Jonathan Dowland: a bug a day
https://jmtd.net/log/a_bug_a_day/
March 25, 2024, 4:58 PM
I recently became a maintainer of/committer to IkiWiki,
the software that powers my site. I also took over maintenance of the Debian
package. Last week I cut a new upstream point release, 3.20200202.4, and a
corresponding Debian package upload, consisting only of a handful of
low-hanging-fruit patches from other people, largely to exercise both
processes.
I've been discussing IkiWiki's maintenance situation with some other users for
a couple of years now. I've also weighed up the pros and cons ...
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Valhalla's Things: Piecepack and postcard boxes
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/11/04-piecepack_and_postcard_boxes/index.html
March 25, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on March 25, 2024


Tags: madeof:bits, craft:cartonnage




This article has been originally posted on November 4, 2023, and has
been updated (at the bottom) since.
Thanks to All Saints’ Day, I’ve just had a 5 days weekend. One of those
days I woke up and decided I absolutely needed a cartonnage box for the
cardboard and linocut piecepack I’ve been working on for quite some
time.
I started drawing a plan with measures before breakfas...
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Anuradha Weeraman: Testing again
https://weeraman.com/testing-again/
March 24, 2024, 3:29 PM
123
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Anuradha Weeraman: This is a test
https://weeraman.com/this-is-a-test/
March 24, 2024, 3:26 PM
Testing 1 2 3
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Niels Thykier: debputy v0.1.21
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/debputy-v0-1-21.html
March 24, 2024, 2:30 PM
Earlier today, I have just released debputy version 0.1.21
to Debian unstable. In the blog post, I will highlight some
of the new features.
Package boilerplate reduction with automatic relationship substvar
Last month, I started a discussion on rethinking how we do
relationship substvars such as the ${misc:Depends}. These
generally ends up being boilerplate runes in the form of
Depends: ${misc:Depends}, ${shlibs:Depends} where you
as the packager has to remember exactly which runes apply
to you...
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Marco d'Itri: CISPE's call for new regulations on VMware
https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_469
March 24, 2024, 12:52 PM
A few days ago CISPE, a trade association of European cloud providers, published a press release complaining about the new VMware licensing scheme and asking for regulators and legislators to intervene.
But VMware does not have a monopoly on virtualization software: I think that asking regulators to interfere is unnecessary and unwise, unless, of course, they wish to question the entire foundations of copyright. Which, on the other hand, could be an intriguing position that I would support...
...
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Jacob Adams: Regular Reboots
https://tookmund.com/2024/03/regular-reboot
March 24, 2024, 12:00 AM
Uptime is often considered a measure of system reliability,
an indication that the running software is stable and can be counted on.
However, this hides the insidious build-up of state throughout the system as
it runs, the slow drift from the expected to the strange.
As Nolan Lawson highlights in an excellent post entitled
Programmers are bad at managing state,
state is the most challenging part of programming.
It’s why “did you try turning it off and on again” is a classic tech support
...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: littler 0.3.20 on CRAN: Moar Features!
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/03/23#littler-0.3.20
March 23, 2024, 10:06 PM
The twentyfirst release of littler as a
CRAN package
landed on CRAN just now, following in the now eighteen 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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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2024)
https://bits.debian.org/2024/03/new-developers-2024-02.html
March 23, 2024, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Carles Pina i Estany (cpina)
Dave Hibberd (hibby)
Soren Stoutner (soren)
Daniel Gröber (dxld)
Jeremy Sowden (azazel)
Ricardo Ribalda Delgado (ribalda)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Joachim Bauch
Ananthu C V
Francesco Ballarin
Yogeswaran Umasankar
Kienan Stewart
Congratulations!...
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Kentaro Hayashi: How about allocating more buildd resource for armel and armhf?
https://kenhys.hatenablog.jp/entry/2024/03/23/211515
March 23, 2024, 12:15 PM
This article is cross-posting from grow-your-ideas. This is just an idea.
salsa.debian.org
The problem
According to Developer Machines [1],
current buildd machines are like this:
armel: 4 buildd (4 for arm64/armhf/armel)
armhf: 7 buildd (4 for arm64/armhf/armel and 3 for armhf only)
[1] https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi
In contrast to other buildd architectures, these instances are quite a few and it seems that
it causes a shortage of buildd resourses. (e.g. during mass transition, giv...
--------------------
Erich Schubert: Do not get Amazon Kids+ or a Fire HD Kids
https://www.vitavonni.de/blog/202403/20240323amazon-kids-has-no-whitelist.html
March 23, 2024, 10:15 AM
The Amazon Kids “parental controls” are extremely insufficient, and I strongly advise against getting any of the Amazon Kids series.
The initial permise (and some older reviews) look okay: you can set some time limits, and you can disable anything that requires buying.
With the hardware you get one year of the “Amazon Kids+” subscription, which includes a lot of interesting content such as books and audio,
but also some apps. This seemed attractive: some learning apps, some decent games...
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Valhalla's Things: Forgotten Yeast Bread - Sourdough Edition
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/03/23-forgotten_yeast_bread_sourdough_edition/index.html
March 23, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on March 23, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:cooking, craft:baking, craft:bread



Yesterday I had planned a pan sbagliato for today, but I also had
quite a bit of sourdough to deal with, so instead of mixing a bit of of
dry yeast at 18:00 and mixing it with some additional flour and water at
21:00, at around maybe 20:00 I substituted:
100 g firm sourdough;
33 g flour;
66 g water.
Then I briefly woke up in the middle of the night and pour...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 261 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-261-released/
March 22, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 261. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't crash if we encounter an .rdb file without an equivalent .rdx file.
(Closes: #1066991)
* In addition, don't identify Redis database dumps (etc.) as GNU R database
files based simply on their filename. (Re: #1066991)
* Update copyright years.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Ian Jackson: How to use Rust on Debian (and Ubuntu, etc.)
https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/18122.html
March 21, 2024, 9:47 PM
tl;dr: Don’t just apt install rustc cargo. Either do that and make sure to use only Rust libraries from your distro (with the tiresome config runes below); or, just use rustup.
Don’t do the obvious thing; it’s never what you wantQ. Download and run whatever code from the internet?
Option 1: WTF, no I don’t want curl|bash
Option 2: Biting the curl|bash bulletPrivilege separation
OMG what a mess
Don’t do the obvious thing; it’s never what you want
Debian ships a Rust compiler, a...
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Ravi Dwivedi: Thailand Trip
https://ravidwivedi.in/posts/thailand-trip/
March 21, 2024, 8:45 PM
This post is the second and final part of my Malaysia-Thailand trip. Feel free to check out the Malaysia part here if you haven’t already. Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok is around 1500 km by road, and so I took a Malaysian Airlines flight to travel to Bangkok. The flight staff at the Kuala Lumpur only asked me for a return/onward flight and Thailand immigration asked a few questions but did not check any documents (obviously they checked and stamped my passport ;)). The currency of Thailand is the Th...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: ciw 0.0.2 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/03/20#ciw_0.0.2
March 20, 2024, 1:18 PM
A first revision of the still only one-week old (at CRAN) package ciw has been
released to CRAN! It provides
is a single (efficient) function incoming() (now along with
an alias ciw()) which summarises the state of the incoming
directories at CRAN. I happen
to like having these things at my (shell) fingertips, so it goes along
with (still draft) wrapper
ciw.r that will be part of the next littler release.
For example, when I do this right now as I type this, I see
(typically less than one second...
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Jonathan Dowland: aerc email client
https://jmtd.net/log/aerc/
March 20, 2024, 10:38 AM
I started looking at aerc, a new Terminal mail client, in
around 2019. At that time it was promising, but ultimately not ready yet for me, so
I put it away and went back to neomutt which I have been
using (in one form or another)   all century.
These days, I use neomutt as an IMAP client which is perhaps what it's worst
at: prior to that, and in common with most users (I think), I used it to read
local mail, either fetched via offlineimap or
directly on my mail server. I switched to using it a...
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Iustin Pop: Corydalis 2024.12.0 released
https://k1024.org/posts/2024/2024-03-20-corydalis-v2024.12/
March 20, 2024, 12:20 AM
I’ve been working for the past few weeks on Corydalis, and was in no
hurry to make a release, but last evening I found the explanation for
a really, really, really annoying issue: unintended “zooming” on touch
interfaces in the image viewer. Or more precisely, I found this post
from 2015 (9 years ago!):
https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/ and I
finally understood things. And decided this was the best choice for
cutting a new release.
Of course, the release contains...
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Colin Watson: apt install everything?
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/ubuntu-install-everything.html
March 19, 2024, 7:05 AM
On Mastodon, the
question came up of
how Ubuntu would deal with something like the npm install
everything situation. I replied:
Ubuntu is curated, so it probably wouldn’t get this far. If it did, then
the worst case is that it would get in the way of CI allowing other
packages to be removed (again from a curated system, so people are used to
removal not being self-service); but the release team would have no
hesitation in removing a package like this to fix that, and it certainly
wouldn’...
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Joey Hess: policy on adding AI generated content to my software projects
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/policy_on_adding_AI_generated_content_to_my_software_projects/
March 18, 2024, 8:54 PM
I am eager to incorporate your AI generated code into my software.
Really!
I want to facilitate making the process as easy as possible. You're already
using an AI to do most of the hard lifting, so why make the last step hard? To
that end, I skip my usually extensive code review process for your AI generated
code submissions. Anything goes as long as it compiles!
Please do remember to include "(AI generated)" in the description of your
changes (at the top), so I know to skip my usual review pr...
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Simon Josefsson: Apt archive mirrors in Git-LFS
https://blog.josefsson.org/2024/03/18/apt-archive-mirrors-in-git-lfs/
March 18, 2024, 4:15 PM
My effort to improve transparency and confidence of public apt archives continues. I started to work on this in “Apt Archive Transparency” in which I mention the debdistget project in passing. Debdistget is responsible for mirroring index files for some public apt archives. I’ve realized that having a publicly auditable and preserved mirror of the apt repositories is central to being able to do apt transparency work, so the debdistget project has become more central to my project than I th...
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Christoph Berg: vcswatch and git --filter
https://www.df7cb.de/blog/2024/vcswatch-git-filter.html
March 18, 2024, 12:45 PM
Debian is running a "vcswatch"
service that keeps track of the status of all packaging repositories that have a
Vcs-Git
(and other VCSes) header set and shows which repos might need a package upload to push pending changes out.
Naturally, this is a lot of data and the scratch partition on qa.debian.org
had to be expanded several times, up to 300 GB in the last iteration.
Attempts to reduce that size using shallow clones (git clone --depth=50)
did not result more than a few percent of space save...
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Gunnar Wolf: After miniDebConf Santa Fe
https://gwolf.org/2024/03/after-minidebconf-santa-fe.html
March 18, 2024, 4:00 AM
Last week we held our promised miniDebConf in Santa Fe City, Santa Fe province,
Argentina — just across the river from Paraná, where I have spent almost six
beautiful months I will never forget.

Around 500 Kilometers North from Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Paraná are separated
by the beautiful and majestic Paraná river, which flows from Brazil, marks the
Eastern border of Paraguay, and continues within Argentina as the heart of the
litoral region of the country, until it merges with th...
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Thomas Koch: Minimal overhead VMs with Nix and MicroVM
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-03-17-minimal-vms-nix-microvm.html
March 17, 2024, 10:13 AM
Posted on March 17, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, nix

Joachim Breitner wrote about a Convenient sandboxed development environment and thus reminded me to blog about MicroVM. I’ve toyed around with it a little but not yet seriously used it as I’m currently not coding.
MicroVM is a nix based project to configure and run minimal VMs. It can mount and thus reuse the hosts nix store inside the VM and thus has a very small disk footprint. I use MicroVM on a debian system...
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Thomas Koch: Rebuild search with trust
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-20-rebuild-search-with-trust.html
March 17, 2024, 10:13 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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Thomas Koch: Using nix package manager in Debian
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-16-using-nix-package-manager-in-debian.html
March 17, 2024, 10:13 AM
Posted on January 16, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, nix, life

The nix package manager is available in Debian since May 2020. Why would one use it in Debian?
learn about nix
install software that might not be available in Debian
install software without root access
declare software necessary for a user’s environment inside $HOME/.config
Especially the last point nagged me every time I set up a new Debian installation. My emacs configuration and my Desktop setup expe...
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Thomas Koch: Chromium gtk-filechooser preview size
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-09-chromium-gtk-filechooser-preview-size.html
March 17, 2024, 10:13 AM
Posted on January 9, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, life

I wanted to report this issue in chromiums issue tracker, but it gave me:
“Something went wrong, please try again later.”
Ok, then at least let me reply to this askubuntu question. But my attempt to signup with my launchpad account gave me:
“Launchpad Login Failed. Please try logging in again.”
I refrain from commenting on this to not violate some code of conduct.
So this is what I wanted to write:
G...
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Thomas Koch: Good things come ... state folder
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2024-01-02-good-things-state-folder.html
March 17, 2024, 10:13 AM
Posted on January 2, 2024


Tags: debian, free software, life

Just a little while ago (10 years) I proposed the addition of a state folder to the XDG basedir specification and expanded the article XDGBaseDirectorySpecification in the Debian wiki. Recently I learned, that version 0.8 (from May 2021) of the spec finally includes a state folder.
Granted, I wasn’t the first to have this idea (2009), nor the one who actually made it happen.
Now, please go ahead and use it! Tha...
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Patryk Cisek: OpenPGP Paper Backup
https://prezu.ca/post/openpgp-paper-backup/
March 15, 2024, 9:42 PM
openpgp-paper-backup I’ve been using OpenPGP through GnuPG since early 2000’. It’s an essential part of Debian Developer’s workflow. We use it regularly to authenticate package uploads and votes. Proper backups of that key are really important.
Up until recently, the only reliable option for me was backing up a tarball of my ~/.gnupg offline on a set few flash drives. This approach is better than nothing, but it’s not nearly as reliable as I’d like it to be....
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Gregor Herrmann: teamwork in practice
https://info.comodo.priv.at/blog/teamwork_in_practice.html
March 14, 2024, 10:10 PM
teamwork, or: why I love the Debian Perl Group:
elbrus has introduced a (very untypical) package into the
Debian Perl Group in 2022.
after changes of the default compiler options
(-Werror=implicit-function-declaration) in debian, it didn't
build any more & received an RC bug.
because I sometimes like challenges, I had a look at it & cobbled together
a patch. as I hardly speak any C, I sent my notes to the bug report
& (implictly) asked for help. – & went out to meet a
friend...
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Matthew Garrett: Digital forgeries are hard
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/69507.html
March 14, 2024, 9:11 AM
Closing arguments in the trial between various people and Craig Wright over whether he's Satoshi Nakamoto are wrapping up today, amongst a bewildering array of presented evidence. But one utterly astonishing aspect of this lawsuit is that expert witnesses for both sides agreed that much of the digital evidence provided by Craig Wright was unreliable in one way or another, generally including indications that it wasn't produced at the point in time it claimed to be. And it's fascinating reading t...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: ciw 0.0.1 on CRAN: New Package!
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/03/13#ciw_0.0.1
March 14, 2024, 12:03 AM
Happy to share that ciw is now on CRAN! I had tooted a little bit
about it, e.g., here.
What it provides is a single (efficient) function
incoming() which summarises the state of the incoming
directories at CRAN. I happen
to like having these things at my (shell) fingertips, so it goes along
with (still draft) wrapper
ciw.r that will be part of the next littler release.
For example, when I do this right now as I type this, I see
edd@rob:~$ ciw.r
Folder Name T...
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, February 2024 (by Roberto C. Sánchez)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2024-02/
March 14, 2024, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In February, 18 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 10.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
Adrian Bunk
did 13.5h (out of 24.25h assigned and 41.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 52.5h to the next month.
Bastien Roucariès
did 20.0h (out of 20.0h assigned).
Ben Hutchings
did 2.0h (ou...
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Russell Coker: The Shape of Computers
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/03/13/shape-computers/
March 13, 2024, 12:16 PM
Introduction
There have been many experiments with the sizes of computers, some of which have stayed around and some have gone away. The trend has been to make computers smaller, the early computers had buildings for them. Recently for come classes computers have started becoming as small as could be reasonably desired. For example phones are thin enough that they can blow away in a strong breeze, smart watches are much the same size as the old fashioned watches they replace, and NUC type comput...
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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, /usr-move, packaging simplemonitor, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-02-2024/
March 13, 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.
/usr-move, by Helmut Grohne
Much of the work was spent on handling interaction with time time64 transition
and sending patches for mitigating fallout. The set of packages relevant to
debootstrap is mostly converted and the patches for glibc and ...
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Russell Coker: Android vs FOSS Phones
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/03/12/android-vs-foss-phones/
March 12, 2024, 10:35 AM
To achieve my aims regarding Convergence of mobile phone and PC [1] I need something a big bigger than the 4G of RAM that’s in the PinePhone Pro [2]. The PinePhonePro was released at the end of 2021 but has a SoC that was first released in 2016. That SoC seems to compare well to the ones used in the Pixel and Pixel 2 phones that were released in the same time period so it’s not a bad SoC, but it doesn’t compare well to more recent Android devices and it also isn’t a great fit for the non...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: digest 0.6.35 on CRAN: New xxhash code
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/03/11#digest_0.6.35
March 11, 2024, 11:23 PM
Release 0.6.35 of the digest package
arrived at CRAN today and has
also been uploaded to Debian
already.
digest
creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects. It can use a number
different hashing algorithms (md5, sha-1,
sha-256, sha-512, crc32,
xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32,
spookyhash, blake3,crc32c – and
now also xxh3_64 and xxh3_128), and enables
easy comparison of (potentially large and nested) R language objects as
it relies on the native serialization in R. It is a mature and
widely-used p...
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Joachim Breitner: Convenient sandboxed development environment
https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/812-Convenient_sandboxed_development_environment
March 11, 2024, 8:39 PM
I like using one machine and setup for everything, from serious development work to hobby projects to managing my finances. This is very convenient, as often the lines between these are blurred. But it is also scary if I think of the large number of people who I have to trust to not want to extract all my personal data. Whenever I run a cabal install, or a fun VSCode extension gets updated, or anything like that, I am running code that could be malicious or buggy.
In a way it is surprising and r...
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Evgeni Golov: Remote Code Execution in Ansible dynamic inventory plugins
https://www.die-welt.net/2024/03/remote-code-execution-in-ansible-dynamic-inventory-plugins/
March 11, 2024, 8:00 PM
I had reported this to Ansible a year ago (2023-02-23), but it seems this is considered expected behavior, so I am posting it here now.
TL;DR
Don't ever consume any data you got from an inventory if there is a chance somebody untrusted touched it.
Inventory plugins
Inventory plugins allow Ansible to pull inventory data from a variety of sources.
The most common ones are probably the ones fetching instances from clouds like Amazon EC2
and Hetzner Cloud or the ones talking to tools like Foreman.
F...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2024
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2024/03/my-debian-activities-in-february-2024/
March 10, 2024, 12:22 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 242 and rejected 42 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 251.
This was just a short month and the weather outside was not really motivating. I hope it will be better in March.
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-sixteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
During my allocated time I uploaded:
[DLA 3739-1] libjwt security update for one CVE to fix some ‘constant-ti...
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Vasudev Kamath: Cloning a laptop over NVME TCP
https://copyninja.in/blog/clone_laptop_nvmet.html
March 10, 2024, 11:45 AM
Recently, I got a new laptop and had to set it up so I could start using it. But
I wasn't really in the mood to go through the same old steps which I had
explained in this post earlier. I was complaining about
this to my colleague, and there came the suggestion of why not copy the entire
disk to the new laptop. Though it sounded like an interesting idea to me, I had
my doubts, so here is what I told him in return.
I don't have the tools to open my old laptop and connect the new disk over
USB to...
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Valhalla's Things: Low Fat, No Eggs, Lasagna-ish
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/drafts/low_fat_no_eggs_lasagna_ish/index.html
March 10, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on March 10, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:cooking



A few notes on what we had for lunch, to be able to repeat it after the
summer.
There were a number of food intolerance related restrictions which meant
that the traditional lasagna recipe wasn’t an option; the result still
tasted good, but it was a bit softer and messier to take out of the pan
and into the dishes.
On Saturday afternoon we made fresh no-egg pasta with 200 g (durum)
f...
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Iustin Pop: Finally learning some Rust - hello photo-backlog-exporter!
https://k1024.org/posts/2024/2024-03-09-learning-rust-finally/
March 9, 2024, 10:30 PM
After 4? 5? or so years of wanting to learn Rust, over the past 4 or
so months I finally bit the bullet and found the motivation to write
some Rust. And the subject.
And I was, and still am, thoroughly surprised. It’s like someone took
Haskell, simplified it to some extents, and wrote a systems language
out of it. Writing Rust after Haskell seems easy, and pleasant, and you:
don’t have to care about unintended laziness which causes memory
“leaks” (stuck memory, more like).
don’t have ...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in February 2024
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2024-02/
March 9, 2024, 4:53 PM
Welcome to the February 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In our reports, we try to outline what we have been up to over the past month as well as mentioning some of the important things happening in software supply-chain security.
Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024
Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. However, that wasn’t the only talk related to Reproducible Builds...
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Valhalla's Things: Elastic Neck Top Two: MOAR Ruffles
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/03/09-elastic_neck_top_two_moar_ruffles/index.html
March 9, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on March 9, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear




After making my Elastic Neck Top
I knew I wanted to make another one less constrained by the amount of
available fabric.
I had a big cut of white cotton voile, I bought some more swimsuit
elastic, and I also had a spool of n°100 sewing cotton, but then I
postponed the project for a while I was working on other things.
Then FOSDEM 2024 arrived, I was going to remote it, a...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Acts of active procrastination: example of a silly Python script for Moodle
https://veronneau.org/acts-of-active-procrastination-example-of-a-silly-python-script-for-moodle.html
March 8, 2024, 11:15 PM
My brain is currently suffering from an overload caused by grading student
assignments.
In search of a somewhat productive way to procrastinate, I thought I
would share a small script I wrote sometime in 2023 to facilitate my grading
work.
I use Moodle for all the classes I teach and students use it to hand me out
their papers. When I'm ready to grade them, I download the ZIP archive Moodle
provides containing all their PDF files and comment them using xournalpp and
my Wacom tablet.
Once this is...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 260 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-260-released/
March 8, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 260. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Actually test 7z support in the test_7z set of tests, not the lz4
functionality. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#359)
* In addition, correctly check for the 7z binary being available
(and not lz4) when testing 7z.
* Prevent a traceback when comparing a contentful .pyc file with an
empty one. (Re: Debian:#1064973)
You find out mor...
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Valhalla's Things: Denim Waistcoat
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/03/08-denim_waistcoat/index.html
March 8, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on March 8, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear




I had finished sewing my jeans, I had a scant 50 cm of elastic denim
left.
Unrelated to that, I had just finished drafting a vest with Valentina,
after the Cutters’ Practical Guide to the Cutting of Ladies Garments.
A new pattern requires a (wearable) mockup. 50 cm of leftover fabric
require a quick project. The decision didn’t take a lot of time.
As a mockup, I kept ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: prrd 0.0.6 at CRAN: Several Improvements
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/03/07#prrd_0.0.6
March 7, 2024, 11:05 PM
Thrilled to share that a new version of prrd arrived at
CRAN yesterday in a first
update in two and a half years. prrd facilitates
the parallel running [of] reverse dependency [checks] when
preparing R packages. It is used extensively for releases I make of Rcpp, RcppArmadillo,
RcppEigen,
BH, and
others.
The key idea of prrd is simple,
and described in some more detail on its webpage and
its GitHub repo.
Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development
that is easily done ...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: Plain text accounting file from your bitcoin transactions
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Plain_text_accounting_file_from_your_bitcoin_transactions.html
March 7, 2024, 5:00 PM
A while back I wrote a small script to extract the Bitcoin
transactions in a wallet in the
ledger plain text accounting
format. The last few days I spent some time to get it working
better with more special cases. In case it can be useful for others,
here is a copy:
#!/usr/bin/python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# Copyright (c) 2023-2024 Petter Reinholdtsen
from decimal import Decimal
import json
import subprocess
import time
import numpy
def format_float(num):
return numpy.format_float_...
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Guido Günther: Phosh Nightly Package Builds
https://phosh.mobi/posts/phosh-nightly/
March 7, 2024, 2:19 PM
Tightening the feedback loop Link to heading One thing we notice ever so often is that although Phosh’s source code is publicly available and upcoming changes are open for review the feedback loop between changes being made to the development branch and users noticing the change can still be quiet long.
This can be problematic as we ideally want to catch a regression or broken use case triggered by a change on the development branch (aka main) before the general availability of a new version....
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Gunnar Wolf: Constructed truths — truth and knowledge in a post-truth world
https://gwolf.org/2024/03/constructed-truths-truth-and-knowledge-in-a-post-truth-world.html
March 7, 2024, 1:08 AM
This post is a review for Computing Reviews


for Constructed truths — truth and knowledge in a post-truth world



, a book
published in Springer Link



Many of us grew up used to having some news sources we could implicitly trust, such as well-positioned newspapers and radio or TV news programs. We knew they would only hire responsible journalists rather than risk diluting public trust and losing their br...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Reverse Amdahl's Law
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-03-06-17-39_reverse_amdahls_law.html
March 6, 2024, 4:39 PM
Everybody working in performance knows Amdahl's law,
and it is usually framed as a negative result; if you optimize
(in most formulations, parallelize) a part of an operation,
you gain diminishing results after a while. (When optimizing a
given fraction p of the total time T by a speedup factor s,
the new time taken is (1-p)T + pT/s.)
However, Amdahl's law also works beautifully in reverse!
When you optimize something, there's usually some limit where
a given optimization isn't worth it anymore...
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Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana: Bits from FOSDEM 2023 and 2024
http://phls.com.br/bits-from-fosdem-2023-and-2024
March 4, 2024, 11:50 PM
Link para versão em português
Intro
Since 2019, I have traveled to Brussels at the beginning of the year to join FOSDEM, considered the largest and most important Free Software event in Europe. The 2024 edition was the fourth in-person edition in a row that I joined (2021 and 2022 did not happen due to COVID-19) and always with the financial help of Debian, which kindly paid my flight tickets after receiving my request asking for help to travel and approved by the Debian leader.
In 2020 I w...
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Colin Watson: Free software activity in January/February 2024
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/activity-2024-02.html
March 4, 2024, 10:39 AM
Two months into my new gig and it’s going
great! Tracking my time has taken a bit of
getting used to, but having something that amounts to a queryable database
of everything I’ve done has also allowed some helpful introspection.
Freexian sponsors up
to 20% of my time on Debian tasks of my choice. In fact I’ve been spending
the bulk of my time on
debusine which is itself
intended to accelerate work on Debian, but more details on that later.
While I contribute to Freexian’s
summaries no...
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Iustin Pop: New corydalis 2024.9.0 release!
https://k1024.org/posts/2024/2024-03-03-new-corydalis-release/
March 3, 2024, 10:15 PM
Obligatory and misused quote: It’s not dead, Jim!
I’ve kind of dropped by ball lately on organising my own photo
collection, but February was a pretty good month and I managed to
write some more code for
Corydalis, ending up with the
aforementioned new
release.
The release is not a big one, but I did manage to solve one thing that
was annoying me greatly: that lack of ability to play videos inline
in one of the two picture viewing modes (in my preferred mode, in
fact). Now, whether you’re ...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: RAID status from LSI Megaraid controllers using free software
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAID_status_from_LSI_Megaraid_controllers_using_free_software.html
March 3, 2024, 9:40 PM
The last few days I have revisited RAID setup using the LSI
Megaraid controller. These are a family of controllers called PERC by
Dell, and is present in several old PowerEdge servers, and I recently
got my hands on one of these. I had forgotten how to handle this RAID
controller in Debian, so I had to take a peek in the
Debian wiki page
"Linux and Hardware RAID: an administrator's summary" to remember
what kind of software is available to configure and monitor the disks
and controller. I pre...
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Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in February 2024
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/2024/03/03/foss-activity-in-february-2024.html
March 3, 2024, 7:28 PM
I updated the Linux kernel packages in various Debian suites:

buster: Updated linux-5.10 to the latest security update for
bullseye, and uploaded it, but it still needs to be approved.
bullseye-backports: Updated linux (6.1) to the latest security
update from bullseye, and uploaded it.
bookworm-backports: Updated linux to the current version in
testing, and uploaded it.


I reported a regression in documentation
builds in the Linux 5.10 stable
branch....
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities Feb 2024
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2024/03/03/floss-activities/
March 3, 2024, 7:52 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
check-all-the-things:
update dep
Debian reportbug:
allow defaults for multi-select menus
Debian release website:
link arch policy from arch qualification
Debian BTS usertags:
fix porter, reproducible, release tags
Debian wiki pages:
attachement:root-system-build.sh,
attachement:root-system-changes.sh,
DebianScience/ROOT,
Games/GameDataPackager,
PortsDocs/New
Issues
Crashes in
ognibuild...
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Ravi Dwivedi: Malaysia Trip
https://ravidwivedi.in/posts/malaysia-trip/
March 2, 2024, 1:59 PM
Last month, I had a trip to Malaysia and Thailand. I stayed for six days in each of the countries. The selection of these countries was due to both of them granting visa-free entry to Indian tourists for some time window. This post covers the Malaysia part and Thailand part will be covered in the next post. If you want to travel to any of these countries in the visa-free time period, I have written all the questions asked during immigration and at airports during this trip here which might be of...
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