Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.18: Multiple Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/16#rprotobuf_0.4.18
December 16, 2021, 11:05 PM
A new release 0.4.18 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.
This release, the first since March of last year, contains two contributed pull requests improving or extending the package, some internal maintance updating the CI setup as well as ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: BH 1.78.0-0: New Upstream, Two New Libraries
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/16#bh_1.78.0-0.txt" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/16#bh_1.78.0-0.txt
December 16, 2021, 9:46 PM
Boost is a very large and comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming language, containing well over 100 individual libraries. The BH package provides a sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking required) use by R. It is fairly widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud mirrors) show over 28 million package downloads.
Version 1.78.0 of Boost was released in a few days ago on their schedule with April, August and Dece...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: BH 1.78.0-0: New Upstream, Two New Libraries
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/16#bh_1.78.0-0
December 16, 2021, 9:46 PM
Boost is a very large and comprehensive set of (peer-reviewed) libraries for the C++ programming language, containing well over 100 individual libraries. The BH package provides a sizeable subset of header-only libraries for (easier, no linking required) use by R. It is fairly widely used: the (partial) CRAN mirror logs (aggregated from the cloud mirrors) show over 28 million package downloads.
Version 1.78.0 of Boost was released in a few days ago on their schedule with April, August and Decemb...
--------------------
Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2021
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/12/16/freexians-report-about-debian-long-term-support-november-2021/
December 16, 2021, 3:27 PM
Every month we review the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for November below.
Debian project funding
Our project funding work continues with an active bid on the work of packaging a recent gradle in Debian. This month the bidder has been estimating the scope of the entire project.The Grow Your Ideas project page also has some ambitious initiatives that may evolve into a funded project. The project ideas on that page range from a new wiki for Debian, ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.5 on CRAN: Update
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/14#nanotime_0.3.5
December 15, 2021, 3:14 AM
Another (minor) nanotime release, now at version 0.3.5, just arrived at CRAN. It follows the updates RDieHarder 0.2.3 and RcppCCTZ 0.2.10 earlier today in bringing a patch kindly prepared by Tomas Kalibera for the upcoming (and very useful) ‘UCRT’ changes for Windows involving small build changes for the updated Windows toolchain.
nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package for (efficient) high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppCCTZ 0.2.10: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2021/12/14#rcppcctz_0.2.10
December 15, 2021, 12:10 AM
A new release 0.2.10 of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN.
RcppCCTZ uses Rcpp to bring CCTZ to R. CCTZ is a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. In fact, it is two libraries. One for dealing with civil time: human-readable dates and times, and one for converting between between absolute and civil times via time zones. And while CCTZ is made by Google(rs), it is not an official Google product. The RcppCCTZ page has a few usage examples and details. Th...
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Timo Jyrinki: Working and warming up cats
http://losca.blogspot.com/2021/12/working-and-warming-up-cats.html
December 14, 2021, 7:29 AM
How to disable internal keyboard/touchpad when a cat arrives I’m using an external keyboard (1) and mouse (2), but the laptop lid is usually still open for better cooling. That means the internal keyboard (3) and touchpad (4) – made of comfortable materials – are open to be used by a cat searching for warmth (7), in the obvious “every time” case that a normal non-heated nest (6) is not enough.The problem is, everything goes chaotic at that point in the default configuration...
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Andrej Shadura: Coffee gear upgrade
https://blog.shadura.me/2021/12/12/coffee-gear-upgrade/
December 12, 2021, 11:49 AM
Two weeks ago I decided to make myself a combined birthday and Christmas present and upgrade my coffee gear.
I’ve got my first espresso machine back in 2013, it was a cheap Saeco Philips Poemia, which made reasonably
drinkable coffee, but not being able to make good coffee made me increasingly unhappy about it. However,
since it worked, I wasn’t motivated enough to change anything — until it stopped working. One day the nut holding
the ‘shower screen’ broke, and I couldn’t replace it...
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Russell Coker: Some Ideas for Debian Security Improvements
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/12/12/ideas-debian-security-improvements/
December 12, 2021, 7:24 AM
Debian security is pretty good, but there’s always scope for improvement. Here are some ideas that I think could be used to improve things.
A security “wizard”, basically a set of scripts with support for plugins that will investigate your system and look for things that can be improved. It could give suggestions on LSMs that could be used, sysctl settings, lists of daemons running as root that possibly don’t need root privs, etc. Plugins could be for different daemons, so there could b...
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Molly de Blanc: Applications
http://deblanc.net/blog/2021/12/11/applications/
December 11, 2021, 9:07 PM
The first time I applied for grad school it was a bit of a lark. I was serious about it, I wanted to go, I had goals, and I am happy to be here now. However, it was a little fun. I took a white paper and crisped it up with the help of some friends who read it and provided comments. I wrote a personal statement, got some letters of recommendation, and generally felt pretty good about the process. It wasn’t stressful.
The second time I applied to grad school it was a slog. For several weeks I ga...
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Neil Williams: Diversity and gender
https://linux.codehelp.co.uk/diversity-and-gender.html
December 11, 2021, 12:20 PM
As a follow on to a previous blog entry of mine, Free and Open, I feel it
worthwhile to do my bit to dismantle the pseudo-science and over
simplification in the idea that gender is binary at a biological level.
TL;DR: Science simply does not support binary sexes or binary genders.
Truth is a bit more complicated.
There is certainty and there are binary answers in mathematics. Things
get less definitive in physics, certainly as soon as quantum is
broached. Processes become more of an equilibrium...
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Junichi Uekawa: Updated my raspberry pi to bullseye and no longer connects to network.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2021-Dec-11.html.en#2021-Dec-11-10:10:51
December 11, 2021, 1:10 AM
Updated my raspberry pi to bullseye and no longer connects to network. Seems like eth0 got renamed.
probably this thing that I was supposed to have migrated away from.
Not entirely sure how to recover from this now.
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 196 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-196-released/
December 10, 2021, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 196. This version includes the following changes:
[ Roland Clobus ]
* Add a comment/annotation when the GNU_BUILD_ID field has been modified.
[ Brent Spillner ]
* Fix the "Black" version detection.
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Replace "token" with anonymous variable "x" in order to remove extra lines.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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David Kalnischkies: APT for Advent of Code
https://david.kalnischkies.de/blog/2021/apt-for-advent-of-code
December 9, 2021, 12:14 PM
Advent of Code 2021
Advent of Code, for those not in the know,
is a yearly Advent calendar (since 2015) of coding puzzles many people
participate in for a plenary of reasons ranging from speed coding to code
golf with stops at learning a new language or practicing already known
ones.
I usually write boring C++, but any language and then some can be used.
There are reports of people implementing it in hardware, solving them by
hand on paper or using Microsoft Excel…
so, after solving a p...
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Jonathan Dowland: Java in a Container World
https://jmtd.net/log/uksystems21/redhat/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://jmtd.net/log/uksystems21/redhat/
December 8, 2021, 11:02 AM
me, delivering the talk
The redhat talk I gave at UK Systems '21 was entitled "Java in a
Container World: What we've done and where we're going". The slides (with
notes) for it are available:
java in a container world.pdf (PDF, 670K)...
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Craig Small: Fediverse Test Three
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/08/test3/
December 8, 2021, 6:25 AM
This supposedly will go out to the fediverse if I can fix wp-cron.
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Craig Small: ap test 4
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/08/ap-test-4/
December 8, 2021, 5:13 AM
dfdsfssdffdsfs
--------------------
Craig Small: ap test3
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/08/ap-test3/
December 8, 2021, 4:57 AM
this is the body
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Craig Small: Hello world!
https://dropbear.xyz/2021/12/08/hello-world/
December 8, 2021, 1:58 AM
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
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Abiola Ajadi: Outreachy- Get to know me!
https://ajadi-abiola.github.io/blog/Outreachy-Get-to-know-me!
December 8, 2021, 12:00 AM
Hello Everyone!
I am Abiola Ajadi from Lagos, Nigeria. I have my B.sc in computer science from the University of Ilorin where I was involved in various community building and also a student leader.
In my free time, I love watching anime, reading comics also surfing the net. I enjoy learning about different cultures and will love to travel the world soon!
Concerning pets, I love dogs(they are so cute!!)
My core values
I will use the 3Cs to describe my core values, which stands for Curiosity, ...
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Jonathan Dowland: Cost models for evaluating stream-processing programs
https://jmtd.net/log/uksystems21/
December 7, 2021, 9:29 PM
As I wrote, last week I attended the UK Systems Research
2021 and gave two (or 2½, or 3) talks. my
PhD talk is entitled "Picking a winner: cost models for evaluating
stream-processing programs". The slides (with notes) are here:
picking a winner.pdf (PDF, 425K)...
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Evgeni Golov: The Mocking will continue, until CI improves
https://www.die-welt.net/2021/12/the-mocking-will-continue-until-ci-improves/
December 7, 2021, 7:39 PM
One might think, this blog is exclusively about weird language behavior and yelling at computers… Well, welcome to another episode of Jackass!
Today's opponent is Ruby, or maybe minitest , or maybe Mocha. I'm not exactly sure, but it was a rather amusing exercise and I like to share my nightmares ;)
It all started with the classical "you're using old and unmaintained software, please switch to something new".
The first attempt was to switch from the ci_reporter_minitest plugin to the minitest-...
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Daniel Lange: Gradual improvements at the Linux Foundation
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/172-Gradual-improvements-at-the-Linux-Foundation.html
December 7, 2021, 10:11 AM
After last year's blunder with trying to hide the Adobe toolchain and using hilarious stock photos, the Linux Foundation did much better in their 2021 annual report1 published Dec. 6, 2021.
Still they are using the Adobe toolchain (InDesign, Acrobat PDF) and my fellow DebianKernel2 Developer Geert was quick to point that out as the first comment to the LWN note on the publication:
I think it is important to call the Linux Foundation (LF) out again and again. Adobe is a Silver member of the L...
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Russell Coker: AS400
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/12/07/as400/
December 7, 2021, 3:08 AM
The IBM i operating system on the AS/400 is a system that runs on PPC for “midrange” systems. I did a bit of reading about it after seeing an AS/400 on ebay for $300, if I had a lot more spare time and energy I might have put in a bid for that if it didn’t look like it had been left out in the rain. It seems that AS/400 is not dead, there are cloud services available, here’s one that provides a VM with 2GM of RAM for “only EUR 251 monthly” [1], wow. I’m not qualified to comment on ...
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Jonathan Dowland: Sixth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop lightning talk
https://jmtd.net/log/lightning/
December 6, 2021, 10:04 PM
me looking awkward, thanks Mark Little
Last week I attended the UK Systems Research
2021 conference in County Durham, my first
conference in nearly two years (since FOSDEM 2020,
right on the cusp of the Pandemic). The Systems conference community
is very pleasant and welcoming and so when I heard it was going to
take place "physically" again this year I was so keen to attend I
decided to hedge my bets and submit two talk proposals. I wasn't
expecting them both to be accepted…
As well as t...
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Matthias Klumpp: New things in AppStream 0.15
https://blog.tenstral.net/2021/12/new-things-in-appstream-0-15.html
December 6, 2021, 5:40 PM
On the road to AppStream 1.0, a lot of items from the long todo list have been done so far – only one major feature is remaining, external release descriptions, which is a tricky one to implement and specify. For AppStream 1.0 it needs to be present or be rejected though, as it would be a major change in how release data is handled in AppStream.
Besides 1.0 preparation work, the recent 0.15 release and the releases before it come with their very own large set of changes, that are worth a lo...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Proxying Ethernet Frames to PACKRAT (Part 5/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-proxy/
December 6, 2021, 4:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
In the last post, we left off at being able to send and recieve PACKRAT frames
to and from devices. Since we can transport IPv4 packets over the network,
let’s go ahead and see if we can read/write
Ethernet frames from a Linux network
interface, and on the backend, read and write PACKRAT frames over the air.
This...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2021
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2021-11/
December 5, 2021, 6:33 PM
Welcome to the November 2021 report from the Reproducible Builds project.
As a quick 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. The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is therefore to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to co...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Framing data (Part 4/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-framing/
December 5, 2021, 4:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
In the last post, we we were able to build a functioning
Layer 1 PHY where we can encode symbols to transmit, and receive symbols on the
other end, we’re now at the point where we can encode and decode those symbols
as bits and frame blocks of data, marking them with a Sender and a Destination
for routing to the ...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Leaving MySQL
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2021-12-05-16-41_leaving_mysql.html
December 5, 2021, 3:41 PM
Today was my last day at Oracle, and thus also in the MySQL team.
When a decision comes to switch workplaces, there's always the question of
“why”, but that question always has multiple answers, and perhaps the
simplest one is that I found another opportunity, and and as a whole,
it was obvious it was time to move on when that arrived.
But it doesn't really explain why I did go looking for that somewhere else
in the first place. The reasons for that are again complex, and it's not
possible...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 195 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-195-released/
December 5, 2021, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 195. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't use the runtime platform's native endianness when unpacking .pyc
files to fix test failures on big-endian machines.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
--------------------
Jonathan Dowland: Haskell mortgage calculator
https://jmtd.net/log/mortgage_calculator/
December 4, 2021, 10:01 PM
A few months ago I was trying to compare two mortgage offers, and ended up
writing a small mortgage calculator to help me. Both mortgages were fixed-term
for the same time period (5 years). One of the mortgages had a lower rate than
the other, but much higher arrangement fees.
A broker recommended the mortgage with the higher rate but lower fee, on an
affordability basis for the fixed term: over all, we would spend less money
within the fixed term on that deal than the other. (I thought) this l...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Receiving BPSK symbols (Part 3/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-receiving/
December 4, 2021, 4:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
In the last post, we worked through how to generate
a BPSK signal, and hopefully transmit it using one of our SDRs.
Let’s take that and move on to Receiving BPSK and turning that back
into symbols!
Demodulating BPSK data is a bit more tricky than transmitting BPSK data, mostly
due to tedious facts of life such as...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Transmitting BPSK symbols (Part 2/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-transmitting/
December 3, 2021, 4:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
In the last post, we worked through what IQ is,
and different formats that it may be sent or received in. Let’s take that
and move on to Transmitting BPSK using IQ data!
When we transmit and receive information through RF using an SDR, data is
traditionally encoded into a stream of
symbols
which are then used by ...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: A Brazilian Portuguese translation of the book Made with Creative Commons
http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Brazilian_Portuguese_translation_of_the_book_Made_with_Creative_Commons.html
December 3, 2021, 8:30 AM
A few days ago, a productive translator started working on a new
translation of the Made with Creative
Commons book for Brazilian Portuguese. The translation take place on
the
Weblate web based translation system. Once the translation is
complete and proof read, we can publish it on paper as well as in PDF,
ePub and HTML format. The translation is already 16% complete, and if
more people get involved I am conviced it can very quickly reach 100%.
If you are interested in helping out with this ...
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Evgeni Golov: Dependency confusion in the Ansible Galaxy CLI
https://www.die-welt.net/2021/12/dependency-confusion-in-the-ansible-galaxy-cli/
December 3, 2021, 8:00 AM
I hope you enjoyed my last post about Ansible Galaxy Namespaces. In there I noted that I originally looked for something completely different and the namespace takeover was rather accidental.
Well, originally I was looking at how the different Ansible content hosting services and their client (ansible-galaxy) behave in regard to clashes in naming of the hosted content.
"Ansible content hosting services"?! There are currently three main ways for users to obtain Ansible content:
Ansible Galaxy - ...
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Jonathan McDowell: Building a desktop to improve my work/life balance
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2021/12/desktop-work-life-balance.html
December 2, 2021, 8:00 PM
It’s been over 20 months since the first COVID lockdown kicked in here in Northern Ireland and I started working from home. Even when the strict lockdown was lifted the advice here has continued to be “If you can work from home you should work from home”. I’ve been into the office here and there (for new starts given you need to hand over a laptop and sort out some login details it’s generally easier to do so in person, and I’ve had a couple of whiteboard sessions that needed the hig...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Processing IQ data formats (Part 1/5) 🐀
https://k3xec.com/packrat-processing-iq/
December 2, 2021, 5:00 PM
🐀 This post is part of a series called "PACKRAT". If this is the first post
you've found, it'd be worth reading the
intro post first and then looking over
all posts in the series.
When working with SDRs, information about the signals your radio is receiving
are communicated by streams of
IQ
data. IQ is short for “In-phase” and “Quadrature”, which means 90 degrees
out of phase. Values in the IQ stream are
complex numbers, so
converting them to a native complex type in your language
he...
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Steve Kemp: It has been some time..
https://blog.steve.fi/it_has_been_some_time__.html
December 2, 2021, 5:00 PM
I realize it has been quite some time since I last made a blog-post, so I guess the short version is "I'm still alive", or as Granny Weatherwax would have said:
I ATE'NT DEAD
Of course if I die now this would be an awkward post!
I can't think of anything terribly interesting I've been doing recently, mostly being settled in my new flat and tinkering away with things. The latest "new" code was something for controlling mpd via a web-browser:
https://github.com/skx/mpd-web
This is a simp...
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Junichi Uekawa: December.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2021-Dec-2.html.en#2021-Dec-2-08:56:22
December 1, 2021, 11:56 PM
December. The world is turbulent and I am still worried where we are going.
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2021
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2021/12/my-debian-activities-in-november-2021/
December 1, 2021, 3:33 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 564 and rejected 93 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 591.
Debian LTS
This was my eighty-ninth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
This month my all in all workload has been 40h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of:
[DLA 2820-1] atftp security update for two CVEs
[DLA 2821-1] axis security update for one CVE
[DLA 2822-1] netkit-rsh security update for...
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Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in December 2021
https://utkarsh2102.com/posts/foss-in-nov-21/
December 1, 2021, 5:41 AM
Here’s my (twenty-sixth) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 35th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! o/
Just churning through the backlog again this month. Ugh.
Anyway, I did the following stuff in Debian:
Uploads and bug fixes:
rails (2:6.1.4.1+dfsg-3) - No-change rebuild for unstable.
Other $things:
Mentoring for newcomers.
Moderation of -project mailing ...
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Russ Allbery: Review: A World Without Email
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-525-53657-4.html
December 1, 2021, 5:07 AM
Review: A World Without Email, by Cal Newport

Publisher:
Portfolio/Penguin


Copyright:
2021


ISBN:
0-525-53657-4


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
264

A World Without Email is the latest book by computer science
professor and productivity writer Cal Newport. After a detour to comment
on the drawbacks of social media in Digital Minimalism, Newport is back to writing about focus and
concentration in the vein of Deep Work.
This time, thou...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2021
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2021/12/01/floss-activities/
December 1, 2021, 2:52 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
crazydiskinfo:
cleanup
plac:
cleanup
mpv-mpris:
cleanup
(1
2)
purple-discord:
cleanup
yt-dlp:
add
RTRFM,
Blogger,
ABC iView show/series
extractors
gensim:
reenable test dep,
use PATH too
whohas:
https
devscripts:
bts CC improvements
Debian package uploads:
sptag,
purple-discord,
uvloop
Debian wiki pages:
AndroidTools,
ChrootOnAndroid,
DebianBookworm,
DebianHams/Handbook,
DebianKernel/Users...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Links November 2021
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/11/30/links-november-2021/
November 30, 2021, 1:31 PM
The Guardian has an amusing article by Sophie Elmhirst about Libertarians buying a cruise ship to make a “seasteading” project off the coast of Panama [1]. It turns out that you need permits etc to do this and maintaining a ship is expensive. Also you wouldn’t want to mine cryptocurrency in a ship cabin as most cabins are small and don’t have enough airconditioning to remain pleasant if you dump 1kW or more into the air.
NPR has an interesting article about the reaction of the NRA to the...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Commitcoin
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2021-11-30-12-00_commitcoin.html
November 30, 2021, 11:00 AM
How do you get a git commit with an interesting commit ID (or “SHA”)?
Of course, interesting is in the eye of the beholder, but let's define
it as having many repeated hex nibbles, e.g. “000” in the commit would
be somewhat interesting and “8888888888888888888888888” would be very
interesting. This is pretty similar to the dreaded cryptocoin mining;
we have no simple way of forcing a given SHA-1 hash unless someone
manages a complete second-preimage break, so we must brute-force.
(An...
--------------------
Russell Coker: Your Device Has Been Improved
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2021/11/30/your-device-has-been-improved/
November 30, 2021, 9:41 AM
I’ve just started a Samsung tablet downloading a 770MB update, the description says:
Overall stability of your device has been improved
The security of your device has been improved
Technically I have no doubt that both those claims are true and accurate. But according to common understanding of the English language I think they are both misleading.
By “stability improved” they mean “fixed some bugs that made it unstable” and no technical person would imagine that after a certain n...
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Evgeni Golov: Getting access to somebody else's Ansible Galaxy namespace
https://www.die-welt.net/2021/11/getting-access-to-somebody-elses-ansible-galaxy-namespace/
November 29, 2021, 8:00 AM
TL;DR: adding features after the fact is hard, normalizing names is hard, it's patched, carry on.
I promise, the longer version is more interesting and fun to read!
Recently, I was poking around Ansible Galaxy and almost accidentally got access to someone else's namespace. I was actually looking for something completely different, but accidental finds are the best ones!
If you're asking yourself: "what the heck is he talking about?!", let's slow down for a moment:
Ansible is a great automation ...
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Dima Kogan: GL_image_display
http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2021/11/28_glimagedisplay.html
November 29, 2021, 7:53 AM
I just spent an unspeakable number of days typing to produce something that
sounds very un-impressive: an FLTK widget that can display an image. The docs
and code live here. The big difference from the usual image-drawing widget is
that this one uses OpenGL internally, so after the initial image load, the
common operations (drawing, redrawing, panning and zooming) are very fast. I
have high-resolution images in my projects, and this will make my tools much
nicer.
Three separate interfaces are...
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Russ Allbery: Fall haul
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2021-11/002.html
November 29, 2021, 3:45 AM
It's been a while since I've posted one of these, and I also may have had
a few moments of deciding to support authors by buying their books even if
I'm not going to get a chance to read them soon. There's also a bit of
work reading in here.
Ryka Aoki — Light from Uncommon Stars (sff)
Frederick R. Chromey — To Measure the Sky (non-fiction)
Neil Gaiman, et al. — Sandman: Overture (graphic novel)
Alix E. Harrow — A Spindle Splintered (sff)
Jordan Ifueko — Raybearer (sff)
Jordan Ifuek...
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Wouter Verhelst: GR procedures and timelines
https://grep.be/blog//en/life/debian/GR_procedures_and_timelines/
November 28, 2021, 7:04 PM
A vote has been proposed in
Debian to change the formal procedure in Debian by which General
Resolutions (our name for "votes") are proposed. The original proposal
is based on a text by Russ
Allberry, which changes a number
of rules to be less ambiguous and, frankly, less weird.
One thing Russ' proposal does, however, which I am absolutely not in
agreement with, is to add a absolutly hard time limit after three weeks.
That is, in the proposed procedure, the discussion time will be two
weeks ini...
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Joachim Breitner: Zero-downtime upgrades of Internet Computer canisters
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/789-Zero-downtime_upgrades_of_Internet_Computer_canisters
November 28, 2021, 5:11 PM
TL;DR: Zero-downtime upgrades are possible if you stick to the basic actor model.
Background
DFINITY’s Internet Computer provides a kind of serverless compute platform, where the services are WebAssemmbly programs called “canisters”. These services run without stopping (or at least that’s what it feels like from the service’s perspective; this is called “orthogonal persistence”), and process one message after another. Messages not only come from the outside (“ingress” calls), b...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Soul Music
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-223741-1.html
November 28, 2021, 5:35 AM
Review: Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #16


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
January 1995


Printing:
November 2013


ISBN:
0-06-223741-1


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
420

Soul Music is the sixteenth Discworld novel and something of a plot
sequel to Reaper Man (although more of a
sequel to the earlier Mort). I would
not start reading the Discworld books here.
Susan is a student in the ...
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Russ Allbery: Review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-23622-3.html
November 27, 2021, 5:27 AM
Review: A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers

Series:
Monk & Robot #1


Publisher:
Tordotcom


Copyright:
July 2021


ISBN:
1-250-23622-3


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
160

At the start of the story, Sibling Dex is a monk in a monastery in Panga's
only City. They have spent their entire life there, love the buildings,
know the hidden corners of the parks, and find the architecture beautiful.
They're also hearti...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 194 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-194-released/
November 26, 2021, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 194. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't traceback when comparing nested directories with non-directories.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#288)
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Mike Gabriel: Touching Firefox on Linux
https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/139
November 25, 2021, 10:01 AM
More as a reminder to myself, but possibly also helpful to other people who want to use Firefox on a tablet running Debian...
Without the below adjustment, finger gestures in Firefox running on a tablet result in image moving, text highlighting, etc. (operations related to copy+paste). Not the intuitively expected behaviour...
If you use e.g. GNOME on Wayland for your tablet and want to enable touch functionalities in Firefox, then switch the whole browser to native Wayland rendering. This lin...
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Enrico Zini: Really lossy compression of JPEG
http://www.enricozini.org/blog/2021/python/really-lossy-compression-of-jpeg
November 23, 2021, 6:58 PM
Suppose you have a tool that archives images, or scientific data, and it has a
test suite. It would be good to collect sample files for the test suite, but
they are often so big one can't really bloat the repository with them.
But does the test suite need everything that is in those files? Not necesarily.
For example, if one's testing code that reads EXIF metadata, one doesn't care
about what is in the image.
That technique works extemely well. I can take GRIB
files that are several megabytes in...
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Jonathan Wiltshire: Mischief managed
https://www.jwiltshire.org.uk/2021/11/22/mischief-managed/
November 22, 2021, 10:50 PM
I’m finally paying up a certain amount of household technical debt, including investigating some exciting mystery cabling and insulating the space it inhabits. This has meant pulling down large chunks of ceiling (eventually, most or all of it for the insulation) on a cable hunt.
Turns out the best tool for this part of the job is a decent length of 4 by 2, some borrowed muscle, and a certain amount of bravery. Once a couple of holes have been cut the old-fashioned way to be sure there’s n...
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Ricardo Mones: Claws Mail 4 in experimental
https://mones.livejournal.com/118453.html
November 22, 2021, 9:49 AM
A full month has passed since Claws Mail 4.0.0 was uploaded to Debian experimental, and, somewhat surprisingly, I've received no bug report about it.
This of course can be either because nobody has been brave enough to install it or because well, it works really nice.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, just note that this version is the first Debian upload for the GTK+3 version of Claws Mail. There was an initial upstream release, namely 3.99, but it was less polished and also I wa...
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Paul Tagliamonte: Be careful when using vxlan!
https://blog.pault.ag/post/668518326195109888
November 22, 2021, 2:39 AM
I’ve spent a bit of time playing with
vxlan - which is very neat, but also incredibly insecure by default.When using vxlan, be very careful to understand how the host is connected to the internet. The kernel will listen on all interfaces for packets, which means hosts accessable to VMs it’s hosting (e.g., by bridged interface or a private LAN will accept packets from VMs and inject them into arbitrary VLANs, even ones it’s not on.I reported this to the kernel mailing list to no reply with ...
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