This show has a counter point show hpr3316 :: FSF and RMS on election of Richard Stallman

Warning This show contains information that may not be suitable for all. Listener discretion is advised.

Recently Richard M. Stallman, announced that he has rejoined the Free Software Foundation’s board of directors. An open letter on github called for him to be removed again, and for the FSF’s entire board to resign.

When he resigned in 2019, Bradley M. Kuhn (from the Free as in Freedom podcast) wrote an article titled "On Recent Controversial Events" about the issue. I am submitting that article here under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. The post contains many links and is available in the shownotes for this show. Some examples are included at the end of the blog post, and listener discretion is advised.

On Recent Controversial Events

Tuesday 15 October 2019 by Bradley M. Kuhn

The last 33 days have been unprecedentedly difficult for the software freedom community and for me personally. Folks have been emailing, phoning, texting, tagging me on social media (— the last of which has been funny, because all my social media accounts are placeholder accounts). But, just about everyone has urged me to comment on the serious issues that the software freedom community now faces. Until now, I have stayed silent regarding all these current topics: from Richard M. Stallman (RMS)’s public statements, to his resignation from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), to the Epstein scandal and its connection to MIT. I’ve also avoided generally commenting on software freedom organizational governance during this period. I did this for good reason, which is explained below. However, in this blog post, I now share my primary comments on the matters that seem to currently be of the utmost attention of the Open Source and Free Software communities.

I have been silent the last month because, until two days ago, I was an at-large member of FSF’s Board of Directors, and a Voting Member of the FSF. As a member of FSF’s two leadership bodies, I was abiding by a reasonable request from the FSF management and my duty to the organization. Specifically, the FSF asked that all communication during the crisis come directly from FSF officers and not from at-large directors and/or Voting Members. Furthermore, the FSF management asked all Directors and Voting Members to remain silent on this entire matter — even on issues only tangentially related to the current situation, and even when speaking in our own capacity (e.g., on our own blogs like this one). The FSF is an important organization, and I take any request from the FSF seriously — so I abided fully with their request.

The situation was further complicated because folks at my employer, Software Freedom Conservancy (where I also serve on the Board of Directors) had strong opinions about this matter as well. Fortunately, the FSF and Conservancy both had already created clear protocols for what I should do if ever there was a disagreement or divergence of views between Conservancy and FSF. I therefore was recused fully from the planning, drafting, and timing of Conservancy’s statement on this matter. I thank my colleagues at the Conservancy for working so caref

One of the key tools in GIMP is Layer Masks, which allow you to make selected parts of a layer transparent, so that lower layers can come through. This is a way to get the same kinds of effects you would get with physical transparency sheets or animation gels.

Links:

https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

https://snappygoat.com/

https://snappygoat.com/s/?q=flowerscloseup#eda72d0e7eedc238eed8f7acffc515dba94ce64c,1,342

https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-support-any-kind-of-non-destructive-editing-like-adjustment-layers-layer-filters-andor-full-blown-node-based-editing

https://www.ahuka.com/gimp/layer-masks/

In this episode, our two heroes explore the realm of the great uncertainties also known as probabilistic data structures. For this adventures they managed to retain one of the experts in this field from the open source realm. Check out the episode to get in on this secret and its details!

Links:

Probabilistic data structures (PDS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Probabilistic_data_structures

Hash functions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function

Bloom / cuckoo filters: https://bdupras.github.io/filter-tutorial

Scalable Bloom filter: https://www.waitingforcode.com/big-data-algorithms/scalable-bloom-filter/read

redis module: https://oss.redislabs.com/redisbloom

HyperLogLog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog

PDS Foundation: https://www.amazon.de/Probabilistic-Data-Structures-Algorithms-Applications/dp/3748190484

Thunder bird, the wonderful email client. I share how I use and enjoy the Thunderbird email client.

use `hpr391` as the subject for all emails. If not, junk filter.

Create a new worktree

$ git branch | tee

* dev

trunk

$ git worktree add -b hotfix ~/demo/penguin.tree trunk

Preparing ../penguin.tree (identifier penguin.tree)

HEAD is now at 62a2daf commit

List existing worktrees

$ git worktree list

/home/tux/demo/penguin.git 15fca84 [dev]

/home/tux/demo/penguin.tree 09e585d [trunk]

Move a worktree

$ git worktree move penguin.tree ~/Temp

Remove a worktree

$ git worktree remove penguin.tree

table td.shrink {

white-space:nowrap

}

New hosts

Welcome to our new host:

timttmy.

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I did not get any feed back on my first nagios episode, so I can only assume that I perfectly explained what nagios is. And my installation instructions were so good, that no one had any questions. So I will move on to some additional nagios topics.

Why use nagios

One thing I meant to talk about but forgot in the intro is why you may want to run nagios as a hobbyist.

Education, learning a new technology for fun

Network Monitoring is a valuable skill and benefit your career if you work in IT

Early warning for failing hardware

Monitoring self hosted applications

Notification for home security devices IP cameras

Most of the benefits of nagios are not specific to nagios. There are plenty of other options for monitoring, and all of them are worth exploring.

Notification Options

Email

I had planned on discussing how to set up postfix to send emails. But, that is such a big topic I will have to skip it. I will instead talk about what I do to send email. And Maybe you can do something similar.

Spammers have ruined the ability to directly send email. Most residential ISPs block port 25 outbound to prevent malware from sending email. Some Virtual hosting providers may not block sending mail, but many mail servers will not accept mail from VPS IP ranges.

There are a few ways to get around this problem. I use the email delivery service Sendgrid. They do all the work of staying off the list of spammers, and most email providers trust mail send via Sendgrid.

I wont go into the instructions for configuring postfix to relay outgoing mail via Sendgrid, but their documentation is easy to follow.

There are plenty of services like sendgrid. And most have a free tier. So unless you are blasting out alerts you probably will not have to pay. If you want to send alerts from nagios via email, I recommend finding a email sending service that works for you.

Push alerts

There are a few options (besides email) for getting alerts on your phone.

aNag

The easiest way to get alerts is probably the aNag Android app. aNag connects to the nagios UI to get status updates. It can be configured to check in periodically and there generate notifications for failed checks.

One downside to aNag is the phone has to be able to connect to the nagios server. So, if nagios is on a private network, you will need a VPN when you are not on the same network.

If you decide to put nagios on a public network, be sure to configure apache to only use HTTPS. certbot makes this really easy.

Pushover

Another option is to us a Push Notification service that can send notifications that are triggered by API calls.

I like to use the pushover.net You pay $5 when you download the pushover app from the app store, and then notifications are sent for free. They offer a 30 day trial if you want to evaluate the service.

To use pushover, we will add a new contact to nagios. The command for the pushover contact is a script that calls the pushover API via curl.

Remember from the previous episode, nagios has a conf.d directory and will load any files in that directory. So we will create a new file /etc/nagios4/conf.d/pushover.cfg and restart nagios. The contents of the pushover file will be in the show notes.

To use pushover for specific checks, and the contact to that check. See the example in the show notes. Or if you want to use pushover for everything Modify the definitions for the host and service templates to use pushover as a contact

The script that calls the Pushover API is at https://github.com/jedda/OSX-Monitoring-Tools/blob/master/notify_by_pushover.sh Save a

Introduction

After many years of confusion it has been decided to produce a common standard for dates and times between Europe and the United States of America.

When encountering a USA date such as 03/14/2021 (known as Pi Day in the USA) there has been ambiguity over which part of the date is the day and which the month. There can also be confusion as to the year if the two-digit form is used.

Standardisation is a way in which these sorts of ambiguities can be resolved. Having a common method of representation avoids confusion.

Therefore, starting in 2021, in the spirit of clarity and prevention of misunderstanding, the EU has decided to standardise on compatible formats wherever possible.

Dates

Henceforward dates will be represented in one of the following forms:

MM/DD/YY month/day of month/two-digit year

YY/DD/MM two-digit year/day of month/month

Thus, 21/14/03 or 03/14/21 will be universally recognised as Pi Day.

Times

The break from the previous tyranny of large|medium|small or small|medium|large formats has been extended to 24-hour time representations.

Henceforward 24-hour times will be represented in one of the following forms:

SS:HH:MM seconds:hours:minutes

MM:HH:SS minutes:hours:seconds

Support

Bash already introduced support last year. You will need to update to Ubuntu Falex to get the latest version.

Future plans

The Standardisation Working Group will be planning other measures.

Forthcoming rationalisations will be:

Weights and Measures:

Discrepancies such as the US pint (16 fluid ounces) versus the British pint (20 fluid ounces)

Temperature:

Fahrenheit versus Centigrade, replaced by the new Eurotemp which straddles both ranges. The choice might be the Rankine scale (°R), but this has yet to be decided.

a little history

slackware on arm started by stuart winter in 2002

became an official port of slackware in 2009

lots of info at the video podcast on youtube

why choose slackware

can do minimal installs easy

education

stable and secure

who should avoid slackware

unwilling or unable to read and follow directions

if you think your leet when you use apt instead of apt-get

if you think commands like dd are 'scary'

howto

there is no official port of slackware arm to raspberrypi

i think this is because of raspberrypi has a non standard way of booting compared to most arm devices

community has stepped in

on the slackware documentation project website there are 'manual' install projects

took a while, had to download firmware from the raspberrypi project itself

quite a bit of cleanup

this is the guide if you want slackware on a pi-zero

link to the sarpi project

guy named phil project lead, started in 2012

the sarpi project is also a manual process

even if you don't do this you should look at the website content, this is the way to do a tutorial

after you download the sources this install is exactly like any other slackware install

when you get to the package selection its easy to customize

after install

you have a complete development environment

be prepared to up your search foo

many packages can be built from slackbuilds

The only mistakes you can't learn from are, your own fatal mistakes

Links

http://arm.slackware.com/

https://sarpi.fatdog.eu/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCabC1NZDGA3FZXf2hQ-6uyA/featured

http://docs.slackware.com/howtos:hardware:arm:start

https://slackbuilds.org

First I go to the Language Support window. Either search (press Super/Windows, then type) for

"Language Support" and go there directly, or search for "Region & Language", go there, then click

"Manage Installed Languages".

There I click Install / Remove Languages ..., check the Chinese I want, then click Apply.

Then I add the packages for the input methods I want, either using the command line (apt install)

or the Ubuntu Software application:

Chinese Quick: ibus-table-quick-classic

Chinese Pinyin: ibus-libpinyin

Chinese (Cantonese) Jyutping: ibus-table-jyutping

Bonus input method:

Unicode emoji: ibus-typing-booster

Now for each user that wants an input method, I search for and go to Region & Language. At the

bottom of the Input Sources section I click the plus button. The different input methods are found

by clicking down into different sublists. Click the right choice, then Add:

Chinese Quick: Chinese -> Chinese (QuickClassic)

Chinese Pinyin: ⋮ -> Other -> Chinese (Intelligent Pinyin)

Chinese (Cantonese) Jyutping: Chinese -> Chinese (Jyutping)

Unicode emoji: ⋮ -> Other -> Other (Typing Booster)

EurKEY: English (United States) -> EurKEY (US based layout with European letters)

The EurKEY layout is part of the standard English language support in Ubuntu.

Finally, to enable unicode color emoji as completion suggestions, switch to the Typing Booster mode

by pressing Super/Windows+Space repeatedly until you see the rocket in your notification area. Click

the rocket -> Unicode symbols and emoji predictions -> On.

I owe you a followup episode once I figure out how to make this work for Guix applications running

inside Ubuntu.

This episode was based on a Fediverse thread:https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-6760-517c-52c9-654926232346

References for your further study:

IBus is an input method protocol for the

GNU/Linux desktop. Other protocols supported are XIM,

SCIM,

fcitx and uim. You

have to choose one of these to use for all your input methods, but the most common input methods

exist at least for IBus and the first three of the rest, so this is not as much a limitation as

it sounds like.

Quick is a simplification of the

Cangjie input method. Cangjie assigns

radicals, character components, to 24 keys on the alphabetic keyboard, and you combine these into

a character. In Quick you combine two and then choose a completion from a list.

Pinyin is a romanization, a Latin alphabetic spelling,

for Standard Chinese (Mandarin).

Jyutping is one of

many

romanizations

for

Cantonese.