+ <item>
+ <title>Full battery stats collector is now available in Debian</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Full_battery_stats_collector_is_now_available_in_Debian.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 23 Mar 2016 22:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Since this morning, the battery-stats package in Debian include an
+extended collector that will collect the complete battery history for
+later processing and graphing. The original collector store the
+battery level as percentage of last full level, while the new
+collector also record battery vendor, model, serial number, design
+full level, last full level and current battery level. This make it
+possible to predict the lifetime of the battery as well as visualise
+the energy flow when the battery is charging or discharging.</p>
+
+<p>The new tools are available in <tt>/usr/share/battery-stats/</tt>
+in the version 0.5.1 package in unstable. Get the new battery level graph
+and lifetime prediction by running:
+
+<p><pre>
+/usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph /var/log/battery-stats.csv
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>Or select the 'Battery Level Graph' from your application menu.</p>
+
+<p>The flow in/out of the battery can be seen by running (no menu
+entry yet):</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+/usr/share/battery-stats/battery-stats-graph-flow
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>I'm not quite happy with the way the data is visualised, at least
+when there are few data points. The graphs look a bit better with a
+few years of data.</p>
+
+<p>A while back one important feature I use in the battery stats
+collector broke in Debian. The scripts in
+<tt>/usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/</tt> were no longer executed. I
+suspect it happened when Jessie started using systemd, but I do not
+know. The issue is reported as bug #818649 against pm-utils. I
+managed to work around it by adding an udev rule to call the collector
+script every time the power connector is connected and disconnected.
+With this fix in place it was finally time to make a new release of
+the package, and get it into Debian.</p>
+
+<p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
+check out the
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
+in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
+Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
+As always, patches are very welcome.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>UsingQR - "Electronic" paper invoices using JSON and QR codes</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/UsingQR____Electronic__paper_invoices_using_JSON_and_QR_codes.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 19 Mar 2016 09:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Back in 2013 I proposed
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Electronic__paper_invoices___using_vCard_in_a_QR_code.html">a
+way to make paper and PDF invoices easier to process electronically by
+adding a QR code with the key information about the invoice</a>. I
+suggested using vCard field definition, to get some standard format
+for name and address, but any format would work. I did not do
+anything about the proposal, but hoped someone one day would make
+something like it. It would make it possible to efficiently send
+machine readable invoices directly between seller and buyer.</p>
+
+<p>This was the background when I came across a proposal and
+specification from the web based accounting and invoicing supplier
+<a href="http://www.visma.com/">Visma</a> in Sweden called
+<a href="http://usingqr.com/">UsingQR</a>. Their PDF invoices contain
+a QR code with the key information of the invoice in JSON format.
+This is the typical content of a QR code following the UsingQR
+specification (based on a real world example, some numbers replaced to
+get a more bogus entry). I've reformatted the JSON to make it easier
+to read. Normally this is all on one long line:</p>
+
+<p><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-19-qr-invoice.png" align="right"><pre>
+{
+ "vh":500.00,
+ "vm":0,
+ "vl":0,
+ "uqr":1,
+ "tp":1,
+ "nme":"Din Leverandør",
+ "cc":"NO",
+ "cid":"997912345 MVA",
+ "iref":"12300001",
+ "idt":"20151022",
+ "ddt":"20151105",
+ "due":2500.0000,
+ "cur":"NOK",
+ "pt":"BBAN",
+ "acc":"17202612345",
+ "bc":"BIENNOK1",
+ "adr":"0313 OSLO"
+}
+</pre></p>
+
+</p>The interpretation of the fields can be found in the
+<a href="http://usingqr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/UsingQR_specification1.pdf">format
+specification</a> (revision 2 from june 2014). The format seem to
+have most of the information needed to handle accounting and payment
+of invoices, at least the fields I have needed so far here in
+Norway.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, the site and document do not mention anything about
+the patent, trademark and copyright status of the format and the
+specification. Because of this, I asked the people behind it back in
+November to clarify. Ann-Christine Savlid (ann-christine.savlid (at)
+visma.com) replied that Visma had not applied for patent or trademark
+protection for this format, and that there were no copyright based
+usage limitations for the format. I urged her to make sure this was
+explicitly written on the web pages and in the specification, but
+unfortunately this has not happened yet. So I guess if there is
+submarine patents, hidden trademarks or a will to sue for copyright
+infringements, those starting to use the UsingQR format might be at
+risk, but if this happen there is some legal defense in the fact that
+the people behind the format claimed it was safe to do so. At least
+with patents, there is always
+<a href="http://www.paperspecs.com/paper-news/beware-the-qr-code-patent-trap/">a
+chance of getting sued...</a></p>
+
+<p>I also asked if they planned to maintain the format in an
+independent standard organization to give others more confidence that
+they would participate in the standardization process on equal terms
+with Visma, but they had no immediate plans for this. Their plan was
+to work with banks to try to get more users of the format, and
+evaluate the way forward if the format proved to be popular. I hope
+they conclude that using an open standard organisation like
+<a href="http://www.ietf.org/">IETF</a> is the correct place to
+maintain such specification.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Update 2016-03-20</strong>: Via Twitter I became aware of
+<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11319492">some comments
+about this blog post</a> that had several useful links and references to
+similar systems. In the Czech republic, the Czech Banking Association
+standard #26, with short name SPAYD, uses QR codes with payment
+information. More information is available from the Wikipedia page on
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor">Short
+Payment Descriptor</a>. And in Germany, there is a system named
+<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/">BezahlCode</a>,
+(<a href="http://www.bezahlcode.de/wp-content/uploads/BezahlCode_TechDok.pdf">specification
+v1.8 2013-12-05 available as PDF</a>), which uses QR codes with
+URL-like formatting using "bank:" as the URI schema/protocol to
+provide the payment information. There is also the
+<a href="http://www.ferd-net.de/front_content.php?idcat=231">ZUGFeRD</a>
+file format that perhaps could be transfered using QR codes, but I am
+not sure if it is done already. Last, in Bolivia there are reports
+that tax information since november 2014 need to be printed in QR
+format on invoices. I have not been able to track down a
+specification for this format, because of my limited language skill
+sets.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Making battery measurements a little easier in Debian</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Making_battery_measurements_a_little_easier_in_Debian.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2016 15:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Back in September, I blogged about
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html">the
+system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery</a>, and
+how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced). I
+created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing,
+but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">a battery-stats
+package in Debian</a> that should do the same thing, and I did not see
+a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be
+fixed instead. I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and
+hoped someone would step in and fix it. But no-one did.</p>
+
+<p>I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own
+hands. The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of
+battery stats (<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">available from github</a>) and part of the team maintaining
+battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally
+able to collect battery status using the <tt>/sys/class/power_supply/</tt>
+information provided by the Linux kernel. If you install the
+battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a
+graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the
+status of the battery. The source package build and work just fine in
+Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not
+tested). The default graph you get for that system look like this:</p>
+
+<p align="center"><img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-03-15-battery-stats-graph-example.png" width="70%" align="center"></p>
+
+<p>My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the
+battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details
+about the battery. The scripts are merged into the upstream
+battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work
+yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way. Will have to test a
+bit more before I make a new release.</p>
+
+<p>I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I
+suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it
+impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing
+and graphing.</p>
+
+<p>If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop
+battery, check out the battery-stats package in
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">Debian</a> and
+on
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
+I would love some help to improve the system further.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Creating, updating and checking debian/copyright semi-automatically</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creating__updating_and_checking_debian_copyright_semi_automatically.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 19 Feb 2016 15:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Making packages for Debian requires quite a lot of attention to
+details. And one of the details is the content of the
+debian/copyright file, which should list all relevant licenses used by
+the code in the package in question, preferably in
+<a href="https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/">machine
+readable DEP5 format</a>.</p>
+
+<p>For large packages with lots of contributors it is hard to write
+and update this file manually, and if you get some detail wrong, the
+package is normally rejected by the ftpmasters. So getting it right
+the first time around get the package into Debian faster, and save
+both you and the ftpmasters some work.. Today, while trying to figure
+out what was wrong with
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=686447">the
+zfsonlinux copyright file</a>, I decided to spend some time on
+figuring out the options for doing this job automatically, or at least
+semi-automatically.</p>
+
+<p>Lucikly, there are at least two tools available for generating the
+file based on the code in the source package,
+<tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/debmake">debmake</a></tt>
+and <tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/cme">cme</a></tt>. I'm
+not sure which one of them came first, but both seem to be able to
+create a sensible draft file. As far as I can tell, none of them can
+be trusted to get the result just right, so the content need to be
+polished a bit before the file is OK to upload. I found the debmake
+option in
+<a href="http://goofying-with-debian.blogspot.com/2014/07/debmake-checking-source-against-dep-5.html">a
+blog posts from 2014</a>.
+
+<p>To generate using debmake, use the -cc option:
+
+<p><pre>
+debmake -cc > debian/copyright
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>Note there are some problems with python and non-ASCII names, so
+this might not be the best option.</p>
+
+<p>The cme option is based on a config parsing library, and I found
+this approach in
+<a href="https://ddumont.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/improving-creation-of-debian-copyright-file/">a
+blog post from 2015</a>. To generate using cme, use the 'update
+dpkg-copyright' option:
+
+<p><pre>
+cme update dpkg-copyright
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>This will create or update debian/copyright. The cme tool seem to
+handle UTF-8 names better than debmake.</p>
+
+<p>When the copyright file is created, I would also like some help to
+check if the file is correct. For this I found two good options,
+<tt>debmake -k</tt> and <tt>license-reconcile</tt>. The former seem
+to focus on license types and file matching, and is able to detect
+ineffective blocks in the copyright file. The latter reports missing
+copyright holders and years, but was confused by inconsistent license
+names (like CDDL vs. CDDL-1.0). I suspect it is good to use both and
+fix all issues reported by them before uploading. But I do not know
+if the tools and the ftpmasters agree on what is important to fix in a
+copyright file, so the package might still be rejected.</p>
+
+<p>The devscripts tool <tt>licensecheck</tt> deserve mentioning. It
+will read through the source and try to find all copyright statements.
+It is not comparing the result to the content of debian/copyright, but
+can be useful when verifying the content of the copyright file.</p>
+
+<p>Are you aware of better tools in Debian to create and update
+debian/copyright file. Please let me know, or blog about it on
+planet.debian.org.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Update 2016-02-20</strong>: I got a tip from Mike Gabriel
+on how to use licensecheck and cdbs to create a draft copyright file
+
+<p><pre>
+licensecheck --copyright -r `find * -type f` | \
+ /usr/lib/cdbs/licensecheck2dep5 > debian/copyright.auto
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>He mentioned that he normally check the generated file into the
+version control system to make it easier to discover license and
+copyright changes in the upstream source. I will try to do the same
+with my packages in the future.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Update 2016-02-21</strong>: The cme author recommended
+against using -quiet for new users, so I removed it from the proposed
+command line.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Using appstream in Debian to locate packages with firmware and mime type support</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_in_Debian_to_locate_packages_with_firmware_and_mime_type_support.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 4 Feb 2016 16:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">appstream system</a>
+is taking shape in Debian, and one provided feature is a very
+convenient way to tell you which package to install to make a given
+firmware file available when the kernel is looking for it. This can
+be done using apt-file too, but that is for someone else to blog
+about. :)</p>
+
+<p>Here is a small recipe to find the package with a given firmware
+file, in this example I am looking for ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin, randomly
+picked from the set of firmware announced using appstream in Debian
+unstable. In general you would be looking for the firmware requested
+by the kernel during kernel module loading. To find the package
+providing the example file, do like this:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+% apt install appstream
+[...]
+% apt update
+[...]
+% appstreamcli what-provides firmware:runtime ctfw-3.2.3.0.bin | \
+ awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
+firmware-qlogic
+%
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>See <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/AppStream/Guidelines">the
+appstream wiki</a> page to learn how to embed the package metadata in
+a way appstream can use.</p>
+
+<p>This same approach can be used to find any package supporting a
+given MIME type. This is very useful when you get a file you do not
+know how to handle. First find the mime type using <tt>file
+--mime-type</tt>, and next look up the package providing support for
+it. Lets say you got an SVG file. Its MIME type is image/svg+xml,
+and you can find all packages handling this type like this:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+% apt install appstream
+[...]
+% apt update
+[...]
+% appstreamcli what-provides mimetype image/svg+xml | \
+ awk '/Package:/ {print $2}'
+bkchem
+phototonic
+inkscape
+shutter
+tetzle
+geeqie
+xia
+pinta
+gthumb
+karbon
+comix
+mirage
+viewnior
+postr
+ristretto
+kolourpaint4
+eog
+eom
+gimagereader
+midori
+%
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>I believe the MIME types are fetched from the desktop file for
+packages providing appstream metadata.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Creepy, visualise geotagged social media information - nice free software</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Creepy__visualise_geotagged_social_media_information___nice_free_software.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 24 Jan 2016 10:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Most people seem not to realise that every time they walk around
+with the computerised radio beacon known as a mobile phone their
+position is tracked by the phone company and often stored for a long
+time (like every time a SMS is received or sent). And if their
+computerised radio beacon is capable of running programs (often called
+mobile apps) downloaded from the Internet, these programs are often
+also capable of tracking their location (if the app requested access
+during installation). And when these programs send out information to
+central collection points, the location is often included, unless
+extra care is taken to not send the location. The provided
+information is used by several entities, for good and bad (what is
+good and bad, depend on your point of view). What is certain, is that
+the private sphere and the right to free movement is challenged and
+perhaps even eradicated for those announcing their location this way,
+when they share their whereabouts with private and public
+entities.</p>
+
+<p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-01-24-nice-creepy-desktop-window.png"></p>
+
+<p>The phone company logs provide a register of locations to check out
+when one want to figure out what the tracked person was doing. It is
+unavailable for most of us, but provided to selected government
+officials, company staff, those illegally buying information from
+unfaithful servants and crackers stealing the information. But the
+public information can be collected and analysed, and a free software
+tool to do so is called
+<a href="http://www.geocreepy.com/">Creepy or Cree.py</a>. I
+discovered it when I read
+<a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/kultur/Slik-kan-du-bli-overvaket-pa-Twitter-og-Instagram-uten-a-ane-det-7787884.html">an
+article about Creepy</a> in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten i
+November 2014, and decided to check if it was available in Debian.
+The python program was in Debian, but
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/creepy">the version in
+Debian</a> was completely broken and practically unmaintained. I
+uploaded a new version which did not work quite right, but did not
+have time to fix it then. This Christmas I decided to finally try to
+get Creepy operational in Debian. Now a fixed version is available in
+Debian unstable and testing, and almost all Debian specific patches
+are now included
+<a href="https://github.com/jkakavas/creepy">upstream</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The Creepy program visualises geolocation information fetched from
+Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Google+, and allow one to get a
+complete picture of every social media message posted recently in a
+given area, or track the movement of a given individual across all
+these services. Earlier it was possible to use the search API of at
+least some of these services without identifying oneself, but these
+days it is impossible. This mean that to use Creepy, you need to
+configure it to log in as yourself on these services, and provide
+information to them about your search interests. This should be taken
+into account when using Creepy, as it will also share information
+about yourself with the services.</p>
+
+<p>The picture above show the twitter messages sent from (or at least
+geotagged with a position from) the city centre of Oslo, the capital
+of Norway. One useful way to use Creepy is to first look at
+information tagged with an area of interest, and next look at all the
+information provided by one or more individuals who was in the area.
+I tested it by checking out which celebrity provide their location in
+twitter messages by checkout out who sent twitter messages near a
+Norwegian TV station, and next could track their position over time,
+making it possible to locate their home and work place, among other
+things. A similar technique have been
+<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/does-this-soldiers-instagram-account-prove-russia-is-covertl">used
+to locate Russian soldiers in Ukraine</a>, and it is both a powerful
+tool to discover lying governments, and a useful tool to help people
+understand the value of the private information they provide to the
+public.</p>
+
+<p>The package is not trivial to backport to Debian Stable/Jessie, as
+it depend on several python modules currently missing in Jessie (at
+least python-instagram, python-flickrapi and
+python-requests-toolbelt).</p>
+
+<p>(I have uploaded
+<a href="https://screenshots.debian.net/package/creepy">the image to
+screenshots.debian.net</a> and licensed it under the same terms as the
+Creepy program in Debian.)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Always download Debian packages using Tor - the simple recipe</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Always_download_Debian_packages_using_Tor___the_simple_recipe.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum
+<a href="https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/331/what-is-to-be-done/">observed
+that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to
+believe a computer have a given security hole</a> if it download a
+security fix from a Debian mirror. This is a good reason to always
+use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those
+listening do not know which IP address to attack. In August, Richard
+Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible
+to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that
+download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and
+<a href="http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/08/24-Tor-enabled_Debian_mirror/">proposed
+to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror</a>. He
+was not the first to propose this, as the
+<tt><a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/apt-transport-tor">apt-transport-tor</a></tt>
+package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt
+to use <a href="https://www.torproject.org/">Tor</a>, but I was not
+aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.</p>
+
+<p>Richard discussed the idea with Peter Palfrader, one of the Debian
+sysadmins, and he set up a Tor hidden service on one of the central
+Debian mirrors using the address vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion, thus making
+it possible to download packages directly between two tor nodes,
+making sure the network traffic always were encrypted.</p>
+
+<p>Here is a short recipe for enabling this on your machine, by
+installing <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> and replacing http and https
+urls with tor+http and tor+https, and using the hidden service instead
+of the official Debian mirror site. I recommend installing
+<tt>etckeeper</tt> before you start to have a history of the changes
+done in /etc/.</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+apt install apt-transport-tor
+sed -i 's% http://ftp.debian.org/% tor+http://vwakviie2ienjx6t.onion/%' /etc/apt/sources.list
+sed -i 's% http% tor+http%' /etc/apt/sources.list
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>If you have more sources listed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, run
+the sed commands for these too. The sed command is assuming your are
+using the ftp.debian.org Debian mirror. Adjust the command (or just
+edit the file manually) to match your mirror.</p>
+
+<p>This work in Debian Jessie and later. Note that tools like
+<tt>apt-file</tt> only recently started using the apt transport
+system, and do not work with these tor+http URLs. For
+<tt>apt-file</tt> you need the version currently in experimental,
+which need a recent apt version currently only in unstable. So if you
+need a working <tt>apt-file</tt>, this is not for you.</p>
+
+<p>Another advantage from this change is that your machine will start
+using Tor regularly and at fairly random intervals (every time you
+update the package lists or upgrade or install a new package), thus
+masking other Tor traffic done from the same machine. Using Tor will
+become normal for the machine in question.</p>
+
+<p>On <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox</a>, APT
+is set up by default to use <tt>apt-transport-tor</tt> when Tor is
+enabled. It would be great if it was the default on any Debian
+system.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>OpenALPR, find car license plates in video streams - nice free software</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenALPR__find_car_license_plates_in_video_streams___nice_free_software.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 23 Dec 2015 01:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>When I was a kid, we used to collect "car numbers", as we used to
+call the car license plate numbers in those days. I would write the
+numbers down in my little book and compare notes with the other kids
+to see how many region codes we had seen and if we had seen some
+exotic or special region codes and numbers. It was a fun game to pass
+time, as we kids have plenty of it.</p>
+
+<p>A few days I came across
+<a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr">the OpenALPR
+project</a>, a free software project to automatically discover and
+report license plates in images and video streams, and provide the
+"car numbers" in a machine readable format. I've been looking for
+such system for a while now, because I believe it is a bad idea that the
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognition">automatic
+number plate recognition</a> tool only is available in the hands of
+the powerful, and want it to be available also for the powerless to
+even the score when it comes to surveillance and sousveillance. I
+discovered the developer
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/747509">wanted to get the tool into
+Debian</a>, and as I too wanted it to be in Debian, I volunteered to
+help him get it into shape to get the package uploaded into the Debian
+archive.</p>
+
+<p>Today we finally managed to get the package into shape and uploaded
+it into Debian, where it currently
+<a href="https://ftp-master.debian.org//new/openalpr_2.2.1-1.html">waits
+in the NEW queue</a> for review by the Debian ftpmasters.</p>
+
+<p>I guess you are wondering why on earth such tool would be useful
+for the common folks, ie those not running a large government
+surveillance system? Well, I plan to put it in a computer on my bike
+and in my car, tracking the cars nearby and allowing me to be notified
+when number plates on my watch list are discovered. Another use case
+was suggested by a friend of mine, who wanted to set it up at his home
+to open the car port automatically when it discovered the plate on his
+car. When I mentioned it perhaps was a bit foolhardy to allow anyone
+capable of placing his license plate number of a piece of cardboard to
+open his car port, men replied that it was always unlocked anyway. I
+guess for such use case it make sense. I am sure there are other use
+cases too, for those with imagination and a vision.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to build your own version of the Debian package, check
+out the upstream git source and symlink ./distros/debian to ./debian/
+before running "debuild" to build the source. Or wait a bit until the
+package show up in unstable.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Using appstream with isenkram to install hardware related packages in Debian</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Using_appstream_with_isenkram_to_install_hardware_related_packages_in_Debian.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 20 Dec 2015 12:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Around three years ago, I created
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">the isenkram
+system</a> to get a more practical solution in Debian for handing
+hardware related packages. A GUI system in the isenkram package will
+present a pop-up dialog when some hardware dongle supported by
+relevant packages in Debian is inserted into the machine. The same
+lookup mechanism to detect packages is available as command line
+tools in the isenkram-cli package. In addition to mapping hardware,
+it will also map kernel firmware files to packages and make it easy to
+install needed firmware packages automatically. The key for this
+system to work is a good way to map hardware to packages, in other
+words, allow packages to announce what hardware they will work
+with.</p>
+
+<p>I started by providing data files in the isenkram source, and
+adding code to download the latest version of these data files at run
+time, to ensure every user had the most up to date mapping available.
+I also added support for storing the mapping in the Packages file in
+the apt repositories, but did not push this approach because while I
+was trying to figure out how to best store hardware/package mappings,
+<a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/appstream/docs/">the
+appstream system</a> was announced. I got in touch and suggested to
+add the hardware mapping into that data set to be able to use
+appstream as a data source, and this was accepted at least for the
+Debian version of appstream.</p>
+
+<p>A few days ago using appstream in Debian for this became possible,
+and today I uploaded a new version 0.20 of isenkram adding support for
+appstream as a data source for mapping hardware to packages. The only
+package so far using appstream to announce its hardware support is my
+pymissile package. I got help from Matthias Klumpp with figuring out
+how do add the required
+<a href="https://appstream.debian.org/html/sid/main/metainfo/pymissile.html">metadata
+in pymissile</a>. I added a file debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml with
+this content:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
+&lt;component&gt;
+ &lt;id&gt;pymissile&lt;/id&gt;
+ &lt;metadata_license&gt;MIT&lt;/metadata_license&gt;
+ &lt;name&gt;pymissile&lt;/name&gt;
+ &lt;summary&gt;Control original Striker USB Missile Launcher&lt;/summary&gt;
+ &lt;description&gt;
+ &lt;p&gt;
+ Pymissile provides a curses interface to control an original
+ Marks and Spencer / Striker USB Missile Launcher, as well as a
+ motion control script to allow a webcamera to control the
+ launcher.
+ &lt;/p&gt;
+ &lt;/description&gt;
+ &lt;provides&gt;
+ &lt;modalias&gt;usb:v1130p0202d*&lt;/modalias&gt;
+ &lt;/provides&gt;
+&lt;/component&gt;
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>The key for isenkram is the component/provides/modalias value,
+which is a glob style match rule for hardware specific strings
+(modalias strings) provided by the Linux kernel. In this case, it
+will map to all USB devices with vendor code 1130 and product code
+0202.</p>
+
+<p>Note, it is important that the license of all the metadata files
+are compatible to have permissions to aggregate them into archive wide
+appstream files. Matthias suggested to use MIT or BSD licenses for
+these files. A challenge is figuring out a good id for the data, as
+it is supposed to be globally unique and shared across distributions
+(in other words, best to coordinate with upstream what to use). But
+it can be changed later or, so we went with the package name as
+upstream for this project is dormant.</p>
+
+<p>To get the metadata file installed in the correct location for the
+mirror update scripts to pick it up and include its content the
+appstream data source, the file must be installed in the binary
+package under /usr/share/appdata/. I did this by adding the following
+line to debian/pymissile.install:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+debian/pymissile.metainfo.xml usr/share/appdata
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>With that in place, the command line tool isenkram-lookup will list
+all packages useful on the current computer automatically, and the GUI
+pop-up handler will propose to install the package not already
+installed if a hardware dongle is inserted into the machine in
+question.</p>
+
+<p>Details of the modalias field in appstream is available from the
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a> proposal.</p>
+
+<p>To locate the modalias values of all hardware present in a machine,
+try running this command on the command line:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+cat $(find /sys/devices/|grep modalias)
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>To learn more about the isenkram system, please check out
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">my
+blog posts tagged isenkram</a>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>The GNU General Public License is not magic pixie dust</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_GNU_General_Public_License_is_not_magic_pixie_dust.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov 2015 09:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>A blog post from my fellow Debian developer Paul Wise titled
+"<a href="http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2015/11/27/sfc-supporter/">The
+GPL is not magic pixie dust</a>" explain the importance of making sure
+the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GPL</a> is enforced.
+I quote the blog post from Paul in full here with his permission:<p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/"><img src="https://sfconservancy.org/img/supporter-badge.png" width="194" height="90" alt="Become a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter!" align="right" border="0" /></a></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+The GPL is not magic pixie dust. It does not work by itself.<br/>
+
+The first step is to choose a
+<a href="https://copyleft.org/">copyleft</a> license for your
+code.<br/>
+
+The next step is, when someone fails to follow that copyleft license,
+<b>it must be enforced</b><br/>
+
+and its a simple fact of our modern society that such type of
+work<br/>
+
+is incredibly expensive to do and incredibly difficult to do.
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><small>-- <a href="http://ebb.org/bkuhn/">Bradley Kuhn</a>, in
+<a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in Freedom">FaiF</a>
+<a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode
+0x57</a></small></p>
+
+<p>As the Debian Website
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/794116">used</a>
+<a href="https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/intro/free.wml?r1=1.24&amp;r2=1.25">to</a>
+imply, public domain and permissively licensed software can lead to
+the production of more proprietary software as people discover useful
+software, extend it and or incorporate it into their hardware or
+software products. Copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL were created
+to close off this avenue to the production of proprietary software but
+such licenses are not enough. With the ongoing adoption of Free
+Software by individuals and groups, inevitably the community's
+expectations of license compliance are violated, usually out of
+ignorance of the way Free Software works, but not always. As Karen
+and Bradley explained in <a href="http://faif.us/" title="Free as in
+Freedom">FaiF</a>
+<a href="http://faif.us/cast/2015/nov/24/0x57/">episode 0x57</a>,
+copyleft is nothing if no-one is willing and able to stand up in court
+to protect it. The reality of today's world is that legal
+representation is expensive, difficult and time consuming. With
+<a href="http://gpl-violations.org/">gpl-violations.org</a> in hiatus
+<a href="http://gpl-violations.org/news/20151027-homepage-recovers/">until</a>
+some time in 2016, the <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/">Software
+Freedom Conservancy</a> (a tax-exempt charity) is the major defender
+of the Linux project, Debian and other groups against GPL violations.
+In March the SFC supported a
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/mar/05/vmware-lawsuit/">lawsuit
+by Christoph Hellwig</a> against VMware for refusing to
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html">comply
+with the GPL</a> in relation to their use of parts of the Linux
+kernel. Since then two of their sponsors pulled corporate funding and
+conferences
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">blocked
+or cancelled their talks</a>. As a result they have decided to rely
+less on corporate funding and more on the broad community of
+individuals who support Free Software and copyleft. So the SFC has
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/23/2015fundraiser/">launched</a>
+a <a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">campaign</a> to create
+a community of folks who stand up for copyleft and the GPL by
+supporting their work on promoting and supporting copyleft and Free
+Software.</p>
+
+<p>If you support Free Software,
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/26/like-what-I-do/">like</a>
+what the SFC do, agree with their
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/principles.html">compliance
+principles</a>, are happy about their
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">successes</a> in 2015,
+work on a project that is an SFC
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/members/current/">member</a> and or
+just want to stand up for copyleft, please join
+<a href="https://identi.ca/cwebber/image/JQGPA4qbTyyp3-MY8QpvuA">Christopher
+Allan Webber</a>,
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/">Carol
+Smith</a>,
+<a href="http://www.jonobacon.org/2015/11/25/supporting-software-freedom-conservancy/">Jono
+Bacon</a>, myself and
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/#supporters">others</a> in
+becoming a
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/">supporter</a>. For the
+next week your donation will be
+<a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/nov/27/black-friday/">matched</a>
+by an anonymous donor. Please also consider asking your employer to
+match your donation or become a sponsor of SFC. Don't forget to
+spread the word about your support for SFC via email, your blog and or
+social media accounts.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I agree with Paul on this topic and just signed up as a Supporter
+of Software Freedom Conservancy myself. Perhaps you should be a
+supporter too?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>PGP key transition statement for key EE4E02F9</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/PGP_key_transition_statement_for_key_EE4E02F9.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 17 Nov 2015 10:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I've needed a new OpenPGP key for a while, but have not had time to
+set it up properly. I wanted to generate it offline and have it
+available on <a href="http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/#openpgp">a OpenPGP
+smart card</a> for daily use, and learning how to do it and finding
+time to sit down with an offline machine almost took forever. But
+finally I've been able to complete the process, and have now moved
+from my old GPG key to a new GPG key. See
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-11-17-new-gpg-key-transition.txt">the
+full transition statement, signed with both my old and new key</a> for
+the details. This is my new key:</p>
+
+<pre>
+pub 3936R/<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/111D6B29EE4E02F9.html">111D6B29EE4E02F9</a> 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-14]
+ Key fingerprint = 3AC7 B2E3 ACA5 DF87 78F1 D827 111D 6B29 EE4E 02F9
+uid Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@hungry.com&gt;
+uid Petter Reinholdtsen &lt;pere@debian.org&gt;
+sub 4096R/87BAFB0E 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
+sub 4096R/F91E6DE9 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
+sub 4096R/A0439BAB 2015-11-03 [expires: 2019-11-02]
+</pre>
+
+<p>The key can be downloaded from the OpenPGP key servers, signed by
+my old key.</p>
+
+<p>If you signed my old key
+(<a href="http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/stats/DB4CCC4B2A30D729.html">DB4CCC4B2A30D729</a>),
+I'd very much appreciate a signature on my new key, details and
+instructions in the transition statement. I m happy to reciprocate if
+you have a similarly signed transition statement to present.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Is Pentagon deciding the Norwegian negotiating position on Internet governance?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_Pentagon_deciding_the_Norwegian_negotiating_position_on_Internet_governance_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 3 Nov 2015 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>In Norway, all government offices are required by law to keep a
+list of every document or letter arriving and leaving their offices.
+Internal notes should also be documented. The document list (called a mail
+journal - "postjournal" in Norwegian) is public information and thanks
+to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) the mail
+journal is available for everyone. Most offices even publish the mail
+journal on their web pages, as PDFs or tables in web pages. The state-level offices even have a shared web based search service (called
+<a href="https://www.oep.no/">Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal -
+OEP</a>) to make it possible to search the entries in the list. Not
+all journal entries show up on OEP, and the search service is hard to
+use, but OEP does make it easier to find at least some interesting
+journal entries .</p>
+
+<p>In 2012 I came across a document in the mail journal for the
+Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications on OEP that
+piqued my interest. The title of the document was
+"<a href="https://www.oep.no/search/resultSingle.html?journalPostId=4192362">Internet
+Governance and how it affects national security</a>" (Norwegian:
+"Internet Governance og påvirkning på nasjonal sikkerhet"). The
+document date was 2012-05-22, and it was said to be sent from the
+"Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations". I asked for a
+copy, but my request was rejected with a reference to a legal clause said to authorize them to reject it
+(<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20,
+letter c</a>) and an explanation that the document was exempt because
+of foreign policy interests as it contained information related to the
+Norwegian negotiating position, negotiating strategies or similar. I
+was told the information in the document related to the ongoing
+negotiation in the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The
+explanation made sense to me in early January 2013, as a ITU
+conference in Dubay discussing Internet Governance
+(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union#World_Conference_on_International_Telecommunications_2012_.28WCIT-12.29">World
+Conference on International Telecommunications - WCIT-12</a>) had just
+ended,
+<a href="http://www.digi.no/kommentarer/2012/12/18/tvil-om-usas-rolle-pa-teletoppmote">reportedly
+in chaos</a> when USA walked out of the negotiations and 25 countries
+including Norway refused to sign the new treaty. It seemed
+reasonable to believe talks were still going on a few weeks later.
+Norway was represented at the ITU meeting by two authorities, the
+<a href="http://www.nkom.no/">Norwegian Communications Authority</a>
+and the <a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dep/sd/">Ministry of
+Transport and Communications</a>. This might be the reason the letter
+was sent to the ministry. As I was unable to find the document in the
+mail journal of any Norwegian UN mission, I asked the ministry who had
+sent the document to the ministry, and was told that it was the Deputy
+Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Norway in
+Geneva.</p>
+
+<p>Three years later, I was still curious about the content of that
+document, and again asked for a copy, believing the negotiation was
+over now. This time
+<a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/kopi_av_dokumenter_i_sak_2012914">I
+asked both the Ministry of Transport and Communications as the
+receiver</a> and
+<a href="https://mimesbronn.no/request/brev_om_internet_governance_og_p">asked
+the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva as the sender</a> for a
+copy, to see if they both agreed that it should be withheld from the
+public. The ministry upheld its rejection quoting the same law
+reference as before, while the permanent mission rejected it quoting a
+different clause
+(<a href="http://lovdata.no/lov/2006-05-19-16/§20">offentleglova § 20
+letter b</a>), claiming that they were required to keep the
+content of the document from the public because it contained
+information given to Norway with the expressed or implied expectation
+that the information should not be made public. I asked the permanent
+mission for an explanation, and was told that the document contained
+an account from a meeting held in the Pentagon for a limited group of NATO
+nations where the organiser of the meeting did not intend the content
+of the meeting to be publicly known. They explained that giving me a
+copy might cause Norway to not get access to similar information in
+the future and thus hurt the future foreign interests of Norway. They
+also explained that the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was not
+the author of the document, they only got a copy of it, and because of
+this had not listed it in their mail journal.</p>
+
+<p>Armed with this
+knowledge I asked the Ministry to reconsider and asked who was the
+author of the document, now realising that it was not same as the
+"sender" according to Ministry of Transport and Communications. The
+ministry upheld its rejection but told me the name of the author of
+the document. According to
+<a href="https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/unga69_rapport1/id2001204/">a
+government report</a> the author was with the Permanent Mission of
+Norway in New York a bit more than a year later (2014-09-22), so I
+guessed that might be the office responsible for writing and sending
+the report initially and
+<a href="https://www.mimesbronn.no/request/mote_2012_i_pentagon_om_itu">asked
+them for a copy</a> but I was obviously wrong as I was told that the
+document was unknown to them and that the author did not work there
+when the document was written. Next, I asked the Permanent Mission of
+Norway in Geneva and the Foreign Ministry to reconsider and at least
+tell me who sent the document to Deputy Permanent Representative with
+the Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva. The Foreign Ministry also
+upheld its rejection, but told me that the person sending the document
+to Permanent Mission of Norway in Geneva was the defence attaché with
+the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. I do not know if this is the
+same person as the author of the document.</p>
+
+<p>If I understand the situation correctly, someone capable of
+inviting selected NATO nations to a meeting in Pentagon organised a
+meeting where someone representing the Norwegian defence attaché in
+Washington attended, and the account from this meeting is interpreted
+by the Ministry of Transport and Communications to expose Norways
+negotiating position, negotiating strategies and similar regarding the
+ITU negotiations on Internet Governance. It is truly amazing what can
+be derived from mere meta-data.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder which NATO countries besides Norway attended this meeting?
+And what exactly was said and done at the meeting? Anyone know?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>New book, "Fri kultur" by @lessig, a Norwegian Bokmål translation of "Free Culture" from 2004</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_book___Fri_kultur__by__lessig__a_Norwegian_Bokm_l_translation_of__Free_Culture__from_2004.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 31 Oct 2015 09:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>People keep asking me where to get the various forms of the book I
+published last week, the Norwegian Bokmål edition of Lawrence Lessigs
+book <a href="http://www.free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a>. It was
+published on paper via lulu.com, and is also available in PDF, ePub
+and MOBI format. I currently sell the paper edition for self cost
+from lulu.com, but might extend the distribution to book stores like
+Amazon and Barnes & Noble later. This will double the price and force
+me to make a profit from selling the book. Anyway, here are links to
+get the book in different formats:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/fri-kultur/paperback/product-22406445.html">Buy
+ paper edition from lulu.com</a></li>
+
+ <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf">Download
+ PDF, size 7.9 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
+
+ <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub">Download
+ ePub, size 11 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
+
+ <li><a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/archive/freeculture.nb.mobi">Download
+ MOBI, size 3.8 MiB</a> (gratis/free)</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>Note that the MOBI version have problems with the table of content,
+at least with the viewers I have been able to test. And the ePub file
+have several problems according to
+<a href="https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck">epubcheck</a>, but seem
+to display fine in the viewers I have tested. All the files needed to
+create the book in various forms are available from
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">the
+github project page</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The project got press coverage from the Norwegian IT news site
+digi.no. Check out the article
+"<a href="http://www.digi.no/juss_og_samfunn/2015/10/29/vil-apne-politikernes-oyne-for-creative-commons">Vil
+åpne politikernes øyne for Creative Commons</a>".</li>
+
+<p>I've <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/freeculture">blogged
+about the project</a> as it moved along. The blogs document the translation
+progress and insights I had along the way.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>"Free Culture" by @lessig - The background story for Creative Commons - new edition available</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/_Free_Culture__by__lessig___The_background_story_for_Creative_Commons___new_edition_available.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 23 Oct 2015 12:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">Click
+here to buy the book</a>.</p>
+
+<p>In 2004, as the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons
+movement</a> gained momentum, its creator Lawrence Lessig wrote the
+book <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)">Free
+Culture</a> to explain the problems with increasing copyright
+regulation and suggest some solutions. I read the book back then and
+was very moved by it. Reading the book inspired me and changed the
+way I looked on copyright law, and I would love it if more people
+would read it too.</p>
+
+<p>Because of this, I decided in the summer of 2012 to translate it to
+Norwegian Bokmål and publish it for those of my friends and family
+that prefer to read books in Norwegian. I translated the book using
+docbook and a gettext PO file, and a byproduct of this process is a
+new edition of the English original. I've been in touch with the
+author during by work, and he said it was fine with him if I also
+published an English version. So I decided to do so. Today, I made
+this edition
+<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html">available
+for sale on Lulu.com</a>, for those interested in a paper book. This
+is the cover:
+
+<p align="center"><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lawrence-lessig/free-culture/paperback/product-22402863.html"><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-10-23-free-culture-english-published-cover.png"/></a></p>
+
+<p>The Norwegian Bokmål version will be available for purchase in a
+few days. I also plan to publish a French version in a few weeks or
+months, depending on the amount of people with knowledge of French to
+join the translation project. So far there is only one active
+person, but the French book is almost completely translated but
+need some proof reading.</p>
+
+<p>The book is also available in PDF, ePub and MOBI formats from
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
+github project page</a>. Note the ePub and MOBI versions have some
+formatting problems I believe is due to bugs in the docbook tool
+dbtoepub (Debian BTS issues
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=795842">#795842</a>
+and
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=796871">#796871</a>),
+but I have not taken the time to investigate. I recommend the PDF and
+ePub version for now, as they seem to show up fine in the viewers I
+have available.</p>
+
+<p>After the translation to Norwegian Bokmål was complete, I was able
+to secure some sponsoring from
+<a href="http://www.nuugfoundation.no/">the NUUG Foundation</a> to
+print the book. This is the reason their logo is located on the back
+cover. I am very grateful for their contribution, and will use it to
+give a copy of the Norwegian edition to members of the Norwegian
+Parliament and other decision makers here in Norway.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Lawrence Lessig interviewed Edward Snowden a year ago</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Lawrence_Lessig_interviewed_Edward_Snowden_a_year_ago.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2015 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Last year, <a href="https://lessig2016.us/">US president candidate
+in the Democratic Party</a> Lawrence interviewed Edward Snowden. The
+one hour interview was
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Sr96TFQQE">published by
+Harvard Law School 2014-10-23 on Youtube</a>, and the meeting took
+place 2014-10-20.</p>
+
+<p>The questions are very good, and there is lots of useful
+information to be learned and very interesting issues to think about
+being raised. Please check it out.</p>
+
+<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o_Sr96TFQQE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
+
+<p>I find it especially interesting to hear again that Snowden did try
+to bring up his reservations through the official channels without any
+luck. It is in sharp contrast to the answers made 2013-11-06 by the
+Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg to the Norwegian Parliament,
+<a href="https://tale.holderdeord.no/speeches/s131106/68">claiming
+Snowden is no Whistle-Blower</a> because he should have taken up his
+concerns internally and using official channels. It make me sad
+that this is the political leadership we have here in Norway.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>The Story of Aaron Swartz - Let us all weep!</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Story_of_Aaron_Swartz___Let_us_all_weep_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 8 Oct 2015 12:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The movie "<a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The
+Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz</a>" is both inspiring
+and depressing at the same time. The work of Aaron Swartz has
+inspired me in my work, and I am grateful of all the improvements he
+was able to initiate or complete. I wish I am able to do as much good
+in my life as he did in his. Every minute of this 1:45 long movie is
+inspiring in documenting how much impact a single person can have on
+improving the society and this world. And it is depressing in
+documenting how the law enforcement of USA (and other countries) is
+corrupted to a point where they can push a bright kid to his death for
+downloading too many scientific articles. Aaron is dead. Let us all
+weep.</p>
+
+<p>The movie is also available on
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58">Youtube</a>. I
+wish there were Norwegian subtitles available, so I could show it to
+my parents.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>French Docbook/PDF/EPUB/MOBI edition of the Free Culture book</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/French_Docbook_PDF_EPUB_MOBI_edition_of_the_Free_Culture_book.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 1 Oct 2015 13:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>As I wrap up the Norwegian version of
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
+Culture</a> book by Lawrence Lessig (still waiting for my final proof
+reading copy to arrive in the mail), my great
+<a href="http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/">dblatex</a> helper and
+developer of the dblatex docbook processor, Benoît Guillon, decided a
+to try to create a French version of the book. He started with the
+French translation available from the
+<a href="http://www.wikilivres.ca/wiki/Culture_libre">Wikilivres wiki
+pages</a>, and wrote a program to convert it into a PO file, allowing
+the translation to be integrated into the po4a based framework I use
+to create the Norwegian translation from the English edition. We meet
+on the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23dblatex">#dblatex IRC
+channel</a> to discuss the work. If you want to help create a French
+edition, check out
+<a href="https://github.com/marsgui/free-culture-lessig">his git
+repository</a> and join us on IRC. If the French edition look good,
+we might publish it as a paper book on lulu.com. A French version of
+the drawings and the cover need to be provided for this to happen.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>The life and death of a laptop battery</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_battery.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2015 16:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>When I get a new laptop, the battery life time at the start is OK.
+But this do not last. The last few laptops gave me a feeling that
+within a year, the life time is just a fraction of what it used to be,
+and it slowly become painful to use the laptop without power connected
+all the time. Because of this, when I got a new Thinkpad X230 laptop
+about two years ago, I decided to monitor its battery state to have
+more hard facts when the battery started to fail.</p>
+
+<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-24-laptop-battery-graph.png"/>
+
+<p>First I tried to find a sensible Debian package to record the
+battery status, assuming that this must be a problem already handled
+by someone else. I found
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>,
+which collects statistics from the battery, but it was completely
+broken. I sent a few suggestions to the maintainer, but decided to
+write my own collector as a shell script while I waited for feedback
+from him. Via
+<a href="http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html">a
+blog post about the battery development on a MacBook Air</a> I also
+discovered
+<a href="https://github.com/jradavenport/batlog.git">batlog</a>, not
+available in Debian.</p>
+
+<p>I started my collector 2013-07-15, and it has been collecting
+battery stats ever since. Now my
+/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log file contain around 115,000
+measurements, from the time the battery was working great until now,
+when it is unable to charge above 7% of original capacity. My
+collector shell script is quite simple and look like this:</p>
+
+<pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+# Inspired by
+# http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/08/the-de-evolution-of-my-laptop-battery.html
+# See also
+# http://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2013/01/02/debian-how-to-monitor-battery-capacity/
+logfile=/var/log/hjemmenett-battery-status.log
+
+files="manufacturer model_name technology serial_number \
+ energy_full energy_full_design energy_now cycle_count status"
+
+if [ ! -e "$logfile" ] ; then
+ (
+ printf "timestamp,"
+ for f in $files; do
+ printf "%s," $f
+ done
+ echo
+ ) > "$logfile"
+fi
+
+log_battery() {
+ # Print complete message in one echo call, to avoid race condition
+ # when several log processes run in parallel.
+ msg=$(printf "%s," $(date +%s); \
+ for f in $files; do \
+ printf "%s," $(cat $f); \
+ done)
+ echo "$msg"
+}
+
+cd /sys/class/power_supply
+
+for bat in BAT*; do
+ (cd $bat && log_battery >> "$logfile")
+done
+</pre>
+
+<p>The script is called when the power management system detect a
+change in the power status (power plug in or out), and when going into
+and out of hibernation and suspend. In addition, it collect a value
+every 10 minutes. This make it possible for me know when the battery
+is discharging, charging and how the maximum charge change over time.
+The code for the Debian package
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-status">is now
+available on github</a>.</p>
+
+<p>The collected log file look like this:</p>
+
+<pre>
+timestamp,manufacturer,model_name,technology,serial_number,energy_full,energy_full_design,energy_now,cycle_count,status,
+1376591133,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,62800000,62160000,39050000,0,Discharging,
+[...]
+1443090528,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
+1443090601,LGC,45N1025,Li-ion,974,4900000,62160000,4900000,0,Full,
+</pre>
+
+<p>I wrote a small script to create a graph of the charge development
+over time. This graph depicted above show the slow death of my laptop
+battery.</p>
+
+<p>But why is this happening? Why are my laptop batteries always
+dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and
+satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe
+<a href="http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries">Battery
+University</a>, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a
+chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100%
+all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.
+I've been told that the Tesla electric cars
+<a href="http://my.teslamotors.com/de_CH/forum/forums/battery-charge-limit">limit
+the charge of their batteries to 80%</a>, with the option to charge to
+100% when preparing for a longer trip (not that I would want a car
+like Tesla where rights to privacy is abandoned, but that is another
+story), which I guess is the option we should have for laptops on
+Linux too.</p>
+
+<p>Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to
+stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in
+preparation for a longer trip? I found
+<a href="http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-battery-charging-to-80-capacity">one
+recipe on askubuntu for Ubuntu to limit charging on Thinkpad to
+80%</a>, but could not get it to work (kernel module refused to
+load).</p>
+
+<p>I wonder why the battery capacity was reported to be more than 100%
+at the start. I also wonder why the "full capacity" increases some
+times, and if it is possible to repeat the process to get the battery
+back to design capacity. And I wonder if the discharge and charge
+speed change over time, or if this stay the same. I did not yet try
+to write a tool to calculate the derivative values of the battery
+level, but suspect some interesting insights might be learned from
+those.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2015-09-24: I got a tip to install the packages
+acpi-call-dkms and tlp (unfortunately missing in Debian stable)
+packages instead of the tp-smapi-dkms package I had tried to use
+initially, and use 'tlp setcharge 40 80' to change when charging start
+and stop. I've done so now, but expect my existing battery is toast
+and need to be replaced. The proposal is unfortunately Thinkpad
+specific.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Book cover for the Free Culture book finally done</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Book_cover_for_the_Free_Culture_book_finally_done.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 3 Sep 2015 21:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected.
+I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of
+the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">Free
+Culture</a> book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in
+vector format for high resolution printing. But my inkscape knowledge
+were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
+
+<p>But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up
+the cover yesterday evening. I asked on the
+<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23inkscape">#inkscape IRC channel</a>
+on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered
+to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML
+version. Not only did he create a
+<a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/copy1.svg ">SVG document with
+the original and his vector version side by side</a>, he even provided
+an <a href="https://marc.jeanmougin.fr/share/out-1.ogv">instruction
+video</a> explaining how he did it</a>. But the instruction video is
+not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a
+recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as
+the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did
+use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it
+give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the
+stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.</p>
+
+<p>I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit
+on the cover I was drawing. I am happy with the end result, and the
+current english version look like this:</p>
+
+<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-09-03-free-culture-cover.png" width="70%" align="center"/>
+
+<p>I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will
+do. I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and
+hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers. The
+Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code
+replaced with the Norwegian version.</p>
+
+<p>The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect
+to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a
+final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should
+before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in
+English or Norwegian Bokmål. I'm waiting to give the the productive
+proof readers a chance to complete their work.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>In my hand, a pocket book edition of the Norwegian Free Culture book!</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/In_my_hand__a_pocket_book_edition_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2015 22:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Today, finally, my first printed draft edition of the Norwegian
+translation of Free Culture I have been working on for the last few
+years arrived in the mail. I had to fake a cover to get the interior
+printed, and the exterior of the book look awful, but that is
+irrelevant at this point. I asked for a printed pocket book version
+to get an idea about the font sizes and paper format as well as how
+good the figures and images look in print, but also to test what the
+pocket book version would look like. After receiving the 500 page
+pocket book, it became obvious to me that that pocket book size is too
+small for this book. I believe the book is too thick, and several
+tables and figures do not look good in the size they get with that
+small page sizes. I believe I will go with the 5.5x8.5 inch size
+instead. A surprise discovery from the paper version was how bad the
+URLs look in print. They are very hard to read in the colophon page.
+The URLs are red in the PDF, but light gray on paper. I need to
+change the color of links somehow to look better. But there is a
+printed book in my hand, and it feels great. :)</p>
+
+<p>Now I only need to fix the cover, wrap up the postscript with the
+store behind the book, and collect the last corrections from the proof
+readers before the book is ready for proper printing. Cover artists
+willing to work for free and create a Creative Commons licensed vector
+file looking similar to the original is most welcome, as my skills as
+a graphics designer are mostly missing.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>First paper version of the Norwegian Free Culture book heading my way</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_of_the_Norwegian_Free_Culture_book_heading_my_way.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 9 Aug 2015 10:15:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Typesetting a book is harder than I hoped. As the translation is
+mostly done, and a volunteer proof reader was going to check the text
+on paper, it was time this summer to focus on formatting my translated
+<a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> based version of the
+<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> book by Lawrence
+Lessig. I've been trying to get both docboox-xsl+fop and dblatex to
+give me a good looking PDF, but in the end I went with dblatex, because
+its Debian maintainer and upstream developer were responsive and very
+helpful in solving my formatting challenges.</p>
+
+<p>Last night, I finally managed to create a PDF that no longer made
+<a href="http://www.lulu.com/">Lulu.com</a> complain after uploading,
+and I ordered a text version of the book on paper. It is lacking a
+proper book cover and is not tagged with the correct ISBN number, but
+should give me an idea what the finished book will look like.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of using Lulu, I did consider printing the book using
+<a href="http://www.createspace.com/">CreateSpace</a>, but ended up
+using Lulu because it had smaller book size options (CreateSpace seem
+to lack pocket book with extended distribution). I looked for a
+similar service in Norway, but have not seen anything so far. Please
+let me know if I am missing out on something here.</p>
+
+<p>But I still struggle to decide the book size. Should I go for
+pocket book (4.25x6.875 inches / 10.8x17.5 cm) with 556 pages, Digest
+(5.5x8.5 inches / 14x21.6 cm) with 323 pages or US Trade (6x8 inches /
+15.3x22.9 cm) with 280 pages? Fewer pager give a cheaper book, and a
+smaller book is easier to carry around. The test book I ordered was
+pocket book sized, to give me an idea how well that fit in my hand,
+but I suspect I will end up using a digest sized book in the end to
+bring the prize down further.</p>
+
+<p>My biggest challenge at the moment is making nice cover art. My
+inkscape skills are not yet up to the task of replicating the original
+cover in SVG format. I also need to figure out what to write about
+the book on the back (will most likely use the same text as the
+description on web based book stores). I would love help with this,
+if you are willing to license the art source and final version using
+the same CC license as the book. My artistic skills are not really up
+to the task.</p>
+
+<p>I plan to publish the book in both English and Norwegian and on
+paper, in PDF form as well as EPUB and MOBI format. The current
+status can as usual be found on
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
+in the archive/ directory. So far I have spent all time on making the
+PDF version look good. Someone should probably do the same with the
+dbtoepub generated e-book. Help is definitely needed here, as I
+expect to run out of steem before I find time to improve the epub
+formatting.</p>
+
+<p>Please let me know via github if you find typos in the book or
+discover translations that should be improved. The final proof
+reading is being done right now, and I expect to publish the finished
+result in a few months.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Typesetting DocBook footnotes as endnotes with dblatex</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Typesetting_DocBook_footnotes_as_endnotes_with_dblatex.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jul 2015 18:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I'm still working on the Norwegian version of the
+<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture book by Lawrence
+Lessig</a>, and is now working on the final typesetting and layout.
+One of the features I want to get the structure similar to the
+original book is to typeset the footnotes as endnotes in the notes
+chapter. Based on the
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/685063">feedback from the Debian
+maintainer and the dblatex developer</a>, I came up with this recipe I
+would like to share with you. The proposal was to create a new LaTeX
+class file and add the LaTeX code there, but this is not always
+practical, when I want to be able to replace the class using a make
+file variable. So my proposal misuses the latex.begindocument XSL
+parameter value, to get a small fragment into the correct location in
+the generated LaTeX File.</p>
+
+<p>First, decide where in the DocBook document to place the endnotes,
+and add this text there:</p>
+
+<pre>
+&lt;?latex \theendnotes ?&gt;
+</pre>
+
+<p>Next, create a xsl stylesheet file dblatex-endnotes.xsl to add the
+code needed to add the endnote instructions in the preamble of the
+generated LaTeX document, with content like this:</p>
+
+<pre>
+&lt;?xml version='1.0'?&gt;
+&lt;xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version='1.0'&gt;
+ &lt;xsl:param name="latex.begindocument"&gt;
+ &lt;xsl:text&gt;
+\usepackage{endnotes}
+\let\footnote=\endnote
+\def\enoteheading{\mbox{}\par\vskip-\baselineskip }
+\begin{document}
+ &lt;/xsl:text&gt;
+ &lt;/xsl:param&gt;
+&lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
+</pre>
+
+<p>Finally, load this xsl file when running dblatex, for example like
+this:</p>
+
+<pre>
+dblatex --xsl-user=dblatex-endnotes.xsl freeculture.nb.xml
+</pre>
+
+<p>The end result can be seen on github, where
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">my
+book project</a> is located.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>MPEG LA on "Internet Broadcast AVC Video" licensing and non-private use</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MPEG_LA_on__Internet_Broadcast_AVC_Video__licensing_and_non_private_use.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 7 Jul 2015 09:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>After asking the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Hva_gj_r_at_NRK_kan_distribuere_H_264_video_uten_patentavtale_med_MPEG_LA_.html">why
+they can broadcast and stream H.264 video without an agreement with
+the MPEG LA</a>, I was wiser, but still confused. So I asked MPEG LA
+if their understanding matched that of NRK. As far as I can tell, it
+does not.</p>
+
+<p>I started by asking for more information about the various
+licensing classes and what exactly is covered by the "Internet
+Broadcast AVC Video" class that NRK pointed me at to explain why NRK
+did not need a license for streaming H.264 video:
+
+<p><blockquote>
+
+<p>According to
+<a href="http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf">a
+MPEG LA press release dated 2010-02-02</a>, there is no charge when
+using MPEG AVC/H.264 according to the terms of "Internet Broadcast AVC
+Video". I am trying to understand exactly what the terms of "Internet
+Broadcast AVC Video" is, and wondered if you could help me. What
+exactly is covered by these terms, and what is not?</p>
+
+<p>The only source of more information I have been able to find is a
+PDF named
+<a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf">AVC
+Patent Portfolio License Briefing</a>, which states this about the
+fees:</p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li>Where End User pays for AVC Video
+ <ul>
+ <li>Subscription (not limited by title) – 100,000 or fewer
+ subscribers/yr = no royalty; &gt; 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers/yr =
+ $25,000; &gt;250,000 to 500,000 subscribers/yr = $50,000; &gt;500,000 to
+ 1M subscribers/yr = $75,000; &gt;1M subscribers/yr = $100,000</li>
+
+ <li>Title-by-Title - 12 minutes or less = no royalty; &gt;12 minutes in
+ length = lower of (a) 2% or (b) $0.02 per title</li>
+ </ul></li>
+
+ <li>Where remuneration is from other sources
+ <ul>
+ <li>Free Television - (a) one-time $2,500 per transmission encoder or
+ (b) annual fee starting at $2,500 for &gt; 100,000 HH rising to
+ maximum $10,000 for &gt;1,000,000 HH</li>
+
+ <li>Internet Broadcast AVC Video (not title-by-title, not subscription)
+ – no royalty for life of the AVC Patent Portfolio License</li>
+ </ul></li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>Am I correct in assuming that the four categories listed is the
+categories used when selecting licensing terms, and that "Internet
+Broadcast AVC Video" is the category for things that do not fall into
+one of the other three categories? Can you point me to a good source
+explaining what is ment by "title-by-title" and "Free Television" in
+the license terms for AVC/H.264?</p>
+
+<p>Will a web service providing H.264 encoded video content in a
+"video on demand" fashing similar to Youtube and Vimeo, where no
+subscription is required and no payment is required from end users to
+get access to the videos, fall under the terms of the "Internet
+Broadcast AVC Video", ie no royalty for life of the AVC Patent
+Portfolio license? Does it matter if some users are subscribed to get
+access to personalized services?</p>
+
+<p>Note, this request and all answers will be published on the
+Internet.</p>
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The answer came quickly from Benjamin J. Myers, Licensing Associate
+with the MPEG LA:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+<p>Thank you for your message and for your interest in MPEG LA. We
+appreciate hearing from you and I will be happy to assist you.</p>
+
+<p>As you are aware, MPEG LA offers our AVC Patent Portfolio License
+which provides coverage under patents that are essential for use of
+the AVC/H.264 Standard (MPEG-4 Part 10). Specifically, coverage is
+provided for end products and video content that make use of AVC/H.264
+technology. Accordingly, the party offering such end products and
+video to End Users concludes the AVC License and is responsible for
+paying the applicable royalties.</p>
+
+<p>Regarding Internet Broadcast AVC Video, the AVC License generally
+defines such content to be video that is distributed to End Users over
+the Internet free-of-charge. Therefore, if a party offers a service
+which allows users to upload AVC/H.264 video to its website, and such
+AVC Video is delivered to End Users for free, then such video would
+receive coverage under the sublicense for Internet Broadcast AVC
+Video, which is not subject to any royalties for the life of the AVC
+License. This would also apply in the scenario where a user creates a
+free online account in order to receive a customized offering of free
+AVC Video content. In other words, as long as the End User is given
+access to or views AVC Video content at no cost to the End User, then
+no royalties would be payable under our AVC License.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, if End Users pay for access to AVC Video for a
+specific period of time (e.g., one month, one year, etc.), then such
+video would constitute Subscription AVC Video. In cases where AVC
+Video is delivered to End Users on a pay-per-view basis, then such
+content would constitute Title-by-Title AVC Video. If a party offers
+Subscription or Title-by-Title AVC Video to End Users, then they would
+be responsible for paying the applicable royalties you noted below.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, in the case where AVC Video is distributed for free
+through an "over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission", then
+such content would constitute Free Television AVC Video and would be
+subject to the applicable royalties.</p>
+
+<p>For your reference, I have attached
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-07-07-mpegla.pdf">a
+.pdf copy of the AVC License</a>. You will find the relevant
+sublicense information regarding AVC Video in Sections 2.2 through
+2.5, and the corresponding royalties in Section 3.1.2 through 3.1.4.
+You will also find the definitions of Title-by-Title AVC Video,
+Subscription AVC Video, Free Television AVC Video, and Internet
+Broadcast AVC Video in Section 1 of the License. Please note that the
+electronic copy is provided for informational purposes only and cannot
+be used for execution.</p>
+
+<p>I hope the above information is helpful. If you have additional
+questions or need further assistance with the AVC License, please feel
+free to contact me directly.</p>
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Having a fresh copy of the license text was useful, and knowing
+that the definition of Title-by-Title required payment per title made
+me aware that my earlier understanding of that phrase had been wrong.
+But I still had a few questions:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+<p>I have a small followup question. Would it be possible for me to get
+a license with MPEG LA even if there are no royalties to be paid? The
+reason I ask, is that some video related products have a copyright
+clause limiting their use without a license with MPEG LA. The clauses
+typically look similar to this:
+
+<p><blockquote>
+ This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
+ the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer to (a) encode
+ video in compliance with the AVC standard ("AVC video") and/or (b)
+ decode AVC video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a
+ personal and non-commercial activity and/or AVC video that was
+ obtained from a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No
+ license is granted or shall be implied for any other use. additional
+ information may be obtained from MPEG LA L.L.C.
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>It is unclear to me if this clause mean that I need to enter into
+an agreement with MPEG LA to use the product in question, even if
+there are no royalties to be paid to MPEG LA. I suspect it will
+differ depending on the jurisdiction, and mine is Norway. What is
+MPEG LAs view on this?</p>
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>According to the answer, MPEG LA believe those using such tools for
+non-personal or commercial use need a license with them:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+
+<p>With regard to the Notice to Customers, I would like to begin by
+clarifying that the Notice from Section 7.1 of the AVC License
+reads:</p>
+
+<p>THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR
+THE PERSONAL USE OF A CONSUMER OR OTHER USES IN WHICH IT DOES NOT
+RECEIVE REMUNERATION TO (i) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC
+STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (ii) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED
+BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM
+A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED
+OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE
+OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM</p>
+
+<p>The Notice to Customers is intended to inform End Users of the
+personal usage rights (for example, to watch video content) included
+with the product they purchased, and to encourage any party using the
+product for commercial purposes to contact MPEG LA in order to become
+licensed for such use (for example, when they use an AVC Product to
+deliver Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free Television or Internet
+Broadcast AVC Video to End Users, or to re-Sell a third party's AVC
+Product as their own branded AVC Product).</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, if a party is to be licensed for its use of an AVC
+Product to Sell AVC Video on a Title-by-Title, Subscription, Free
+Television or Internet Broadcast basis, that party would need to
+conclude the AVC License, even in the case where no royalties were
+payable under the License. On the other hand, if that party (either a
+Consumer or business customer) simply uses an AVC Product for their
+own internal purposes and not for the commercial purposes referenced
+above, then such use would be included in the royalty paid for the AVC
+Products by the licensed supplier.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, I note that our AVC License provides worldwide coverage in
+countries that have AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, including
+Norway.</p>
+
+<p>I hope this clarification is helpful. If I may be of any further
+assistance, just let me know.</p>
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The mentioning of Norwegian patents made me a bit confused, so I
+asked for more information:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+
+<p>But one minor question at the end. If I understand you correctly,
+you state in the quote above that there are patents in the AVC Patent
+Portfolio that are valid in Norway. This make me believe I read the
+list available from &lt;URL:
+<a href="http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx">http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx</a>
+&gt; incorrectly, as I believed the "NO" prefix in front of patents
+were Norwegian patents, and the only one I could find under Mitsubishi
+Electric Corporation expired in 2012. Which patents are you referring
+to that are relevant for Norway?</p>
+
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Again, the quick answer explained how to read the list of patents
+in that list:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+
+<p>Your understanding is correct that the last AVC Patent Portfolio
+Patent in Norway expired on 21 October 2012. Therefore, where AVC
+Video is both made and Sold in Norway after that date, then no
+royalties would be payable for such AVC Video under the AVC License.
+With that said, our AVC License provides historic coverage for AVC
+Products and AVC Video that may have been manufactured or Sold before
+the last Norwegian AVC patent expired. I would also like to clarify
+that coverage is provided for the country of manufacture and the
+country of Sale that has active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, if a party offers AVC Products or AVC Video for Sale in
+a country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents (for example,
+Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.), then that party would still need
+coverage under the AVC License even if such products or video are
+initially made in a country without active AVC Patent Portfolio
+Patents (for example, Norway). Similarly, a party would need to
+conclude the AVC License if they make AVC Products or AVC Video in a
+country with active AVC Patent Portfolio Patents, but eventually Sell
+such AVC Products or AVC Video in a country without active AVC Patent
+Portfolio Patents.</p>
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>As far as I understand it, MPEG LA believe anyone using Adobe
+Premiere and other video related software with a H.264 distribution
+license need a license agreement with MPEG LA to use such tools for
+anything non-private or commercial, while it is OK to set up a
+Youtube-like service as long as no-one pays to get access to the
+content. I still have no clear idea how this applies to Norway, where
+none of the patents MPEG LA is licensing are valid. Will the
+copyright terms take precedence or can those terms be ignored because
+the patents are not valid in Norway?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>New laptop - some more clues and ideas based on feedback</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_laptop___some_more_clues_and_ideas_based_on_feedback.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 5 Jul 2015 21:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Several people contacted me after my previous blog post about my
+need for a new laptop, and provided very useful feedback. I wish to
+thank every one of these. Several pointed me to the possibility of
+fixing my X230, and I am already in the process of getting Lenovo to
+do so thanks to the on site, next day support contract covering the
+machine. But the battery is almost useless (I expect to replace it
+with a non-official battery) and I do not expect the machine to live
+for many more years, so it is time to plan its replacement. If I did
+not have a support contract, it was suggested to find replacement parts
+using <a href="http://www.francecrans.com/">FrancEcrans</a>, but it
+might present a language barrier as I do not understand French.</p>
+
+<p>One tip I got was to use the
+<a href="https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb">Skinflint</a> web service to
+compare laptop models. It seem to have more models available than
+prisjakt.no. Another tip I got from someone I know have similar
+keyboard preferences was that the HP EliteBook 840 keyboard is not
+very good, and this matches my experience with earlier EliteBook
+keyboards I tested. Because of this, I will not consider it any further.
+
+<p>When I wrote my blog post, I was not aware of Thinkpad X250, the
+newest Thinkpad X model. The keyboard reintroduces mouse buttons
+(which is missing from the X240), and is working fairly well with
+Debian Sid/Unstable according to
+<a href="http://www.corsac.net/X250/">Corsac.net</a>. The reports I
+got on the keyboard quality are not consistent. Some say the keyboard
+is good, others say it is ok, while others say it is not very good.
+Those with experience from X41 and and X60 agree that the X250
+keyboard is not as good as those trusty old laptops, and suggest I
+keep and fix my X230 instead of upgrading, or get a used X230 to
+replace it. I'm also told that the X250 lack leds for caps lock, disk
+activity and battery status, which is very convenient on my X230. I'm
+also told that the CPU fan is running very often, making it a bit
+noisy. In any case, the X250 do not work out of the box with Debian
+Stable/Jessie, one of my requirements.</p>
+
+<p>I have also gotten a few vendor proposals, one was
+<a href="http://pro-star.com">Pro-Star</a>, another was
+<a href="http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/libreboot-x200/">Libreboot</a>.
+The latter look very attractive to me.</p>
+
+<p>Again, thank you all for the very useful feedback. It help a lot
+as I keep looking for a replacement.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2015-07-06: I was recommended to check out the
+<a href="">lapstore.de</a> web shop for used laptops. They got several
+different
+<a href="http://www.lapstore.de/f.php/shop/lapstore/f/411/lang/x/kw/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X_Serie/">old
+thinkpad X models</a>, and provide one year warranty.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Time to find a new laptop, as the old one is broken after only two years</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Time_to_find_a_new_laptop__as_the_old_one_is_broken_after_only_two_years.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 3 Jul 2015 07:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>My primary work horse laptop is failing, and will need a
+replacement soon. The left 5 cm of the screen on my Thinkpad X230
+started flickering yesterday, and I suspect the cause is a broken
+cable, as changing the angle of the screen some times get rid of the
+flickering.</p>
+
+<p>My requirements have not really changed since I bought it, and is
+still as
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Thank_you_Thinkpad_X41__for_your_long_and_trustworthy_service.html">I
+described them in 2013</a>. The last time I bought a laptop, I had
+good help from
+<a href="http://www.prisjakt.no/category.php?k=353">prisjakt.no</a>
+where I could select at least a few of the requirements (mouse pin,
+wifi, weight) and go through the rest manually. Three button mouse
+and a good keyboard is not available as an option, and all the three
+laptop models proposed today (Thinkpad X240, HP EliteBook 820 G1 and
+G2) lack three mouse buttons). It is also unclear to me how good the
+keyboard on the HP EliteBooks are. I hope Lenovo have not messed up
+the keyboard, even if the quality and robustness in the X series have
+deteriorated since X41.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder how I can find a sensible laptop when none of the options
+seem sensible to me? Are there better services around to search the
+set of available laptops for features? Please send me an email if you
+have suggestions.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2015-07-23: I got a suggestion to check out the FSF
+<a href="http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom">list
+of endorsed hardware</a>, which is useful background information.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>MakerCon Nordic videos now available on Frikanalen</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/MakerCon_Nordic_videos_now_available_on_Frikanalen.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 2 Jul 2015 14:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Last oktober I was involved on behalf of
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> with recording the talks at
+<a href="http://www.makercon.no/">MakerCon Nordic</a>, a conference for
+the Maker movement. Since then it has been the plan to publish the
+recordings on <a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, which
+finally happened the last few days. A few talks are missing because
+the speakers asked the organizers to not publish them, but most of the
+talks are available. The talks are being broadcasted on RiksTV
+channel 50 and using multicast on Uninett, as well as being available
+from the Frikanalen web site. The unedited recordings are
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">available on
+Youtube too</a>.</p>
+
+<p>This is the list of talks available at the moment. Visit the
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/video/?q=makercon">Frikanalen video
+pages</a> to view them.</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>Evolutionary algorithms as a design tool - from art
+ to robotics (Kyrre Glette)</li>
+
+ <li>Make and break (Hans Gerhard Meier)</li>
+
+ <li>Making a one year school course for young makers
+ (Olav Helland)</li>
+
+ <li>Innovation Inspiration - IPR Databases as a Source of
+ Inspiration (Hege Langlo)</li>
+
+ <li>Making a toy for makers (Erik Torstensson)</li>
+
+ <li>How to make 3D printer electronics (Elias Bakken)</li>
+
+ <li>Hovering Clouds: Looking at online tool offerings for Product
+ Design and 3D Printing (William Kempton)</li>
+
+ <li>Travelling maker stories (Øyvind Nydal Dahl)</li>
+
+ <li>Making the first Maker Faire in Sweden (Nils Olander)</li>
+
+ <li>Breaking the mold: Printing 1000’s of parts (Espen Sivertsen)</li>
+
+ <li>Ultimaker — and open source 3D printing (Erik de Bruijn)</li>
+
+ <li>Autodesk’s 3D Printing Platform: Sparking innovation (Hilde
+ Sevens)</li>
+
+ <li>How Making is Changing the World – and How You Can Too!
+ (Jennifer Turliuk)</li>
+
+ <li>Open-Source Adventuring: OpenROV, OpenExplorer and the Future of
+ Connected Exploration (David Lang)</li>
+
+ <li>Making in Norway (Haakon Karlsen Jr., Graham Hayward and Jens
+ Dyvik)</li>
+
+ <li>The Impact of the Maker Movement (Mike Senese)</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>Part of the reason this took so long was that the scripts NUUG had
+to prepare a recording for publication were five years old and no
+longer worked with the current video processing tools (command line
+argument changes). In addition, we needed better audio normalization,
+which sent me on a detour to
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html">package
+bs1770gain for Debian</a>. Now this is in place and it became a lot
+easier to publish NUUG videos on Frikanalen.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Graphing the Norwegian company ownership structure</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Graphing_the_Norwegian_company_ownership_structure.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2015 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It is a bit work to figure out the ownership structure of companies
+in Norway. The information is publicly available, but one need to
+recursively look up ownership for all owners to figure out the complete
+ownership graph of a given set of companies. To save me the work in
+the future, I wrote a script to do this automatically, outputting the
+ownership structure using the Graphviz/dotty format. The data source
+is web scraping from <a href="http://www.proff.no/">Proff</a>, because
+I failed to find a useful source directly from the official keepers of
+the ownership data, <a href="http://www.brreg.no/">Brønnøysundsregistrene</a>.</p>
+
+<p>To get an ownership graph for a set of companies, fetch
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/brreg-norway-ownership-graph">the code from git</a> and run it using the organisation number. I'm
+using the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet as an example here, as its
+ownership structure is very simple:</p>
+
+<pre>
+% time ./bin/eierskap-dotty 958033540 > dagbladet.dot
+
+real 0m2.841s
+user 0m0.184s
+sys 0m0.036s
+%
+</pre>
+
+<p>The script accept several organisation numbers on the command line,
+allowing a cluster of companies to be graphed in the same image. The
+resulting dot file for the example above look like this. The edges
+are labeled with the ownership percentage, and the nodes uses the
+organisation number as their name and the name as the label:</p>
+
+<pre>
+digraph ownership {
+rankdir = LR;
+"Aller Holding A/s" -> "910119877" [label="100%"]
+"910119877" -> "998689015" [label="100%"]
+"998689015" -> "958033540" [label="99%"]
+"974530600" -> "958033540" [label="1%"]
+"958033540" [label="AS DAGBLADET"]
+"998689015" [label="Berner Media Holding AS"]
+"974530600" [label="Dagbladets Stiftelse"]
+"910119877" [label="Aller Media AS"]
+}
+</pre>
+
+<p>To view the ownership graph, run "<tt>dotty dagbladet.dot</tt>" or
+convert it to a PNG using "<tt>dot -T png dagbladet.dot >
+dagbladet.png</tt>". The result can be seen below:</p>
+
+<img src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2015-06-15-ownership-graphs-norway-dagbladet.png" width="80%">
+
+<p>Note that I suspect the "Aller Holding A/S" entry to be incorrect
+data in the official ownership register, as that name is not
+registered in the official company register for Norway. The ownership
+register is sensitive to typos and there seem to be no strict checking
+of the ownership links.</p>
+
+<p>Let me know if you improve the script or find better data sources.
+The code is licensed according to GPL 2 or newer.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2015-06-15: Since the initial post I've been told that
+"<a href="http://www.proff.dk/firma/carl-allers-etablissement-aktieselskab/københavn-v/hovedkontorer/13624518-3/">Aller
+Holding A/S</a>" is a Danish company, which explain why it did not
+have a Norwegian organisation number. I've also been told that there
+is a <a href="http://www.brreg.no/automatiske/webservices/">web
+services API available</a> from Brønnøysundsregistrene, for those
+willing to accept the terms or pay the price.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Measuring and adjusting the loudness of a TV channel using bs1770gain</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Measuring_and_adjusting_the_loudness_of_a_TV_channel_using_bs1770gain.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2015 13:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Television loudness is the source of frustration for viewers
+everywhere. Some channels are very load, others are less loud, and
+ads tend to shout very high to get the attention of the viewers, and
+the viewers do not like this. This fact is well known to the TV
+channels. See for example the BBC white paper
+"<a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP202.pdf">Terminology
+for loudness and level dBTP, LU, and all that</a>" from 2011 for a
+summary of the problem domain. To better address the need for even
+loadness, the TV channels got together several years ago to agree on a
+new way to measure loudness in digital files as one step in
+standardizing loudness. From this came the ITU-R standard BS.1770,
+"<a href="http://www.itu.int/rec/R-REC-BS.1770/en">Algorithms to
+measure audio programme loudness and true-peak audio level</a>".</p>
+
+<p>The ITU-R BS.1770 specification describe an algorithm to measure
+loadness in LUFS (Loudness Units, referenced to Full Scale). But
+having a way to measure is not enough. To get the same loudness
+across TV channels, one also need to decide which value to standardize
+on. For European TV channels, this was done in the EBU Recommondaton
+R128, "<a href="https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf">Loudness
+normalisation and permitted maximum level of audio signals</a>", which
+specifies a recommended level of -23 LUFS. In Norway, I have been
+told that NRK, TV2, MTG and SBS have decided among themselves to
+follow the R128 recommondation for playout from 2016-03-01.</p>
+
+<p>There are free software available to measure and adjust the loudness
+level using the LUFS. In Debian, I am aware of a library named
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libebur128">libebur128</a>
+able to measure the loudness and since yesterday morning a new binary
+named <a href="http://bs1770gain.sourceforge.net">bs1770gain</a>
+capable of both measuring and adjusting was uploaded and is waiting
+for NEW processing. I plan to maintain the latter in Debian under the
+<a href="https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-multimedia-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org">Debian
+multimedia</a> umbrella.</p>
+
+<p>The free software based TV channel I am involved in,
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a>, plan to follow the
+R128 recommondation ourself as soon as we can adjust the software to
+do so, and the bs1770gain tool seem like a good fit for that part of
+the puzzle to measure loudness on new video uploaded to Frikanalen.
+Personally, I plan to use bs1770gain to adjust the loudness of videos
+I upload to Frikanalen on behalf of <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the
+NUUG member organisation</a>. The program seem to be able to measure
+the LUFS value of any media file handled by ffmpeg, but I've only
+successfully adjusted the LUFS value of WAV files. I suspect it
+should be able to adjust it for all the formats handled by ffmpeg.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_citizens_now_required_by_law_to_give_their_fingerprint_to_the_police.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 10 May 2015 16:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all
+citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something
+criminal or not, are
+<a href="https://www.holderdeord.no/votes/1430838871e">required to
+give fingerprints to the police</a> (vote details from Holder de
+ord). The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few
+years there will be no option any more. The ID will be required to
+vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the
+post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license
+and many other tasks required to function in Norway. The banks plan
+to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new
+national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to
+change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards.
+In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will
+be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to
+the police.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which
+promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in
+time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the
+fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of
+the face and other information about the person. Some of the
+information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same
+system as currently used in the passports. The codes to decrypt will
+be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around
+the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it
+is good to know that
+<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/nov/17/news.homeaffairs">the
+encryption is already broken</a>. And they
+<a href="http://www.networkworld.com/article/2215057/wireless/bad-guys-could-read-rfid-passports-at-217-feet--maybe-a-lot-more.html">can
+be read from 70 meters away</a>. This can be mitigated a bit by
+keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but
+one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose
+ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no
+business getting access to that information.</p>
+
+<p>The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft,
+and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion
+of privacy without any objections. So are the Norwegian passports,
+but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far.
+That option is going away with the passing of the new law. In this, I
+envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric
+information is stored in their national ID.</p>
+
+<p>And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the
+information collected in the national ID card register can be handed
+over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when
+extradition is not considered disproportionate".</p>
+
+<p>Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament
+really could make such decision, I wrote
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Blir_det_virkelig_krav_om_fingeravtrykk_i_nasjonale_ID_kort_.html">a
+summary of the sources I have</a> for concluding the way I do
+(Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>What would it cost to store all phone calls in Norway?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_would_it_cost_to_store_all_phone_calls_in_Norway_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 1 May 2015 19:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Many years ago, a friend of mine calculated how much it would cost
+to store the sound of all phone calls in Norway, and came up with the
+cost of around 20 million NOK (2.4 mill EUR) for all the calls in a
+year. I got curious and wondered what the same calculation would look
+like today. To do so one need an idea of how much data storage is
+needed for each minute of sound, how many minutes all the calls in
+Norway sums up to, and the cost of data storage.</p>
+
+<p>The 2005 numbers are from
+<a href="http://www.digi.no/analyser/2005/10/04/vi-prater-stadig-mindre-i-roret">digi.no</a>,
+the 2012 numbers are from
+<a href="http://www.nkom.no/aktuelt/nyheter/fortsatt-vekst-i-det-norske-ekommarkedet">a
+NKOM report</a>, and I got the 2013 numbers after asking NKOM via
+email. I was told the numbers for 2014 will be presented May 20th,
+and decided not to wait for those, as I doubt they will be very
+different from the numbers from 2013.</p>
+
+<p>The amount of data storage per minute sound depend on the wanted
+quality, and for phone calls it is generally believed that 8 Kbit/s is
+enough. See for example a
+<a href="http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html#topic1">summary
+on voice quality from Cisco</a> for some alternatives. 8 Kbit/s is 60
+Kbytes/min, and this can be multiplied with the number of call minutes
+to get the storage requirements.</p>
+
+<p>Storage prices varies a lot, depending on speed, backup strategies,
+availability requirements etc. But a simple way to calculate can be
+to use the price of a TiB-disk (around 1000 NOK / 120 EUR) and double
+it to take space, power and redundancy into account. It could be much
+higher with high speed and good redundancy requirements.</p>
+
+<p>But back to the question, What would it cost to store all phone
+calls in Norway? Not much. Here is a small table showing the
+estimated cost, which is within the budget constraint of most medium
+and large organisations:</p>
+
+<table border="1">
+<tr><th>Year</th><th>Call minutes</th><th>Size</th><th>Price in NOK / EUR</th></tr>
+<tr><td>2005</td><td align="right">24 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.3 PiB</td><td align="right">3 mill / 358 000</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2012</td><td align="right">18 000 000 000</td><td align="right">1.0 PiB</td><td align="right">2.2 mill / 262 000</td></tr>
+<tr><td>2013</td><td align="right">17 000 000 000</td><td align="right">950 TiB</td><td align="right">2.1 mill / 250 000</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>This is the cost of buying the storage. Maintenance need to be
+taken into account too, but calculating that is left as an exercise
+for the reader. But it is obvious to me from those numbers that
+recording the sound of all phone calls in Norway is not going to be
+stopped because it is too expensive. I wonder if someone already is
+collecting the data?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>First Jessie based Debian Edu beta release</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_beta_release.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2015 14:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I am happy to report that the Debian Edu team sent out
+<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2015/04/msg00000.html">this
+announcement today</a>:</p>
+
+<pre>
+the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is pleased to announce the first
+*beta* release of Debian Edu "Jessie" 8.0+edu0~b1, which for the first
+time is composed entirely of packages from the current Debian stable
+release, Debian 8 "Jessie".
+
+(As most reading this will know, Debian "Jessie" hasn't actually been
+released by now. The release is still in progress but should finish
+later today ;)
+
+We expect to make a final release of Debian Edu "Jessie" in the coming
+weeks, timed with the first point release of Debian Jessie. Upgrades
+from this beta release of Debian Edu Jessie to the final release will
+be possible and encouraged!
+
+Please report feedback to debian-edu@lists.debian.org and/or submit
+bugs: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs
+
+Debian Edu - sometimes also known as "Skolelinux" - is a complete
+operating system for schools, universities and other
+organisations. Through its pre- prepared installation profiles
+administrators can install servers, workstations and laptops which
+will work in harmony on the school network. With Debian Edu, the
+teachers themselves or their technical support staff can roll out a
+complete multi-user, multi-machine study environment within hours or
+days.
+
+Debian Edu is already in use at several hundred schools all over the
+world, particularly in Germany, Spain and Norway. Installations come
+with hundreds of applications pre-installed, plus the whole Debian
+archive of thousands of compatible packages within easy reach.
+
+For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
+installation instructions are available, including detailed
+instructions in the manual explaining the first steps, such as setting
+up a network or adding users. Please note that the password for the
+user your prompted for during installation must have a length of at
+least 5 characters!
+
+== Where to download ==
+
+A multi-architecture CD / usbstick image (649 MiB) for network booting
+can be downloaded at the following locations:
+
+ http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso
+ rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-CD.iso .
+
+The SHA1SUM of this image is: 54a524d16246cddd8d2cfd6ea52f2dd78c47ee0a
+
+Alternatively an extended DVD / usbstick image (4.9 GiB) is also
+available, with more software included (saving additional download
+time):
+
+ http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
+ rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~b1-USB.iso
+
+The SHA1SUM of this image is: fb1f1504a490c077a48653898f9d6a461cb3c636
+
+Sources are available from the Debian archive, see
+http://ftp.debian.org/debian-cd/8.0.0/source/ for some download
+options.
+
+== Debian Edu Jessie manual in seven languages ==
+
+Please see https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/ for
+the English version of the Debian Edu jessie manual.
+
+This manual has been fully translated to German, French, Italian,
+Danish, Dutch and Norwegian Bokmål. A partly translated version exists
+for Spanish. See http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ for
+online version of the translated manual.
+
+More information about Debian 8 "Jessie" itself is provided in the
+release notes and the installation manual:
+- http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
+- http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
+
+
+== Errata / known problems ==
+
+ It takes up to 15 minutes for a changed hostname to be updated via
+ DHCP (#780461).
+
+ The hostname script fails to update LTSP server hostname (#783087).
+
+Workaround: run update-hostname-from-ip on the client to update the
+hostname immediately.
+
+Check https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie for a possibly
+more current and complete list.
+
+== Some more details about Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~b1 Codename Jessie released 2015-04-25 ==
+
+=== Software updates ===
+
+Everything which is new in Debian 8 Jessie, e.g.:
+
+ * Linux kernel 3.16.7-ctk9; for the i386 architecture, support for
+ i486 processors has been dropped; oldest supported ones: i586 (like
+ Intel Pentium and AMD K5).
+
+ * Desktop environments KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11.13, GNOME 3.14,
+ Xfce 4.12, LXDE 0.5.6
+ * new optional desktop environment: MATE 1.8
+ * KDE Plasma Workspaces is installed by default; to choose one of
+ the others see the manual.
+ * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 41
+ * LibreOffice 4.3.3
+ * GOsa 2.7.4
+ * LTSP 5.5.4
+ * CUPS print system 1.7.5
+ * new boot framework: systemd
+ * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.12
+ * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
+ * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
+ * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.1
+ * golearn 0.9
+ * tuxpaint 0.9.22
+ * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
+ * Debian Jessie includes about 43000 packages available for installation.
+ * More information about Debian 8 Jessie is provided in its release
+ notes and the installation manual, see the link above.
+
+=== Installation changes ===
+
+ Installations done via PXE now also install firmware automatically
+ for the hardware present.
+
+=== Fixed bugs ===
+
+A number of bugs have been fixed in this release; the most noticeable
+from a user perspective:
+
+ * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
+ DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
+ information is corrected (710362)
+
+ * shutdown-at-night now shuts the system down if gdm3 is used (775608).
+
+=== Sugar desktop removed ===
+
+As the Sugar desktop was removed from Debian Jessie, it is also not
+available in Debian Edu jessie.
+
+
+== About Debian Edu / Skolelinux ==
+
+Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on
+Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
+configured school network. Directly after installation a school server
+running all services needed for a school network is set up just
+waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
+Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
+initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
+machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
+provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
+centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
+services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
+packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
+can choose between KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
+environment.
+
+== About Debian ==
+
+The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
+free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
+the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
+volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
+maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
+huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
+operating system.
+
+== Thanks ==
+
+Thanks to everyone making Debian and Debian Edu / Skolelinux happen!
+You rock.
+</pre>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Shirish Agarwal</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Shirish_Agarwal.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
+computer system for schools I've involved in,
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, was
+being used in India. But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
+interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
+Agarwal.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
+historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
+My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
+installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
+fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
+few software start-ups as well.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
+years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
+anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
+educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
+nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
+it was known then. Since then I have started using the various
+education meta-packages provided by the project.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
+software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
+figuratively). Even if I take the simplest software which is
+gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
+the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
+pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781841">#781841</a> and
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/781842">#781842</a>.</p>
+
+<p>I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
+as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
+possibility of a larger life span. Of course with both it's more a
+question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
+for the developer per-se.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
+think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
+help from people and the larger community wherever possible.</p>
+
+<p>I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
+that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
+However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
+pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
+but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
+Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
+still) I have had for a long time :</p>
+
+<p>1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
+each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
+far would each travel and similar questions like these.
+
+<p>The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
+be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
+interactive manner. While sites such as the
+<a href="http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.two.trains.html">Ask
+Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem</a> (as an example or point of
+inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done. I dunno
+if there is a free software which does something like this. The idea
+being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
+this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
+colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
+or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
+This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
+the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
+psychics and everything in-between.</p>
+
+<p>One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
+one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
+meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
+also be used.</p>
+
+<p>2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
+enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary. I don't think it
+should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
+sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
+from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
+the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
+the user's input.</p>
+
+<p>3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
+palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
+needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
+copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
+nature, history etc. and let it loose. This could turn to be really
+huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
+commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
+stock photos. Potential is immense.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
+both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
+lot. This is more so in educational software as these applications
+need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
+immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
+maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
+of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
+maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
+aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
+quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
+between kpat and Aiselriot. In desktops it's a tie between
+gnome-flashback and mate.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
+whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
+Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
+school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
+people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
+various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.</p>
+
+<p>What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
+passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
+then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
+well.</p>
+
+<p>I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
+instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
+there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
+Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.</p>
+
+<p>One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
+and upgrades. People have this myth that each update and upgrade
+means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
+innumerable times. That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
+like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
+it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
+changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
+the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
+releases.</p>
+
+<p>The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
+is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
+is aimed at.
+
+<p>Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
+around 2 years, and
+<a href="https://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/sharings/">gathered
+some experience</a> there. Some of the things we learnt/discovered
+there was :</p>
+
+<ol>
+
+ <li>Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
+ and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
+ portion/syllabus given.</li>
+
+ <li>They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
+ is in the syllabus.</li>
+
+ <li>There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
+ times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
+ you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
+ say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
+ as recognizable as say a
+ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puneri_Pagadi">Puneri
+ Pagdi</a> so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
+ possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
+ which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
+ parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
+ something but that is something for upstream to do.</li>
+
+</ol>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>I'm going to the Open Source Developers' Conference Nordic 2015!</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_m_going_to_the_Open_Source_Developers__Conference_Nordic_2015_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 7 Apr 2015 10:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I am happy to let you all know that I'm going to the <a
+href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/">Open Source Developers'
+Conference Nordic 2015</a>!</p>
+
+<p>It take place Friday 8th to Sunday 10th of May in Oslo next to
+where I work, and I finally got around to submitting
+<a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talk/6192">a talk proposal for
+it</a> (dead link for most people until the talk is accepted). As
+part of my involvement with the
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group member
+association</a> I have been slightly involved in the planning of this
+conference for a while now, with a focus on organising a Civic Hacking
+Hackathon with our friends
+over at <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a> and
+<a href="http://www.holderdeord.no/">Holder de ord</a>. This part is
+named the 'My Society' track in the program. There is still space for
+more talks and participants. I hope to see you there.</p>
+
+<p>Check out <a href="http://act.osdc.no/osdc2015no/talks">the talks
+submitted and accepted so far</a>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Proof reading the Norwegian translation of Free Culture by Lessig</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Proof_reading_the_Norwegian_translation_of_Free_Culture_by_Lessig.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 4 Apr 2015 09:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>During eastern I had some time to continue working on the Norwegian
+<a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
+<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig.
+At the moment I am proof reading the finished text, looking for typos,
+inconsistent wordings and sentences that do not flow as they should.
+I'm more than two thirds done with the text, and welcome others to
+check the text up to chapter 13. The current status is available on the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
+project pages. You can also check out the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
+and HTML version available in the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
+directory</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
+you find any.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Frikanalen, Norwegian TV channel for technical topics</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Frikanalen__Norwegian_TV_channel_for_technical_topics.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 9 Mar 2015 11:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a>,
+where I am a member, and where people interested in free software,
+open standards and UNIX like operating systems like Linux and the BSDs
+come together, record our monthly technical presentations on video.
+The purpose is to document the talks and spread them to a wider
+audience. For this, the the Norwegian nationwide open channel
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is a useful venue.
+Since a few days ago, when I figured out the
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.no/api/">REST API</a> to program the
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/guide/">channel time schedule</a>,
+the channel has been filled with NUUG talks, related recordings and
+some Creative Commons licensed TED talks (from archive.org). I fill
+all "leftover bits" on the channel with content from NUUG, which at
+the moment is almost 17 of 24 hours every day.</p>
+
+<p>The list of NUUG videos
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/organization/82">uploaded so far</a>
+include things like a
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/625090">one hour talk by John
+Perry Barlow when he visited Oslo</a>, a presentation of
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624275">Haiku, the BeOS
+re-implementation</a>, the
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/624493">history of FiksGataMi,
+the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet</a>, the good old
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/video/623566">Warriors of the net
+video</A> and many others.</p>
+
+<p>We have a large backlog of NUUG talks not yet uploaded to
+Frikanalen, and plan to upload every useful bit to the channel to
+spread the word there. I also hope to find useful recordings from the
+Chaos Computer Club and Debian conferences and spread them on the
+channel as well. But this require locating the videos and their meta
+information (title, description, license, etc), and preparing the
+recordings for broadcast, and I have not yet had the spare time to
+focus on this. Perhaps you want to help. Please join us on IRC,
+<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/%23nuug">#nuug on irc.freenode.net</a>
+if you want to help make this happen.</p>
+
+<p>But as I said, already the channel is already almost exclusively
+filled with technical topics, and if you want to learn something new
+today, check out the <a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">Ogg Theora
+web stream</a> or use one of the other ways to get access to the
+channel. Unfortunately the Ogg Theora recoding for distribution still
+do not properly sync the video and sound. It is generated by recoding
+a internal MPEG transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to
+Ogg Theora / Vorbis, and we have not been able to find a way that
+produces acceptable quality. Help needed, please get in touch if you
+know how to fix it using free software.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>The Citizenfour documentary on the Snowden confirmations to Norway</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Citizenfour_documentary_on_the_Snowden_confirmations_to_Norway.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2015 22:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Today I was happy to learn that the documentary
+<a href="https://citizenfourfilm.com/">Citizenfour</a> by
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Poitras">Laura Poitras</a>
+finally will show up in Norway. According to the magazine
+<a href="http://montages.no/">Montages</a>, a deal has finally been
+made for
+<a href="http://montages.no/nyheter/snowden-dokumentaren-citizenfour-far-norsk-kinodistribusjon/">Cinema
+distribution in Norway</a> and the movie will have its premiere soon.
+This is great news. As part of my involvement with
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the Norwegian Unix User Group</a>, me and
+a friend have
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_til_Norge_.shtml">tried
+to get the movie to Norway</a> ourselves, but obviously
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Dokumentar_om_Snowdenbekreftelsene_endelig_til_Norge_.shtml">we
+were too late</a> and Tor Fosse beat us to it. I am happy he did, as
+the movie will make its way to the public and we do not have to make
+it happen ourselves.
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM">The trailer</a>
+can be seen on youtube, if you are curious what kind of film this
+is.</p>
+
+<p>The whistle blower Edward Snowden really deserve political asylum
+here in Norway, but I am afraid he would not be safe.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>The Norwegian open channel Frikanalen - 24x7 on the Internet</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_Norwegian_open_channel_Frikanalen___24x7_on_the_Internet.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2015 09:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The Norwegian nationwide open channel
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> is still going
+strong. It allow everyone to send the video they want on national
+television. It is a TV station administrated completely using a web
+browser, running only <ahref="https://github.com/Frikanalen">Free
+Software</a>, providing <ahref="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api">a REST
+api</a> for administrators and members, and with distribution on the
+national DVB-T distribution network RiksTV. But only between 12:00
+and 17:30 Norwegian time. This has finally changed, after many years
+with limited distribution. A few weeks ago, we set up a Ogg Theora
+stream via icecast to allow everyone with Internet access to check out
+the channel the rest of the day. This is presented on
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.tv/se">the Frikanalen web site now</a>. And
+since a few days ago, the channel is also available
+via <a href="https://www.uninett.no/iptv-tilgang">multicast on
+UNINETT</a>, available for those using IPTV TVs and set-top boxes in
+the Norwegian National Research and Education network.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to see what is on the channel, point your media player
+to one of these sources. The first should work with most players and
+browsers, while as far as I know, the multicast UDP stream only work
+with VLC.</p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li><a href="http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv">http://video.nuug.no/frikanalen.ogv</a></li>
+ <li>udp://@224.17.43.129:1234</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>The Ogg Theora / icecast stream is not working well, as the video
+and audio is slightly out of sync. We have not been able to figure
+out how to fix it. It is generated by recoding a internal MPEG
+transport stream with MPEG4 coded video (ie H.264) to Ogg Theora /
+Vorbis, and the result is less then stellar. If you have ideas how to
+fix it, please let us know on frikanalen (at) nuug.no. We currently
+use this with ffmpeg2theora 0.29:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+./ffmpeg2theora.linux &lt;OBE_gemini_URL.ts&gt; -F 25 -x 720 -y 405 \
+ --deinterlace --inputfps 25 -c 1 -H 48000 --keyint 8 --buf-delay 100 \
+ --nosync -V 700 -o - | oggfwd video.nuug.no 8000 &lt;pw&gt; /frikanalen.ogv
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>If you get the multicast UDP stream working, please let me know, as
+I am curious how far the multicast stream reach. It do not make it to
+my home network, nor any other commercially available network in
+Norway that I am aware of.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Nude body scanner now present on Norwegian airport</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nude_body_scanner_now_present_on_Norwegian_airport.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2015 15:20:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Aftenposten, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, today report
+that
+<a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/reise/Slik-skannes-kroppen-din-i-fremtidens-sikkerhetskontroll-490666_1.snd">three
+of the nude body scanners now is put to use at Gardermoen</a>, the
+main airport in Norway. This way the travelers can have their body
+photographed without cloths when visiting Norway. Of course this
+horrible news is presented with a positive spin, stating that "now
+travelers can move past the security check point faster and more
+efficiently", but fail to mention that the machines in question take
+pictures of their nude bodies and store them internally in the
+computer, while only presenting sketch figure of the body to the
+public. The article is written in a way that leave the impression
+that the new machines do not take these nude pictures and only create
+the sketch figures. In reality the same nude pictures are still
+taken, but not presented to everyone. They are still available for
+the owners of the system and the people doing maintenance of the
+scanners, as long as they are taken and stored.</p>
+
+<p>Wikipedia have a more on
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner">Full body
+scanners</a>, including example images and a summary of the
+controversy about these scanners.</p>
+
+<p>Personally I will decline to use these machines, as I believe strip
+searches of my body is a very intrusive attack on my privacy, and not
+something everyone should have to accept to travel.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Nagios module to check if the Frikanalen video stream is working</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Nagios_module_to_check_if_the_Frikanalen_video_stream_is_working.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 8 Feb 2015 13:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>When running a TV station with both broadcast and web stream
+distribution, it is useful to know that the stream is working. As I
+am involved in the Norwegian open channel
+<a href="http://www.frikanalen.no/">Frikanalen</a> as part of my
+activity in the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG member
+organisation</a>, I wrote a script to use mplayer to connect to a
+video stream, pick two images 35 seconds apart and compare them. If
+the images are missing or identical, something is probably wrong with
+the stream and an alarm should be triggered. The script is written as
+a Nagios plugin, allowing us to use Nagios to run the check regularly
+and sound the alarm when something is wrong. It is able to detect
+both a hanging and a broken video stream.</p>
+
+<p>I just uploaded the code for the script into the
+<a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen/blob/master/nagios-plugin/check_video_stream_images">Frikanalen
+git repository</a> on github. If you run a TV station with web
+streaming, perhaps you can find it useful too.</p>
+
+<p>Last year, the Frikanalen public TV station transformed into using
+only Linux based free software to administrate, schedule and
+distribute the TV content. The
+<a href="https://github.com/Frikanalen">source code for the entire TV
+station</a> is available from the Github project page. Everyone can
+use it to send their content on national TV, and we provide both a web
+GUI and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/api/">a web API</a> to
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/login/?next=/members/video/">add</a>
+and <a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/members/plan/">schedule
+content</a>. And thanks to last weeks developer gathering and
+following activity, we now have the schedule
+<a href="http://beta.frikanalen.tv/xmltv/2015/01/01">available as
+XMLTV</a> too. Still a lot of work left to do, especially with the
+process to add videos and with the scheduling, so your contribution is
+most welcome. Perhaps you want to set up your own TV station?</p>
+
+<p>Update 2015-02-25: Got a tip from Uninett about their
+<a href="https://scm.uninett.no/maalepaaler/qstream/">qstream
+monitoring system</a>, which gather connection time, jitter, packet
+loss and burst bandwidth usage. It look useful to check if UDP
+streams are working as they should.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Norwegian Bokmål subtitles for the FSF video User Liberation</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Norwegian_Bokm_l_subtitles_for_the_FSF_video_User_Liberation.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2015 21:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>A few days ago, the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software
+Foundation</a> announced a new video
+<a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">explaining
+Free software</a> in simple terms. The video named User Liberation is
+3 minutes long, and I recommend showing it to everyone you know as a
+way to explain what Free Software is all about. Unfortunately several
+of the people I know do not understand English and Spanish, so it did
+not make sense to show it to them.</p>
+
+<p>But today I was told that
+<a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video">English
+subtitles were available</a> and set out to provide Norwegian Bokmål
+subtitles based on these. The result has been sent to FSF and made
+available in
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/fsf-video-user-liberation-subtitles">a
+git repository</a> provided by Github. Please let me know if you find
+errors or have improvements to the subtitles.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2015-02-03: Since I publised this post, FSF created a
+Libreplanet
+<a href="http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/User_Liberation_Video_Translation">project
+to track subtitles</A> for the video.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Updated version of the Norwegian web service FiksGataMi</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Updated_version_of_the_Norwegian_web_service_FiksGataMi.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2014 17:55:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I am very happy that we in the
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User group (NUUG)</a>,
+spearheaded by Marius Halden from NUUG and Matthew Somerville from
+<a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>, finally managed to
+upgrade the code base for the Norwegian version of
+<a href="http://fixmystreet.org/">FixMyStreet</a>. This
+was the first major update since 2011. The refurbished
+<a href="http://www.fiksgatami.no/">FiksGataMi</a> is already live, and
+seem to hold up the pressure. The
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/Pressemelding__FiksGataMi_i_oppdatert_og_mobilvennlig_klesdrakt.shtml">press
+release and announcement</a> went out this morning.</p>
+
+<p>FixMyStreet is a web platform for allowing the citizens to easily
+report problems with public infrastructure to the responsible
+authorities. Think of it as a shared mail client with map support,
+allowing everyone to see what already was reported and comment on the
+reports in public.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Of course USA loses in cyber war - NSA and friends made sure it would happen</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Of_course_USA_loses_in_cyber_war___NSA_and_friends_made_sure_it_would_happen.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 13:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>So, Sony caved in
+(<a href="https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/545338568512917504">according
+to Rob Lowe</a>) and demonstrated that America lost its first cyberwar
+(<a href="https://twitter.com/newtgingrich/status/545339074975109122">according
+to Newt Gingrich</a>). It should not surprise anyone, after the
+whistle blower Edward Snowden documented that the government of USA
+and their allies for many years have done their best to make sure the
+technology used by its citizens is filled with security holes allowing
+the secret services to spy on its own population. No one in their
+right minds could believe that the ability to snoop on the people all
+over the globe could only be used by the personnel authorized to do so
+by the president of the United States of America. If the capabilities
+are there, they will be used by friend and foe alike, and now they are
+being used to bring Sony on its knees.</p>
+
+<p>I doubt it will a lesson learned, and expect USA to lose its next
+cyber war too, given how eager the western intelligence communities
+(and probably the non-western too, but it is less in the news) seem to
+be to continue its current dragnet surveillance practice.</p>
+
+<p>There is a reason why China and others are trying to move away from
+Windows to Linux and other alternatives, and it is not to avoid
+sending its hard earned dollars to Cayman Islands (or whatever
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven">tax haven</a>
+Microsoft is using these days to collect the majority of its
+income. :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>How to stay with sysvinit in Debian Jessie</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_stay_with_sysvinit_in_Debian_Jessie.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 22 Nov 2014 01:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>By now, it is well known that Debian Jessie will not be using
+sysvinit as its boot system by default. But how can one keep using
+sysvinit in Jessie? It is fairly easy, and here are a few recipes,
+courtesy of
+<a href="http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201410/2014102101-avoiding-systemd.html">Erich
+Schubert</a> and
+<a href="http://smcv.pseudorandom.co.uk/2014/still_universal/">Simon
+McVittie</a>.
+
+<p>If you already are using Wheezy and want to upgrade to Jessie and
+keep sysvinit as your boot system, create a file
+<tt>/etc/apt/preferences.d/use-sysvinit</tt> with this content before
+you upgrade:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+Package: systemd-sysv
+Pin: release o=Debian
+Pin-Priority: -1
+</pre></blockquote><p>
+
+<p>This file content will tell apt and aptitude to not consider
+installing systemd-sysv as part of any installation and upgrade
+solution when resolving dependencies, and thus tell it to avoid
+systemd as a default boot system. The end result should be that the
+upgraded system keep using sysvinit.</p>
+
+<p>If you are installing Jessie for the first time, there is no way to
+get sysvinit installed by default (debootstrap used by
+debian-installer have no option for this), but one can tell the
+installer to switch to sysvinit before the first boot. Either by
+using a kernel argument to the installer, or by adding a line to the
+preseed file used. First, the kernel command line argument:
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+preseed/late_command="in-target apt-get install --purge -y sysvinit-core"
+</pre></blockquote><p>
+
+<p>Next, the line to use in a preseed file:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+d-i preseed/late_command string in-target apt-get install -y sysvinit-core
+</pre></blockquote><p>
+
+<p>One can of course also do this after the first boot by installing
+the sysvinit-core package.</p>
+
+<p>I recommend only using sysvinit if you really need it, as the
+sysvinit boot sequence in Debian have several hardware specific bugs
+on Linux caused by the fact that it is unpredictable when hardware
+devices show up during boot. But on the other hand, the new default
+boot system still have a few rough edges I hope will be fixed before
+Jessie is released.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2014-11-26: Inspired by
+<ahref="https://www.mirbsd.org/permalinks/wlog-10-tg_e20141125-tg.htm#e20141125-tg_wlog-10-tg">a
+blog post by Torsten Glaser</a>, added --purge to the preseed
+line.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>A Debian package for SMTP via Tor (aka SMTorP) using exim4</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_Debian_package_for_SMTP_via_Tor__aka_SMTorP__using_exim4.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The right to communicate with your friends and family in private,
+without anyone snooping, is a right every citicen have in a liberal
+democracy. But this right is under serious attack these days.</p>
+
+<p>A while back it occurred to me that one way to make the dragnet
+surveillance conducted by NSA, GCHQ, FRA and others (and confirmed by
+the whisleblower Snowden) more expensive for Internet email,
+is to deliver all email using SMTP via Tor. Such SMTP option would be
+a nice addition to the FreedomBox project if we could send email
+between FreedomBox machines without leaking metadata about the emails
+to the people peeking on the wire. I
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2014-October/006493.html">proposed
+this on the FreedomBox project mailing list in October</a> and got a
+lot of useful feedback and suggestions. It also became obvious to me
+that this was not a novel idea, as the same idea was tested and
+documented by Johannes Berg as early as 2006, and both
+<a href="https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile/wiki/SMTorP">the
+Mailpile</a> and <a href="http://dee.su/cables">the Cables</a> systems
+propose a similar method / protocol to pass emails between users.</p>
+
+<p>To implement such system one need to set up a Tor hidden service
+providing the SMTP protocol on port 25, and use email addresses
+looking like username@hidden-service-name.onion. With such addresses
+the connections to port 25 on hidden-service-name.onion using Tor will
+go to the correct SMTP server. To do this, one need to configure the
+Tor daemon to provide the hidden service and the mail server to accept
+emails for this .onion domain. To learn more about Exim configuration
+in Debian and test the design provided by Johannes Berg in his FAQ, I
+set out yesterday to create a Debian package for making it trivial to
+set up such SMTP over Tor service based on Debian. Getting it to work
+were fairly easy, and
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/exim4-smtorp">the
+source code for the Debian package</a> is available from github. I
+plan to move it into Debian if further testing prove this to be a
+useful approach.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to test this, set up a blank Debian machine without any
+mail system installed (or run <tt>apt-get purge exim4-config</tt> to
+get rid of exim4). Install tor, clone the git repository mentioned
+above, build the deb and install it on the machine. Next, run
+<tt>/usr/lib/exim4-smtorp/setup-exim-hidden-service</tt> and follow
+the instructions to get the service up and running. Restart tor and
+exim when it is done, and test mail delivery using swaks like
+this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+torsocks swaks --server dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion \
+ --to fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>This will test the SMTP delivery using tor. Replace the email
+address with your own address to test your server. :)</p>
+
+<p>The setup procedure is still to complex, and I hope it can be made
+easier and more automatic. Especially the tor setup need more work.
+Also, the package include a tor-smtp tool written in C, but its task
+should probably be rewritten in some script language to make the deb
+architecture independent. It would probably also make the code easier
+to review. The tor-smtp tool currently need to listen on a socket for
+exim to talk to it and is started using xinetd. It would be better if
+no daemon and no socket is needed. I suspect it is possible to get
+exim to run a command line tool for delivery instead of talking to a
+socket, and hope to figure out how in a future version of this
+system.</p>
+
+<p>Until I wipe my test machine, I can be reached using the
+<tt>fbx@dutlqrrmjhtfa3vp.onion</tt> mail address, deliverable over
+SMTorP. :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>First Jessie based Debian Edu released (alpha0)</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_Jessie_based_Debian_Edu_released__alpha0_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2014 20:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
+sent out
+<a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce/2014/10/msg00000.html">this
+announcement</a>:</p>
+
+<pre>
+The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
+Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
+
+Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
+various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
+and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
+Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
+roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
+hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
+pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
+
+For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
+installation instructions are available, including detailed
+instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
+setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
+for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
+of at least 5 characters!
+
+ [1] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie</a> &gt;
+
+Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
+tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
+reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
+the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
+Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
+
+Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
+mostly in Germany and Norway.
+
+About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
+===============================
+
+Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
+on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
+configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
+server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
+waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
+Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
+initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
+machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
+provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
+centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
+services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
+packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
+schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
+environment.
+
+ [2] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">http://www.skolelinux.org/</a> &gt;
+ [3] &lt;URL: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html</a> &gt;
+
+Full release notes and manual
+=============================
+
+Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
+and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
+list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
+the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
+available, see the manual translation overview[5].
+
+ [4] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features</a> &gt;
+ [5] &lt;URL: <a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/</a> &gt;
+
+Where to get it
+---------------
+
+To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
+
+ * <a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
+ * <a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso">http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso</a>
+ * rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
+
+The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
+
+New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
+===============================================================================
+
+
+Installation changes
+--------------------
+
+ * PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
+
+Software updates
+----------------
+
+Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
+
+ * Linux kernel 3.16.x
+ * Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
+ LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
+ choose one of the others see manual.)
+ * the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
+ * !LibreOffice 4.3.3
+ * GOsa 2.7.4
+ * LTSP 5.5.4
+ * CUPS print system 1.7.5
+ * new boot framework: systemd
+ * Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
+ * Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
+ * Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
+ * Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
+ * golearn 0.9
+ * tuxpaint 0.9.22
+ * New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
+ * Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
+ installation.
+ * More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
+ notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
+
+ [6] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes</a> &gt;
+ [7] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual">http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual</a> &gt;
+
+Fixed bugs
+----------
+
+ * Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
+ DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
+ information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
+ * and many others.
+
+Documentation and translation updates
+-------------------------------------
+
+ * The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
+ Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
+ Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
+
+Other changes
+-------------
+
+ * Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
+ server takes more time.
+ * To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
+ doesn't work.
+
+Regressions / known problems
+----------------------------
+
+ * Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
+ exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
+ and Debian bug #762103).
+ * Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
+ #764594). The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
+ * PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
+ work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
+ Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
+
+See the status page[8] for the complete list.
+
+ [8] &lt;URL: <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie</a> &gt;
+
+How to report bugs
+------------------
+
+&lt;URL: <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs">http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs</a> &gt;
+
+About Debian
+============
+
+The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
+free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
+the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
+volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
+maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
+huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
+operating system.
+
+Contact Information
+For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
+mail to press@debian.org.
+
+ [9] &lt;URL: <a href="http://www.debian.org/">http://www.debian.org/</a> &gt;
+</pre>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>I spent last weekend recording MakerCon Nordic</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/I_spent_last_weekend_recording_MakerCon_Nordic.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2014 23:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I spent last weekend at <a href="http://www.makercon.no/">Makercon
+Nordic</a>, a great conference and workshop for makers in Norway and
+the surrounding countries. I had volunteered on behalf of the
+Norwegian Unix Users Group (NUUG) to video record the talks, and we
+had a great and exhausting time recording the entire day, two days in
+a row. There were only two of us, Hans-Petter and me, and we used the
+regular video equipment for NUUG, with a
+<a href="http://dvswitch.alioth.debian.org/wiki/">dvswitch</a>, a
+camera and a VGA to DV convert box, and mixed video and slides
+live.</p>
+
+<p>Hans-Petter did the post-processing, consisting of uploading the
+around 180 GiB of raw video to Youtube, and the result is
+<a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/MakerConNordic/">now becoming
+public</a> on the MakerConNordic account. The videos have the license
+NUUG always use on our recordings, which is
+<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/no/">Creative
+Commons Navngivelse-Del på samme vilkår 3.0 Norge</a>. Many great
+talks available. Check it out! :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>listadmin, the quick way to moderate mailman lists - nice free software</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/listadmin__the_quick_way_to_moderate_mailman_lists___nice_free_software.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2014 20:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
+alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
+operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
+and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
+and various options for each email address. This take a while for
+every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
+job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative,
+<a href="http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin">the
+listadmin program</a>. It allow you to check lists for new messages
+to moderate in a fraction of a second. Here is a test run on two
+lists I recently took over:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+% time listadmin xiph
+fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
+fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
+
+real 0m1.709s
+user 0m0.232s
+sys 0m0.012s
+%
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
+there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I
+currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
+minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
+ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me
+less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
+program.</p>
+
+<p>If you install
+<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/listadmin">the listadmin
+package</a> from Debian and create a file <tt>~/.listadmin.ini</tt>
+with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+username username@example.org
+spamlevel 23
+default discard
+discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
+
+password secret
+adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
+mailman-list@lists.example.com
+
+password hidden
+other-list@otherserver.example.org
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to
+learn the details.</p>
+
+<p>If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
+the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
+generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
+variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
+can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
+initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only
+lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it
+quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
+email.</p>
+
+<p>Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
+mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
+process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
+time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free
+software.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
+configuration example. Also, I've been told that the
+PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone. Not
+sure why.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Debian Jessie, PXE and automatic firmware installation</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Jessie__PXE_and_automatic_firmware_installation.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2014 14:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>When PXE installing laptops with Debian, I often run into the
+problem that the WiFi card require some firmware to work properly.
+And it has been a pain to fix this using preseeding in Debian.
+Normally something more is needed. But thanks to
+<a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/i/isenkram.html">my isenkram
+package</a> and its recent tasksel extension, it has now become easy
+to do this using simple preseeding.</p>
+
+<p>The isenkram-cli package provide tasksel tasks which will install
+firmware for the hardware found in the machine (actually, requested by
+the kernel modules for the hardware). (It can also install user space
+programs supporting the hardware detected, but that is not the focus
+of this story.)</p>
+
+<p>To get this working in the default installation, two preeseding
+values are needed. First, the isenkram-cli package must be installed
+into the target chroot (aka the hard drive) before tasksel is executed
+in the pkgsel step of the debian-installer system. This is done by
+preseeding the base-installer/includes debconf value to include the
+isenkram-cli package. The package name is next passed to debootstrap
+for installation. With the isenkram-cli package in place, tasksel
+will automatically use the isenkram tasks to detect hardware specific
+packages for the machine being installed and install them, because
+isenkram-cli contain tasksel tasks.</p>
+
+<p>Second, one need to enable the non-free APT repository, because
+most firmware unfortunately is non-free. This is done by preseeding
+the apt-mirror-setup step. This is unfortunate, but for a lot of
+hardware it is the only option in Debian.</p>
+
+<p>The end result is two lines needed in your preseeding file to get
+firmware installed automatically by the installer:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+base-installer base-installer/includes string isenkram-cli
+apt-mirror-setup apt-setup/non-free boolean true
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The current version of isenkram-cli in testing/jessie will install
+both firmware and user space packages when using this method. It also
+do not work well, so use version 0.15 or later. Installing both
+firmware and user space packages might give you a bit more than you
+want, so I decided to split the tasksel task in two, one for firmware
+and one for user space programs. The firmware task is enabled by
+default, while the one for user space programs is not. This split is
+implemented in the package currently in unstable.</p>
+
+<p>If you decide to give this a go, please let me know (via email) how
+this recipe work for you. :)</p>
+
+<p>So, I bet you are wondering, how can this work. First and
+foremost, it work because tasksel is modular, and driven by whatever
+files it find in /usr/lib/tasksel/ and /usr/share/tasksel/. So the
+isenkram-cli package place two files for tasksel to find. First there
+is the task description file (/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc):</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+Task: isenkram-packages
+Section: hardware
+Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
+ Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
+ proposed.
+Test-new-install: show show
+Relevance: 8
+Packages: for-current-hardware
+
+Task: isenkram-firmware
+Section: hardware
+Description: Hardware specific firmware packages (autodetected by isenkram)
+ Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific firmware
+ packages are proposed.
+Test-new-install: mark show
+Relevance: 8
+Packages: for-current-hardware-firmware
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The key parts are Test-new-install which indicate how the task
+should be handled and the Packages line referencing to a script in
+/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/. The scripts use other scripts to get a
+list of packages to install. The for-current-hardware-firmware script
+look like this to list relevant firmware for the machine:
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+#
+PATH=/usr/sbin:$PATH
+export PATH
+isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>With those two pieces in place, the firmware is installed by
+tasksel during the normal d-i run. :)</p>
+
+<p>If you want to test what tasksel will install when isenkram-cli is
+installed, run <tt>DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical tasksel --test
+--new-install</tt> to get the list of packages that tasksel would
+install.</p>
+
+<p><a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/">Debian Edu</a> will be
+pilots in testing this feature, as isenkram is used there now to
+install firmware, replacing the earlier scripts.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Ubuntu used to show the bread prizes at ICA Storo</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ubuntu_used_to_show_the_bread_prizes_at_ICA_Storo.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 4 Oct 2014 15:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Today I came across an unexpected Ubuntu boot screen. Above the
+bread shelf on the ICA shop at Storo in Oslo, the grub menu of Ubuntu
+with Linux kernel 3.2.0-23 (ie probably version 12.04 LTS) was stuck
+on a screen normally showing the bread types and prizes:</p>
+
+<p align="center"><img width="70%" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2014-10-04-ubuntu-ica-storo-crop.jpeg"></p>
+
+<p>If it had booted as it was supposed to, I would never had known
+about this hidden Linux installation. It is interesting what
+<a href="http://revealingerrors.com/">errors can reveal</a>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>New lsdvd release version 0.17 is ready</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_lsdvd_release_version_0_17_is_ready.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 4 Oct 2014 08:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd project</a>
+got a new set of developers a few weeks ago, after the original
+developer decided to step down and pass the project to fresh blood.
+This project is now maintained by Petter Reinholdtsen and Steve
+Dibb.</p>
+
+<p>I just wrapped up
+<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/message/32896061/">a
+new lsdvd release</a>, available in git or from
+<a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/lsdvd/files/lsdvd/">the
+download page</a>. This is the changelog dated 2014-10-03 for version
+0.17.</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>Ignore 'phantom' audio, subtitle tracks</li>
+ <li>Check for garbage in the program chains, which indicate that a track is
+ non-existant, to work around additional copy protection</li>
+ <li>Fix displaying content type for audio tracks, subtitles</li>
+ <li>Fix pallete display of first entry</li>
+ <li>Fix include orders</li>
+ <li>Ignore read errors in titles that would not be displayed anyway</li>
+ <li>Fix the chapter count</li>
+ <li>Make sure the array size and the array limit used when initialising
+ the palette size is the same.</li>
+ <li>Fix array printing.</li>
+ <li>Correct subsecond calculations.</li>
+ <li>Add sector information to the output format.</li>
+ <li>Clean up code to be closer to ANSI C and compile without warnings
+ with more GCC compiler warnings.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>This change bring together patches for lsdvd in use in various
+Linux and Unix distributions, as well as patches submitted to the
+project the last nine years. Please check it out. :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>How to test Debian Edu Jessie despite some fatal problems with the installer</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_test_Debian_Edu_Jessie_despite_some_fatal_problems_with_the_installer.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 12:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
+project</a> provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
+powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
+web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
+boot of both clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
+Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
+to mention here). We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
+the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
+freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
+future. The
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie">current
+status</a> can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
+work left. Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
+but it is possible to work around these to get anyway. Here is a
+recipe on how to get the installation limping along.</p>
+
+<p>First, download the test ISO via
+<a href="ftp://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">ftp</a>,
+<a href="http://ftp.skolelinux.no/cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso">http</a>
+or rsync (use
+ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
+The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
+12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
+install with some tweaking.</p>
+
+<p>When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
+(use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
+optimization. Return to the installation, select the profile you want
+and continue. Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
+due to a known bug in eatmydata.</p>
+
+<p>When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
+this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be. All my
+test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
+your need.</p>
+
+<p>If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
+root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
+education-desktop-XXX metapackage. XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
+or mate. If you want several desktop options, install more than one
+metapackage. Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
+graphical login screen. This workaround should no longer be needed
+once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
+days.</p>
+
+<p>I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
+tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
+update the debian-cd git repository. The eatmydata, grub and desktop
+issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
+on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again. Well the
+eatmydata optimization is really just disabled. The proper fix
+require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
+provided in bug <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">#702711</a>.
+The rest have proper fixes in unstable.</p>
+
+<p>I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
+quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
+installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Suddenly I am the new upstream of the lsdvd command line tool</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Suddenly_I_am_the_new_upstream_of_the_lsdvd_command_line_tool.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2014 11:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I use the <a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/">lsdvd tool</a>
+to handle my fairly large DVD collection. It is a nice command line
+tool to get details about a DVD, like title, tracks, track length,
+etc, in XML, Perl or human readable format. But lsdvd have not seen
+any new development since 2006 and had a few irritating bugs affecting
+its use with some DVDs. Upstream seemed to be dead, and in January I
+sent a small probe asking for a version control repository for the
+project, without any reply. But I use it regularly and would like to
+get <a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/lsdvd">an updated version
+into Debian</a>. So two weeks ago I tried harder to get in touch with
+the project admin, and after getting a reply from him explaining that
+he was no longer interested in the project, I asked if I could take
+over. And yesterday, I became project admin.</p>
+
+<p>I've been in touch with a Gentoo developer and the Debian
+maintainer interested in joining forces to maintain the upstream
+project, and I hope we can get a new release out fairly quickly,
+collecting the patches spread around on the internet into on place.
+I've added the relevant Debian patches to the freshly created git
+repository, and expect the Gentoo patches to make it too. If you got
+a DVD collection and care about command line tools, check out
+<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/git/ci/master/tree/">the git source</a> and join
+<a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/lsdvd/mailman/">the project mailing
+list</a>. :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Speeding up the Debian installer using eatmydata and dpkg-divert</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Speeding_up_the_Debian_installer_using_eatmydata_and_dpkg_divert.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2014 14:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> installer could be
+a lot quicker. When we install more than 2000 packages in
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux / Debian Edu</a> using
+tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
+A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/613428">bug #613428</a> about too
+much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
+responsible for unpacking the binary packages. Other parts (like code
+executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
+installation. All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
+me. If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
+to salvage the half installed system. So the failure sync-ing is
+supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
+relevant while the installer is running.</p>
+
+<p>A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
+system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
+change the code in several packages. The idea is not new, but I have
+not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before. It
+depend on the small and clever package
+<a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/eatmydata">eatmydata</a>, which
+uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
+disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
+dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly. Instead of
+modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
+packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
+it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
+them with a simple shell wrapper calling
+"eatmydata&nbsp;$program&nbsp;$@", to get the same effect.
+Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
+implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.</p>
+
+<p>The effect was stunning. In my first test it reduced the running
+time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
+minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
+Latitude D505 machine. I am not quite sure what the optimised time
+would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
+priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
+installation. As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
+along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
+installation. I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
+and got these results. The time measured is the time stamp in
+/var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
+"pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
+yourself. In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
+timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
+dialog.</p>
+
+<p><table>
+
+<tr>
+<th>Machine/setup</th>
+<th>Original tasksel</th>
+<th>Optimised tasksel</th>
+<th>Reduction</th>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE</td>
+<td>64 min (07:46-08:50)</td>
+<td><44 min (11:27-12:11)</td>
+<td>>20 min 18%</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE</td>
+<td>57 min (08:48-09:45)</td>
+<td>34 min (07:43-08:17)</td>
+<td>23 min 40%</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Latitude D505 Minimal</td>
+<td>22 min (10:37-10:59)</td>
+<td>11 min (11:16-11:27)</td>
+<td>11 min 50%</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Thinkpad X200 Minimal</td>
+<td>6 min (08:19-08:25)</td>
+<td>4 min (08:04-08:08)</td>
+<td>2 min 33%</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td>Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE</td>
+<td>19 min (09:21-09:40)</td>
+<td>15 min (10:25-10:40)</td>
+<td>4 min 21%</td>
+</tr>
+
+</table></p>
+
+<p>The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
+time is spent downloading packages. The connection to the Internet
+was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
+significant factor in the measurement. Download typically took a few
+seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
+installed.</p>
+
+<p>The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
+<a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">Debian
+Installer</a>, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
+finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
+installation. I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
+post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
+eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
+Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO. The
+negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
+optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i. If the code is
+moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
+for the entire installation.</p>
+
+<p>I've implemented this in the
+<a href="https://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-install">debian-edu-install</a>
+git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
+Debian Edu installation. If you want to test this yourself, you can
+create two files in the installer (or in an udeb). One shell script
+need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+set -e
+. /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
+info() {
+ logger -t my-pkgsel "info: $*"
+}
+error() {
+ logger -t my-pkgsel "error: $*"
+}
+override_install() {
+ apt-install eatmydata || true
+ if [ -x /target/usr/bin/eatmydata ] ; then
+ for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
+ file=/usr/bin/$bin
+ # Test that the file exist and have not been diverted already.
+ if [ -f /target$file ] ; then
+ info "diverting $file using eatmydata"
+ printf "#!/bin/sh\neatmydata $bin.distrib \"\$@\"\n" \
+ > /target$file.edu
+ chmod 755 /target$file.edu
+ in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
+ --rename --quiet --add $file
+ ln -sf ./$bin.edu /target$file
+ else
+ error "unable to divert $file, as it is missing."
+ fi
+ done
+ else
+ error "unable to find /usr/bin/eatmydata after installing the eatmydata pacage"
+ fi
+}
+
+override_install
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>To clean up, another shell script should go into
+/usr/lib/finish-install.d/ with code like this:
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+#! /bin/sh -e
+. /usr/share/debconf/confmodule
+error() {
+ logger -t my-finish-install "error: $@"
+}
+remove_install_override() {
+ for bin in dpkg apt-get aptitude tasksel ; do
+ file=/usr/bin/$bin
+ if [ -x /target$file.edu ] ; then
+ rm /target$file
+ in-target dpkg-divert --package debian-edu-config \
+ --rename --quiet --remove $file
+ rm /target$file.edu
+ else
+ error "Missing divert for $file."
+ fi
+ done
+ sync # Flush file buffers before continuing
+}
+
+remove_install_override
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
+edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
+finish-install.d scripts.</p>
+
+<p>By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
+Debian installer too? I suspect it should, but am not sure the
+current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough. It also
+depend on the side effects of the change. I'm not aware of any, but I
+guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
+Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
+fsync() having effect? Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
+allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
+everyone.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
+will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/702711">bug #702711</a>. An updated
+eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
+the optimization work again. And I have discovered that the
+dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
+simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package. See
+tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/765738">bug #765738</a> in eatmydata only
+triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
+optimization again. If <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/768893">unblock
+request 768893</a> is accepted, it should be working again.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Good bye subkeys.pgp.net, welcome pool.sks-keyservers.net</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Good_bye_subkeys_pgp_net__welcome_pool_sks_keyservers_net.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 10 Sep 2014 13:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk with the
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">Norwegian Unix User Group</a> about
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20140909-sks-keyservers/">the
+OpenPGP keyserver pool sks-keyservers.net</a>, and was very happy to
+learn that there is a large set of publicly available key servers to
+use when looking for peoples public key. So far I have used
+subkeys.pgp.net, and some times wwwkeys.nl.pgp.net when the former
+were misbehaving, but those days are ended. The servers I have used
+up until yesterday have been slow and some times unavailable. I hope
+those problems are gone now.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the round robin DNS entry of the
+<a href="https://sks-keyservers.net/">sks-keyservers.net</a> service
+there is a pool of more than 100 keyservers which are checked every
+day to ensure they are well connected and up to date. It must be
+better than what I have used so far. :)</p>
+
+<p>Yesterdays speaker told me that the service is the default
+keyserver provided by the default configuration in GnuPG, but this do
+not seem to be used in Debian. Perhaps it should?</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, I've updated my ~/.gnupg/options file to now include this
+line:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>With GnuPG version 2 one can also locate the keyserver using SRV
+entries in DNS. Just for fun, I did just that at work, so now every
+user of GnuPG at the University of Oslo should find a OpenGPG
+keyserver automatically should their need it:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+% host -t srv _pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no
+_pgpkey-http._tcp.uio.no has SRV record 0 100 11371 pool.sks-keyservers.net.
+%
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Now if only
+<a href="http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/">the
+HKP lookup protocol</a> supported finding signature paths, I would be
+very happy. It can look up a given key or search for a user ID, but I
+normally do not want that, but to find a trust path from my key to
+another key. Given a user ID or key ID, I would like to find (and
+download) the keys representing a signature path from my key to the
+key in question, to be able to get a trust path between the two keys.
+This is as far as I can tell not possible today. Perhaps something
+for a future version of the protocol?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Do you need an agreement with MPEG-LA to publish and broadcast H.264 video in Norway?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Do_you_need_an_agreement_with_MPEG_LA_to_publish_and_broadcast_H_264_video_in_Norway_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 25 Aug 2014 22:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Two years later, I am still not sure if it is legal here in Norway
+to use or publish a video in H.264 or MPEG4 format edited by the
+commercially licensed video editors, without limiting the use to
+create "personal" or "non-commercial" videos or get a license
+agreement with <a href="http://www.mpegla.com">MPEG LA</a>. If one
+want to publish and broadcast video in a non-personal or commercial
+setting, it might be that those tools can not be used, or that video
+format can not be used, without breaking their copyright license. I
+am not sure.
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Trenger_en_avtale_med_MPEG_LA_for___publisere_og_kringkaste_H_264_video_.html">Back
+then</a>, I found that the copyright license terms for Adobe Premiere
+and Apple Final Cut Pro both specified that one could not use the
+program to produce anything else without a patent license from MPEG
+LA. The issue is not limited to those two products, though. Other
+much used products like those from Avid and Sorenson Media have terms
+of use are similar to those from Adobe and Apple. The complicating
+factor making me unsure if those terms have effect in Norway or not is
+that the patents in question are not valid in Norway, but copyright
+licenses are.</p>
+
+<p>These are the terms for Avid Artist Suite, according to their
+<a href="http://www.avid.com/US/about-avid/legal-notices/legal-enduserlicense2">published
+end user</a>
+<a href="http://www.avid.com/static/resources/common/documents/corporate/LICENSE.pdf">license
+text</a> (converted to lower case text for easier reading):</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+<p>18.2. MPEG-4. MPEG-4 technology may be included with the
+software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice: </p>
+
+<p>This product is licensed under the MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio
+license for the personal and non-commercial use of a consumer for (i)
+encoding video in compliance with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4
+video”) and/or (ii) decoding MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a
+consumer engaged in a personal and non-commercial activity and/or was
+obtained from a video provider licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4
+video. No license is granted or shall be implied for any other
+use. Additional information including that relating to promotional,
+internal and commercial uses and licensing may be obtained from MPEG
+LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com. This product is licensed under
+the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license for encoding in compliance
+with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except that an additional license
+and payment of royalties are necessary for encoding in connection with
+(i) data stored or replicated in physical media which is paid for on a
+title by title basis and/or (ii) data which is paid for on a title by
+title basis and is transmitted to an end user for permanent storage
+and/or use, such additional license may be obtained from MPEG LA,
+LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for additional details.</p>
+
+<p>18.3. H.264/AVC. H.264/AVC technology may be included with the
+software. MPEG LA, L.L.C. requires this notice:</p>
+
+<p>This product is licensed under the AVC patent portfolio license for
+the personal use of a consumer or other uses in which it does not
+receive remuneration to (i) encode video in compliance with the AVC
+standard (“AVC video”) and/or (ii) decode AVC video that was encoded
+by a consumer engaged in a personal activity and/or was obtained from
+a video provider licensed to provide AVC video. No license is granted
+or shall be implied for any other use. Additional information may be
+obtained from MPEG LA, L.L.C. See http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Note the requirement that the videos created can only be used for
+personal or non-commercial purposes.</p>
+
+<p>The Sorenson Media software have
+<a href="http://www.sorensonmedia.com/terms/">similar terms</a>:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+
+<p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4 Video
+Decoders and/or Encoders: Any such product is licensed under the
+MPEG-4 visual patent portfolio license for the personal and
+non-commercial use of a consumer for (i) encoding video in compliance
+with the MPEG-4 visual standard (“MPEG-4 video”) and/or (ii) decoding
+MPEG-4 video that was encoded by a consumer engaged in a personal and
+non-commercial activity and/or was obtained from a video provider
+licensed by MPEG LA to provide MPEG-4 video. No license is granted or
+shall be implied for any other use. Additional information including
+that relating to promotional, internal and commercial uses and
+licensing may be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See
+http://www.mpegla.com.</p>
+
+<p>With respect to a license from Sorenson pertaining to MPEG-4
+Consumer Recorded Data Encoder, MPEG-4 Systems Internet Data Encoder,
+MPEG-4 Mobile Data Encoder, and/or MPEG-4 Unique Use Encoder: Any such
+product is licensed under the MPEG-4 systems patent portfolio license
+for encoding in compliance with the MPEG-4 systems standard, except
+that an additional license and payment of royalties are necessary for
+encoding in connection with (i) data stored or replicated in physical
+media which is paid for on a title by title basis and/or (ii) data
+which is paid for on a title by title basis and is transmitted to an
+end user for permanent storage and/or use. Such additional license may
+be obtained from MPEG LA, LLC. See http://www.mpegla.com for
+additional details.</p>
+
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Some free software like
+<a href="https://handbrake.fr/">Handbrake</A> and
+<a href="http://ffmpeg.org/">FFMPEG</a> uses GPL/LGPL licenses and do
+not have any such terms included, so for those, there is no
+requirement to limit the use to personal and non-commercial.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Bernd Zeitzen</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Bernd_Zeitzen.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2014 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
+schools, <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux</a>, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
+involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
+from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
+the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
+employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I
+haven't worked for 30 years in this job. 30 years ago I started to
+support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
+administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
+Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
+Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
+works with Windows . :-(</p>
+
+<p>In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
+Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a
+Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
+children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
+psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
+work with the documentations of our patients.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
+his school (<a href="http://www.gymnasium-harsewinkel.de/">Gymnasium
+Harsewinkel</a>). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
+were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
+software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
+computer skills in optional lessons. I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
+with this job.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>The independence.</p>
+
+<p>First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
+software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
+included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.</p>
+
+<p>Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
+possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The
+servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
+working reliable. </p>
+
+<p>We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
+workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
+solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the
+terminal server. In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
+workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
+machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN
+router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
+dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Teachers and pupils are Windows users. &lt;Irony on&gt; And Linux
+isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. &lt;Irony
+off&gt; They don't realize the stability of the system. </p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Ubuntu Server 12.04 (Samba,
+Apache, MySQL, Joomla!, … and Skolelinux / Debian Edu)</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
+which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
+teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
+Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
+Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
+instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They
+develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>98.6 percent done with the Norwegian draft translation of Free Culture</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/98_6_percent_done_with_the_Norwegian_draft_translation_of_Free_Culture.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2014 22:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>This summer I finally had time to continue working on the Norwegian
+<a href="http://www.docbook.org/">docbook</a> version of the 2004 book
+<a href="http://free-culture.cc/">Free Culture</a> by Lawrence Lessig,
+to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with todays copyright
+law. Yesterday, I finally completed translated the book text. There
+are still some foot/end notes left to translate, the colophon page
+need to be rewritten, and a few words and phrases still need to be
+translated, but the Norwegian text is ready for the first proof
+reading. :) More spell checking is needed, and several illustrations
+need to be cleaned up. The work stopped up because I had to give
+priority to other projects the last year, and the progress graph of
+the translation show this very well:</p>
+
+<p><img width="80%" align="center" src="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/raw/master/progress.png"></p>
+
+<p>If you want to read the result, check out the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig">github</a>
+project pages and the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.pdf?raw=true">PDF</a>,
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/blob/master/archive/freeculture.nb.epub?raw=true">EPUB</a>
+and HTML version available in the
+<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig/tree/master/archive">archive
+directory</a>.</p>
+
+<p>Please report typos, bugs and improvements to the github project if
+you find any.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>From English wiki to translated PDF and epub via Docbook</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/From_English_wiki_to_translated_PDF_and_epub_via_Docbook.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 17 Jun 2014 11:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
+project</a> provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
+administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
+and maintaining a Debian Edu installation. This text is about how the
+text processing of this manual is handled in the project.</p>
+
+<p>One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
+language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
+But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
+information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
+in sync. And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
+documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
+contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
+edit the documentation using a web browser. We also want it to be
+easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
+help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
+tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
+goals.</p>
+
+<p>We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">Debian
+wiki</a>, as several wiki pages written in English. It consist of one
+front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
+for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
+chapters together into one large web page (aka
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/AllInOne">the
+AllInOne page</a>). The AllInOne page is the one used for further
+processing and translations. Thanks to the fact that the
+<a href="http://moinmo.in/">MoinMoin</a> installation on
+wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
+<a href="http://www.docbook.org/">the Docbook format</a>, we can fetch
+the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
+page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
+manual. This process also download images and transform image
+references to use the locally downloaded images. The generated
+Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
+using the <tt>documentation/scripts/get_manual</tt> program, and the
+result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
+a handfull of images. The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
+and epub versions of the English manual. This is the basic step of
+our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
+epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
+are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.</p>
+
+<p>But English documentation is not enough for us. We want translated
+documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
+track the English original. For this we use the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/poxml.html">poxml</a> package,
+which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
+translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
+translation tools used by those translating free software. The pot
+file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
+files), which the translations update with the native language
+translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
+original. The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
+and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
+create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
+debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml). This translated (or partly
+translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
+then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
+of the documentation.</p>
+
+<p>The translators use different tools to edit the .po files. We
+recommend using
+<a href="http://www.kde.org/applications/development/lokalize/">lokalize</a>,
+while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
+<a href="http://pootle.translatehouse.org/">Poodle</a> or
+<a href="https://www.transifex.com/">Transifex</a>. All we care about
+is where the .po file end up, in our git repository. Updated
+translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/src:debian-edu-doc">bug reports
+against the debian-edu-doc package</a>.</p>
+
+<p>One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
+they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
+formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
+this regard). For this we transform the original PNG images to the
+needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
+translated images by storing translated versions in
+images/$LANGUAGECODE/. I am a bit unsure about the details here. The
+package maintainers know more.</p>
+
+<p>If you wonder what the result look like, we provide
+<a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/">the content
+of the documentation packages on the web</a>. See for example the
+<a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/it/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.pdf">Italian
+PDF version</a> or the
+<a href="http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/de/debian-edu-wheezy-manual.html">German
+HTML version</a>. We do not yet build the epub version by default,
+but perhaps it will be done in the future.</p>
+
+<p>To learn more, check out
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/debian-edu-doc.html">the
+debian-edu-doc package</a>,
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/">the
+manual on the wiki</a> and
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/Translations">the
+translation instructions</a> in the manual.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Free software car computer solution?</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Free_software_car_computer_solution_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 29 May 2014 18:45:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Dear lazyweb. I'm planning to set up a small Raspberry Pi computer
+in my car, connected to
+<a href="http://www.dx.com/p/400a-4-0-tft-lcd-digital-monitor-for-vehicle-parking-reverse-camera-1440x272-12v-dc-57776">a
+small screen</a> next to the rear mirror. I plan to hook it up with a
+GPS and a USB wifi card too. The idea is to get my own
+"<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carputer">Carputer</a>". But I
+wonder if someone already created a good free software solution for
+such car computer.</p>
+
+<p>This is my current wish list for such system:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>Work on Raspberry Pi.</li>
+
+ <li>Show current speed limit based on location, and warn if going too
+ fast (for example using color codes yellow and red on the screen,
+ or make a sound). This could be done either using either data from
+ <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/">Openstreetmap</a> or OCR
+ info gathered from a dashboard camera.</li>
+
+ <li>Track automatic toll road passes and their cost, show total spent
+ and make it possible to calculate toll costs for planned
+ route.</li>
+
+ <li>Collect GPX tracks for use with OpenStreetMap.</li>
+
+ <li>Automatically detect and use any wireless connection to connect
+ to home server. Try IP over DNS
+ (<a href="http://dev.kryo.se/iodine/">iodine</a>) or ICMP
+ (<a href="http://code.gerade.org/hans/">Hans</a>) if direct
+ connection do not work.</li>
+
+ <li>Set up mesh network to talk to other cars with the same system,
+ or some standard car mesh protocol.</li>
+
+ <li>Warn when approaching speed cameras and speed camera ranges
+ (speed calculated between two cameras).</li>
+
+ <li>Suport dashboard/front facing camera to discover speed limits and
+ run OCR to track registration number of passing cars.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>If you know of any free software car computer system supporting
+some or all of these features, please let me know.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Half the Coverity issues in Gnash fixed in the next release</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Half_the_Coverity_issues_in_Gnash_fixed_in_the_next_release.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 14:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I've been following <a href="http://www.getgnash.org/">the Gnash
+project</a> for quite a while now. It is a free software
+implementation of Adobe Flash, both a standalone player and a browser
+plugin. Gnash implement support for the AVM1 format (and not the
+newer AVM2 format - see
+<a href="http://lightspark.github.io/">Lightspark</a> for that one),
+allowing several flash based sites to work. Thanks to the friendly
+developers at Youtube, it also work with Youtube videos, because the
+Javascript code at Youtube detect Gnash and serve a AVM1 player to
+those users. :) Would be great if someone found time to implement AVM2
+support, but it has not happened yet. If you install both Lightspark
+and Gnash, Lightspark will invoke Gnash if it find a AVM1 flash file,
+so you can get both handled as free software. Unfortunately,
+Lightspark so far only implement a small subset of AVM2, and many
+sites do not work yet.</p>
+
+<p>A few months ago, I started looking at
+<a href="http://scan.coverity.com/">Coverity</a>, the static source
+checker used to find heaps and heaps of bugs in free software (thanks
+to the donation of a scanning service to free software projects by the
+company developing this non-free code checker), and Gnash was one of
+the projects I decided to check out. Coverity is able to find lock
+errors, memory errors, dead code and more. A few days ago they even
+extended it to also be able to find the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL.
+There are heaps of checks being done on the instrumented code, and the
+amount of bogus warnings is quite low compared to the other static
+code checkers I have tested over the years.</p>
+
+<p>Since a few weeks ago, I've been working with the other Gnash
+developers squashing bugs discovered by Coverity. I was quite happy
+today when I checked the current status and saw that of the 777 issues
+detected so far, 374 are marked as fixed. This make me confident that
+the next Gnash release will be more stable and more dependable than
+the previous one. Most of the reported issues were and are in the
+test suite, but it also found a few in the rest of the code.</p>
+
+<p>If you want to help out, you find us on
+<a href="https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev">the
+gnash-dev mailing list</a> and on
+<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#gnash">the #gnash channel on
+irc.freenode.net IRC server</a>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Install hardware dependent packages using tasksel (Isenkram 0.7)</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Install_hardware_dependent_packages_using_tasksel__Isenkram_0_7_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 23 Apr 2014 14:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It would be nice if it was easier in Debian to get all the hardware
+related packages relevant for the computer installed automatically.
+So I implemented one, using
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/isenkram">my Isenkram
+package</a>. To use it, install the tasksel and isenkram packages and
+run tasksel as user root. You should be presented with a new option,
+"Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)". When you
+select it, tasksel will install the packages isenkram claim is fit for
+the current hardware, hot pluggable or not.<p>
+
+<p>The implementation is in two files, one is the tasksel menu entry
+description, and the other is the script used to extract the list of
+packages to install. The first part is in
+<tt>/usr/share/tasksel/descs/isenkram.desc</tt> and look like
+this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+Task: isenkram
+Section: hardware
+Description: Hardware specific packages (autodetected by isenkram)
+ Based on the detected hardware various hardware specific packages are
+ proposed.
+Test-new-install: mark show
+Relevance: 8
+Packages: for-current-hardware
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The second part is in
+<tt>/usr/lib/tasksel/packages/for-current-hardware</tt> and look like
+this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+#
+(
+ isenkram-lookup
+ isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
+) | sort -u
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>All in all, a very short and simple implementation making it
+trivial to install the hardware dependent package we all may want to
+have installed on our machines. I've not been able to find a way to
+get tasksel to tell you exactly which packages it plan to install
+before doing the installation. So if you are curious or careful,
+check the output from the isenkram-* command line tools first.</p>
+
+<p>The information about which packages are handling which hardware is
+fetched either from the isenkram package itself in
+/usr/share/isenkram/, from git.debian.org or from the APT package
+database (using the Modaliases header). The APT package database
+parsing have caused a nasty resource leak in the isenkram daemon (bugs
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/719837">#719837</a> and
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/730704">#730704</a>). The cause is in
+the python-apt code (bug
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/745487">#745487</a>), but using a
+workaround I was able to get rid of the file descriptor leak and
+reduce the memory leak from ~30 MiB per hardware detection down to
+around 2 MiB per hardware detection. It should make the desktop
+daemon a lot more useful. The fix is in version 0.7 uploaded to
+unstable today.</p>
+
+<p>I believe the current way of mapping hardware to packages in
+Isenkram is is a good draft, but in the future I expect isenkram to
+use the AppStream data source for this. A proposal for getting proper
+AppStream support into Debian is floating around as
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DEP-11">DEP-11</a>, and
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects#SummerOfCode2014.2FProjects.2FAppStreamDEP11Implementation.AppStream.2FDEP-11_for_the_Debian_Archive">GSoC
+project</a> will take place this summer to improve the situation. I
+look forward to seeing the result, and welcome patches for isenkram to
+start using the information when it is ready.</p>
+
+<p>If you want your package to map to some specific hardware, either
+add a "Xb-Modaliases" header to your control file like I did in
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pymissile">the pymissile
+package</a> or submit a bug report with the details to the isenkram
+package. See also
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/isenkram/">all my
+blog posts tagged isenkram</a> for details on the notation. I expect
+the information will be migrated to AppStream eventually, but for the
+moment I got no better place to store it.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>FreedomBox milestone - all packages now in Debian Sid</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/FreedomBox_milestone___all_packages_now_in_Debian_Sid.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 15 Apr 2014 22:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
+project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware to make
+it easy for non-technical people to host their data and communication
+at home, and being able to communicate with their friends and family
+encrypted and away from prying eyes. It is still going strong, and
+today a major mile stone was reached.</p>
+
+<p>Today, the last of the packages currently used by the project to
+created the system images were accepted into Debian Unstable. It was
+the freedombox-setup package, which is used to configure the images
+during build and on the first boot. Now all one need to get going is
+the build code from the freedom-maker git repository and packages from
+Debian. And once the freedombox-setup package enter testing, we can
+build everything directly from Debian. :)</p>
+
+<p>Some key packages used by Freedombox are
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/freedombox-setup">freedombox-setup</a>,
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/plinth">plinth</a>,
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/pagekite">pagekite</a>,
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/tor">tor</a>,
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/privoxy">privoxy</a>,
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/owncloud">owncloud</a> and
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/dnsmasq">dnsmasq</a>. There
+are plans to integrate more packages into the setup. User
+documentation is maintained on the Debian wiki. Please
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Jessie">check out
+the manual</a> and help us improve it.</p>
+
+<p>To test for yourself and create boot images with the FreedomBox
+setup, run this on a Debian machine using a user with sudo rights to
+become root:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
+ mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
+ u-boot-tools
+git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
+ freedom-maker
+make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
+devices. See the README in the freedom-maker git repo for more
+details on the build. If you do not want all three images, trim the
+make line. Note that the virtualbox-image target is not really
+virtualbox specific. It create a x86 image usable in kvm, qemu,
+vmware and any other x86 virtual machine environment. You might need
+the version of vmdebootstrap in Jessie to get the build working, as it
+include fixes for a race condition with kpartx.</p>
+
+<p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
+method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
+the preseed values:</p>
+
+<p><pre>
+url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
+</pre></p>
+
+<p>I have not tested it myself the last few weeks, so I do not know if
+it still work.</p>
+
+<p>If you wonder how to help, one task you could look at is using
+systemd as the boot system. It will become the default for Linux in
+Jessie, so we need to make sure it is usable on the Freedombox. I did
+a simple test a few weeks ago, and noticed dnsmasq failed to start
+during boot when using systemd. I suspect there are other problems
+too. :) To detect problems, there is a test suite included, which can
+be run from the plinth web interface.</p>
+
+<p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
+us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
+irc.debian.org)</a> and
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
+mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>S3QL, a locally mounted cloud file system - nice free software</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/S3QL__a_locally_mounted_cloud_file_system___nice_free_software.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 9 Apr 2014 11:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>For a while now, I have been looking for a sensible offsite backup
+solution for use at home. My requirements are simple, it must be
+cheap and locally encrypted (in other words, I keep the encryption
+keys, the storage provider do not have access to my private files).
+One idea me and my friends had many years ago, before the cloud
+storage providers showed up, was to use Google mail as storage,
+writing a Linux block device storing blocks as emails in the mail
+service provided by Google, and thus get heaps of free space. On top
+of this one can add encryption, RAID and volume management to have
+lots of (fairly slow, I admit that) cheap and encrypted storage. But
+I never found time to implement such system. But the last few weeks I
+have looked at a system called
+<a href="https://bitbucket.org/nikratio/s3ql/">S3QL</a>, a locally
+mounted network backed file system with the features I need.</p>
+
+<p>S3QL is a fuse file system with a local cache and cloud storage,
+handling several different storage providers, any with Amazon S3,
+Google Drive or OpenStack API. There are heaps of such storage
+providers. S3QL can also use a local directory as storage, which
+combined with sshfs allow for file storage on any ssh server. S3QL
+include support for encryption, compression, de-duplication, snapshots
+and immutable file systems, allowing me to mount the remote storage as
+a local mount point, look at and use the files as if they were local,
+while the content is stored in the cloud as well. This allow me to
+have a backup that should survive fire. The file system can not be
+shared between several machines at the same time, as only one can
+mount it at the time, but any machine with the encryption key and
+access to the storage service can mount it if it is unmounted.</p>
+
+<p>It is simple to use. I'm using it on Debian Wheezy, where the
+package is included already. So to get started, run <tt>apt-get
+install s3ql</tt>. Next, pick a storage provider. I ended up picking
+Greenqloud, after reading their nice recipe on
+<a href="https://greenqloud.zendesk.com/entries/44611757-How-To-Use-S3QL-to-mount-a-StorageQloud-bucket-on-Debian-Wheezy">how
+to use S3QL with their Amazon S3 service</a>, because I trust the laws
+in Iceland more than those in USA when it come to keeping my personal
+data safe and private, and thus would rather spend money on a company
+in Iceland. Another nice recipe is available from the article
+<a href="http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/HPC-Cloud-Storage">S3QL
+Filesystem for HPC Storage</a> by Jeff Layton in the HPC section of
+Admin magazine. When the provider is picked, figure out how to get
+the API key needed to connect to the storage API. With Greencloud,
+the key did not show up until I had added payment details to my
+account.</p>
+
+<p>Armed with the API access details, it is time to create the file
+system. First, create a new bucket in the cloud. This bucket is the
+file system storage area. I picked a bucket name reflecting the
+machine that was going to store data there, but any name will do.
+I'll refer to it as <tt>bucket-name</tt> below. In addition, one need
+the API login and password, and a locally created password. Store it
+all in ~root/.s3ql/authinfo2 like this:
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+[s3c]
+storage-url: s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
+backend-login: API-login
+backend-password: API-password
+fs-passphrase: local-password
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>I create my local passphrase using <tt>pwget 50</tt> or similar,
+but any sensible way to create a fairly random password should do it.
+Armed with these details, it is now time to run mkfs, entering the API
+details and password to create it:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+# mkdir -m 700 /var/lib/s3ql-cache
+# mkfs.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
+ --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
+Enter backend login:
+Enter backend password:
+Before using S3QL, make sure to read the user's guide, especially
+the 'Important Rules to Avoid Loosing Data' section.
+Enter encryption password:
+Confirm encryption password:
+Generating random encryption key...
+Creating metadata tables...
+Dumping metadata...
+..objects..
+..blocks..
+..inodes..
+..inode_blocks..
+..symlink_targets..
+..names..
+..contents..
+..ext_attributes..
+Compressing and uploading metadata...
+Wrote 0.00 MB of compressed metadata.
+# </pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The next step is mounting the file system to make the storage available.
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+# mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
+ --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
+Using 4 upload threads.
+Downloading and decompressing metadata...
+Reading metadata...
+..objects..
+..blocks..
+..inodes..
+..inode_blocks..
+..symlink_targets..
+..names..
+..contents..
+..ext_attributes..
+Mounting filesystem...
+# df -h /s3ql
+Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
+s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name 1.0T 0 1.0T 0% /s3ql
+#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The file system is now ready for use. I use rsync to store my
+backups in it, and as the metadata used by rsync is downloaded at
+mount time, no network traffic (and storage cost) is triggered by
+running rsync. To unmount, one should not use the normal umount
+command, as this will not flush the cache to the cloud storage, but
+instead running the umount.s3ql command like this:
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+# umount.s3ql /s3ql
+#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>There is a fsck command available to check the file system and
+correct any problems detected. This can be used if the local server
+crashes while the file system is mounted, to reset the "already
+mounted" flag. This is what it look like when processing a working
+file system:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+# fsck.s3ql --force --ssl s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name
+Using cached metadata.
+File system seems clean, checking anyway.
+Checking DB integrity...
+Creating temporary extra indices...
+Checking lost+found...
+Checking cached objects...
+Checking names (refcounts)...
+Checking contents (names)...
+Checking contents (inodes)...
+Checking contents (parent inodes)...
+Checking objects (reference counts)...
+Checking objects (backend)...
+..processed 5000 objects so far..
+..processed 10000 objects so far..
+..processed 15000 objects so far..
+Checking objects (sizes)...
+Checking blocks (referenced objects)...
+Checking blocks (refcounts)...
+Checking inode-block mapping (blocks)...
+Checking inode-block mapping (inodes)...
+Checking inodes (refcounts)...
+Checking inodes (sizes)...
+Checking extended attributes (names)...
+Checking extended attributes (inodes)...
+Checking symlinks (inodes)...
+Checking directory reachability...
+Checking unix conventions...
+Checking referential integrity...
+Dropping temporary indices...
+Backing up old metadata...
+Dumping metadata...
+..objects..
+..blocks..
+..inodes..
+..inode_blocks..
+..symlink_targets..
+..names..
+..contents..
+..ext_attributes..
+Compressing and uploading metadata...
+Wrote 0.89 MB of compressed metadata.
+#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Thanks to the cache, working on files that fit in the cache is very
+quick, about the same speed as local file access. Uploading large
+amount of data is to me limited by the bandwidth out of and into my
+house. Uploading 685 MiB with a 100 MiB cache gave me 305 kiB/s,
+which is very close to my upload speed, and downloading the same
+Debian installation ISO gave me 610 kiB/s, close to my download speed.
+Both were measured using <tt>dd</tt>. So for me, the bottleneck is my
+network, not the file system code. I do not know what a good cache
+size would be, but suspect that the cache should e larger than your
+working set.</p>
+
+<p>I mentioned that only one machine can mount the file system at the
+time. If another machine try, it is told that the file system is
+busy:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+# mount.s3ql --cachedir /var/lib/s3ql-cache --authfile /root/.s3ql/authinfo2 \
+ --ssl --allow-root s3c://s.greenqloud.com:443/bucket-name /s3ql
+Using 8 upload threads.
+Backend reports that fs is still mounted elsewhere, aborting.
+#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The file content is uploaded when the cache is full, while the
+metadata is uploaded once every 24 hour by default. To ensure the
+file system content is flushed to the cloud, one can either umount the
+file system, or ask S3QL to flush the cache and metadata using
+s3qlctrl:
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+# s3qlctrl upload-meta /s3ql
+# s3qlctrl flushcache /s3ql
+#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>If you are curious about how much space your data uses in the
+cloud, and how much compression and deduplication cut down on the
+storage usage, you can use s3qlstat on the mounted file system to get
+a report:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+# s3qlstat /s3ql
+Directory entries: 9141
+Inodes: 9143
+Data blocks: 8851
+Total data size: 22049.38 MB
+After de-duplication: 21955.46 MB (99.57% of total)
+After compression: 21877.28 MB (99.22% of total, 99.64% of de-duplicated)
+Database size: 2.39 MB (uncompressed)
+(some values do not take into account not-yet-uploaded dirty blocks in cache)
+#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>I mentioned earlier that there are several possible suppliers of
+storage. I did not try to locate them all, but am aware of at least
+<a href="https://www.greenqloud.com/">Greenqloud</a>,
+<a href="http://drive.google.com/">Google Drive</a>,
+<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/">Amazon S3 web serivces</a>,
+<a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a> and
+<a href="http://crowncloud.net/">Crowncloud</A>. The latter even
+accept payment in Bitcoin. Pick one that suit your need. Some of
+them provide several GiB of free storage, but the prize models are
+quite different and you will have to figure out what suits you
+best.</p>
+
+<p>While researching this blog post, I had a look at research papers
+and posters discussing the S3QL file system. There are several, which
+told me that the file system is getting a critical check by the
+science community and increased my confidence in using it. One nice
+poster is titled
+"<a href="http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/science_highlights_2013/docs/pg68_69.pdf">An
+Innovative Parallel Cloud Storage System using OpenStack’s SwiftObject
+Store and Transformative Parallel I/O Approach</a>" by Hsing-Bung
+Chen, Benjamin McClelland, David Sherrill, Alfred Torrez, Parks Fields
+and Pamela Smith. Please have a look.</p>
+
+<p>Given my problems with different file systems earlier, I decided to
+check out the mounted S3QL file system to see if it would be usable as
+a home directory (in other word, that it provided POSIX semantics when
+it come to locking and umask handling etc). Running
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_if_a_file_system_can_be_used_for_home_directories___.html">my
+test code to check file system semantics</a>, I was happy to discover that
+no error was found. So the file system can be used for home
+directories, if one chooses to do so.</p>
+
+<p>If you do not want a locally file system, and want something that
+work without the Linux fuse file system, I would like to mention the
+<a href="http://www.tarsnap.com/">Tarsnap service</a>, which also
+provide locally encrypted backup using a command line client. It have
+a nicer access control system, where one can split out read and write
+access, allowing some systems to write to the backup and others to
+only read from it.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>ReactOS Windows clone - nice free software</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/ReactOS_Windows_clone___nice_free_software.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 1 Apr 2014 12:10:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
+2014-04-08, in 7 days. But there are heaps of machines still running
+Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
+upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
+comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
+new operating system. Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
+machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
+are already well known and covered elsewhere. Most of them involve
+leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
+trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
+to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
+the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
+operating system that is Windows XP compatible.</p>
+
+<p><a href="http://www.reactos.org/">ReactOS</a> is a free software
+operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
+system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
+programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
+The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
+drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
+system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing. It is
+a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
+from the approach taken by <a href="http://www.winehq.org/">the Wine
+project</a>, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
+Linux.</p>
+
+<p>The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
+shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
+There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
+allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
+click directly from the Internet. Check out the
+<a href="http://www.reactos.org/screenshots">screen shots on the
+project web site</a> for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
+Windows before metro).</p>
+
+<p>I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
+operating systems. I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
+virtual machine. The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
+fine as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, my main test application
+is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
+seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
+the disk after the installation. So no luck with that test software.
+No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
+I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
+to work just fine. If you like Windows and want to keep running your
+old Windows binaries, check it out by
+<a href="http://www.reactos.org/download">downloading</a> the
+installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
+image.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Roger Marsal</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Roger_Marsal.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2014 11:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p><a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
+keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a>, with a
+wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
+contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
+live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
+work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally,
+I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
+last development phase of a new social networking concept.</p>
+
+<p>I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
+ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
+and as a necessary step to gain expertise.</p>
+
+<p>In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
+can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
+hunger.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I discovered the <a href="http://www.ltsp.org/">LTSP</a> advantages
+with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
+started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and
+respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
+change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using
+Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
+Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered
+that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
+and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
+running. I just loved it.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
+tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
+complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
+other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
+be made of steel.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I found two main disadvantages.</p>
+
+<p>I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
+amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
+stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
+resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
+or dropped.</p>
+
+<p>It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
+this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
+more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
+discourage many people too.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
+Virtualbox.</p>
+
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
+attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
+really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
+the <a href="http://www.r-project.org/">"R" statistical language</a>; a
+few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
+Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
+different level of studies. I believe free and open software will
+increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
+first scenarios where this will happen.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Public Trusted Timestamping services for everyone</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Public_Trusted_Timestamping_services_for_everyone.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 12:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Did you ever need to store logs or other files in a way that would
+allow it to be used as evidence in court, and needed a way to
+demonstrate without reasonable doubt that the file had not been
+changed since it was created? Or, did you ever need to document that
+a given document was received at some point in time, like some
+archived document or the answer to an exam, and not changed after it
+was received? The problem in these settings is to remove the need to
+trust yourself and your computers, while still being able to prove
+that a file is the same as it was at some given time in the past.</p>
+
+<p>A solution to these problems is to have a trusted third party
+"stamp" the document and verify that at some given time the document
+looked a given way. Such
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notarius">notarius</a> service
+have been around for thousands of years, and its digital equivalent is
+called a
+<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">trusted
+timestamping service</a>. <a href="http://www.ietf.org/">The Internet
+Engineering Task Force</a> standardised how such service could work a
+few years ago as <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">RFC
+3161</a>. The mechanism is simple. Create a hash of the file in
+question, send it to a trusted third party which add a time stamp to
+the hash and sign the result with its private key, and send back the
+signed hash + timestamp. Both email, FTP and HTTP can be used to
+request such signature, depending on what is provided by the service
+used. Anyone with the document and the signature can then verify that
+the document matches the signature by creating their own hash and
+checking the signature using the trusted third party public key.
+There are several commercial services around providing such
+timestamping. A quick search for
+"<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfc+3161+service">rfc 3161
+service</a>" pointed me to at least
+<a href="https://www.digistamp.com/technical/how-a-digital-time-stamp-works/">DigiStamp</a>,
+<a href="http://www.quovadisglobal.co.uk/CertificateServices/SigningServices/TimeStamp.aspx">Quo
+Vadis</a>,
+<a href="https://www.globalsign.com/timestamp-service/">Global Sign</a>
+and <a href="http://www.globaltrustfinder.com/TSADefault.aspx">Global
+Trust Finder</a>. The system work as long as the private key of the
+trusted third party is not compromised.</p>
+
+<p>But as far as I can tell, there are very few public trusted
+timestamp services available for everyone. I've been looking for one
+for a while now. But yesterday I found one over at
+<a href="https://www.pki.dfn.de/zeitstempeldienst/">Deutches
+Forschungsnetz</a> mentioned in
+<a href="http://www.d-mueller.de/blog/dealing-with-trusted-timestamps-in-php-rfc-3161/">a
+blog by David Müller</a>. I then found
+<a href="http://www.rz.uni-greifswald.de/support/dfn-pki-zertifikate/zeitstempeldienst.html">a
+good recipe on how to use the service</a> over at the University of
+Greifswald.</p>
+
+<p><a href="http://www.openssl.org/">The OpenSSL library</a> contain
+both server and tools to use and set up your own signing service. See
+the ts(1SSL), tsget(1SSL) manual pages for more details. The
+following shell script demonstrate how to extract a signed timestamp
+for any file on the disk in a Debian environment:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+set -e
+url="http://zeitstempel.dfn.de"
+caurl="https://pki.pca.dfn.de/global-services-ca/pub/cacert/chain.txt"
+reqfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsq)
+resfile=$(mktemp -t tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.tsr)
+cafile=chain.txt
+if [ ! -f $cafile ] ; then
+ wget -O $cafile "$caurl"
+fi
+openssl ts -query -data "$1" -cert | tee "$reqfile" \
+ | /usr/lib/ssl/misc/tsget -h "$url" -o "$resfile"
+openssl ts -reply -in "$resfile" -text 1>&2
+openssl ts -verify -data "$1" -in "$resfile" -CAfile "$cafile" 1>&2
+base64 < "$resfile"
+rm "$reqfile" "$resfile"
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The argument to the script is the file to timestamp, and the output
+is a base64 encoded version of the signature to STDOUT and details
+about the signature to STDERR. Note that due to
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=742553">a bug
+in the tsget script</a>, you might need to modify the included script
+and remove the last line. Or just write your own HTTP uploader using
+curl. :) Now you too can prove and verify that files have not been
+changed.</p>
+
+<p>But the Internet need more public trusted timestamp services.
+Perhaps something for <a href="http://www.uninett.no/">Uninett</a> or
+my work place the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
+to set up?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Video DVD reader library / python-dvdvideo - nice free software</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Video_DVD_reader_library___python_dvdvideo___nice_free_software.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:25:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Keeping your DVD collection safe from scratches and curious
+children fingers while still having it available when you want to see a
+movie is not straight forward. My preferred method at the moment is
+to store a full copy of the ISO on a hard drive, and use VLC, Popcorn
+Hour or other useful players to view the resulting file. This way the
+subtitles and bonus material are still available and using the ISO is
+just like inserting the original DVD record in the DVD player.</p>
+
+<p>Earlier I used dd for taking security copies, but it do not handle
+DVDs giving read errors (which are quite a few of them). I've also
+tried using
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ripping_problematic_DVDs_using_dvdbackup_and_genisoimage.html">dvdbackup
+and genisoimage</a>, but these days I use the marvellous python library
+and program
+<a href="http://bblank.thinkmo.de/blog/new-software-python-dvdvideo">python-dvdvideo</a>
+written by Bastian Blank. It is
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/python-dvdvideo.html">in Debian
+already</a> and the binary package name is python3-dvdvideo. Instead
+of trying to read every block from the DVD, it parses the file
+structure and figure out which block on the DVD is actually in used,
+and only read those blocks from the DVD. This work surprisingly well,
+and I have been able to almost backup my entire DVD collection using
+this method.</p>
+
+<p>So far, python-dvdvideo have failed on between 10 and
+20 DVDs, which is a small fraction of my collection. The most common
+problem is
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=720831">DVDs
+using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 characters</a>, which according to
+Bastian is against the DVD specification (and seem to cause some
+players to fail too). A rarer problem is what seem to be inconsistent
+DVD structures, as the python library
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=723079">claim
+there is a overlap between objects</a>. An equally rare problem claim
+<a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=741878">some
+value is out of range</a>. No idea what is going on there. I wish I
+knew enough about the DVD format to fix these, to ensure my movie
+collection will stay with me in the future.</p>
+
+<p>So, if you need to keep your DVDs safe, back them up using
+python-dvdvideo. :)</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Freedombox on Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and virtual x86 machine</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Freedombox_on_Dreamplug__Raspberry_Pi_and_virtual_x86_machine.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 14 Mar 2014 11:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox">Freedombox
+project</a> is working on providing the software and hardware for
+making it easy for non-technical people to host their data and
+communication at home, and being able to communicate with their
+friends and family encrypted and away from prying eyes. It has been
+going on for a while, and is slowly progressing towards a new test
+release (0.2).</p>
+
+<p>And what day could be better than the Pi day to announce that the
+new version will provide "hard drive" / SD card / USB stick images for
+Dreamplug, Raspberry Pi and VirtualBox (or any other virtualization
+system), and can also be installed using a Debian installer preseed
+file. The Debian based Freedombox is now based on Debian Jessie,
+where most of the needed packages used are already present. Only one,
+the freedombox-setup package, is missing. To try to build your own
+boot image to test the current status, fetch the freedom-maker scripts
+and build using
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vmdebootstrap">vmdebootstrap</a>
+with a user with sudo access to become root:
+
+<pre>
+git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/freedombox/freedom-maker.git \
+ freedom-maker
+sudo apt-get install git vmdebootstrap mercurial python-docutils \
+ mktorrent extlinux virtualbox qemu-user-static binfmt-support \
+ u-boot-tools
+make -C freedom-maker dreamplug-image raspberry-image virtualbox-image
+</pre>
+
+<p>Root access is needed to run debootstrap and mount loopback
+devices. See the README for more details on the build. If you do not
+want all three images, trim the make line. But note that thanks to <a
+href="https://bugs.debian.org/741407">a race condition in
+vmdebootstrap</a>, the build might fail without the patch to the
+kpartx call.</p>
+
+<p>If you instead want to install using a Debian CD and the preseed
+method, boot a Debian Wheezy ISO and use this boot argument to load
+the preseed values:</p>
+
+<pre>
+url=<a href="http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat">http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-jessie.dat</a>
+</pre>
+
+<p>But note that due to <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/740673">a
+recently introduced bug in apt in Jessie</a>, the installer will
+currently hang while setting up APT sources. Killing the
+'<tt>apt-cdrom ident</tt>' process when it hang a few times during the
+installation will get the installation going. This affect all
+installations in Jessie, and I expect it will be fixed soon.</p>
+
+<p>Give it a go and let us know how it goes on the mailing list, and help
+us get the new release published. :) Please join us on
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org:6667/%23freedombox">IRC (#freedombox on
+irc.debian.org)</a> and
+<a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss">the
+mailing list</a> if you want to help make this vision come true.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>How to add extra storage servers in Debian Edu / Skolelinux</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_add_extra_storage_servers_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 12:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
+storing user home directories and data. The design for handling this
+in <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>, is
+to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
+the clients take care of the rest. I was reminded about the need to
+document this better when one of the customers of
+<a href="http://www.slxdrift.no/">Skolelinux Drift AS</a>, where I am
+on the board of directors, asked about how to do this. The steps to
+get this working are the following:</p>
+
+<p><ol>
+
+<li>Add new storage server in DNS. I use nas-server.intern as the
+example host here.</li>
+
+<li>Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
+all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.</li>
+
+<li>Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
+tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.</li>
+
+</ol></p>
+
+<p>DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here. Follow the
+<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Wheezy/GettingStarted">instructions
+in the manual</a> (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
+started).</p>
+
+<p>Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
+relevant subnets or machines:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+root@tjener:~# showmount -e nas-server
+Export list for nas-server:
+/storage 10.0.0.0/8
+root@tjener:~#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
+/storage export. With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
+netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
+NFS access.</p>
+
+<p>The next step is to update LDAP. This can not be done using GOsa²,
+because it lack a module for automount. Instead, use ldapvi and add
+the required LDAP objects using an editor.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+ldapvi --ldap-conf -ZD '(cn=admin)' -b ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
+bottom of the document. The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
+wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
+need to list individual mount points in LDAP.</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+add cn=nas-server,ou=auto.skole,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+objectClass: automount
+cn: nas-server
+automountInformation: -fstype=autofs --timeout=60 ldap:ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+
+add ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+objectClass: top
+objectClass: automountMap
+ou: auto.nas-server
+
+add cn=/,ou=auto.nas-server,ou=automount,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
+objectClass: automount
+cn: /
+automountInformation: -fstype=nfs,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,rw,intr,hard,nodev,nosuid,noatime nas-server.intern:/&
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
+tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
+directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.</p>
+
+<p>When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
+the storage server directly by just visiting the
+/tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
+workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>New home and release 1.0 for netgroup and innetgr (aka ng-utils)</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_home_and_release_1_0_for_netgroup_and_innetgr__aka_ng_utils_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 22 Feb 2014 21:45:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Many years ago, I wrote a GPL licensed version of the netgroup and
+innetgr tools, because I needed them in
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Skolelinux</a>. I called the project
+ng-utils, and it has served me well. I placed the project under the
+<a href="http://www.hungry.com/">Hungry Programmer</a> umbrella, and it was maintained in our CVS
+repository. But many years ago, the CVS repository was dropped (lost,
+not migrated to new hardware, not sure), and the project have lacked a
+proper home since then.</p>
+
+<p>Last summer, I had a look at the package and made a new release
+fixing a irritating crash bug, but was unable to store the changes in
+a proper source control system. I applied for a project on
+<a href="https://alioth.debian.org/">Alioth</a>, but did not have time
+to follow up on it. Until today. :)</p>
+
+<p>After many hours of cleaning and migration, the ng-utils project
+now have a new home, and a git repository with the highlight of the
+history of the project. I published all release tarballs and imported
+them into the git repository. As the project is really stable and not
+expected to gain new features any time soon, I decided to make a new
+release and call it 1.0. Visit the new project home on
+<a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/">https://alioth.debian.org/projects/ng-utils/</a>
+if you want to check it out. The new version is also uploaded into
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ng-utils.html">Debian Unstable</a>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Testing sysvinit from experimental in Debian Hurd</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Testing_sysvinit_from_experimental_in_Debian_Hurd.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Mon, 3 Feb 2014 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>A few days ago I decided to try to help the Hurd people to get
+their changes into sysvinit, to allow them to use the normal sysvinit
+boot system instead of their old one. This follow up on the
+<a href="https://teythoon.cryptobitch.de//categories/gsoc.html">great
+Google Summer of Code work</a> done last summer by Justus Winter to
+get Debian on Hurd working more like Debian on Linux. To get started,
+I downloaded a prebuilt hard disk image from
+<a href="http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz">http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz</a>,
+and started it using virt-manager.</p>
+
+<p>The first think I had to do after logging in (root without any
+password) was to get the network operational. I followed
+<a href="https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install">the
+instructions on the Debian GNU/Hurd ports page</a> and ran these
+commands as root to get the machine to accept a IP address from the
+kvm internal DHCP server:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+settrans -fgap /dev/netdde /hurd/netdde
+kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[p]finet/ { print $2}')
+kill $(ps -ef|awk '/[d]evnode/ { print $2}')
+dhclient /dev/eth0
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>After this, the machine had internet connectivity, and I could
+upgrade it and install the sysvinit packages from experimental and
+enable it as the default boot system in Hurd.</p>
+
+<p>But before I did that, I set a password on the root user, as ssh is
+running on the machine it for ssh login to work a password need to be
+set. Also, note that a bug somewhere in openssh on Hurd block
+compression from working. Remember to turn that off on the client
+side.</p>
+
+<p>Run these commands as root to upgrade and test the new sysvinit
+stuff:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/experimental.list &lt;&lt;EOF
+deb http://http.debian.net/debian/ experimental main
+EOF
+apt-get update
+apt-get dist-upgrade
+apt-get install -t experimental initscripts sysv-rc sysvinit \
+ sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils
+update-alternatives --config runsystem
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>To reboot after switching boot system, you have to use
+<tt>reboot-hurd</tt> instead of just <tt>reboot</tt>, as there is not
+yet a sysvinit process able to receive the signals from the normal
+'reboot' command. After switching to sysvinit as the boot system,
+upgrading every package and rebooting, the network come up with DHCP
+after boot as it should, and the settrans/pkill hack mentioned at the
+start is no longer needed. But for some strange reason, there are no
+longer any login prompt in the virtual console, so I logged in using
+ssh instead.
+
+<p>Note that there are some race conditions in Hurd making the boot
+fail some times. No idea what the cause is, but hope the Hurd porters
+figure it out. At least Justus said on IRC (#debian-hurd on
+irc.debian.org) that they are aware of the problem. A way to reduce
+the impact is to upgrade to the Hurd packages built by Justus by
+adding this repository to the machine:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hurd-ci.list &lt;&lt;EOF
+deb http://darnassus.sceen.net/~teythoon/hurd-ci/ sid main
+EOF
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>At the moment the prebuilt virtual machine get some packages from
+http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian, because some of the packages in
+unstable do not yet include the required patches that are lingering in
+BTS. This is the completely list of "unofficial" packages installed:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote><pre>
+# aptitude search '?narrow(?version(CURRENT),?origin(Debian Ports))'
+i emacs - GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
+i gdb - GNU Debugger
+i hurd-recommended - Miscellaneous translators
+i isc-dhcp-client - ISC DHCP client
+i isc-dhcp-common - common files used by all the isc-dhcp* packages
+i libc-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Binaries
+i libc-dev-bin - Embedded GNU C Library: Development binaries
+i libc0.3 - Embedded GNU C Library: Shared libraries
+i A libc0.3-dbg - Embedded GNU C Library: detached debugging symbols
+i libc0.3-dev - Embedded GNU C Library: Development Libraries and Hea
+i multiarch-support - Transitional package to ensure multiarch compatibilit
+i A x11-common - X Window System (X.Org) infrastructure
+i xorg - X.Org X Window System
+i A xserver-xorg - X.Org X server
+i A xserver-xorg-input-all - X.Org X server -- input driver metapackage
+#
+</pre></blockquote></p>
+
+<p>All in all, testing hurd has been an interesting experience. :)
+X.org did not work out of the box and I never took the time to follow
+the porters instructions to fix it. This time I was interested in the
+command line stuff.<p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>A fist full of non-anonymous Bitcoins</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_fist_full_of_non_anonymous_Bitcoins.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 14:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Bitcoin is a incredible use of peer to peer communication and
+encryption, allowing direct and immediate money transfer without any
+central control. It is sometimes claimed to be ideal for illegal
+activity, which I believe is quite a long way from the truth. At least
+I would not conduct illegal money transfers using a system where the
+details of every transaction are kept forever. This point is
+investigated in
+<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">USENIX ;login:</a>
+from December 2013, in the article
+"<a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf">A
+Fistful of Bitcoins - Characterizing Payments Among Men with No
+Names</a>" by Sarah Meiklejohn, Marjori Pomarole,Grant Jordan, Kirill
+Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Geoffrey M. Voelker, and Stefan Savage. They
+analyse the transaction log in the Bitcoin system, using it to find
+addresses belong to individuals and organisations and follow the flow
+of money from both Bitcoin theft and trades on Silk Road to where the
+money end up. This is how they wrap up their article:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+<p>"To demonstrate the usefulness of this type of analysis, we turned
+our attention to criminal activity. In the Bitcoin economy, criminal
+activity can appear in a number of forms, such as dealing drugs on
+Silk Road or simply stealing someone else’s bitcoins. We followed the
+flow of bitcoins out of Silk Road (in particular, from one notorious
+address) and from a number of highly publicized thefts to see whether
+we could track the bitcoins to known services. Although some of the
+thieves attempted to use sophisticated mixing techniques (or possibly
+mix services) to obscure the flow of bitcoins, for the most part
+tracking the bitcoins was quite straightforward, and we ultimately saw
+large quantities of bitcoins flow to a variety of exchanges directly
+from the point of theft (or the withdrawal from Silk Road).</p>
+
+<p>As acknowledged above, following stolen bitcoins to the point at
+which they are deposited into an exchange does not in itself identify
+the thief; however, it does enable further de-anonymization in the
+case in which certain agencies can determine (through, for example,
+subpoena power) the real-world owner of the account into which the
+stolen bitcoins were deposited. Because such exchanges seem to serve
+as chokepoints into and out of the Bitcoin economy (i.e., there are
+few alternative ways to cash out), we conclude that using Bitcoin for
+money laundering or other illicit purposes does not (at least at
+present) seem to be particularly attractive."</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+
+<p>These researches are not the first to analyse the Bitcoin
+transaction log. The 2011 paper
+"<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.4524">An Analysis of Anonymity in
+the Bitcoin System</A>" by Fergal Reid and Martin Harrigan is
+summarized like this:</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+"Anonymity in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic currency system, is a
+complicated issue. Within the system, users are identified by
+public-keys only. An attacker wishing to de-anonymize its users will
+attempt to construct the one-to-many mapping between users and
+public-keys and associate information external to the system with the
+users. Bitcoin tries to prevent this attack by storing the mapping of
+a user to his or her public-keys on that user's node only and by
+allowing each user to generate as many public-keys as required. In
+this chapter we consider the topological structure of two networks
+derived from Bitcoin's public transaction history. We show that the
+two networks have a non-trivial topological structure, provide
+complementary views of the Bitcoin system and have implications for
+anonymity. We combine these structures with external information and
+techniques such as context discovery and flow analysis to investigate
+an alleged theft of Bitcoins, which, at the time of the theft, had a
+market value of approximately half a million U.S. dollars."
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>I hope these references can help kill the urban myth that Bitcoin
+is anonymous. It isn't really a good fit for illegal activites. Use
+cash if you need to stay anonymous, at least until regular DNA
+sampling of notes and coins become the norm. :)</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>New chrpath release 0.16</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_16.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2014 11:00:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p><a href="http://www.coverity.com/">Coverity</a> is a nice tool to
+find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code
+analysis. It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very
+useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of
+the source. The company behind it provide
+<a href="https://scan.coverity.com/">check of free software projects as
+a community service</a>, and many hundred free software projects are
+already checked. A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at
+the Coverity system, and discovered that the
+<a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/">gnash</a> and
+<a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipmitool/">ipmitool</a>
+projects I am involved with was already registered. But these are
+fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to
+check, and decided to <a href="http://scan.coverity.com/projects/1179">request
+checking of the chrpath project</a>. It was
+added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects. Six of
+these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an
+error. Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction
+of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it
+is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in
+the future end up in a library. Having fixed all defects and added
+<a href="https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/chrpath-devel">a
+mailing list for the chrpath developers</a>, I decided it was time to
+publish a new release. These are the release notes:</p>
+
+<p>New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.</li>
+ <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.</li>
+ <li>Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>You can
+<a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
+new version 0.16 from alioth</a>. Please let us know via the Alioth
+project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
+did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
+include a test suite check.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Dominik George</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Dominik_George.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 25 Dec 2013 13:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>The <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux
+project</a> consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
+was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
+up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
+successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
+to <a href="https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/Natureshadow">Dominik
+George</a>.</p>
+
+<!-- http://www.dominik-george.de/images/foto.jpg -->
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
+life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
+student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
+Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
+voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
+a bit vacant right now however.</p>
+
+<p>I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
+(public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
+around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
+it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
+network of that school together with a team of very interested and
+talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
+learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
+to help building another school's informational education concept from
+scratch.</p>
+
+<p>That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
+and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
+ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.</p>
+
+<p>When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
+and cycling.</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
+<a href="http://www.froscon.org">FrOSCon</a> and visited the project
+booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
+have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
+own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
+"out-of-the-box" solution ;).</p>
+
+<p>The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
+<a href="http://www.openrheinruhr.de">OpenRheinRuhr</a> 2011 when the
+BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
+really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
+ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
+a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
+guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
+small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
+seemed rather uninterested.</p>
+
+<p>After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
+mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
+reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
+basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
+works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
+in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
+without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
+from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
+have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
+and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
+server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
+notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
+and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
+it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
+tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
+that it rocks!</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
+politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
+operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
+will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
+school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
+this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
+too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
+answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
+other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
+can list a few points about that:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream
+ <li>be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers
+ <li>be helpful at being helpful ;)
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
+all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
+year.</p>
+
+<p>I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
+run text tools. I use
+<a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm">mksh</a> as shell,
+<a href="https://www.mirbsd.org/jupp.htm">jupp</a> as very advanced
+text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
+based full-featured student management software with the two),
+<a href="http://mcabber.com/">mcabber</a> for XMPP and
+<a href="http://www.irssi.org/">irssi</a> for IRC. For that overly
+coloured world called the WWW, I use
+<a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Iceweasel
+(Firefox)</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a> for
+e-mail.</p>
+
+<p>However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
+are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
+least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
+kids. One of these things is <a href="http://jappix.org/">Jappix</a>,
+which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
+Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
+Facebook now ;).</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
+side is what I have experienced.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
+that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
+grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
+to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
+see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
+students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
+desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
+they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
+that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
+software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
+networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
+not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
+already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
+if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
+that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
+plain criminal.</p>
+
+<p>That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
+method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
+founded an association named
+<a href="https://www.teckids.org">Teckids</a> here in Germany that does
+just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
+area of free and open source software, for example the
+<a href="http://kids.froscon.org">FrogLabs</a>, which share staff with
+Teckids and are the youth programme of
+<a href="http://www.froscon.org">the Free and Open Source Software
+Conference (FrOSCon)</a>. We do a lot more than most other conferences
+- this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
+aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
+and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
+of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
+the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
+their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
+Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
+clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
+it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
+who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
+We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
+open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
+software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
+group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
+Skolelinux in the future ;)!</p>
+
+<p>So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
+being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
+that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
+but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.</p>
+
+<!--
+
+> * Who should be interviewed with this questions in the future?
+
+That's probably the hardest question of them all, as I do not know the
+community. However, I would be willing to do the following:
+
+ <li>Run an interview with a German headteacher who is very open to
+ free software, and also prefers it, but cannot really use it because
+ of the decision makers above;
+ <li>Run interviews with some kids, both with and without previous
+ knowledge about free software
+
+If that is wanted, just let me know ;).
+
+-->
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Debian Edu interview: Klaus Knopper</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Klaus_Knopper.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 6 Dec 2013 09:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
+but the <a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu /
+Skolelinux</a> community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
+had a new school administrator show up on
+<a href="irc://irc.debian.org/#debian-edu">#debian-edu</a> to share
+his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This
+time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
+Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
+Germany a few years ago.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
+
+<p>I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical
+engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
+the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
+freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.</p>
+
+<p>All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
+from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
+projects like the <a href="http://www.knoppix.org">Knoppix GNU/Linux live
+system</a> (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
+<a href="http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-adriane/index-en.html">ADRIANE</a>
+(a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
+<a href="http://www.knopper.net/linbo/index-en.html">LINBO</a>
+(Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
+system supporting various operating systems).</p>
+
+<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
+project?</strong></p>
+
+<p>The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
+coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open
+source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
+introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.</p>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li>Quick installation,</li>
+ <li>works (almost) out of the box,</li>
+ <li>contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,</li>
+ <li>is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
+ single company,</li>
+ <li>has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
+ experience and problem solutions.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
+Edu?</strong></p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li>Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
+ the next version. Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
+ a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
+ working again reliably.
+
+ <li>Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
+ little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
+ similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
+ as their base.
+
+ <li>Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
+ configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
+ not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
+ configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
+ and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
+ network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".
+
+ <li>Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
+ contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
+ distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
+ Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
+ future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
+ schemes.</li>
+
+ <li>Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
+ compared to Debian.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
+rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
+Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
+upgradeable without reinstallation.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
+
+<p>GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
+programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
+occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
+programming languages for teaching.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
+
+<p>Strong arguments are</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
+ teaching and learning.</li>
+
+ <li>Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
+ home, and at their working place without running into license or
+ conversion problems.</li>
+
+ <li>Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
+ than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
+ customers to certain products. But teachers need to teach
+ science, not products.</li>
+
+ <li>If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
+ would you need proprietary software for?</li>
+
+</ul>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>Dugnadsnett for alle, a wireless community network in Oslo, take shape</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Dugnadsnett_for_alle__a_wireless_community_network_in_Oslo__take_shape.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 30 Nov 2013 10:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>If you want the ability to electronically communicate directly with
+your neighbors and friends using a network controlled by your peers in
+stead of centrally controlled by a few corporations, or would like to
+experiment with interesting network technology, the
+<a href="http://www.dugnadsnett.no/">Dugnasnett for alle i Oslo</a>
+might be project for you. 39 mesh nodes are currently being planned,
+in the freshly started initiative from NUUG and Hackeriet to create a
+wireless community network. The work is inspired by
+<a href="http://freifunk.net/">Freifunk</a>,
+<a href="http://www.awmn.net/">Athens Wireless Metropolitan
+Network</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet">Roofnet</a>
+and other successful mesh networks around the globe. Two days ago we
+held a workshop to try to get people started on setting up their own
+mesh node, and there we decided to create a new mailing list
+<a href="http://lists.nuug.no/mailman/listinfo/dugnadsnett">dugnadsnett
+(at) nuug.no</a> and IRC channel
+<a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#dugnadsnett.no">#dugnadsnett.no</a> to
+coordinate the work. See also the NUUG blog post
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/news/E_postliste_og_IRC_kanal_for_Dugnadsnett_for_alle_i_Oslo.shtml">announcing
+the mailing list and IRC channel</a>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>New chrpath release 0.15</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/New_chrpath_release_0_15.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>After many years break from the package and a vain hope that
+development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my
+acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath,
+the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already
+compiled ELF programs. The update was triggered by the persistence of
+Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get
+support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he
+is working on. I checked the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/chrpath">Debian</a>,
+<a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chrpath">Ubuntu</a> and
+<a href="https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/chrpath">Fedora</a>
+packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from
+OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes.
+These are the release notes:</p>
+
+<p>New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+ <li>Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work
+ with newer architectures. Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads
+ up.</li>
+
+ <li>Updated README with current URLs.</li>
+
+ <li>Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and
+ Matthias Klose.</li>
+
+ <li>Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by
+ Petr Machata found in Fedora.</li>
+
+ <li>Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in
+ .dynamic is a NULL terminated string. Based on patch found in
+ Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>You can
+<a href="https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31052">download the
+new version 0.15 from alioth</a>. Please let us know via the Alioth
+project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite
+did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also
+include a testsuite check.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
+ <item>
+ <title>All drones should be radio marked with what they do and who they belong to</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/All_drones_should_be_radio_marked_with_what_they_do_and_who_they_belong_to.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Thu, 21 Nov 2013 15:40:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>Drones, flying robots, are getting more and more popular. The most
+know ones are the killer drones used by some government to murder
+people they do not like without giving them the chance of a fair
+trial, but the technology have many good uses too, from mapping and
+forest maintenance to photography and search and rescue. I am sure it
+is just a question of time before "bad drones" are in the hands of
+private enterprises and not only state criminals but petty criminals
+too. The drone technology is very useful and very dangerous. To have
+some control over the use of drones, I agree with Daniel Suarez in his
+TED talk
+"<a href="https://archive.org/details/DanielSuarez_2013G">The kill
+decision shouldn't belong to a robot</a>", where he suggested this
+little gem to keep the good while limiting the bad use of drones:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed
+I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement
+through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on
+aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to
+download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous
+vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and
+historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones
+to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their
+own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their
+presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic
+drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.</p>
+
+<p>But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It
+would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles
+and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The key is that <em>every citizen</em> should be able to read the
+radio beacons sent from the drones in the area, to be able to check
+both the government and others use of drones. For such control to be
+effective, everyone must be able to do it. What should such beacon
+contain? At least formal owner, purpose, contact information and GPS
+location. Probably also the origin and target position of the current
+flight. And perhaps some registration number to be able to look up
+the drone in a central database tracking their movement. Robots
+should not have privacy. It is people who need privacy.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff