Search Results: "samu"

22 December 2023

Gunnar Wolf: Pushing some reviews this way

Over roughly the last year and a half I have been participating as a reviewer in ACM s Computing Reviews, and have even been honored as a Featured Reviewer. Given I have long enjoyed reading friends reviews of their reading material (particularly, hats off to the very active Russ Allbery, who both beats all of my frequency expectations (I could never sustain the rythm he reads to!) and holds documented records for his >20 years as a book reader, with far more clarity and readability than I can aim for!), I decided to explicitly share my reviews via this blog, as the audience is somewhat congruent; I will also link here some reviews that were not approved for publication, clearly marking them so. I will probably work on wrangling my Jekyll site to display an (auto-)updated page and RSS feed for the reviews. In the meantime, the reviews I have published are:

10 December 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.12 preparations, debian-printing, merged-/usr tranisition updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Preparing for Python 3.12 by Stefano Rivera Stefano uploaded a few packages in preparation for Python 3.12, including pycxx and cython. Cython has a major new version (Cython 3), adding support for 3.12, but also bringing changes that many packages in Debian aren t ready to build with, yet. Stefano uploaded it to Debian experimental and did an archive rebuild of affected packages, and some analysis of the result. Matthias Klose has since filed bugs for all of these issues.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten invested some of the previously obtained money to build his own printlab. At the moment it only consists of a dedicated computer with an USB printer attached. Due to its 64GB RAM and an SSD, building of debian-printing packages is much faster now. Over time other printers will be added and understanding bugs should be a lot easier now. Also Thorsten again adopted two packages, namely mink and ink, and moved them to the debian-printing team.

Merged-/usr transition by Helmut Grohne, et al The dumat analysis tool has been improved in quite some aspects. Beyond fixing false negative diagnostics, it now recognizes protective diversions used for mitigating Multi-Arch: same file loss. It was found that the proposed mitigation for ineffective diversions does not work as expected. Trying to fix it up resulted in more problems, some of which remain unsolved as of this writing. Initial work on moving shared libraries in the essential set has been done. Meanwhile, the wider Debian community worked on fixing all known Multi-Arch: same file loss scenarios. This work is now being driven by Christian Hofstaedler and during the Mini DebConf in Cambridge, Chris Boot, tienne Mollier, Miguel Landaeta, Samuel Henrique, and Utkarsh Gupta sent the other half of the necessary patches.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano merged patches to support loong64 and hurd-amd64 in re2.
  • For the Cambridge mini-conf, Stefano added a web player to the DebConf video streaming frontend, as the Cambridge miniconf didn t have its own website to host the player.
  • Rapha l helped the upstream developers of hamster-time-tracker to prepare a new upstream release (the first in multiple years) and packaged that new release in Debian unstable.
  • Enrico joined Hemut in brainstorming some /usr-merge solutions.
  • Thorsten took care of RM-bugs to remove no longer needed packages from the Debian archive and closed about 50 of them.
  • Helmut ported the feature of mounting a fuse connection via /dev/fd/N from fuse3 to fuse2.
  • Helmut sent a number of patches simplifying unprivileged use of piuparts.
  • Roberto worked with Helmut to prepare the Shorewall package for the ongoing /usr-move transition.
  • Utkarsh also helped with the ongoing /usr-merge work by preparing patches for gitlab, libnfc, and net-tools.
  • Utkarsh, along with Helmut, brainstormed on fixing #961138, as this affects the whole archive and all the suites and not just R packages. Utkarsh intends to follow up on the bug in December.
  • Santiago organized a MiniDebConf in Uruguay. In total, nine people attended, including most of DDs in the surrounding area. Here s a nicely written blog by Gunnar Wolf.
  • Santiago also worked on some issues on Salsa CI, fixed with some merge requests: #462, #463, and #466.

28 February 2023

Russell Coker: Links February 2023

Vox has an insightful interview with the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century [1]. The main claim of that book is that The 140 years from 1870 to 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity s centuries . A claim that seems well supported. PostMarketOS is an interesting OS for hardware designed for Android [2]. It is based on Alpine Linux, is small, and modular. If you want to change something just change that package not the entire image. Also an aim is to have as much commonality between devices as possible, all phones with the same CPU family can run the same packages apart from the kernel and maybe some utilities related to hardware. Abhijithpa blogged about getting started with pmOS, it seems easy to do [3]. Interesting article about gay samurai [4]. Regarding sex with men or women an elderly arbiter, after hearing the impassioned arguments of the two sides, counsels that the wisest course is to follow both paths in moderation, thereby helping to prevent overindulgence in either . Wow. The SCP project is an interesting collaborative SciFi/horror fiction project [5] based on an organisation that aims to Secure and Contain dangerous objects and beings and Protect the world from them. The series of stories about the Anti-Memetics Division [6] is a good place to start reading.

9 November 2022

Debian Brasil: Brasileiros(as) Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015

Desde de setembro de 2015, o time de publicidade do Projeto Debian passou a publicar a cada dois meses listas com os nomes dos(as) novos(as) Desenvolvedores(as) Debian (DD - do ingl s Debian Developer) e Mantenedores(as) Debian (DM - do ingl s Debian Maintainer). Estamos aproveitando estas listas para publicar abaixo os nomes dos(as) brasileiros(as) que se tornaram Desenvolvedores(as) e Mantenedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015. Desenvolvedores(as) Debian / Debian Developers / DDs: Marcos Talau Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich Gabriel F. T. Gomes Thiago Andrade Marques M rcio de Souza Oliveira Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana Samuel Henrique S rgio Durigan J nior Daniel Lenharo de Souza Giovani Augusto Ferreira Adriano Rafael Gomes Breno Leit o Lucas Kanashiro Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto Mantenedores(as) Debian / Debian Maintainers / DMs: Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo David da Silva Polverari Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro William Grzybowski Tiago Ilieve
Observa es:
  1. Esta lista ser atualizada quando o time de publicidade do Debian publicar novas listas com DMs e DDs e tiver brasileiros.
  2. Para ver a lista completa de Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian, inclusive outros(as) brasileiros(as) antes de julho de 2015 acesse: https://nm.debian.org/public/people

Debian Brasil: Brasileiros(as) Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015

Desde de setembro de 2015, o time de publicidade do Projeto Debian passou a publicar a cada dois meses listas com os nomes dos(as) novos(as) Desenvolvedores(as) Debian (DD - do ingl s Debian Developer) e Mantenedores(as) Debian (DM - do ingl s Debian Maintainer). Estamos aproveitando estas listas para publicar abaixo os nomes dos(as) brasileiros(as) que se tornaram Desenvolvedores(as) e Mantenedores(as) Debian a partir de julho de 2015. Desenvolvedores(as) Debian / Debian Developers / DDs: Marcos Talau Fabio Augusto De Muzio Tobich Gabriel F. T. Gomes Thiago Andrade Marques M rcio de Souza Oliveira Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana Samuel Henrique S rgio Durigan J nior Daniel Lenharo de Souza Giovani Augusto Ferreira Adriano Rafael Gomes Breno Leit o Lucas Kanashiro Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto Mantenedores(as) Debian / Debian Maintainers / DMs: Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo David da Silva Polverari Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira Sergio Almeida Cipriano Junior Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro William Grzybowski Tiago Ilieve
Observa es:
  1. Esta lista ser atualizada quando o time de publicidade do Debian publicar novas listas com DMs e DDs e tiver brasileiros.
  2. Para ver a lista completa de Mantenedores(as) e Desenvolvedores(as) Debian, inclusive outros(as) brasileiros(as) antes de julho de 2015 acesse: https://nm.debian.org/public/people

1 November 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: What Makes This Book So Great

Review: What Makes This Book So Great, by Jo Walton
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: January 2014
ISBN: 0-7653-3193-4
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 447
Jo Walton, in addition to being an excellent science fiction and fantasy writer, is a prodigious reader and frequent participant in on-line SFF book discussion going back to the Usenet days. This book is a collection of short essays previously published on Tor.com between July 2008 and February 2011. The unifying theme is that Walton regularly re-reads her favorite books, and each essay (apart from some general essays on related topics) is about why this specific book is one that she re-reads, and (as the title says) what makes it so great. Searching for the title of one of the essays turns it up on Tor.com still, so this is one of those collections that you don't have to buy since you can read its contents on-line for free. That said, it looks like these essays were from before Tor.com started classifying posts into series, so it's going to be challenging to track them down in the huge number of other articles Walton has written for the site. (That said, you can't go far wrong by reading any of her essays at random.) I read these essays as they were originally published, so this was also a re-read for me, but it had been a while. I'm happy to report that they were just as much fun the second time. In the introduction and in the final essay of this collection, Walton draws a distinction between what she's doing, criticism, and reviewing. As someone else who writes about books (in a far more amateur fashion), I liked this distinction. The way I'd characterize it is that criticism is primarily about the work: taking it apart to see what makes it tick, looking for symbolism and hidden meanings, and comparing and contrasting other works that are tackling similar themes. I've often finished a work of criticism and still had no idea if the author enjoyed reading the work being criticized or not, since that isn't the point. Reviewing is assistance to consumers and focuses more on the reader: would you enjoy this book? Is it enjoyable to read? Does it say something new? What genre and style is it in, so that you can match that to your tastes? Talking about books is neither of those things, although it's a bit closer to reviewing. But the emphasis is on one's personal enjoyment instead of attempting to review a product for others. When I talk about books with friends, I talk primarily about what bits I liked, what bits I didn't like, where the emotional beats were for me, and what interesting things the book did that surprised me or caught my attention. One can find a review in there, and sometimes even criticism, but the focus and the formality is different. (And, to be honest, my reviews are more on the "talking about the book" side than fully proper reviews.) These essays are indeed talking about books. They're all re-reads; in some cases the first re-read, but more frequently the latest of many re-reads. There are lots of spoilers, which makes for bad reviews (the target audience of a review hasn't read the book yet) but good fodder for conversations about books. (The spoilers are mostly marked, but if you're particularly averse to spoilers, you'll need to read carefully.) Most of the essays are about a single book, but there are a few on more general topics, such as Walton's bafflement that anyone would skim a novel. Since these are re-reads, and the essays collected here are more than a decade old, the focus is on older books. Some of them are famous: Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, early Le Guin, Samuel Delaney's SF novels, Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Some of them are more obscure. C.J. Cherryh, for example, is a writer who never seems to get much on-line attention, but who is one of Walton's favorites. Most of the essays stand alone or come in small clusters about a writer, often sprinkled through the book instead of clumped together. (The book publishes the essays in the same order they originally appeared on Tor.com.) The two largest groups of essays are re-readings of every book in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos universe (including Brokedown Palace and the Paarfi books) up to Jhegaala, and every book in Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series up to Diplomatic Immunity. This is fitting: those are two of the great series of science fiction, but don't seem to be written about nearly as much as I would expect. There are over 130 essays in a 447 page book, so there's a lot of material here and none of them outlive their welcome. Walton has a comfortable, approachable style that bubbles with delight and appreciation for books. I think it's impossible to read this collection without wanting to read more, and without adding several more books to the ever-teetering to-read pile. This is perhaps not the best source of reading recommendations if you dislike spoilers, although it can be used for that if you read carefully. But if you love listening to conversations about the genre and talking about how books bounce off each other, and particularly if you have read most of these books already or don't mind spoilers, this collection is a delight. If you're the type of SFF reader who likes reading the reviews in Locus or is already reading Tor.com, highly recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

17 April 2022

Matthew Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

The Freedom Phone advertises itself as a "Free speech and privacy first focused phone". As documented on the features page, it runs ClearOS, an Android-based OS produced by Clear United (or maybe one of the bewildering array of associated companies, we'll come back to that later). It's advertised as including Signal, but what's shipped is not the version available from the Signal website or any official app store - instead it's this fork called "ClearSignal".

The first thing to note about ClearSignal is that the privacy policy link from that page 404s, which is not a great start. The second thing is that it has a version number of 5.8.14, which is strange because upstream went from 5.8.10 to 5.9.0. The third is that, despite Signal being GPL 3, there's no source code available. So, I grabbed jadx and started looking for differences between ClearSignal and the upstream 5.8.10 release. The results were, uh, surprising.

First up is that they seem to have integrated ACRA, a crash reporting framework. This feels a little odd - in the absence of a privacy policy, it's unclear what information this gathers or how it'll be stored. Having a piece of privacy software automatically uploading information about what you were doing in the event of a crash with no notification other than a toast that appears saying "Crash Report" feels a little dubious.

Next is that Signal (for fairly obvious reasons) warns you if your version is out of date and eventually refuses to work unless you upgrade. ClearSignal has dealt with this problem by, uh, simply removing that code. The MacOS version of the desktop app they provide for download seems to be derived from a release from last September, which for an Electron-based app feels like a pretty terrible idea. Weirdly, for Windows they link to an official binary release from February 2021, and for Linux they tell you how to use the upstream repo properly. I have no idea what's going on here.

They've also added support for network backups of your Signal data. This involves the backups being pushed to an S3 bucket using credentials that are statically available in the app. It's ok, though, each upload has some sort of nominally unique identifier associated with it, so it's not trivial to just download other people's backups. But, uh, where does this identifier come from? It turns out that Clear Center, another of the Clear family of companies, employs a bunch of people to work on a ClearID[1], some sort of decentralised something or other that seems to be based on KERI. There's an overview slide deck here which didn't really answer any of my questions and as far as I can tell this is entirely lacking any sort of peer review, but hey it's only the one thing that stops anyone on the internet being able to grab your Signal backups so how important can it be.

The final thing, though? They've extended Signal's invitation support to encourage users to get others to sign up for Clear United. There's an exposed API endpoint called "get_user_email_by_mobile_number" which does exactly what you'd expect - if you give it a registered phone number, it gives you back the associated email address. This requires no authentication. But it gets better! The API to generate a referral link to send to others sends the name and phone number of everyone in your phone's contact list. There does not appear to be any indication that this is going to happen.

So, from a privacy perspective, going to go with things being some distance from ideal. But what's going on with all these Clear companies anyway? They all seem to be related to Michael Proper, who founded the Clear Foundation in 2009. They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavily invested in blockchain stuff, while Clear United also appears to be some sort of multi-level marketing scheme which has a membership agreement that includes the somewhat astonishing claim that:

Specifically, the initial focus of the Association will provide members with supplements and technologies for:

9a. Frequency Evaluation, Scans, Reports;

9b. Remote Frequency Health Tuning through Quantum Entanglement;

9c. General and Customized Frequency Optimizations;


- there's more discussion of this and other weirdness here. Clear Center, meanwhile, has a Chief Physics Officer? I have a lot of questions.

Anyway. We have a company that seems to be combining blockchain and MLM, has some opinions about Quantum Entanglement, bases the security of its platform on a set of novel cryptographic primitives that seem to have had no external review, has implemented an API that just hands out personal information without any authentication and an app that appears more than happy to upload all your contact details without telling you first, has failed to update this app to keep up with upstream security updates, and is violating the upstream license. If this is their idea of "privacy first", I really hate to think what their code looks like when privacy comes further down the list.

[1] Pointed out to me here

comment count unavailable comments

29 December 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2021: Memoir/biography

Just as I did for 2020, I won't publically disclose exactly how many books I read in 2021, but they evidently provoked enough thoughts that felt it worth splitting my yearly writeup into separate posts. I will reveal, however, that I got through more books than the previous year, and, like before, I enjoyed the books I read this year even more in comparison as well. How much of this is due to refining my own preferences over time, and how much can be ascribed to feeling less pressure to read particular books? It s impossible to say, and the question is complicated further by the fact I found many of the classics I read well worth of their entry into the dreaded canon. But enough of the throat-clearing. In today's post I'll be looking at my favourite books filed under memoir and biography, in no particular order. Books that just missed the cut here include: Bernard Crick's celebrated 1980 biography of George Orwell, if nothing else because it was a pleasure to read; Hilary Mantel's exhilaratingly bitter early memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003); and Patricia Lockwood's hilarious Priestdaddy (2017). I also had a soft spot for Tim Kreider's We Learn Nothing (2012) as well, despite not knowing anything about the author in advance, likely a sign of good writing. The strangest book in this category I read was definitely Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart. Based on a highly-recommended 2018 essay in the New Yorker, its rich broth of genuine yearning for a departed mother made my eyebrows raise numerous times when I encountered inadvertent extra details about Zauner's relationships.

Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (2020) Laura Tunbridge Whilst it might immediately present itself as a clickbait conceit, organising an overarching narrative around just nine compositions by Beethoven turns out to be an elegant way of saying something fresh about this grizzled old bear. Some of Beethoven's most famous compositions are naturally included in the nine (eg. the Eroica and the Hammerklavier piano sonata), but the book raises itself above conventional Beethoven fare when it highlights, for instance, his Septet, Op. 20, an early work that is virtually nobody's favourite Beethoven piece today. The insight here is that it was widely popular in its time, played again and again around Vienna for the rest of his life. No doubt many contemporary authors can relate to this inability to escape being artistically haunted by an earlier runaway success. The easiest way to say something interesting about Beethoven in the twenty-first century is to talk about the myth of Beethoven instead. Or, as Tunbridge implies, perhaps that should really be 'Beethoven' in leaden quotation marks, given so much about what we think we know about the man is a quasi-fictional construction. Take Anton Schindler, Beethoven's first biographer and occasional amanuensis, who destroyed and fabricated details about Beethoven's life, casting himself in a favourable light and exaggerating his influence with the composer. Only a few decades later, the idea of a 'heroic' German was to be politically useful as well; the Anglosphere often need reminding that Germany did not exist as a nation-state prior to 1871, so it should be unsurprising to us that the late nineteenth-century saw a determined attempt to create a uniquely 'German' culture ex nihilo. (And the less we say about Immortal Beloved the better, even though I treasure that film.) Nevertheless, Tunbridge cuts through Beethoven's substantial legacy using surgical precision that not only avoids feeling like it is settling a score, but it also does so in a way that is unlikely to completely alienate anyone emotionally dedicated to some already-established idea of the man to bring forth the tediously predictable sentiment that Beethoven has 'gone woke'. With Alex Ross on the cult of Wagner, it seems that books about the 'myth of X' are somewhat in vogue right now. And this pattern within classical music might fit into some broader trend of deconstruction in popular non-fiction too, especially when we consider the numerous contemporary books on the long hangover of the Civil Rights era (Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, etc.), the multifarious ghosts of Empire (Akala's Natives, Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland, etc.) or even the 'transmogrification' of George Orwell into myth. But regardless of its place in some wider canon, A Life in Nine Pieces is beautifully printed in hardback form (worth acquiring for that very reason alone), and it is one of the rare good books about classical music that can be recommended to both the connoisseur and the layperson alike.

Sea State (2021) Tabitha Lasley In her mid-30s and jerking herself out of a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley left London and put all her savings into a six-month lease on a flat within a questionable neighbourhood in Aberdeen, Scotland. She left to make good on a lukewarm idea for a book about oil rigs and the kinds of men who work on them: I wanted to see what men were like with no women around, she claims. The result is Sea State, a forthright examination of the life of North Sea oil riggers, and an unsparing portrayal of loneliness, masculinity, female desire and the decline of industry in Britain. (It might almost be said that Sea State is an update of a sort to George Orwell's visit to the mines in the North of England.) As bracing as the North Sea air, Sea State spoke to me on multiple levels but I found it additionally interesting to compare and contrast with Julian Barnes' The Man with Red Coat (see below). Women writers are rarely thought to be using fiction for higher purposes: it is assumed that, unlike men, whatever women commit to paper is confessional without any hint of artfulness. Indeed, it seems to me that the reaction against the decades-old genre of autofiction only really took hold when it became the domain of millennial women. (By contrast, as a 75-year-old male writer with a firmly established reputation in the literary establishment, Julian Barnes is allowed wide latitude in what he does with his sources and his writing can be imbued with supremely confident airs as a result.) Furthermore, women are rarely allowed metaphor or exaggeration for dramatic effect, and they certainly aren t permitted to emphasise darker parts in order to explore them... hence some of the transgressive gratification of reading Sea State. Sea State is admittedly not a work of autofiction, but the sense that you are reading about an author writing a book is pleasantly unavoidable throughout. It frequently returns to the topic of oil workers who live multiple lives, and Lasley admits to living two lives herself: she may be in love but she's also on assignment, and a lot of the pleasure in this candid and remarkably accessible book lies in the way these states become slowly inseparable.

Twilight of Democracy (2020) Anne Applebaum For the uninitiated, Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine who won a Pulitzer-prize for her 2004 book on the Soviet Gulag system. Her latest book, however, Twilight of Democracy is part memoir and part political analysis and discusses the democratic decline and the rise of right-wing populism. This, according to Applebaum, displays distinctly authoritarian tendencies, and who am I to disagree? Applebaum does this through three main case studies (Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States), but the book also touches on Hungary as well. The strongest feature of this engaging book is that Appelbaum's analysis focuses on the intellectual classes and how they provide significant justification for a descent into authoritarianism. This is always an important point to be remembered, especially as much of the folk understanding of the rise of authoritarian regimes tends to place exaggerated responsibility on the ordinary and everyday citizen: the blame placed on the working-class in the Weimar Republic or the scorn heaped upon 'white trash' of the contemporary Rust Belt, for example. Applebaum is uniquely poised to discuss these intellectuals because, well, she actually knows a lot of them personally. Or at least, she used to know them. Indeed, the narrative of the book revolves around two parties she hosted, both in the same house in northwest Poland. The first party, on 31 December 1999, was attended by friends from around the Western world, but most of the guests were Poles from the broad anti-communist alliance. They all agreed about democracy, the rule of law and the route to prosperity whilst toasting in the new millennium. (I found it amusing to realise that War and Peace also starts with a party.) But nearly two decades later, many of the attendees have ended up as supporters of the problematic 'Law and Justice' party which currently governs the country. Applebaum would now cross the road to avoid them, and they would do the same to her, let alone behave themselves at a cordial reception. The result of this autobiographical detail is that by personalising the argument, Applebaum avoids the trap of making too much of high-minded abstract argument for 'democracy', and additionally makes her book compellingly spicy too. Yet the strongest part of this book is also its weakest. By individualising the argument, it often feels that Applebaum is settling a number of personal scores. She might be very well justified in doing this, but at times it feels like the reader has walked in halfway through some personal argument and is being asked to judge who is in the right. Furthermore, Applebaum's account of contemporary British politics sometimes deviates into the cartoonish: nothing was egregiously incorrect in any of her summations, but her explanation of the Brexit referendum result didn't read as completely sound. Nevertheless, this lively and entertaining book that can be read with profit, even if you disagree with significant portions of it, and its highly-personal approach makes it a refreshing change from similar contemporary political analysis (eg. David Runciman's How Democracy Ends) which reaches for that more 'objective' line.

The Man in the Red Coat (2019) Julian Barnes As rich as the eponymous red coat that adorns his cover, Julian Barnes quasi-biography of French gynaecologist Samuel-Jean Pozzi (1846 1918) is at once illuminating, perplexing and downright hilarious. Yet even that short description is rather misleading, for this book evades classification all manner number of ways. For instance, it is unclear that, with the biographer's narrative voice so obviously manifest, it is even a biography in the useful sense of the word. After all, doesn't the implied pact between author and reader require the biographer to at least pretend that they are hiding from the reader? Perhaps this is just what happens when an author of very fine fiction turns his hand to non-fiction history, and, if so, it represents a deeper incursion into enemy territory after his 1984 metafictional Flaubert's Parrot. Indeed, upon encountering an intriguing mystery in Pozzi's life crying out for a solution, Barnes baldly turns to the reader, winks and states: These matters could, of course, be solved in a novel. Well, quite. Perhaps Barnes' broader point is that, given that's impossible for the author to completely melt into air, why not simply put down your cards and have a bit of fun whilst you're at it? If there's any biography that makes the case for a rambling and lightly polemical treatment, then it is this one. Speaking of having fun, however, two qualities you do not expect in a typical biography is simply how witty they can be, as well as it having something of the whiff of the thriller about it. A bullet might be mentioned in an early chapter, but given the name and history of Monsieur Pozzi is not widely known, one is unlikely to learn how he lived his final years until the closing chapters. (Or what happened to that turtle.) Humour is primarily incorporated into the book in two main ways: first, by explicitly citing the various wits of the day ( What is a vice? Merely a taste you don t share. etc.), but perhaps more powerful is the gentle ironies, bon mots and observations in Barnes' entirely unflappable prose style, along with the satire implicit in him writing this moreish pseudo-biography to begin with. The opening page, with its steadfast refusal to even choose where to begin, is somewhat characteristic of Barnes' method, so if you don't enjoy the first few pages then you are unlikely to like the rest. (Indeed, the whole enterprise may be something of an acquired taste. Like Campari.) For me, though, I was left wryly grinning and often couldn't wait to turn the page. Indeed, at times it reminded me of a being at a dinner party with an extremely charming guest at the very peak of his form as a wit and raconteur, delighting the party with his rambling yet well-informed discursive on his topic de jour. A significant book, and a book of significance.

31 August 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Men at Arms

Review: Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #15
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 1993
Printing: November 2013
ISBN: 0-06-223740-3
Format: Mass market
Pages: 420
Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel and a direct plot sequel to Guards! Guards!. You could start here without missing too much, but starting with Guards! Guards! would make more sense. And of course there are cameos (and one major appearance) by other characters who are established in previous books. Carrot, the adopted dwarf who joined the watch in Guards! Guards!, has been promoted to corporal. He is now in charge of training new recruits, a role that is more important because of the Night Watch's new Patrician-ordered diversity initiative. The Watch must reflect the ethnic makeup of the city. That means admitting a troll, a dwarf... and a woman? Trolls and dwarfs hate each other because dwarfs mine precious things out of rock and trolls are composed of precious things embedded in rocks, so relations between the new recruits are tense. Captain Vimes is leaving the Watch, and no one is sure who would or could replace him. (The reason for this is a minor spoiler for Guards! Guards!) A magical weapon is stolen from the Assassin's Guild. And a string of murders begins, murders that Vimes is forbidden by Lord Vetinari from investigating and therefore clearly is going to investigate. This is an odd moment at which to read this book. The Night Watch are not precisely a police force, although they are moving in that direction. Their role in Ankh-Morpork is made much stranger by the guild system, in which the Thieves' Guild is responsible for theft and for dealing with people who steal outside of the quota of the guild. But Men at Arms is in part a story about ethics, about what it means to be a police officer, and about what it looks like when someone is very good at that job. Since I live in the United States, that makes it hard to avoid reading Men at Arms in the context of the current upheavals about police racism, use of force, and lack of accountability. Men at Arms can indeed be read that way; community relations, diversity in the police force, the merits of making two groups who hate each other work together, and the allure of violence are all themes Pratchett is working with in this novel. But they're from the perspective of a UK author writing in 1993 about a tiny city guard without any of the machinery of modern police, so I kept seeing a point of clear similarity and then being slightly wrong-footed by the details. It also felt odd to read a book where the cops are the heroes, much in the style of a detective show. This is in no way a problem with the book, and in a way it was helpful perspective, but it was a strange reading experience.
Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days but already he had absorbed one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law.
Vimes and Carrot are both excellent police officers, but in entirely different ways. Vimes treats being a cop as a working-class job and is inclined towards glumness and depression, but is doggedly persistent and unable to leave a problem alone. His ethics are covered by a thick layer of world-weary cynicism. Carrot is his polar opposite in personality: bright, endlessly cheerful, effortlessly charismatic, and determined to get along with everyone. On first appearance, this contrast makes Vimes seem wise and Carrot seem a bit dim. That is exactly what Pratchett is playing with and undermining in Men at Arms. Beneath Vimes's cynicism, he's nearly as idealistic as Carrot, even though he arrives at his ideals through grim contrariness. Carrot, meanwhile, is nowhere near as dim as he appears to be. He's certain about how he wants to interact with others and is willing to stick with that approach no matter how bad of an idea it may appear to be, but he's more self-aware than he appears. He and Vimes are identical in the strength of their internal self-definition. Vimes shows it through the persistent, grumpy stubbornness of a man devoted to doing an often-unpleasant job, whereas Carrot verbally steamrolls people by refusing to believe they won't do the right thing.
Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.
There's a lot going on in this book apart from the profiles of two very different models of cop. Alongside the mystery (which doubles as pointed commentary on the corrupting influence of violence and personal weaponry), there's a lot about dwarf/troll relations, a deeper look at the Ankh-Morpork guilds (including a horribly creepy clown guild), another look at how good Lord Vetinari is at running the city by anticipating how other people will react, a sarcastic dog named Gaspode (originally seen in Moving Pictures), and Pratchett's usual collection of memorable lines. It is also the origin of the now-rightfully-famous Vimes boots theory:
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Men at Arms regularly makes lists of the best Discworld novels, and I can see why. At this point in the series, Pratchett has hit his stride. The plots have gotten deeper and more complex without losing the funny moments, movie and book references, and glorious turns of phrase. There is also a lot of life philosophy and deep characterization when one pays close attention to the characters.
He was one of those people who would recoil from an assault on strength, but attack weakness without mercy.
My one complaint is that I found it a bit overstuffed with both characters and subplots, and as a result had a hard time following the details of the plot. I found myself wanting a timeline of the murders or a better recap from one of the characters. As always with Pratchett, the digressions are wonderful, but they do occasionally come at the cost of plot clarity. I'm not sure I recommend the present moment in the United States as the best time to read this book, although perhaps there is no better time for Carrot and Vimes to remind us what good cops look like. But regardless of when one reads it, it's an excellent book, one of the best in the Discworld series to this point. Followed, in publication order, by Soul Music. The next Watch book is Feet of Clay. Rating: 8 out of 10

4 August 2020

Osamu Aoki: exim4 configuration for Desktop (better gmail support)

Since gmail rewrites "From:" address now (2020) and keep changing access limitation, it is wise not to use it as smarthost any more. (If you need to access multiple gmail addresses from mutt etc, use esmtp etc.)

---
For most of our Desktop PC running with stock exim4 and mutt, I think sending out mail is becoming a bit rough since using random smarthost causes lots of trouble due to the measures taken to prevent spams.

As mentioned in Exim4 user FAQ , /etc/hosts should have FQDN with external DNS resolvable domain name listed instead of localdomain to get the correct EHLO/HELO line. That's the first step.

The stock configuration of exim4 only allows you to use single smarthost for all your mails. I use one address for my personal use which is checked by my smartphone too. The other account is for subscribing to the mailing list. So I needed to tweak ...

Usually, mutt is smart enough to set the From address since my .muttrc has

# Set default for From: for replyes for alternates.
set reverse_name

So how can I teach exim4 to send mails depending on the mail accounts listed in the From header.

For my gmail accounts, each mail should be sent to the account specific SMTP connection matching your From header to get all the modern SPAM protection data in right state. DKIM, SPF, DMARC... (Besides, they overwrite From: header anyway if you use wrong connection.)

For my debian.org mails, mails should be sent from my shell account on people.debian.org so it is very unlikely to be blocked. Sometimes, I wasn't sure some of these debian.org mails sent through my ISP's smarthost are really getting to the intended person.

To these ends, I have created small patches to the /etc/exim4/conf.d files and reported it to Debian BTS: #869480 Support multiple smarthosts (gmail support). These patches are for the source package.

To use my configuration tweak idea, you have easier route no matter which exim version you are using. Please copy and read pertinent edited files from my github site to your installed /etc/exim4/conf.d files and get the benefits.
If you really wish to keep envelope address etc. to match From: header, please rewite agressively using the From: header using eddited rewrite/31_exim4-config_rewriting as follows:

 .ifndef NO_EAA_REWRITE_REWRITE
*@+local_domains "$ lookup $ local_part lsearch /etc/email-addresses \
$value fail " f
# identical rewriting rule for /etc/mailname
*@ETC_MAILNAME "$ lookup $ local_part lsearch /etc/email-addresses \
$value fail " f
.endif
* "$h_from:" Frs

So far its working fine for me but if you find bug, let me know.

Osamu

18 November 2017

Matthieu Caneill: MiniDebconf in Toulouse

I attended the MiniDebconf in Toulouse, which was hosted in the larger Capitole du Libre, a free software event with talks, presentation of associations, and a keysigning party. I didn't expect the event to be that big, and I was very impressed by its organization. Cheers to all the volunteers, it has been an amazing week-end! Here's a sum-up of the talks I attended. Du logiciel libre la monnaie libre Speaker: lo s The first talk I attended was, translated to English, "from free software to free money". lo s compared the 4 freedoms of free software with money, and what properties money needs to exhibit in order to be considered free. He then introduced 1, a project of free (as in free speech!) money, started in the region around Toulouse. Contrary to some distributed ledgers such as Bitcoin, 1 isn't based on an hash-based proof-of-work, but rather around a web of trust of people certifying each other, hence limiting the energy consumption required by the network to function. YunoHost Speaker: Jimmy Monin I then attended a presentation of YunoHost. Being an happy user myself, it was very nice to discover the future expected features, and also meet two of the developers. YunoHost is a Debian-based project, aimed at providing all the tools necessary to self-host applications, including email, website, calendar, development tools, and dozens of other packages. Premiers pas dans l'univers de Debian Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont For the first talk of the MiniDebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont introduced Debian, its philosophy, and how it works with regards to upstreams and downstreams. He gave many details on the teams, the infrastructure, and the internals of Debian. Trusting your computer and system Speaker: Jonas Smedegaard Jonas introduced some security concepts, and how they are abused and often meaningless (to quote his own words, "secure is bullshit"). He described a few projects which lean towards a more secure and open hardware, for both phones and laptops. Automatiser la gestion de configuration de Debian avec Ansible Speaker: J r my Lecour J r my, from Evolix, introduced Ansible, and how they use it to manage hundreds of Debian servers. Ansible is a very powerful tool, and a huge ecosystem, in many ways similar to Puppet or Chef, except it is agent-less, using only ssh connections to communicate with remote machines. Very nice to compare their use of Ansible with mine, since that's the software I use at work for deploying experiments. Making Debian for everybody Speaker: Samuel Thibault Samuel gave a talk about accessibility, and the general availability of the tools in today's operating systems, including Debian. The lesson to take home is that we often don't do enough in this domain, particularly when considering some issues people might have that we don't always think about. Accessibility on computers (and elsewhere) should be the default, and never require complex setups. Retour d'exp rience : mise jour de milliers de terminaux Debian Speaker: Cyril Brulebois Cyril described a problem he was hired for, an update of thousands of Debian servers from wheezy to jessie, which he discovered afterwards was worse than initially thought, since the machines were running the out-of-date squeeze. Since they were not always administered with the best sysadmin practices, they were all exhibiting different configurations and different packages lists, which raised many issues and gave him interesting challenges. They were solved using Ansible, which also had the effect of standardizing their system administration practices. Retour d'exp rience : utilisation de Debian chez Evolix Speaker: Gr gory Colpart Gr gory described Evolix, a company which manages servers for their clients, and how they were inspired by Debian, for both their internal tools and their practices. It is very interesting to see that some of the Debian values can be easily exported for a more open and collaborative business. Lightning talks To close the conference, two lightning talks were presented, describing the switch from Windows XP to Debian in an ecologic association near Toulouse; and how snapshot.debian.org can be used with bisections to find the source of some regressions. Conclusion A big thank you to all the organizers and the associations who contributed to make this event a success. Cheers!

14 September 2017

James McCoy: devscripts needs YOU!

Over the past 10 years, I've been a member of a dwindling team of people maintaining the devscripts package in Debian. Nearly two years ago, I sent out a "Request For Help" since it was clear I didn't have adequate time to keep driving the maintenance. In the mean time, Jonas split licensecheck out into its own project and took over development. Osamu has taken on much of the maintenance for uscan, uupdate, and mk-origtargz. Although that has helped spread the maintenance costs, there's still a lot that I haven't had time to address. Since Debian is still fairly early in the development cycle for Buster, I've decided this is as good a time as any for me to officially step down from active involvement in devscripts. I'm willing to keep moderating the mailing list and other related administrivia (which is fairly minimal given the repo is part of collab-maint), but I'll be unsubscribing from all other notifications. I think devscripts serves as a good funnel for useful scripts to get in front of Debian (and its derivatives) developers, but Jonas may also be onto something by pulling scripts out to stand on their own. One of the troubles with "bucket" packages like devscripts is the lack of visibility into when to retire scripts. Breaking scripts out on their own, and possibly creating multiple binary packages, certainly helps with that. Maybe uscan and friends would be a good next candidate. At the end of the day, I've certainly enjoyed being able to play my role in helping simplify the life of all the people contributing to Debian. I may come back to it some day, but for now it's time to let someone else pick up the reins. If you're interested in helping out, you can join #devscripts on OFTC and/or send a mail to <devscripts-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>.

28 May 2017

Russ Allbery: Debian Policy 4.0.0.0

Today, about a month later than I had intended due to having three consecutive work weeks that mostly drained me of energy, I finally uploaded Debian Policy 4.0.0.0 to Debian experimental. This went to experimental rather than unstable for two reasons: I expect there to be a few more point-release changes to packaging and formatting uploaded to experimental before uploading to unstable for the start of the buster development cycle. (I've indeed already noticed about six minor bugs, including the missing release date in the upgrading checklist....) Due to the DocBook conversion, and the resources rightly devoted to the stretch release instead, it may be a bit before the new Policy version shows up properly in all the places it's published. As you might expect from it having been more than a year since the previous release, there were a lot of accumulated changes. I posted the full upgrading-checklist entries to debian-devel-announce, or of course you can install the debian-policy package from experimental and review them in /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.txt.gz.

12 May 2017

Norbert Preining: Gaisi Takeuti, 1926-2017

Two days ago one of the most influential logician of the 20th century has passed away, Gaisi Takeuti ( ). I had the pleasure to meet this excellent man, teacher, writer, thinker several times while he was the president of the Kurt G del Society. I don t want to recall his achievements in mathematical logic, in particular proof theory, because I am not worth to write about such a genius. I want to recall a few personal stories from my own experience. I came into contact with Prof. Takeuti via is famous book Proof Theory, which my then Professor, now colleague and friend Matthias Baaz used for teaching us students proof theory. Together with Shoenfield s Mathematical Logic these two books became the foundation of my whole logic education. Now again in print, back then the Proof Theory was a rare precious. Few prints did remain in the library, and over the years one by one disappeared, until the last copy we had access to was my copy where I had scribbled pages and pages of notes and proofs. Matthias later on used these copies for his lectures, I should have written on the back-side! I remember well my first meeting with Prof. Takeuti: I was on the Conference on Internationalization in 2003 in Tsukuba, long before I moved to Japan. Back then I was just finishing my PhD and without much experience. When I arrived in the hotel, without fail there was a message of Prof. Takeuti inviting me for dinner the following day. We had dinner in a specialty restaurant of his area, together with is lovely wife. I was soo nervous about Japanese manners and stuttered Japanese phrases just to be stopped by Prof. Takeuti pouring himself a glass of sake and telling me: Relax, and forget the rules and fill your own glass when you want to. I am well aware that this liberal attitude didn t extend to Japanese colleagues, where he, descendant from a Samurai family, was at times very, extremely strict. The dinner was decided upon already, not easy since I was still strict vegetarian back than (now I would have enjoyed the dinner much more!), but for the last course we could decide. I remember with a smile how Prof. Takeuti suggested in Japanese various sweets, just to be interrupted by his wife with No Gaisi, no! . I asked what is going on and she explained that he wants to order a Japanese sweet for me I agreed, and that was probably the worst dish I had in Japan. Slippy noodles swimming in a cold broth, to be picked with chopsticks and put into a semi-sweet soja-sauce. I finished it, but it wasn t good. I should have thought twice when Prof. Takeuti s wife ordered a normal fruit salad. Scientifically he was simply a genius and famous for not reading a lot but reinventing everything. One of my research areas, G del logics, was reinvented by him as Intuitionistic Fuzzy Logic (for an overview see my talk at the Collegium Logicum 2016: G del Logics a short survey). But I want to recall one of my favorite articles of him: A Conservative Extension of Peano Arithmetic . This was published as part 2 of Volume 17 of Publications of the Mathematical Society of Japan, retypeset pdf is available here, JSTOR page. Therein he develops classical (real and complex) analysis over Peano s arithmetic. He shows that any arithmetical theorem proved in analytic number theory is a theorem in Peano s arithmetic. The proof uses Gentzen s cut elimination theorem, the center piece of modern proof theory. With Georg Kreisel having passed away in 2015, and now Gaisi Takeuti, we loose two of the greatest, if not the greatest minds in logic.

8 May 2017

Mike Gabriel: [Arctica Project] Release of nx-libs (version 3.5.99.7)

Introduction NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a network, especially a slow one. NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in 2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name "nx-libs". Release Announcement On Friday, May 5th 2017, version 3.5.99.7 of nx-libs has been released [1]. Credits A special thanks goes to Ulrich Sibiller for tracking down a regression bug that caused a tremendously slowed down keyboard input on high latency connections. Thanks for that! Another thanks goes to the Debian project for indirectly providing us with so many build platforms. We are nearly at the point where nx-libs builds on all architectures supported by the Debian project. (Runtime stability is a completely different issue, we will get to this soon). Changes between 3.5.99.6 and 3.5.99.7 Change Log The complete list of changes (since 3.5.99.6) can be obtained from here. Known Issues A list of known issues can be obtained from the nx-libs issue tracker [issues]. Binary Builds You can obtain binary builds of nx-libs for Debian (jessie, stretch, unstable) and Ubuntu (trusty, xenial) via these apt-URLs: Our package server's archive key is: 0x98DE3101 (fingerprint: 7A49 CD37 EBAE 2501 B9B4 F7EA A868 0F55 98DE 3101). Use this command to make APT trust our package server:
 wget -qO - http://packages.arctica-project.org/archive.key   sudo apt-key add -
The nx-libs software project brings to you the binary packages nxproxy (client-side component) and nxagent (nx-X11 server, server-side component). The nxagent Xserver can be used from remote sessions (via nxcomp compression library) or as a next Xserver. Ubuntu developers, please note: we have added nightly builds for Ubuntu latest to our build server. At the moment, you can obtain nx-libs builds for Ubuntu 16.10 (yakkety) and 17.04 (zenial) as nightly builds. References

3 November 2016

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2016)

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

1 October 2016

Vincent Sanders: Paul Hollywood and the pistoris stone

There has been a great deal of comment among my friends recently about a particularly British cookery program called "The Great British Bake Off". There has been some controversy as the program is moving from the BBC to a commercial broadcaster.

Part of this discussion comes from all the presenters, excepting Paul Hollywood, declining to sign with the new broadcaster and partly because of speculation the BBC might continue with a similar format show with a new name.

Rob Kendrick provided the start to this conversation by passing on a satirical link suggesting Samuel L Jackson might host "cakes on a plane"

This caused a large number of suggestions for alternate names which I will be reporting but Rob Kendrick, Vivek Das Mohapatra, Colin Watson, Jonathan McDowell, Oki Kuma, Dan Alderman, Dagfinn Ilmari Manns ke, Lesley Mitchell and Daniel Silverstone are the ones to blame.




So that is our list, anyone else got better ideas?

1 August 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 65 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday July 17 and Saturday July 23 2016: GSoC and Outreachy updates Valerie Young wrote an update about her Outreachy progress on tests.reproducible.org. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches have been submitted by: Package reviews 17 package reviews have been added and 4 have been updated. adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Some issues have been updated: Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by: diffoscope development strip-nondeterminism development reprotest development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC.

14 July 2016

Norbert Preining: Osamu Dazai No Longer Human

Japanese authors have a tendency to commit suicide, it seems. I have read Ryunosuke Akutagawa ( , at 35), Yukio Mishima ( , at 45), and also Osamu Dazai ( , at 39). Their end often reflects in their writings, and one of these examples is the book I just finished, No Longer Human. Dazai_Osamu-No_Longer_Human Considered as Dazai s master piece, and with Soseki s Kokoro the best selling novels in Japan. The book recounts the life of Oba Yozo, from childhood to the end in a mental hospital. The early years, described in the first chapter ( Memorandum ), are filled with the feeling of differentness, alienation from the rest, and Oba starts his way of living by playing the clown, permanently making jokes. The Second Memorandom spans the time to university, where he drops out, tries to become a painter, indulges in alcohol, smoking and prostitutes, leading to a suicide attempt together with a married woman, but he survived. The first part of the Third Memorandom sees a short recovering due to his relationship with a woman. He stops drinking and works as cartoonist, but in the last part his drinking pal from university times shows up again and they return into an ever increasing vicious drinking. Eventually he is separated from his wife, and confined to a mental hospital. Very depressing to read, but written in a way that one cannot stop reading. The disturbing thing about this book is that, although the main actor conceives many bad actions, we feel somehow attached to him and feel pity for him. It is somehow a exercise how circumstances and small predispositions can make a huge change in our lives. And it warns us that each one of us can easily come to this brink.

12 April 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 48 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 20th and March 26th: Toolchain fixes Daniel Kahn Gillmor worked on removing build path from build symbols submitting a patch adding -fdebug-prefix-map to clang to match GCC, another patch against gcc-5 to backport the removal of -fdebug-prefix-map from DW_AT_producer, and finally by proposing the addition of a normalizedebugpath to the reproducible feature set of dpkg-buildflags that would use -fdebug-prefix-map to replace the current directory with . using -fdebug-prefix-map. Sergey Poznyakoff merged the --clamp-mtime option so that it will be featured in the next Tar release. This option is likely to be used by dpkg-deb to implement deterministic mtimes for packaged files. Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: augeas, gmtkbabel, ktikz, octave-control, octave-general, octave-image, octave-ltfat, octave-miscellaneous, octave-mpi, octave-nurbs, octave-octcdf, octave-sockets, octave-strings, openlayers, python-structlog, signond. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: tests.reproducible-builds.org i386 build nodes have been setup by converting 2 of the 4 amd64 nodes to i386. (h01ger) Package reviews 92 reviews have been removed, 66 added and 31 updated in the previous week. New issues: timestamps_generated_by_xbean_spring, timestamps_generated_by_mangosdk_spiprocessor. Chris Lamb filed 7 FTBFS bugs. Misc. On March 20th, Chris Lamb gave a talk at FOSSASIA 2016 in Singapore. The very same day, but a few timezones apart, h01ger did a presentation at LibrePlanet 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Seven GSoC/Outreachy applications were made by potential interns to work on various aspects of the reproducible builds effort. On top of interacting with several applicants, prospective mentors gathered to review the applications.

Next.