I released version 2.5 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. Here are the changes in 2.5:

• Don't create negative cost for lot without cost
• Support complex implicit conversions
• Handle typed metadata with value 0 correctly
• Set per-unit instead of total cost when cost is missing from lot
• Support commodity-less amounts
• Convert transactions with no amounts or only 0 amounts to notes
• Fix parsing of transaction notes
• Keep tags in transaction notes on same line as transaction header
• Add beancount config options for non-standard root names automatically
• Fix conversion of fixated prices to costs
• Fix removal of price when price==cost but when they use different number formats
• Fix removal of price when price==cost but per-unit and total notation mixed
• Fix detection of tags and metadata after posting/aux date
• Use D directive to set default commodity for hledger
• Improve support for postings with commodity-less amounts
• Allow empty comments
• Preserve leading whitespace in comments in postings and transaction headers
• Preserve indentation for tags and metadata
• Preserve whitespace between amount and comment
• Refactor code to use more data structures
• Remove dependency on Config::Onion module

Thanks to input from Remco R nders, Yuri Khan, and Thierry. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli and Kirill Goncharov for testing my changes. You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub

I released version 2.1 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. Here are the changes in 2.1:

• Handle postings with posting dates and comments but no amount
• Show transactions with only one posting (without bucket)
• Adding spacing between automatic declarations
• Preserve preliminary info at the top

You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub. Thanks to Thierry (thdox) for reporting a bug and for fixing some typos in the documentation. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for some good feedback.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Allison Randal (wendar)
• Carsten Schoenert (tijuca)
• Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)
• Luca Boccassi (bluca)
• Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)
• Elana Hashman (ehashman)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Ervin Heged s
• Tom Marble
• Lukas Schwaighofer
• Philippe Thierry

Congratulations!

A new release, now at version 0.6.12, of the digest package is now on CRAN and in Debian. The digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the 'md5', 'sha-1', 'sha-256', 'crc32', 'xxhash' and 'murmurhash' algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. This release extends sha1 digest methods to even more types, thanks to another contribution by Thierry Onkelinx. CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new release, now at version number 0.6.10, of the digest package is now on CRAN. I also just prepared the Debian upload. This release, just like the previous one, is once again the work mostly of external contributors. Michel Lang added length checks to sha1(); Thierry Onkelinx extended sha1() support and added more tests, Viliam Simko also extended sha1() to more types, and Henrik Bengtsson improved intervals and fixed a bug with file usage. CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

A new release, now at version number 0.6.9, of the digest package is now on CRAN. I also just prepared the Debian upload. This release is very large part the work of Thierry Onkelinx who added stable sha1 support in a new function sha1(). Here, stable means that numerically equivalent numbers (in the sense of the semi-famous R FAQ entry 7.31) result in identical hashes. This is useful for hashing results from numerical analysis---where the representation may differ bitwise between, say, 32 and 64-bit platforms. We started to write a little more about this in a (at this very point still rather unfinished) little vignette. We also had a nice pull request from fellow Rcpp hacker Qiang Kou who updated the code to use XLENGTH so that large vectors can be supported. CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Following the lead of my dear friend Daniel and his fantastic and addictive Summing up series, here s a link pack of recent stuff I read around the web. Link pack is definitely a terrible name, but I m working on it.

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How to Silence Negative Thinking
On how to avoid the pitfall of being a Negatron and not an Optimist Prime. You might be your own worst enemy and you might not even know it:

Psychologists use the term automatic negative thoughts to describe the ideas that pop into our heads uninvited, like burglars, and leave behind a mess of uncomfortable emotions. In the 1960s, one of the founders of cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck, concluded that ANTs sabotage our best self, and lead to a vicious circle of misery: creating a general mindset that is variously unhappy or anxious or angry (take your pick) and which is (therefore) all the more likely to generate new ANTs. We get stuck in the same old neural pathways, having the same negative thoughts again and again.

Meet Harlem s Official Street Photographer
A man goes around Harlem with his camera, looking to give instead of taking. Makes you think about your approach to people and photography, things can be simpler. Kinda like Humans of New York, but in Harlem. And grittier, and on film but as touching, or more:

I tell people that my camera is a healing mechanism, Allah says. Let me photograph it and take it away from you.

What Happens When We Let Industry and Government Collect All the Data They Want
Why having nothing to hide is not about the now, but about the later. It s not that someone is going to judge for pushing every detail of your life to Twitter and Instagram, it s just that something you do might be illegal a few years later:

There was a time when it was essentially illegal to be gay. There was a time when it was legal to own people and illegal for them to run away. Sometimes, society gets it wrong. And it s not just nameless bureaucrats; it s men like Thomas Jefferson. When that happens, strong privacy protections including collection controls that let people pick who gets their data, and when allow the persecuted and unpopular to survive.

The Sex-Abuse Scandal Plaguing USA Swimming
Abusive coaches and a bullying culture in sports training are the perfect storm for damaging children. And it s amazing the extent to which a corporation or institution is willing to look the other way, as long as they save face. Very long piece, but intriguing to read. What Cities Would Look Like if Lit Only by the Stars
Thierry Cohen goes around the world and builds beautiful and realistic composite images of how would big cities look like if lit only by stars. The original page has some more cities: Villes teintes (Darkened Cities). On Muppets & Merchandise: How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business
Lessons from how Jim Henson managed to juggle both art and business without selling out for the wrong reasons. Really interesting, and reminds you to put Henson in perspective as a very smart man who managed to convince everyone to give him money for playing with muppets. The linked video on How the Muppet Show is Made is also cool. Made me curious enough to get the book. Barbie, Remixed: I (really!) can be a computer engineer
Mattel launched the most misguided book about empowering Barbie to be anything but a computer engineer in a book about being a computer engineer. The internet did not disappoint and fixed the problem within hours. There s now even an app for that (includes user submitted pages).

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Scott Kitterman (kitterman)
• Dominique Belhachemi (domibel)
• Sylvain Beucler (beuc)
• Alessio Treglia (alessio)
• Giovanni Mascellani (gio)
• Ulises Vitulli (dererk)
• Tommi Vainikainen (tvainika)
• Serafeim Zanikolas (sez)
• Hideki Yamane (henrich)
• Obey Arthur Liu (arthurliu)
• Thierry Soloniaina Randrianiriana (thierry)
• Thomas Weber (tweber)
• Mikhail Gusarov (dottedmag)
• Ritesh Sarraf (rrs)
• Kanru Chen (koster)

Congratulations!

For several months now, the XSF has been discussing, planning, and preparing to move from our old reliable svn repository to our new distributed git repositories on git.debian.org. As of a few minutes ago, that move is complete.

I'd like to thank the Alioth admins for setting up git.debian.org and letting us hammer it with the whole xorg codebase. Also deserving the lion's share of the credit for this move is Thierry Reding, who wrote the infrastructure and did a lot of debugging of the conversion script that came with git to let us make this move. It was a huge task, and I'm still amazed at how quickly he managed to pull it off.

I'm really excited that this is finally done. I've been wanting to have our codebase in some sort of distributed system ever since I started working on xorg a while back. Because I was deriving packages from Ubuntu, who was in turn deriving packages from us, it seemed like having the whole thing in a distributed system would have made my life a lot easier. It would also potentially make it easier on other derivatives who customize the X packages, like Knoppix. For a while I thought we were going to move to mercurial, but once X.org itself moved to git, it only made sense to follow suit. I'm excited at the benefits that this move will provide us, which will hopefully translate to faster updates and higher quality packages for Debian users. And this is only the beginning of what's going to come during the Lenny release cycle.

This has been a little overdue, but here it is. Lots of less than glamorous stuff has been going on in the XSF, and a few more exciting things are in the pipeline.

Among the less glamorous stuff, our resident release junkie/alpha porter, Steve Langasek, fixed #392500 which was our major RC bug on the alpha arch. Aside from that bug, there's been a whole host of bug triage by our newest team member, Brice Goglin. Brice has taken on the unenviable task of going through the massive list of bugs owned by the XSF. I've been traditionally less than responsible about handling bug reports like I should, and Brice is dealing with the mess I've left behind. Before he started, we were at over 2000 outstanding bugs, and as of this writing we're down to 1646 bugs, which is a huge amount of work. Hopefully this will go a long way towards making our little corner of the BTS usable for mere mortals. Aside from that, there's been an enormous amount of small cleanups and bug fixes by the whole team, most notably Julien Cristau (who's been doing more actual release management than yours truly), Thierry Redding, and Drew Parsons. Perhaps most important among these are miscellaneous last minute driver fixes that will enable a fair number of people to actually run Etch without backports. Michel D nzer has continued to be his usual awesome self, responding to the tough DRI bugs that the rest of us are terrified to approach.

Some of the more exciting stuff from a user perspective has been the various updates and new packaging going on. Thierry has taken on mesa, which is an incredibly daunting task, and he's done and incredible job of it so far. He and Julien cooperated on getting the newest mesa release, 6.5.2, in to experimental. That's a huge step on the way to getting the 7.2 release in to the archive. Thierry has also packaged up the newest compiz and some additional plugins ported from beryl, both of which are waiting in NEW right now for our overworked ftp masters to find time to have a look at them. Speaking of beryl, we also have that more or less complete and packaged. Our second-newest XSF member, Shawn Starr, has taken on beryl, and done a great job of getting the packages ready for experimental. They came back from review with a few minor comments, so he's busy getting those last issues resolved, so beryl should be winging its way over to NEW again for re-review soon. Finally, Josh Triplett and Jamie Sharp, who are both Debian and XCB developers, have put XCB in to experimental for you to test and play with. Expect to hear more about this when the Lenny development cycle starts.

The other huge thing that's been going on, and what I've been devoting most of my time to (aside from reading all the mail from Brice's bug triage), is transitioning the XSF over to git. Thierry has written major chunk of infrastructure to help move us over. I've done most of the conversion locally, and have been putting things up on git.debian.org as I go. As of now, we've got a very large chunk of X in git now, and using svn for those bits is officially closed. I'm hoping to complete the move in the next two weeks or so. If you want the above software that's not yet in the archive (beryl, compiz, compiz-extra, etc) you can clone it from the git repositories and build away. The other major thing that I've been doing is writing up a XSF git policy. This required a lot of input from the team, and we had to come up with a reasonable way of working the archive so that we could easily work with an upstream that was also using git, which as far as I know is a unique situation right now. It's in pretty good shape right now and we're just starting to put it in to real use. I've proposed a talk for Debconf on the XSF roadmap for Lenny, and I'll be sure to talk about our experiences using git if it gets accepted. In addition, we've all been learning the ins and outs of git, which is a whole other post in itself. I think that the XSF will end up being a really good resource for people in Debian who are looking to use git, as we'll have a lot of real world experience with a tool that relatively few people actually seem to know. Since I think git usage will only grow in the future, hopefully this will end up being valuable for Debian as a whole.

I'm finally done with this intense histology class I've been taking over the past few weeks. I haven't had nearly as much time to focus on real dedicated Debian work, so I've been largely reduced to sponsoring the killer work done by other XSF members and distracting my brain a little by trying to wrap it around haskell. At this point I can tell you the difference between different parts of the testes at a cellular level, and how your lung and liver compare. Thrilling stuff, I know.

Tonight my plan is to drink heavily to celebrate the end of this insane brush with medical school. Tomorrow I'll work off the hangover by writing up requests to get a few last minute bugfixes approved for etch, hopefully followed by moving all of the XSF repos over to git, since Thierry appears to have worked out all the major bugs with our svn->git conversion scripts. It's a strange feeling, hovering between infrastructures, and I'll be glad to have it finished so I can move on to hacking our current packaging to little tiny bits.

With all the talk about binary drivers, and Ubuntu's recent decision to ship them by default, I was going to try and rant or philosophize about the various issues it raises, and how I think ripping Ubuntu a new one for this move is justified, but instead I'm going to talk about kitties and happy things.

On the XSF front, the coolest news has come from people other than me. In addition to providing compiz updates and improvements, Thierry Reding has been busy cleaning up the Debian mesa packaging in the XSF repo. Mesa's Debian maintainer hasn't been very active over the past few months, so Thierry has stepped in to help out there.

Julien Cristau, who helped in the early work moving from XFree86 to Xorg, has returned to the XSF to take over maintainance of xterm, which I've almost completely neglected. Both these packages needed more dedicated maintainance than I could provide, and it's great to see them both being beaten in to shape.

Drew Parsons has been as industrious as ever, packaging updates for drivers so we can ship Etch with driver support that is very close to what will be released upstream as 7.2. In addition, he's packaged the modesetting branch of the i810 driver. This is an experimental development branch that will become the mainline in the nearish future, and it basically allows the driver to set modelines that aren't specified by the BIOS, just like other drivers.

Christian Perrier continues to rock the translations.

I've been doing unglamorous work bringing the Xorg docs in to the late 90's, thus making sure that we ship with docs so that users can tell what's on their systems.

Finally, Thierry has put a ton of work in building infrastructure to move the XSF svn repo over to git. I've been evaluating this, and hopefully we can make the move soon so that we hit etch+1 development running. Using git will provide an easier means of pulling from and pushing to upstream. Hopefully, downstream derivatives will also use git as well to facilitate this. I'm really excited about all of this because it feels like we're active across the board.

And now for the kitties. Nicole and I have adopted a cat. We get to take her home from the shelter next Wednesday, so if some random characters start to appear from me on irc, it's probably her fault. Rest assured that when I never run for DPL, she will be a far better running mate than Zeke. As a favor I would like to ask you, all my loyal readers: if I start to talk about my cat constantly, like one would one's own child, please punch me in the kidney. Thank you.

Thanks to David Nusinow, Thierry Reding, Kristian H gsberg and Michel D nzer to have made this possible. It’s really nice looking, but damn, this is soooooooooooooo slooooooooooow. I already tweaked my X configuration, so that GL applications would be fluid, and they are, but compiz is so much slower than all the rest of the GL applications that I really wonder what’s going on. Is it so much more difficult to display 3 windows than to display the full earth with plenty of textures ? As a bonus, for an unknown reason, it cuts the nautilus desktop window at a width of 1024 instead of 1280., which makes the right of the screen a warp zone… (For the record, I have a Radeon Mobility 9200 with the x.org drivers ; I should try with the proprietary ones) Update : The slowness might be related to this message:
libGL warning: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x4b Update 2 : According to this comment from Michel D nzer, the above message is only cosmetic.
I solved my slowness problem ! I just needed to switch back to XAA instead of EXA as an acceleration method (Option “AccelMethod”). There still remains the geometry problem… even fullscreened windows are limited to a width of 1024, though the gnome panel is correctly at the right-most of the screen (I use a vertical panel on the right of the screen).
There is also a cosmetic problem when switching from “normal” use to GL use (like cube rotation, window moving with wobbly, etc.): the window contents are kind of blured, but there’s nothing we can do about that, except have the windows blured in the same way in the first place.
Ah, and scrolling in windows is more sluggish, now. Update 3 : After some tracing of compiz, and some reading of the source code, it appears that the width limit problem is indeed due, as suggested by Hez in the comments, to GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE being 1024 (you can display it with glxinfo -l grep GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE). I wonder if, as suggested by erich, there is really an environment variable to change that…

I'm proud to annouce that thanks to the work of Thierry Reding, an appropriately patched X server as well as compiz have been uploaded to unstable. The patches were all written by Kristian H gsberg, who helped advise Thierry on some of the patches. As always, Michel D nzer (who I never seem to mention often enough here), helped advise on the various patches as well. In addition, Shawn Starr has taken on the task of packaging the recent fork of compiz named beryl, and we should be uploading that to Debian within a few days as well. My thanks go out to all of them who helped make this a reality. I did very little on this one but act as a final focal point for the work, the credit goes to them, particularly Theirry. May your windows jiggle with joy!

Today, the founding members of the Debian France non-profit met during the RMLL in Vandoeuvre-l s-Nancy; we signed the required papers and proceeded to the election of the board. We’ve been working on setting up the Debian France non-profit for the past months, discussing the idea and drafting the legal documents. Now we need to incorporate, this is the last big step :-) We’re all very happy now, and very excited to complete the last steps needed before we can open the membership and start to lobby more efficiently, among other things ;-) The 12 founding members are :

• Julien BLACHE (DD)
• C dric DELFOSSE (DD)
• Laurent FOUSSE (DD)
• Aur lien G R ME
• Pierre HABOUZIT (DD)
• Rapha l HERTZOG (DD)
• Aur lien JARNO (DD)
• Sven LUTHER (DD)
• Xavier OSWALD (Debian-edu, Skolelinux-fr)
• Olivier PENINGAULT
• Ludovic RESLINGER
• Thierry STAUDER (Debian-edu, Skolelinux-fr)

Unfortunately, not everybody could make it to Vandoeuvre today. A big thank you to all the people who helped in the process, and continue helping today!