Search Results: "toots"

24 September 2023

Sahil Dhiman: Abraham Raji

Abraham with Polito Man, you re no longer with us, but I am touched by the number of people you have positively impacted. Almost every DebConf23 presentations by locals I saw after you, carried how you were instrumental in bringing them there. How you were a dear friend and brother. It s a weird turn of events, that you left us during one thing we deeply cared and worked towards making possible since the last 3 years together. Who would have known, that Sahil, I m going back to my apartment tonight and casual bye post that would be the last conversation we ever had. Things were terrible after I heard the news. I had a hard time convincing myself to come see you one last time during your funeral. That was the last time I was going to get to see you, and I kept on looking at you. You, there in front of me, all calm, gave me peace. I ll carry that image all my life now. Your smile will always remain with me. Now, who ll meet and receive me on the door at almost every Debian event (just by sheer co-incidence?). Who ll help me speak out loud about all the Debian shortcomings (and then discuss solutions, when sober :)). Abraham and me during Debian discussion in DebUtsav Kochi It was a testament of the amount of time we had already spent together online, that when we first met during MDC Palakkad, it didn t feel we were physically meeting for the first time. The conversations just flowed. Now this song is associated with you due to your speech during post MiniDebConf Palakkad dinner. Hearing it reminds me of all the times we spent together chilling and talking community (which you cared deeply about). I guess, now we can t stop caring for the community, because your energy was contagious. Now, I can t directly dial your number to listen - Hey Sahil! What s up? from the other end, or Tell me, tell me on any mention of the problem. Nor would I be able to send reference usage of your Debian packaging guide in the wild. You already know how popular this guide of yours. How many people that guide has helped with getting started with packaging. Our last telegram text was me telling you about guide usage in Ravi s DebConf23 presentation. Did I ever tell you, I too got my first start with packaging from there. I started looking up to you from there, even before we met or talked. Now, I missed telling you, I was probably your biggest fan whenever you had the mic in hand and started speaking. You always surprised me all the insights and idea you brought and would kept on impressing me for someone who was just my age but was way more mature. Reading recent toots from Raju Dev made me realize how much I loved your writings. You wrote How the Future will remember Us , Doing what s right and many more. The level of depth in your thought was unparalleled. I loved reading those. That s why I kept pestering you to write more, which you slowly stopped. Now I fully understand why though. You were busy; really busy helping people out or just working for making things better. You were doing Debian, upstream projects, web development, designs, graphics, mentoring, free software evangelism while being the go-to person for almost everyone around. Everyone depended on you, because you were too kind to turn down anyone. Abraham and me just chilling around. We met for the first time there Man, I still get your spelling wrong :) Did I ever tell you that? That was the reason, I used to use AR instead online. You ll be missed and will always be part of our conversations, because you have left a profound impact on me, our friends, Debian India and everyone around. See you! the coolest man around. In memory: PS - Just found you even had a Youtube channel, you one heck of a talented man.

12 November 2022

Bastian Venthur: Mastodon

Due to recent events around Twitter, I finally decided to give Mastodon a try. Naturally, I find the idea of an open and decentralized platform much more appealing than the privately owned walled gardens that became so hugely popular in the past two decades. I m curious whether Mastodon can keep up the momentum of the last two weeks and eventually establish itself as an alternative to Twitter. On that note, I think it will be interesting to see how well moderation of hate speech etc. works- and scales on Mastodon. I believe that Twitter, Facebook and the likes, spend a significant amount of resources on content moderation, so this may become a huge headache for Mastodon instance admins when it gets more popular. Choosing an Instance For no particular reason, I went with the mastodon.social instance, so my handle is @venthur@mastodon.social. After my first steps, I realized that choosing the instance does have an impact, particularly if you follow the local timeline. mastodon.social is currently one of the biggest instances and therefore the local timeline is very busy and the topics naturally very random. Maybe I ll try out a more specialized instance such as fosstodon at some point one of the awesome features of Mastodon is that it actually supports the migration of accounts between instances! I wonder if there are plans to have an official Debian instance? First Impressions So far I m quite happy with Mastodon. There s good quality content and I already found a few people that I was following on Twitter here on Mastodon too. Interestingly, some of them actually are more active on Mastodon than on Twitter. But truth to be told: many of them do cross-post on both mediums, and most of the people I follow on Twitter are not on Mastodon yet. I do like the concepts of the local- and federated timelines, although they are quite busy. I like that you can set the language of your (individual) toots which allows users to filter their timelines for languages. In practice, this does not work so well yet, and I still see a lot of different languages in my local and federated timelines. I assume the problem is that people just forget to set the language of their toots so the default language is used. This problem should be easily solvable in the frontend by guessing the language once a few words have been typed. I also like the idea that you can follow hashtags, although for me the results were mixed. I tried to follow #debian and #python and got a lot of toots that were not really relevant for me in the case of #python I got quite spammed with job ads so I had to unfollow it again. Unfollwing a hashtag is not very intuitive, as the tags are not in your list of people you follow, so you have to find the page of the hashtag itself (e.g. #debian) and unfollow from there. You see, there are some rough edges here and there, but I find the overall experience much more enjoyable than Twitter. Debian Folks in the Fediverse? Which brings me to: are there any Debian Developers or -Maintainers out there to follow in the fediverse? I found most of the ones I m following on Twitter, but I m sure there s more hiding out there.

27 August 2017

Carl Chenet: The Importance of Choosing the Correct Mastodon Instance

Remember, Mastodon is a new decentralized social network, based on a free software which is rapidly gaining users (already there is more than 1.5 million accounts). As I ve created my account in June, I was a fast addict and I ve already created several tools for this network, Feed2toot, Remindr and Boost (mostly written in Python).

Now, with all this experience I have to stress out the importance of choosing the correct Mastodon instance.

Some technical reminders on how Mastodon works

First, let s quickly clarify something about the decentralized part. In Mastodon, decentralization is made through a federation of dedicated servers, called instances , each one with a complete independent administration. Your user account is created on one specific instance. You have two choices:

  • Create your own instance. Which requires advanced technical knowledge.
  • Create your user account on a public instance. Which is the easiest and fastest way to start using Mastodon.

You can move your user account from one instance to another, but you have to follow a special procedure which can be quite long, considering your own interest for technical manipulation and the total amount of your followers you ll have to warn about your change. As such, you ll have to create another account on a new instance and import three lists: the one with your followers, the one with the accounts you have blocked, and the one with the account you have muted.

From this working process, several technical and human factors will interest us.

A good technical administration for instance

As a social network, Mastodon is truly decentralized, with more than 1.5 million users on more than 2350 existing instances. As such, the most common usage is to create an account on an open instance. To create its own instance is way too difficult for the average user. Yet, using an open instance creates a strong dependence on the technical administrator of the chosen instance.

The technical administrator will have to deal with several obligations to ensure its service continuity, with high-quality hardware and regular back-ups. All of these have a price, either in money and in time. Regarding the time factor, it would be better to choose an administration team over an individual, as life events can change quite fast everyone s interests. As such, Framasoft, a French association dedicated to promoting the Free software use, offers its own Mastodon instance named: Framapiaf. The creator of the mastodon project, also offers a quite solid instance, Mastodon.social (see below).

Regarding the money factor, many instance administrators with a large number of users are currently asking for donation via Patreon, as hosting an instance server or renting one cost money.

Mastodon.social, the first instance of the Mastodon network

The Ideological Trend Of Your Instance

If anybody could have guessed the previous technical points since the recent registration explosion on the Mastodon social network, the following point took almost everyone by surprise. Little by little, different instances show their culture , their protest action, and their propaganda on this social network.

As the instance administrator has all the powers over its instance, he or she can block the instance of interacting with some other instances, or ban its instance s users from any interaction with other instances users.

With everyone having in mind the main advantages to have federalized instance from, this partial independence of some instances from the federation was a huge surprise. One of the most recent example was when the Unixcorn.xyz instance administrator banned its users from reading Aeris account, which was on its own instance. It was a cataclysm with several consequences, which I ve named the #AerisGate as it shows the different views on moderation and on its reception by various Mastodon users.

If you don t manage your own instance, when you ll have to choose the one where to create your account, make sure that the content you plan to toot is within the rules and compatible with the ideology of said instance s administrator. Yes, I know, it may seem surprising but, as stated above, by entering a public instance you become dependent on someone else s infrastructure, who may have an ideological way to conceive its Mastodon hosting service. As such, if you re a nazi, for example, don t open your Mastodon account on a far-left LGBT instance. Your account wouldn t stay open for long.

The moderation rules are described in the about/more page of the instance, and may contain ideological elements.

To ease the process for newcomers, it is now possible to use a great tool to select what instance should be the best to host your account.

Remember that, as stated above, Mastodon is decentralized, and as such there is no central authority which can be reached in case you have a conflict with your instance administrator. And nobody can force said administrator to follow its own rules, or not to change them on the fly. Think Twice Before Creating Your Account

If you want to create an account on an instance you don t control, you need to check two elements: the availability of the instance hosting service in the long run, often linked to the administrator or the administration group of said instance, and the ideological orientation of your instance. With these two elements checked, you ll be able to let your Mastodon account growth peacefully, without fearing an outage of your instance, or simple your account blocked one morning because it doesn t align with your instance s ideological line.

in Conclusion

To help me get involved in free software and writing articles for this blog, please consider a donation through my Liberapay page, even if it s only a few cents per week. My contact Bitcoin and Monero are also available on this page. Follow me on Mastodon Translated from French to English by St phanie Chaptal.

21 August 2017

Carl Chenet: Remind people about your great content using social networks with Remindr

Each time I remind people about one of my best blog posts, I do have positive reviews and a peak of traffic on my blog. But as an IT guy, I hate (so much) manually (gosh!) posting reminders of my articles on both my Twitter account and my Mastodon account. So I wrote Remindr. Each time you launch it, it posts a content through both Mastodon and Twitter. You can attach an image for each message and using different languages is managed for your different content is managed. Under the hood, it s a self hosted (my instance just runs on my workstation) Python 3 application released under the GPLv3 license. Going further with Remindr How does exactly Remindr work? Remindr iterates through a list of messages in a file you write and extract one line for each execution of Remindr, adding a user-defined prefix and send them to both the Mastodon and Twitter social networks. Here is the format of the file:
o en Automatically Send Toots To The Mastodon Social Network https://carlchenet.com/automatically-send-toots-to-the-mastodon-social-network/ #Mastodon
x fr Sur Mastodon, cr er son compte de secours  ou tout perdre https://carlchenet.com/sur-mastodon-creer-son-compte-de-secours-ou-tout-perdre/ #Mastodon
x en Automatically boost cool toots on Mastodon with the Boost bot https://carlchenet.com/automatically-boost-cool-toots-on-mastodon-with-the-boost-bot/ #Mastodon
x en Cryptocurrencies On the New Social Network Mastodon #Mastodon #bitcoin #ethereum #monero
The first field only indicates if the line is the next one to be considered by Remindr, the o indicates the next line to be sent. The second field is the 2-letters code language your content is using, in my example en or fr. Next content on the line will compose the body of your messages to Mastodon and Twitter. So each time you launch Remindr, one of the lines of your file will be sent to Mastodon and Twitter. How easy to use is that? and finally You can help me developing tools for Mastodon and other social networks by donating anything through Liberaypay (also possible with cryptocurrencies). Any contribution will be appreciated. That s a big factor motivation
Donate You also may follow my account @carlchenet on Mastodon  Carl Chenet On Mastodon

12 January 2011

Romain Beauxis: Le roi est nu !

I am deeply thankful for the good work done by translators all over the world.. Sometimes, however, I also have a good laugh. This one, in particular:
ATTENTION ! Votre mot de passe pour de royaume d'authentification : <https://savonet.svn.sourceforge.net:443> SourceForge Subversion area ne peut tre sauvegard qu'en clair !

23 November 2010

Romain Beauxis: Smarter Bots..

So, it's not yet a successful Turing Test but here is what I received today through the chat of a famous social network:
Alice: hey bob, got a second??
Bob: yes!
Alice: alright cool, I want you to try something real quick
Bob : ok
Bob : :)
At this point, I had zero suspicion about who was really talking to me..
Alice: alright bob, try this test and show me what you get.. i can't get over like a 105, its pathetic http://stupid-iq-test.com
Yes, looking at the stupid IQ test and knowing some facts about the person asking me to do it, I became suspicious, so I tried a first question:
Bob : what do I get from that ? :)
Alice: lemme know what ya get plz, so far everyone beat me, except for Clarence LOL be carfeful some of the questions are hard ;-)
Not too bad of an answer! Also, Clarence is one of our common friends and knowing Clarence, he could indeed have challenged Alice. But I was still suspicious so I tried a last question:
Bob: how much did you get ?
Alice disconnected
Talking in real life, it appears that it was indeed a bot... I'm quite impressed, though. I wonder now the extend of work they have put in it to make it sound real to me...

5 October 2010

Romain Beauxis: Spam..

I totally understand that sf.net's economical stability may require ads in their services. However, I do not really like to see this added to my emails:
Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today.

28 September 2010

Romain Beauxis: Liquidsoap at ON2: Test signals, October, 22-23 2010 in Berlin

It is my pleasure to announce that the Savonet Team [1] will be presenting Liquidsoap [2] at the ON2: Test signals festival [3], taking place on Friday, Oct. 22 and Saturday, Oct. 23 in Berlin, Germany. We will be holding a workshop session on Friday, during which we will explain how to use Liquidsoap in many details, and a more general talk about Liquidsoap the next Saturday. We are also expecting to prepare and release a second beta for the occasion, which we are planning to use during the event. Any interested user or contributor to Liquidoap that is available is warmly invited to join and meet with us! The festival is free but requires to signup (see above link).

11 September 2010

Romain Beauxis: Liquidsoap 1.0 beta1 and 0.9.3 released!

We have finally released two new versions of Liquidsoap [1]! This is a very good news for the project because the 1.0 branch contains huge and exciting improvements in particular video support, dynamic source creation/destruction and support for different clocks/time flow. 1.0 beta is also the first release that runs natively on windows, when compiled using the ocaml cross-compiler [2]. 1.0 is still some time away but the beta is now considered solid enough to be considered for production. That's also where bugfixing will happen now. 0.9.3 is a bugfix release for 0.9.2 and will be the last 0.9.x release. The release also includes a bunch of new binding releases, namely:
  • ocaml-alsa: added resume and recover function, reworked exception handling
  • ocaml-cry: removed an extra crlf sent when using icecast source protocol
  • ocaml-dtools: added support for syslog
  • ocaml-duppy: minor win32 fixes..
  • ocaml-gavl: fixed Gc issue.
  • ocaml-mad: win32-related fixes.
  • ocaml-ogg: stricter parsing of ogg streams
  • ocaml-theora: support for theora 1.1 API
The custom debian packages have been updated for 0.9.3. For the beta, you can try the SVN daily package [3] Official Debian packages should come, but through experimental while squeeze is frozen.. The release notes and changelog can be read in the announcement mail [4]. Yeah!

[1] http://savonet.sf.net/ [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Feat... [3] the automatic build needs to be fixed, the cron script does not work now for some reasons although it is perfectly fine manually.. [4] https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive...

11 August 2010

Romain Beauxis: Mingw32-ocaml 3.12.0

An updated version of the ocaml cross-compiler package, based on ocaml 3.12.0, has just been uploaded to Debian experimental ! Any report and test on the package would be very welcome ! I have personally tested it with Liquidsoap and built a win32 version of the software. Since this build implies many external modules as well as C objects, I am pretty confident in the cross-compiler uploaded to experimental.. About the cross-compiler: the ocaml cross-compiler is the result of the hard work done by Richard Jones for Fedora. The Debian package is merely a backport (and adaptation to ocaml 3.12.0) of his patches. If you care about the future of the cross-compiler, the best you can do is work with upstream to find how to push the needed changes there in order to have a plain support for it. I have personally no time for starting this process but I could try to describe the patches to an intereste contributor. Warning: some are REALLY hacky :-)

4 August 2010

Romain Beauxis: Pkg-mediawiki..

..recently got two new contributors, Jonathan Wiltshire and Thorsten Glaser. I forgot to blog about this but I am very happy to see the mediawiki packages getting more love, considering that I have much less time for them these days... Good work guys!

Romain Beauxis: Gotcha!

Thanks Daniel, I just got the world's most powerful wireless network card. It works and connects great including with aircrack-ng and co.. !

Romain Beauxis: SPIP 2.1.1

...was just released and uploaded to Debian unstable!

16 July 2010

Romain Beauxis: What's this thing with CDBS ?

What's this thing with CDBS that makes people so angry at it ? I can understand that one may not like that it is a bunch of makefiles, but, hell, the whole makefile system is obscured all the way, so I guess those people NEVER write (complex) makefile.. :-) More seriously, I have used CDBS for years, I've always been very happy with it. I understand that some people prefer other solutions, but it does not mean that there should be a war between this or that. Those are simply personal options/opinions et c'est tout !

21 June 2010

Romain Beauxis: I have a dream...

I have a dream that one day, serious programming language theoriticians, which would gather and realize that LaTeX has done a great job but is basically just a pile of rewriting rules built on top of postscript. I have a dream that one day, one would get the fundings and rewrite from scratch a new language. A language with a clear syntax for describing the beautification constraints. A language which would also be flexible enough to be able to override those constraints. A language that would allow to write mathematic formula, macros and other tools without arcane tricks and hacks to obtain the required rending.... And much more...

10 May 2010

Romain Beauxis: Ubuntu, the firm and its employees

This post is not meant to be offensive in any way. I would just like to write down things that came to my mind recently. It all started when I was considering applying for the right to upload the package I maintain into Ubuntu. Looking at the procedure, I realized that this needs to be present during an IRC meeting at a given date online. This stopped me immediately. I am working most of my day-time and, given the time zone I am living now, this was not an option. But, since I had registered to the corresponding mailing list, I started receiving mails of other applicants that where trying to arrange things with their work and private life to be able to participate. Now, today, I stumbled upon these notes of Mark's presentation in Bruxelles, relayed by a friend that is not either working for Ubuntu. Reading it gave me a strong taste of management-oriented presentation, with all this sort of "yeah we want our product in every box next year" propaganda. Not like Steve Ballmer, fortunately, but not far perhaps. So, yeah, there is something that makes me uncomfortable with Ubuntu. I am really happy by its success and I will continue to recommend it to friends around me. However, I wonder if, in a way, Ubuntu is not a model of commercial company where a minimal core of developers are actually payed, while a second layer of developers are fan-boys that are willing to participate as if there were employees but without being actually payed, and a third layer being the open-source developers whose work is actually what makes 90% of the core of the OS. A very good illustration is at the end of the note from Mark's presentation. It reads:
Somebody asks about advertising Ubuntu, looks like there are no plans for the moment to actually advertise Ubuntu across traditional media. Mark uses the Ubuntu Manual as an example of how Ubuntu gets advertised and will reach the mainstream, Mark points out myself and the room applauds the Ubuntu Manual Project! Woohoo!
Now, guess what:
About Us We are a group of individuals trying to promote the use of Ubuntu and its variants. This is a private web site that is not connected in any official or financial way with Ubuntu, Canonical PL or Ubuntu.com. Official Ubuntu guides and downloads are freely available at www.ubuntu.com. Ubuntu is a registered trademark of Canonical PL
Source: http://ubuntumanual.org/about-us

2 May 2010

Romain Beauxis: SPIP is cool

I have been playing around with SPIP for some time today. I am really happy with the software and its current packaging ! I have packaged this application because I believed it was missing among the possible powerful CMS for Debian. I hope this will be a good package for squeeze !

7 April 2010

Romain Beauxis: [Security] Mediawiki 1.15.3

The Wikimedia fundation has just released a new security update for mediawiki. Unfortunately, I will have no time to prepare updated packages before next week. Hence, any interested contributor is welcome to propose/upload a fixed package. Additionally, there is a patch available. You may use it to update your installation while the package is being prepared..

3 April 2010

Romain Beauxis: On mail servers and google spam filter..

The worst April's fool ever, on which I will not comment here, has forced me to quickly move the services on my previous machine. Among them was the email services, which I fear the most. Configuring again a postfix server, I realize again how arcane its configuration is. Email is probably, with nttp and unix, one of the oldest paradigm in modern computing, and you feel it. I understand that email used to be intrinsicly linked with unix account. But, come on, those were the days where you would login to a mainframe, way before personal computers. So, why do you need to know about all sort of server-wide files, like /etc/aliasee and /etc/mailname ? Why do you need to have to tweak the server-wide accounts and login system to create new mailboxes ? In 99% of the situations now, email accounts do not corresponds to anything on the server, so why keeping all sort of arcane stuff that make the configuration of a mail server so delicate ? On a side note, I would like to share 3 questions. First is this idea of using gmail as a spam filter service. You register your address, say joe@doe.com with your joe.doe@gmail.com and you tell your mail server to redirect all the mail to joe@doe.com to joe.doe@gmail.com. Then in gmail's interface, you ask gmail to redirect all mails to joe@mail.doe.com. Eventually, the mail at mail.joe.com is delivered to the local inbox. This allows to use gmail as a spam filter loop. However, I have no idea if this is something already known and if gmail administrators will like it. Lazy web, what do you think ? Second is the following parameters for postfix: reject_non_fqdn_recipient and reject_unknown_reverse_client_hostname. I wonder if I may loose some mail using them.. Any idea ? Third is that I wanted to configure the old server to relay anything on the new, and filter there. But, as much fuzz there is about open relay, I was not able to configure my postfix as an open relay.. Any idea on how to do it ?

16 March 2010

Romain Beauxis: Wlan repeater

Just a quick note about something I have been looking for long... Say you have an access to a wireless network but the signal is bad so you'd like to relay it through another wifi network.. In this case, you may be interested into getting this cheap piece of hardware [1] (a used one on craigslist for instance) and look at this page.. Straight and clear :-)

[1] I got version 4.0, not all are enabled for this purpose..

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