Russ Allbery: Review: A Study in Honor
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-269932-6.html
December 26, 2023, 3:37 AM
Review: A Study in Honor, by Claire O'Dell

Series:
Janet Watson Chronicles #1


Publisher:
Harper Voyager


Copyright:
July 2018


ISBN:
0-06-269932-6


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
295

A Study in Honor is a near-future science fiction novel by Claire
O'Dell, a pen name for Beth Bernobich. You will see some assertions,
including by the Lambda Literary Award judges, that it is a mystery novel.
There is a mystery, but... wel...
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Russ Allbery: krb5-strength 3.3
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2023-12/002.html
December 26, 2023, 3:24 AM
krb5-strength is a toolkit of plugins and support programs for password
strength checking for Kerberos KDCs, either Heimdal or MIT. It also
includes a password history mechanism for Heimdal KDCs.
This is a maintenance release, since there hadn't been a new release since
2020. It contains the normal sort of build system and portability
updates, and the routine bump in the number of hash iterations used for
the history mechanism to protect against (some) brute force attacks. It
also includes...
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Sergio Talens-Oliag: GitLab CI/CD Tips: Automatic Versioning Using semantic-release
https://blogops.mixinet.net/posts/gitlab-ci/semantic-release/
December 25, 2023, 11:30 PM
This post describes how I’m using
semantic-release on
gitlab-ci to manage versioning automatically
for different kinds of projects following a simple workflow (a develop branch
where changes are added or merged to test new versions, a temporary
release/#.#.# to generate the release candidate versions and a main branch
where the final versions are published).
What is semantic-releaseIt is a Node.js application designed to manage project
versioning information on Git Repositories using a
Continu...
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John Goerzen: The Grumpy Cricket (And Other Enormous Creatures)
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10618-the-grumpy-cricket-and-other-enormous-creatures
December 25, 2023, 8:23 PM
This Christmas, one of my gifts to my kids was a text adventure (interactive fiction) game for them. Now that they’ve enjoyed it, I’m releasing it under the GPL v3.
As interactive fiction, it’s like an e-book, but the reader is also the player, guiding the exploration of the world.
The Grumpy Cricket is designed to be friendly for a first-time player of interactive fiction. There is no way to lose the game or to die. There is an in-game hint system providing context-sensitive hints anytim...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Blackwing War
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/blackwing-war.html
December 25, 2023, 4:08 AM
Review: The Blackwing War, by K.B. Spangler

Series:
Deep Witches #1


Publisher:
A Girl and Her Fed Books


Copyright:
March 2021


ISBN:
blackwing-war


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
284

The Blackwing War is the first book of a projected space opera
series. I previously reviewed Stoneskin,
which was intended as a prelude to this series. In theory you can start
here, but I would read Stoneskin first.
Tembi is a Witch, w...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Liberty's Daughter
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-958880-16-7.html
December 24, 2023, 2:39 AM
Review: Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer

Publisher:
Fairwood Press


Copyright:
November 2023


ISBN:
1-958880-16-7


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
257

Liberty's Daughter is a stand-alone near-future science fiction
fix-up novel. The original stories were published in Fantasy and
Science Fiction between 2012 and 2015.
Beck Garrison lives on New Minerva (Min), one of a cluster of libertarian
seasteads 220 nautical
miles off the c...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Bookshops & Bonedust
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-88611-2.html
December 23, 2023, 3:33 AM
Review: Bookshops & Bonedust, by Travis Baldree

Series:
Legends & Lattes #2


Publisher:
Tor


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-250-88611-2


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
337

Bookshops & Bonedust is a prequel to the cozy fantasy
Legends & Lattes. You can read them in
either order, although the epilogue of Bookshops & Bonedust spoils
(somewhat guessable) plot developments in Legends & Lattes.
Viv is a ne...
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Gunnar Wolf: Pushing some reviews this way
https://gwolf.org/2023/12/pushing-some-reviews-this-way.html
December 22, 2023, 5:17 PM
Over roughly the last year and a half I have been participating as a reviewer in
ACM’s Computing Reviews, and have even
been honored as a Featured
Reviewer.
Given I have long enjoyed reading friends’ reviews of their reading material
(particularly, hats off to the very active Russ
Allbery, who both beats all of my
frequency expectations (I could never sustain the rythm he reads to!) and holds
documented records for his >20 years as a book reader, with far more clarity and
readability tha...
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Joachim Breitner: The Haskell Interlude Podcast
https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/810-The_Haskell_Interlude_Podcast
December 22, 2023, 9:04 AM
It was pointed out to me that I have not blogged about this, so better now than never:
Since 2021 I am – together with four other hosts – producing a regular podcast about Haskell, the Haskell Interlude. Roughly every two weeks two of us interview someone from the Haskell Community, and we chat for approximately an hour about how they came to Haskell, what they are doing with it, why they are doing it and what else is on their mind. Sometimes we talk to very famous people, like Simon Peyton ...
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Russell Coker: Links December 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/12/21/links-december-2023/
December 21, 2023, 12:17 PM
David Brin wrote an insightful blog post about the latest round of UFO delusion [1]. There aren’t a heap of scientists secretly working on UFOs.
David Brin wrote an informative and insightful blog post about rich doomsday preppers who want to destroy democracy [2].
Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about how ChatGPT helps people write letters and how that decreases the value of the letter [3]. What can we do to show that letters mean something? Hand deliver them? Pay someone to hand d...
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Ulrike Uhlig: How volunteer work in F/LOSS exacerbates pre-existing lines of oppression, and what that has to do with low diversity
https://the.curlybracket.net/2023/12/21/unpaid-work.html
December 20, 2023, 11:00 PM
This is a post I wrote in June 2022, but did not publish back then.
After first publishing it in December 2023, a perfectionist insecure
part of me unpublished it again. After receiving positive feedback, i
slightly amended and republish it now.
In this post, I talk about unpaid work in F/LOSS, taking on the example
of hackathons, and why, in my opinion, the expectation of volunteer work
is hurting diversity.
Disclaimer: I don’t have all the answers, only some ideas and questions.
Previous ...
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Ryan Kavanagh: Battery charge start and stop threshold on OpenBSD
https://rak.ac/blog/2023-12-20-battery-charge-start-stop-threshold-on-openbsd/
December 20, 2023, 4:11 PM
I often use my laptops as portable desktops: they are plugged into AC
power and an external monitor/keyboard 95% of time. Unfortunately,
continuous charging is hard on the battery. To mitigate this,
ThinkPads have customizable start and stop charging thresholds, such
that the battery will only start charging if its level falls below the
start threshold, and it will stop charging as soon as it reaches the
stop threshold. Suggested thresholds from Lenovo’s battery team can
be found in this comm...
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Russell Coker: Abuse and Free Software
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/12/20/abuse-free-software/
December 20, 2023, 12:36 PM
People in positions of power can get away with mistreating other people. For any organisation to operate effectively there have to be mechanisms to address bad behaviour, both to help the organisation to achieve it’s goals and to protect people who work for it.
When an organisation operates in the public interest there is a greater reason to try to prevent bad behaviour as hurting people is not in the public interest.
There are many forms of power, in the free software community a reputation f...
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Melissa Wen: The Rainbow Treasure Map Talk: Advanced color management on Linux with AMD/Steam Deck.
https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2023/12/20/xdc2023-colors-talk
December 20, 2023, 12:00 PM
Last week marked a major milestone for me:
the AMD driver-specific color management properties
reached the upstream linux-next!
And to celebrate, I’m happy to share the
slides
notes from my 2023 XDC talk, “The Rainbow Treasure Map” along with the
individual recording that just
dropped last week on youtube – talk about happy coincidences!
Steam Deck Rainbow: Treasure Map & Magic Frogs
While I may be bubbly and chatty in everyday life, the stage isn’t exactly my
comfort zone (ha...
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Matthew Garrett: Making SSH host certificates more usable
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68721.html
December 19, 2023, 7:48 PM
Earlier this year, after Github accidentally committed their private RSA SSH host key to a public repository, I wrote about how better support for SSH host certificates would allow this sort of situation to be handled in a user-transparent way without any negative impact on security. I was hoping that someone would read this and be inspired to fix the problem but sadly that didn't happen so I've actually written some code myself.The core part of this is straightforward - if a server presents you...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Waiting for updates
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-12-19-15-06_waiting_for_updates.html
December 19, 2023, 2:06 PM
Apple M1: A CPU that's twice as fast, that requires you to run an OS that's
5x as slow.
(OK, the Asahi people are doing great work and one day I'll try running their
product, but for macOS development you kind of need macOS)
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Jonathan Dowland: William Basinski, Gateshead, 2022
https://jmtd.net/log/basinski/
December 19, 2023, 9:33 AM
I was looking over the list of live music I'd seen this year and realised that
avante-garde composer William Basinski was actually last year and I had
forgotten to write about it!
In November 2022, Basinski headlined a night of performances which otherwise
featured folk from the venue's "Arists in Residence" programme, with some
affiliation to Newcastle's DIY music
scene.
Unfortunately we arrived too late to catch any of the other acts: partly
because of the venue's sometimes doggiest insis...
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François Marier: Filtering your own spam using SpamAssassin
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/filtering-own-spam-using-spamassassin/
December 19, 2023, 6:20 AM
I know that people rave about GMail's spam filtering, but it didn't work for
me: I was seeing too many false positives. I personally prefer to see some
false negatives (i.e. letting some spam through), but to reduce false
positives as much as possible (and ideally have a way to tune this).
Here's the local SpamAssassin setup I
have put together over many years. In addition to the parts I describe here,
I also turn off
greylisting on my email
provider (KolabNow) because I don't want to have to
w...
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Antoine Beaupré: (Re)introducing screentest
https://anarc.at/blog/2023-12-18-rewrote-screentest/
December 19, 2023, 3:46 AM
I have accidentally rewritten screentest, an old
X11/GTK2 program that I was previously using to, well, test
screens.
Screentest is dead
It was removed from Debian in May 2023 but had already missed two
releases (Debian 11 "bullseye" and 12 "bookworm") due to release
critical bugs. The stated reason for removal was:
The package is orphaned and its upstream is no longer developed. It
depends on gtk2, has a low popcon and no reverse dependencies.
So I had little hope to see this program back ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: tinythemes 0.0.1 at CRAN: New Package
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/12/18#tinythemes_0.0.1
December 19, 2023, 12:28 AM
Delighted to announce a new package that arrived on CRAN today: tinythemes. It
repackages the theme_ipsum_rc() function by Bob Rudis from his hrbrthemes
package in a zero (added) dependency way. A simple example is (also
available as a demo inside the packages in the next update) contrasts
the default style (on left) with the one added by this package (on the
right):
The GitHub
repo also shows this little example: total dependencies of hrbrthemes
over what ggplot2
installs:
> db <- tools:...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.3.19 on CRAN: Several Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/12/17#littler-0.3.19
December 17, 2023, 10:33 PM
The twentieth release of littler as a
CRAN package
landed a few minutes ago, following in the now seventeen year history
(!!) as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined
by me a few weeks later.
littler
is the first command-line interface for R as it predates
Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang
scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more
consistently and still starts
faster. It also always loaded the methods package which
Rscript only began to do in recent years.
little...
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Thomas Lange: Adding a writeable data partition to an ISO image
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/extending-iso-images/
December 16, 2023, 9:24 PM
Some years ago a customer needed a live ISO containing a customized
FAI environment (not for installing but for extended hardware stress
tests), but on an USB stick with the possibility to store the logs of
the tests on the USB stick. But an ISO file system (iso9660) remains
read-only, even when put onto an USB stick.
I had the idea to add another partition onto the USB stick after
the ISO was written to it (using cp or dd).
You can use fdisk with an ISO file, add a new partition, loop mount
the...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Snaps, KDEneon, Debian and my future.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-snaps-kdeneon-debian-and-my-future/
December 15, 2023, 9:33 PM
First I want to thank KDE for this wonderful write up on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kde_akademy-2023-over-a-million-reasons-why-activity-7139965489153208320-PNem?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop It made my heart explode with happiness as I prepped for my interview on Monday. I didn’t get the job ( Just the usual “we were very impressed with your experience, but we went with another candidate” ). I think the cosmos is determined for me to hold out for the ‘proj...
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Arturo Borrero González: OpenTofu: handcrafted include-file mechanism with YAML
https://ral-arturo.org/2023/12/14/opentofu.html
December 14, 2023, 3:00 PM
I recently started playing with Terraform/OpenTofu almost on a daily basis.
The other day I was working with Amazon Managed Prometheus (or AMP), and wanted to define prometheus alert rules on YAML files.
I decided that I needed a way to put the alerts on a bunch of files, and then load them by the declarative code, on the correct
AMP workspace.
I came up with this code pattern that I’m sharing here, for my future reference, and in case it is interesting to someone else.
The YAML file whe...
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Russell Coker: Fat Finger Shell
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/12/14/fat-finger-shell/
December 14, 2023, 10:35 AM
I’ve been trying out the Fat Finger Shell which is a terminal emulator for Linux on touch screen devices where the keyboard is overlayed with the terminal output. This means that instead of having a tiny keyboard and a tiny terminal output you have the full screen for both. There is a YouTube video showing how the Fat Finger Shell works [1].
Here is a link to the Github page [2], which hasn’t changed much in the last 11 years.
Currently the shell is hard-coded to a 80*24 terminal and a 640*4...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.21 on CRAN: Updated Upstream Support!
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/12/13#rprotobuf_0.4.21
December 14, 2023, 12:49 AM
An exciting new release 0.4.21 of RProtoBuf
arrived on CRAN earlier today.
RProtoBuf
provides R with bindings for the
Google Protocol Buffers
(“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and
released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a
language and operating-system agnostic protocol.
ProtoBuf
development, following what seemed like a multi-year lull, all of a
sudden picked up again with a vengeance a little while ago. And the
library releases we rely on...
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Jonathan Dowland: equivalence problems with StreamGraph
https://jmtd.net/log/type_design/equivalence/
December 13, 2023, 8:51 PM
I've been tackling an equivalence problem with rewritten programs in
StrIoT, our proof-of-concept
stream-processing system.
The StrIoT Logical Optimiser applies a set of rewrite rules to a
stream-processing program, generating a set of variants that can be reasoned
about, ranked, and deployed. The problem I've been tackling is that a variant
may appear to be semantically equivalent to another, but compare (with ==)
as distinct.
The issue relates to the design of our data-type representing prog...
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Melissa Wen: 15 Tips for Debugging Issues in the AMD Display Kernel Driver
https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2023/12/13/amd-display-debugging-tips
December 13, 2023, 12:25 PM
A self-help guide for examining and debugging the AMD display driver within the
Linux kernel/DRM subsystem.
It’s based on my experience as an external developer working on the driver, and
are shared with the goal of helping others navigate the driver code.
Acknowledgments: These tips were gathered thanks to the countless help
received from AMD developers during the driver development process. The list
below was obtained by examining open source code, reviewing public
documentation, playing w...
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2023 (by Roberto C. Sánchez)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2023-11/
December 12, 2023, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Some notable fixes which were made in LTS during the month of November include the gnutls28 cryptographic library and the freerdp2 Remote Desktop Protocol client/server implementation. The gnutls28 update was prepared by LTS contributor Markus Koschany and dealt with a timing attack which could be used to compromise a cryptographic system, while the freerdp2 update was prepared by LTS contributor Tobias Frost an...
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Jonathan Dowland: Talks: why?
https://jmtd.net/log/talks/
December 11, 2023, 4:08 PM
I'd planned to write some private mail on the subject of preparing and
delivering conference talks. However, each time I try to write that mail,
I've managed to somehow contrive to lose it. So I thought I'd try as a
blog post instead, to break the curse.
The first aspect I wanted to write about is the pre-planning phase, or,
the bit where you decide to give a talk in the first place. But first a
bit about me.
I don't talk all that regularly. I think I'm averaging one talk a year.
I don't consi...
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Jonathan Dowland: Tex Shura
https://jmtd.net/log/tex_shura/
December 11, 2023, 3:36 PM
So yeah, I bought the Shura.
It's been about a year since I got the Tex Shinobi keyboard. I ended up
taking to the office and using it there. The MX Silent Red switches are a good
fit for a shared space, and I have a bit more desk space so the extra large
footprint is not a problem.
Back at home, I have a reasonably large desk, but I've got a Synth jammed at
the back-centre, leaving a slightly tight budget for keyboard depth. The Shura
is nice and compact and fits in perfectly.
So wha...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: KDE Snaps 23.08.4, PIM! KDE neon, Debian
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-kde-snaps-23-08-4-pim-kde-neon-debian/
December 10, 2023, 1:33 PM
KDE PIM Kaddressbook snap
KDE Snaps:
This weeks big accomplishment is KDE PIM snaps! I have successfully added akonadi as a service via an akonadi content snap and running it as a service. Kaddressbook is our first PIM snap with this setup and it works flawlessly! It is available in the snap store. I have a pile of MRs awaiting approvals, so keep your eye out for the rest of PIM in the next day.
KDE Applications 23.08.4 has been released and available in the snap store.
Krita 5.2.2 h...
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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.12 preparations, debian-printing, merged-/usr tranisition updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-11-2023/
December 10, 2023, 12:00 AM
Contributing to Debian
is part of Freexian’s mission. This article
covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this
is made possible by organizations subscribing to our
Long Term Support contracts and
consulting services.
Preparing for Python 3.12 by Stefano Rivera
Stefano uploaded a few packages in preparation for Python 3.12, including
pycxx and cython. Cython has a major new version (Cython 3), adding support
for 3.12, but also bringing changes that many packa...
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Simon Josefsson: Classic McEliece goes to IETF and OpenSSH
https://blog.josefsson.org/2023/12/10/classic-mceliece-goes-to-ietf-and-openssh/
December 9, 2023, 11:11 PM
My earlier work on Streamlined NTRU Prime has been progressing along. The IETF document on sntrup761 in SSH has passed several process points. GnuPG’s libgcrypt has added support for sntrup761. The libssh support for sntrup761 is working, but the merge request is stuck mostly due to lack of time to debug why the regression test suite sporadically errors out in non-sntrup761 related parts with the patch.
The foundation for lattice-based post-quantum algorithms has some uncertainty around it...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Cubemap 1.5.0 released
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-12-09-17-18_cubemap_1_5_0_released.html
December 9, 2023, 4:18 PM
I've released version 1.5.0 of Cubemap,
my scalable video reflector. This was a long time coming, and I've mostly
been lazy about getting the actual release out. :-) There are some fairly
big features this time, reflecting further the fact that my primary way
of creating video isn't VLC anymore (which was Cubemap's original proposal;
a better reflector for VLC). It's on its way up into Debian unstable,
but you can also get it from git and just build.
Changelog goes as follows:
Cubemap 1.5.0, 2...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2023
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2023/12/my-debian-activities-in-november-2023/
December 9, 2023, 1:49 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 276 and rejected 25 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 276. I also handled several RM bugs, so the archive did not grow that much :-).
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-thirteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
During my allocated time I uploaded:
[DLA 3670-1] minizip security update for one CVE to fix an integer overflow[DLA 3673-1] gst-plugins-bad1.0 secu...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppInt64 0.0.4 on CRAN: Minor Bugfix
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/12/09#rcppint64_0.0.4
December 9, 2023, 1:22 PM
The new-ish package RcppInt64
(announced earlier this fall in this
post, with two small updates following) arrived on CRAN minutes ago as relase 0.0.4.
RcppInt64
collects some of the previous conversions between 64-bit integer values
in R and C++, and regroups them in a single package. It offers two
interfaces: both a more standard as<>() converter
from R values along with its companions wrap() to return to
R, as well as more dedicated functions ‘from’ and ‘to’.
This release addres...
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Jonathan Dowland: The scourge of Electron, the nostalgia of Pidgin
https://jmtd.net/log/pidgin/
December 8, 2023, 2:18 PM
For reasons I won't go into right now, I've spent some of this year
working on a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 260. Despite it being
relatively underpowered, I love almost everything about it.
Unfortunately the model I bought has 8G RAM which turned out to be
more limiting than I thought it would be. You can do incredible
things with 8G of RAM: incredible, wondrous things. And most of
my work, whether that's wrangling containers, hacking on OpenJDK, or
complex Haskell projects, are manageabl...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 253 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-253-released/
December 8, 2023, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 253. This version includes the following changes:
* Improve DOS/MBR extraction by adding support for 7z.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#333)
* Process objdump symbol comment filter inputs as the Python "bytes" type
(and not str). (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#358)
* Add a missing RequiredToolNotFound import.
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Dima Kogan: roslanch and =LD_PRELOAD=
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2023/12/07_roslanch-and-ldpreload.html
December 7, 2023, 8:56 PM
This is part 2 of our series entitled "ROS people don't know how to use
computers". This is about ROS1. ROS2 is presumably broken in some completely
different way, but I don't know.
Unlike normal people, the ROS people don't "run" applications. They "launch"
"nodes" from "packages" (these are "ROS" packages; obviously). You run
roslaunch PACKAGE THING.launch
Then it tries to find this PACKAGE (using some rules that nobody understands),
and tries to find the file THING.launch within th...
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Daniel Kahn Gillmor: New OpenPGP certificate for dkg, December 2023
https://dkg.fifthhorseman.net/blog/2023-dkg-openpgp-transition.html
December 7, 2023, 12:15 AM
dkg's New OpenPGP certificate in December 2023
In December of 2023, I'm moving to a new OpenPGP certificate.
You might know my old OpenPGP certificate, which had an fingerprint of
C29F8A0C01F35E34D816AA5CE092EB3A5CA10DBA.
My new OpenPGP certificate has a fingerprint of:
D477040C70C2156A5C298549BB7E9101495E6BF7.
Both certificates have the same set of User IDs:
Daniel Kahn Gillmor
<dkg@debian.org>
<dkg@fifthhorseman.net>
You can find a version of this transition statement signed by b...
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Tim Retout: Nostalgia for my attention span
https://retout.co.uk/2023/12/06/nostalgia-for-my-attention-span/
December 6, 2023, 6:38 PM
This post was possibly inspired by my daughter’s homework assignment
to interview an old person about technology change. Guess who’s old
now?
Sometimes I look back at how life used to be, and remember what it was
like. There are two key nostalgia points for me: before internet, and
before smartphones.
Before the internet
Before the internet, there were computers. There were always computers
in my life, they were just less fancy, with mainly text and fewer
graphics at first. These days we a...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2023
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2023-11/
December 6, 2023, 2:57 PM
Welcome to the November 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a rather rapid recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries (more).
Reproducible Builds Summit 2023
Between October 31st and November 2nd, we held our seventh Reproducible Builds Summit in Hamburg, Germany...
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Thomas Lange: FAI.me service now supports installing recommended packages
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/faime-recommends/
December 5, 2023, 9:10 PM
The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud
images has a new feature by a user requested it.
You can now enable installing recommended packages for your custom
package list. By default FAIme does only install the dependencies
needed, but not the recommended packages.
This was a very easy enhancement, only a few lines in the web
interface and nearly no changes in the backend were needed.
The web interface of the FAI.me service is available at
https://fai-project.org/F...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - November 2023
https://veronneau.org/montreals-debian-stuff-november-2023.html
December 5, 2023, 7:45 PM
Hello from a snowy Montréal! My life has been pretty busy lately1 so
please forgive this late report.
On November 19th, our local Debian User Group met at Montreal's most
prominent hackerspace, Foulab. We've been there a few times already, but
since our last visit, Foulab has had some membership/financial troubles. Happy
to say things are going well again and a new team has taken over the space.
This meetup wasn't the most productive day for me (something about being
exhausted apparently makes ...
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Matthew Garrett: Why does Gnome fingerprint unlock not unlock the keyring?
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68537.html
December 5, 2023, 6:32 AM
There's a decent number of laptops with fingerprint readers that are supported by Linux, and Gnome has some nice integration to make use of that for authentication purposes. But if you log in with a fingerprint, the moment you start any app that wants to access stored passwords you'll get a prompt asking you to type in your password, which feels like it somewhat defeats the point. Mac users don't have this problem - authenticate with TouchID and all your passwords are available after login. Why ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.6.6.1 on CRAN: No More Deprecation
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2023/12/04#rcpparmadillo_0.12.6.6.1
December 5, 2023, 2:07 AM
Armadillo is a powerful
and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific
computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use,
has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm
development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into
production environments. RcppArmadillo
integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is
widely used by (currently) 1126 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 31.7 million
tim...
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Ian Jackson: Don’t use apt-get source; use dgit
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/17579.html
December 4, 2023, 3:12 PM
tl;dr:
If you are a Debian user who knows git, don’t work with Debian source packages. Don’t use apt source, or dpkg-source. Instead, use dgit and work in git.
Also, don’t use: “VCS” links on official Debian web pages, debcheckout, or Debian’s (semi-)official gitlab, Salsa. These are suitable for Debian experts only; for most people they can be beartraps. Instead, use dgit.
Struggling with Debian source packages?
Just use dgit
ObjectionsBut I don’t want to learn yet another tool
Sh...
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Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in November 2023
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/foss-activity-in-november-2023.html
December 3, 2023, 8:41 PM
Reviewed
changes to Debian package building in upstream Linux.


Attended the Debian LTS monthly meeting on IRC.


Reviewed the following merge requests:


linux:
[ia64]
Workaround an ICE when built with gcc-13 (proposed a
less invasive fix)


linux:
Remove
architectures not existing in Debian (ongoing discussion)


linux:
Build
linux-libc-dev as arch-all package (proposed further changes:
d/rules.real:
Change linux-libc-dev insta...
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Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in October 2023
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/foss-activity-in-october-2023.html
December 3, 2023, 8:09 PM
Discussed several bug/issue reports in Debian:


Bug#1053122:
linux-image-6.5.0-1-amd64: Kernel page fault in process exit
due to bit flip


Bug#1052676:
linux-config: Enabling Kernel Configurations for MediaTek
Platforms (CONFIG_ARCH_MEDIATEK)


CONFIG_PREEMPT_DYNAMIC=y?


Illegal
Instruction Using sudo in Bookworm on i686




And for Linux stable branches:


[PATCH
v2] docs: add backporting and conflict resolu...
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Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in September 2023
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/foss-activity-in-september-2023.html
December 3, 2023, 7:42 PM
Discussed the
ongoing
difficulties in supporting the Debian "marvell" kernel flavour.
Reviewed the related
merge
request to fix armel build regression in Debian 12 "bookworm".


Wrote and recorded a talk for DebConf on
What's
new in the Linux kernel. Apologies for the poor audio
quality; I will use a different microphone if I do this again.


Reviewed
Bastian Blank's proposed changes to kernel package versioning and
signing in Debian.
...
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Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in August 2023
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/foss-activity-in-august-2023.html
December 3, 2023, 7:20 PM
Updated the linux-5.10 package in buster and issued
DLA-3512-1
for it.


Together with Aurelien Jarno, I investigated boot failures of
Linux 5.10 and later versions on Debian's MIPS buildds, but I
didn't find the root cause or any solution.


Reviewed and tested the kernel mitigations for the SRSO
(CVE-2023-20569)
issue in AMD CPUs, and added a critical missing patch to the
backports.


Updated the linux (4.19) and linux-5.10 packages in buster...
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Iustin Pop: Life, getting sick and unfit
https://k1024.org/posts/2023/2023-12-03-life-and-getting-sick/
December 3, 2023, 10:41 AM
Like clockwork, like every autumn, got sick again. “Just” a flu,
actually probably two in a row. I don’t really understand it - from
January to September I’m feeling really awesome, and I manage to do
sports five days a week, or more. Then September comes, and things
start degrading, and then October or November, I get sick and it takes
me ~3 weeks to recover, during which I’m not even managing reliably 5K
steps a day (from walking), not even talking about running or swimming
or biking...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE neon and snaps, Debian Weekly report.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kde-neon-and-snaps-debian-weekly-report/
December 1, 2023, 6:05 PM
While the winter sets in, I have been mostly busy following up on job leads and applying to anything and everything. Something has to stick… I am trying! Even out of industry.
Debian:
This weeks main focus was getting involved and familiar with Debian rust-packaging. It is really quite different from other teams! I was successful and the MR is https://salsa.debian.org/rust-team/debcargo-conf/-/merge_requests/566 if anyone on the rust team can take a gander, I will upload when merged. I w...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2023
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2023/12/01/floss-activities/
December 1, 2023, 2:53 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
tracer:
mention needrestart
duck:
add inactive project indicator
Debian wiki pages:
AutoGeneratedFiles,
CopyrightReviewTools,
CornerCase,
CrossGrading,
DeveloperNews,
Hardware/Wanted,
InstallingDebianOn/SiFive/HiFiveUnmatched
FOSSjobs wiki pages:
Resources
vcs-home wiki:
add more dotfile repos/tools
Issues
Files in wrong dir in
git-cola
Conffile removal needed in
dkms
New SWH listers n...
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Valhalla's Things: Modern XMPP Server
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/12/01-modern-xmpp-server/index.html
December 1, 2023, 12:00 AM
Posted on December 1, 2023



Just a quick mention that I’ve updated my instructions on how I
configured my XMPP server
to its current status under Debian Bookworm.
And yes, it took me just a bit of time, we release when we’re ready here
:D
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Junichi Uekawa: Did a tea ceremony yesterday.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2023-Dec-1.html.en#2023-Dec-1-08:43:37
November 30, 2023, 11:43 PM
Did a tea ceremony yesterday. Having fun talking about stuff is the most important part.
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2023)
https://bits.debian.org/2023/11/new-developers-2023-10.html
November 30, 2023, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
François Mazen (mzf)
Andrew Ruthven (puck)
Christopher Obbard (obbardc)
Salvo Tomaselli (ltworf)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Bo YU
Athos Coimbra Ribeiro
Marc Leeman
Filip Strömbäck
Congratulations!...
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Russell Coker: Links November 2023
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/11/30/links-november-2023/
November 30, 2023, 1:04 PM
The Long Now has an insightful article about air quality [1].
Every country needs food labelling laws like Mexico has [2]. Also we need to abolish the investor state tribunals, companies should just accept local laws and obey them – or be treated in the same way as pirates on the high seas.
Ian Jackson wrote a good post about conference policies regarding Covid19 [3]. We really need to do more about this, conservatives like to imagine that it’s gone away but people are still getting sick and...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Framework debt
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2023-11-28-20-34_framework_debt.html
November 28, 2023, 7:34 PM
Today's shower thought:
Taking on a dependency is assuming some amount of technical debt.
Using a framework is taking on a dependency that is very hard to get rid of.
(All the usual properties of technical debt, positive and negative, apply)
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