I think Maxwell was probably right, certainly the unit of current Ampere gives his name to has been a concern of mine recently.

Regular readers may have possibly noticed my unhealthy obsession with single board computers. I have recently rehomed all the systems into my rack which threw up a small issue of powering them all. I had been using an ad-hoc selection of USB wall warts and adapters but this ended up needing nine mains sockets and short of purchasing a very expensive PDU for the rack would have needed a lot of space.

Additionally having nine separate convertors from mains AC to low voltage DC was consuming over 60Watts for 20W of load! The majority of these supplies were simply delivering 5V either via micro USB or DC barrel jack.

Initially I considered using a ten port powered USB hub but this seemed expensive as I was not going to use the data connections, it also had a limit of 5W per port and some of my systems could potentially use more power than that so I decided to build my own supply.

A quick look on ebay revealed that a 150W (30A at 5V) switching supply could be had from a UK vendor for 9.99 which seemed about right. An enclosure, fused and switched IEC inlet, ammeter/voltmeter with shunt and suitable cables were acquired for another 15

A little careful drilling and cutting of the enclosure made openings for the inlets, cables and display. These were then wired together with crimped and insulated spade and ring connectors. I wanted this build to be safe and reliable so care was taken to get the neatest layout I could manage with good separation between the low and high voltage cabling.

The result is a neat supply with twelve outputs which i can easily extend to eighteen if needed. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that even with twelve SBC connected generating 20W load the power drawn by the supply was 25W or about 80% efficiency instead of the 33% previously achieved.

The inbuilt meter allows me to easily see the load on the supply which so far has not risen above 5A even at peak draw, despite the cubitruck and BananaPi having spinning rust hard drives attached, so there is plenty of room for my SBC addiction to grow (I already pledged for a Pine64).

Overall I am pleased with how this turned out and while there are no detailed design files for this project it should be easy to follow if you want to repeat it. One note of caution though, this project has mains wiring and while I am confident in my own capabilities dealing with potentially lethal voltages I cannot be responsible for anyone else so caveat emptor!

I m organizing an event at the University of Washington in Seattle that involves a reading, the screening of a documentary film, and a Q&A about Aaron Swartz. The event coincides with the third anniversary of Aaron s death and the release of a new book of Swartz s writing that I contributed to. The event is free and open the public and details are below:

WHEN: Wednesday, January 13 at 6:30-9:30 p.m.

WHERE: Communications Building (CMU) 120, University of Washington

We invite you to celebrate the life and activism efforts of Aaron Swartz, hosted by UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill. The event is next week and will consist of a short book reading, a screening of a documentary about Aaron s life, and a Q&A with Mako who knew Aaron well details are below. No RSVP required; we hope you can join us.

Aaron Swartz was a programming prodigy, entrepreneur, and information activist who contributed to the core Internet protocol RSS and co-founded Reddit, among other groundbreaking work. However, it was his efforts in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to promoting increased access to information that entangled him in a two-year legal nightmare that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26.

January 11, 2016 marks the third anniversary of his death. Join us two days later for a reading from a new posthumous collection of Swartz s writing published by New Press, a showing of The Internet s Own Boy (a documentary about his life), and a Q&A with UW Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill a former roommate and friend of Swartz and a contributor to and co-editor of the first section of the new book. If you re not in Seattle, there are events with similar programs being organized in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and San Francisco. All of these other events will be on Monday January 11 and registration is required for all of them. I will be speaking at the event in San Francisco.

The New Press has published a new collection of Aaron Swartz s writing called The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz. I worked with Seth Schoen to introduce and help edit the opening section of book that includes Aaron s writings on free culture, access to information and knowledge, and copyright. Seth and I have put our introduction online under an appropriately free license (CC BY-SA). Over the last week, I ve read the whole book again. I think the book really is a wonderful snapshot of Aaron s thought and personality. It s got bits that make me roll my eyes, bits that make me want to shout in support, and bits that continue to challenge me. It all makes me miss Aaron terribly. I strongly recommend the book. Because the publication is post-humous, it s meant that folks like me are doing media work for the book. In honor of naming the book their progressive pick of the week, Truthout has also published an interview with me about Aaron and the book. Other folks who introduced and/or edited topical sections in the book are David Auerbach (Computers), David Segal (Politics), Cory Doctorow (Media), James Grimmelmann (Books and Culture), and Astra Taylor (Unschool). The book is introduced by Larry Lessig.

With a heavy heart Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock, stalwart proponent of Free Open Source Software, Father, Son, and the 'ian' in Debian. Ian started the Debian project in August of 1993, releasing the first versions of Debian later that same year. Debian would go on to become the world's Universal Operating System, running on everything from embedded devices to the space station. Ian's sharp focus was on creating a Distribution and community culture that did the right thing, be it ethically, or technically. Releases went out when they were ready, and the project's staunch stance on Software Freedom are the gold standards in the Free and Open Source world. Ian's devotion to the right thing guided his work, both in Debian and in the subsequent years, always working towards the best possible future. Ian's dream has lived on, the Debian community remains incredibly active, with thousands of developers working untold hours to bring the world a reliable and secure operating system. The thoughts of the Debian Community are with Ian's family in this hard time. His family has asked for privacy during this difficult time and we very much wish to respect that. Within our Debian and the larger Linux community condolences may be sent to in-memoriam-ian@debian.org where they will be kept and archived.

Midsummer for me is also known as Noite do Lume Novo (literally New Fire Night ), one of the big calendar events of the year, marking the end of the school year and the beginning of summer. On this day, there are celebrations not very unlike the bonfires in the Guy Fawkes Night in England or Britain ^[1]. It is a bit different in that it is not a single event for the masses, more of a friends and neighbours thing, and that it lasts for a big chunk of the night (sometimes until morning). Perhaps for some people, or outside bigger towns or cities, Guy Fawkes Night is also celebrated in that way and that's why during the first days of November there are fireworks rocketing and cracking in the neighbourhoods all around. Like many other celebrations around the world involving bonfires, many of them also happening around the summer solstice, it is supposed to be a time of renewal of cycles, purification and keeping the evil spirits away; with rituals to that effect like jumping over the fire when the flames are not high and it is safe enough. So it was fitting that, in the middle of June (almost Midsummer in the northern hemisphere), I learnt that I was about to leave my now-previous job, which is a pretty big signal and precursor for renewal (and it might have something to do with purifying and keeping the evil away as well ;-) ). Whatever... But what does all of this have to do with aptitude or Debian, anyway? For one, it was a question of timing. While looking for a new job (and I am still at it), I had more spare time than usual. DebConf 15 @ Heidelberg was within sight, and for the first time circumstances allowed me to attend this event. It also coincided with the time when I re-gained access to commit to aptitude on the 19th of June. Which means Renewal. End of June was also the time of the announcement of the colossal GCC-5/C++11 ABI transition in Debian, that was scheduled to start on the 1st of August, just before the DebConf. Between 2 and 3 thousand source packages in Debian were affected by this transition, which a few months later is not yet finished (although the most important parts were completed by mid-end September). aptitude itself is written in C++, and depends on several libraries written in C++, like Boost, Xapian and SigC++. All of them had to be compiled with the new C++11 ABI of GCC-5, in unison and in a particular order, for aptitude to continue to work (and for minimal breakage). aptitude and some dependencies did not even compile straight away, so this transition meant that aptitude needed attention just to keep working. Having recently being awarded again with the Aptitude Hat, attending DebConf for the first time and sailing towards the Transition Maelstrom, it was a clear sign that Something Had to Be Done (to avoid the sideways looks and consequent shame at DebConf, if nothing else). Happily (or a bit unhappily for me, but let's pretend...), with the unexpected free time in my hands, I changed the plans that I had before re-gaining the Aptitude Hat (some of them involving Debian, but in other ways maybe I will post about that soon). In July I worked to fix the problems before the transition started, so aptitude would be (mostly) ready, or in the worst case broken only for a few days, while the chain of dependencies was rebuilt. But apart from the changes needed for the new GCC-5, it was decided at the last minute that Boost 1.55 would not be rebuilt with the new ABI, and that the only version with the new ABI would be 1.58 (which caused further breakage in aptitude, was added to experimental only a few days before, and was moved to unstable after the transition had started). Later, in the first days of the transition, aptitude was affected for a few days by breakage in the dependencies, due to not being compiled in sequence according to the transition levels (so with a mix of old and new ABI). With the critical intervention of Axel Beckert (abe / XTaran), things were not so bad as they could have been. He was busy testing and uploading in the critical days when I was enjoying a small holiday on my way to DebConf, with minimal internet access and communicating almost exclusively with him; and he promptly tended the complaints arriving in the Bug Tracking System and asked for rebuilds of the dependencies with the new ABI. He also brought the packaging up to shape, which had decayed a bit in the last few years. Gruesome Challenges But not all was solved yet, more storms were brewing and started to appear in the horizon, in the form of clouds of fire coming from nearby realms. The APT Deities, which had long ago spilled out their secret, inner challenge (just the initial paragraphs), were relentless. Moreover, they were present at Heidelberg in full force, in or close to their home grounds, and they were Marching Decidedly towards Victory: In the talk @ DebConf This APT has Super Cow Powers (video available), by David Kalnischkies, they told us about the niceties of apt 1.1 (still in experimental but hopefully coming to unstable soon), and they boasted about getting the lead in our arms race (should I say bugs race?) by a few open bug reports. This act of provocation further escalated the tensions. The fierce competition which had been going on for some time gained new heights. So much so that APT Deities and our team had to sit together in the outdoor areas of the venue and have many a weissbier together, while discussing and fixing bugs. But beneath the calm on the surface, and while pretending to keep good diplomatic relations, I knew that Something Had to Be Done, again. So I could only do one thing jump over the bonfire and Keep the Evil away, be that Keep Evil bugs Away or Keep Evil APT Deities Away from winning the challenge, or both. After returning from DebConf I continued to dedicate time to the project, more than a full time job in some weeks, and this is what happened in the last few months, summarised in another graph, showing the evolution of the BTS for aptitude: The numbers for apt right now (15th November 2015) are:

• 629 open (731 if counting all merged bugs independently)
• 0 Release Critical
• 275 (318 unmerged) with severity Important or Normal
• 354 (413 unmerged) with severity Minor or Wishlist
• 0 marked as Forwarded or Pending

The numbers for aptitude right now are:

• 488 (573 if counting all merged bugs independently)
• 1 Release Critical (but it is an artificial bug to keep it from migrating to testing)
• 197 (239 unmerged) with severity Important or Normal
• 271 (313 unmerged) with severity Minor or Wishlist
• 19 (20 unmerged) marked as Forwarded or Pending

The Aftermath As we can see, for the time being I could keep the Evil at bay, both in terms of bugs themselves and re-gaining the lead in the bugs race the Evil APT Deities were thwarted again in their efforts. ... More seriously, as most of you suspected, the graph above is not the whole truth, so I don't want to boast too much. A big part of the reduction in the number of bugs is because of merging duplicates, closing obsolete bugs, applying translations coming from multiple contributors, or simple fixes like typos and useful suggestions needing minor changes. Many of remaining problems are comparatively more difficult or time consuming that the ones addressed so far (except perhaps avoiding the immediate breakage of the transition, that took weeks to solve), and there are many important problems still there, chief among those is aptitude offering very poor solutions to resolve conflicts. Still, even the simplest of the changes takes effort, and triaging hundreds of bugs is not fun at all and mostly a thankless effort althought there is the occasionally kind soul that thanks you for handling a decade-old bug. If being subjected to the rigours of the BTS and reading and solving hundreds of bug reports is not Purification, I don't know what it is. Apart from the triaging, there were 118 bugs closed (or pending) due to changes made in the upstream part or the packaging in the last few months, and there are many changes that are not reflected in bugs closed (like most of the changes needed due to the C++11 ABI transition, bugs and problems fixed that had no report, and general rejuvenation or improvement of some parts of the code). How long this will last, I cannot know. I hope to find a job at some point, which obviously will reduce the time available to work on this. But in the meantime, for all aptitude users: Enjoy the fixes and new features! Notes [1] ^{^} Some visitors of the recent mini-DebConf @ Cambridge perhaps thought that the fireworks and throngs gathered were in honour of our mighty Universal Operating System, but sadly they were not. They might be, some day. In any case, the reports say that the visitors enjoyed the fireworks.

This weekend is organized the Aaron Swartz Day across the world. There are events organized in many cities and video streams available. It is important that we remember Aaron's projects and fights. If you want to know more about Aaron Swartz, you may start by watching the excellent documentary The Internet's Own Boy : The Story of Aaron Swartz. His work was very inspirational and should not be forgotten!

The movie "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" is both inspiring and depressing at the same time. The work of Aaron Swartz has inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he was able to initiate or complete. I wish I am able to do as much good in my life as he did in his. Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on improving the society and this world. And it is depressing in documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for downloading too many scientific articles. Aaron is dead. Let us all weep. The movie is also available on Youtube. I wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to my parents.

The movie "The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" is both inspiring and depressing at the same time. The work of Aaron Swartz has inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he was able to initiate or complete. I wish I am able to do as much good in my life as he did in his. Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on improving the society and this world. And it is depressing in documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for downloading too many scientific articles. Aron is dead. Let us all weep. The movie is also available on Youtube. I wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to my parents.

A very late start into the season, with a nice ending. We had about zero snow until after christmas, and not just down in the valley, but also at 2000m in the mountains. My first run was therefore very late, on January 1st, followed by two short excursions (8:45 - 11:20) due to too many people on January 5th and 6th. After that we had more than enough snow which allowed me to go to Diedamskopf most of the time (basically only natural snow there, which makes better slopes). I went there almost exclusively until they closed on Easter sunday after heavy snowfall in Holy week, and had 5 more days therafter In Dam&uumlls and Warth/Schr cken. Last run was on April 19. Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13	2013/14	2014/15
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25	23	30	24
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10	4	29	9
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14	19	1	13
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1	0	0	2
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588	203562	274706	224909
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m	13885m	12848m	13278
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516	468	597	530

What does not show up here is the number of times I walked (with and without snowshoes) up the mountain and used the lift down and obviously also tobogganing.

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Editorial Note: The following post was kindly contributed by Steven Pav.

Why Drat? After playing around with drat for a few days now, my impressions of it are best captured by Dirk's quote:

It just works.

Demo To get some idea of what I mean by this, suppose you are a happy consumer of R packages, but want access to, say, the latest, greatest releases of my distribution package, sadist. You can simply add the following to your .Rprofile file:

drat::add("shabbychef")

After this, you instantly have access to new releases in the github/shabbychef drat store via the package tools you already know and tolerate. You can use

install.package('sadists')

to install the sadists package from the drat store, for example. Similarly, if you issue

update.packages(ask=FALSE)

all the drat stores you have added will be checked for package updates, along with their dependencies which may well come from other repositories including CRAN.

Use cases The most obvious use cases are:

1. Micro releases. For package authors, this provides a means to get feedback from the early adopters, but also allows one to push small changes and bug fixes without burning through your CRAN karma (if you have any left). My personal drat store tends to be a few minor releases ahead of my CRAN releases.
2. Local repositories. In my professional life, I write and maintain proprietary packages. Pushing package updates used to involve saving the package .tar.gz to a NAS, then calling something like R CMD INSTALL package_name_0.3.1.9001.tar.gz. This is not something I wanted to ask of my colleagues. With drat, they can instead add the following stanza to .Rprofile: drat:::addRepo('localRepo','file:///mnt/NAS/r/local/drat'), and then rely on update.packages to do the rest.

I suspect that in the future, drat might be (ab)used in the following ways:

3. Rolling your own vanilla CRAN mirror, though I suspect there are better existing ways to accomplish this.
4. Patching CRAN. Suppose you found a bug in a package on CRAN (inconceivable!). As it stands now, you email the maintainer, and wait for a fix. Maybe the patch is trivial, but suppose it is never delivered. Now, you can simply make the patch yourself, pick a higher revision number, and stash it in your drat store. The only downside is that eventually the package maintainer might bump their revision number without pushing a fix, and you are stuck in an arms race of version numbers.
5. Forgoing CRAN altogether. While some package maintainers might find this attractive, I think I would prefer a single huge repository, warts and all, to a landscape of a million microrepos. Perhaps some enterprising group will set up a CRAN-like drat store on github, and accept packages by pull request (whether github CDN can or will support the traffic that CRAN does is another matter), but this seems a bit too futuristic for me now.

My wish list In exchange for writing this blog post, I get to lobby Dirk for some features in drat:

6. I shudder at the thought of hundreds of tiny drat stores. Perhaps there should be a way to aggregate addRepo commands in some way. This would allow curators to publish their suggested lists of repos.
7. Drat stores are served in the gh-pages branch of a github repo. I wish there were some way to keep the index.html file in that directory reflect the packages present in the sources. Maybe this could be achieved with some canonical RMarkdown code that most people use.

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

Got the player moving in the map! And, got the map to be deadly in its own special way. Even winning the game is implemented. The game has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I left the player movement mostly unconstrained, today, while I was working on things to do with the end of the game, since that makes it easier to play through and test them. Tomorrow, I will turn on fully constrained movement (an easy change), implement inventory (which is very connected to movement constraints in Scroll), and hope to start on the spell system too.

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At this point, Scroll is 622 lines of code, including content. Of which, I notice, fully 119 are types and type classes. Only 4 days left! Eep! I'm very glad that scroll's central antagonist is already written. I don't plan to add other creatures, which will save some time.

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Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, it came to me a way to implement my own threading system for my roguelike. Since time in a roguelike happens in discrete ticks, as the player takes each action, normal OS threads are not suitable. And in my case, I'm doing everything in pure code anyway and certianly cannot fork off a thread for some background job. But, since I'm using continuation passing style, I can just write my own fork, that takes two continuations and combines them, causing both to be run on each tick, and recursing to handle combining the resulting continuations. It was really quite simple to implement. Typechecked on the first try even! That has some warts, but it's good enough for my purposes, and pretty awesome for a threading system in 66 LOC.

I ll admit it. I have a soft spot for FreeBSD. FreeBSD was the first Unix I ran, and it was somewhere around 20 years ago that I did so, before I switched to Debian. Even then, I still used some of the FreeBSD Handbook to learn Linux, because Debian didn t have the great Reference that it does now. Anyhow, some comments in my recent posts ( Has modern Linux lost its way? and Reactions to that, and the value of simplicity), plus a latent desire to see how ZFS fares in FreeBSD, caused me to try it out. I installed it both in VirtualBox under Debian, and in an old 64-bit Thinkpad sitting in my basement that previously ran Debian. The results? A mixture of amazing and disappointing. I will say that I am quite glad that both exist; there is plenty of innovation happening everywhere and neat features exist everywhere, too. But I can also come right out and say that the statement that FreeBSD doesn t have issues like Linux does is false and misleading. In many cases, it s running the exact same stack. In others, it s better, but there are also others where it s worse. Perhaps this article might dispell a bit of the FUD surrounding jessie, while also showing off some of the nice things FreeBSD does. My conclusion: Both jessie and FreeBSD 10.1 are awesome Free operating systems, but both have their warts. This article is more about FreeBSD than Debian, but it will discuss a few of Debian s warts as well. The experience My initial reaction to FreeBSD was: wow, this feels so familiar. It reminds me of a commercial Unix, or maybe of Linux from a few years ago. A minimal, well-documented base system, everything pretty much in logical places in the filesystem, and solid memory management. I felt right at home. It was almost reassuring, even. Putting together a FreeBSD box is a lot of package installing and config file editing. The FreeBSD Handbook, describing how to install X, talks about editing this or that file for this or that feature. I like being able to learn directly how things fit together by doing this. But then you start remembering the reasons you didn t like Linux a few years ago, or the commercial Unixes: maybe it s that programs like apache are still not as well supported, or maybe it s that the default vi has this tendency to corrupt the terminal periodically, or perhaps it s that root s default shell is csh. Or perhaps it s that I have to do a lot of package installing and config file editing. It is not quite the learning experience it once was, either; now there are things like paste this XML file into some obscure polkit location to make your mouse work or something. Overall, there are some areas where FreeBSD kills it in a way no other OS does. It is unquestionably awesome in several areas. But there are a whole bunch of areas where it s about 80% as good as Linux, a number of areas (even polkit, dbus, and hal) where it s using the exact same stack Linux is (so all these comments about FreeBSD being so differently put together strike me as hollow), and frankly some areas that need a lot of work and make it hard to manage systems in a secure and stable way. The amazing Let s get this out there: I ve used ZFS too much to use any OS that doesn t support it or something like it. Right now, I m not aware of anything like ZFS that is generally stable and doesn t cost a fortune, so pretty much: if your Unix doesn t do ZFS, I m not interested. (btrfs isn t there yet, but will be awesome when it is.) That s why I picked FreeBSD for this, rather than NetBSD or OpenBSD. ZFS on FreeBSD is simply awesome. They have integreated it extremely well. The installer supports root on zfs, even encrypted root on zfs (though neither is a default). top on a FreeBSD system shows a line of ZFS ARC (cache) stats right alongside everything else. The ZFS defaults for maximum cache size, readahead, etc. auto-tune themselves at boot (unless overridden) based on the amount of RAM in a system and the system type. Seriously, these folks have thought of everything and it just reeks of solid. I haven t seen ZFS this well integrated outside the Solaris-type OSs. I have been using ZFSOnLinux for some time now, but it is just not as mature as ZFS on FreeBSD. ZoL, for instance, still has some memory tuning issues, and is not really suggested for 32-bit machines. FreeBSD just nails it. ZFS on FreeBSD even supports TRIM, which is not available in ZoL and I think fairly unique even among OpenZFS platforms. It also supports delegated administration of the filesystem, both to users and to jails on the system, seemingly very similar to Solaris zones. FreeBSD also supports beadm, which is like a similar tool on Solaris. This lets you basically use ZFS snapshots to make lightweight boot environments , so you can select which to boot into. This is useful, say, before doing upgrades. Then there are jails. Linux has tried so hard to get this right, and fallen on its face so many times, a person just wants to take pity sometimes. We ve had linux-vserver, openvz, lxc, and still none of them match what FreeBSD jails have done for a long time. Linux s current jail-du-jour is LXC, though it is extremely difficult to configure in a secure way. Even its author comments that you won t hear any of the LXC maintainers tell you that LXC is secure and that it pretty much requires AppArmor profiles to achieve reasonable security. These are still rather in flux, as I found out last time I tried LXC a few months ago. My confidence in LXC being as secure as, say, KVM or FreeBSD is simply very low. FreeBSD s jails are simple and well-documented where LXC is complex and hard to figure out. Its security is fairly transparent and easy to control and they just work well. I do think LXC is moving in the right direction and might even get there in a couple years, but I am quite skeptical that even Docker is getting the security completely right. The simply different People have been throwing around the word distribution with respect to FreeBSD, PC-BSD, etc. in recent years. There is an analogy there, but it s not perfect. In the Linux ecosystem, there is a kernel project, a libc project, a coreutils project, a udev project, a systemd/sysvinit/whatever project, etc. You get the idea. In FreeBSD, there is a base system project. This one project covers the kernel and the base userland. Some of what they use in the base system is code pulled in from elsewhere but maintained in their tree (ssh), some is completely homegrown (kernel), etc. But in the end, they have a nicely-integrated base system that always gets upgraded in sync. In the Linux world, the distribution makers are responsible for integrating the bits from everywhere into a coherent whole. FreeBSD is something of a toolkit to build up your system. Gentoo might be an analogy in the Linux side. On the other end of the spectrum, Ubuntu is a just install it and it works, tweak later sort of setup. Debian straddles the middle ground, offering both approaches in many cases. There are pros and cons to each approach. Generally, I don t think either one is better. They are just different. The not-quite-there I said that there are a lot of things in FreeBSD that are about 80% of where Linux is. Let me touch on them here. Its laptop support leaves something to be desired. I installed it on a few-years-old Thinkpad basically the best possible platform for working suspend in a Free OS. It has worked perfectly out of the box in Debian for years. In FreeBSD, suspend only works if it s in text mode. If X is running, the video gets corrupted and the system hangs. I have not tried to debug it further, but would also note that suspend on closed lid is not automatic in FreeBSD; the somewhat obscure instuctions tell you what policykit pkla file to edit to make suspend work in XFCE. (Incidentally, it also says what policykit file to edit to make the shutdown/restart options work). Its storage subsystem also has some surprising misses. Its rough version of LVM, LUKS, and md-raid is called GEOM. GEOM, however, supports only RAID0, RAID1, and RAID3. It does not support RAID5 or RAID6 in software RAID configurations! Linux s md-raid, by comparison, supports RAID0, RAID1, RAID4, RAID5, RAID6, etc. There seems to be a highly experimental RAID5 patchset floating around for many years, but it is certainly not integrated into the latest release kernel. The current documentation makes no mention of RAID5, although it seems that a dated logical volume manager supported it. In any case, RAID5 does not seem to be well-supported in software like it is in Linux. ZFS does have its raidz1 level, which is roughly the same as RAID5. However, that requires full use of ZFS. ZFS also does not support some common operations, like adding a single disk to an existing RAID5 group (which is possible with md-raid and many other implementations.) This is a ZFS limitation on all platforms. FreeBSD s filesystem support is rather a miss. They once had support for Linux ext* filesystems using the actual Linux code, but ripped it out because it was in GPL and rewrote it so it had a BSD license. The resulting driver really only works with ext2 filesystems, as it doesn t work with ext3/ext4 in many situations. Frankly I don t see why they bothered; they now have something that is BSD-licensed but only works with a filesystem so old nobody uses it anymore. There are only two FreeBSD filesystems that are really useable: UFS2 and ZFS. Virtualization under FreeBSD is also not all that present. Although it does support the VirtualBox Open Source Edition, this is not really a full-featured or fast enough virtualization environment for a server. Its other option is bhyve, which looks to be something of a Xen clone. bhyve, however, does not support Windows guests, and requires some hoops to even boot Linux guest installers. It will be several years at least before it reaches feature-parity with where KVM is today, I suspect. One can run FreeBSD as a guest under a number of different virtualization systems, but their instructions for making the mouse work best under VirtualBox did not work. There may have been some X.Org reshuffle in FreeBSD that wasn t taken into account. The installer can be nice and fast in some situations, but one wonders a little bit about QA. I had it lock up on my twice. Turns out this is a known bug reported 2 months ago with no activity, in which the installer attempts to use a package manger that it hasn t set up yet to install optional docs. I guess the devs aren t installing the docs in testing. There is nothing like Dropbox for FreeBSD. Apparently this is because FreeBSD has nothing like Linux s inotify. The Linux Dropbox does not work in FreeBSD s Linux mode. There are sketchy reports of people getting an OwnCloud client to work, but in something more akin to rsync rather than instant-sync mode, if they get it working at all. Some run Dropbox under wine, apparently. The desktop environments tend to need a lot more configuration work to get them going than on Linux. There s a lot of editing of polkit, hal, dbus, etc. config files mentioned in various places. So, not only does FreeBSD use a lot of the same components that cause confusion in Linux, it doesn t really configure them for you as much out of the box. FreeBSD doesn t support as many platforms as Linux. FreeBSD has only two platforms that are fully supported: i386 and amd64. But you ll see people refer to a list of other platforms that are supported , but they don t have security support, official releases, or even built packages. They includ arm, ia64, powerpc, and sparc64. The bad: package management Roughly 20 years ago, this was one of the things that pulled me to Debian. Perhaps I am spolied from running the distribution that has been the gold standard for package management for so long, but I find FreeBSD s package management even pkg-ng in 10.1-RELEASE to be lacking in a number of important ways. To start with, FreeBSD actually has two different package management systems: one for the base system, and one for what they call the ports/packages collection ( ports being the way to install from source, and packages being the way to install from binaries, but both related to the same tree.) For the base system, there is freebsd-update which can install patches and major upgrades. It also has a cron option to automate this. Sadly, it has no way of automatically indicating to a calling script whether a reboot is necessary. freebsd-update really manages less than a dozen packages though. The rest are managed by pkg. And pkg, it turns out, has a number of issues. The biggest: it can take a week to get security updates. The FreeBSD handbook explains pkg audit -F which will look at your installed packages (but NOT the ones in the base system) and alert you to packages that need to be updates, similar to a stripped-down version of Debian s debsecan. I discovered this myself, when pkg audit -F showed a vulnerability in xorg, but pkg upgrade showed my system was up-to-date. It is not documented in the Handbook, but people on the mailing list explained it to me. There are workarounds, but they can be laborious. If that s not bad enough, FreeBSD has no way to automatically install security patches for things in the packages collection. Debian has several (unattended-upgrades, cron-apt, etc.) There is pkg upgrade , but it upgrades everything on the system, which may be quite a bit more than you want to be upgraded. So: if you want to run Apache with PHP, and want it to just always apply security patches, FreeBSD packages are not up to the job like Debian s are. The pkg tool doesn t have very good error-handling. In fact, its error handling seems to be nonexistent at times. I noticed that some packages had failures during install time, but pkg ignored them and marked the package as correctly installed. I only noticed there was a problem because I happened to glance at the screen at the right moment during messages about hundreds of packages. In Debian, by contrast, if there are any failures, at the end of the run, you get a nice report of which packages failed, and an exit status to use in scripts. It also has another issue that Debian resolved about a decade ago: package scripts displaying messages that are important for the administrator, but showing so many of them that they scroll off the screen and are never seen. I submitted a bug report for this one also. Some of these things just make me question the design of pkg. If I can t trust it to accurately report if the installation succeeded, or show me the important info I need to see, then to what extent can I trust it? Then there is the question of testing of the ports/packages. It seems that, automated tests aside, basically everyone is running off the master branch of the ports/packages. That s like running Debian unstable on your servers. I am distinctly uncomfortable with this notion, though it seems FreeBSD people report it mostly works well. There are some other issues, too: FreeBSD ports make no distinction between development and runtime files like Debian s packages do. So, just by virtue of wanting to run a graphical desktop, you get all of the static libraries, include files, build scripts, etc for XOrg installed. For a package as concerned about licensing as FreeBSD, the packages collection does not have separate sections like Debian s main, contrib, and non-free. It s all in one big pot: BSD-license, GPL-license, proprietary without source license. There is /usr/local/share/licenses where you can look up a license for each package, but there is no way with FreeBSD, like there is with Debian, to say never even show me packages that aren t DFSG-free. This is useful, for instance, when running in a company to make sure you never install packages that are for personal use only or something. The bad: ABI stability I m used to being able to run binaries I compiled years ago on a modern system. This is generally possible in Linux, assuming you have the correct shared libraries available. In FreeBSD, this is explicitly NOT possible. After every major version upgrade, you must reinstall or recompile every binary on your system. This is not necessarily a showstopper for me, but it is a hassle for a lot of people. Update 2015-02-17: Some people in the comments are pointing out compat packages in the ports that may help with this situation. My comment was based on advice in the FreeBSD Handbook stating After a major version upgrade, all installed packages and ports need to be upgraded . I have not directly tried this, so if the Handbook is overstating the need, then this point may be in error. Conclusions As I said above, I found little validation to the comments that the Debian ecosystem is noticeably worse than the FreeBSD one. Debian has its warts too particularly with keeping software up-to-date. You can see that the two projects are designed around a different passion: FreeBSD s around the base system, and Debian s around an integrated whole system. It would be wrong to say that either of those is always better. FreeBSD s approach clearly produces some leading features, especially jails and ZFS integration. Yet Debian s approach also produces some leading features in the way of package management and security maintainability beyond the small base. My criticism of excessive complexity in the polkit/cgmanager/dbus area still stands. But to those people commenting that FreeBSD hasn t lost its way like Linux has, I would point out that FreeBSD mostly uses these same components also, and FreeBSD has excessive complexity in its ports/package system and system management tools. I think it s a draw. You pick the best for your use case. If you re looking for a platform to run a single custom app then perhaps all of the Debian package management benefits don t apply to you (you may not even need FreeBSD s packages, or just a few). The FreeBSD ZFS support or jails may well appeal. If you re looking to run a desktop environment, or a server with some application that needs a ton of PHP, Python, Perl, or C libraries, then Debian s package management and security handling may well be attractive. I am disappointed that Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will not be a release architecture in jessie. That project had the promise to provide a best of both worlds for those that want jails or tight ZFS integration.

I left Debian. I don't really have a lot to say about why, but I do want to clear one thing up right away. It's not about systemd. As far as systemd goes, I agree with my friend John Goerzen:

I promise you 18 years from now, it will not matter what init Debian chose in 2014. It will probably barely matter in 3 years.

read the rest And with Jonathan Corbet:

However things turn out, if it becomes clear that there is a better solution than systemd available, we will be able to move to it.

read the rest I have no problem with trying out a piece of Free Software, that might have abrasive authors, all kinds of technical warts, a debatable design, scope creep etc. None of that stopped me from giving Linux a try in 1995, and I'm glad I jumped in with both feet. It's important to be unafraid to make a decision, try it out, and if it doesn't work, be unafraid to iterate, rethink, or throw a bad choice out. That's how progress happens. Free Software empowers us to do this. Debian used to be a lot better at that than it is now. This seems to have less to do with the size of the project, and more to do with the project having aged, ossified, and become comfortable with increasing layers of complexity around how it makes decisions. To the point that I no longer feel I can understand the decision-making process at all ... or at least, that I'd rather be spending those scarce brain cycles on understanding something equally hard but more useful, like category theory. It's been a long time since Debian was my main focus; I feel much more useful when I'm working in a small nimble project, making fast and loose decisions and iterating on them. Recent events brought it to a head, but this is not a new feeling. I've been less and less involved in Debian since 2007, when I dropped maintaining any packages I wasn't the upstream author of, and took a year of mostly ignoring the larger project. Now I've made the shift from being a Debian developer to being an upstream author of stuff in Debian (and other distros). It seems best to make a clean break rather than hang around and risk being sucked back in. My mailbox has been amazing over the past week by the way. I've heard from so many friends, and it's been very sad but also beautiful.

I got word via the Electronic Frontier Foundation about an act of injustice happening to a person for doing... Not only what I do day to day, but what I promote and believe to be right: Sharing academic articles. Diego is a Colombian, working towards his Masters degree on conservation and biodiversity in Costa Rica. He is now facing up to eight years imprisonment for... Sharing a scholarly article he did not author on Scribd. Many people lack the knowledge and skills to properly set up a venue to share their articles with people they know. Many people will hope for the best and expect academic publishers to be fundamentally good, not to send legal threats just for the simple, noncommercial act of sharing knowledge. Sharing knowledge is fundamental for science to grow, for knowledge to rise. Besides, most scholarly studies are funded by public money, and as the saying goes, they should benefit the public. And the public is everybody, is all of us. And yes, if this sounds in any way like what drove Aaron Swartz to his sad suicide early this year... It is exactly the same thing. Thankfully (although, sadly, after the sad fact), thousands of people strongly stood on Aaron's side on that demand. Please sign the EFF petition to help Diego, share this, and try to spread the word on the real world needs for Open Access mandates for academics! Some links with further information:

Diego's own account on the matter in Compartir no es delito
• Why are we prosecuting students for sharing knowledge? (Timothy Vollmer, on Creative Commons' weblog)
• Science is not a crime (David R. Koepsell, Center for Inquiry)
• Fuller story on the EFF

On May 21st 2014, the two Mikes (Gabriel DePaulo) from the X2Go core developer team were interviewed about X2Go by the famous Randal L. Schwartz (merlyn) and equally famous Randi Harper (freebsdgirl) on the FLOSS Weekly Netcast [1]. If you're having trouble watching the embedded video on that page, try one of the below alternatives: HD Video [2]
SD Video, large [3]
SD Video, small [4]
Audio only [5] light+love,
Mike [1] http://twit.tv/floss295 read more

Little snow, but above-average season. The macro weather situation was very stable this year, very high snowfall in Austria's south (eastern tyrol and carinthia), and long periods of warm and sunny weather with little precipitation on the northern side of the alps (i.e. us). This had me going snowboarding a lot, but almost exclusively in Dam ls since it is characterized by a) grassy terrain (no stones) and b) huge numbers of snow cannons. I started early (December 7) with another 6 days on piste in December. If there had been more snow the season would have been a long one, too. - Season's end depends on the timimg of easter (because of the holidays) which would have been late. However I again stopped rather early, last day was March 30. In addition to the days listed below I had an early season's opening at the glacier in Pitztal. I attended the pureboarding in November (21st to 23rd). Looking back at the season I am not quite satisfied with my progress, I just have not managed to implement and practise the technique I should have learned there. It is next to impossible when the slopes are full, and when they aren't one likes to give it a run. ;-) Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13	2013/14
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25	23	30
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10	4	29
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14	19	1
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1	0	0
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588	203562	274706
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m	13885m	12848m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516	468	597

Between 2001 and 2004, John Wielgley wrote emacs-chess, a rather complete Chess library for Emacs. I found it around 2004, and was immediately hooked. Why? Because Emacs is configurable, and I was hoping that I could customize the chessboard display much more than with any other console based chess program I have ever seen. And I was right. One of the four chessboard display types is exactly what I was looking for, chess-plain.el:

  
8 tSlDjLsT 
7 XxXxXxXx 
6         
5         
4         
3         
2 pPpPpPpP 
1 RnBqKbNr 
  
  abcdefgh

This might look confusing at first, but I have to admit that I grew rather fond of this way of displaying chess positions as ASCII diagrams. In this configuration, initial letters for (mostly) German chess piece names are used for the black pieces, and English chess piece names are used for the white pieces. Uppercase is used to indicate if a piece is on a black square and braille dot 7 is used to indicate an empty black square. chess-plain is completely configurable though, so you can have more classic diagrams like this as well:

  
8 rnbqkbnr 
7 pppppppp 
6  + + + + 
5 + + + +  
4  + + + + 
3 + + + +  
2 PPPPPPPP 
1 RNBQKBNR 
  
  abcdefgh

Here, upper case letters indicate white pieces, and lower case letters black pieces. Black squares are indicated with a plus sign. However, as with many Free Software projects, Emacs Chess was rather dormant in the last 10 years. For some reason that I can not even remember right now, my interest in Emacs Chess has been reignited roughly 5 weeks ago.

I want Zoe to do one "extra curricular" activity per term this year. Something dance-related, something gymnastics-related and maybe some other form of sport (I'm thinking soccer). My girlfriend and I were wandering through Westfield Carindale on Saturday, and we happened upon a guy from Infinity Martial Arts touting his wares. I thought I'd suss it out, and they had an introductory offer where the sign-up fee and uniform fee were significantly reduced, and they had a pretty flexible timetable. They were just starting up their East Brisbane location, and the close proximity to home along with the reduced price sealed the deal. Long-term, I'd like for Zoe to learn Tae Kwon Do, for self-defense, but BJJ seemed as good as anything to get her introduced to the idea of martial arts. The class for 2-4 year olds was billed as "Fun and Fitness 4 Kids" so it's really a combination of listening to the instructor, some basic gymnastics-style stuff and a little bit of martial arts. We biked over this morning (going up Hawthorne Road is a slog) and got there in about 15 minutes via the direct route. It's in the upstairs of a gym in the middle of an industrial area, but it was pretty easily accessible by bike. They're still waiting on some of the equipment, so the space was a little spartan. It was just Zoe and I and a mother of two not quite 2 year old twin girls taking a trial class. First up, we got her uniform, and she looked so cute. There were pants and a jacket and a belt. I'm going to have to video the instructor tying up the belt next week so I can learn how to do it the right way. The class started with the kids standing on these flat coloured circles ("mushrooms") and effectively playing "Simon Says" ("instructor says") without being caught out. It was a pretty sneaky way of doing a bunch of warm up exercises like rotating the knees and ankles. Zoe did very well, but there were a few that she just point blank refused to do. Next the instructor set up a bunch of "stations" around the room. The first station involved me crouching in a fetal position with a football and Zoe had to try and tip me over to get the football. That was a load of fun. The next station was a few steps and foam-filled vinyl ramp, and Zoe just had to do a somersault down that. The next station was pretty much the same but taller, and Zoe had to do a "sausage roll" on her side down that. The next station was just a small exercise ball and Zoe had to do some "donkey kicks" on it. The final station involved me waving a couple of cut-off pool noodles at arm's length, and Zoe had to run in covering her head and give me a bear hug. We did a few rotations of these stations. It was heaps of fun. Next, the instructor got a whole bunch of ball pit balls of different colours, and scattered them over the floor, and put a basket at each end of the room. The kids were then instructed to retrieve specific colours as fast as possible. Zoe started out trying to get as many as possible in her arms before returning to the basket, but the idea was to do it one ball at a time. A lot of running back and forth. Finally, we did some actual BJJ (I think). It was called the "sleeping crocodile hold" or something like that. I had to lie on my back, and Zoe had to sneak up to me from my side and grapple me with one arm behind my head and the other around my waist and a knee in my side. I have no interest in Zoe learning mixed martial arts, but this class was so much fun. I was feeling a bit tired this morning before we headed out, but by the end of it I was so pumped. It was just the right combination of daddy/daughter rough and tumble, with a bit of gymnastics and following instruction. I'm pretty certain Zoe enjoyed it. I liked that the instructor stopped for a water break between each activity, so the kids were kept well hydrated throughout. We took the "scenic route" home, because we had no particular time constraints. It was more like 25 minutes and involved the Norman Park Greenway. I was so glad we went that way. It was a beautiful ride that I didn't know existed. Very indirect, it involved going through Woolloongabba, Coorparoo and Norman Park, around the back of Coorparoo State High School along the side of Norman Creek. It was semi-wetland conditions.The only part that was a bit annoying was where Norman Avenue met Wynnum Road. It was quite steep and the green light didn't last very long. I had wanted to do story time at Bulimba Library at 10:30am on Fridays, but I'd rather bike home via the Norman Park Greenway instead, because it's a nice ride. I've since decided that I'll just use the story time at the library during wet weather, when we'd be driving to BJJ anyway, and be able to make it to the library in time after class. I've also got to figure out where I'm going to fit doing some Science into the schedule. Fridays are going to be busy I think. I managed to get Zoe down for a nap by a bit after 12:30pm today. She was pretty knackered after the class (as was I from biking home) so I let her watch a bit of TV while I prepared lunch. She was funny, she saw how sweaty I was when we got home, and suggested I take a shower while she watch some TV. I was a bit unprepared for my first Science Friday, though. I'd been considering going to the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium after BJJ, but I discovered it's closed until February 7 for maintenance and an upgrade, so that cunning plan was thwarted. I used her nap time to order 365 Science Experiments and 50 Dangerous Things (you Should Let Your Children Do). I should get plenty of inspiration out of those two. After she woke up, we did the old "vinegar and sodium bicarbonate" trick as our science experiment. I've finally got a use for my Google Labs Founders' Award lab coat. I need to try and find some child-sized safety glasses. The adult ones barely stay on her little nose. After that, we went for a walk to our local toy store to see if they sold child-sized safety glasses (they didn't) and then Zoe watched a little bit of TV and then we walked to the CityCat to go to Teneriffe to catch a bus to Chinatown. I couldn't have timed it better if I tried. Just as we got to Chinatown, they started doing a thing with the Chinese dragons, and I hoisted Zoe up on my shoulders so she could watch. I wasn't sure how she was going to take it, with all the noise from the drums and the dragons themselves, but she was enthralled. We watched other acts and then my girlfriend joined us, and we went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. I bought Zoe these training chopsticks a while ago, and she's taken to them like a duck to water. I brought them with us so she could use them at the restaurant, and she ate the biggest dinner I've ever seen her eat. After dinner, we caught the tail end of a procession and had some ice cream. We were starting to leave, and there was another dragon, and Zoe was brave enough to go and touch it on her own, for good luck. We then made our way back to the bus. By the time the bus arrived and got us back to Teneriffe, and a CityCat finally arrived, it was very late, but Zoe was pretty good the whole time. It was probably the latest night she's ever had with me while we've been out on the go, and she only got a bit ratty once we were home. It didn't help that she'd forgotten that she'd put Cowie in a cupboard this morning and we burned some more time tracking her down. Today was a fantastic (and very full) day. I enjoyed it a lot, and I think Zoe did too. Fortunately, Fridays won't always be this full on.