Gentoo at FOSDEM 2016

Gentoo Linux was present at this year's Free and Open Source Developer European Meeting (FOSDEM). For those not familiar with FOSDEM it is a conference that consists of more than 5,000 developers and more than 600 presentations over a two-day span at the premises of the Université libre de Bruxelles. The presentations are both streamed directly and recorded making it available to browse the archive once published.

Hanno Böck, a name mostly heard in relation to the fuzzing project, was the only Gentoo Developer presenting a talk this year on the very important subject of security and how Gentoo can be used as a framework for running Address Sanitizer to detect security bugs: "Can we run C code and be safe?: A Linux system protected with Address Sanitizer".

For the first time in many years Gentoo had a stand this year where we handed out buttons and stickers in addition to a LiveDVD.

Gentoo Boot

The Gentoo Ten team created a hybrid amd64/x86 "FOSDEM 2016 Special Edition" release for our user's benefit (thanks likewhoa!), and 200 DVDs were printed of which 155 were already distributed to potential users by the end of day one. A posters on the stand succinctly listed all the packages included on the LiveDVD with some highlights of packages more familiar to some users, something that also highlights one of the benefits of rolling release distributions in that the versions are up to date with upstream releases.

Gentoo DVD package list

If the LiveDVD is used on USB instead of the handed out DVDs it also offers the option of using persistence to store changes on the USB. It uses aufs to layer a read-write file system on top of a read-only squashfs compressed file system. This is great, because it allows you to make changes to the livedvd and have those changes appear on future reboots.

As mentioned in a blog post by dilfridge the stand also attracted attention due to a comment involving Gentoo Linux by Lennart Poettering in his keynote speech as a distribution that doesn't use systemd by default. This fit nicely with one of our banners at the stand; "Gentoo Linux | Works even without systemd | choice included".

gentoo-choice

There was a lot of positive feedback from various users and the stand functioned very nicely as a meeting place for the various people and the atmosphere was good throughout the conference.

10 fosdem-booth

As has become a tradition there was also a Gentoo dinner again this year amongst developers and users (thanks xaviermiller), a nice way to meet up and discuss everything in a relaxing setting.

Email: Are you writing emails in a proper etiquette?

Most of us use email rather frequently, however how email is used varies substantially across groups of people. The differences are especially noticeable when it comes to etiquette of quotation and threading of email, that in particular becomes important as the volume of information increase in order to keep track of the various threads.

Some groups are inherently better than others, and some email clients encourage better practices than others, but in the end it all comes down to the user choices being made. Not surprisingly, developers tend to have a better grasp at email etiquette, but what can we learn from this?

HTML emails:

Lets start off with HTML emails. I mean, seriously, disable this at once. Email should be text only, and if that isn't sufficient it likely should be an external reference or an attachment. HTML emails doesn't provide any obvious advantage over text email, but has many downsides, in particular external loading of resources leading to privacy issues and possibility to execute script files leading to security vulnerabilities. Having HTML, in particular in combination with scripting, or allowing external resource loading is as such only negative, not to mention you can't really work and compose a response offline.

If using HTML for the purpose of text formatting there exists common practices for styling plain text emails that removes most of the need for it. The following are a few of the tricks for bold, underlined and italic text that will have effect in sane email clients.

  • *bold text* , the asterisk will be treated to indicate bold
  • _underlined text_ , the underscore character on both sides of the text will be used throught the client
  • /italic text/ , slashes are useful too

bold_underline_italic

Proper quotation

So, once you start writing proper emails in plain text only, the question of quotation comes to mind. Do you ever top-post? if so, why would you do such a silly thing? Wikipedia has some more information on this quoting style, but I prefer to keep to the basic:

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Reading in the opposite order does something funky with your brain, doesn't it? Why do you want your readers to suffer like that in order to try to get a context of a conversation, in particular if this is one of 100 different threads they are actually following?

Continuing form that; quotes should be properly nested using the ">" character. That is how it has been done for several decades, and newcomers to email not following the practice are just an annoyance. Proper email clients will interpret this and display it accordingly:

quotation

On that same note, remove information that isn't relevant when responding to an email, reading through non-related information just increases the workload of everyone of your recipient, so just... don't, the few seconds more it takes you to clear out the information that isn't related results in a N times amplification of savings for the readers depending on the number of people involved (and the times the email is accessed).

Threading

Etiquette also comes into mind with regards to threading. In some mailing lists this becomes vital in order to follow the discussion, and if someone is using an email client (such as Google's  Android standard email client that doesn't support In-Reply-To and References). A user that posts a message that breaks the thread can reasonable expect to be cursed upon and told to get a proper email client.

threading

A sub-topic of proper threading is, if you during the course of the discussion create a sub-thread that actually focus on something different from the initial one, for crying out loud, change the subject of the email to reflect this to make it easier to keep track of and look back in the archives.

OpenPGP signature and encryption

I've likely said enough about this topic already, but any post about emails are required to cover the need for proper authentication, integrity and confidentiality of information. So if you don't use OpenPGP / GnuPG / PGP to protect your information (and going forwards, hopefully with a Memory Hole compliant client). Well, don't expect too much positive response from me at least.

Diaspora*: A different social community model

One of the talks on 32C3 titled "A new kid on the block" talked about Diaspora* and the social networking effects required to build alternatives to existing social network structures. Now, I must admit I haven't paid too much attention to Diaspora* in the past, despite it having been around for quite a while, but now I got more curious and set up my own pod to test it a bit, with the added side benefit that I can stop using Hootsuite to publish blog posts to Twitter and Facebook as it can be integrated directly in this service.

So, what is Diaspora? The official website focus on three aspects:

  • Decentralization: Instead of everyone’s data being contained on huge central servers owned by a large organization, local servers (“pods”) can be set up anywhere in the world. You choose which pod to register with - perhaps your local pod - and seamlessly connect with the diaspora* community worldwide.
  • Freedom: You can be whoever you want to be in diaspora*. Unlike some networks, you don’t have to use your real identity. You can interact with whomever you choose in whatever way you want. The only limit is your imagination. diaspora* is also Free Software, giving you liberty to use it as you wish.
  • Privacy: In diaspora* you own your data. You do not sign over any rights to a corporation or other interest who could use it. With diaspora*, your friends, your habits, and your content is your business ... not ours! In addition, you choose who sees what you share, using Aspects.

My own Diaspora page can be seen on social.sumptuouscapital.com. Time will show whether that increase my activity on social networks in general. As participating on Diaspora requires access to a pod, if you are an acquaintance of mine and want access to sign up send me a message and I'll arrange for an invite. For others, there are plenty of publicly available pods that can be used, including those in this list.