Planet Debian

Leonardo and I are happy to announce the release of another maintenance release 0.1.3 of our dtts package which has been on CRAN for a good 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 release contains two nice and focussed contributed pull requests. Tomas Kalibera, who as part of R Core looks after everything concerning R on Windows, and then some, needed an adjustment for pending / upcoming R on Windows changes for builds with LLVM which is what Arm-on-Windows uses. We happily obliged: neither Leonardo nor I see much of Windows these decades. (Easy thing to say on a day like today with its crowdstrike hammer falling!) Similarly, Michael Chirico supplied a PR updating one of our tests to an upcoming change at data.table which we are of course happy to support.

The short list of changes follows.

Changes in version 0.1.3 (2024-07-18)

• Windows builds use localtime_s with LLVM (Tomas Kalibera in #16)

• Tests code has been adjusted for an upstream change in data.table tests for all.equal (Michael Chirico in #18 addressing #17)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a report with diffstat for this release. Questions, comments, issue tickets can be brought to the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Dennis van Dok (dvandok)
• Peter Wienemann (wiene)
• Quentin Lejard (valde)
• Sven Geuer (sge)
• Taavi Väänänen (taavi)
• Hilmar Preusse (hille42)
• Matthias Geiger (werdahias)
• Yogeswaran Umasankar (yogu)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Bernhard Miklautz
• Felix Moessbauer
• Maytham Alsudany
• Aquila Macedo
• David Lamparter
• Tim Theisen
• Stefano Brivio
• Shengqi Chen

Congratulations!

Suppose you have a meson project like this:

meson.build:

project('example', 'cpp', version: '1.0', license : '…', default_options: ['warning_level=everything', 'cpp_std=c++17']) subdir('example')

example/meson.build:

test_example = executable('example-test', ['main.cc'])

example/string.h:

/* This file intentionally left empty */

example/main.cc:

#include <cstring> int main(int argc,const char* argv[]) { std::string foo("foo"); return 0; }

This builds fine with autotools and cmake, but not meson:

$ meson setup builddir The Meson build system Version: 1.0.1 Source dir: /home/enrico/dev/deb/wobble-repr Build dir: /home/enrico/dev/deb/wobble-repr/builddir Build type: native build Project name: example Project version: 1.0 C++ compiler for the host machine: ccache c++ (gcc 12.2.0 "c++ (Debian 12.2.0-14) 12.2.0") C++ linker for the host machine: c++ ld.bfd 2.40 Host machine cpu family: x86_64 Host machine cpu: x86_64 Build targets in project: 1 Found ninja-1.11.1 at /usr/bin/ninja $ ninja -C builddir ninja: Entering directory `builddir' [1/2] Compiling C++ object example/example-test.p/main.cc.o FAILED: example/example-test.p/main.cc.o ccache c++ -Iexample/example-test.p -Iexample -I../example -fdiagnostics-color=always -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -Wall -Winvalid-pch -Wextra -Wpedantic -Wcast-qual -Wconversion -Wfloat-equal -Wformat=2 -Winline -Wmissing-declarations -Wredundant-decls -Wshadow -Wundef -Wuninitialized -Wwrite-strings -Wdisabled-optimization -Wpacked -Wpadded -Wmultichar -Wswitch-default -Wswitch-enum -Wunused-macros -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wunsafe-loop-optimizations -Wstack-protector -Wstrict-overflow=5 -Warray-bounds=2 -Wlogical-op -Wstrict-aliasing=3 -Wvla -Wdouble-promotion -Wsuggest-attribute=const -Wsuggest-attribute=noreturn -Wsuggest-attribute=pure -Wtrampolines -Wvector-operation-performance -Wsuggest-attribute=format -Wdate-time -Wformat-signedness -Wnormalized=nfc -Wduplicated-cond -Wnull-dereference -Wshift-negative-value -Wshift-overflow=2 -Wunused-const-variable=2 -Walloca -Walloc-zero -Wformat-overflow=2 -Wformat-truncation=2 -Wstringop-overflow=3 -Wduplicated-branches -Wattribute-alias=2 -Wcast-align=strict -Wsuggest-attribute=cold -Wsuggest-attribute=malloc -Wanalyzer-too-complex -Warith-conversion -Wbidi-chars=ucn -Wopenacc-parallelism -Wtrivial-auto-var-init -Wctor-dtor-privacy -Weffc++ -Wnon-virtual-dtor -Wold-style-cast -Woverloaded-virtual -Wsign-promo -Wstrict-null-sentinel -Wnoexcept -Wzero-as-null-pointer-constant -Wabi-tag -Wuseless-cast -Wconditionally-supported -Wsuggest-final-methods -Wsuggest-final-types -Wsuggest-override -Wmultiple-inheritance -Wplacement-new=2 -Wvirtual-inheritance -Waligned-new=all -Wnoexcept-type -Wregister -Wcatch-value=3 -Wextra-semi -Wdeprecated-copy-dtor -Wredundant-move -Wcomma-subscript -Wmismatched-tags -Wredundant-tags -Wvolatile -Wdeprecated-enum-enum-conversion -Wdeprecated-enum-float-conversion -Winvalid-imported-macros -std=c++17 -O0 -g -MD -MQ example/example-test.p/main.cc.o -MF example/example-test.p/main.cc.o.d -o example/example-test.p/main.cc.o -c ../example/main.cc In file included from ../example/main.cc:1: /usr/include/c++/12/cstring:77:11: error: ‘memchr’ has not been declared in ‘::’ 77 | using ::memchr; | ^~~~~~ /usr/include/c++/12/cstring:78:11: error: ‘memcmp’ has not been declared in ‘::’ 78 | using ::memcmp; | ^~~~~~ /usr/include/c++/12/cstring:79:11: error: ‘memcpy’ has not been declared in ‘::’ 79 | using ::memcpy; | ^~~~~~ /usr/include/c++/12/cstring:80:11: error: ‘memmove’ has not been declared in ‘::’ 80 | using ::memmove; | ^~~~~~~ …

It turns out that meson adds the current directory to the include path by default:

Another thing to note is that include_directories adds both the source directory and corresponding build directory to include path, so you don't have to care.

It seems that I have to care after all.

Thankfully there is an implicit_include_directories setting that can turn this off if needed.

Its documentation is not as easy to find as I'd like (kudos to Kangie on IRC), and hopefully this blog post will make it easier for me to find it in the future.

The Rcpp Core Team is once again pleased to announce a new release (now at 1.0.13) of the Rcpp package. It arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has since been uploaded to Debian. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days, as will builds in different Linux distribution–and of course r2u should catch up tomorrow too. The release was uploaded last week, but not only does Rcpp always gets flagged because of the grandfathered .Call(symbol) but CRAN also found two packages ‘regressing’ which then required them to take five days to get back to us. One issue was known; another did not reproduce under our tests against over 2800 reverse dependencies leading to the eventual release today. Yay. Checks are good and appreciated, and it does take time by humans to review them.

This release continues with the six-months January-July cycle started with release 1.0.5 in July 2020. As a reminder, we do of course make interim snapshot ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases available via the Rcpp drat repo as well as the r-universe page and repo and strongly encourage their use and testing—I run my systems with these versions which tend to work just as well, and are also fully tested against all reverse-dependencies.

Rcpp has long established itself as the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. Right now, 2867 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further, along with 256 in BioConductor. On CRAN, 13.6% of all packages depend (directly) on Rcpp, and 59.9% of all compiled packages do. From the cloud mirror of CRAN (which is but a subset of all CRAN downloads), Rcpp has been downloaded 86.3 million times. The two published papers (also included in the package as preprint vignettes) have, respectively, 1848 (JSS, 2011) and 324 (TAS, 2018) citations, while the the book (Springer useR!, 2013) has another 641.

This release is incremental as usual, generally preserving existing capabilities faithfully while smoothing our corners and / or extending slightly, sometimes in response to changing and tightened demands from CRAN or R standards. The move towards a more standardized approach for the C API of R leads to a few changes; Kevin did most of the PRs for this. Andrew Johnsom also provided a very nice PR to update internals taking advantage of variadic templates.

The full list below details all changes, their respective PRs and, if applicable, issue tickets. Big thanks from all of us to all contributors!

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.13 (2024-07-11)

• Changes in Rcpp API:

  • Set R_NO_REMAP if not already defined (Dirk in #1296)

  • Add variadic templates to be used instead of generated code (Andrew Johnson in #1303)

  • Count variables were switches to size_t to avoid warnings about conversion-narrowing (Dirk in #1307)

  • Rcpp now avoids the usage of the (non-API) DATAPTR function when accessing the contents of Rcpp Vector objects where possible. (Kevin in #1310)

  • Rcpp now emits an R warning on out-of-bounds Vector accesses. This may become an error in a future Rcpp release. (Kevin in #1310)

  • Switch VECTOR_PTR and STRING_PTR to new API-compliant RO variants (Kevin in #1317 fixing #1316)

• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:

  • Small updates to the CI test containers have been made (#1304)

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues).

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

The Initial Encounter:

I recently started to work with Nginx to explore the requirements on how to configure a then so called server block. It’s quite different than within Apache. But there are a tons of good websites out there which do explain the different steps and options quite well. I also realized quickly that I need to be able to configure my Nginx setups in a way so the content is delivered through https with some automatic redirection from http URLs.

• Let’s install Nginx

Installing Nginx $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install nginx Checking your Web Server

• We can check now nginx service is active or inactive

Output ● nginx.service - A high performance web server and a reverse proxy server Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: active (running) since Tue 2024-02-12 09:59:20 UTC; 3h ago Docs: man:nginx(8) Main PID: 2887 (nginx) Tasks: 2 (limit: 1132) Memory: 4.2M CPU: 81ms CGroup: /system.slice/nginx.service ├─2887 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on; └─2890 nginx: worker process

• Now we successfully installed nginx and it in running state.

How To Secure Nginx with Let’s Encrypt on Debian 12

• In this documentation, you will use Certbot to obtain a free SSL certificate for Nginx on Debian 12 and set up your certificate.

Step 1 — Installing Certbot

$ sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-nginx

• Certbot is now ready to use, but in order for it to automatically configure SSL for Nginx, we need to verify some of Nginx’s configuration.

Step 2 — Confirming Nginx’s Configuration

• Certbot needs to be able to find the correct server block in your Nginx configuration for it to be able to automatically configure SSL. Specifically, it does this by looking for a server_name directive that matches the domain you request a certificate for. To check, open the configuration file for your domain using nano or your favorite text editor.

$ sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

server { listen 80; root /var/www/html/; index index.html; server_name example.com location / { try_files $uri $uri/ =404; } location /test.html { try_files $uri $uri/ =404; auth_basic "admin area"; auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd; } }

• Fillup above data your project wise and then save the file, quit your editor, and verify the syntax of your configuration edits.

$ sudo nginx -t

Step 3 — Obtaining an SSL Certificate

• Certbot provides a variety of ways to obtain SSL certificates through plugins. The Nginx plugin will take care of reconfiguring Nginx and reloading the config whenever necessary. To use this plugin, type the following command line.

$ sudo certbot --nginx -d example.com

• The configuration will be updated, and Nginx will reload to pick up the new settings. certbot will wrap up with a message telling you the process was successful and where your certificates are stored.

Output IMPORTANT NOTES: - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem Your key file has been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem Your cert will expire on 2024-05-12. To obtain a new or tweaked version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot again with the "certonly" option. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run "certbot renew" - If you like Certbot, please consider supporting our work by: Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/donate Donating to EFF: https://eff.org/donate-le

• Your certificates are downloaded, installed, and loaded. Next check the syntax again of your configuration.

$ sudo nginx -t

• If you get an error, reopen the server block file and check for any typos or missing characters. Once your configuration file’s syntax is correct, reload Nginx to load the new configuration.

$ sudo systemctl reload nginx

• Try reloading your website using https:// and notice your browser’s security indicator. It should indicate that the site is properly secured, usually with a lock icon.

Now your website is secured by SSL usage.

While I was living in Argentina, we (my family) found ourselves checking for weather forecasts almost constantly — weather there can be quite unexpected, much more so that here in Mexico. So it took me a bit of tinkering to come up with a couple of simple scripts to show the weather forecast as part of my Waybar setup. I haven’t cared to share with anybody, as I believe them to be quite trivial and quite dirty.

But today, Víctor was asking for some slightly-related things, so here I go. Please do remember I warned: Dirty.

I am using OpenWeather’s open API. I had to register to get an APPID, and it allows me for up to 1,000 API calls per day, more than plenty for my uses, even if I am logged in at my desktops at three different computers (not an uncommon situation). Having that, I set up a file named /etc/get_weather/, that currently reads:

# Home, Mexico City LAT=19.3364 LONG=-99.1819 # # Home, Paraná, Argentina # LAT=-31.7208 # LONG=-60.5317 # # PKNU, Busan, South Korea # LAT=35.1339 #LONG=129.1055 APPID=SomeLongRandomStringIAmNotSharing

Then, I have a simple script, /usr/local/bin/get_weather, that fetches the current weather and the forecast, and stores them as /run/weather.json and /run/forecast.json:

#!/usr/bin/bash CONF_FILE=/etc/get_weather if [ -e "$CONF_FILE" ]; then . "$CONF_FILE" else echo "Configuration file $CONF_FILE not found" exit 1 fi if [ -z "$LAT" -o -z "$LONG" -o -z "$APPID" ]; then echo "Configuration file must declare latitude (LAT), longitude (LONG) " echo "and app ID (APPID)." exit 1 fi CURRENT=/run/weather.json FORECAST=/run/forecast.json wget -q "https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?lat=${LAT}&lon=${LONG}&units=metric&appid=${APPID}" -O "${CURRENT}" wget -q "https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?lat=${LAT}&lon=${LONG}&units=metric&appid=${APPID}" -O "${FORECAST}"

This script is called by the corresponding systemd service unit, found at /etc/systemd/system/get_weather.service:

[Unit] Description=Get the current weather [Service] Type=oneshot ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/get_weather

And it is run every 15 minutes via the following systemd timer unit, /etc/systemd/system/get_weather.timer:

[Unit] Description=Get the current weather every 15 minutes [Timer] OnCalendar=*:00/15:00 Unit=get_weather.service [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

(yes, it runs even if I’m not logged in, wasting some of my free API calls… but within reason)

Then, I declare a "custom/weather" module in the desired position of my ~/.config/waybar/waybar.config, and define it as:

"custom/weather": { "exec": "while true;do /home/gwolf/bin/parse_weather.rb;sleep 10; done", "return-type": "json", },

This script basically morphs a generic weather JSON description into another set of JSON bits that display my weather in the way I prefer to have it displayed as:

#!/usr/bin/ruby require 'json' Sources = {:weather => '/run/weather.json', :forecast => '/run/forecast.json' } Icons = {'01d' => '🌞', # d → day '01n' => '🌃', # n → night '02d' => '🌤️', '02n' => '🌥', '03d' => '☁️', '03n' => '🌤', '04d' => '☁️', '04n' => '🌤', '09d' => '🌧️', '10n' => '🌧 ', '10d' => '🌦️', '13d' => '❄️', '50d' => '🌫️' } ret = {'text': nil, 'tooltip': nil, 'class': 'weather', 'percentage': 100} # Current weather report: Main text of the module begin weather = JSON.parse(open(Sources[:weather],'r').read) loc_name = weather['name'] icon = Icons[weather['weather'][0]['icon']] || '？' + f['weather'][0]['icon'] + f['weather'][0]['main'] temp = weather['main']['temp'] sens = weather['main']['feels_like'] hum = weather['main']['humidity'] wind_vel = weather['wind']['speed'] wind_dir = weather['wind']['deg'] portions = {} portions[:loc] = loc_name portions[:temp] = '%s 🌡%2.2f°C (%2.2f)' % [icon, temp, sens] portions[:hum] = '💧 %2d%%' % hum portions[:wind] = '🌬%2.2fm/s %d°' % [wind_vel, wind_dir] ret['text'] = [:loc, :temp, :hum, :wind].map {|p| portions[p]}.join(' ') rescue => err ret['text'] = 'Could not process weather file (%s ⇒ %s: %s)' % [Sources[:weather], err.class, err.to_s] end # Weather prevision for the following hours/days begin cast = [] forecast = JSON.parse(open(Sources[:forecast], 'r').read) min = '' max = '' day=Time.now.strftime('%Y.%m.%d') by_day = {} forecast['list'].each_with_index do |f,i| by_day[day] ||= [] time = Time.at(f['dt']) time_lbl = '%02d:%02d' % [time.hour, time.min] icon = Icons[f['weather'][0]['icon']] || '？' + f['weather'][0]['icon'] + f['weather'][0]['main'] by_day[day] << f['main']['temp'] if time.hour == 0 min = '%2.2f' % by_day[day].min max = '%2.2f' % by_day[day].max cast << ' ↑ min: <b>%s°C</b> max: <b>%s°C</b>' % [min, max] day = time.strftime('%Y.%m.%d') cast << ' ┍━━━━━┫ <b>%04d.%02d.%02d</b> ┠━━━━━┑' % [time.year, time.month, time.day] end cast << '%s | %2.2f°C | 🌢%2d%% | %s %s' % [time_lbl, f['main']['temp'], f['main']['humidity'], icon, f['weather'][0]['description'] ] end cast << ' ↑ min: <b>%s</b>°C max: <b>%s°C</b>' % [min, max] ret['tooltip'] = cast.join("\n") rescue => err ret['tooltip'] = 'Could not process forecast file (%s ⇒ %s)' % [Sources[:forecast], err.class, err.to_s] end # Print out the result for Waybar to process puts ret.to_json

The end result? Nothing too stunning, but definitively something I find useful and even nicely laid out:

Do note that it seems OpenWeather will return the name of the closest available meteorology station with (most?) recent data — for my home, I often get Ciudad Universitaria, but sometimes Coyoacán or even San Ángel Inn.

Lomiri Weather App goes Open Meteo

In Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri, Maciej Sopyło has updated Lomiri's Weather App to operate against a different weather forecast provider (Open Meteo). Additionally, the new implementation is generic and pluggable, so other weather data providers can be added-in later.

Big thanks to Maciej for working on this just in time (the previous implementation's API has recently been EOL'ed and is not available anymore to Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri users).

Lomiri Weather App - new Meteorological Terms part of the App now

While the old weather data provider implementation obtained all the meteorological information as already localized strings from the provider, the new implementation requires all sorts of weather conditions being translated within the Lomiri Weather App itself.

The meteorological terms are probably not easy to translate for the usual software translator, so special help might be required here.

Call for Translations: Lomiri Weather App

So, if you feel entitled to help here, please join the Hosted Weblate service [1] and start working on Lomiri Weather App.

Thanks a lot!

light+love
Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver)

[1] https://hosted.weblate.org/
[2] https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/lomiri/lomiri-weather-app/

After the VoLTE saga [1] and the problems with battery life on the PinePhonePro [2] (which lasted 4 hours while idle with the screen off in my last test a few weeks ago) I’m running a Galaxy Note 9 [3] with the default Samsung OS as my daily driver.

I don’t think that many people will be rushing out to buy a 2018 phone regardless of my review. For someone who wants a phone of such age (which has decent hardware and a low price) then good options are the Pixel phones which are all supported by LineageOS.

I recommend not buying this phone due to the fact that it doesn’t have support for VoLTE with LineageOS (and presumably any other non-Samsung Android build) and doesn’t have support from any other OS. The One Plus 6/6T has Mobian support [4] as well as LineageOS support and is worth considering.

The Note 9 still has capable hardware by today’s standards. A 6.4″ display is about as big as most people want in their pocket and 2960×1440 resolution in that size (516dpi) is probably as high as most people can see without a magnifying glass. The model I’m using has 8G of RAM which is as much as the laptop I was using at the start of this year. I don’t think that many people will have things that they actually want to do on a phone which needs more hardware than this. The only hardware feature in new phones which beats this is the large folding screen in some recent phones, but $2500+ (the price of such phones in Australia) is too much IMHO and the second hand market for folding phones is poor due to the apparently high incidence of screens breaking.

The Note 9 has the “Dex” environment for running as a laptop if you connect it to a USB-C dock. It can run nicely with a 4K monitor with USB keyboard and mouse. The UI is very similar to that of older versions of Windows.

The Samsung version of Android seems mostly less useful than the stock Google version or the LineageOS version. The Samsung keyboard flags words such as “gay” as spelling errors and it can’t be uninstalled even when you install a better keyboard app. There is a “Bixby” button on the side of the phone to launch the Bixby voice recognition app which can’t be mapped to any useful purpose, The Google keyboard has a voice dictation option which I will try out some time but that’s all I desire in terms of voice recognition. There are alerts about Samsung special deals and configuration options including something about signing in to some service and having it donate money to charity, I doubt that any users want such features. Apart from Dex the Samsung Android build is a good advert for LineageOS.

The screen has curved sides for no good reason. This makes it more difficult to make a protective phone case as a case can’t extend beyond the screen at the sides and therefore if it’s dropped and hits an edge (step, table, etc) then the glass can make direct contact with something. Also the curved sides reflect sunlight in all directions, this means that the user has to go to more effort to avoid reflecting the sun into their eyes and that a passenger can more easily reflect sunlight into the eyes of a car driver. It’s an impressive engineering feat to make a curved touch-screen but it doesn’t do any good for users.

The stylus is good as always and the screen is AMOLED so it doesn’t waste much power when in dark mode. There is a configuration option to display a clock all the time when the screen is locked because that apparently doesn’t use much power. I haven’t felt inclined to enable the always on screen but it’s a nice feature for those who like such things.

The VoLTE implementation is apparently a bit unusual so it’s not supported by LineageOS and didn’t work on Droidian for the small amount of time that Droidian supported it.

Generally this phone is quite nice hardware it’s just a pity that it demonstrates all of the downsides to buying a non-Pixel phone.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/07/01/volte-australia/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinephone-status/
• [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Note_9
• [4] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/OnePlus/OnePlus6

Related posts:

1. Samsung Galaxy Note 2 A few weeks ago I bought a new Samsung Galaxy...
2. Samsung Galaxy Note 3 In June last year I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note...
3. Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 In May 2014 I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1...

I just got one of those utterly funny spam messages… And yes, I recognize everybody likes building a name for themselves. But some spammers are downright silly.

I just got the following mail:

From: Hermine Wolf <hwolf850@gmail.com> To: me, obviously 😉 Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2024 22:18:58 -0700 Subject: Make sure that your manuscript gets indexed and showcased in the prestigious Scopus database soon. Message-ID: <CAEZZb3XCXSc_YOeR7KtnoSK4i3OhD=FH7u+A5xSMsYvhQZojQA@mail.gmail.com> This message has visual elements included. If they don't display, please update your email preferences. *Dear Esteemed Author,* Upon careful examination of your recent research articles available online, we are excited to invite you to submit your latest work to our esteemed journal, '*WULFENIA*'. Renowned for upholding high standards of excellence in peer-reviewed academic research spanning various fields, our journal is committed to promoting innovative ideas and driving advancements in theoretical and applied sciences, engineering, natural sciences, and social sciences. 'WULFENIA' takes pride in its impressive 5-year impact factor of *1.000* and is highly respected in prestigious databases including the Science Citation Index Expanded (ISI Thomson Reuters), Index Copernicus, Elsevier BIOBASE, and BIOSIS Previews. *Wulfenia submission page:* [image: research--check.png][image: scrutiny-table-chat.png][image: exchange-check.png][image: interaction.png] . Please don't reply to this email We sincerely value your consideration of 'WULFENIA' as a platform to present your scholarly work. We eagerly anticipate receiving your valuable contributions. *Best regards,* Professor Dr. Vienna S. Franz

Who cares what Wulfenia is about? It’s about you, my stupid Wolf cousin!

I do a lot in free software for ham radio, and Steve at Zero Retries encouraged me to take this email I sent him and translate it into something here. UK Packet Radio Network UKPRN is going nicely, with the Nottingham and South segment really quite impressively interconnected over RF - https://nodes.ukpacketradio.network/packet-network-map.html?rfonly=1 I’m excited to see the growth down there! We’re sorting out forwarding and routes in Aberdeen too, and working to grow the RF path to Inverness.

We are pleased to announce that Wind River has committed to sponsor DebConf24 as a Platinum Sponsor.

For nearly 20 years, Wind River has led in commercial open source Linux solutions for mission-critical enterprise edge computing. With expertise across aerospace, automotive, industrial, telecom, more, the company is committed to open source through initiatives like eLxr, Yocto, Zephyr, and StarlingX.

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Wind River is contributing to make possible our annual conference, and directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software, helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Wind River plans to announce an exiting new project based on Debian at this year's DebConf!

Thank you very much, Wind River, for your support of DebConf24!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf24 will take place from 28th July to 4th August 2024 in Busan, South Korea, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from 21st to 27th July 2024.

DebConf24 is accepting sponsors! Interested companies and organizations should contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, or visit the DebConf24 website at https://debconf24.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/.

This project inspired me to investigate whether git.sesse.net could start accepting patches in a format that was less friction than email, and didn't depend on custom SSH-facing code written by others. And it seems it really can! The thought was to simply allow git push from anyone, but that git push doesn't actually push anything; it just creates a pull request (by email). It was much simpler than I'd thought. First make an empty hooks directory with this pre-receive hook (make sure it is readable by your web server, and marked as executable):

#! /bin/bash set -e read oldsha newsha refname git send-email --to=steinar+git@gunderson.no --suppress-cc=all --subject-prefix="git-anon-push PATCH" --quiet $oldsha..$newsha echo '' echo 'Thank you for your contribution! The patch has been sent by email and will be examined for inclusion.' echo 'The push will now exit with an error. No commits have actually been pushed.' exit 1

Now we can activate this hook and anonymous push in each project (I already run git-http-backend on the server for pulling, and it supports just fine if you tell it to), and give www-data write permissions to store the pushed objects temporarily:

git config core.hooksPath /srv/git.sesse.net/hooks git config http.receivepack true sudo chgrp -R www-data . chmod -R g+w .

And now any attempts to git push will send me patch emails that I can review and optionally include!

It's not perfect. For instance, it doesn't support multipush, and if you try to push to a branch that doesn't exist already, will error out since $oldsha is all-zeros. And the From: header is always www-data (but I didn't want to expose myself to all sorts of weird injection attacks by trying to parse the committer email). And of course, there's no spam control, but if you want to spam me with email, then you could just like… send email?

(I have backups, in case someone discovers some sort of evil security hole.)

In two weeks DebConf24, the Debian conference starts in Busan, South Korea. Therefore I've added support for the Korean language into the web service of FAI:

https://fai-project.org/FAIme/

Another new feature of the FAIme service will be announced at DebConf24 in August.

podlators contains the Perl modules and scripts used to convert Perl's documentation language, POD, to text and manual pages.

This is another small bug fix release that is part of iterating on getting the new podlators incorproated into Perl core. The bug fixed in this release was another build system bug I introduced in recent refactorings, this time breaking the realclean target so that some generated scripts were not removed. Thanks to James E Keenan for the report.

You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the podlators distribution page.

DocKnot is my static web site generator, with some additional features for managing software releases.

This release fixes some bugs in the newly-added conversion of text to HTML that were due to my still-incomplete refactoring of that code. It still uses some global variables, and they were leaking between different documents and breaking the formatting. It also fixes consistency problems with how the style parameter in *.spin files was interpreted, and fixes some incorrect docknot update-spin behavior.

You can get the latest version from CPAN or from the DocKnot distribution page.

Prior to arrival in Kenya, you need to apply for an Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA) on their website by uploading all the required documents. This system is in place since Jan 2024 after the country abolished the visa system, implementing the eTA portal. The required documents will depend on the purpose of your visit, which in my case, was to attend a conference.

Here is the list of documents I submitted for my eTA:

• Scanned copy of my passport

• Photograph with white background

• Flight tickets (reservation)

• Hotel bookings (reservation)

• Invitation letter from the conference

• Yellow Fever vaccination certificate (optional)

• Job contract (optional)

“Reservation” means I didn’t book the flights and hotels, but rather reserved them. Additionally, “optional” means that those documents were not mandatory to submit, but I submitted them in the “Other Documents” section in order to support my application. After submitting the eTA, I had to make a payment of around 35 US Dollars (approximately 3000 Indian Rupees).

It took 40 hours for me to receive an email from Kenya stating that my eTA has been approved, along with an attached PDF, making this one of my smoothest experiences of obtaining travel documents to travel to a country :). An eTA is technically not a visa, but I put the word “visa” in the title due to familiarity with the term.

Twenty years ago, it was easy to dislike Microsoft. It was the quintessential evil MegaCorp that was quick to squash competition, often ruthlessly, but in some cases slowly through a more insidious process of embracing, extending, and exterminating anything that got in the way. This was the signature personality of Ballmer-era Microsoft that also inspired and united the software freedom fighting forces that came together to safeguard things that mattered to them and were at risk.

I remember the era when the Novell, SCO, and Microsoft saga cast fear, uncertainty, and doubt on the future of open Unix and Linux and on what would happen to the operating systems that we loved if the suits of Redmond prevailed. Looking back, I&aposm glad that the arc of this story has bent towards justice, and I shudder at the possibilities had it worked out differently.

Looking at today&aposs Microsoft, I&aposm amazed at how much change a leader with the right vision can make to the trajectory of a company that even makes an old-school software freedom advocate as me admire and even applaud the strides it has taken in the last 10 or so years that has dramatically shifted the perception of Microsoft. The personality of the Satya-era Microsoft is one to behold. While it will take more time to win back the trust, we see the tides changing and the positivity is important for the entire industry.

For Microsoft, it was TypeScript and VS Code that helped change the narrative internally which led to its internal resurgence and acceptance of open source. Its acquisition of GitHub propelled it forward within the community overnight. Its contributions to the Linux kernel and other major software projects have also been consequential in changing its public perceptions.

It takes a while to claw back trust and is very easy to breach. This time, however, Microsoft seems to understand this dynamic more than it did 20 years ago. All it took was the right leadership.

Recently, I got vaccinated with yellow fever vaccine as I am planning to travel to Kenya, a high risk country for yellow fever, in the near future. The vaccine takes 10 days to produce the required antibodies, so it should be taken at least 10 days before the date of departure to the at-risk country. In order to get vaccinated, I searched for vaccination centers in Delhi for yellow fever. I found this page by the Indian government which lists vaccination centers for yellow fever all over India. From that list, I made a phone call to the Airport Health Organization, a vaccination center near to the Delhi Airport.

They asked me to write an email stating that I need yellow fever vaccination. After sending the email, they requested a scanned copy of my passport. Subsequently, they emailed me my appointment date, asking me to pay 300 INR in advance along with other instructions.

You have to reach vaccination center at any time between 10 AM to 12 noon. I got there at around 11 AM on my appointment date and got vaccinated in around 40 minutes, followed by obtaining a vaccine certificate in half an hour. One dosage of this vaccine gives immunity against yellow fever for lifetime. Therefore, I can travel to any country at risk of yellow fever. Although some countries may require proof of vaccination within some time frame and some people might need a booster dose to maintain immunity.

This is a small bug-fix release to remove use of autodie from the build system for the module. podlators is included in Perl core, and at the point when it is built during the core build, the prerequisites of the autodie module are not yet met, so the module is not available. This release reverts to explicit error checking in all the files used by the build system.

Thanks to James E Keenan for the report and the analysis.

You can get the latest version from CPAN or the podlators distribution page.

Review: The Splinter in the Sky, by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Publisher: Saga Press Copyright: July 2023 ISBN: 1-6680-0849-1 Format: Kindle Pages: 372

The Splinter in the Sky is a stand-alone science fiction political thriller. It is Kemi Ashing-Giwa's first novel.

Enitan is from Koriko, a vegetation-heavy moon colonized by the Vaalbaran empire. She lives in the Ijebu community with her sibling Xiang and has an on-again, off-again relationship with Ajana, the Vaalbaran-appointed governor. Xiang is studying to be an architect, which requires passing stringent entrance exams to be allowed to attend an ancillary imperial school intended for "primitives." Enitan works as a scribe and translator, one of the few Korikese allowed to use the sacred Orin language of Vaalbara. In her free time, she grows and processes tea.

When Xiang mysteriously disappears while she's at work, Enitan goes to Ajana for help. Then Ajana dies, supposedly from suicide. The Vaalbaran government demands a local hostage while the death is investigated, someone who will be held as a diplomatic "guest" on the home world and executed if there is any local unrest. This hostage is supposed to be the child of the local headwoman, a concept that the Korikese do not have. Seeing a chance to search for Xiang, Enitan volunteers, heading into the heart of imperial power with nothing but desperate determination and a tea set.

The empire doesn't stand a chance.

Admittedly, a lot of the reason why the empire doesn't stand a chance is because the author is thoroughly on Enitan's side. Before she even arrives on Gondwana, Vaalbara's home world, Enitan is recruited as a spy by the other Gondwana power and Vaalbara's long-standing enemy. Her arrival in the Splinter, the floating arcology that serves as the center of Vaalbaran government, is followed by a startlingly meteoric rise in access. Some of this is explained by being a cultural curiosity for bored nobles, and some is explained by political factors Enitan is not yet aware of, but one can see the author's thumb resting on the scales.

This was the sort of book that was great fun to read, but whose political implausibility provoked "wait, that didn't make sense" thoughts afterwards. I think one has to assume that the total population of Vaalbara is much less than first comes to mind when considering an interplanetary empire, which would help explain the odd lack of bureaucracy. Enitan is also living in, effectively, the palace complex, for reasonably well-explained political reasons, and that could grant her a surprising amount of access. But there are other things that are harder to explain away: the lack of surveillance, the relative lack of guards, and the odd political structure that's required for the plot to work.

It's tricky to talk about this without spoilers, but the plot rests heavily on a conspiratorial view of how government power is wielded that I think strains plausibility. I'm not naive enough to think that the true power structure of a society matches the formal power structure, but I don't think they diverge as much as people think they do. It's one thing to say that the true power brokers of society can be largely unknown to the general population. In a repressive society with a weak media, that's believable. It's quite another matter for the people inside the palace to be in the dark about who is running what.

I thought that was the biggest problem with this book. Its greatest feature is the characters, and particularly the character relationships. Enitan is an excellent protagonist: fascinating, sympathetic, determined, and daring in ways that make her success more believable. Early in the book, she forms an uneasy partnership that becomes the heart of the book, and I loved everything about that relationship. The politics of her situation might be a bit too simple, but the emotions were extremely well-done.

This is a book about colonialism. Specifically, it's a book about cultural looting, appropriation, and racist superiority. The Vaalbarans consider Enitan barely better than an animal, and in her home they're merciless and repressive. Taken out of that context into their imperial capital, they see her as a harmless curiosity and novelty. Enitan exploits this in ways that are entirely believable. She is also driven to incandescent fury in ways that are entirely believable, and which she only rarely can allow herself to act on. Ashing-Giwa drives home the sheer uselessness of even the more sympathetic Vaalbarans more forthrightly than science fiction is usually willing to be. It's not a subtle point, but it is an accurate one.

The first two thirds of this book had me thoroughly engrossed and unable to put it down. The last third unfortunately turns into a Pokémon hunt of antagonists, which I found less satisfying and somewhat less believable. I wish there had been more need for Enitan to build political alliances and go deeper into the social maneuverings of the first part of the book, rather than gaining some deus ex machina allies who trivially solve some otherwise-tricky plot problems. The setup is amazing; the resolution felt a bit like escaping a maze by blasting through the walls, which I don't think played to the strengths of the characters and relationships that Ashing-Giwa had constructed. The advantage of that approach is that we do get a satisfying resolution and a standalone novel.

The central relationship of the book is unfortunately too much of a spoiler to talk about in a review, but I thought it was the best part of the story. This is a political thriller on the surface, but I think it's heart is an unexpected political alliance with a fascinatingly tricky balance of power. I was delighted that Ashing-Giwa never allows the tension in that relationship to collapse into one of the stock patterns it so easily could have become.

The Splinter in the Sky reminded me a little of Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's not as assured or as adroitly balanced as that book, and the characters are not quite as memorable, but that's a very high bar. The political point is even sharper, and it has some of the same appeal.

I had so much fun reading this book. You may need to suspend your disbelief about some of the politics, and I wish the conclusion had been a bit less brute-force, but this is great stuff. Recommended when you're in the mood for a character story in the trappings of a political thriller.

Rating: 8 out of 10