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systemd is a new way to start a Linux-system with the expressed goal of rethinking all of init. These are my top 5 gripes with it. (»skip the updates«)

Update (2019): I now use GNU Guix with shepherd. That’s one more better option than systemd. In that it joins OpenRC and many others.

Update (2016-09-28): Systemd is an exploit kit just waiting to be activated. And once it is active, only those who wrote it will be able to defuse it — and check whether it is defused. And it is starting: How to crash systemd in one tweet? Alternatives? Use OpenRC for system services. That’s simple and fast and full-featured with minimal fuss. Use runit for process supervision of user-services and system-services alike.

Update (2014-12-11): One more deconstruction of the strategies around systemd: systemd: Assumptions, Bullying, Consent. It shows that the attitude which forms the root of the dangers of systemd is even visible in its very source code.

Update (2014-11-19): The Debian General Resolution resulted in “We do not need a general resolution to decide systemd”. The vote page provides detailed results and statistics. Ian Jackson resigned from the Technical Committee: “And, speaking personally, I am exhausted.”

Update (2014-10-16): There is now a vote on a General Resolution in Debian for preserving the ability to switch init systems. It is linked under “Are there better solutions […]?” on the site Shall we fork Debian™? :^|.

Update (2014-10-07): Lennart hetzt (german) describes the rhetoric tricks used by Lennart Poettering to make people forget that he is a major part of the communication problems we’re facing at times - and to hide valid technical, practical, pragmatical, political und strategical criticism of Systemd.

Update (2014-09-24): boycott systemd calls for action with 12 reasons against systemd: “We do recognize the need for a new init system in the 21st century, but systemd is not it.”

Update (2014-04-03): And now we have Julian Assange warning about NSA control over Debian, Theodore Ts’o, maintainer of ext4, complaining about incomprehensible systemd, and Linus Torvalds (you know him, right?) rant against disrupting behavior from systemd developers, going as far as refusing to merge anything from the developers in question into Linux. Should I say “I said so”? Maybe not. After all, I came pretty late. Others saw this trend 2 years before I even knew about systemd. Can we really assume that there won’t be intentional disruption? Maybe I should look for solutions. It could be a good idea to start having community-paid developers.

Update (2014-02-18): An email to the mailing list of the technical committee of debian summarized the strategic implications of systemd-adoption for Debian and RedHat. It was called conspiracy theory right away, but the gains for RedHat are obvious: RedHat would be dumb not to try this. And only a fool trusts a company. Even the best company has to put money before ethics.

Update (2013-11-20): Further reading shows that people have been giving arguments from my list since 2011, and they got answers in the range of “anything short of systemd is dumb”, “this cannot work” (while OpenRC clearly shows that it works well), requests for implementation details without justification and insults and further insults; but the arguments stayed valid for the last 2 years. That does not look like systemd has a friendly community - or is healthy for distributions adopting it. Also an OpenRC developer wrote the best rebuttal of systemd propaganda I read so far: “Alternativlos”: Systemd propaganda (note, though, that I am biased against systemd due to problems I had in the past with udev kernel-dependencies)

Phoronix recently did a benchmark of GCC vs. LLVM on AMD hardware. Sadly their conclusion did not fit the data they showed. Actually it misrepresented the data so strongly, that I decided to speak up here instead of having my comments disappear in their forums. This post was started on 2013-05-14 and got updates when things changed - first for the better, then for the worse.

Update 3 (the last straw, 2013-11-09): In the recent most blatant attack by Phoronix on copyleft programs - this time openly targeted at GNU - Michael Larabel directly misrepresented a post from Josh Klint to badmouth GDB (Josh confirmed this¹). Josh gave a report of his initial experience with GDB in a Kickstarter Update in which he reported some shortcomings he saw in GDB (of which the major gripe is easily resolved with better documentation²) and concluded with “the limitations of GDB are annoying, but I can deal with it. It's very nice to be able to run and debug our editor on Linux”. Michael Larabel only quoted the conclusion up to “annoying” and abused that to support the claim that game developers (in general) call GDB “crap” and for further badmouthing of GDB. With this he provided the straw which I needed to stop reading Phoronix: Michael Larabel is hostile to copyleft and in particular to GNU and he goes as far as rigging test results³ and misrepresenting words of others to further his agenda. I even donated to Phoronix a few times in the past. I guess I won’t do that again, either. I should have learned from the error of the german pirates and should have avoided reading media which is controlled by people who want to destroy what I fight for (sustainable free software).
Update 2 (2013-07-06): But the next went down the drain again… “Of course, LLVM/Clang 3.3 still lacks OpenMP support, so those tests are obviously in favor of GCC.” — I couldn’t find a better way to say that those tests are completely useless while at the same time devaluing OpenMP support as “ignore this result along with all others where GCC wins”…
Update (2013-06-21): The recent report of GCC 4.8 vs. LLVM 3.3 looks much better. Not perfect, but much better.

I just made the colors of my plotting framework safe for colorblind people (thanks to Paul Tol’s notes) and I want to share a very nice result I got: How to make the really websafe colors safe for colorblind people with minimal changes.

(the colorblind-safe colors are on the left, the original websafe colors on the right)

To do so, I turned to Color Oracle (for simulation of colorblindness directly on my screen) and Emacs rainbow-mode (for seeing the colors while editing the hex-codes - as shown in the screenshots above) and tweaked the color codes bit by bit, until they were distinguishable in the simulation of Deuteranopia, Protanopia and Tritanopia.

You have an awesome project, but you see people reach for inferior tools? There are people using your project, but you can’t reach the ones you care about? Read on for a way to ensure that your communication doesn’t ruin your prospects but instead helps your project to shine.

Communicating your project is an essential step for getting the users you want. Here I summarize my experience from working on several different projects including KDE (where I learned the basics of PR - yay, sebas!), the Hurd (where I could really make a difference by improving the frontpage and writing the Month of the Hurd), Mercurial (where I practiced minimally invasive PR) and 1d6 (my own free RPG where I see how much harder it is to do PR, if the project to communicate is your own).

Since voicing the claim that marketing is important often leads to discussions with people who hate marketing of any kind, I added an appendix with an example which illustrates nicely what happens when you don’t do any PR - and what happens if you do PR of the wrong kind.

If you’re pressed for time and want the really short form, just jump to the questionnaire.

• What is good marketing?
• How to comunicate your project?
  • Who are our Target Groups?
  • What could they ask?
  • Whose wishes can we fullfil?
  • Provide those answers!
  • Further points
• bab-com Q: Short questionaire
• Note: The mission statement
• Summary
• Appendix: Why communicating your project?

I just needed to tweak my Emacs org-mode to beamer-latex export to embed images into a figure environment (not wrapfigure!). After lots of googling and documentation reading I decided to bite the bullet and just read the source. Which proved to be much easier than I had expected.

This tutorial requires at least org-mode 8.0 (before that you had to use hacks to get figure without a caption). It is only tested for org-mode 8.0.2: The code you see when you read the source might look different in other versions.

I just decided to give a default answer when I get some email from people asking me to connect to them on some new unfree service:

Hello [Person],

You asked me to connect with you on some unfree service. If you still want that, just use a status.net-server. Those are federated, so you can use a number of different providers and still be connected to everyone on any other server.

Timezones of most active TCCON stations in UTC+x (without daylight saving time (DST). Because I needed it and could not find a simple list quickly.

anmyondo: +9,
ascension: 0,
bialystok: +1,
bremen: +1,
caltech: -8,
darwin: 9, # Timezones2008 says 9 1/2???

Plotting global equal area maps with python, matplotlib/pylab and Basemap.

Table of Contents

• 1. Problem
  • 1.1. lat/lon pixels misrepresent areas
• 2. Map-Notes
  • 2.1. Map Projections
• 3. Plotted
  • 3.1. Hobo-Dyer
  • 3.2. Hammer
  • 3.3. Flat Polar Quartic
• 4. Other maps
  • 4.1. Other Equal Area map types
• 5. Conclusing
  • 5.1. Maps I plan to use
• 6. Thank you!
  • 6.1. Thank you for listening!
• 7. Appendix: Supporting functions
  • 7.1. Basemap Imports
  • 7.2. Draw a map
  • 7.3. Map features
  • 7.4. Tissots Indicatrix
  • 7.5. Plot emissions
  • 7.6. Nice colorbar

→ a comment to You call it privacy invasion, I don't from Flameeyes.

What you state is a strong version of the “I’ve got nothing to hide” argument. If you’re interested in a thorough debunking, there is a very good article in the chronicle about that: Why Privacy Matters even if you have nothing to hide.

It’s always a great feeling to see a flattr - Thank you for your support!
You can find new free works for you enjoyment on draketo.de (infrequent and bursty) and 1w6.org (currently weekly but mostly in German).

→ ArneBab on Flattr

Es ist ein tolles Gefühl, geflattrd zu werden - Danke für eure Unterstützung!

If you came here searching for a way to set the username in Mercurial: just run hg config --edit and add
    [ui]
    username = YOURNAME <EMAIL>
to the file which gets opened. If you have a very old version of Mercurial (<3.0), open $HOME/.hgrc manually.

Update (2015-02-05): For the Git breakage there is now a partial solution in Git v2.3.0: You can push into a checked out branch when you prepare the target repo via git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead, but only if nothing was changed there. This does not fully address the workflow breakage (the success of the operation is still state-dependent), but at least it makes it work. With Git providing a partial solution for the breakage I reported and Mercurial providing a full solution since 2014-05-01, I call this blog post a success. Thank you Git and Mercurial devs!

Update (2014-05-01): The Mercurial breakage is fixed in Mercurial 3.0: When you commit without username it now says “Abort: no username supplied (use "hg config --edit" to set your username)”. The editor shows a template with a commented-out field for the username. Just put your name and email after the pre-filled username = and save the file. The Git breakage still exists.

Update (2013-04-18): In #mercurial @ irc.freenode.net there were discussions yesterday for improving the help output if you do not have your username setup, yet.

New version: draketo.de/software/wisp

display "Hello World!" ↦ (display "Hello World!")

define : factorial n     (define (factorial n)            
    if : zero? n       ↦     (if (zero? n)                
       . 1                      1                      
       * n : factorial {n - 1}  (* n (factorial {n - 1}))))

Table of Contents

Intro

I recently started looking into Autotools, to make it easier to run my code on multiple platforms.

Naturally you can use cmake or scons or waf or ninja or tup, all of which are interesting in there own respect. But none of them has seen the amount of testing which went into autotools, and none of them have the amount of tweaks needed to support about every system under the sun. And I recently found pyconfigure which allows using autotools with python and offers detection of library features.

Warning 2016: Contains some cargo-cult-programming — my current setup is cleaner thanks to using AC_CONFIG_LINKS in configure.ac.

TCO: Reducing the algorithmic complexity of recursion.
Debug build: Add overhead to a program to trace errors.
Debug without TCO: Obliterate any possibility of fixing recursion bugs.

“Never develop with optimizations which the debug mode of the compiler of the future maintainer of your code does not use.”°

UPDATE: GCC 4.8 gives us -Og -foptimize-sibling-calls which generates nice-backtraces, and I had a few quite embarrassing errors in my C - thanks to AKF for the catch!

1 Intro

Tail Call Optimization (TCO) makes this

def foo(n):
    print(n)
    return foo(n+1)

foo(1)

behave like this

def foo(n):
    print(n)
    return n+1

n = 1
while True:
    n = foo(n)

NC covered works trick people into investing in a dead end

Free licensing lowers the barrier of entry to creating cultural works, which unlocks a dynamic where people can realize their ideas much easier - and where culture can actually live, creating memes, adjusting them to new situations and using new approaches with old topics.

But for that to really take off, people have to be able to make a living from their creations - which build on other works.

Update 2016: Later Bundles seem to have gotten better again.

Comment to New Humble Bundle Is Windows Only, DRM Games.

The new Humble Indie Bundle is no longer free, indie, cross-plattform or user-respecting.

When the first bundle had a huge boost in last-minute sales after the devs offered to free the source of 4 of the 5 games, I had hoped, they would keep that.

→ comment on Slashdot concerning Unexpected methods to promote freedom?

Was it really Apple who ended DRM? Would they have done so without the protests and evangelizing against DRM? Without protesters in front of Apple Stores? And without the many people telling their friends to just not accept DRM?

That “preaching” created a situation where Apple could reap monetary gain from doing the right thing.

I recently needed to send an email to many people¹.

Putting all of them into the BCC field did not work (mail rejected by provider) and when I split it into 2 emails, many did not see my mail because it was flagged as potential spam (they were not in the To-Field)².

I did not want to put them all into the To-Field, because that would have spread their email-addresses around, which many would not want³.

So I needed a different solution. Which I found in the extensibility of emacs and wanderlust⁴. It now carries the name wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer.

You simply write the email as usual via wl-draft, then put all email addresses you want write to into a buffer and call M-x wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer. It asks you about the buffer with email addresses, then shows you all addresses and asks for confirmation.

Then it sends one email after the other, with a randomized wait of 0-10 seconds between messages to avoid flagging as spam.

If you want to use it, just add the following to your .emacs:

(defun wl-draft-clean-mail-address (address)
  (replace-regexp-in-string "," "" address))

(defun wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers (addresses)
  (loop for address in addresses do
        (progn 
          (wl-user-agent-insert-header "To" 
            (wl-draft-clean-mail-address address))
          (let ((wl-interactive-send nil))
            (wl-draft-send))
          (sleep-for (random 10)))))

(defun wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer 
    (&optional addresses-buffer-name)
  "Send a mail to multiple recipients - one recipient at a time"
  (interactive "BBuffer with one address per line")
  (let ((addresses nil))
    (with-current-buffer addresses-buffer-name
      (setq addresses (split-string (buffer-string) "\n")))
    (if (y-or-n-p (concat "Send this mail to " 
            (mapconcat 'identity addresses ", ")))
        (wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers addresses))))

Happy Hacking!

Intro

When you enter the freenet Web of Trust, you first need to get some trust from people by solving captchas. And even when people trust you somehow, you have no way to prove your identity in an automatic way, so you can’t create identities which freenet can label as trusted without manual intervention from your side.

Proposal

To change this, we can use the Web of Trust used in GnuPG to infer trust relationships between freenet WoT IDs.

Practically that means:

• Write a message: “I am the WoT ID USK@” (replace with the

An answer to a reddit-comment by tedemang to the article 1540 Anonymous vs. TrapWire: "We must, at all costs, shut this system down and render it useless".

The problem

Nature only gives me ris-formatted citations, but I use bibtex.

Also ris is far from human readable.

The background

ris can be reformatted to bibtext, but doing that manually disturbs my workflow when getting references while taking note about a paper in emacs.

I tend to search online for references, often just using google scholar, so when I find a ris reference, the first data I get for the ris-citation is a link.

The solution

Cross platform, Free Software, almost all features you can think of, graphical and in the shell: Learn once, use for everything.

» Get Emacs «

Emacs is a self-documenting, extensible editor, a development environment and a platform for lisp-programs - for example programs to make programming easier, but also for todo-lists on steroids, reading email, posting to identi.ca, and a host of other stuff (learn lisp).

It is one of the origins of GNU and free software (Emacs History).

In Markdown-mode it looks like this:

New version: draketo.de/software/mercurial-branching-strategy

This is a complete collaboration model for Mercurial. It shows you all the actions you may need to take, except for the basics already found in other tutorials like

• Mercurial in workflows (official guide, 15 minutes)
• hg init (more graphics and for Windows)
• hg init science (slides 12 to 23)

Adaptions optimize the model for special needs like maintaining multiple releases¹, grafting micro-releases and an explicit code review stage.

Summary: 3 simple rules

Any model to be used by people should consist of simple, consistent rules. Programming is complex enough without having to worry about elaborate branching directives. Therefore this model boils down to 3 simple rules:

3 simple rules:

(1) you do all the work on default² - except for hotfixes.

(2) on stable you only do hotfixes, merges for release³ and tagging for release. Only maintainers⁴ touch stable.

(3) you can use arbitrary feature-branches⁵, as long as you don’t call them default or stable. They always start at default (since you do all the work on default).

Diagram

To visualize the structure, here’s a 3-tiered diagram. To the left are the actions of programmers (commits and feature branches) and in the center the tasks for maintainers (release and hotfix). The users to the right just use the stable branch.⁶

An overview of the branching strategy. Click the image to get the emacs org-mode ditaa-source.

Table of Contents

• Summary
  • Diagram
• Practical Actions
  • Regular development
  • Feature branches
  • Tasks for maintainers
• Example
  • Initialize
  • Stable branch and first release
  • Further development
  • Hotfix
  • Regular release
  • Feature branches
• Adaptions
  • multiple maintained releases
  • Graft changes into micro releases
  • Explicit review branch
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Where does QA (Quality Assurance) come in?
• Summary

Practial Actions

Now we can look at all the actions you will ever need to do in this model:⁷

• Regular development

  • commit changes: (edit); hg ci -m "message"

  • continue development after a release: hg update; (edit); hg ci -m "message"

• Feature Branches

  • start a larger feature: hg branch feature-x; (edit); hg ci -m "message"

  • continue with the feature: hg update feature-x; (edit); hg ci -m "message"

  • merge the feature: hg update default; hg merge feature-x; hg ci -m "merged feature x into default"

  • close and merge the feature when you are done: hg update feature-x; hg ci --close-branch -m "finished feature x"; hg update default; hg merge feature-x; hg ci -m "merged finished feature x into default"

• Tasks for Maintainers

  • Initialize (only needed once)

    • create the repo: hg init reponame; cd reponame

    • first commit: (edit); hg ci -m "message"

    • create the stable branch and do the first release: hg branch stable; hg tag tagname; hg up default; hg merge stable; hg ci -m "merge stable into default: ready for more development"

  • apply a hotfix⁸: hg up stable; (edit); hg ci -m "message"; hg up default; hg merge stable; hg ci -m "merge stable into default: ready for more development"

  • do a release⁹: hg up stable; hg merge default; hg ci -m "(description of the main changes since the last release)" ; hg tag tagname; hg up default ; hg merge stable ; hg ci -m "merged stable into default: ready for more development"

That’s it. All that follows are a detailed example which goes through all actions one-by-one, adaptions to this workflow and the final summary.