Planet Debian

It’s been around 6 months since the GNOME Foundation was joined by our new Executive Director, Holly Million, and the board and I wanted to update members on the Foundation’s current status and some exciting upcoming changes. Finances As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 …

I wrote a blog post The Shape of Computers [1] exploring ideas of how computers might evolve and how we can use them. One of the devices I mentioned was the Humane AI Pin, which has just been the recipient of one of the biggest roast reviews I’ve ever seen [2] , good work Marques Brownlee! As an aside I was once given a product to review which didn’t work nearly as well as I think it should have worked so I sent an email to the developers saying “sorry this product failed to work well so I can’…

I previously wrote a blog post titled Considering Convergence [1] about the possible ways of using a phone as a laptop. While I still believe what I wrote there I’m now considering the possibility of ease of movement of work in progress as a way of addressing some of the same issues. Currently the expected use is that if you have web pages open on Chrome on Android it’s possible to instruct Chrome on the desktop to open the same page if both instances of Chrome are signed in to the same GMail a…

A new minor release 0.4.22 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian . QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R environment and language, and has been part of CRAN for more than twenty years (!!) as it was one of the first packages I uploaded there. This release of RQuantLib updates to QuantLib version 1.34 which was just released yesterday, and deprecates use of an acce…

Nine days ago, I started migrating orphaned Debian packages with no version control system listed in debian/control of the source to git. At the time there were 438 such packages. Now there are 391, according to the UDD. In reality it is slightly less, as there is a delay between uploads and UDD updates. In the nine days since, I have thus been able to work my way through ten percent of the packages. I am starting to run out of steam, and hope someone else will also help brushing some dust of t…

I've been enjoying Biosphere as the soundtrack to my recent "concentrated work" spells. Knives by Biosphere I remember seeing their name on playlists of yester-year: axioms , bluemars 1 , and (still a going concern) soma.fm 's drone zone . Bluemars lives on, at echoes of bluemars ↩

Review: Nation , by Terry Pratchett Publisher: Harper Copyright: 2008 Printing: 2009 ISBN: 0-06-143303-9 Format: Trade paperback Pages: 369 Nation is a stand-alone young adult fantasy novel. It was published in the gap between Discworld novels Making Money and Unseen Academicals . Nation starts with a plague. The Russian influenza has ravaged Britain, including the royal family. The next in line to the throne is off on a remote island and must be retrieved and crowned as soon as possible, or an…

The XKCD comic Code Quality [1] inspired me to test out emoji in source. I really should have done this years ago when that XKCD was first published. The following code compiles in gcc and runs in the way that anyone who wants to write such code would want it to run. The hover text in the XKCD comic is correct. You could have a style guide for such programming, store error messages in the doctor and nurse emoji for example. #include int main() { int = 1, = 2; printf("=%d, =%d\n", , ); return 0;…

When using Bubblewrap (the bwrap command) to create a container in Ubuntu 24.04 you can expect to get one of the following error messages: bwrap: loopback: Failed RTM_NEWADDR: Operation not permitted bwrap: setting up uid map: Permission denied This is due to Ubuntu developers deciding to use Apparmor to restrict the creation of user namespaces. Here is a Ubuntu blog post about it [1] . To resolve that you could upgrade to SE Linux, but the other option is to create a file named /etc/apparmor.d…

Review: The Stars, Like Dust , by Isaac Asimov Series: Galactic Empire #2 Publisher: Fawcett Crest Copyright: 1950, 1951 Printing: June 1972 Format: Mass market Pages: 192 The Stars, Like Dust is usually listed as the first book in Asimov's lesser-known Galactic Empire Trilogy since it takes place before Pebble in the Sky . Pebble in the Sky was published first, though, so I count it as the second book. It is very early science fiction with a few mystery overtones. Buying books produces about 5…