Planet Kwekje

Tanguy Ortolo: Debian with recent AMD graphic cards

If you install Debian on a computer with a recent AMD graphic card (a, integrated Radeon HD 6310 in my case), you will only get garbage on your screen. Even without X.Org.

This is because these graphic card require a non-free firmware to work, even in 2D with free drivers. So, boot with the kernel option radeon.modeset=0 to get a working console, then install the non-free package linux-firmware-nonfree.

After that, do not forget to complain to AMD, because that really sucks hard. At the beginning there were microwave network cards unusable without non-free firmware, then wired network cards, and they are even invading graphic cards!

Bartosz Feński: dibbler 0.8.1

Can’t believe its almost 7 years since my first sponsored upload of Dibbler to Debian archive. I did it cause upstream promised to maintain it and fix any bugs submitted by Debian users. Unfortunately after 3-4 years he stopped to do it. Well since I was the sponsor of it, then I should feel responsible for these packages after him. It’s quite hard to do it, cause I’m not using these packages at all

Anyway, I finally found some time and reviewed them. It wasn’t easy cause in the meantime whole build process totally changed.

To whom it may concern: Dibbler is an IPv6 DHCP client, relay and server.

I’ve just uploaded the newest upstream version.

Changelog follows:

dibbler (0.8.1-1) unstable; urgency=low

* ACK previous NMUes – thanks!
* New upstream version (Closes: #629685)
– uses correct example adsress pool in examples (Closes: #544323)
– corrects scope of stateless in manpage (Closes: #615165)
* Fix pending l10n issues. Debconf translations:
– Danish courtesy of Joe Hansen (Closes: #597767)
– Dutch courtesy of Jeroen Schot (Closes: #632628)
* Fixes handling of children processes using resolvconf (Closes: #627317)
* Doesn’t conflict with other resolver configuration daemons (Closes: #627786)
* Correctly handles multiselect values from debconf (Closes: #629681)
* Debianized almost from scratch, uses new source format.
* New Standards-Version (no changes needed).

— Bartosz Fenski <fenio> Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:37:13 +0100

Yep, it fixes 8 bugs, and brings the newest upstream version with huge number of new features to Debian.

Enjoy!

Opstelten wil handhaving boerkaverbod

AMSTERDAM - Minister van Veiligheid en Justitie Ivo Opstelten (VVD) vindt dat de politie het vrijdag voorgestelde boerkaverbod, als dat eenmaal door het parlement is aangenomen, gewoon moet handhaven.

Dode gevangenen aangetroffen in Hama

AMMAN - De lichamen van 17 mannen die eerder deze week door troepen van de Syrische president Bashar al-Assad werden aangehouden, zijn zaterdag op straat gevonden in de stad Hama.

New Privacy Laws Could Boost EU Cloud Industry

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amsterdam helpt gemeenten bij weren Angels

AMSTERDAM - Amsterdam gaat desgewenst advies geven aan gemeenten in de regio om te voorkomen dat de Hells Angels die Amsterdam moeten verlaten, zich daar vervolgens willen vestigen.

Sap baalt van PvdA in SP-kamp

HILVERSUM - Het bevalt GroenLinks-leider Jolande Sap niet dat de PvdA te veel in de richting van de SP beweegt.

Agent door schietincident gedood in woning

HAARLEMMERLIEDE - Een agent is vrijdagavond laat in zijn eigen woning in Haarlemmerliede gedood door een schietincident.

'Vlammend protest' aan beide kanten A15

LINGEWAARD - Aan beide kanten van de snelweg A15 (Rotterdam - Ewijk) laten actievoerders zaterdagmiddag een 'vlammend protest' horen tegen besluiten van minister Melanie Schultz van Haegen van Infrastructuur en Milieu.

Schmallenberg wil nieuwe naam voor virus

SCHMALLENBERG - Het Schmallenbergvirus dat heerst onder schapen, geiten en runderen, is vernoemd naar het Duitse stadje waar het virus voor het eerst werd aangetroffen.

5 naschokken van de grote ING-storing

Online bankieren van ING is afgelopen verworden tot offline bankieren. Een groter dan grote storing heeft de klanten van de bank getroffen. Ondanks herstel is de ramp nog niet voorbij.

Hacker kraakt encryptie smartphone via radio

Encryptiesleutels van smartphones zijn te kraken door het opvangen van radiogolven. De ontdekker van de kraak zal hem volgende maand demonstreren op de RSA-conferentie in San Francisco.

'Misstanden fabrieken door wurgcontracten Apple'

Niet alleen Apple, maar ook zijn concurrenten nemen producten af van fabrieken die in opspraak raken. Die concurrenten geven leveranciers wel meer ruimte om voor betere werkomstandigheden te zorgen.

De geheimzinnigheid rond ACTA verklaard

Het anti-piraterijverdrag ACTA kenmerkt zich door een wolk van geheimzinnigheid, achterkamertjespolitiek en een dikke vinger van de Amerikaanse filmindustrie. Waarom ACTA verder gaat dan SOPA en PIPA.

Alessandro Vermeulen: Getting rid of programming JavaScript with Haskell

For my Experimentation Project at Utrecht University I ported the “JCU” application to Haskell. The JCU application is used to give Dutch High school students the opportunity to taste Prolog.

The project uses the Utrecht Haskell Compiler and its JavaScript backend. The UHC translates Haskell to Core and then translates this Core language to JavaScript. For more information on this see the blog of the creator of the UHC JavaScript backend.

Please read my report on this project. The project is hosted on GitHub in the following repositories:

• JCU,
• uhc-jscript,
• NanoProlog, and
• UU-TC.

update 28-01-2012: The keyword jscript in the UHC has been changed to js in order to avoid association with Microsoft’s JScript. Also new Object syntax is now available in the foreign import directives.

1
2

foreign import js "new Object()"
  newObject :: IO (JSPtr a)

Sony Xperia S heeft 'snel laden'-functie

De Sony Xperia S-smartphone kan volgens de fabrikant binnen een half uur voor meer dan driekwart worden opgeladen, meldt een Zwitserse site. Om dat mogelijk te maken, is de accu geïntegreerd en niet door de gebruiker te verwisselen.

EU: Nederlandse artiesten compenseren bij afschaffing kopieheffing

De Europese Commissie antwoordt op vragen van een PvdA-europarlementariër dat Nederland alleen de thuiskopieheffing mag afschaffen, zoals staatssecretaris Teeven wil, als er een garantie is dat artiesten gecompenseerd worden.

'Android-malware is miljoenen keren gedownload'

Volgens beveiligingsbedrijf Symantec heeft de Android Market te kampen gehad met een grote hoeveelheid malware. Deze zit verstopt in applicaties van verschillende ontwikkelaars, waarbij de hoeveelheid downloads boven het miljoen zit.

Web app that shows you the changes between releases of packages on hackage

submitted by donri
[link] [3 comments]

x-post from /r/programming: Vellum, a verified model for LLVM

Seem like there's a boycott of Elsevier going on.

submitted by barsoap
[link] [1 comment]

I remember there being a functional web programming language that translated into HTML and Javascript and PHP. Does anyone remember it?

submitted by zarus
[link] [17 comments]

Transportondernemer Assen geteisterd door brand

ASSEN - Door een brand bij een transportbedrijf in Assen zijn zaterdagochtend vier vrachtwagens uitgebrand en is er een ernstig beschadigd geraakt.

Russ Allbery: Review: Effective Java, Second Edition

Review: Effective Java, Second Edition, by Joshua Bloch

Guy Steele, in the forward to this book, writes:

Programs, unlike spoken sentences and unlike most books and magazines, are likely to be changed over time. It's typically not enough to produce code that operates effectively and is readily understood by other persons; one must also organize the code so that it is easy to modify. There may be ten ways to write code for some task T. Of those ten ways, seven will be awkward, inefficient, or puzzling. Of the other three, which is most likely to be similar to the code needed for the task T′ in next year's software release?

Teaching this, as well as how to avoid being awkward, inefficient, or puzzling, is the goal of this book. Clearly communicating effective, idiomatic, and maintainable usage to a newcomer to a programming language is one of the hardest types of programming books to write. Books like this are therefore quite scarce. Most introductory texts do try to communicate some degree of basic usage, but they rarely go far beyond the syntax, and when they do that usage is rarely both well-defended and inobvious. Bloch takes the concept quite far indeed, going deep not only into the Java language but also into object-oriented software construction in general.

Effective Java is modeled after Effective C++ by Scott Meyers, a book I've not read (due to the lack of need for C++ in my programming life), but which I've heard a great deal about. This means the book is organized into 78 numbered items, each of which provides specific advice and analysis about one area of Java. Examples include item 16, "Favor composition over inheritance," or item 33, "Use EnumMap instead of ordinal indexing." As you can see, they run the gamut from high-level design principles to specific coding techniques.

This sort of book demands a lot of the author. Everyone has a coding style, and everyone can make usage recommendations, but the merits or lack thereof of specific recommendations are often only visible with substantial later experience. More than any other type of programming language book, this sort of usage guide must be written by a language expert with years of experience with both good and bad code in the language. This is where Effective Java shines. Joshua Bloch led the design and implementation of significant portions of the Java core libraries at Sun and is currently the chief Java architect at Google, but even without knowing that background, his expertise is obvious. Every item in this book is backed up with specific examples and justification, and Bloch quotes extensively from the Java core library to illustrate both the advantages of the techniques he describes and the problems that result when they're not followed.

This is not an introductory book, which is one of the things that makes it so efficient and concise. It's a book aimed at the intermediate or advanced Java programmer and assumes you already know the language and the basic pitfalls. There are only a few items in here that would be obvious to most experienced programmers, and even there Bloch ties them back to specific issues in Java in ways that are illuminating. I would not have expected to learn something new from a chapter on a hoary old problem like avoiding float and double for precise values, but I did: Bloch discusses the available alternatives within Java and their tradeoffs and then makes useful specific recommendations.

If, like me, you're an experienced programmer already but relatively new to Java, you still should not read this book first. You need a general introduction to the language and libraries and a few projects under your belt before you can appreciate it. (I personally started with Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel and it served me well, although on several points of style Bloch disagrees with advice in Eckel's book, and I find Bloch's arguments convincing.) But I think this is one of the best possible choices for your second book on Java, in large part because Bloch will head off bad design and style decisions that you don't realize you're making and catch them before they become entrenched. I'm glad I read it as soon as I knew the language well enough to absorb it, and it's the sort of book that I'm likely to re-read sections of whenever I work on Java code related to those topics.

It's not entirely obvious that you should take my advice about this sort of book, since I'm not a Java expert and don't have those years of experience with it. But I've checked the recommendation with other programmers I know who are experts, and I've never heard anything but praise for it. It's also one of the books recommended in Coders at Work, and Bloch is one of the people interviewed there, which carries a lot of weight with me. And, apart from that, any long-time programmer who cares about their craft builds an internal sense of aesthetics around what a well-written program should look like and finds themselves recognizing a similar sense in other people's code, even in languages with which they're not familiar. Bloch's recommendations and analysis feel right; one can immediately see how they improve maintainability and robustness, and some of the techniques he shows are elegant and beautiful.

This is not a general programming book. It's specifically focused on the Java language, and much of it deals with specific suggestions on how to use Java's core libraries and language features. If you're not going to be writing code in Java, I can't really recommend it. But one of the things I loved about it is that, while talking about Java, Bloch also talks about object-oriented software construction: techniques for extending foreign libraries one does not control, API design, and the proper use of inheritance, among other topics.. That advice is some of the best object-oriented software design advice I've ever read. There isn't enough of it to recommend the book to people with no interest in Java, but this book has even made my C and Perl code better, and has helped me grasp the tradeoff between inheritance and composition in a deeper way than I ever had before. It's a lovely side bonus.

If you're writing Java, read this book. If you're learning Java, don't read it first, but read it second, and more than once, or alongside a project where you can apply the advice. It's dense and efficient in the information that it conveys, which means there's more in a couple pages here than in thirty or forty pages of some of the sprawling introductory programming books. I did read it cover to cover, which is one of the better ways to get a sense of Bloch's more general advice on software construction, but you'll hit information overload and will want to return to it piecemeal to fully absorb it.

And do get the second edition. I'm sure the first edition is available cheap used, but the additions of enums and generics to the Java language are hugely important and provide some of the most elegant and graceful techniques in the book.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Site onthult geheimen koninklijke wachtkamers

UTRECHT - De koninklijke wachtkamers op de stations Amsterdam CS, Den Haag HS en Baarn zijn niet langer voorbehouden aan koningin Beatrix en haar familie.

'Beurswaarde Facebook ruim 75 miljard'

NEW YORK - De socialenetwerksite Facebook zal bij zijn beursgang worden gewaardeerd op 75 tot 100 miljard dollar (57 tot 76 miljard euro).

iPhone 4S's Siri Is a Bandwidth Guzzler

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ten... smart TVs

Product round-up Net set and catch up

Christian Perrier: 2012 update 7 for Debian Installer localization

• Persian completes level 1 and is now 100% everywhere
• Polish completes level 2 and 3 and is now 100% everywhere
• Turkish complete level 2 and is now 100% everywhere
• Arabic, Greek and Hindi complete level 1
• Serbian completes level 3
• Progress for Estonian and Romanian in level 1
• Big progress for Kannada in level 1: only sublevel 4 left incomplete
• Progress for Asturian in level 2

• 29 languages 100%: ar bg cs de el eo es fa fr gu hi it ja kk km ko mr nb nl pl pt ru sk sr sv ta th uk zh_CN
• 3 languages 99%: bs si te
• 2 languages 97%: eu tr
• 2 languages 96%: be he
• 7 languages 95%: bn dz et id kn ro zh_TW
• 3 languages 94%: ast da ga
• 3 languages 93%: hu is lo
• 1 language 92%: sl
• 2 languages 91%: pa vi
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 22 languages 100%: bg cs da de eo es fa fr he is it ja kk nl pl pt ru si sk tr uk zh_CN
• 5 languages 99%: be id sl sv th
• 5 languages 98%: ast ca eu pt_BR ro
• 1 language 96%: nb
• 2 langauges 95%: el fi
• 5 languages 94%: ar gl hr vi zh_TW
• 6 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne sr
• 10 languages 91%: dz ga gu ka km lt mk mr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 30 languages 100%: be bg bs ca cs de el eo es fa fi fr ga gl he is it ja kk nb nl pl pt ru sk sr sv th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 98%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

'PVV'ers zogen klachten uit duim'

AMSTERDAM - Een zwartboek met klachten over de verkeerssituatie in Den Haag is door de gemeenteraadsfractie van de PVV in de stad deels verzonnen.

Hacker kraakt bewijs voor onveiligheid Havengebied

Een Anonymous-hacker heeft zich gemeld AD/Rotterdams Dagblad. Hij zegt bewijs te hebben over milieuovertredingen van een bedrijf in de Rotterdamse haven. Het bedrijf is gehacked.

'Pakistan wist waar Bin Laden was'

WASHINGTON - De Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Leon Panetta is ervan overtuigd dat er hooggeplaatste Pakistanen zijn die wisten waar terroristenleider Osama bin Laden zich schuil hield, al heeft hij daarvoor geen hard bewijs.

Peetoom twijfelt over kiezen leider

AMSTERDAM - Ruth Peetoom weet niet zeker of de partijleider van het CDA wel via interne verkiezingen moet worden gekozen.

Tieners VS wilden school opblazen

ROY - Twee tieners uit het Amerikaanse stadje Roy zijn deze week opgepakt, omdat ze ervan worden verdacht dat ze hun school wilden opblazen.

Web application that uses UHC to compile Haskell to JavaScript

submitted by apfelmus
[link] [12 comments]

Russ Allbery: Summary of C++ symbols experience

This is a follow-up to my previous post about the way that Debian's library symbols analysis support interacts with C++ libraries, based on further debian-devel discussion. The primary outcome of that discussion was to point me at the pkg-kde-tools utilities for handling maintenance of these files, which solved a bunch of my problems.

As before, this was also posted on debian-devel, which is where I expect most of the discussion to be.

First of all, for those who haven't explored the pkg-kde-tools infrastructure for this, it looks like the effective process goes something like this:

1. Do a local build of the package and then generate an initial symbols template for that architecture. So, for example, I did:

       fakeroot debian/rules build install
       pkgkde-gensymbols -plibxml-security-c16 -v1.6.1 -Osymbols.i386 \
           -edebian/libxml-security-c16/usr/lib/*/libxml-security-c.so.*.*
       pkgkde-symbolshelper create -o debian/libxml-security-c16.symbols \
           -v 1.6.1 symbols.i386
   

   This generates an initial symbols file that will work for i386.

2. Build and upload this version of the package. Now wait for all the buildds to fail (because they will, on probably nearly every other architecture than your local one).

3. Download all of the build logs and feed them back into pkgkde-symbolshelper so that it can adjust your symbols template for all of the architecture variations. So, for example, I did:

       pkgkde-getbuildlogs
       pkgkde-symbolshelper batchpatch -v 1.6.1 *_unstable_logs/*.build
   

   This will generate rather nice annotated symbols files with appropriate arch lists and using subst tags where appropriately (such as when an argument to a function is a size_t).

4. Modify your package to use pkg-kde-tools during the build, because subst tags are a really nice way to handle a lot of C++ symbol patterns but #533916 against dpkg-dev is wontfix, so you need the pkg-kde-tools replacement for dpkg-gensymbols. I added a dependency on pkg-kde-tools and then added the (undocumented) pkgkde_symbolshelper add-on to my dh --with flag.

5. Build and upload the package again. Now it will hopefully build on all architectures.

This is, as you might expect, a fair bit of work, but it does work, and what comes out the other end is a symbols file that works across the current buildd architectures and detects any mistakes by upstream that change the symbols exported.

However, it does have some problems, some obvious, and some more subtle. Here's a list of the issues that I see:

1. It feels like this symbols file is still likely to be fragile. While pkg-kde-tools detects a lot of template instances and marks them optional, I was still seeing a lot of "leaked" symbols from other C++ libraries that my package build-depends on, and which I suspect may also disappear. There's also the problem of optimizers eliminating some things that are inlined; for example, that appears to be the variation that my package sees on arm. And for a substantial C++ library, the symbols file is HUGE. Over 12,000 lines for one of my libraries. It's kind of scary to think of how many fragility landmines are buried under there.

2. By the nature of this process, it's very sensitive to the current supported architectures. I expect any package with a symbols template built this way stands a good chance of FTBFS on a new architecture. For example, my symbols file has a lot of !armel !armhf patterns, which don't appear to be anything unique to arm except that the C++ compiler behaves slightly differently there due to inlining, and those are the only two architectures in the current set with that pattern.

3. The lack of dpkg-gensymbols support for subst is very unfortunate, since it's used by the pkg-kde-tools utilities and it's the Right Thing To Do for symbols that take, for example, size_t as an argument. I would strongly encourage the dpkg maintainers to accept the work in #533916 except maybe for the vt work, since the alternative is to generate regexes that are significantly worse at capturing mistakes (since they're going to accept either int or long, rather than only whatever one corresponds to size_t, for example), or to embed a lot of specific architecture restrictions listing, for instance, all 64-bit architectures and guarantee FTBFS for every new architecture.

4. It's a little hard on the infrastructure, since adding a symbols file requires uploading a package that's guaranteed to fail to build almost everywhere just so that you can get all the build logs to feed into the machinery. I always feel guilty about doing that.

5. It's still not clear that the benefit is worth the amount of effort, since I expect most C++ libraries to require frequent SONAME changes anyway, which means that the long-term binary compatibility angle of symbols is probably futile. Mostly, all of this is to give you a tool to do ABI checking, which will catch some mistakes but not all of them. And I'm guessing it's going to be substantially more work than maintaining symbols for a C library if one actually does it properly and checks every missing symbol and change in new builds.

I'm going to try this for the Shibboleth packages for a while since I want to see what it's like across a new upstream release, but I'm still very much not convinced that this is a useful use of a packager's time.

Android Malware May Have Infected 5 Million Users

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sea Water Could Cause Uranium Pollution From Nuclear Fuel Rods

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo of the Day

Photo of the Day: The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart (then Jon Leibowitz) as a young College of William & Mary student moshing at a Dead Kennedys show at Casablanca in Richmond, VA, c. 1982.

Photo by Irish Willis Peele.

[gawker.]

This x That

This x That:

Know This:

• Report: Ron Paul signed off on racist newsletters.

• Hillary Clinton says she wants to step off “the high wire of American politics“; this is not the first time she’s said that; and Ice-T isn’t quite ready to let her go.

• New York Times: Patrick Witt’s Rhodes Scholarship candidacy suspended over sexual assault accusation; Witt: Nuh-uh; also: Yale Daily News knew and tell.

Read This:

• White House chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra tenders his resignation.

• Adam Jacobi fired from CBS for premature Joe Paterno death story.

• “Barefoot Bandit” Colton Harris-Moore sentenced to 6-1/2 years in prison.

• President John Tyler’s grandson is still alive, thinks Newt Gingrich is a jerk.

• Cell phone usage a “war crime” in North Korea during 100-day mourning period.

The Other:

• NewsFeed: Do Not Return to Sender: 16 Kilos of Cocaine Mailed to U.N. Headquarters.

• Tea x Time List: 5 Famous People Who Succeeded Long After They Should’ve Quit.

• Above: “Don’t believe the pipe” by marcos c. (via.)

My new favorite word

I was sitting on the bus on the way to work this morning, just spacing out and looking around. The person in front of me was reading a book that caught my eye because tons of notes had been scribbled in the margins in different handwriting and colors of ink. I was absentmindedly staring at it just because it looked neat, but then a word someone scrawled larger than the others popped out at me:

Nagnostic.

It was beautiful. I don’t know what they intended it to mean, or if it was really just a vaguely N-shaped scribble that happened to occur in front of “agnostic.” But I instantly knew how I would define the term:

nagnostic (noun) - A person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena, and takes that belief to such extremes that they persistently annoy others with assertions that their position is obviously the most philosophically sound and that they too are actually agnostic.

Susie: So I went to this atheist meetup the other day and -
Billy: How can you be an atheist? Can you prove god doesn’t exist?
Susie: Well, no, but-
Billy: Then you’re really an agnostic!
Susie: That small margin of doubt is effectively insignificant. And you can’t prove a negative…
Billy: There’s still technically doubt! You’re agnostic!
Susie: But that’s impractical. Are you agnostic about unicorns because they’ve never been proved not to exist?
Billy: Yes.
Susie: …You’re such a fucking nagnostic.

As a former nagnostic, I apologize. And plan to use this slang wherever applicable. …Which is unfortunately pretty often.

I wasn't looking at the same part of the map Neil deGrasse Tyson is inexplicably obsessed with

Also, really area to papers published is the wrong thing to struck by. It should be population to papers published.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

IFFR: Kill List

Marcel Ruijters: Twee huurmoordenaars (ex-commando's) gaan door dik en dun, steunen elkaar bij huwelijksproblemen en nemen vervolgens een klus aan die niet alleen te groot zal blijken (dát zie je aan komen) maar ook een afdaling in bizarre horror met een onverwachte en perverse dimensie...

IFFR: Big Talk: Aki Kaurismäki

Marcel Ruijters: Voorafgaand aan zijn nieuwste film Le Havre nemen Aki Kaurismäki en schrijfster Natasja van den Berg plaats voor een inleidend gesprek...

Russ Allbery: Do symbols files make sense for C++?

I also posted this to debian-devel, which is where the discussion will be, but I wanted to post it on my journal as well so that others who may be interested will see it on Planet Debian. For those not familiar with Debian, this concerns the implications of a new feature for how Debian tracks shared library dependencies.

I'm currently working on the Policy modification to document (and recommend) use of symbols instead of shlibs, but I'd only personally used symbols with C libraries. Today I decided that I should try adding a symbols file to a C++ library, particularly if I'm going to recommend everyone do it. I tried this exercise with xml-security-c, which is, I think, a reasonably typical C++ library. Not the sort of core C++ library that would sit at the center of the distribution, but a random software package that's in Debian because other things use it.

The experience was rather interesting, and I ended up uploading the new version without a symbols file and continuing to just use shlibs. That's for the following reasons:

1. The generated symbols file was HUGE. Hundreds of lines. This is a marked difference from the typical C symbols file, which is of quite manageable size. Some of that is that the library provides a lot of different classes, but some of it is that C++ just generates a lot of exported symbols. There's no way that I could do what I would do with a C library and understand those symbols, why they're there, and whether they are likely to have changed between revisions.

2. Generating a reasonable symbols file was a pain. Generating an unreasonable symbols file that just contains all of the mangled symbols is largely mechanical and uninteresting, but that symbols file doesn't seem to me to convey useful information. So I did some scripting to translate the symbols back with c++filt, and add (c++) tags, and then try to understand what I was looking at and figure out whether I should sort the symbols list because the default sort is by mangled name, which is meaningless. This is a rather unappealing process. It's not particularly difficult, but it's very awkward and feels like it's missing vital tools.

3. The resulting symbols file is incomprehensible to someone without strong knowledge of C++. It's full of opaque entries that don't make sense to the non-C++ programmer, which I suspect is a substantial number of people who package C++ libraries for Debian. I know enough C++ from school that I can evaluate security fixes, make simple patches, and review upstream changes, and I think that's all that should be needed to package things for Debian. But I'm deeply uncomfortable producing a symbols file on my own that contains entries for things that I know nothing about and cannot evaluate when they've last changed, like "non-virtual thunk to FooClass::~FooClass@Base".

4. Once I had a symbols file that resulted in a successful build and that I could have uploaded, I started thinking about how I was going to maintain it. With a C program, I would change the symbols file versions when the underlying function implementation changes in a way that may not offer eqiuvalence, similar to bumping shlibs. I realized that I was going to have no idea when that happened, and the only way that I would maintain the symbols file would be to either trust upstream to maintain ABI equivalence and therefore only change the symbols file when upstream changes the SONAME, or not trust upstream to maintain ABI equivalence and therefore change all the versions with each new upstream release. That gives me exactly the same semantics as a shlibs file, so what's the point in having a symbols file?

5. The exported symbols of the library contained many symbols that obviously weren't really from that library, but instead were artifacts of the C++ compilation process, things like instantiations of std::vector. Do those go into the symbols file? Do they change from architecture to architecture? If they disappear again, is that actually an ABI break? How do I know? It's all very mysterious, and while shlibs provides the same semantics as just ignoring this, at least I'm not then including in the package data, generated by me, things that I'm just blindly ignoring.

I came away from this experience thinking that I should revise the Policy amendment to say that symbols files are really for C libraries and for C++ libraries with either a tightly maintained symbol export list or maintained by a C++ expert, and that most C++ library maintainers should just not bother with this and use shlibs, bumping the shlibs version or not based on their impression of how good upstream is at maintaining ABI equivalence.

But that feels like a result contrary to what I had previously thought was the intended direction, so I wanted to ask the Debian development community as a whole: am I missing something? Are these symbols files actually useful? Am I missing some trick to make them useful?

How Allan Scherr Hacked Around the First Computer Password

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blog blast births boffin boycott of publisher Elsevier

Rage over high fees and SOPA support

The ongoing world protests against SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA have helped inspire a revolt among scientists over the role of academic publisher Elsevier and its business practices.…

Don Armstrong: Using wicd on UCR's WPA network

UC Riverside's wireless network uses WPA-EAP for the encrypted network. [The unencrypted network does a https based browser capture.] Unfortunately, none of the default wicd encryption templates support the precise brand of WPA that the network does, so you have to make your own template. Luckily, wicd makes this fairly simple:

Create a new template, say, /etc/wicd/encryption/templates/eap-only, with appropriate contents.

 name = EAP
 author = Don Armstrong
 version = 1
 require identity *Identity passwd *Password 

 -----
 ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
 network={
    ssid="$_ESSID"
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    identity="$_IDENTITY"
    password="$_PASSWD"
 }

Then tell wicd about this new template by editing /etc/wicd/encryption/templates/active and adding eap-only to the existing list of templates, and restart wicd /etc/init.d/wicd restart. [I'm not sure if restarting wicd is necessary, but it shouldn't hurt.]

Finally, configure the network using the appropriate wicd interface as usual.

January 28 is Data Privacy Day

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webOS daddy Jon Rubinstein exits HP

Enough is enough: 'I'm gonna go for a swim, have a little lunch..."

Jon Rubinstein, late of NeXT, FirePower, Apple, and Palm, has resigned from his position at HP, where he endured the mismanagement and eventual overboarding of Palm's webOS mobile operating system.…

Cyanide & Happiness

Cy&H.

Awesomeness Runs In The Family of the Day

Awesomeness Runs In The Family of the Day: Video artist Dicken Schrader rubs his sensational child-rearing skills in all our faces by enlisting the help of his kickass kids Milah and Korben in covering Depeche Mode’s “Everything Counts.”

[dpaf.]

Blooper Reel of the Day

Blooper Reel of the Day: The Artist‘s blooper reel is pretty much the classiest blooper reel ever.

[deadline.]

The More You Know of the Day

The More You Know of the Day: And so, one of the greatest mysteries of our time is finally solved: Ice Cube’s “good day” took place on the 20th of January, 1992.

How did Murk Avenue‘s Donovan Strain arrive at that particular date? Using details gleaned from the song’s lyrics, Strain was able to conclude the following:

The ONLY day where:
Yo MTV Raps was on air
It was a clear and smogless day
Beepers were commercially sold
Lakers beat the SuperSonics
and Ice Cube had no events to attend was…

JANUARY 20 1992

So there you have it. Twenty years and one week ago today was what shall henceforth be known as the first annual National Good Day Day.

[gawker.]

YouTube: Vibop by NewBlue

I'm proud to announce that we launched a new YouTube.com/create partner, Vibop:

Vibop makes your videos shine with just a few clicks. Add an animated intro, a vintage filter, a cartoon look, a silent movie theme, and dozens of other effects. Brighten dark images and fix a shaky camera. Fun, fast, and easy, Vibop will take your memories to the next level!

Dart at BayPiggies

I gave a talk on Dart last night at BayPiggies. We had a great turn out, and the crowd was super interactive! Never underestimate a Python programmer's ability to question every aspect of a new programming language, especially one that uses curly braces and semicolons ;)

If you're interested, here are the slides.

Mars-Bound Probe Serves As Radiation Guinea Pig

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Haskell equivalent of Racket's "Any" type?

USPTO Declares Invalid Third of Three Critical Rambus Patents

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

White House Chief Technology Officer Steps Down

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White House Chief Technology Officer Steps Down

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Students busted for hacking computers, changing grades

'Very bright kids' too bright for their own good

Three high school juniors have been arrested after they devised a sophisticated hacking scheme to up their grades and make money selling quiz answers to their classmates.…

Petter Reinholdtsen: Handling non-free firmware in Debian Edu/Squeeze

With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs. This is the sad fact of todays computers. In the next version of Debian Edu / Skolelinux based on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make firmware blobs easier to handle. The common use case I run into is a laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to work, but there are other use cases as well.

First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them during installation. This take care firmware for network devices used by the installer when installing from from local media. But for example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are not taken care of by this.

For non-network devices, we provide the script /usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware which search through the dmesg output for drivers requesting extra firmware. The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz file available in the package repository, and the packages providing the requested firmware file(s) is installed. I have proposed to do something similar in debian-installer (BTS report #655507), to allow PXE installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better. Run the script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed firmware packages.

Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and because some machines need firmware to get their network cards working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware included to be able to install at all. To fill the PXE installation initrd with extra firmware, the /usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware script is provided. Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the PXE initrd with firmware packages.

Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their network cards working. For this, /usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware is provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs. It is used the same way as the other firmware related tools.

At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation. We do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use non-free software, and it is their choice.

We plan to release beta3 this weekend. You might want to give it a try.

DARPA Funding a $50 Drone-Droppable Spy Computer

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North Star May Be Wasting Away

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Flaw In YouTube Takedown Process Exposed

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'Politie zal weinig tegen boerka optreden'

HILVERSUM - De politie zal weinig optreden tegen dragers van boerka's. Dat verwacht Frank Giltay, voorzitter van de Centrale Ondernemingsraad (COR) van de Nederlandse politie.

Hek Westoever kan van Israël grens worden

RAMALLAH - Israël heeft voorgesteld om van het afscheidingshek op de Westelijke Jordaanoever de grens te maken tussen Israël en een toekomstige Palestijnse staat.

Birthday Boy of the Day

Birthday Boy of the Day: In honor of Mike Patton turning the big 4-4 today, I would like take the opportunity to post Faith No More’s “Midlife Crisis” which is both a friendly dig at Mike, and just a really awesome song that I really enjoy listening to.

Happy birthday, Mr. Patton! May you live forever.

[youtube.]

Colten Moore Crash of the Day

Colten Moore Crash of the Day: Snowmobile freestyler Colten Moore had the dubious honor of being the first person at Winter X Games 2012 to wipeout in spectacular fashion.

The Extreme Texan walked away from the 120-foot freefall unscathed, and even managed to pick up a gold medal for his trouble. 

[espn / nbcsports.]

From The Archives

From The Archives: A fascinating look at the coffee bar culture of 1950′s and 60′s London.

[swissmiss.]

Parei-d’oh-lia of the Day

Parei-d’oh-lia of the Day: An eBay auction for a piece old, dried glue that slightly resembles Homer Simpson has racked up over 80 bids in the last few days, with the highest bidder (as of now) offering up £151,000 for the chance to own a blob of gunk.

Christopher Herbert posted the item on eBay after finding it while cleaning out his stationery cupboard. He says he never expected anyone would offer to pay money for the sticky “collectible,” clearly underestimating just how many real-life Homer Simpsons there are out there.

[telegraph / arbroath.]

Tom Moertel: The inner beauty of tree traversals

This has been done a million times before, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty neat. Let’s say you have a simple recursive data structure like a binary tree:

module Tree where

data Tree a = Empty
            | Node a (Tree a) (Tree a)
            deriving (Eq, Show)

-- some binary trees

t0 = Empty
t1 = Node 1 Empty Empty
t3 = Node 2 (Node 1 Empty Empty) (Node 3 Empty Empty)

Now say you want to traverse the nodes, in “preorder.” So you write a traversal function. It folds a binary operator f through the values in the tree, starting with an initial accumulator value of z. First, it visits the current node, then the left subtree, and finally the right subtree, combining each value it encounters with the current accumulator value to get the next accumulator value. The final accumulator value is the result.

Spelling out the steps, it looks like this:

preorder_traversal f z tree = go tree z
  where
    go Empty        z = z
    go (Node v l r) z = let z'   = f v z     -- current node
                            z''  = go l z'   -- left subtree
                            z''' = go r z''  -- right subtree
                        in z'''

But if you wanted an “inorder” traversal instead, you’d write a slightly different function, visiting the left subtree before the current node:

inorder_traversal f z tree = go tree z
  where
    go Empty        z = z
    go (Node v l r) z = let z'   = go l z    -- left subtree
                            z''  = f v z'    -- current node
                            z''' = go r z''  -- right subtree
                        in z'''

To see how the two traversal functions work, let’s use both to flatten the 3-node tree t3 we defined earlier.

flatten traversal = reverse . traversal (:) []

test0i = flatten inorder_traversal t3   -- [1,2,3]
test0p = flatten preorder_traversal t3  -- [2,1,3]

Great.

But now you start thinking about post-order traversal. Do you want to write a third traversal function that’s almost the same as the first two?

So you go back to the inorder traversal and start staring real hard at that let statement. Can you rewrite it? Yes:

inorder_traversal2 f z tree = go tree z
  where
    go Empty        z = z
    go (Node v l r) z = go r . f v . go l $ z

And now you’ve got it. Just by reordering the applications of (go l), (f v), and (go r), you can control the traversal.

Which leads to a general traversal function that lets some other function control that ordering:

traverse step f z tree = go tree z
  where
    go Empty        z = z
    go (Node v l r) z = step (f v) (go l) (go r) z

Doesn’t that look beautiful?

Now you can just spell out your desired traversals:

preorder   = traverse $ \n l r -> r . l . n
inorder    = traverse $ \n l r -> r . n . l
postorder  = traverse $ \n l r -> n . r . l

A test drive:

test1p = flatten preorder t3   -- [2,1,3]
test1i = flatten inorder t3    -- [1,2,3]
test1o = flatten postorder t3  -- [1,3,2]

And you’re happy.

But can you go further? What if your trees are binary search trees and you just want to find the minimum or maximum value? Can you just traverse to the left or right?

Yes:

leftorder  = traverse $ \n l r -> l . n
rightorder = traverse $ \n l r -> r . n

treemin = leftorder min maxBound
treemax = rightorder max minBound

test2l = treemin t3 :: Int  -- 1
test2r = treemax t3 :: Int  -- 3

Isn’t that neat?

When Viruses Infect Worms

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Samsung gaat Exynos 5250-soc vanaf voorjaar gebruiken voor tablets

Samsung gaat zijn nieuwe Exynos 5250-soc het eerst gebruiken in tablets. Dat zegt de fabrikant in toelichting op de jaarcijfers. De dualcore-chipset zal vanaf het voorjaar in groten getale geproduceerd gaan worden, aldus Samsung.

Amerikaanse HTC heeft verborgen antenne voor Nederlandse gsm-netwerken

De Rezound, de enige HTC tot nu toe met 720p-scherm, blijkt een verborgen antenne voor Europese gsm- en umts-netwerken te hebben. Volgens de specs werkt het toestel alleen op de netwerken van de Amerikaanse provider Verizon.

Egyptenaren herdenken 'Vrijdag van Woede'

CAÏRO - Grote groepen Egyptenaren hebben vrijdag op het Tahrir-plein in Caïro de verjaardag van de 'Vrijdag van Woede' herdacht.

Romney weer aan kop in Florida

MIAMI - De Amerikaanse presidentskandidaat Mitt Romney lijkt volledig hersteld van de pijnlijke nederlaag bij de voorverkiezingen in de staat South Carolina.

The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is At Stake & What You Can Do

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Opponents protest signing of ACTA without adequate debate (ars technica)

ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) was called "more dangerous than SOPA" by US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), as ars technica reports. "Kader Arif, a French member of the European Parliament from the Socialist Party, had been assigned to be a rapporteur on ACTA, meaning that he was asked to study the issue and deliver a report on the subject. But he resigned in protest on Thursday. ”I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement," he said, according to one translation. "No inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.”"

Bill Gates Gives $750M To AIDS Fund

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Geen langstudeerboete voor premasterstudenten

AMSTERDAM - Honderden studenten die een zogeheten premaster hebben gevolgd mogen toch twee jaar over hun masteropleiding doen zonder een zogenoemde langstudeerboete te betalen.

FBI Building App To Scrape Social Media

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'Holleeder wil niks met de media te maken hebben'

RIJSWIJK - Peter R. de Vries heeft Willem Holleeder vrijdag ontmoet. De vrijgelaten crimineel heeft hem vertelt dat hij de komende jaren niks met de media te maken wil hebben.

Vorst komt eraan

ZEIST - De vorst komt eraan. Na een periode van zacht en wisselvallig weer breekt een koude (droge) tijd aan.

Security advisories for Friday

Debian has updated libxml2 (code execution/denial of service) and wireshark (multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated F15: php (denial of service and information disclosure), F15: php-eaccelerator (denial of service and information disclosure), and F15: maniadrive (denial of service and information disclosure).

Gentoo has updated ktsuss (privilege escalation).

openSUSE will be updating the certificates for all openSUSE hosts located Nuremberg. Click below for details.

Russian Rocket Fleet Grounded Again

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First US CTO Aneesh Chopra resigns from post

Logs out for possible political career

The first US government chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra has announced he’s leaving the job.…

Mars Rover Opportunity Turns 8

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReDigi Defends Used Digital Music Market

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GaleForce control freak paints clouds KVM red

Spanning more devices and hypervisors

Gale Technologies, one of the many companies that wants to manage your private and public clouds, has revved up its GaleForce cloud control freak to 6.0, and is improving its support for XenServer-based clouds and adding KVM to the mix.…

Polish lawmakers don Guy Fawkes masks to protest ACTA

Thousands roil Polish streets – more protests planned for Friday

Over 30 Polish lawmakers held up paper replicas of the Guy Fawkes mask, made famous by both Anoymous hacktivists and the Occupy movement, during a protest in parliament of their country's signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the EU's highly controversial online-piracy legislation.…

Joran van der Sloot weigert te getuigen

LIMA - Joran van der Sloot heeft vrijdag niet willen getuigen in de zaak van de drie taxichauffeurs die hem naar Chili hebben gebracht. Dat zei een woordvoerder van de rechtbank ter plekke.

Chemie-Pack in beroep om rapport

DEN HAAG - Chemie-Pack, het bedrijf in Moerdijk waar vorig jaar een enorme chemische brand woedde, heeft hoger beroep aangetekend tegen het vonnis van de kortgedingrechter van 18 januari.

'VVD misbruikt kinderen voor stoer immigratiepraatje'

DEN HAAG - De VVD misbruikt kinderen als Mauro om naar de kiezers toe een stoer immigratiepraatje te kunnen houden.

Chuck & Beans

Chuck & Beans.

Follow Up of the Day: Taco Mayor Gets His Tacos

Follow Up of the Day: Following East Haven mayor Joseph Maturo’s insensitive comments toward the Latino community, a local branch of the Reform Immigration for America organization made sure he got his just tacos.

“I might have tacos when I go home” the mayor told a reporter when asked what he plans to do for the Latino community in light of four local police officers being arrested by the feds for racial profiling.

The activist group Junta for Progressive Action decided to give the mayor what he wanted, and launched a campaign promising to send Maturo a taco for every text they received.

500 tacos have been delivered thus far.

“The town of East Haven has received an abundance of tacos as a result of the campaign initiated by the group ‘Reform Immigration for America,” the mayor’s office said in a statement. “Recognizing that there are many in need in our state, we have arranged for all of the tacos to be donated to local soup kitchens and pantries, including the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen in New Haven.”

The mayor previously apologized for his remark, blaming it on fatigue from a long workday. He insists he has no plans to resign at this time.

[cnn / wpix / photo: ri4a.]

Godspeed You! Black Mesa of the Day

Godspeed You! Black Mesa of the Day: Impressive and haunting mashup of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “The Dead Flag Blues” and in-game footage from Half-Life 2 that took Michael over 100 hours to compile. 

The goal of this project was to take the song “The Dead Flag Blues” and match it with striking imagery from the Half-Life 2 series to create a unique video that fans can enjoy. Call it a trailer, short, montage, music video, machinima, whatever you want, this my tribute to one the best game series around and everyone’s favorite hero. Oh, the band rules too.

[kotaku.]

Hand-Drawn Bags of the Day

Hand-Drawn Bags of the Day: “Trick your eyes! Twist your view!” exclaim Taipei-based designers Chay Su and Rika Lin, AKA JumpFromPaper.

Their collection of clutches, satchels, and other carrying accessories are all designed to look as if they’ve been brought to life by a magical crayon set.

Pricing and other info here.

[gizmodo.]

Dubstep Drumline of the Day

Dubstep Drumline of the Day: The Princes of Pen-Based Percussion Shane Bang and Kevin Ke do a decent dubstep beat with nothing but a few common school supplies.

As for the lack of a drop, says Shane: ” i apologize on behalf of my plastic ruler. it tried its best.”

[bangshane.]

Say No To Understanding Terrorism of the Day

Say No To Understanding Terrorism of the Day: When MidAmerica Nazarene University student Sophia Stockton received her textbook on understanding terrorism from Amazon, she flipped through it to find that it came with an unwelcome study aid: A bag of cocaine.

Stockton says she took the substance to the Gardner police station, where it was identified by an officer.

“He put some gloves on and put it in a plastic bag, he took it back to test it and like 10 minutes later he came back and said, ‘Did you happen to order some cocaine with your textbook?” Stockton told KWCH.

Though the book, Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues, was used, Stockton claims she received it directly from Amazon “entirely wrapped up.”

He (the person who previously had the book) did not know it was in there,” she said. “I am sure the guy was mad he left it in there, but I am kind of glad it is off the streets.”

Amazon has not yet commented on the case.

[kwch / kctv / tnw.]

Artsen: verzekeraars geven onjuiste info over EPD - update

De landelijke huisartsenvereniging heeft helemaal niet afgesproken met de zorgverzekeraars dat in de contracten met huisartsen aansluiting op het Elektronisch Patiëntendossier wordt verplicht.

Standalone lexers with lex: synopsis, examples, and pitfalls

Lexical analysis is the first phase of compilation.

During this phase, source code received character-by-character is transformed into a sequence of "tokens."

For example, for the following Python expression:

  print (3 + x 
    *2 ) # comment

the resulting stream of tokens might be (encoded as S-Expressions as):

 (keyword "print")
 (delim "(")
 (int 3)
 (punct "+")
 (id "x")
 (punct "*")
 (int 2)
 (delim ")")

Lexical analysis strips away insignificant whitespace and comments, and it groups the remaining characters into individual tokens.

Using the Unix tool lex, it's possible to create "standalone" lexers.

In a compiler/interpreter toolchain where each phase is standalone, a shell pipeline plugs them together, e.g.:

  tokenize < input | parse | interpret

Read on for an introduction to lex with synopses, examples and pitfalls.

Worked examples include:

• a comment-density calculator for C;
• a desugarer for Python-like significant whitespace; and
• a standalone lexer for the obligatory calc language.

Click here to read the rest of the article

Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Publiek en parlement bewust buitenspel gezet bij EU-besluit Acta'

Maatschappelijke organisaties en het Europees parlement zijn bewust buitenspel gezet bij het besluit om het anti-piraterijverdrag Acta te ondertekenen. Dat zegt de rapporteur van het parlement, die spreekt van een 'politieke poppenkast'.

Voormalig directeur Palm verlaat HP

Jon Rubinstein, een van de makers van de iPod en directeur van smartphonemaker Palm, heeft HP verlaten. Rubinstein was directeur van Palm toen dat bedrijf in 2010 voor 1,2 miljard dollar werd overgenomen door computergigant HP.

DigiD binnenkort zes uur plat vanwege verhelpen kwetsbaarheid

Overheidsinstantie Logius legt DigiD over anderhalve week zes uur plat om een kwetsbaarheid aan de servers te verhelpen. Het zou wellicht gaan om een kwetsbaarheid die vorige maand openbaar is gemaakt door een beveiligingsbedrijf.

Google wil Menu-knop uit Android halen

Google wil dat apps voortaan geen gebruik meer maken van de Menu-knop in Android. Veel toestellen hebben een Menu-knop, maar toekomstige toestellen niet meer. Daarom zouden ontwikkelaars hem niet meer moeten gebruiken.

'Intel werkt aan verbeterde opslagtechniek'

Intel zou van plan zijn om zijn opslagproducten voor zakelijk gebruik van een update te voorzien. Zo zou het bedrijf nog dit jaar zijn Rapid Storage Technology flink onder handen willen nemen, onder meer met een update voor Windows 8.

ODF Toolkit gets first Apache release

Containing tools for creating, manipulating and scanning ODF documents directly, the currently incubating ODF Toolkit will offer server applications an easy way to process the standard format used by OpenOffice and LibreOffice

Cisco Security Appliances at risk from Telnet bug

Attackers can remotely execute code with system privileges as a result of a known bug in Telnet daemon telnetd

Fedora relocates operating system under /usr/

All files previously stored in the Linux distribution's /bin/, /sbin/, /lib/ and /lib64/ directories will shortly be moved to equivalent sub-directories in /usr/

GlusterFS advisory board established

Red Hat has established a GlusterFS Advisory Board to promote the technical development of the distributed file system.

FFmpeg 0.10 "Freedom" released

Version 0.10 of FFmpeg adds several new encoders and decoders, as well as new filters and tools. The latest stable release also closes 15 security holes

Trojan downloader is a problem for virus scanners

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center has discovered a trojan downloader that only downloads and executes malicious code in the RAM, making it difficult to detect

A poll

Did not fry my eyeballs last night

I did get exposed to something that's triggered a major asthma attack and didn't recognize what was going on in time prevent it by taking an anti-histamine. Since I started feeling sick right after I walked across campus last week, I am guessing it was whatever I reacted to over in Physics.

I sound like a barking seal.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

doc_lemming's Crackpot Engineers

So for whatever reason, I was thinking about crackpots on the bus this morning and why engineers seem so prone to it. (James Nicoll has repeatedly said so on his LJ.) But I think that there's a selection bias: we notice the engineers more because they fit the criteria so well.

Quantum shares plunge after results

Turning the corner

Revenues for the third quarter of fy2012 were $173m, 2 per cent down on the $176m of a year ago. Net income was $3.94m, down from the $5.8m recorded a year ago. These earnings exceeded the Street's expectations so why did investors decide to sell the shares?…

IFFR: Les Géants

Marcel Ruijters: Sociale ellende, dat hoef je niet per se in de schaduw van wegroestende staalfabrieken te Luik of Charleroi te filmen...

IFFR: Skoonheid

Tonio van Vugt: Het is niet alleen het samenleven van zwart en blank waar veel voormalige blanke heersers in Zuid-Afrika moeite mee hebben; ook 'moffies', oftewel flikkers, worden door hen niet gelust...

AT&T Threatening To Raise Rates After Merger Failure

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vier jaar cel voor hoofdverdachte vastgoedfraude

AMSTERDAM - De hoofdverdachte in de vastgoedfraudezaak heeft vier jaar cel gekregen. meer informatie volgt

America abandoning DSL in favour of faster cable

Dash to fibre as people abandon twisted copper

ADSL connections to US homes are on the slide as companies and consumers turn to cable and fibre for faster connectivity.…

Franse troepen hervatten operatie Afghanistan

PARIJS - De Franse troepen hervatten zaterdag hun trainingsmissie in Afghanistan. Dit heeft president Nicolas Sarkozy vrijdag bekendgemaakt tijdens een persconferentie met zijn Afghaanse ambtgenoot Hamid Karzai.

Verdachte in zaak explosie Ritthem bekent

MIDDELBURG - Een van de verdachten die afgelopen dinsdag werden aangehouden in verband met de ontploffing van een caisson vorig jaar op het strand in Ritthem, heeft bekend betrokken te zijn.

Overlevenden herdenken bevrijding Auschwitz

WARSCHAU - Overlevenden en hoogwaardigheidsbekleders hebben vrijdag in Polen de bevrijding van Auschwitz, 67 jaar geleden, herdacht.

Enterprise gets social: Twitter-style data streams, engagement 'apps'

Little numbers, big software and the data deluge

Open ... and Shut The winning game plan for enterprise software has long been to "play it safe."…

America's Future Is In Software, Not Hardware

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Juniper stalled by jittery service providers, product transitions

Switch hitting

Juniper Networks warned Wall Street earlier this month that the fourth quarter was going to be rough because key service provider customers are cutting back on spending at the same time that the company is putting the finishing touches on some new switches and routers.…

Dumb salesmen are hurting us – Nokia CEO

Incentivising the McJobs

Analysis Stephen Elop got a pretty indulgent reception from analysts, and most of the press yesterday, after delivering some shocking results. Nokia turned a profit of €2bn into a loss of €1bn in the new boss's first full year; volumes are down by 29 per cent; sales of the new Windows phone are unremarkable (to put it generously); and Elop has scrapped guidance for the rest of the year. [Summary] News like this would normally have analysts reaching for the panic button - but not today. Why would this be?…

Jon Dowland: An Early Start

An early start.

Bestorming van Syrische ambassade in Caïro

CAÏRO - Tientallen Syrische betogers hebben vrijdag de ambassade van hun land in de Egyptische hoofdstad Caïro bestormd.

Nominet puts the squeeze on rude members

Scammers, speculators warned

Nominet, which runs the .uk domain registry, has proposed a new code of conduct that would ban unprofessional behaviour by its members.…

Apple Italy throws up ruling on its store site

We accept that they think we were wrong

UPDATE: Apple Italy has posted details of the ruling against it, as required by the Italian courts, though we don't yet know if Cupertino will be coughing up the €1.2m fine too.…

Iwata Confirms Nintendo Network, New Wii U Controller Functions

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Close Approach By Asteroid 2012 BX34

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook flings clickjack spam lawsuit at ad-slingers

Social network teams up with Washington State to hound marketing firm

Facebook and US state of Washington have filed lawsuits against marketing firm Adscend Media over alleged clickjacking and spam practices, as the social networking giant finally gets tough with scammers operating on the site.…

RIM slashes BlackBerry PlayBook tablet prices

Up to 58 per cent off launch cost

RIM has taken an axe to the prices it charges for its BlackBerry PlayBook tablets in the UK - again.…

Spotify reckons 1 in 5 freebie-gulper eventually pay up

Takes pop at labels for withholding

Spotify executive Ken Parks says Spotify has 3 million paying customers, and 20 per cent of people who get on to the free, ad-supported part of the service are signing up to become paying punters. Most of those, 15 per cent, sign up to the premium tier, Parks claimed. The premium tier gives you offline and mobile access to the music.…

Van Bijsterveldt aanvaardt excuses AOb

DEN HAAG - Minister Marja van Bijsterveldt (Onderwijs) accepteert de excuses die het bestuur van onderwijsbond AOb heeft aangeboden voor de uitspraken van bestuurslid Marten Kircz.

Noord-Italië weer opgeschrikt door aardbeving

MILAAN/GENUA - Voor de tweede keer deze week zijn grote delen van Noord-Italië vrijdag opgeschrikt door een aardbeving.

US lawmakers question Google over privacy policy

Politicos ask if Chocolate Factory's new rules violate an FTC agreement

Google is insisting that its new privacy policy will still give its users control, after criticism in a letter from US members of Congress.…

Graphene Membranes Superpermeable to Water

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Morning Fluff

Morning Fluff: A dog park — from a dog’s point-of-view.

[tastefullyoff.]

Early Bird Special

Early Bird Special: Benny The Jukebox plays the hits of the 90′s on his trusty melodica.

[reddit.]

Artsen: verzekeraars geven onjuiste info over EPD

De landelijke huisartsenvereniging heeft helemaal niet afgesproken met de zorgverzekeraars dat in de contracten met huisartsen aansluiting op het Elektronisch Patiëntendossier wordt verplicht.

CBP onderzoekt nieuw privacybeleid Google

Privacywaakhond CBP neemt het koppelen van gebruikersdata van verschillende diensten door Google "uiterst serieus" en zal de "ingrijpende wijziging" bestuderen.

6 Chromium-browsers die het proberen waard zijn

Terwijl Google Chrome steeds populairder aan het worden is, doen ook spin-offs van de open source-browser het goed. Voor ieder is er wat wils, wij bekijken zes Chrome-varianten.