Older blog entries for joey (starting at number 540)

license monads

This could have been a blog post about toothbrushes for monkeys, which I seem to have dreamed about this morning. But then I was vaguely listening to the FAIFCast in the car, and I came up with something even more esoteric to write about!

License monads would allow separating parts of code that are under different licenses, in a rigorous fashion. For example, we might have two functions in different license monads:

foo :: String -> GPL String

bar :: Char -> BSD Char

Perhaps foo needs to use bar to calculate its value. It can only do so if there's a way to lift code in the BSD monad into the GPL monad. Which we can legally write, since the BSD license is upwards-compatable with the GPL:

liftGPL :: BSD a -> GPL a

On the other hand, there should be no way provided to lift the GPL monad into the BSD monad. So bar cannot be written using code from foo, which would violate foo's GPL license.

Perhaps the reason I am thinking about this is that the other day I found myself refactoring some code out of the git-annex webapp (which is AGPL) licensed and into the git-annex assistant (which is GPL licensed). Which meant I had to relicense that code.

Luckily that was easy to do legally speaking, since I am the only author of the git-annex webapp so far, and own the whole license of it. (Actually, it's only around 3 thousand lines of code, and another thousand of html.)

It also turned out to be easy to do the refactoring, technically speaking because looking at the code, I realized I had accidentially written it in the wrong monad; all the functions were in the webapp's Handler monad, but all of them used liftAnnex to actually do their work in the Annex monad. If that had not been the case, I would not have been able to refactor the code, at least not without entirely rewriting it.

It's as if I had accidentially written:

foo :: String -> GPL String
foo = mapM (liftGPL . bar)

Which can be generalized to:

foo :: String -> BSD String
foo = mapM bar

I don't think that license monads can be realistically used in the current world, because lawyers and math often don't mix well. Lawyers have, after all, in the past written laws re-defining pi to be 3. Still, license monads are an interesting way to think about things for myself. They capture how my code and licenses are structured and allow me to reason about it on a more granular level than the licences of individual files.

(I have a vague feeling someone else may have written about this idea before? Perhaps I should have been blogging about monkey toothbrushes after all...)

Syndicated 2013-10-30 15:17:57 from see shy jo

insured

Here in the US, the Affordable Care Act is finally going into effect, with accompanying drama. I managed to get signed up today at healthcare.gov. After not having health insurance since 2000, I will finally be covered starting January 1 2014.

Since my income is mosty publically known anyway, I thought it might be helpful to blog about some details.

I was uninsured for 14 years due to a combination of three factors:

  1. Initially, youthful stupidity and/or a perfectly resonable cost/benefit analysis. (Take your pick.)
  2. Due to the US health insurance system being obviously broken, and my preference to avoid things that are broken. Especially when the breakage involved insurers refusing to cover me at any sane level due to a minor and easily controlled pre-existing condition.
  3. Since I'm not much motivated by income levels, and am very motivated to have time to work on things that are important to me, my income has been on average pretty low, and perhaps more importantly, I have intentionally avoided being a full-time employee of anyone at any point in the past 14 years (have rejected job offers), and so was not eligible for any employee plans which were the only reasonable way to be covered in the US. (See point #2.)

So, if you're stuck waiting in line on healthcare.gov (is this an entirely new online experience brought to us by the US government?), or have seen any of the dozen or so failure modes that I saw just trying to register for a login to the site, yeah, it's massively overloaded right now, and it's also quite broken on a number of technical levels. But you can eventually get though it.

Based on some of the bugs I saw, it may help to have an large number of email addresses and use a different one for each application attempt. It also wouldn't hurt to write some programs to automate the attempts, because otherwise you may have to fill out the same form dozens of times. And no, you can't use "you+foo@bar.com" for your email; despite funding the development of RFC-822 in the 80's, the US government is clueless about what consititutes a valid email address.

But my "favorite" misfeature of the site is that it refuses to let you enter any accented characters, or characters not in the latin alphabet when signing up. Even if they're, you know, part of your name. (Welcome back to Ellis Island..) I want to check the git repository to see if I can find the backstory for these and other interesting technical decisions, but they have forgotten to push anything to it for over 3 months.

The good news is that once you get past the initial signup process, and assuming you get the confirmation mail before the really short expiration period of apparently less than 1 hour (another interesting technical choice, given things like greylisting), the actual exchange is not badly overloaded, and nor is it very buggy (comparatively). I was able to complete an application in about an hour.

The irony is that after all that, I was only able to choose from one health insurer covering my area on the so-called "exchange". (Blue Cross/Blue Shield) I also signed up for dental insurance (it was a welcome surprise that the site offers this at all) and had a choice of two insurers for that.

The application process was made more uncertian for me since I have no idea what I'll end up doing for money once my current crowdsourced year of work is done. The site wants you to know how much income you'll have in 2014, and my guess is anywhere between $6000 (from a rental property) and about what I made this year (approx $25000 before taxes). Or up, if I say, answered the Google pings. The best choice seemed to be to answer what I made this year, which is also close to what I made last year.

So, I'll be paying around $200/month for a combination of not very good health insurance, and not very good dental insurance. There is around $750/year of financial aid to people at my guesstimated 2014 income level, which would drop that to $140/month, but I will let them refund me whatever that turns out to be in a lump sum later instead.

For comparison, I am lucky to spend rather less renting a three bedroom house situated in 25 acres of woods..

It's strange to think that all of this is an improvement to the system here in the US, especially given all the better options that could have been passed instead, but it seems that it probably is. Especially when I consider the many people around me who are less fortunate than myself. If you'd like a broader perspective on this, see Tobias Buckell's "American healthcare was already socialized by Reagan, we’re just fighting about how to pay for it".

Syndicated 2013-10-02 22:33:10 from see shy jo

a special announcement from RMS

A little grep has told me that RMS is going to announce something special on olduse.net in two weeks time, on 27 September 1983. Best not to speculate about the details, but this announcement will be something people are still talking about thirty years later. So it's an event you and your news reader won't want to miss.

I have set up an IRC channel #olduse.net on FreeNode, and we'll see who first spots the post!

Syndicated 2013-09-13 23:21:41 from see shy jo

a rope ladder to the dgit treehouse

Ian has said something along the lines of dgit being a private club; if you're not in the club the strange git-centric views of its members don't affect you. With that said, dgit is now a quite usable and nice tool and we would like more people in the club.

To that end, here's one way to get into our little world where the Debian source repository is really a collection of git repositories. I recently made a new package and added it to Debian, and here is every command I typed to do it (other than vim, lintian, and dpkg -i). As you read through, notice that every command has to do with git in one way or another.

git clone https://github.com/blake2-ppc/git-remote-gcrypt

This software makes git be able to push to encrypted git remotes. Very neat stuff.

git archive --format=tar origin/master -o | gzip > ../git-remote-gcrypt_0.20130908.orig.tar.gz

Like most software on github, this one has no upstream tarball; its git repository is its native source format. Needing to manually generate this tarball appendix is the only unpleasant part of the process.

git add debian
git commit -m debianization

Had to write 48 lines of control file and stuff to make the package build.

dgit build -tc

This just runs dpkg-buildpackage. But you need to commit all files before running it.

dgit push --new

The --new is needed because this is a new package. This created the git repository for the package on alioth and pushed my changes and the upstream history to it, as well as uploadng the package to incoming.

Syndicated 2013-09-09 00:33:24 from see shy jo

best DebConf ever

For me, DebConf13 in Switzerland was a perfect DebConf, and generally an great developer meeting and conference. I've attended several past DebConfs in Canada, Norway, Brazil, Finland, Mexico, Scotland, Spain, NYC, Bosnia, and Nicaragua. I have special memories of each. DebConf13 was ideal in every way.

Let's start with the camping. Only a minority of us did it, and my campsite was located in a small field behind a bar that was often noisy late into the night, when I was trying to rest and preserve my European jetlag remedy of inverted sleeping schedule. Still, I love sleeping cocooned in a tent, and going through the routines of camping and spending time alone there was a good counterpoint to DebConf. I generally find myself retreating for a day or two in the middle of a week-long conference, burnt out with social interactions. That didn't happen this time. I need to find way to camp at future DebConfs.

(Also special shout out to wonderful people who lent me a warmer sleeping bag, and bought me a pillow while on a trip to town! Upgraded my first backpacking in Europe experience's comfort level a lot!)

The next perfect thing for me were the talks I gave at DebConf. I always enjoy presenting at DebConf, and barely remember when I'd get nervous doing it. But I really felt comfortable giving these talks in a way I've not before. I'm pleased with how the Debian Cosmology talk turned out; I'd worried it would be a downer talk, or too light, or not well received, and none of those problems surfaced.

I was especially happy with my dh_busfactor session, which I prepared for all of 10 minutes and was structured entirely to benefit me by talking over my thoughts and getting feedback, and in which I probably drove the camerapeople crazy running my own mic into the audience. Despite all that, I think it succeeded being interesting for the participants as well as for me. Hope to follow up on it soon..

But beyond the two talks I submitted, there were a series of ad-hoc scheduled talks. It seemed that every day I spent at least an hour discussing something I'm deeply involved in. This started with the Ikiwiki bof, and then there was an epic series of (unrecorded) BoFs about git stuff, which basically turned into an unofficial git track at DebConf. Much, much discussion of git-annex and other things I'm involved in.

BTW, I really like that DebConf, as well as being a formal conference on top, is really an un-conference underneath, with new BoFs and things popping up on the schedule all week long. You can even have completely unscheduled meetings that somehow get just the right mix of people to make something awesome happen.

But it wasn't all about talks. Indeed, I only attended 2 or 3 sessions a day. The DebConf13 venue was controversial, but I found it excellent for getting things done. Rather than one or two massive rooms that get too noisy to think in, this venue had many little nooks and crannies suited for different types of work. There were so many I only discovered some while walking down the hill as I was leaving the venue! Anchoring it all was the excellent view, and I particularly enjoyed the "scenic hacklab".

I was particularly impressed with the flexability of the venue's management. Someone asked if we could have cheese for breakfast, and every breakfast thereafter had not one but often three excellent cheeses. One day we'd be complaining that there were not enough vegetables in the food, and the next we'd be eating an excellent vegetarian Swiss lunch. They even apparently relaxed stringent Swiss rules on not allowing tents in sightlines visible from people further up the hill. They were clearly happy to welcome our crazy gathering to Le Camp. They let a DD borrow and use a chain saw and build a bonfire!

The venue also encouraged getting out and exploring the surrounding countryside. Too often I end up spending the whole DebConf without seeing much of the area around. This time I at least got down the hill to see the castle in Vaumarcus a few times, and enjoyed many evening walks amoung the grape fields. The conference dinner (on a boat!) tied into this well too. And the daytrip to CERN was a great addition. We got to poke around the control center for a massive particle accellerator! My only regret is we didn't get a chance to actually go inside the LHC tunnels.

Back to DebConf, another thing I really liked about this one was that its location allowed several upstream authors of software in Debian (other than the usual suspects who are both upstreams and Debian Developers) to attend. I don't know if Lennart Poettering changed any minds about systemd with his talk, but I was happy for the opportunity to buy him a beer. I didn't get to Monty's talk, but it was excellent to see him attend as well.

Finally, I got to meet old friends I'd not seen in years, and new ones I've not met in real life before. We're still not sure where this whole DebConf thing is going -- will it be all about the cheese and wine party and greybeards in 20 years time? But one thing we know is we enjoy our little slice of the year where kilts and coding are equally unremarkable, where problems that seem intractable online somehow solve themselves in person, where we come away with ideas for an entire year and memories for a lifetime.

Syndicated 2013-08-30 21:53:10 from see shy jo

southern fried science fiction with plum sauce

Had an afternoon of steak and science fiction. Elysium is only so-so, but look what we found in a bookstore that was half religious materials and half SF, local books, and carefully hidden romance novels:

Star Wars, Star Trek and the 21st Century Christians

Best part was at the end, when I finally found one of the local asian markets Tomoko tells us about when she casually pulls out the good stuff at family gatherings. I will be back for whole ducks, fresh fish, squid, 50 lb bags of rice, tamarind paste, fresh ginger that has not sat on the shelf for 2 months because only I buy it, etc. Only an hour from home in the woods! Between the garlic sprouts, bean sprouts, enoki mushrooms, etc that I got for $10 today and this week's CSA surprise of 18 inch snake beans and smoked pork knuckles, I have the epic stir fry potential..

Spock and R2D2

Syndicated 2013-08-25 22:25:16 from see shy jo

idea: git push requests

This is an idea that Keith Packard told me. It's a brilliant way to reduce GitHub's growing lockin, but I don't know how to implement it. And I almost forgot about it, until I had another annoying "how do I send you a patch with this amazing git technology?" experience and woke up with my memory refreshed.

The idea is to allow anyone to git push to any anonymous git:// repository. But the objects pushed are not stored in a public part of the repository (which could be abused). Instead the receiving repository emails them off to the repository owner, in a git-am-able format.

So this is like a github pull request except it can be made on any git repository, and you don't have to go look up the obfuscated contact email address and jump through git-format-patch hoops to make it. You just commit changes to your local repository, and git push to wherever you cloned from in the first place. If the push succeeds, you know your patch is on its way for review.

Keith may have also wanted to store the objects in the repository in some way that a simple git command run there could apply them without the git-am bother on the receiving end. I forget. I think git-am would be good enough -- and including the actual diffs in the email would actually make this far superior to github pull request emails, which are maximally annoying by not doing so.


Hmm, I said I didn't know how to implement this, but I do know one way. Make the git-daemon run an arbitrary script when receiving a push request. A daemon.pushscript config setting could enable this.

The script could be something like this:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
tmprepo="$(mktemp -d)"
# this shared clone is *really* fast even for huge repositories, and uses
# only a few 100 kb of disk space!
git clone --shared --bare "$GIT_DIR" "$tmprepo"
git-receive-pack "$tmprepo"
# XXX add email sending code here.
rm -rf "$tmprepo"

Of course, this functionality could be built into the git-daemon too. I suspect a script hook and an example script in contrib/ might be an easier patch to get accepted into git though.

That may be as far as I take this idea, at least for now..

Syndicated 2013-08-25 13:07:32 from see shy jo

experimental multiuser git-annex repository

On the last day of DebConf 13, RichiH and Ganneff and I set up a git-annex repository that all Debian developers have automatic commit access to, and everyone can clone and browse. See the announcement email.

This is an interesting repository for me for several reasons. Selfishly, I have always wanted an easy way to download lots of DebConf photos for offline viewing, and never seem to get around to downloading everything from gallery.debconf.org when I have bandwidth. I've also wanted an example repository that shows how git-annex can be used by a large group for collaboration. Finally, the way this repository is set up with an incoming queue is fairly unique.

With 430 files in the repository, totaling over 3.5 gigabytes (which doesn't include all the talk videos that are #included into it), and at least 18 people having cloned the repository so far, the debconf-share repository is well on its way to being a sort of large git-annex repository.

Just running git annex whereis is interesting; many of the files already have 8 copies. Some talk videos are more popular than others and you can see when they're downloaded too. But enough snooping.. ;)

So far people have uploaded mostly photos and talk slides. Other places exist to store those things in the DebConf infrastructure, but it's nice to have them all available in one tree. I particularly like today's addition of chrysn's files which include the raw photos and hugin files used to produce panoramas, and then pull those together into a postcard which has all its sources available.

In my corner of the debconf-share repository, I'm collecting together files regarding the possibly-historic dpkg-source-git-re-re-redesign process that would have otherwise been scattered around various places and probably not all published. This includes an hour long recording of the main design session (recorded with permissions) made by my laptop's mic, which, surprisingly, turned out to be pretty listenable. I will probably have more to say about this process later, once Ian announces dgit.

So, we're still seeing how usage develops. I hope that having this available during the next DebConf, and other Debian meetings, rather than only at the end, will further facilitate file sharing and storage. Especially if a fast clone is available right on the DebConf LAN. ;)


The technical details of how the repository is put together are:

  • There's a repository on git.debian.org, which piggy-backs on the collab-maint group, so most Debian people have commit access to it.
  • git-annex is used to upload files to that repository, as an incoming queue.
  • A git-annex-shell annex-content hook is run whenever someone uploads a file to there. It moves all annexed content over to annex.debconf.org for publication. This involves some ugly but safe stuff to do with publically readable restricted use ssh private keys. It was the hardest piece to get working, and is only necessary because we don't want to bloat git.debian.org with this stuff and it's not practical to give everyone logins to annex.debconf.org.
  • As an additional guard against accidental bloat, the git.debian.org repository will refuse to accept uploads when there is less than 5 gb free disk.
  • annex.debconf.org was set up following the git-annex public repository on a web site howto.

I've found at least 4 bugs in git-annex as a result of this repository, which is a rather unusual use case. And fixed 2 of them so far..

Syndicated 2013-08-21 20:20:18 from see shy jo

Debian at 20

RichiH used flint and steel to light the bonfire. We carefully fed it up from those sparks to a blaze. Put on the biggest logs we could find to make it last. Now I'm sitting on the hill above it watching folks gathered around. A poem is being read, in Hindi, then translated for us to English. Others have shared songs and poems in a dozen languages, both classics and their own. Out below the darkness of the lake. This is Debian at 20.

At the start of this DebConf, I gave a talk on "Debian Cosmology. In that (and a later "dh_busfactor" talk) I shared my hopes and my fears. I was conflicted about giving the this talk, worked on it for weeks, felt it might not work, or be depressing. I've had nothing but good comments about it.

20 years is ages in internet time and technical projects ossify over time. The last session I was in this afternoon was a presentation of a new tool, which I hope & feel has the potential to fundamentally change an important and suboptimal part of Debian. Then I walked outside to a rainbow over crystal clear Swiss alps on the horizon. How encouraging, and what a nice story that will be around some future campfire.

Syndicated 2013-08-16 22:16:42 from see shy jo

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