Debian

While I had been thinking and also done quite a bit of work on some of the issues we are already facing and the new Government will face, for e.g. in the areas of – 1. Employment 2. Agriculture 3. Petrol prices 4. Woman Safety 5. Women ... [More] empowerment 5. Cow vigilantism 6. Telecommunications7. Indian Railways8. IT industry 9. Make in India 10. Startup India 11. Toilets 12. Aadhar privacy 13. Crop loan14. State of Economy The list is not exhaustive by any means but is the only way to make some sense of things. Instead of using the list I had prepared in the order I had wanted to share, had to go to 4. and 5. because of a viral video which has been doing the rounds lately – A few friends had shared this video yesterday, I saw some partial clip but without audio so couldn’t get any context about what was being shown. Then some other friends shared couple of articles, one from wire and the other from newslaundry which shared slightly different aspects, takes on the same story. Then I saw the video and was truly shocked. Just to make sure I didn’t mishear anything I saw the video a few times. It is and was possible that I misheard or misunderstood something. Just to recap what happened in case the video is not seen, taken off the web or whatever ( the video is of a middle-aged women who is being jostled and questioned by young women for a statement she makes.) While the video is of 14:40 minutes, I will start at the beginning so it’s easier to figure out what happened. Apparently the middle aged lady, a Mrs. Soma Chakravarthy, a teacher from Mumbai went to Delhi and in a restaurant saw two young women wearing short dresses and claimed that it is because of women like you that women get raped. Apparently, she not only stops there but goes to some men who are in the restaurant and tells/asks them to rape the women. Some other women who were in the restaurant overhear the conversation, take the two young women with them along with the elderly lady to some mall nearby and ask her to repeat what she said few minutes ago. After trying to dodge for a few minutes, she again says that the girls who wear short dresses or those who are rebels should be raped. When a woman asks the elderly lady to apologize to the two young women she doesn’t relent. In fact, when a young woman asks the elderly lady as to why 2 year old babies are raped (which was in national news, happened in Unnao some months ago) , and 80 year old women, the elderly woman reply that probably because they wear nighties instead of sarees. As if sarees some hidden quality. If such were the case, then none of the women who have been raped should be the ones who wear sarees, but this is not the case. I do have to point out that after the video went viral, the elderly lady, nicknamed ‘Aunty’ has also been harrassed online which also shows how complex the issue is at some level. The episode however also throws quite a few uncomfortable questions in the air – a. The women is a teacher in some educational institution in Bombay/Mumbai. So doesn’t it raises questions as to what kind of values she may be imparting to impressionable minds in Bombay/Mumbai ? b. While I’m perhaps one of the most fashion illertrate persons on the globe, even then I know that Bombay/Mumbai is the fashion capital of India. All the Indian top-most fashion designers have their boutiques there. Even Parsian fashionistas have their designer boutiques in Mumbai. If you see any of the collections on a ramp walk in Paris, you are sure to get same or a similar thing in one of the top boutiques soon. If you are on a lower budget and a design or two become popular, you may have to stay for some more time but you will get on some on the roadside stalls within a few weeks at probably 1/10th to 1/100th of the price at the boutique. In such a scenario does not she not see what people are wearing in Bombay/Mumbai ? c. The third thing – Then I guess all women from outside India, women tourists should not be allowed or should be told, sorry we cannot protect you. Also ban all the beaches, ban swimming also because women will come in one peice or two-piece swimsuit which could also be alluring. Apart from breach of a person’s fundamental rights it also contravenes another idea which was being germinated in light of Sri Lanka’s attacks. Ban the Burqa And this contravens another set of ideas that an Indian right-wing party called for ‘Ban the Burqa’ or head covering worn by Muslim women. While later they backpeddaled a bit calling it ‘Personal Opinion’ . This episode was particularly illustrated by a twitter user who goes by the name SardarPatelbannedRSS – Message to Women of India by men in politics: 1. Cover yourself up if you don’t want to be raped (‘coz we suck at stopping the men from raping). 2. But expose yourself to prevent terrorism (‘coz we really suck at stopping terrorism). In fact there are and were many threads in twitter which tried to say how Hinduism is great and trying to whitewash how the Hindu Code Bill came. While I didn’t go to all the threads, at least in one I shared that it wasn’t as easy as being shared or told. It took Dr. Ambedkar and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru took 15 years and the issue came to such a head that Dr. Ambedkar resigned from his post . In fact there is an Oxford scholarship book which examines the whole thing in much detail. I don’t have much info. on it apart from the URL . The CJI Sexual Harrassment Case In the last few days this has also been shaking the judiciary. From what I could understand of the case/suit filed, apparently a junior to the CJI filed a sexual harrasment case. The judiciary instead of using the Vishaka guidelines which were formed after the Bhawari Devi Gang rape case became a media sensation. While the guidelines has been superseded by POSH the highest judiciary in the land chose to not even use Vishaka guidelines. Due to this the complainant was forced to take back her complaint . She was supported in her decision to take back the complaint by around 300 women who are part of the legal fraternity . At the end, one is pressed to ask the question, is India not a country for women ? [Less]

Hi,This is a summary of what I have done in April 2019 on DebianChanges I have uploaded raspi3-firmware 1.20190215-2 to sid I have bumped raspi3-firmware to 1.20190401-1 I have bumped the preempt_rt kernel to 4.19.37-rt19 in sid I have bumped ... [More] the experimental kernel to 5.0.7 I have bumped the experimental preempt_rt kernel to 5.0.7-rt5 I have bumped the experimental kernel to 5.0.8 I have bumped the experimental kernel to 5.0.9 I have bumped the experimental kernel to 5.0.10  IssuesI have removed extra binary files from the orig tarball in raspi3-firmware, this closes #924315 I have enabled support for the coreboot memconsole in kernel 5.0.x. It has been backported into sid and should be part of buster. This closes bug #872069 [Less]

Often, someone wants to exhaling the difference between a left-fold and a right-fold, i.e. foldl and foldr in Haskell, you see a picture like the following foldl and foldr This is taken from the recently published and very nice “foldilocks” ... [More] tutorial by Ayman Nadeem, but I have seen similar pictures before. I always thought that something is not quite right about them, in particular the foldr. I mean, they are correct, and while the foldl one clearly conveys the right intuition, the foldr doesn’t quite: it looks as if the computer would fast forward to the end of the list, and then start processing it. But that does not capture the essence of foldr, which also starts at the beginning of the list, by applying its argument lazily. And therefore, this is how I would draw this graph: foldl and foldr This way (at least to people from a left-to-right top-to-bottom culture), it becomes more intuitive that with foldr, you are first looking at an application of the combinator to the first element, and then possibly more. [Less]

In April 2019, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 11.5 hours (of 17.25 hours planned, pulling over 5.75 hours to the next month) and on the Debian ELTS project for another 10 hours (of 10 hours planned) as a paid contributor. LTS Work ... [More] Upload to jessie-security: libssh2 (DLA-1730-2 [1], regression fix) Upload to jessie-security: poppler (DLA-1752-1 [2]) Upload to jessie-security: samba (DLA-1754-1 [3]) Upload to jessie-security: systemd (DLA-1762-1 [4]) Upload to jessie-security: systemd (DLA-1762-2 [5], regression fix) ELTS Work Help fixing sbuild in Debian 10, so it still supports building packages for Debian wheezy. (See Debian bug #926161 [6]) Upload to wheezy-lts: cron (ELA-103-1 [7]) Upload to wheezy-lts: samba (ELA-104-1 [8]) Also build cron arch:i386 for wheezy-lts and update README.how-to-release-an-update. Upload to wheezy-lts: systemd (ELA-115-1) [9] References [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/04/msg00006.html [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/04/msg00011.html [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/04/msg00013.html [4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/04/msg00022.html [5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2019/04/msg00026.html [6] https://bugs.debian.org/926161 [7] https://deb.freexian.com/extended-lts/updates/ela-103-1-cron/ [8] https://deb.freexian.com/extended-lts/updates/ela-104-1-samba/ [9] https://deb.freexian.com/extended-lts/updates/ela-115-1-systemd/ [Less]

I was assigned 17.25 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 14 hours from March. I worked all 31.25 hours this month. I uploaded firmware-nonfree with Emilio Pozuelo Monfort's changes, and issued ... [More] DLA-1747-1. I made a stable update to Linux 3.16 (3.16.65) and rebased the Debian package on top of this. I built and uploaded packages for testing, to reduce the risk of an uncaught regression in the next update to jessie. I prepared the next stable update (3.16.66), which is currently out for review. I merged changes from stretch's linux package into linux-4.9, and from linux-latest into linux-latest-4.9. I built and uploaded these and prepared a DLA. However, linux-4.9 is currently waiting in the NEW queue because it includes an ABI bump. [Less]

Abdication and ascention to the Chrysanthemum Throne. These words are not used that often in everyday life.

April is over and winter is here and things are getting gloomy, but that doesn’t stop surfers from heading out into the ocean (photo taken at Muizenberg surfer’s corner, Cape Town). Debian package work 2019-04-04: Work on gamemode ... [More] (1.3.1-1) update. 2019-04-04: Upload new upstream version of tetzle (2.1.4+dfsg1-1) to debian unstable. 2019-04-04: Upload gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock (66-1~exp2) to debian experimental. 2019-04-04: Upload connectagram (1.2.9-5) to debian unstable. 2019-04-06: Upload kpmcore (3.3.0-5) to debian unstable. 2019-04-08: Non-maintainer upload of plymouth (0.9.4-1.1) to debian unstable. 2019-04-15: Upload desktop-base (10.0.2) to debian unstable. 2019-04-15: File unblock request for desktop-base (10.0.2). 2019-04-15: File unblock request for calamares-settings-debian (10.0.19-1). 2019-04-15: File unblock request for live-config (5.20190312). 2019-04-16: File bug against live media having a stale /etc/fstab file causing problems (#927216). 2019-04-16: File bug against live media having duplicate sources.list entries (#927216). 2019-04-16: File bug against amdgpu not working on debian live systems (#927219). 2019-04-24: Upload new upstream version of btfs (2.19~exp1) to debian experimental. 2019-04-24: Upload new upstream version of calamares (3.2.5-1~exp1) to debian experimental. 2019-04-25: Upload new upstream version of gnome-shell-extension-workspaces-to-dock (50-1~exp1) to debian experimental. 2019-04-29: Upload new upstream version of calamares (3.2.7-1~exp1) to debian experimental. 2019-04-29: Upload new upstream version of gnome-shell-extension-multi-monitors (18-1~exp1) to debian experimental. Debian package review and sponsoring 2019-04-04: Comment on cuba (4.2-1) (mentors.debian.net request). 2019-04-05: Quick review on siconos (4.2.0+git20181026.0ee5349+dfsg.2-1), forward request to debian-science team (mentors.debian.net request). 2019-04-09: Review siconos (4.2.0+git20181026.0ee5349+dfsg.2-1), needs some work (ftbfs) (mentors.debian.net request). 2019-04-10: Sponsor siconos (4.2.0+git20181026.0ee5349+dfsg.2-1) for debian unstable (mentors.debian.net request). Debian QA 2019-04-11: Build fresh Debian live ISOs for testing. 2019-04-11: Test Debian Live ISOs for full-disk encryption from calamares, bootsplash themes and plymouth themes. 2019-04-13: Build fresh Debian live ISOs for testing. 2019-04-13: Test Debian Live ISOs for recent fixes. 2019-04-13: Blog entry: Help test Debian Live. Debian community 2019-04-21: Schedule a Debian town hall meeting “Meet the new DPL and ask him anything!“. DebConf DebConf bursaries took out a whole lot of time towards the end of the month, I didn’t manage to log activity for this, but plan to write a lot of documentation for this process when all the essential (and time-critical) work has been completed. [Less]

At PyCon US in 2019, I reprised my talk "The Black Magic of Python Wheels", originally presented at PyGotham 2018. I based this talk on my three years of work on auditwheel and the manylinux platform, hoping to share some dark details of how the ... [More] proverbial sausage is made. After this talk, I will be retiring from auditwheel maintainership. The Black Magic of Python Wheels Talk page, PyCon website Talk video: not yet posted Talk slides (pdf download) pythonwheels.com Simple manylinux wheelbuilding demo Follow-up readings Linux Programmer's Manual: format of Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) Files The Linux Programming Interface: 42.3.2 "Symbol Versioning", pg. 870. (Note: all of chapter 42 would be a great resource on the topic! This is a great book.) ELF Symbol Versioning Linking to Older Versioned Symbols PLT and GOT - the key to code sharing and dynamic libraries All the PEPs referenced in the talk In increasing numeric order. PEP 376 "Database of Installed Python Distributions" PEP 426 "Metadata for Python Software Packages 2.0" PEP 427 "The Wheel Binary Package Format 1.0" PEP 513 "A Platform Tag for Portable Linux Built Distributions" (aka manylinux1) PEP 571 "The manylinux2010 Platform Tag" Image licensing info Tree Cat Silhouette Sunset: Public Domain (CC0) @besshamiti Happy Halloween! (Costume Dog): Public Domain (CC0) @milkyfactory [Less]

I've not been posting much lately (or writing many book reviews) for a rather good reason: I got sucked into a bunch of open source programming work, including learning Selenium, a little bit of JavaScript, and a lot about web application ... [More] internals. The project in question (currently called Merou, probably will be renamed) isn't that useful for anyone else quite yet, and is still kind of a mess, but we're slowly cleaning it up. It's nice to be working on open source for work again. At some point I need to apply what I've learned to getting remctl's Python bindings off of Python 2 and make my web site not look like I haven't touched it since the early 2000s. It would be nice to have an extra 24 hours in each day. Anyway, book purchasing has continued, of course. Rachel Elise Barkow — Prisoners of Politics (nonfiction) John Carreyrou — Bad Blood (nonfiction) E.K. Johnston — The Afterward (sff) Daniel Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow (nonfiction) Arkady Martine — A Memory Called Empire (sff) Rebecca Roanhorse — Trail of Lightning (sff) I'm currently significantly behind on writing reviews and need to take some time to catch up, but Minecraft keeps calling me.... [Less]

When Where May 2 STAT430 project presentations, U of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA May 17 Rcpp pre-conference Tutorial, R/Finance 2019, Chicago, IL, USA May 22 Northwestern R Users Group, Kellog Global Hub, Evanston, IL, USA May 28-30 ... [More] Invited keynote, ICORS/LASC, Guayaquil, EC June 11-12 Some R hacking, Snapcraft Summit, Montreal, CA July 9-12 Invited Rcpp Tutorial, useR! 2019, Toulouse, FR [Less]