Antoine Beaupré: Wallabako 1.4.0 released
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-05-06-wallabako-1.4.0-released/
May 6, 2022, 4:26 PM
I don't particularly like it when people announce their personal
projects on their blog, but I'm making an exception for this one,
because it's a little special for me.
You see, I have just released Wallabako 1.4.0 (and a quick,
mostly irrelevant 1.4.1 hotfix) today. It's the first release of
that project in almost 3 years (the previous was 1.3.1, before
the pandemic).
The other reason I figured I would mention it is that I have almost
never talked about Wallabako on this blog at all, so many ...
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Holger Levsen: 20220506-i-had-an-abortion
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220506-i-had-an-abortion/
May 6, 2022, 1:42 PM
I had an abortion...
Well, it wasn't me, but when I was 18 my partner thankfully was able to take
a 'morning-after-pill' because we were seriously not ready to have
a baby. As one data point: We were both still in high school.
It's not possible to ban abortions. It's only possible to ban safe abortions.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.16 on CRAN: Small Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/05/05#rquantlib_0.4.16
May 6, 2022, 12:50 AM
A new release 0.4.16 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian as well.
QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language.
The release of RQuantLib comes agaain about four months after the previous release, and brings a a few small updates for daycounters, all thanks to Kai Lin, plus a small parameter change to avoid an error in an example, and small updates to the Docker f...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in April 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-04/
May 5, 2022, 7:18 PM
Welcome to the April 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports, we try to summarise the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please take a few moments to visit our Contribute page on our website.
News
Cory Doctorow published an interesting article this month about the possibility of Undetectable backdoors for machine learning models. Given that machine learning models can provide unpred...
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Bits from Debian: Google Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22
https://bits.debian.org/2022/05/debconf22-google-platinum.html
May 5, 2022, 8:00 AM
We are very pleased to announce that Google
has committed to support DebConf22 as a
Platinum sponsor. This is the third year in a row that Google is
sponsoring The Debian Conference with the higher tier!
Google is one of the largest technology companies in the
world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products
as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf since more than
ten years,...
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Steve Kemp: A plea for books ..
https://blog.steve.fi/a_plea_for_books___.html
May 3, 2022, 5:15 PM
Recently I've been getting much more interested in the "retro" computers of my youth, partly because I've been writing crazy code in Z80 assembly-language, and partly because I've been preparing to introduce our child to his first computer:
An actual 1982 ZX Spectrum, cassette deck and all.
No internet
No hi-rez graphics
Easily available BASIC
And as a nice bonus the keyboard is wipe-clean!
I've got a few books, books I've hoarded for 30+ years, but I'd love to collect some more. So here...
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Gunnar Wolf: Using a RPi as a display adapter
https://gwolf.org/2022/05/using-a-rpi-as-a-display-adapter.html
May 3, 2022, 4:16 PM
Almost ten months ago, I mentioned on this
blog
I bought an ARM laptop, which is now my main machine while away from
home — a Lenovo Yoga C630
13Q50. Yes,
yes, I am still not as much away from home as I used to before, as
this pandemic is still somewhat of a thing, but I do move more.
My main activity in the outside world with my laptop is teaching. I
teach twice a week, and… well, having a display for my slides and
for showing examples in the terminal and such is a must. However, as I
said...
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Thomas Koch: Missing memegen
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-05-01-missing-memegen.html
May 1, 2022, 6:17 PM
Posted on May 1, 2022


Tags: debian, free software, life

Back at $COMPANY we had an internal meme-site. I had some reputation in my team for creating good memes. When I watched Episode 3 of Season 2 from Yes Premier Minister yesterday, I really missed a place to post memes.
This is the full scene. Please watch it or even the full episode before scrolling down to the GIFs. I had a good laugh for some time.
With Debian, I could just download the episode from somewhere on the...
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Thomas Koch: lsp-java coming to debian
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-03-12-lsp-java-coming-to-debian.html
May 1, 2022, 6:17 PM
Posted on March 12, 2022


Tags: debian

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) standardizes communication between editors and so called language servers for different programming languages. This reduces the old problem that every editor had to implement many different plugins for all different programming languages. With LSP an editor just needs to talk LSP and can immediately provide typicall IDE features.
I already packaged the Emacs packages lsp-mode and lsp-haskell for Debia...
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Thomas Koch: Waiting for a STATE folder in the XDG basedir spec
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2014-02-18-state-folder-in-xdg-basedir.html
May 1, 2022, 6:17 PM
Posted on February 18, 2014


Tags: debian, free software

The XDG Basedirectory specification proposes default homedir folders for the categories DATA (~/.local/share), CONFIG (~/.config) and CACHE (~/.cache). One category however is missing: STATE. This category has been requested several times but nothing happened.
Examples for state data are:
history files of shells, repls, anything that uses libreadline
logfiles
state of application windows on exit
recently opened files...
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Thomas Koch: shared infrastructure coop
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2014-02-05-shared-infrastructure-coop.html
May 1, 2022, 6:17 PM
Posted on February 5, 2014


Tags: debian, free software

I’m working in a very small web agency with 4 employees, one of them part time and our boss who doesn’t do programming. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, that our development infrastructure is not perfect. We have many ideas and dreams how we could improve it, but not the time. Now we have two obvious choices: Either we just do nothing or we buy services from specialized vendors like github, atlassian, travis-ci,...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/05/01/floss-activities/
May 1, 2022, 12:26 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
gensim:
allow dep override
icns:
missing comma
libpst:
fix MinGW build
Debian usertags:
drop + usertag,
reassign transition usertag
Debian package uploads:
mpv-mpris
Debian wiki pages:
DebConf/22/newpage,
DebianInstaller/Preseed,
DebianKernel/UserspaceTools,
DeveloperNews
(1
2),
Hardware/Wanted,
Kosovo test123,
PipeWire,
PortsDocs/New,
VirtualBox
FOSSjobs wiki pages:
Resources
Issues
C...
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Junichi Uekawa: Already May.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-May-1.html.en#2022-May-1-08:57:58
April 30, 2022, 11:57 PM
Already May.
I've been writing some code in rust and a bit of javascript. But real life is too busy.
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Jonathan Dowland: hyperlinked PDF planner
https://jmtd.net/log/planner/
April 29, 2022, 9:29 PM
The Year page
A day page
I've been having reasonable success with time blocking, a technique
I learned from Cal Newport's writings,
in particular Deep Work. I'd been doing it on paper for a while, but
I wanted to try and move to a digital solution.
There's a cottage
industry of people
making (and selling) various types of diary and planner as PDF files for use on
tablets such as the Remarkable. Some of these use
PDF hyperlinks to greatly improve navigating around. This one from Clo...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Should we stop teaching the normal distribution?
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-04-29-19-59_should_we_stop_teaching_the_normal_distribution.html
April 29, 2022, 6:30 PM
I guess Betteridge's law of headlines
gives you the answer, but bear with me. :-)
Like most engineers, I am a layperson in statistics; I had some in high
school, then an intro course in university and then used it in a couple
of random courses (like speech recognition). (I also took a multivariate
statistics course on my own after I had graduated.) But pretty much every practical
tool I ever learned was, eventually, centered around the normal distribution;
we learned about Student's t-test
in v...
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Holger Levsen: 20220429-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2022
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220429-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2022/
April 29, 2022, 12:34 PM
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 from May 23 to 30
This is just a quick reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 happening in a bit more than 3 weeks.
So far 43 people have registered and thus there's still some on site accomodation available.
There's no real deadline for registration, however if you register after May 1st you might not
get a t-shirt in your prefered size.
Also: if you attend to give a presentation but haven't replied to the CfP, please do so.
The wiki page linked above has a...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Interesting Times
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-227629-8.html
April 29, 2022, 2:50 AM
Review: Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #17


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
1994


Printing:
February 2014


ISBN:
0-06-227629-8


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
399

Interesting Times is the seventeenth Discworld novel and certainly
not the place to start. At the least, you will probably want to read
The Colour of Magic and
The Light Fantastic before this book,
since it's a sequel to...
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Jonathan McDowell: Resizing consoles automatically
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/04/resizing-consoles-automatically.html
April 28, 2022, 7:03 PM
I have 2 very useful shell scripts related to resizing consoles. The first is imaginatively called resize and just configures the terminal to be the requested size, neatly resizing an xterm or gnome-terminal:
#!/bin/sh
# resize <rows> <columns>
/bin/echo -e '