I'm happy to announce that after the filing of an Intent to Package and nearly 2 years of work, IronRuby 0.9, IronPython 2.6b2, and the DLR are now in Debian. To my knowledge, this is the first package in Debian with direct and active upstream support from Microsoft.

Kudos for this release go to Jo Sheilds (package sponsorship & mentoring), Mirco Bauer (package sponsorship & mentoring), Matthias Klose (IronPython package review), Ivan Porto Carrero (IronRuby build/test support), Jim Deville (IronRuby build/test support), Jimmy Schementi (upstream point of contact @ Microsoft), Dino Viehland (IronPython build/test support), Michael Foord (IronPython build/test support), Marek Safar (mono c# compiler support), Ankit Jain (xbuild support), the folks on OFTC's #debian-cli, Freenode's #ironruby and GimpNet's #mono, and the folks on the IronRuby and IronPython mailing lists.

This is my first package in Debian, too. I'm pretty ecstatic ;)

11 Mar 2010 2:55pm GMT

There was a plug for an up and coming conference in my last post but it was a bit buried and it deserves a bit more attention: the Libre Planet Conference in Cambridge, MA. It is fast approaching but there are still spots, student rates, and funding for female attendees. Though I can't go as I will be out of town, this seems like it will be a great event: excellent speakers, lots of interesting folks, and I am sure a fantastic set of discussions.

11 Mar 2010 1:05pm GMT

I'll be there, and so will Jo for the first time. Be nice to her, please? :-)

11 Mar 2010 11:44am GMT

* Unfortunately…

(with apologies to GIMP)

11 Mar 2010 7:33am GMT

So I've got combat, I've got basic potions that restore health and I've got items such as weapons or shields which can affect your combat stats. Try as I might, I cannot get ncurses to give me a yellow background for some unfathomable reason. It just comes out brown no matter what. Ironically, in the next Konsole over, I have the alpine ncurses-based mua taunting me with a yellow background. I'll look in its source (yay open source!) to see how its done sometime but for now brown will have to do.

C++ is proving a joy to work with as always. Ok It's probably just me; I use it so infrequently, I keep having to relearn how to do multiple inheritance and abstract base classes each time. I am rather proud of figuring out how to access class members from a signal handler without having to look it up.

Now if I can quickly tie up some loose ends, I can spend the last two days maybe making the dungeon generation more roguelike.

11 Mar 2010 7:31am GMT

I realize the openssl s_client tool tries to be upper-layer protocol agnostic, but doesn't everything that uses SSL do commonName checking (HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, POP, XMPP)? Shouldn't this be something openssl s_client does by default, maybe with an option to turn it off for less common situations?

Here it doesn't complain about connecting to "outflux.net" when the cert has a CN for "www.outflux.net":

echo QUIT | openssl s_client -CApath /etc/ssl/certs \
  -connect outflux.net:443 2>/dev/null | egrep "subject=|Verify"

subject=/CN=www.outflux.net
    Verify return code: 0 (ok)

11 Mar 2010 6:47am GMT

Today I took a break before my usual lunchtime to go to the movies - Boogie el Aceitoso was on at 13:00 (and not at the more usual, late screenings).

Oily Boogie is a great antihero drawn by the much beloved Roberto El Negro Fontanarrosa, a very widely known Argentinian humorist/cartoonist. I got acquinted with Boogie as during the 80s-90s my parents were asiduous readers of Proceso, a weekly political analysis magazine which included one of his cartoons at the last page.

Boogie is a pathological ex-Vietnam, ex-Laos ex-El Salvador, ex-Gulf War, ex-(whatever comes next) USA soldier, who deals with the local mafias whenever he is not active. Brutal, often seen as inhuman.

I remember reading it without really understanding its nonsensical violence at first. And, as I said, Fontanarrosa is a very loved cartoonist - In Mexico I think we were much more acquinted with Boogie than with Inodoro Pereyra, and still, Fontanarrosa's death in 2007 was very heartfelt here.

About the movie: I found it to be very good, of course, knowing what to expect. Most lines are short, screen adequations of various cartoons along Boogie's long life as a thug. I specially liked the animation technique - I know very little about the subject, but it mixed quite naturally and constantly obvious still, cartoony characters with vivid, photo-based items. It creates a completely believable atmosphere inside the absolute amoral, selfish and (fortunately!) grossly exagerated and impossible world of Boogie.

I sometimes feel somewhat stupid when writing in English for a mostly Spanish-speaking audience - Still, if you see Boogie in a movie theater, don't hesitate and go. As always, with non-top-selling, non-Hollywood movies, it is quite probable it will not be showing for long.

11 Mar 2010 5:23am GMT

Version 0.1.0 of RcppExamples, a simple demo package for Rcpp should appear on CRAN some time tomorrow.

As mentioned in the post about release 0.7.8 of Rcpp, Romain and I carved this out of Rcpp itself to provide a cleaner separation of code that implements our R / C++ interfaces (which remain in Rcpp) and code that illustrates how to use it --- which is now in RcppExamples. This also provides an easier template for people wanting to use Rcpp in their packages as it will be easier to wrap one's head around the much smaller RcppExamples package.

A simple example (using the newer API) may illustrate this:

#include <Rcpp.h>

RcppExport SEXP newRcppVectorExample(SEXP vector) {

    Rcpp::NumericVector orig(vector);                       // keep a copy (as the classic version does)
    Rcpp::NumericVector vec(orig.size());         // create a target vector of the same size

    // we could query size via
    //   int n = vec.size();
    // and loop over the vector, but using the STL is so much nicer
    // so we use a STL transform() algorithm on each element
    std::transform(orig.begin(), orig.end(), vec.begin(), sqrt);

    Rcpp::Pairlist res(Rcpp::Named( "result", vec),
                       Rcpp::Named( "original", orig));

    return res;
}

With essentially five lines of code, we provide a function that takes any numeric vector and returns both the original vector and a tranformed version---here by applying a square root operation. Even the looping along the vector is implicit thanks to the generic programming idioms of the Standard Template Library.

Nicer still, even on misuse, exceptions get caught cleanly and we get returned to the R prompt without any explicit coding on the part of the user:

R> library(RcppExamples)
Loading required package: Rcpp
R> print(RcppVectorExample( 1:5, "new" )) # select new API
$result
[1] 1.000 1.414 1.732 2.000 2.236

$original
[1] 1 2 3 4 5

R> RcppVectorExample( c("foo", "bar"), "new" )
Error in RcppVectorExample(c("foo", "bar"), "new") :
  not compatible with INTSXP
R>

There is also analogous code for the older API in the package, but it is about three times as long, has to loop over the vector and needs to set up the execption handling explicitly.

As of right now, RcppExamples does not document every class but it should already provide a fairly decent start for using Rcpp. And many more actual usage examples are ... in the over two-hundred unit tests in Rcpp.

Update: Now actually showing new rather than classic API.

11 Mar 2010 2:46am GMT

I don't like unconditionally clearing /tmp on boot, since I'm invariably working on something in there when my system locks up. But I do like /tmp getting cleaned up from time to time. As a compromise, I've set TMPTIME=7 in /etc/default/rcS so that only stuff older than 7 days is deleted when I reboot.

10 Mar 2010 11:48pm GMT

I'm looking for a way to do free hosting. But I mean free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Let me explain.

When I'm using a piece of free and open-source software such as OpenOffice.org, Evolution, or anything else, I have certain possibilities, freedoms if you will, of interacting with the software beyond just consuming it. I can look at the source code to study how it works. I can rebuild it to have a higher degree of confidence that I'm actually running that code. I can fix a bug or create an enhancement. I can send the patch upstream and wait for the next release, or in important cases I can create a local build. With the emerge of new project hosting sites such as GitHub, it's getting even easier to share one's modifications so others can use them. And so on.

As a lot of software moves to the web, how will this work in the future? There are those that say that it won't, and that it will be a big problem, and that's why you shouldn't use such services. Which is what probably a lot of free-software conscious users are doing right now. But I think that in the longer run, resisting isn't going to win over the masses to free software.

First of all, of course, the software would need to be written. So a free web office suite, a free web mail suite that matches the capabilities of the leading nonfree provider, and so on. We have good starts with Identi.ca and OpenStreetMap, for example, but we'd need a lot more. Then you throw it on a machine, and people can use it. Now as a user of this service, how do I get the source code? Of course you could offer a tarball for download, and that is the approach that the AGPL license takes. One problem with that is, if you are used to apt-get source or something similar for getting the source, everyone putting a tarball on their web site in a different place isn't going to make you happy. A standardized packaging-type thing ought to be wrapped around that. Another problem is that even if you trust the site's operator that that's the source code that's actually running on your site (even without malice, it could for example be outdated against the deployed version), it probably won't contain the local configuration files and setup scripts that would allow me to duplicate the service. And if I just want to study how the program is running in actuality, there is not much I can do.

Giving everyone SSH access to the box is probably not a good idea, and won't really solve all the issues anyway. In the future, when virtualization is standardized, ubiquitous, and awesome, one might imagine that a packaging of a web service won't be "put these files on the file system and reload a daemon" but instead "put these files and this configuration on that machine and activate it". This might give rise to a new generation of Linux "distributors". Getting the source tarball or "source package" might then involve getting a snapshot of that image, which you can examine, modify, and redeploy elsewhere. That could work for OpenStreetMap, for example, modulo the space and time required for their massive database. (But you might chose to fork only the code, not the data.) But it won't be easy to do the right thing in many cases, because with a web service, there is usually other people's data on the machine as well, which would need to be masked out or something. Maybe this really can't be done correctly, and the future will be more distributed, like in the way Jabber attempted to supplant centralized services such as ICQ. Distributed web mail makes sense, distributed OpenStreetMap perhaps less so.

Ideas anyone? Does anyone perhaps have experiences with running a web service that attempts to give users the freedoms and practical benefits that are usually associated with locally installed software?

10 Mar 2010 11:05pm GMT

I've just booked my flights to New York, which I guess means I'm definitely off to DebConf this year.

And, since it'll be my first trip to the US, I'm going to be hanging around in NYC for an extra week after the conference. So, does anyone have any recommendations for a nice (and not too pricey) hotel that I can stay in after the conference (and the accompanying accomodation) is finished? Also - any suggestions for stuff I should try to see/visit whilst I'm there?

10 Mar 2010 10:00pm GMT

Thanks!

PS: Things like that shouldn't be a problem… :-)

10 Mar 2010 8:50pm GMT

There is an interesting conversation over at about the "nature" of peer production, and "crowd" based production over at PBS. Thankfully folks right off the bat noted that the types of activities they are addressing-that range from 4chan to open source-are so freaken distinct that perhaps it is not all that useful to use one moniker for them.

The comments I am most fascinated by are danah's who notes:

""We" assume that the collective voice will be populist and, more importantly, that it will reflect the diversity of the populous. Yet, as we've seen time and time again, certain values and attitudes and voices are over-represented in crowd-sourced activities. Who is looking out for those who aren't represented? In what ways are we reinforcing structural inequalities? What are the implications of this?"

And then Clay's response:

So, to re-ask your question in a non-rhetorical way, under what
circumstances would we want to make the population of Deviant Art,
say, less white, or Linux less male, and if we wanted to do so, what
would need to happen?

What I find interesting about this discussion (and will be talking about this topic here, next week) is there not enough recognition of two related things: 1) the efforts are there (more on this soon) 2) that perhaps hacking and F/OSS in particular are not fully accessible to all and everyone because they are full-fledged, full-bodied, cultural worlds -and all cultural worlds-are to some degree not fully accessible and transparent for there are built on particularities, often invisible and unarticulated, forms of value. That is, just as some norms and values of Indo-Guyanese to take one random example, are not of my world, so too is hacking partially inaccessible for the fact that it is culturally configured.

But I am starting to suspect that the "culture-ness" of these domains are often overlooked because they are overwhelmingly white, male, and chock full of computers (and so economically lucrative). All three, I suspect are (incorrectly) seen as lacking culture, as domains of rationality. (I stand rightly corrected and also forget this very fact, though I know it well from all the Brazil/Latin America Debconfs, as this diversity gets a bit lost from a pure US-European perspective, which I was assuming).

Other historical factors have also produced certain distortions that don't allow us to see (easily at least) these worlds as culture-full. First is the fact that so many folks-outside of this world-lobbed onto F/OSS for being radical (and this is partially right in so far as its challenge to intellectual property can be seen as radical). But the portrayal or mere suggestion of these worlds as uber-democratic and populist, made people expect these groups to behave as radical egalitarian collectives. For the most part, they don't and yet never portrayed their own politics and forms of organization as such (openness comes in the form of code and technical merit).

But this vision stuck and when some folks realized that larger projects, for example are very organized (which many people addressed only very late), have hierarchies (which are flexible and also allow them to function, which is I think is a good thing), and are not as diverse, there was deep disappointment that they did not conform to the sense that there was something extremely radical going on as opposed to a cultural group really into producing free software.

But if I am offering a cultural alibi of sorts-in which barriers to participation are to some degree a function of culture, one of the great things about the norms, values, ideas that compose culture is that there are dynamic and changing. They are alive and historical. They are pushed and pulled upon by insiders and outsiders based on wider social values.

And there is an answer to these questions about diversity for there has been a dramatic, noticeable, and noteworthy push within this world, one that really started to coalesce I would say in the last year or so, to address these issues and it ranges from Python's mammoth efforts at addressing diversity (and I have been told that there was a great speech on the topic at Pycon recently), the geek feminism wiki, and smaller but increasingly common efforts such as Libre Planet's women's caucus and their funding of women to participate.

So while I do think that culture goes at least part of the way to explain why these worlds are not fully open-for culture limits-this very domain has grown dissatisfied with its representational make-up and are leading some efforts for cultural change.

10 Mar 2010 7:52pm GMT

How to keep the ftp-team motivated: Say Thanks from time to time.

How to ensure, you demotivate them: Complain, that we didn't answer your mail within 24 hours...

10 Mar 2010 7:16pm GMT

Firefox and automatic proxy configuration

Firefox supports automatic proxy configuration, which means that if you plug your laptop on a network with a properly set up proxy server, it will automatically reconfigure itself to use it.

Oddly enough, however, it requires garbage collection when you then plug it back on a network without proxy, in order not to get "proxy not found" errors.

10 Mar 2010 7:03pm GMT

I hope some people from the OCaml community will enjoy this changelog, extracted from llvm 2.6-7, which has just been uploaded:

  [ Arthur Loiret ]
   
  [...]

  [ Sylvain Le Gall ]
  * Build a libllvm-ocaml-dev package, which contains the OCaml binding:
    Closes: #568556.
    - debian/debhelper.in/libllvm-ocaml-dev.{dirs,doc-base,install,META}: Add.
    - debian/control.in/source: Build-Depends on ocaml-nox (>= 3.11.2),
      ocaml-best-compilers | ocaml-nox, dh-ocaml (>= 0.9.1).
    - debian/packages.d/llvm.mk:
      + (llvm_packages): Add libllvm-ocaml-dev.
      + (libllvm-ocaml-dev_extra_binary): Define, install META file.
    - debian/rules.d/binary.mk: Add dh_installdirs and dh_ocaml.
    - debian/rules.d/vars.mk:
      + include /usr/share/ocaml/ocamlvars.mk.
      + Configure with --with-ocaml-libdir=$(OCAML_STDLIB_DIR)/llvm.
  * debian/rules.d/build.mk: Fix symlinks pointing to the $DESTDIR.

In other words: LLVM is now built with its OCaml bindings and a META file for findlib. It will take some days before reaching every architectures, but hopefully it will be in Squeeze (next Debian stable release).

Thanks to Arthur Loiret for the quick upload.

10 Mar 2010 6:07pm GMT