Arturo Borrero González: Back to the Wikimedia Foundation!
https://ral-arturo.org/2024/02/13/wmf.html
February 13, 2024, 9:30 AM
In October 2023, I departed from the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization
behind well-known projects like Wikipedia and others, to join Spryker.
However, in January 2024 Spryker conducted a round of layoffs reportedly due to budget and business reasons.
I was among those affected, being let go just three months after joining the company.
Fortunately, the Wikimedia Cloud Services team, where I previously worked, was still seeking to backfill my
position, so I reached out to them....
--------------------
Matthew Palmer: Not all TLDs are Created Equal
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/02/13/not-all-tlds-are-created-equal.html
February 13, 2024, 12:00 AM
In light of the recent cancellation of the queer.af domain registration by the Taliban, the fragile and difficult nature of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) has once again been comprehensively demonstrated.
Since many people may not be aware of the risks, I thought I’d give a solid explainer of the whole situation, and explain why you should, in general, not have anything to do with domains which are registered under ccTLDs.
Top-level What-Now?
A top-level domain (TLD) is the last par...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Lessons from (and for) colleagues - and, implicitly, how NOT to get on
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/lessons-from-and-for-colleagues-and.html
February 12, 2024, 10:13 PM
I have had excellent colleagues both at my day job and, especially, in Debian over the last thirty-odd years. Several have attempted to give me good advice - others have been exemplars. People retire: sadly, people die. What impression do you want to leave behind when you leave here?Belatedly, I've come to realise that obduracy, sheer bloody mindedness, force of will and obstinacy will only get you so far. The following began very much as a tongue in cheek private memo to myself a good few years...
--------------------
Emanuele Rocca: Enabling Kernel Settings in Debian
https://www.linux.it/~ema/posts/enabling-kernel-settings-in-debian/
February 12, 2024, 7:52 AM
This time it’s about enabling new kernel config options in the official Debian
kernel packages. A few dependencies are needed to run the various scripts used
by the Debian kernel folks, as well as to build the kernel itself:
apt install git gpg python3-debian python3-dacite
apt build-dep linux
With that in place, fetch the linux and kernel-team repos:
git clone --depth 1 https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux
git clone --depth 1 https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/kernel-team
...
--------------------
Gunnar Wolf: Heads up! A miniDebConf is approaching in Santa Fe, Argentina
https://gwolf.org/2024/02/heads-up-a-minidebconf-is-approaching-in-santa-f-argentina.html
February 12, 2024, 12:03 AM
I realize it’s a bit late to start publicly organizing this, but… better late
than never 😉 I’m happy some Debian people I have directly contacted have
already expressed interest. So, lets make this public!
For all interested people who are reasonably close to central Argentina, or can
be persuaded to come here in a month’s time… You are all welcome!
It seems I managed to convince my good friend Martín Bayo (some Debian people
will remember him, as he was present in DebConf19 in...
--------------------
Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2024 (by Roberto C. Sánchez)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2024-01/
February 12, 2024, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In January, 16 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 14.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
Bastien Roucariès
did 22.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period).
Ben Hutchings
did 14.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
Chris Lamb
di...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 257 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-257-released/
February 12, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 257. This version includes the following changes:
[ James Addison ]
* Parse the header and hunksize of diffs strictly before parsing the context
below. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#363)
* Reformat code to comply with the latest version of Black (24.1.1).
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Expand the previous changelog entry to include the CVE number that was
subsequently assigned.
* Bump the miniumum Black requir...
--------------------
Marco d'Itri: Extending access to the systemd RuntimeDirectory with a POSIX ACL
https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_468
February 11, 2024, 4:12 PM
inn2 uses ephemeral UNIX domain sockets in /run/news/ to communicate with the ctlinnd program. Since the directory is only writeable by the "news" user, other unprivileged users are not able to use the command.
I solved this by extending the inn2.service systemd unit with a drop-in file which uses setfacl to give access to my user "md" to the RuntimeDirectory created by systemd. This is the content of /etc/systemd/system/inn2.service.d/md-ctlinnd.conf:
[Service]
# innd will change the permissi...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: Adding a new date entry using GAS on Google Docs.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2024-Feb-11.html.en#2024-Feb-11-09:15:01
February 11, 2024, 12:15 AM
Adding a new date entry using GAS on Google Docs.
When I am writing a diary, or having a weekly meeting, it is sometimes tedious to add today's date every time. I can automate such tasks with GAS. There's a onOpen method that gets called every time a doc is opened, and you can use that to implement adding the latest date when the latest date does not match....
--------------------
Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, /usr-move, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-01-2024/
February 11, 2024, 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.
Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rincón
Santiago started picking up the work made by Outreachy Intern, Enock Kashada (a
big thanks to him!), to solve some long-standing issues in Salsa CI. Currently,
the first job in a Salsa...
--------------------
Andrew Cater: Debian point releases - updated media for Bullseye (11.9) and Bookworm (12.5) - 2024-02-10
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/debian-point-releases-updated-media-for.html
February 10, 2024, 10:54 PM
 It's been a LONG day: two point releases in a day takes of the order of twelve or thirteen hours of fairly solid work on behalf of those doing the releases and testing.Thanks firstly to the main Debian release team for all the initial work.Thanks to Isy, RattusRattus, Sledge and egw in Cottenham, smcv and Helen closer to the centre of Cambridge, cacin and others who have dropped in and out of IRC and helped testing. I've been at home but active on IRC - missing the team (and the food) and drin...
--------------------
Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2024
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2024/02/my-debian-activities-in-january-2024/
February 9, 2024, 3:23 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 333 and rejected 31 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 342.
Hooray, I already accepted package number 30000.
The statistic, where I get my numbers from, started in February 2002. Up to now 81694 packages got accepted. Given that I accepted package 20000 in October 2020, would I be able to accept half of the packages that made it through NEW?
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-fifteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS...
--------------------
Abhijith PA: A new(kind of) phone
https://abhijithpa.me/2024/A-new-phone-kind-of/
February 9, 2024, 10:53 AM
I was using a refurbished Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro (codename: sakura
. I do remember buying this phone to run LineageOS as I found
this model had support. But by the time I bought it (there was a quite
a gap between my research and the actual purchase) lineageOS ended
the suport for this device. The maintainer might’ve ended this port, I
don’t blame them. Its a non rewarding work.
Later I found there is a DotOS custom rom available. I did a week of
test run. There seems lot of bugs and it all...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 256 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-256-released/
February 9, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 256. This version includes the following changes:
* CVE-2024-25711: Use a determistic name when extracting content from GPG
artifacts instead of trusting the value of gpg's --use-embedded-filenames.
This prevents a potential information disclosure vulnerability that could
have been exploited by providing a specially-crafted GPG file with an
embedded filename of, say, "../../.ssh/id_rsa".
Many thanks...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, Interface Polish
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/02/08#rcpparmadillo_0.12.8.0.0
February 8, 2024, 11:33 PM
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) 1119 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.5 million
tim...
--------------------
Sven Hoexter: Use GitHub CLI to List all Repository Secrets
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/misc_gh_get_all_repo_secrets/
February 8, 2024, 10:12 AM
Write it down before I forget about it again:
for x in $(gh api graphql --paginate -f query='query($endCursor:String) { organization(login:"myorg") {
repositories(first: 100, after: $endCursor, isArchived:false) {
pageInfo {
hasNextPage
endCursor
}
nodes {
name
}
}
}
}' --jq '.data.organization.repositories.nodes[].name'); do
secrets=$(gh secret list --json name --jq '.[].name' -R "myorg/${x}" | tr 'n' ','...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: DebConf24 Logo Contest Results
https://bits.debian.org/2024/02/debconf24-logo-contest-results.html
February 8, 2024, 5:00 AM
Earlier this month the DebConf team announced the DebConf24 Logo Contest
asking aspiring artists, designers, and contributors to submit an image that
would represent the host city of Busan, the host nation of South Korea, and
promote the next Debian Developer Conference.
The logo contest for DebConf24 received 10
submissions and garnered 354 responses with 3 proposals in particular getting
very close to first place. The winning logo received 88 votes, the 2nd favored
logo received 87 votes, and ...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024
https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2024/02/08/reproducible-builds-at-fosdem-2024/
February 8, 2024, 12:00 AM
Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. Titled Reproducible Builds: The First Ten Years…
In this talk Holger ‘h01ger’ Levsen will give an overview about Reproducible Builds: How it started with a small BoF at DebConf13 (and before), then grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an Executive Order of the President o...
--------------------
Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in January 2024
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2024-01/
February 7, 2024, 10:16 PM
Welcome to the January 2024 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. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
“How we executed a critical supply chain attack on PyTorch”
John Stawinski and Adnan Khan published a lengthy blog post detailing how they executed a supply-chain attack against PyTorch, a popular machine learning pla...
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: carbon
https://jmtd.net/log/carbon/
February 7, 2024, 7:24 PM
I got a new work laptop this year: A Thinkpad X1 Carbon (Gen 11). It wasn't the
one I wanted: I'd ordered an X1 Nano, which had a footprint very reminiscent to
me of my beloved x40.
Never mind! The Carbon is lovely. Despite ostensibly the same size as the T470s
it's replacing, it's significantly more portable, and more capable. The two USB-A
ports, as well as the full-size HDMI port, are welcome and useful (over the Nano).
I used to keep notes on setting up Linux on different types of hardware...
--------------------
Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - February 2024
https://veronneau.org/montreals-debian-stuff-february-2024.html
February 6, 2024, 7:30 PM
New Year, Same Great People! Our Debian User Group met for the first of our
2024 bi-monthly meetings on February 4th and it was loads of fun. Around
twelve different people made it this time to Koumbit, where the meeting
happened.
As a reminder, our meetings are called "Debian & Stuff" because we want to be
as open as possible and welcome people that want to work on "other stuff" than
Debian.
Here is what we did:
pollo:
tested a laptop that had a defective battery with a known good one (the...
--------------------
Robert McQueen: Flathub: Pros and Cons of Direct Uploads
https://ramcq.net/2024/02/06/flathub-pros-and-cons-of-direct-uploads/
February 6, 2024, 10:57 AM
I attended FOSDEM last weekend and had the pleasure to participate in the Flathub / Flatpak BOF on Saturday. A lot of the session was used up by an extensive discussion about the merits (or not) of allowing direct uploads versus building everything centrally on Flathub’s infrastructure, and related concerns such as automated security/dependency scanning.
My original motivation behind the idea was essentially two things. The first was to offer a simpler way forward for applications that use ...
--------------------
Junichi Uekawa: February already.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2024-Feb-3.html.en#2024-Feb-3-06:42:40
February 2, 2024, 9:42 PM
February already. I was planning on doing some Debian Rust stuff but then I need to reconstruct my environment.
--------------------
Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in January 2024
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/foss-activity-in-january-2024.html
February 2, 2024, 4:26 PM
I fixed a bug in my merge request
adding
the rsync method to dput-ng. (This has now been merged
and included in the dput 1.38 release.)


I updated the Linux kernel packages in various Debian suites:


buster: Updated linux (4.19) to upstream version 4.19.304,
uploaded it, and issued
DLA-3710-1.


buster: Updated linux-5.10 to the latest security update
for bullseye, uploaded it, and issued
DLA-3711-1.


bullseye-backports: Updated li...
--------------------
Scarlett Gately Moore: Some exciting news! Kubuntu: I’m back!!!
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/some-exciting-news-kubuntu-im-back/
February 2, 2024, 4:22 PM
It’s official, the Kubuntu Council has hired me part time to work on the 24.04 LTS release, preparation for Plasma 6, and to bring life back into the Distribution. First I want thank the Kubuntu Council for this opportunity and I plan a long and successful journey together!!!!
My first week ( I started midweek ):
It has been a busy one! Many meet and greets with the team and other interested parties. I had the chance to chat with Mike from Kubuntu Focus and I have to say I am absolutely...
--------------------
Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in December 2023
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/foss-activity-in-december-2023.html
February 2, 2024, 3:55 PM
I made a
merge request
to get rid of the manual split between old and current
changelogs in the Debian linux source package. As
there wasn't agreement on this I've since closed it.


I updated the linux (4.19) package for buster to upstream
version 4.19.302, but didn't upload it.


I reported a bug in
libnfsidmap packages involving aliased file locations that can
(in principle) result in file loss on upgrade....
--------------------
Ian Jackson: UPS, the Useless Parcel Service; VAT and fees
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/17698.html
February 2, 2024, 12:38 AM
I recently had the most astonishingly bad experience with UPS, the courier company. They severely damaged my parcels, and were very bad about UK import VAT, ultimately ending up harassing me on autopilot.
The only thing that got their attention was my draft Particulars of Claim for intended legal action.
Surprisingly, I got them to admit in writing that the “disbursement fee” they charge recipients alongside the actual VAT, is just something they made up with no legal basis.
What happened
...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.21 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/02/01#rquantlib_0.4.21
February 2, 2024, 12:04 AM
A new minor release 0.4.21 of RQuantLib
arrived at CRAN this afternoon,
and has already been uploaded to Debian as well.
QuantLib is a rather
comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative
finance. RQuantLib
connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has
been part of CRAN for more than
twenty years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded
there.
This release of RQuantLib
benefits from some kind attention that Jeroen has been paying to how we
build (esp...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: System Collapse
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-82698-5.html
February 1, 2024, 6:06 AM
Review: System Collapse, by Martha Wells

Series:
Murderbot Diaries #7


Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-250-82698-5


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
245

System Collapse is the second Murderbot novel. Including the
novellas, it's the 7th in the series. Unlike Fugitive Telemetry, the previous novella that was out of
chronological order, this is the direct sequel to
Network Effect. A very direct sequel;
it pi...
--------------------
Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities January 2024
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2024/02/01/floss-activities/
February 1, 2024, 5:54 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
OpenStreetMap:
fixed a bunch of broken website URLs
Debian pass-otp:
oathtool safety
reportbug:
fix crash
Debian BTS usertags:
fix Python, Ruby, QA, porter, archive, release tags
Debian wiki pages:
TransitionUploadHook
Issues
Warnings in
python3-qgis,
androguard,
qbrz
Review
Debian BTS usertags:
changes for the month
Debian screenshots:
approved
arch-test
vasttrafik-cli
rejected
f...
--------------------
Dirk Eddelbuettel: dtts 0.1.2 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/31#dtts_0.1.2
January 31, 2024, 11:02 PM
Leonardo and I are happy to
announce the release of a very minor maintenance release 0.1.2 of our dtts package
which has been on CRAN for a
little under two years now.
dtts
builds upon our nanotime
package as well as the beloved data.table to bring
high-performance and high-resolution indexing at the
nanosecond level to data frames. dtts aims to
offers the time-series indexing versatility of xts (and zoo) to the immense
power of data.table while
supporting highest nanosecond resolution.
This rel...
--------------------
Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2023)
https://bits.debian.org/2024/01/new-developers-2023-12.html
January 31, 2024, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Alexandre Detiste (tchet)
Amin Bandali (bandali)
Jean-Pierre Giraud (jipege)
Timthy Pearson (tpearson)
The following contributor was added as Debian Maintainer in the last two months:
Safir Secerovic
Congratulations!...
--------------------
Valhalla's Things: Macrame Bookbag
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/01/31-macrame_bookbag/index.html
January 31, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on January 31, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:macrame




In late 2022 I prepared a batch of drawstring backpacks in cotton as
reusable wrappers for Christmas gifts; however I didn’t know what cord
to use, didn’t want to use paracord, and couldn’t find anything that
looked right in the local shops.
With Christmas getting dangerously closer, I visited a craft materials
website for unrelated reasons, found out that they sold macrame
co...
--------------------
Antoine Beaupré: router archeology: the Soekris net5001
https://anarc.at/hardware/server/roadkiller/
January 30, 2024, 4:20 AM
Roadkiller was a Soekris net5501 router I used as my main gateway
between 2010 and 2016 (for réseau and
téléphone).
It was upgraded to FreeBSD 8.4-p12 (2014-06-06) and pkgng. It was
retired in favor of octavia around 2016.
Roughly 10 years later (2024-01-24), I found it in a drawer and, to my
surprised, it booted. After wrangling with a RS-232 USB adapter,
a null modem cable, and bit rates, I even logged in:
comBIOS ver. 1.33 20070103 Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.
net5501...
--------------------
Matthew Palmer: Why Certificate Lifecycle Automation Matters
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/01/30/why-certificate-automation-matters.html
January 30, 2024, 12:00 AM
If you’ve perused the ActivityPub feed of certificates whose keys are known to be compromised, and clicked on the “Show More” button to see the name of the certificate issuer, you may have noticed that some issuers seem to come up again and again.
This might make sense – after all, if a CA is issuing a large volume of certificates, they’ll be seen more often in a list of compromised certificates.
In an attempt to see if there is anything that we can learn from this data, though, I did ...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: bcachefs boot tweaks
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-01-29-18-09_bcachefs_boot_tweaks.html
January 29, 2024, 5:09 PM
Following my previous foray into bcachefs-on-/ booting, I whipped up some
patches to make multidevice root filesystems boot in Debian:
bcachefs-tools:
Enable the Rust parts in the Debian package, and upgrade to latest
git HEAD.
klibc: Add bcachefs detection and
UUID extraction to fstype (probably not needed, blkid is used as a fallback
and seems to work fine)
initramfs-tools:
Don't rewrite root=UUID=12345678 back to a /dev device for bcachefs
(which would find only an arbitrary device in the f...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/29/thinkpad-x1-yoga-gen3/
January 29, 2024, 11:23 AM
I just bought myself a Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen3 for $359.10. I have been quite happy with the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 I’ve had for just over a year (apart from my mistake in buying one with lost password) [1] and I normally try to get more use out of a computer than that. If I divide total cost by the time that I’ve had it working that comes out to about $1.30 per day. I would pay more than that for a laptop and I have paid much more than that for laptops in the past, but I prefer not to. I was...
--------------------
Russ Allbery: Review: Bluebird
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-85766-967-2.html
January 29, 2024, 2:20 AM
Review: Bluebird, by Ciel Pierlot

Publisher:
Angry Robot


Copyright:
2022


ISBN:
0-85766-967-2


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
458

Bluebird is a stand-alone far-future science fiction adventure.
Ten thousand years ago, a star fell into the galaxy carrying three
factions of humanity. The Ascetics, the Ossuary, and the Pyrites each
believe that only their god survived and the other two factions are
heretics. Between them, they have...
--------------------
Michael Ablassmeier: qmpbackup 0.28
https://abbbi.github.io//qmpbackup28/
January 29, 2024, 12:00 AM
Over the last weekend i had some spare time to improve
qmpbackup a little more, the new version:
Uses blockdev-backup QMP commands instead of the soon to be deprecated
drive-backup.
Adds --compress option: target QCOW files data can be compressed.
Adds --speed-limit option to limit backup speed throughput.
Adds --include-raw option so attached raw devices can be backed up
too.
Allows backing up virtual machines in paused or pre-running state.
Adds backup option copy to allow backi...
--------------------
Niels Thykier: Annotating the Debian packaging directory
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/annotating-the-debian-packaging-directory.html
January 28, 2024, 4:45 PM
In my previous blog post Providing online reference documentation for debputy,
I made a point about how debhelper documentation was suboptimal on account
of being static rather than online. The thing is that debhelper is not alone
in this problem space, even if it is a major contributor to the number of
packaging files you have to to know about.
If we look at the "competition" here such as Fedora and Arch Linux, they tend to only
have one packaging file. While most Debian people will tell you a ...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links January 2024
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/28/links-january-2024/
January 28, 2024, 2:22 AM
Long Now has an insightful article about domestication that considers whether humans have evolved to want to control nature [1].
The OMG Elite hacker cable is an interesting device [2]. A Wifi device in a USB cable to allow remote control and monitoring of data transfer, including remote keyboard control and sniffing. Pity that USB-C cables have chips in them so you can’t use a spark to remove unwanted chips from modern cables.
David Brin’s blog post The core goal of tyrants: The “Red-Caes...
--------------------
Bastian Venthur: Investigating popularity of Python build backends over time
https://venthur.de/2024-01-26-build-backends.html
January 26, 2024, 6:00 PM
Inspired by a Mastodon
post by Françoise Conil,
who investigated the current popularity of build backends used in
pyproject.toml files, I wanted to investigate how the popularity of build
backends used in pyproject.toml files evolved over the years since the
introduction of PEP-0517 in 2015.
Getting the data
Tom Forbes provides a huge
dataset that contains information
about every file within every release uploaded to PyPI. To
get the current dataset, we can use:
curl -L --remote-name-all $(curl...
--------------------
Steinar H. Gunderson: Life with bcachefs
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-01-26-17-33_life_with_bcachefs.html
January 26, 2024, 4:33 PM
After bcachefs suddenly got merged into mainline in 6.7 (after years and years
of development and arguing on LKML), I've been curious; could this be an
interesting thing to test out? I gave up btrfs many years ago as just way too
slow, and to be honest I've been quite fine with ext4/xfs + LVM + md, but
there was something in it that spoke to me nevertheless.
So the last month or so, I've been having /home on my primary machine
(server) as bcachefs, with a small 10GB SSD backing. Surprisingly…...
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Dima Kogan: mrcal 2.4 released!
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2024/01/25_mrcal-24-released.html
January 26, 2024, 2:07 AM
mrcal 2.4 is out: the release notes. Once again, this is mostly a bug-fix
release en route to the big new features coming in 3.0. The most noteworthy
fixes:
mrcal can be built with clang. Try it out like this: CC=clang CXX=clang++
make. This opens up some portability improvements, such as making it easier
to run on Windows.
Full dense stereo pipeline in C.
Tools to support more file formats:
mrcal-from-kalibr
mrcal-to-kalibr
mrcal-from-ros
These are experimental. Please let me know ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 255 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-255-released/
January 26, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 255. This version includes the following changes:
[ Vekhir ]
* Add/fix compatibility for Python progressbar 2.5 & 3.0 etc.
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Dimitri John Ledkov: Ubuntu Livepatch service now supports over 60 different kernels
http://blog.surgut.co.uk/2024/01/ubuntu-livepatch-fips-s390-arm64.html
January 25, 2024, 6:01 PM
Linux kernel getting a livepatch whilst running a marathon. Generated with AI.Livepatch service eliminates the need for unplanned maintenance windows for high and critical severity kernel vulnerabilities by patching the Linux kernel while the system runs. Originally the service launched in 2016 with just a single kernel flavour supported.Over the years, additional kernels were added: new LTS releases, ESM kernels, Public Cloud kernels, and most recently HWE kernels too.Recently livepatch support...
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Jonathan Dowland: I'm going to FOSDEM 2024
https://jmtd.net/log/fosdem/2024/
January 25, 2024, 4:04 PM
I'm attending FOSDEM 2024. Perhaps I'll
see you there!
For the first time, I'm giving some talks, both in the Free Java
Devroom (UB5.132) on Saturday 3rd. They are
A beginner's guide to Backports
Bespoke containers with Jlink and OpenShift...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.10 on CRAN: Calendar Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/24#qlcal-r_0.0.10
January 25, 2024, 1:09 AM
The tenth release of the qlcal package
arrivied at CRAN today.
qlcal
delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R
package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained
and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be
demanding to build). qlcal covers
over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its
complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples
are in the README at the repository, the package page,
an...
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Joachim Breitner: GHC Steering Committee Retrospective
https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/811-GHC_Steering_Committee_Retrospective
January 25, 2024, 12:21 AM
After seven years of service as member and secretary on the GHC Steering Committee, I have resigned from that role. So this is a good time to look back and retrace the formation of the GHC proposal process and committee.
In my memory, I helped define and shape the proposal process, optimizing it for effectiveness and throughput, but memory can be misleading, and judging from the paper trail in my email archives, this was indeed mostly Ben Gamari’s and Richard Eisenberg’s achievement: Already...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RApiDatetime 0.0.9 on CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/01/24#rapidatetime_0.0.9
January 24, 2024, 11:06 PM
A new maintenance release of our RApiDatetime
package is now on CRAN
RApiDatetime
provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for
Date and Datetime calculations. The functions
asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long
and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and
Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and
POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between
Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly,
asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions
are rather u...
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Thomas Lange: FAI 6.2 released
http://blog.fai-project.org/posts/fai-6.2/
January 24, 2024, 11:12 AM
After more than one a year, a new minor FAI version is available, but
it includes some interesting new features.
Here a the items from the NEWS file:
fai (6.2) unstable; urgency=low
fai-cd can now create live images
Use systemd during installation
New feature: run FAI inside a screen or tmux session
fai-diskimage: do not use compression of qemu-img which is slow
instead provide .qcow2.zst, add option -C
fai-kvm: add support for booting from USB storage
new tool mk-data-partition adds a data ...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2023 edition
https://veronneau.org/montreal-subway-foot-traffic-data-2023-edition.html
January 24, 2024, 5:00 AM
For the fifth year in a row, I've asked Société de Transport de Montréal,
Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway.
By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the
station's foot traffic.
Orange line (top10)
Green line (top10)
Blue line
Yellow line
Global Top 10
Licences
The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my
modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in
the public domain.
The R code I w...
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Chris Lamb: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains awarded IEEE ‘Best Paper’ award
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/ieee-best-paper-award
January 22, 2024, 5:11 PM
IEEE Software recently announced that a paper that I co-authored with Dr. Stefano Zacchiroli has recently been awarded their ‘Best Paper’ award:
Titled Reproducible Builds: Increasing the Integrity of Software Supply Chains, the abstract reads as follows:
Although it is possible to increase confidence in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by reviewing its source code, trusting code is not the same as trusting its executable counterparts. These are typically built and distributed by thi...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Writing a simulator to check phased array beamforming 🌀
https://k3xec.com/simulating-phased-arrays/
January 22, 2024, 3:11 PM
Interested in future updates? Follow me on mastodon at
@paul@soylent.green. Posts about
hz.tools will be tagged
#hztools.
If you're on the Fediverse, I'd very much appreciate boosts on
my toot!
While working on hz.tools, I started to move my beamforming
code from 2-D (meaning, beamforming to some specific angle on the X-Y plane for
waves on the X-Y plane) to 3-D. I’ll have more to say about that once I get
around to publishing the code as soon as I’m sure it’s not completely wrong,
but ...
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Russell Coker: Storage Trends 2024
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/01/22/storage-trends-2024/
January 22, 2024, 12:57 PM
It has been less than a year since my last post about storage trends [1] and enough has changed to make it worth writing again. My previous analysis was that for <2TB only SSD made sense, for 4TB SSD made sense for business use while hard drives were still a good option for home use, and for 8TB+ hard drives were clearly the best choice for most uses.
I will start by looking at MSY prices, they aren't the cheapest (you can get cheaper online) but they are competitive and they make it easy to...
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Debian Brasil: MiniDebConf BH 2024 - patrocínio e financiamento coletivo
https://debianbrasil.org.br/blog/minidebconf-bh-2024-patrocinio-e-financimento-coletivo/
January 21, 2024, 11:00 AM
Já está rolando a
inscrição de participante e a
chamada de atividades
para a MiniDebConf Belo Horizonte 2024, que acontecerá de 27 a 30 de abril
no Campus Pampulha da UFMG.
Este ano estamos ofertando
bolsas de alimentação, hospedagem e passagens
para contribuidores(as) ativos(as) do Projeto Debian.
Patrocínio:
Para a realização da MiniDebConf, estamos buscando
patrocínio financeiro
de empresas e entidades. Então se você trabalha em uma empresa/entidade (ou
conhece alguém que tra...
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Gunnar Wolf: Ruffle helps bring back my family history
https://gwolf.org/2024/01/ruffle-helps-bring-back-my-family-history.html
January 20, 2024, 6:17 PM
Probably a trait of my family’s origins as migrants from East Europe, probably
part of the collective trauma of jews throughout the world… or probably
because that’s just who I turned out to be, I hold in high regard the
preservation of memory of my family’s photos, movies and such items. And it’s a
trait shared by many people in my familiar group.
Shortly after my grandmother died 24 years ago, my mother did a large, loving
work of digitalization and restoration of my grandparent’s...
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Gunnar Wolf: A deep learning technique for intrusion detection system using a recurrent neural networks based framework
https://gwolf.org/2024/01/a-deep-learning-technique-for-intrusion-detection-system-using-a-recurrent-neural-networks-based-framework.html
January 20, 2024, 5:42 PM
This post is a review for Computing Reviews


for A deep learning technique for intrusion detection system using a recurrent neural networks based framework



, a article
published in Computer Communications



So let’s assume you already know and understand that artificial intelligence’s main building blocks are perceptrons, that is, mathematical models of neurons. And you know that, while a single perce...
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Niels Thykier: Making debputy: Writing declarative parsing logic
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/making-debputy-writing-declarative-parsing-logic.html
January 20, 2024, 5:10 PM
In this blog post, I will cover how debputy parses its manifest and the
conceptual improvements I did to make parsing of the manifest easier.
All instructions to debputy are provided via the debian/debputy.manifest file and
said manifest is written in the YAML format. After the YAML parser has read the
basic file structure, debputy does another pass over the data to extract the
information from the basic structure. As an example, the following YAML file:
manifest-version: "0.1"
installations:
...
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Thomas Koch: Rebuild search with trust
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-20-rebuild-search-with-trust.html
January 20, 2024, 11:10 AM
Posted on January 20, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, life, search, decentralization

Finally there is a thing people can agree on:
2023-08-28, OSNews: The end of the Googleverse
2023-07-28, Cory Doctorow: Microincentives and Enshittification
2023-10-03, Cory Doctorow: Google’s enshittification memos
2024-01-15, Tim Bray: Mourning Google
Apparently, Google Search is not good anymore. And I’m not the only one thinking about decentralization to fix it:
Honey I federat...
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