six months. You could think fellow Debian Developers stopped to upload NEW packages. Sorry, you re wrong! 
Since Squeeze release, 3.832 .changes files with NEW components were processed by dak, with an average of 14,85 NEW packages per day. On the FTP Team side, we had 3.732 accepts (14,47 per day), 339 rejects (1,31 per day) and 178 comments to maintainers (0,69 per day).
So, let s find out which upload was the quickest ever. Try to gamble a bit before reading the answer, to see whether you are near to the real value
Alessio Treglia, you probably already know, because your gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1 upload has been processed in 41 seconds (yes, forty-one seconds!). Here s an excerpt from ftp-master log to certify it:
20110516120252 process-upload dak Processing changes file gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changesAlex was the super-fast FTP Team member behind the quickest accept, do you want to beat him? Join FTP Team
20110516120258 process-upload dak Moving to new gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
20110516120339 process-new tolimar NEW ACCEPT: gwc_0.21.16~dfsg-1_amd64.changes
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+squeeze3So 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.
Mike Waychison from Google sent fancy costum tailored enhancements to kinit. Thanks to new klibc capget and capset support kinit now understands "drop_capabilities=" bootparam. It specifies a list of capability names that will be dropped before switching over to init. dirent.h saw the addition of scandir() and alphasort(). Gentoo devs pushed a klcc enhancement. For details see klibc 1.5.25 release annoucement.
A lot of stuff is in work: current klibc patch queue.
Next.