A Safe and Happy New Year to all. While Debconf India is still a pipe-dream as of now, did see that India has been gradually doing it easier for tourists and casual business visitors to come visit India. This I take as very positive development for India itself. The 1st condition is itself good for anybody visiting India

Eligibility International Travellers whose sole objective of visiting India is recreation , sight-seeing , casual visit to meet friends or relatives, short duration medical treatment or casual business visit.

https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/visa/tvoa.html That this facility is being given to 130 odd countries is better still

Albania, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Island, Chile, China, China- SAR Hong-Kong, China- SAR Macau, Colombia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d lvoire, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Laos, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niue Island, Norway, Oman, Palau, Palestine, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tonga, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks & Caicos Island, Tuvalu, UAE, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, Vanuatu, Vatican City-Holy See, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

This should make it somewhat easier for any Indian organizer as well as any participants from any of the member countries shared. There is possibility that this list would even get longer, provided we are able to scale our airports and all and any necessary infrastructure that would be needed for International Visitors to have a good experience. What has been particularly interesting is to know which ports of call are being used by International Visitors as well as overall growth rate

The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November, 2016 among the top 15 source countries was highest from USA (15.53%) followed by UK (11.21%), Bangladesh (10.72%), Canada (4.66%), Russian Fed (4.53%), Australia (4.04%), Malaysia (3.65%), Germany (3.53%), China (3.14%), France (2.88%), Sri Lanka (2.49%), Japan (2.49%), Singapore (2.16%), Nepal (1.46%) and Thailand (1.37%).

And port of call

The Percentage share of Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in India during November 2016 among the top 15 ports was highest at Delhi Airport (32.71%) followed by Mumbai Airport (18.51%), Chennai Airport (6.83%), Bengaluru Airport (5.89%), Haridaspur Land check post (5.87%), Goa Airport (5.63%), Kolkata Airport (3.90%), Cochin Airport (3.29%), Hyderabad Airport (3.14%), Ahmadabad Airport (2.76%), Trivandrum Airport (1.54%), Trichy Airport (1.53%), Gede Rail (1.16%), Amritsar Airport (1.15%), and Ghojadanga land check post (0.82%) .

The Ghojadanga land check post seems to be between West Bengal, India and Bangladesh. Gede Railway Station is also in West Bengal as well. So all and any overlanders could take any of those ways.Even Hardispur Land Check post comes in the Bengal-Bangladesh border only. In the airports, Delhi Airport seems to be attracting lot more business than the Mumbai Airport. Part of the reason I *think* is the direct link of Delhi Airport to NDLS via the Delhi Airport Express Line . The same when it will happen in Mumbai should be a game-changer for city too. Now if you are wondering why I have been suddenly talking about visas and airports in India, it came because Hong Kong is going to Withdraw Visa Free Entry Facility For Indians. Although, as rightly pointed out in the article doesn t make sense from economic POV and seems to be somewhat politically motivated. Not that I or anybody else can do anything about that. Seeing that, I thought it was a good opportunity to see how good/Bad our Government is and it seems to be on the right path. Although the hawks (Intelligence and Counter-Terrorist Agencies) will probably become a bit more paranoid , their work becomes tougher.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Airport Metro Line 3, #CSIA, #Incredible India, #India, #International Tourism

Burkeman: Why time management is ruining our lives Over the past semester I ve been trying to convince one graduate student and one professor in my department to use Inbox Zero to get a better handle on their e-mail inboxes. The goal is not to be more productive. The two of them get far more academic work done than I do. However, both of them are far more stressed than I am. And in the case of the graduate student, I have to add items to my own to-do list to chase up e-mails that I ve sent him, which only spreads this stress and tension around. The graduate student sent me this essay by Oliver Burkeman about how these techniques can backfire, creating more stress, tension and anxiety. It seems to me that this happens when we think of these techniques as having anything to do with productivity. Often people will say use this technique and you ll be less stressed, more productive, and even more productive because you re less stressed. Why not just say use this technique and you ll be less anxious and stressed ? This is a refusal to treat lower anxiety as merely a means to some further end. People can autonomously set their own ends, and they ll probably do a better job of this when they re less anxious. Someone offering a technique to help with their sense of being overwhelmed need not tell them what to do with their new calm. It might be argued that this response to Burkeman fails to address the huge sense of obligation that an e-mail inbox can generate. Perhaps the only sane response to this infinite to-do list is to let it pile up. If we follow a technique like Inbox Zero, don t we invest our inbox with more importance than it has? Like a lot of areas of life, the issue is that the e-mails that will advance truly valuable projects and relationships, projects of both ourselves and of others, are mixed in with reams of stuff that doesn t matter. We face this situation whenever we go into a supermarket, or wonder what to do during an upcoming vacation. In all these situations, we have a responsibility to learn how to filter the important stuff out, just as we have a responsibility to avoid reading celebrity gossip columns when we are scanning through a newspaper. Inbox Zero is a technique to do that filtering in the case of e-mail. Just letting our inbox pile up is an abdication of responsibility, rather than an intelligent response to a piece of technology that most of the world abuses.

Review: A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman

Translator:	Henning Koch
Publisher:	Washington Square
Copyright:	2012, 2014
Printing:	May 2015
ISBN:	1-4767-3802-5
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	337

Ove is 59 years old and drives a Saab. He's grumpy, often taciturn, very particular in how things should be done, and extremely judgmental about how other people do them. He is the sort of person who regularly rants about how poorly things are done these days and how much better they used to be. Ove does not like change. A Man Called Ove opens with him terrorizing the employees of an Apple Store, trying to buy a computer, but this incident is actually foreshadowing, and will only make sense at the very end of the book. The story actually begins in the second chapter, with Ove making his morning rounds of the neighborhood in which he lives, discovering an out-of-place bicycle and a mangy cat, and then starting to put a hook in his ceiling. But just as he's getting started, he's interrupted by new neighbors, who are incapable of backing up a trailer properly without scraping it against his house. Not that motor vehicles are allowed in the area anyway. That inauspicious beginning changes Ove's life, mostly through the sheer persistence of other people's disasters. It's not obvious at first that it will, and at the start A Man Called Ove could be a funny collection of stories about a curmudgeon. But as Backman shows more of Ove's life and tells more of his background and situation, it becomes something so much more, something satisfying and heart-breaking and deeply human. I've been struggling to review this book because I find it hard to capture what makes it so wonderful. Making that even harder, several key plot elements are introduced gradually in the story in ways that add a lot to the rhythm of the plot, and I don't want to spoil them. I think the closest I can get in a spoiler-free review is that A Man Called Ove is about empathy. It's about human connection, even when people seem unlikable, unreachable, or angrily off-putting. And it's a book about seeing the best inside other people, and about finding ways to be persistently oneself while still changing enough to find new connections, and about recognizing those moments when someone is showing you their best without getting caught up on the surface presentation. The man Ove is the center of this story, the subject of tight third person perspective for nearly all of the book. He's 59 when the story opens, but by the end of the book, mostly through flashback chapters, the reader knows his childhood and early adulthood and much of the story of his marriage. At first, he seems to be an obnoxious, surly, angry curmudgeon, the sort of old man who yells at clouds. But the joy of this book is how the reader's perception changes, how one gains sympathy, and then respect, first for Ove's unshakable inner sense of morality that he got from his father and then for his rule-based approach to how the world should work. One never entirely agrees with him, but Backman demystifies and explains Ove's thought process and ties it into a different generation and a different way of interacting with work (although Ove was still uncommon even in his youth, just not as unique). As I write this review, news and opinion in the United States are very focused on the plight of the white working class and how that does or does not explain recent election results. Backman is Swedish (I read this book in translation), so it's not coming from US culture and the cultural fault lines are not quite the same. But I think this book says something deeply valuable and fascinating about the working-class culture of Ove's youth, something that's much less about specific politics and much more about how it feels to make things with one's hands, to build or rebuild one's own house, or to work for thirty years at the same job and not be interested in a promotion to management. Backman does a truly spectacular job conveying the sense of angry frustration at the changes in work and life, the difficulty communicating one's internal feelings meaningfully, and the quiet joy of finding those places in life where one can do things properly. Ove is, of course, not the only character in this book, and every character here is a delight in their own idiosyncratic ways. The main story arc involves the various people in his neighborhood, particularly his new next-door neighbors: a pregnant Iranian woman and her very laid-back husband who is incapable of doing things around the house but keeps trying. I think Parvaneh, the woman, is my favorite character of the story except for Ove, and it's fitting that she's the first to work out the broad outlines of what's happening in Ove's life and the tricky path to effectively helping him. In a way, she's Ove's opposite: fiery, mercurial, talkative, and meddling. But she sees things in Ove that no one else seems to notice. (And the scene between her and Ove when she's learning to drive is a thing of beauty.) This is a book that could have been extremely sad, and yet isn't. It's a book about somber, depressing topics that somehow manages to be delightfully funny. And it's about a curmudgeon who persistently fails to have any sort of stereotyped heart of gold, but is nonetheless one of the most satisfying, fascinating, ethical, and good-willed characters I've ever read about. It manages to treat a collection of very different characters with individualized deep empathy and appreciation, while never pushing them all into the same mold. And the ending is wonderful. I rarely read slice of life stories, but this one is worth making an exception for. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 10 out of 10

Review: A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman

Translator:	Henning Koch
Publisher:	Washington Square
Copyright:	2012, 2014
Printing:	May 2015
ISBN:	1-4767-3802-5
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	337

Ove is 59 years old and drives a Saab. He's grumpy, often taciturn, very particular in how things should be done, and extremely judgmental about how other people do them. He is the sort of person who regularly rants about how poorly things are done these days and how much better they used to be. Ove does not like change. A Man Called Ove opens with him terrorizing the employees of an Apple Store, trying to buy a computer, but this incident is actually foreshadowing, and will only make sense at the very end of the book. The story actually begins in the second chapter, with Ove making his morning rounds of the neighborhood in which he lives, discovering an out-of-place bicycle and a mangy cat, and then starting to put a hook in his ceiling. But just as he's getting started, he's interrupted by new neighbors, who are incapable of backing up a trailer properly without scraping it against his house. Not that motor vehicles are allowed in the area anyway. That inauspicious beginning changes Ove's life, mostly through the sheer persistence of other people's disasters. It's not obvious at first that it will, and at the start A Man Called Ove could be a funny collection of stories about a curmudgeon. But as Backman shows more of Ove's life and tells more of his background and situation, it becomes something so much more, something satisfying and heart-breaking and deeply human. I've been struggling to review this book because I find it hard to capture what makes it so wonderful. Making that even harder, several key plot elements are introduced gradually in the story in ways that add a lot to the rhythm of the plot, and I don't want to spoil them. I think the closest I can get in a spoiler-free review is that A Man Called Ove is about empathy. It's about human connection, even when people seem unlikable, unreachable, or angrily off-putting. And it's a book about seeing the best inside other people, and about finding ways to be persistently oneself while still changing enough to find new connections, and about recognizing those moments when someone is showing you their best without getting caught up on the surface presentation. The man Ove is the center of this story, the subject of tight third person perspective for nearly all of the book. He's 59 when the story opens, but by the end of the book, mostly through flashback chapters, the reader knows his childhood and early adulthood and much of the story of his marriage. At first, he seems to be an obnoxious, surly, angry curmudgeon, the sort of old man who yells at clouds. But the joy of this book is how the reader's perception changes, how one gains sympathy, and then respect, first for Ove's unshakable inner sense of morality that he got from his father and then for his rule-based approach to how the world should work. One never entirely agrees with him, but Backman demystifies and explains Ove's thought process and ties it into a different generation and a different way of interacting with work (although Ove was still uncommon even in his youth, just not as unique). As I write this review, news and opinion in the United States are very focused on the plight of the white working class and how that does or does not explain recent election results. Backman is Swedish (I read this book in translation), so it's not coming from US culture and the cultural fault lines are not quite the same. But I think this book says something deeply valuable and fascinating about the working-class culture of Ove's youth, something that's much less about specific politics and much more about how it feels to make things with one's hands, to build or rebuild one's own house, or to work for thirty years at the same job and not be interested in a promotion to management. Backman does a truly spectacular job conveying the sense of angry frustration at the changes in work and life, the difficulty communicating one's internal feelings meaningfully, and the quiet joy of finding those places in life where one can do things properly. Ove is, of course, not the only character in this book, and every character here is a delight in their own idiosyncratic ways. The main story arc involves the various people in his neighborhood, particularly his new next-door neighbors: a pregnant Iranian woman and her very laid-back husband who is incapable of doing things around the house but keeps trying. I think Parvaneh, the woman, is my favorite character of the story except for Ove, and it's fitting that she's the first to work out the broad outlines of what's happening in Ove's life and the tricky path to effectively helping him. In a way, she's Ove's opposite: fiery, mercurial, talkative, and meddling. But she sees things in Ove that no one else seems to notice. (And the scene between her and Ove when she's learning to drive is a thing of beauty.) This is a book that could have been extremely sad, and yet isn't. It's a book about somber, depressing topics that somehow manages to be delightfully funny. And it's about a curmudgeon who persistently fails to have any sort of stereotyped heart of gold, but is nonetheless one of the most satisfying, fascinating, ethical, and good-willed characters I've ever read about. It manages to treat a collection of very different characters with individualized deep empathy and appreciation, while never pushing them all into the same mold. And the ending is wonderful. I rarely read slice of life stories, but this one is worth making an exception for. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 10 out of 10

(image courtesy of XKCD) Last week I graduated with a Masters in Legal Science (now taught as an MLaw) from Queen s University Belfast. I m pleased to have achieved a Distinction, as well an award for Outstanding Achievement in the Dissertation (which was on the infringement of privacy by private organisations due to state mandated surveillance and retention laws - pretty topical given the unfortunate introduction of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016). However, as previously stated, I had made the decision that I was happier building things, and wanted to return to the world of technology. I talked to a bunch of interesting options, got to various stages in the hiring process with each of them, and happily accepted a role with Titan IC Systems which started at the beginning of September. Titan have produced a hardware accelerated regular expression processor (hence the XKCD reference); the RXP in its FPGA variant (what I get to play with) can handle pattern matching against 40Gb/s of traffic. Which is kinda interesting, as it lends itself to a whole range of applications from network scanning to data mining to, well, anything where you want to sift through a large amount of data checking against a large number of rules. However it s brand new technology for me to get up to speed with (plus getting back into a regular working pattern rather than academentia), and the combination of that and spending most of the summer post DebConf wrapping up the dissertation has meant I haven t had as much time to devote other things as I d have liked. However I ve a few side projects at various stages of completion and will try to manage more regular updates.

I attended this year's Linux Kernel Summit in Santa Fe, NM, USA and made notes on some of the sessions that were relevant to Debian. LWN also reported many of the discussions. This is the second and last part of my notes; part 1 is here. Kernel Hardening Kees Cook presented the ongoing work on upstream kernel hardening, also known as the Kernel Self-Protection Project or KSPP. GCC plugins The kernel build system can now build and use GCC plugins to implement some protections. This requires gcc 4.5 and the plugin headers installed. It has been tested on x86, arm, and arm64. It is disabled by CONFIG_COMPILE_TEST because CI systems using allmodconfig/allyesconfig probably don't have those installed, but this ought to be changed at some point. There was a question as to how plugin headers should be installed for cross-compilers or custom compilers, but I didn't hear a clear answer to this. Kees has been prodding distribution gcc maintainers to package them. Mark Brown mentioned the Linaro toolchain being widely used; Kees has not talked to its maintainers yet. Probabilistic protections These protections are based on hidden state that an attacker will need to discover in order to make an effective attack; they reduce the probability of success but don't prevent it entirely. Kernel address space layout randomisation (KASLR) has now been implemented on x86, arm64, and mips for the kernel image. (Debian enables this.) However there are still lots of information leaks that defeat this. This could theoretically be improved by relocating different sections or smaller parts of the kernel independently, but this requires re-linking at boot. Aside from software information leaks, the branch target predictor on (common implementations of) x86 provides a side channel to find addresses of branches in the kernel. Page and heap allocation, etc., is still quite predictable. struct randomisation (RANDSTRUCT plugin from grsecurity) reorders members in (a) structures containing only function pointers (b) explicitly marked structures. This makes it very hard to attack custom kernels where the kernel image is not readable. But even for distribution kernels, it increases the maintenance burden for attackers. Deterministic protections These protections block a class of attacks completely. Read-only protection of kernel memory is either mandatory or enabled by default on x86, arm, and arm64. (Debian enables this.) Protections against execution of user memory in kernel mode are now implemented in hardware on x86 (SMEP, in Intel processors from Skylake onward) and on arm64 (PXN, from ARMv8.1). But Skylake is not available for servers and ARMv8.1 is not yet implemented at all! s390 always had this protection. It may be possible to 'emulate' this using other hardware protections. arm (v7) and arm64 now have this, but x86 doesn't. Linus doesn't like the overhead of previously proposed implementations for x86. It is possible to do this using PCID (in Intel processors from Sandy Bridge onward), which has already been done in PaX - and this should be fast enough. Virtually mapped stacks protect against stack overflow attacks. They were implemented as an option for x86 only in 4.9. (Debian enables this.) Copies to or from user memory sometimes use a user-controlled size that is not properly bounded. Hardened usercopy, implemented as an option in 4.8 for many architectures, protects against this. (Debian enables this.) Memory wiping (zero on free) protects against some information leaks and use-after-free bugs. It was already implemented as debug feature with non-zero poison value, but at some performance cost. Zeroing can be cheaper since it allows allocator to skip zeroing on reallocation. That was implemented as an option in 4.6. (Debian does not currently enable this but we might do if the performance cost is low enough.) Constification (with the CONSTIFY gcc plugin) reduces the amount of static data that can be written to. As with RANDSTRUCT, this is applied to function pointer tables and explicitly marked structures. Instances of some types need to be modified very occasionally. In PaX/Grsecurity this is done with pax_ open,close _kernel() which globally disable write protection temporarily. It would be preferable to override write protection in a more directed way, so that the permission to write doesn't leak into any other code that interrupts this process. The feature is not in mainline yet. Atomic wrap detction protects against reference-counting bugs which can result in a use-after-free. Overflow and underflow are trapped and result in an 'oops'. There is no measurable performance impact. It would be applied to all operations on the atomic_t type, but there needs to be an opt-out for atomics that are not ref-counters - probably by adding an atomic_wrap_t type for them. This has been implemented for x86, arm, and arm64 but is not in mainline yet. Kernel Freezer Hell For the second year running, Jiri Kosina raised the problem of 'freezing' kthreads (kernel-mode threads) in preparation for system suspend (suspend to RAM, or hibernation). What are the semantics? What invariants should be met when a kthread gets frozen? They are not defined anywhere. Most freezable threads don't actually need to be quiesced. Also many non-freezable threads are pointlessly calling try_to_freeze() (probably due to copying code without understanding it)). At a system level, what we actually need is I/O and filesystem consistency. This should be achieved by:

• Telling mounted filesystems to freeze. They can quiesce any kthreads they created.
• Device drivers quiescing any kthreads they created, from their PM suspend implementation.

The system suspend code should not need to directly freeze threads. Kernel Documentation Jon Corbet and Mauro Carvalho presented the recent work on kernel documentation. The kernel's documentation system was a house of cards involving DocBook and a lot of custom scripting. Both the DocBook templates and plain text files are gradually being converted to reStructuredText format, processed by Sphinx. However, manual page generation is currently 'broken' for documents processed by Sphinx. There are about 150 files at the top level of the documentation tree, that are being gradually moved into subdirectories. The most popular files, that are likely to be referenced in external documentation, have been replaced by placeholders. Sphinx is highly extensible and this has been used to integrate kernel-doc. It would be possible to add extensions that parse and include the MAINTAINERS file and Documentation/ABI/ files, which have their own formats, but the documentation maintainers would prefer not to add extensions that can't be pushed to Sphinx upstream. There is lots of obsolete documentation, and patches to remove those would be welcome. Linus objected to PDF files recently added under the Documentation/media directory - they are not the source format so should not be there! They should be generated from the corresponding SVG or image files at build time. Issues around Tracepoints Steve Rostedt and Shuah Khan led a discussion about tracepoints. Currently each maintainer decides which tracepoints to create. The cost of each added tracepoint is minimal, but the cost of very many tracepoints is more substantial. So there is such a thing as too many tracepoints, and we need a policy to decide when they are justified. They advised not to create tracepoints just in case, since kprobes can be used for tracing (almost) anywhere dynamically. There was some support for requiring documentation of each new tracepoint. That may dissuade introduction of obscure tracepoints, but also creates a higher expectation of stability. Tools such as bcc and IOVisor are now being created that depend on specific tracepoints or even function names (through kprobes). Should we care about breaking them? Linus said that we should strive to be polite to developers and users relying on tracepoints, but if it's too painful to maintain a tracepoint then we should go ahead and change it. Where the end users of the tool are themselves developers it's more reasonable to expect them to upgrade the tool and we should care less about changing it. In some cases tracepoints could provide dummy data for compatibility (as is done in some places in procfs).

I don't often write on this blog, and when I do, it's either tech related, or light life stuff. Over the next few weeks, it's going to get a lot more political. If you currently follow this blog for its technical content, you may be tempted to tune out. I would encourage you to stay and listen. I'm passionate about the technology that I work on; but the greatest problems facing our world today are not ones that will be solved with software. American democracy is in bad shape, and it's because of what we're doing to it. This is not a problem of the Right or of the Left; it is not a problem that began with the election of Donald Trump, and it's not a problem that will go away at the end of his term. It is partly a structural problem with the way our elections work, but more than that it's a problem of how we're splitting into separate tribes, isolating ourselves from those who don't agree with us. As Russ Allbery wrote the morning after the election, everything about how we organize ourselves online today - and how we let Facebook and Twitter organize us - leads us to surround ourselves with people who already think the same way we do. That leaves all of us with huge blind spots for other people in our country, and it stifles the free exchange of ideas that is so essential for a healthy democracy. We need leaders who will work to make America a better and more just place for all our neighbors, not just a two-party system that plays tug-of-war using two different sets of voters that feel shut out. And the way we organize ourselves today (online and off) does not let us recognize those leaders. There's a lot of talk now about Facebook changing how it decides what to show people; and maybe they can manage to help everyone's online experience be a little less of a bubble. But part of the change needs to come from us. We need to be willing to engage, civilly, with people whose perspective is different from ours, and make the effort to understand where the other is coming from. So for the next few weeks, I'm going to talk. And I'm going to listen. I have no unique qualifications to speak about the country's issues. But I do have a perspective of my own, which might be different enough from yours to be useful. I was born and raised in Iowa, and graduated from college there. This election cycle, I learned that Iowa holds the distinction of being the state with the lowest percentage of college-educated whites. I'm part of that statistic, because a few years after graduating I moved to Portland, Oregon - a place that's notoriously so far to the left of what we think of as the middle, that it actually has anarchists who would shamefully use a peaceful protest as cover to commit property crime. So I know a few things about the people in each state, that I think the other should hear. I'm also that rarest of creatures, a Portlander who goes to church (Catholic). But I still choose as my neighbors the weird, wonderful, and welcoming community that we have here, whatever Glenn Beck might think. I have a son, and I worry about what kind of world he'll grow up to live in. I work in software, which means I'm doing a lot better than a lot of people in the country right now; it also means that from where I sit, I see trends already in progress that will have an effect on the working class and the middle class that makes NAFTA look like a gnat's fart in comparison. And so I worry for what kind of world we will all live in, if we don't make some changes fast. Let's have a conversation. No comments enabled on this blog, but you can find me on G+ or on Facebook.

Every year since 2010 the Whitley Bay Film Festival has put on a programme of movies in my home town, often with some quirk or gimmick. A few years back we watched "Dawn Of The Dead" in a shopping centre the last act was interrupted by a fake film-reel break, then a load of zombies emerged from the shops. Sometime after that, we saw "The Graduate" within a Church as part of their annual "Secret Cinema" showing. Other famous stunts (which I personally did not witness) include a screening of Jaws on the beach and John Carpenter's "The Fog" in Whitley Bay Lighthouse.

Massive thanks to Hunter North Recruitment for sponsoring Metropolis https://t.co/mphzHPCQ6O @snattaz pic.twitter.com/S9MNQmeLWZ Whitley Film Fest (@wbayfilmfest) August 14, 2016

This year I only went to one showing, Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Two twists this time: it was being shown in The Rendezvous Cafe, an Art-Deco themed building on the sea front; the whole film was accompanied by a live, improvised synthesizer jam by a group of friends and synth/sound enthusiasts who branded themselves "The Mediators" for the evening.

Metropolis live soundtrack preparations at the Rendezvous Cafe. Doors open 19.30 #metropolis pic.twitter.com/AdAqNVdEdx Whitley Film Fest (@wbayfilmfest) August 14, 2016

I've been meaning to watch Metropolis for a long time (I've got the Blu-Ray still sat in the shrink-wrap) and it was great to see the newly restored version, but the live synth accompaniment was what really made the night special for me. They used a bunch of equipment, most notably a set of Korg Volcas. The soundtrack varied in style and intensity to suit the scenes, with the various under-city scenes backed by a pumping, industrial-style improvisation which sounded quite excellent. I've had an interest in playing with synthesisers and making music for years, but haven't put the time in to do it properly. I left newly inspired and energised to finally try to make the time to explore it.

Traduction de l'article original anglais https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/replacing-a-failed-raid-drive/. Voici la proc dure que j'ai suivi pour remplacer un disque RAID d fectueux sur une machine Debian.

Remplacer le disque Apr s avoir remarqu que /dev/sdb a t expuls de mon RAID, j'ai utilis smartmontools pour identifier le num ro de s rie du disque retirer :

smartctl -a /dev/sdb

Cette information en main, j'ai ferm l'ordinateur, retir le disque d fectueux et mis un nouveau disque vide la place.

Initialiser le nouveau disque Apr s avoir d marr avec le nouveau disque vide, j'ai copi la table de partitions avec parted. Premi rement, j'ai examin la table de partitions sur le disque dur non-d fectueux :

$ parted /dev/sda
unit s
print

et cr une nouvelle table de partitions sur le disque de remplacement :

$ parted /dev/sdb
unit s
mktable gpt

Ensuite j'ai utilis la commande mkpart pour mes 4 partitions et je leur ai toutes donn la m me taille que les partitions quivalentes sur /dev/sda. Finalement, j'ai utilis les commandes toggle 1 bios_grub (partition d'amorce) et toggle X raid (o X est le num ro de la partition) pour toutes les partitions RAID, avant de v rifier avec la commande print que les deux tables de partitions sont maintenant identiques.

Resynchroniser/recr er les RAID Pour synchroniser les donn es du bon disque (/dev/sda) vers celui de remplacement (/dev/sdb), j'ai ex cut les commandes suivantes sur mes partitions RAID1 :

mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdb2
mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sdb4

et j'ai gard un oeil sur le statut de la synchronisation avec :

watch -n 2 cat /proc/mdstat

Pour acc l rer le processus, j'ai utilis le truc suivant :

blockdev --setra 65536 "/dev/md0"
blockdev --setra 65536 "/dev/md2"
echo 300000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min
echo 1000000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max

Ensuite, j'ai recr ma partition swap RAID0 comme suit :

mdadm /dev/md1 --create --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3
mkswap /dev/md1

Par que la partition swap est toute neuve (il n'est pas possible de restorer une partition RAID0, il faut la re-cr er compl tement), j'ai d faire deux choses:

• remplacer le UUID pour swap dans /etc/fstab, avec le UUID donn par la commande mkswap (ou bien en utilisant la command blkid et en prenant le UUID pour /dev/md1)
• remplacer le UUID de /dev/md1 dans /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf avec celui retourn pour /dev/md1 par la commande mdadm --detail --scan

S'assurer que l'on peut d marrer avec le disque de remplacement Pour tre certain de bien pouvoir d marrer la machine avec n'importe quel des deux disques, j'ai r install le boot loader grub sur le nouveau disque :

grub-install /dev/sdb

avant de red marrer avec les deux disques connect s. Ceci confirme que ma configuration fonctionne bien. Ensuite, j'ai d marr sans le disque /dev/sda pour m'assurer que tout fonctionnerait bien si ce disque d cidait de mourir et de me laisser seulement avec le nouveau (/dev/sdb). Ce test brise videmment la synchronisation entre les deux disques, donc j'ai d red marrer avec les deux disques connect s et puis r -ajouter /dev/sda tous les RAID1 :

mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sda2
mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sda4

Une fois le tout fini, j'ai red marrer nouveau avec les deux disques pour confirmer que tout fonctionne bien :

cat /proc/mdstat

et j'ai ensuite ex cuter un test SMART complet sur le nouveau disque :

smartctl -t long /dev/sdb

Traduction de l'article original anglais https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/replacing-a-failed-raid-drive/. Voici la proc dure que j'ai suivi pour remplacer un disque RAID d fectueux sur une machine Debian.

Remplacer le disque Apr s avoir remarqu que /dev/sdb a t expuls de mon RAID, j'ai utilis smartmontools pour identifier le num ro de s rie du disque retirer :

smartctl -a /dev/sdb

Cette information en main, j'ai ferm l'ordinateur, retir le disque d fectueux et mis un nouveau disque vide la place.

Initialiser le nouveau disque Apr s avoir d marr avec le nouveau disque vide, j'ai copi la table de partitions avec parted. Premi rement, j'ai examin la table de partitions sur le disque dur non-d fectueux :

$ parted /dev/sda
unit s
print

et cr une nouvelle table de partitions sur le disque de remplacement :

$ parted /dev/sdb
unit s
mktable gpt

Ensuite j'ai utilis la commande mkpart pour mes 4 partitions et je leur ai toutes donn la m me taille que les partitions quivalentes sur /dev/sda. Finalement, j'ai utilis les commandes toggle 1 bios_grub (partition d'amorce) et toggle X raid (o X est le num ro de la partition) pour toutes les partitions RAID, avant de v rifier avec la commande print que les deux tables de partitions sont maintenant identiques.

Resynchroniser/recr er les RAID Pour synchroniser les donn es du bon disque (/dev/sda) vers celui de remplacement (/dev/sdb), j'ai ex cut les commandes suivantes sur mes partitions RAID1 :

mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdb2
mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sdb4

et j'ai gard un oeil sur le statut de la synchronisation avec :

watch -n 2 cat /proc/mdstat

Pour acc l rer le processus, j'ai utilis le truc suivant :

blockdev --setra 65536 "/dev/md0"
blockdev --setra 65536 "/dev/md2"
echo 300000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min
echo 1000000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max

Ensuite, j'ai recr ma partition swap RAID0 comme suit :

mdadm /dev/md1 --create --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3
mkswap /dev/md1

Par que la partition swap est toute neuve (il n'est pas possible de restorer une partition RAID0, il faut la re-cr er compl tement), j'ai d faire deux choses:

• remplacer le UUID pour swap dans /etc/fstab, avec le UUID donn par la commande mkswap (ou bien en utilisant la command blkid et en prenant le UUID pour /dev/md1)
• remplacer le UUID de /dev/md1 dans /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf avec celui retourn pour /dev/md1 par la commande mdadm --detail --scan

S'assurer que l'on peut d marrer avec le disque de remplacement Pour tre certain de bien pouvoir d marrer la machine avec n'importe quel des deux disques, j'ai r install le boot loader grub sur le nouveau disque :

grub-install /dev/sdb

avant de red marrer avec les deux disques connect s. Ceci confirme que ma configuration fonctionne bien. Ensuite, j'ai d marr sans le disque /dev/sda pour m'assurer que tout fonctionnerait bien si ce disque d cidait de mourir et de me laisser seulement avec le nouveau (/dev/sdb). Ce test brise videmment la synchronisation entre les deux disques, donc j'ai d red marrer avec les deux disques connect s et puis r -ajouter /dev/sda tous les RAID1 :

mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sda2
mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sda4

Une fois le tout fini, j'ai red marrer nouveau avec les deux disques pour confirmer que tout fonctionne bien :

cat /proc/mdstat

et j'ai ensuite ex cuter un test SMART complet sur le nouveau disque :

smartctl -t long /dev/sdb

The Cat Model of Package Ownership

Debian has been moving away from strong ownership of packages by package maintainers and towards encouraging group maintainership, for very good reasons: single maintainers have a bad bus factor and a number of other disadvantages.

When single maintainership is changed into maintainership by a small , open group of people who can easily communicate and sync with each other, everything is just better: there is an easy way to gradually replace people who want to leave, but there is also no duplication of efforts (because communication is easy), there are means to always have somebody available for emergency work and generally package quality can only gain from it.

Unfortunately, having such group of maintainers for every package would require more people than are available and willing to work on it, and while I think it's worth doing efforts to have big and important packages managed that way, it may not be so for the myriad of small ones that make up the long tail of a distribution.

Many of those packages may end up being maintained in a big team such as the language-based ones, which is probably better than remaining with a single maintainer, but can lead to some problems.

My experience with the old OpenEmbedded, back when it was still using monotone instead of git and everybody was maintaining everything, however, leads me to think that this model has a big danger of turning into nobody maintains anything, because when something needs to be done everybody is thinking that somebody else will do it.

As a way to prevent that, I have been thinking in the general direction of a Cat Model of Package Ownership, which may or may not be a way to prevent some risks of both personal maintainership and big teams.

The basic idea is that the my in my packages is not the my in my toys , but the my in my Cat, to whom I am a servant .

As in the case of a cat, if my package needs a visit to the vet, it's my duty to do so. Other people may point me to the need of such a visit, e.g. by telling me that they have seen the cat leaving unhealty stools, that there is a bug in the package, or even that upstream released a new version a week ago, did you notice?, but the actual putting the package in a cat carrier and bringing it to the vet falls on me.

Whether you're allowed to play with or pet the cat is her decision, not mine, and giving her food or doing changes to the package is usually fine, but please ask first: a few cats have medical issues that require a special diet.

And like cats, sometimes the cat may decide that I'm not doing a good enough job of serving her, and move away to another maintainer; just remember that there is a difference between a lost cat who wants to go back to her old home and a cat that is looking for a new one. When in doubt, packages usually wear a collar with contact informations, trying to ping those is probably a good idea.

This is mostly a summer afternoon idea and will probably require some refinement, but I think that the basic idea can have some value. Comments are appreciated on the federated social networks where this post is being published, via email (valid addresses are on my website http://www.trueelena.org/computers/articles/the_cat_model_of_package_ownership.html and on my GPG key http://www.trueelena.org/about/gpg.html) or with a post on a blog that appears on planet debian http://planet.debian.org/.

how small is small depends a lot on the size of the package, the amount of work it requires, how easy it is to parallelize it and how good are the people involved at communicating, so it would be quite hard to put a precise number here.

I've moved away from it because the boards I was using could run plain Debian, but I've heard that after the move to git there have been a number of workflow changes (of which I've seen the start) and everything now works much better.

Review: Matter, by Iain M. Banks

Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	February 2008
ISBN:	0-316-00536-3
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	593

Sursamen is an Arithmetic, Mottled, Disputed, Multiply Inhabited, Multi-million Year Safe, and Godded Shellworld. It's a constructed world with multiple inhabitable levels, each lit by thermonuclear "suns" on tracks, each level supported above the last by giant pillars. Before the recorded history of the current Involved Species, a culture called the Veil created the shellworlds with still-obscure technology for some unknown purpose, and then disappeared. Now, they're inhabited by various transplants and watched over by a hierarchy of mentor and client species. In the case of Sursamen, both the Aultridia and the Oct claim jurisdiction (hence "Disputed"), and are forced into an uneasy truce by the Nariscene, a more sophisticated species that oversees them both. On Sursamen, on level eight to be precise, are the Sarl, a culture with an early industrial level of technology in the middle of a war of conquest to unite their level (and, they hope, the next level down). Their mentors are the Oct, who claim descendance from the mysterious Veil. The Deldeyn, the next level down, are mentored by the Aultridia, a species that evolved from a parasite on Xinthian Tensile Aranothaurs. Since a Xinthian, treated by the Sarl as a god, lives in the heart of Sursamen (hence "Godded"), tensions between the Sarl and the Aultridians run understandably high. The ruler of the Sarl had three sons and a daughter. The oldest was killed by the people he is conquering as Matter starts. The middle son is a womanizer and a fop who, as the book opens, watches a betrayal that he's entirely unprepared to deal with. The youngest is a thoughtful, bookish youth pressed into a position that he also is not well-prepared for. His daughter left the Sarl, and Sursamen itself, fifteen years previously. Now, she's a Special Circumstances agent for the Culture. Matter is the eighth Culture novel, although (like most of the series) there's little need to read the books in any particular order. The introduction to the Culture here is a bit scanty, so you'll have more background and understanding if you've read the previous novels, but it doesn't matter a great deal for the story. Sharp differences in technology levels have turned up in previous Culture novels (although the most notable example is a minor spoiler), but this is the first Culture novel I recall where those technological differences were given a structure. Usually, Culture novels have Special Circumstances meddling in, from their perspective, "inferior" cultures. But Sursamen is not in Culture space or directly the Culture's business. The Involved Species that governs Sursamen space is the Morthanveld: an aquatic species roughly on a technology level with the Culture themselves. The Nariscene are their client species; the Oct and Aultridia are, in turn, client species (well, mostly) of the Nariscene, while meddling with the Sarl and Deldeyn. That part of this book reminded me of Brin's Uplift universe. Banks's Involved Species aren't the obnoxious tyrants of Brin's universe, and mentoring doesn't involve the slavery of the Uplift universe. But some of the politics are a bit similar. And, as with Uplift, all the characters are aware, at least vaguely, of the larger shape of galactic politics. Even the Sarl, who themselves have no more than early industrial technology. When Ferbin flees the betrayal to try to get help, he ascends out of the shellworld to try to get assistance from an Involved species, or perhaps his sister (which turns out to be the same thing). Banks spends some time here, mostly through Ferbin and his servant (who is one of the better characters in this book), trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a society that just invented railroads while being aware of interstellar powers that can do practically anything. The plot, like the world on which it's set, proceeds on multiple levels. There is court intrigue within the Sarl, war on their level and the level below, and Ferbin's search for support and then justice. But the Sarl live in an artifact with some very mysterious places, including the best set piece in the book: an enormous waterfall that's gradually uncovering a lost city on the level below the Sarl, and an archaeological dig that proceeds under the Deldeyn and Sarl alike. Djan Seriy decides to return home when she learns of events in Sarl, originally for reasons of family loyalty and obligation, but she's a bit more in touch with the broader affairs of the galaxy, including the fact that the Oct are acting very strangely. There's something much greater at stake on Sursamen than tedious infighting between non-Involved cultures. As always with Banks, the set pieces and world building are amazing, the scenery is jaw-dropping, and I have some trouble warming to the characters. Dramatic flights across tower-studded landscapes seeking access to forbidden world-spanning towers largely, but don't entirely, make up for not caring about most of the characters for most of the book. This did change, though: although I never particularly warmed to Ferbin, I started to like his younger brother, and I really liked his sister and his servant by the end of the book. Unfortunately, the end of Matter is, if not awful, at least exceedingly abrupt. As is typical of Banks, we get a lot of sense of wonder but not much actual explanation, and the denouement is essentially nonexistent. (There is a coy epilogue hiding after the appendices, but it mostly annoyed me and provides only material for extrapolation about the characters.) Another SF author would have written a book about the Xinthian, the Veil, the purpose of the shellworlds, and the deep history of the galaxy. I should have known going in that Banks isn't that sort of SF author, but it was still frustrating. Still, Banks is an excellent writer and this is a meaty, complex, enjoyable story with some amazing moments of wonder and awe. If you like Culture novels in general, you will like this. If you like set-piece-heavy SF on a grand scale, such as Alastair Reynolds or Kim Stanley Robinson, you probably like this. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

Historically, the adt-run command line has allowed multiple tests; as a consequence, arguments like --binary or --override-control were position dependent, which confused users a lot (#795274, #785068, #795274, LP #1453509). On the other hand I don t know anyone or any CI system which actually makes use of the multiple tests on a single command line feature. The command line also was a bit confusing in other ways, like the explicit --built-tree vs. --unbuilt-tree and the magic / vs. // suffixes, or option vs. positional arguments to specify tests. The other long-standing confusion is the pervasive adt acronym, which is still from the very early times when autopkgtest was called autodebtest (this was changed one month after autodebtest s inception, in 2006!). Thus in some recent night/weekend hack sessions I ve worked on a new command line interface and consistent naming. This is now available in autopkgtest 4.0 in Debian unstable and Ubuntu Yakkety. You can download and use the deb package on Debian jessie and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as well. (I will provide official backports after the first bug fix release after this got some field testing.) New autopkgtest command The adt-run program is now superseded by autopkgtest:

• It accepts only exactly one tested source package, and gives a proper error if none or more than one (often unintend) is given. Binaries to be tested, --override-control, etc. can now be specified in any order, making the arguments position independent. So you now can do things like:

  autopkgtest *.dsc *.deb [...]

  Before, *.deb only applied to the following test.
• The explicit --source, --click-source etc. options are gone, the type of tested source/binary packages, including built vs. unbuilt tree, is detected automatically. Tests are now only specified with positional arguments, without the need (or possibility) to explicitly specify their type. The one exception is --installed-click com.example.myapp as possible names are the same as for apt source package names.

  # Old:
  adt-run --unbuilt-tree pkgs/foo-2 [...]
  # or equivalently:
  adt-run pkgs/foo-2// [...]
  # New:
  autopkgtest pkgs/foo-2

  # Old:
  adt-run --git-source http://example.com/foo.git [...]
  # New:
  autopkgtest http://example.com/foo.git [...]
  

• The virtualization server is now separated with a double instead of a tripe dash, as the former is standard Unix syntax.
• It defaults to the current directory if that is a Debian source package. This makes the command line particularly simple for the common case of wanting to run tests in the package you are just changing:

  autopkgtest -- schroot sid

  Assuming the current directory is an unbuilt Debian package, this will build the package, and run the tests in ./debian/tests against the built binaries.
• The virtualization server must be specified with its short name only, e. g. ssh instead of adt-virt-ssh . They also don t get installed into $PATH any more, as it s hardly useful to call them directly.

README.running-tests got updated to the new CLI, as usual you can also read the HTML online. The old adt-run CLI is still available with unchanged behaviour, so it is safe to upgrade existing CI systems to that version. Image build tools All adt-build* tools got renamed to autopkgtest-build*, and got changed to build images prefixed with autopkgtest instead of adt . For example, adt-build-lxc ubuntu xenial now produces an autopkgtest-xenial container instead of adt-xenial. In order to not break existing CI systems, the new autopkgtest package contains symlinks to the old adt-build* commands, and when being called through them, also produce images with the old adt- prefix. Environment variables in tests Finally there is a set of environment variables that are exported by autopkgtest for using in tests and image customization tools, which now got renamed from ADT_* to AUTOPKGTEST_*:

• AUTOPKGTEST_APT_PROXY
• AUTOPKGTEST_ARTIFACTS
• AUTOPKGTEST_AUTOPILOT_MODULE
• AUTOPKGTEST_NORMAL_USER
• AUTOPKGTEST_REBOOT_MARK
• AUTOPKGTEST_TMP

As these are being used in existing tests and tools, autopkgtest also exports/checks those under their old ADT_* name. So tests can be converted gradually over time (this might take several years). Feedback As usual, if you find a bug or have a suggestion how to improve the CLI, please file a bug in Debian or in Launchpad. The new CLI is recent enough that we still have some liberty to change it. Happy testing!

I'll tune in to the post-based conversation being held on Planet Debian: Russell Coker wonders about what's needed to get university graduates with enough skills for a sysadmin job, to which Lucas Nussbaum responds with his viewpoints. They present a very contrasting view of what's needed for students And for a good reason, I'd say: Lucas is an academician; I don't know for sure about Russell, but he seems to be a down-to-the-earth, dirty-handed, proficient sysadmin working on the field. They both contact newcomers to their fields, and will notice different shortcomings. I tend to side with Lucas' view. That does not come as a surprise, as I've been working for over 15 years in an university, and in the last few years I started walking from a mostly-operative sysadmin in an academic setting towards becoming an academician that spends most of his time sysadmining. Subtle but important distinction. I teach at the BSc level at UNAM, and am a Masters student at IPN (respectively, Mexico's largest and second-largest universities). And yes, the lack of sysadmin abilities in both is surprising. But so is a good understanding of programming. And I'm sure that, were I to dig into several different fields, I'd feel the same: Student formation is very basic at each of those fields. But I see that as natural. Of course, if I were to judge people as geneticists as they graduate from Biology, or were I to judge them as topologists as they graduate from Mathematics, or any other discipline in which I'm not an expert, I'd surely not know where to start Given I have about 20 years of professional life on my shoulders, I'm quite skewed as to what is basic for a computing professional. And of course, there are severe holes in my formation, in areas I never used. I know next to nothing of electronics, my mathematical basis is quite flaky, and I'm a poor excuse when talking about artificial intelligence. Where am I going with this? An university degree (BSc in English, would amount to "licenciatura" in Spanish) is not for specialization. It is to have a sufficiently broad panorama of the field, and all of the needed tools to start digging deeper and specializing either by yourself, working on a given field and learning its details as you go, or going through a postgraduate program (Specialization, Masters, Doctorate). Even most of my colleagues at the Masters in Engineering in Security and Information Technology lack of a good formation in fields I consider essential. However, what does information security mean? Many among them are working on legal implications of several laws that touch our field. Many other are working on authenticity issues in images, audios and other such media. Many other are trying to come up with mathematical ways to cheapen the enormous burden of crypto operations (say, "shaving" CPU cycles off a very large exponentiation). Others are designing autonomous learning mechanisms to characterize malware. Were I as a computing professional to start talking about their research, I'd surely reveal I know nothing about it and get laughed at. That's because I haven't specialized in those fields. University education should give a broad universal basis to enter a professional field. It should not focus on teaching tools or specific procedures (although some should surely be presented as examples or case studies). Although I'd surely be happy if my university's graduates were to know everything about administering a Debian system, that would be wrong for a university to aim at; I'd criticize it the same way I currently criticize programs that mix together university formation and industry certification as if they were related.

Russell Coker wrote about Sysadmin Skills and University Degrees. I couldn t agree more that a major deficiency in Computer Science degrees is the lack of sysadmin training. It seems like most sysadmins learned most of what they know from experience. It s very hard to recruit young engineers (freshly out of university) for sysadmin jobs, and the job interviews are often a bit depressing. Sysadmins jobs are also not very popular with this public, probably because university curriculums fail to emphasize what s exciting about those jobs. However, I think I disagree rather deeply with Russell s detailed analysis. First, Version Control. Well, I think that it s pretty well covered in university curriculums nowadays. From my point of view, teaching CS in Universit de Lorraine (France), mostly in Licence Professionnelle Administration de Syst mes, R seaux et Applications base de Logiciels Libres (warning: french), a BSc degree focusing on Linux systems administration, it s not usual to see student projects with a mandatory use of Git. And it doesn t seem to be a major problem for students (which always surprises me). However, I wouldn t rate Version Control as the most important thing that is required for a sysadmin. Similarly Dependencies and Backups are things that should be covered, but probably not as first class citizens. I think that there are several pillars in the typical sysadmin knowledge. First and foremost, sysadmins need a good understanding of the inner workings of an operating system. I sometimes feel that many Operating Systems Design courses are a bit too much focused on the Design side of things. Yes, it s useful to understand the low-level mechanisms, and be able to (mentally) recreate an OS from scratch. But it s also interesting to know how real systems are actually built, and what are the trade-off involved. I very much enjoyed reading Branden Gregg s Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud because each chapter starts with a great overview of how things are in the real world, with a very good level of detail. Also, addressing OS design from the point of view of performance could be a way to turn those courses into something more attractive for students: many people like to measure, benchmark, optimize things, and it s quite easy to demonstrate how different designs, or different configurations, make a big difference in terms of performance in the context of OS design. It s possible to be a sysadmin and ignore, say, the existence of the VFS, but there s a large class of problems that you will never be able to solve. It can be a good trade-off for a curriculum (e.g. at the BSc level) to decide to ignore most of the low-level stuff, but it s important to be aware of it. Students also need to learn how to design a proper infrastructure (that meets requirements in terms of scalability, availability, security, and maybe elasticity). Yes, backups are important. But monitoring is, too. As well as high availability. In order to scale, it s important to be able to automatize stuff. Russell writes that Sysadmins need some programming skills, but that s mostly scripting and basic debugging. Well, when you design an infrastructure, or when you use configuration management tools such as Puppet, in some sense, you are programming, and in terms of needs to abstract things, it s actually similar to doing object-oriented programming, with similar choices (should I use that off-the-shelf puppet module, or re-develop my own? How should everything fit together?). Also, when debugging, it s often useful to be able to dig into code, understand what the developer was trying to do, and if the expected behavior actually matches what you are seeing. It often results in spending a lot of time to create a one-line fix, and it requires very advanced programming skills. Again, it s possible to be a sysadmin with only limited software development knowledge, but there s a large class of things that you are unlikely to address properly. I think that what makes sysadmins jobs both very interesting and very challenging is that they require a very wide range of knowledge. There s often the ability to learn about new stuff (much more than in software development jobs). Of course, the difficult question is where to draw the line. What is the sysadmin knowledge that every CS graduate should have, even in curriculums not targeting sysadmin jobs? What is the sysadmin knowledge for a sysadmin BSc degree? for a sysadmin MSc degree?

I think that a major deficiency in Computer Science degrees is the lack of sysadmin training. Version Control The first thing that needs to be added is the basics of version control. CVS (which is now regarded as obsolete) was initially released when I was in the first year of university. But SCCS and RCS had been in use for some time. I think that the people who designed my course were remiss in not adding any mention of version control (not even strategies for saving old versions of your work), one could say that they taught us about version control by letting us accidentally delete our assignments. :-# If a course is aimed at just teaching programmers (as most CS degrees are) then version control for group assignments should be a standard part of the course. Having some marks allocated for the quality of comments in the commit log would also be good. A modern CS degree should cover distributed version control, that means covering Git as it s the most popular distributed version control system nowadays. For people who want to work as sysadmins (as opposed to developers who run their own PCs) a course should have an optional subject for version control of an entire system. That includes tools like etckeeper for version control of system configuration and tools like Puppet for automated configuration and system maintenance. Dependencies It s quite reasonable for a CS degree to provide simplified problems for the students to solve so they can concentrate on one task. But in the real world the problems are more complex. One of the more difficult parts of managing real systems is dependencies. You have issues of header files etc at compile time and library versions at deployment. Often you need a program to run on systems with different versions of the OS which means making it compile for both and deal with differences in behaviour. There are lots of hacky things that people do to deal with dependencies in systems. People link compiled programs statically, install custom versions of interpreters in user home directories or /usr/local for daemons, and do many other things. These things can have bad consequences including data loss, system downtime, and security problems. It s not always wrong to do such things, but it s something that should only be done with knowledge of the potential consequences and a plan for mitigating them. A CS degree should teach the potential advantages and disadvantages of these options to allow graduates to make informed decisions. Backups I ve met many people who call themselves computer professionals and think that backups aren t needed. I ve seen production systems that were designed in a way that backups were impossible. The lack of backups is a serious problem for the entire industry. Some lectures about backups could be part of a version control subject in a general CS degree. For a degree that majors in Sysadmin at least one subject about backups is appropriate. For any backup (even backing up your home PC) you should have offsite backups to deal with fire damage, multiple backups of different ages (especially important now that encryption malware is a serious threat), and a plan for how fast you can restore things. The most common use of backups is to deal with the case of deleting the wrong file. Unfortunately this case seems to be the most rarely mentioned. Another common situation that should be covered is a configuration error that results in a system that won t boot correctly. It s a very common problem and one that can be solved quickly if you are prepared but which can take a long time if you aren t. For a Sysadmin course it is important to cover backups of systems in remote datacenters. Hardware A good CS degree should cover the process of selecting suitable hardware. Programmers often get to advise on the hardware used to run their code, especially at smaller companies. Reliability features such as RAID, ECC RAM, and clustering should be covered. Planning for upgrades is a very important part of this which is usually not taught. Not only do you need to plan for an upgrade without much downtime or cost but you also need to plan for what upgrades are possible. Next year will your system require hardware that is more powerful than you can buy next year? If so you need to plan for a cluster now. For a Sysadmin course some training about selecting cloud providers and remote datacenter hosting should be provided. There are many complex issues that determine whether it s most appropriate to use a cloud service, hosted virtual machines, hosted physical servers managed by the ISP, hosted physical servers purchased by the client, or on-site servers. Often a large system will involve 2 or more of those options, even some small companies use 3 or more of those options to try and provide the performance and reliability they need at a price they can afford. We Need Sysadmin Degrees Covering the basic coding skills takes a lot of time. I don t think we can reasonably expect a CS degree to cover all that and also give good coverage to sysadmin work. While some basic sysadmin skills are needed by every programmer I think we need to have separate majors for people who want a career in system administration. Sysadmins need some programming skills, but that s mostly scripting and basic debugging. Someone who s main job is as a sysadmin can probably expect to never make any significant change to a program that s more than 10,000 lines long. A large amount of the programming in a CS degree can be replaced by file a bug report for a sysadmin degree. This doesn t mean that sysadmins shouldn t be doing software development or that they aren t good at it. One noteworthy fact is that it appears that the most common job among developers of the Debian distribution of Linux is System Administration. Developing an OS involves some of the most intensive and demanding programming. But I think that more than a few people who do such work would have skipped a couple of programming subjects in favour of sysadmin subjects if they were given a choice. Suggestions Did I miss anything? What other sysadmin skills should be taught in a CS degree? Do any universities teach these things now? If so please name them in the comments, it is good to help people find universities that teach them what they want to learn and help them in their career.

This is the first blog post among series of posts which I will be writing throughout the summer about Google Summer of Code 2016 under Debian Reproducible Builds Experience. Introduction: I am Satyam Zode I am a final year Computer Science student (Satyam_z on IRC). I live in Pune, India (GMT +5:30). I am pursuing my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from Pune Institute of Computer Technology, Pune. I have been programming for the past 4 years. I am well versed in C/C++, Python3, and Golang. My Alioth and Github handles are satyamz-guest and satyamz respectively. I have been using GNU/Linux and free software from last four years. I am an open source enthusiast and I have been following Hacker culture since past three years. Accepted into Google Summer of Code 2016 under Debian Project: I am glad that I have got an opportunity to contribute to the Debian Project via Google Summer of Code 2016. I am accepted for project Improving diffoscope tool and reproducibility of Debian packages. This Summer and beyond I will be working with Debian Reproducible Builds team to improve the debbugging tool called Diffoscope (previously known as debbindiff). Thanks a bunch to Debian community, Lunar, Holger Levsen, Reiner Herrmann, Mattia Rizzolo and reproducible-builds folks for giving me this opportunity. Here is my GSoC'16 Proposal. And Yay! It really feels great :smile: Project details: I will be working on Diffoscope tool which is debbugging tool developed under reproducible-builds effort. Basically, Diffoscope compares two files and shows the difference in text and html format. Diffoscope is mainly developed to compare two Debian packages which may consist of binary files, tar files, text files etc. Diffoscope helps to identify difference between two Debian packages with respect to timestamps, file ordering etc. Diffoscope will try to get to the bottom of what makes files or directories different. It will recursively unpack archives of many kinds and transform various binary formats into more human readable form to compare them. It can compare two tarballs, ISO images, Debian packages or PDF just as easily. Diffoscope helps to identify the reproduciblity of Debian packages. During this summer I will be improving Diffoscope. I will be mainly working on:

• Finish Parallel processing part.
• Add command line option - -ignore-profile to allow users to ignore arbitrary differences.
• perform fuzzy-matching across archives.
• Add new file comparators to extend support of diffoscope for new file types.

My next blog post will be regarding community bonding. Thanks for reading :)

Review: The Language of Power, by Rosemary Kirstein

Series:	Steerswomen #4
Publisher:	Rosemary Kirstein
Copyright:	2004, 2014
Printing:	April 2014
ISBN:	0-9913546-3-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	400

This is the fourth book in the Steerswomen series and definitely not the place to start. It's also a difficult series to review without spoilers, so I won't be able to provide too many details about the plot. I will say that this is a reunion and a return of sorts to themes from earlier in the series, rather than a direct follow-up to the revelations at the end of The Lost Steersman. Rowan is back in the Inner Lands, continuing to investigate the affairs of wizards. In particular, she's digging into the past of the town of Donner, following up on the report of an earlier steerswoman and investigating a now-dead wizard who seemed to act far different from a typical wizard. And Bel is back at her side again, watching her back. The first half of The Language of Power goes over somewhat familiar ground. Similar to both The Steerswoman and The Lost Steersman, Rowan is poking around in a city, getting to know unfamiliar people, being a steerswoman, and winning people over with her unique charm. But that's a theme I don't mind seeing repeated, since Rowan is one of my favorite protagonists from any series I've read. She's both ethical and respectful in a way that doesn't feel artificial or constructed. She thinks oddly and dives into sudden fascinations, and she does rely on the conventions for interacting with steerswomen, but the more time one spends with her, the better one likes her. This is true of both the reader and the town inhabitants, and Kirstein is brilliant at writing the gradual getting-to-know and growing-respect process. Events in The Language of Power slowly build up to another confrontation with wizards, and this one is full of major revelations about the world. Some of the ambiguity of earlier books is firmly resolved, we find out a lot more about how wizards view themselves and their abilities, and tons of new questions are raised. It's not a conclusion in any way, which is a bit unfortunate given that the next book is still being written (twelve years later, although thankfully it's being actively worked on as I write this). But we get the first clear look at the substratum of the world that Kirstein is building in this series. This sounds satisfying, and to some extent it is, but any regular SFF reader will have guessed at many of the revelations here. I was pretty sure the world was following one of two possible patterns partway through the second book, certain which it was during the third book, and was nodding right along with the revelations in this book. I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but if you read a lot of SFF, chances are you've read about something akin to this background before. That takes a bit of the thrill out of the revelations, unfortunately. What adds the excitement and thrill back in are Rowan's reactions. It's very difficult to write a character who comes from an entirely different perspective than either the author or the reader, and Kirstein does an amazing job. Not perfect, quite, at least for me: there were a few points where I thought Rowan was more baffled or more upset than it felt like she should have been. But they are few and far between, and it's quite possible my expectations are the ones that wouldn't ring true if written into the story. It's just such a delight to see Rowan analyzing the world, incorporating new revelations into her growing world model, and figuring out how to take the most moral action at any point. I would happily read another dozen books of this (but I wish they were all already written). If you've read the previous three books, definitely pick up this one as well. For me, it narrowly misses being the best book of the series (I think that's still The Outskirter's Secret because of the difficulty of the perspective change Kirstein pulls off), but it's a close competition. And the final reveal at the very end of this book points to upcoming adventures that I can hardly wait to read. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: The Effective Engineer, by Edmond Lau

Publisher:	Effective Bookshelf
Copyright:	2015
ISBN:	0-9961281-0-7
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	222

Silicon Valley start-up tech companies have a standard way of thinking about work. Large chunks of this come from Google, which pioneered a wide variety of new, or at least not-yet-mainstream, ways of organizing and thinking about work. The rest accreted through experience with fast-paced start-ups, engineer-focused companies, web delivery of products, and rabid turnover and high job mobility within a hothouse of fairly similar companies. A key part of this mindset is the firm belief that this atmosphere has created a better way to work, at least for software engineers (and systems administrators, although heaven forbid that one call them that any more): more effective, more efficient, more focused on what really matters. I think this is at least partly true, at least from the perspective of a software engineer. This Silicon Valley work structure focuses on data gathering, data-based decision-making, introspection, analysis, and continuous improvement, all of which I think are defensibly pointed in the right direction (if rarely as rigorous as one might want to believe). It absorbs bits and pieces of work organization techniques that are almost certainly improvements for the type of work software engineers do: Agile, Lean, continuous deployment, and fast iteration times. In other cases, though, I'm less convinced that this Silicon Valley consensus is objectively better as opposed to simply different; interviewing, for instance, is a puzzle that I don't think anyone has figured out, and the remarkable consensus in Silicon Valley on how to interview (basically, "like Google except for the bits we thought were obnoxious") feels more like a social fad than a sign of getting it right. But every industry has its culture of good ideas, bad ideas, fads, and fashion, and it's quite valuable to know that culture if you want to work in that industry. The Effective Engineer is a self-published book by Edmund Lau, a Silicon Valley software engineer who also drifted (as is so common in Silicon Valley) into mentoring, organizing, and speaking to other software engineers. Its purpose, per the subtitle, is to tell you "how to leverage your efforts in software engineering to make a disproportionate and meaningful impact." While that's not exactly wrong, and the book contains some useful and valuable tips, I'd tend to give it a slightly different subtitle: "a primer on how a Silicon Valley software engineer is expected to think about their work." This is a bit more practical, a bit less confident, and a bit less convinced of its own correctness than Lau might want to present his work, but it's just as valuable of a purpose if you want to work in the industry. (And is a bit more honest about its applicability outside of that industry.) What this book does extremely well is present, in a condensed, straightforward, and fast-moving form, most of the highlights of how start-ups and web-scale companies approach software engineering and the SWE role in companies (SWE, meaning software engineer, is another bit of Google terminology that's now nearly universal). If you've already worked in or around this industry for a while, you've probably picked up a lot of this via osmosis: prioritize based on impact and be unapologetic about letting other things drop, have a growth mindset, reprioritize regularly, increase your iteration speed, measure everything constantly, check your assumptions against data, derisk your estimates, use code review and automated testing (but not too much), automate operations, and invest heavily in hiring and onboarding. (The preceding list is a chapter list for this book.) If you're working at one of these sorts of companies, you're probably currently somewhere between nodding and rolling your eyes because no one at work will shut up about these topics. But if you've not worked inside one of these companies, even if you've done software engineering elsewhere, this is a great book to read to prepare yourself. You're going to hear about these ideas constantly, and, if it achieves nothing else at all, The Effective Engineer will give you a firm enough grounding in the lingo and mindset that you can have intelligent conversations with people who assume this is the only way to think about software engineering. By this point, you might be detecting a certain cynicism in this review. It's not entirely fair: a lot of these ideas are clearly good ones, and Lau does a good job of describing them quickly and coherently. It's a good job for what it is. But there are a couple of things that limited its appeal for me. First, it's definitely a primer. I read it after having worked at a web-scale start-up for a year and a half. There wasn't much in it that seemed particularly new, and it's somewhat superficial. The whole middle section in particular (build tools for yourself, measure everything, be data-driven) are topics for which the devil is often in the details. Lau gives you the terminology and the expected benefits, but putting any one of these techniques into practice could be a book (or several) by itself. Don't expect to come away from The Effective Engineer with much of a concrete plan for how to do these things in your day-to-day software development projects. But it's a good reminder to be thinking about, say, how to embed metrics and data-gathering hooks into the software you write. This is the nature of a primer; no 222-page book can get into much depth about the fractal complexity of doing good, fast, scalable software development. Second, there's a fundamental question raised by a book like this: effective at what? Lau tackles that in the first chapter with his focus on impact and leverage, and it's good advice as far as it goes. (Regular readers of my book reviews know that I love this sort of time management and prioritization discussion.) But measuring impact is a hard problem that requires a prioritization framework, and this is not really the book for this. The Effective Engineer is written primarily for software developers at start-ups, leaves the whole venture-capital start-up process as unquestioned background material, and accepts without comment the standard measures of value in that world: fast-deployed products, hypergrowth, racing competitors for perceived innovation, and finding ways to extract money. That's as deep into the question of impact as Lau gets: increases in company revenue. There's nothing wrong with this for the kind of book Lau intended to write, and it's not his fault that I find it unsatisfying. But don't expect The Effective Engineer to ask any hard questions about whether that's a meaningful definition of impact, or to talk much about less objective goals: quality of implementation, craftsmanship, giving back to a broader community via free software contributions, impact on the world in ways that can't be measured in market share, or anything else that is unlikely to lead to objective impact for company profits. At best he leaves a bit of wiggle room around using the concept of impact with different goals. If you're a new graduate who wants to work at Silicon-Valley-style start-ups, this is a great orientation, and likewise if you're coming from a different area of software development into that world. If you're not working in that industry, The Effective Engineer may still be moderately interesting, but it's not written for that audience and has little or nothing to say of the challenges of other types of businesses. But if you've already worked in the industry for a while, or if you're more interested in deeper discussions of goals and subjective values, you may not get much out of this. Rating: 7 out of 10

The first time I was paid to do software development came as something of a surprise to me. I was working as a sysadmin in a computational physics research group when a friend asked me if I'd be willing to talk to her PhD supervisor. I had nothing better to do, so said yes. And that was how I started the evening having dinner with David MacKay, and ended the evening better fed, a little drunker and having agreed in principle to be paid to write free software.

I'd been hired to work on Dasher, an information-efficient text entry system. It had been developed by one of David's students as a practical demonstration of arithmetic encoding after David had realised that presenting a visualisation of an effective compression algorithm allowed you to compose text without having to enter as much information into the system. At first this was merely a neat toy, but it soon became clear that the benefits of Dasher had a great deal of overlap with good accessibility software. It required much less precision of input, it made it easy to correct mistakes (you merely had to reverse direction in order to start zooming back out of the text you had entered) and it worked with a variety of input technologies from mice to eye tracking to breathing. My job was to take this codebase and turn it into a project that would be interesting to external developers.

In the year I worked with David, we turned Dasher from a research project into a well-integrated component of Gnome, improved its support for Windows, accepted code from an external contributor who ported it to OS X (using an OpenGL canvas!) and wrote ports for a range of handheld devices. We added code that allowed Dasher to directly control the UI of other applications, making it possible for people to drive word processors without having to leave Dasher. We taught Dasher to speak. We strove to avoid the mistakes present in so many other pieces of accessibility software, such as configuration that could only be managed by an (expensive!) external consultant. And we visited Dasher users and learned how they used it and what more they needed, then went back home and did what we could to provide that.

Working on Dasher was an incredible opportunity. I was involved in the development of exciting code. I spoke on it at multiple conferences. I became part of the Gnome community. I visited the USA for the first time. I entered people's homes and taught them how to use Dasher and experienced their joy as they realised that they could now communicate up to an order of magnitude more quickly. I wrote software that had a meaningful impact on the lives of other people.

Working with David was certainly not easy. Our weekly design meetings were, charitably, intense. He had an astonishing number of ideas, and my job was to figure out how to implement them while (a) not making the application overly complicated and (b) convincing David that it still did everything he wanted. One memorable meeting involved me gradually arguing him down from wanting five new checkboxes to agreeing that there were only two combinations that actually made sense (and hence a single checkbox) - and then admitting that this was broadly equivalent to an existing UI element, so we could just change the behaviour of that slightly without adding anything. I took the opportunity to delete an additional menu item in the process.

I was already aware of the importance of free software in terms of developers, but working with David made it clear to me how important it was to users as well. A community formed around Dasher, helping us improve it and allowing us to develop support for new use cases that made the difference between someone being able to type at two words per minute and being able to manage twenty. David saw that this collaborative development would be vital to creating something bigger than his original ideas, and it succeeded in ways he couldn't have hoped for.

I spent a year in the group and then went back to biology. David went on to channel his strong feelings about social responsibility into issues such as sustainable energy, writing a freely available book on the topic. He served as chief adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change for five years. And earlier this year he was awarded a knighthood for his services to scientific outreach.

David died yesterday. It's unlikely that I'll ever come close to what he accomplished, but he provided me with much of the inspiration to try to do so anyway. The world is already a less fascinating place without him.

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