Many of us use Python Selenium to do functional testing of our websites or web applications. We generally test against Firefox and Google Chrome browser on the desktop. But, there is also a lot of people who uses Tor Browser (from Tor Project) to browse the internet and access the web applications.

In this post we will see how can we use the Tor Browser along with Selenium for our testing.

Setting up the environment

First step is to download and verify, and then extract the Tor Browser somewhere in your system. Next, download and extract geckodriver 0.17.0 somewhere in the path. For the current series of Tor Browsers, you will need this particular version of the geckodriver.

We will use pipenv to create the Python virtualenv and also to install the dependencies.

$ mkdir tortests
$ cd tortests
$ pipenv install selenium tbselenium
$ pipenv shell

The tor-browser-selenium is Python library required for Tor Browser Selenium tests.

Example code

import unittest
from time import sleep
from tbselenium.tbdriver import TorBrowserDriver


class TestSite(unittest.TestCase):
    def setUp(self):
        # Point the path to the tor-browser_en-US directory in your system
        tbpath = '/home/kdas/.local/tbb/tor-browser_en-US/'
        self.driver = TorBrowserDriver(tbpath, tbb_logfile_path='test.log')
        self.url = "https://check.torproject.org"

    def tearDown(self):
        # We want the browser to close at the end of each test.
        self.driver.close()

    def test_available(self):
        self.driver.load_url(self.url)
        # Find the element for success
        element = self.driver.find_element_by_class_name('on')
        self.assertEqual(str.strip(element.text),
                         "Congratulations. This browser is configured to use Tor.")
        sleep(2)  # So that we can see the page


if __name__ == '__main__':
    unittest.main()

In the above example, we are connecting to the https://check.torproject.org and making sure that it informs we are connected over Tor. The tbpath variable in the setUp method contains the path to the Tor Browser in my system.

You can find many other examples in the source repository.

Please make sure that you test web application against Tor Browser, having more applications which can run smoothly on top of the Tor Browser will be a great help for the community.

PyQt is the Python binding for Qt library. To write Qt5 code, we use PyQt5 module. Like many others, my first introduction to GUI application development was using PyQt. Back in foss.in 2005 a talk from Sirtaj introduced me to PyQt, and later fall in love with it.

I tried to help in a GUI application after 8 years (I think), a lot of things have changed in between. But, Qt/PyQt still seems to be super helpful when it comes to ease of development. Qt has one of the best documentation out there for any Open Source project.

Many students start developing GUI tools by replacing one of the command line tool they use. Generally the idea is very simple, take some input in the GUI, and then process it (using a subprocess call) on a button click, and then show the output. The subprocess call happens over a simple method, means the whole GUI gets stuck till the function call finishes. We can fix this issue by using a QThread. In the below example, we will just write a frontend for git clone command and then will do the same using QThread.

Setting up project directory

I have used qt creator to create a simple MainWindow form and saved it as mainwindow.ui in the project directory. Then, used pipenv to create a virtualenv and also installed the pyqt5 module. Next, used the pyuic5 command to create a Python file from UI file.

The code does not have error checks, the subprocess documentation should give you enough details about how to add them.

Doing git clone without any thread

The following code creates a temporary directory, and then git clones any given git repository into that.

#!/usr/bin/python3

import sys
import tempfile
import subprocess
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets

from mainwindow import Ui_MainWindow


class ExampleApp(QtWidgets.QMainWindow, Ui_MainWindow):

    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(ExampleApp, self).__init__(parent)
        self.setupUi(self)
        # Here we are telling to call git_clone method when
        # someone clicks on the pushButton.
        self.pushButton.clicked.connect(self.git_clone)

    # Here is the actual method which does git clone
    def git_clone(self):
        git_url = self.lineEdit.text()  # Get the git URL
        tmpdir = tempfile.mkdtemp()  # Creates a temporary directory
        cmd = "git clone {0} {1}".format(git_url, tmpdir)
        subprocess.check_output(cmd.split())  # Execute the command
        self.textEdit.setText(tmpdir)  # Show the output to the user


def main():
    app = QtWidgets.QApplication(sys.argv)
    form = ExampleApp()
    form.show()
    app.exec_()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Doing git clone with a thread

In the below example we added a new CloneThread class, it has a run method, which gets called when the thread starts. At the end of the run, we are emitting a signal to inform the main thread that the git clone operation has finished.

#!/usr/bin/python3

import sys
import tempfile
import subprocess
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets
from PyQt5.QtCore import QThread, pyqtSignal

from mainwindow import Ui_MainWindow


class CloneThread(QThread):
    signal = pyqtSignal('PyQt_PyObject')

    def __init__(self):
        QThread.__init__(self)
        self.git_url = ""

    # run method gets called when we start the thread
    def run(self):
        tmpdir = tempfile.mkdtemp()
        cmd = "git clone {0} {1}".format(self.git_url, tmpdir)
        subprocess.check_output(cmd.split())
        # git clone done, now inform the main thread with the output
        self.signal.emit(tmpdir)


class ExampleApp(QtWidgets.QMainWindow, Ui_MainWindow):

    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(ExampleApp, self).__init__(parent)
        self.setupUi(self)
        self.pushButton.setText("Git clone with Thread")
        # Here we are telling to call git_clone method when
        # someone clicks on the pushButton.
        self.pushButton.clicked.connect(self.git_clone)
        self.git_thread = CloneThread()  # This is the thread object
        # Connect the signal from the thread to the finished method
        self.git_thread.signal.connect(self.finished)

    def git_clone(self):
        self.git_thread.git_url = self.lineEdit.text()  # Get the git URL
        self.pushButton.setEnabled(False)  # Disables the pushButton
        self.textEdit.setText("Started git clone operation.")  # Updates the UI
        self.git_thread.start()  # Finally starts the thread

    def finished(self, result):
        self.textEdit.setText("Cloned at {0}".format(result))  # Show the output to the user
        self.pushButton.setEnabled(True)  # Enable the pushButton


def main():
    app = QtWidgets.QApplication(sys.argv)
    form = ExampleApp()
    form.show()
    app.exec_()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

The example looks like the above GIF. You can find the source code here. You can find a bigger example in the journalist_gui of the SecureDrop project.

In case you missed the news, Fedora 28 is now available as a template in Qubes OS 4.0. Fedora 26 will end of life on 2018-06-01, means this is a good time for everyone to upgrade. Use the following command in your dom0 to install the template. The template is more than 1GB in size, means it will take some time to download.

$ sudo qubes-dom0-update qubes-template-fedora-28

After installation, remember to start the template, and update, and also install all the required applications there. Next step would be to use this template everywhere.

Btw, we do have the latest Python 3.6.5 in Fedora 28 :)

$ python3
Python 3.6.5 (default, Mar 29 2018, 18:20:46)
[GCC 8.0.1 20180317 (Red Hat 8.0.1-0.19)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

Can you spot what that is?

* વિનોદ ભટ્ટે ગઇકાલે એટલે કે ૨૩મી મે એ બધાંને બાય-બાય કર્યું અને ગુજરાતી હાસ્યસાહિત્યનો એક યુગ પૂરો થયો એમ કહી શકાય. વિનોદ ભટ્ટ અને બકુલ ત્રિપાઠી અને અશોક દવે – આ ત્રણ મારા માનીતા હાસ્ય લેખકો છે.

વિનોદ ભટ્ટ એક વખત અકસ્માતે મળી ગયા ત્યારે ઓળખી શક્યો નહોતો (તેઓ સેલ્સ ટેક્સ કે પછી એવા કોઇ વિભાગમાં હતા ત્યારે કોઇ નિમંત્રણ આપવા મામાના ઘરે આવેલા). પછી ખબર પડી કે તેઓ વિનોદ ભટ્ટ હતા!

હવે વિકિપીડિયામાં તેમના લેખમાં વધુ માહિતી ઉમેરીને તેમને શ્રદ્ધાંજલિ અર્પવામાં આવશે.

Seymour Papert is credited as saying that tools to support learning should have “high ceilings” and “low floors.” The phrase is meant to suggest that tools should allow learners to do complex and intellectually sophisticated things but should also be easy to begin using quickly. Mitchel Resnick extended the metaphor to argue that learning toolkits should also have “wide walls” in that they should appeal to diverse groups of learners and allow for a broad variety of creative outcomes. In a new paper, Benjamin Mako Hill and I attempted to provide the first empirical test of Resnick’s wide walls theory. Using a natural experiment in the Scratch online community, we found causal evidence that “widening walls” can, as Resnick suggested, increase both engagement and learning.

Over the last ten years, the “wide walls” design principle has been widely cited in the design of new systems. For example, Resnick and his collaborators relied heavily on the principle in the design of the Scratch programming language. Scratch allows young learners to produce not only games, but also interactive art, music videos, greetings card, stories, and much more. As part of that team, I was guided by “wide walls” principle when I designed and implemented the Scratch cloud variables system in 2011-2012.

While designing the system, I hoped to “widen walls” by supporting a broader range of ways to use variables and data structures in Scratch. Scratch cloud variables extend the affordances of the normal Scratch variable by adding persistence and shared-ness. A simple example of something possible with cloud variables, but not without them, is a global high-score leaderboard in a game (example code is below). After the system was launched, I saw many young Scratch users using the system to engage with data structures in new and incredibly creative ways.

Example of Scratch code that uses a cloud variable to keep track of high-scores among all players of a game.

Although these examples reflected powerful anecdotal evidence, I was also interested in using quantitative data to reflect the causal effect of the system. Understanding the causal effect of a new design in real world settings is a major challenge. To do so, we took advantage of a “natural experiment” and some clever techniques from econometrics to measure how learners’ behavior changed when they were given access to a wider design space.

Understanding the design of our study requires understanding a little bit about how access to the Scratch cloud variable system is granted. Although the system has been accessible to Scratch users since 2013, new Scratch users do not get access immediately. They are granted access only after a certain amount of time and activity on the website (the specific criteria are not public). Our “experiment” involved a sudden change in policy that altered the criteria for who gets access to the cloud variable feature. Through no act of their own, more than 14,000 users were given access to feature, literally overnight. We looked at these Scratch users immediately before and after the policy change to estimate the effect of access to the broader design space that cloud variables afforded.

We found that use of data-related features was, as predicted, increased by both access to and use of cloud variables. We also found that this increase was not only an effect of projects that use cloud variables themselves. In other words, learners with access to cloud variables—and especially those who had used it—were more likely to use “plain-old” data-structures in their projects as well.

The graph below visualizes the results of one of the statistical models in our paper and suggests that we would expect that 33% of projects by a prototypical “average” Scratch user would use data structures if the user in question had never used used cloud variables but that we would expect that 60% of projects by a similar user would if they had used the system.

Model-predicted probability that a project made by a prototypical Scratch user will contain data structures (w/o counting projects with cloud variables)

It is important to note that the estimated effective above is a “local average effect” among people who used the system because they were granted access by the sudden change in policy (this is a subtle but important point that we explain this in some depth in the paper). Although we urge care and skepticism in interpreting our numbers, we believe our results are encouraging evidence in support of the “wide walls” design principle.

Of course, our work is not without important limitations. Critically, we also found that rate of adoption of cloud variables was very low. Although it is hard to pinpoint the exact reason for this from the data we observed, it has been suggested that widening walls may have a potential negative side-effect of making it harder for learners to imagine what the new creative possibilities might be in the absence of targeted support and scaffolding. Also important to remember is that our study measures “wide walls” in a specific way in a specific context and that it is hard to know how well our findings will generalize to other contexts and communities. We discuss these caveats, as well as our methods, models, and theoretical background in detail in our paper which now available for download as an open-access piece from the ACM digital library.

This blog post, and the open access paper that it describes, is a collaborative project with Benjamin Mako Hill. Financial support came from the eScience Institute and the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. Quantitative analyses for this project were completed using the Hyak high performance computing cluster at the University of Washington.

Thanks.

Last week, I had an interesting meeting with Panjabi Wikimedian community and CIS-A2K team.

Panjabi wikimedia community is small in count. But each of them are contributing with their best. Many of them doing 100-days-of-wiki, personal wiki edithathon for 100 days. Few of them do in in multiple sites and many times a year.

Their interest on contribution and passion on their language is awesome.

Interacted on wikisource, wiktionary and wikipedia. Shared many ideas to improve their workflow. They are looking for many tools to automate their tasks. Those tools will be useful for all wiki communities.

Then, had some great discussions with CIS-A2K team. We spoke about many interesting project ideas.
Listing them all the ideas here.

1. List down the Top 10 tricks/hacks/must know on any wikisource project

2. Make simple tutorials on how to start contributing to wiki, in all possible languages. Still we dont have an ebook or easy starter guide in Tamil. There may be video tutorials. curate them and show them in better way to find them easily.

3. Telegram bot to proofread wikisource contents. Get a page from wikisource. split it into lines, then words. Show a word and OCRed content in a telegrambot. User should verify or type the correct spelling in telegram itself. Submit the changes to wikisource. Thus, we can make the collaborated proofreading easily.

4. Explore how to use flickr for helping photographers to donate their photos for commons. Flickr is easy for them to upload and showcase. From there, we should move the photos to commons. Few tools are already available. Explore them and train them for photographers.

5. We should celebrate the volunteers who contribute to wiki. By events, news announcements, interviews etc. CIS may explore this.

6. Web application for OCR4WikiSource

7. Make a web application to record audio and upload to commons and add in wiktionary words. explore Lingua-Libre for web app.

8. Make a mobile application to record audio and upload to commons and add in wiktionary words.

9. CIS may ask the language based organizations to give their works/tools on public licenses.

10. A one/two day meeting/conference to connect various language technologies. Each team can demonstrate the tools they are working on. others can learn and use them for their languages. CIS may organize this soon.

11. Building spell checkers for Tamil. Learn how other other languages are doing. Odia seems to have good spell checker. Explore that.

12. For iOS, there is no commons app to upload photos. It was there sometime ago. Fix the iOS commons app and rerelease it again.

13. Build Maps with local languages with OSM.

14. One/Two day training on wiki tech. like gadgets, tools, toolserver, API, etc

15. Tweet marketing to promote the ebooks released in wikisource projects. Measure the downloads.

16. CIS may talk with amazon to release the ebooks from wikisource for free always at amazon.

17. Explore Valmigi project of malayalam, chikubuku of kannada – for their ebooks.

18. Download ebooks from dspace, bengali books – West Bengal Public Library Network – url – http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/

19. Explore paid works for wikisource proofreading.

20. Blog on how ta wikisource for 2000 ebooks from TN government in public domain license. Send to CIS. They may try to do the same for other languages.

21. ASI website has info about all monuments. Scrap them all and add in wiki.

22. Scrap details from tourism sites and add in wiki.

23. Kannada archeology site has tons of images but with 3 seals added in all images. scrap them, remove seal and add to commons.

24. Tool to audit wiki sites. like new users, edits, measurements, KPIs, reports etc.

25. Discuss with wiki writers and help them to automate their tasks. Build new tools to help them. train existing tools.

26. Get existing photos from many photographers. Get license doc. Add in OTRS. Have a team to upload the photos to commons.

27. Find the pages that don’t have images. Search in commons and add 1 image automatically.

28. Infobox in wiki pages may have 1 image. Check for the same page in other languages.. get the image from infobox and use it in missing pages.

29. Tito showed a broken JS script. Explore it and fix it.

30. Discuss with victor and google team to improve the OCR feature and integrating with wikisource. Explore existing tools like http://tools.wmflabs.org/ws-google-ocr/ and https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Google_OCR

Thanks to Ravi, Tito, Tanveer, Dan, Charan Singh, Manavpreet, Rupika,Gurlaal, Stain for the interesting meeting and great ideas.

We can work on these ideas and implement them soon.

If you are interested in doing any of the ideas, reply here or mail me on tshrinivasan@gmail.com

ગઇકાલે સહ કુટુંબ 102 નોટ આઉટ માણવામાં આવ્યું. 3ડી ન હોય એવી ફિલ્મો જોવાનું વધતું જાય છે એ સારી વાત છે. ચલ મન જીતવા જઇએ પછી લાંબા વિરામ પછી સરસ બ્રેક મળ્યો.

ફિલ્મની આડઅસર રૂપે સૌમ્ય જોશી વિશે ગુજરાતી વિકિપીડિયામાં લેખ અનુવાદ કરી રહ્યો છું.

હા, 77 વર્ષ બાકી છે પેલા ચીનાનો રેકોર્ડ તોડવામાં.

Hello all,

The Tamil TTS system provided by IITM and SSN College of Engineering had one issue. It can convert one tamil string to audio at one time.

https://github.com/tshrinivasan/tamil-tts-install

Because of this, we can not do parallel conversion. Few full text books took 4-5 hours for conversion. Because of this, we could not make it as a web application for public use.

Mohan

Mohan helped to make the Tamil TTS Script simpler to process multiple
conversion simultaneously.

Here is the super script that does magics.

https://github.com/mohan43u/tamil-tts-install

Thanks Mohan for your great works.

now, we need to convert this as a web application, so that anyone can
use it easily.

The requirements are below.
1. user registration with gmail
2. user should upload a tamil text file
3. once it is converted, user should receive an email with the link to
the audio file
4. we can keep the audio files for 1 week
5. REPT API support with authentication
6. A queue system

All these will be released in GPL.

If you are interested in doing this, reply here or write to me.

Astute users might have noticed that the GNOME Terminal binary distributed by Fedora has separate menu items for opening new tabs and windows, while the vanilla version available from GNOME doesn’t.

With separate menu items

This has been the case since Fedora 25 and was achieved by a downstream patch that reverted two upstream commits.

Without separate menu items

I am happy to say that since version 3.28 GNOME Terminal has regained the ability to have separate menu items as a compile time option. The gnome-terminal-server binary needs to be built with the DISUNIFY_NEW_TERMINAL_SECTION pre-processor macro defined. Here’s one way to do so.

SecureDrop will take part in PyCon US development sprints (from 14th to 17th May). This will be first time for the SecureDrop project to present in the sprints.

If you never heard of the project before, SecureDrop is an open source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Currently, dozens of news organizations including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Associated Press, USA Today, and more, use SecureDrop to preserve the anonymous tipline in an era of mass surveillance. SecureDrop is installed on-premises in the news organizations, and journalists and source both use a web application to interact with the system. It was originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz and is now managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation.

How to prepare for the sprints

The source code of the project is hosted on Github.

The web applications, administration CLI tool, and a small Qt-based GUI are all written in Python. We use Ansible heavily for the orchestration. You can setup the development environment using Docker. This section of the documentation is a good place to start.

A good idea would be to create the initial Docker images for the development before the sprints. We have marked many issues for PyCon Sprints and also there are many documentation issues.

Another good place to look is the tests directorty. We use pytest for most of our test cases. We also have Selenium based functional tests.

Where to find the team?

Gitter is our primary communication platform. During the sprint days, we will in the same room of the CPython development (as I will be working on both).

So, if you are in PyCon sprints, please visit us to know more and maybe, start contributing to the project while in sprints.

PodSync.net converts a YouTube channel into a podcast.

This is a beautiful bridge that lets me listen to DJ mixes by “Confused bi-Product of a Misinformed Culture” without having to use YouTube.

[This post was drafted on the day Fedora 27 released, about half a year ago, but was not published. The issue bit me again with Fedora 28, so documenting it for referring next time.]

With fedup and subsequently dnf improving the upgrade experience of Fedora for power users, last few system upgrades have been smooth, quiet, even unnoticeable. That actually speaks volumes of the maturity and user friendliness achieved by these tools.

Upgrading from Fedora 25 to 26 was so event-less and smooth (btw: I have installed and used every version of Fedora from its inception and the default wallpaper of Fedora 26 was the most elegant of them all!).

With that, on the release day I set out to upgrade the main workstation from Fedora 26 to 27 using dnf system-upgrade as documented. Before downloading the packages, dnf warned that upgrade cannot be done because of package dependency issues with grub2-efi-modules and grub2-tools.

Things go wrong!

I simply removed both the offending packages and their dependencies (assuming were probably installed for the grub2-breeze-theme dependency, but grub2-tools actually provides grub2-mkconfig) and proceeded with dnf upgrade --refresh and dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=27. If you are attempting this, don’t remove the grub2 packages yet, but read on!

Once the download and check is completed, running dnf system-upgrade reboot will cause the system reboot to upgrade target and actual upgrade happen.

Except, I was greeted with EFI MOK (Machine Owner Key) screen on reboot. Now that the grub2 bootloader is broken thanks to the removal of grub2-efi-modules and other related packages, a recovery must be attempted.

Rescue

It is important to have a (possibly EUFI enabled) live media where you can boot from. Boot into the live media and try to reinstall grub. Once booted in, mount the root filesystem under /mnt/sysimage, and EFI boot partition at /mnt/sysimage/boot/efi. Then chroot /mnt/sysimage and try to reinstall grub2-efi-x64 and shim packages. If there’s no network connectivity, don’t despair, nmcli is to your rescue. Connect to wifi using nmcli device wifi connect <ssid> password <wifi_password>. Generate the boot configuration using grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg followed by actual install grub2-install --target=x86_64-efi /dev/sdX (the –target option ensures correct host installation even if the live media is booted via legacy BIOS). You may now reboot and proceed with the upgrade.

But this again failed at the upgrade stage because of grub package clash that dnf warned earlier about.

Solution

Once booted into old installation, take a backup of the /boot/ directory, remove the conflicting grub related packages, and copy over the backed up /boot/ directory contents, especially /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grubx64.efi. Now rebooting (using dnf system-upgrade reboot) had  the grub contents intact and the upgrade worked smoothly.

For more details on the package conflict issue, follow this bug.

https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-go-statement-considered-harmful/

Such clear thinking and elucidation around concurrency!

દર વર્ષની જેમ પણ આ વખતે “કેરીનો છૂંદો” બનાવવાની પ્રક્રિયાનો આરંભ થઇ ગયો છે. મને યાદ છે કે પહેલાં રાજાપુરી કેરીઓ ઘરે લાવીને જાતે છીણીને છૂંદો બનાવાતો હતો. હવે, છીણ બજારમાં તૈયાર મળે છે એટલે ઝંઝટ ઓછી. તો પણ, દરરોજ તડકામાં છૂંદો મૂકવા અને લેવા જવાનું તો હોય છે. મૂકવા જવાનું તો ઠીક, લેવા જવાનું યાદ આવે એ માટે ખાસ એલાર્મ મૂકવામાં આવે છે. ગયા વર્ષે ધાબા પરથી છૂંદો લાવવાનું ભૂલી ગયા હતા ત્યારે ૧.૩૦ વાગે રાત્રે યાદ આવ્યું અને અમારે જવું પડ્યું હતું. ખતરો એ કે રાત્રે કોઇ ઉંદર કે પક્ષી તેને બગાડી નાખે, તેમજ ઠંડીમાં છૂંદોની ગુણવત્તા પર અસર પડી શકે.

છૂંદો એ અમારી કેરી લાલસા છેક દિવાળી સુધી પૂરી કરે છે, એટલે છૂંદો અત્યંત મહત્વનો છે!

I spent the last seven days attending Libre Graphics Meeting in sunny and beautiful Seville. This was my second LGM, the first being six years ago in Vienna, so it was refreshing to be back. I stayed in one of the GIMP apartments near the Alameda de Hércules garden square. Being right in the middle of the city meant that everything of interest was either within walking distance or a short bus ride away.

Unlike other conferences that I have been to, LGM 2018 started at six o’clock in the evening. That was good because one didn’t have to worry about waking up in time not to miss the opening keynote; and you haven’t attended LGM if you haven’t been to the State of Libre Graphics. Other than that I went to Øyvind’s presentation on colour; saw Nara describe her last ten years with Estúdio Gunga; and listened to Dave Crossland and Nathan Willis talk about fonts. There was a lot of live coding based music and algorave going on this year. My favourite was Neil C. Smith’s performance using Praxis LIVE.

All said and done, the highlight of this LGM had to be the GIMP 2.10.0 release at the beginning of the conference. GEGL 0.4.0 was also rolled out to celebrate the occasion. Much happiness and rejoicing ensued.

I spent my time at LGM alternating between delicious tapas, strolling down the narrow and colourful alleys of Seville, sight-seeing, and hacking on GEGL. I started sketching out a proper codec API for GeglBuffer modelled on GdkPixbuf, and continued to performance tune babl, but those are topics for later blog posts.

Four years ago, I migrated this blog from WordPress to Jekyll, with the intention of using whatever format I want to use inside Emacs… Subsequently, my posting rate dropped drastically to just 13 posts in 4 years!

I don’t think that was a coincidence. Tools matter.

I believe the speed and ease of writing dropped drastically. Even simple steps like using photos in a post meant using a separate tool such as Finder.app (on macOS) or command-line to move it to the right directory and then linking to it from the main post. In WordPress, that’s one drag-and-drop and done.

Similarly, no comments was demotivating as well. While there tends to be more nitpicking these days, I would still like to benefit from the wisdom of the crowds.

So now I have migrated back to WordPress. Let’s see how this goes.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS got released yesterday. Here is the direct link to download from the India Server.

Other releases:

http://mirrors.piconets.webwerks.in/ubuntu-mirror/ubuntu-releases/18.04/

http://mirrors.piconets.webwerks.in/ubuntu-mirror/ubuntu-cdimage/ubuntu/releases/18.04/release/

Regards

Prakash

* વેકેશન શરૂ થઇ ગયું છે, જોકે મારું વેકેશન તો પૂરું પણ થઇ ગયું છે. વેકેશનમાં કવિનના એક ક્લાસ બંધ કરાવવામાં આવ્યા છે અને એક બીજા ક્લાસ શરૂ કરવાનો પ્લાન છે, તો પણ તેને રમવા-રખડવાનો પૂરતો સમય મળે એનું ધ્યાન રાખેલું છે. જોકે, વેકેશનમાં સૌથી મોટો ત્રાસ નવરા લોકોનો છે, જે છોકરાઓને સોસાયટીના ગ્રાઉન્ડમાં રમવા દેતા નથી. સવારે-બપોરે-સાંજે ત્રણેય સમયે તેઓ કંઇને કંઇ વાંધા-વચકા કાઢવા માટે તૈયાર જ હોય છે. મને થાય છે કે આવા નવરાઓ કેમ વિકિપીડિયા એડિટ કરતા નથી કે કેમ સાયકલ ચલાવતા નથી? શા માટે દોડવાનું શરૂ કરતા નથી કે શા માટે નજીકના પુસ્તકાલયો મુલાકાત લેતા નથી?

The following screenshots don’t have the correct colours. Their colour channels got inverted because of this bug.

Brave testers of pre-release Fedora builds might have noticed the absence of updates to GNOME Terminal and VTE during the Fedora 28 development cycle. That’s no longer the case. Kalev submitted gnome-terminal-3.28.1 as part of the larger GNOME 3.28.1 mega-update, and it will make its way into the repositories in time for the Fedora 28 release early next month.

The recent lull in the default Fedora Workstation terminal was not due to the lack of development effort, though. The recent GNOME 3.28 release had a relatively large number of changes in both GNOME Terminal and VTE, and it took some time to update the Fedora-specific patches to work with the new upstream version.

Here are some highlights from the past six months.

Unified preferences dialog

The global and profile preferences were merged into a single preferences dialog. I am very fond of this unified dialog because I have a hard time remembering whether a setting is global or not.

Text settings

The profile-specific settings UI has seen some changes. The bulk of these are in the “Text” tab, which used to be known as “General” in the past.

It’s now possible to adjust the vertical and horizontal spacing between the characters rendered by the terminal for the benefit of those with visual impairments. The blinking of the cursor can be more easily tweaked because the setting is now exposed in the UI. Some people are distracted by a prominently flashing cursor block in the terminal, but still want their thin cursors to flash elsewhere for the sake of discoverability. This should help with that.

Last but not the least, it’s nice to see the profile ID occupy a less prominent position in the UI.

Colours and bold text

There are some subtle improvements to the foreground colour selection for bold text. As a result, the “allow bold text” setting has been deprecated and replaced with “show bold text in bright colors” in the “Colors” tab. Various inconsistencies in the Tango palette were also resolved.

Port to GAction and GMenu

The most significant non-UI change was the port to GAction and GMenuModel. GNOME Terminal no longer uses the deprecated GtkAction and GtkUIManager classes.

Blinking text

VTE now supports blinking text. Try this:

  $ tput blink; echo "blinking text"; tput sgr0

If you don’t like it, then there’s a setting to turn it off.

Overline and undercurl

Similar to underline and strikethrough, VTE now supports overline and undercurl. These can be interesting for spell checkers and software development tools.

The reformed or simplified orthographic script style of Malayalam was introduced in 1971 by this government order. This is what is taught in schools. The text book content is also in reformed style. The prevailing academic situation does not facilitate the students to learn the exhaustive and rich orthographic set of Malayalam script. At the same time  they observe a lot of wall writings, graffiti, bill-boards and handwriting sticking to the exhaustive orthographic set.

The sign marks for the vowels ഉ and ഊ (u and uː) have many diverse forms in the exhaustive orthographic set when joined with different consonants. But in the reformed style they are always detached from the base consonant with a unique form as ു and ൂ respectively for the vowel sounds u and uː. Everyone learns to read both of these orthographic variants either from the school or from everyday observations. But while writing the styles, they often gets mixed up as seen below.

u sign forms on wall writings

Redundant usage of vowel sign of u is indicated in circle

In this blog post I  try to consolidate the vowel signs of u and uː referring to early script learning resources for Malayalam.

Vowel signs in Malayalam

There are 37 consonants and 15 vowels in Malayalam (additionally there are less popular consonant vowels like ൠ, ഌ and ൡ). Vowels have independent existence only at word beginnings. Otherwise they appear as consonant sound modifiers, in form of vowel signs. These signs often modify the glyph shape of consonants and this is a reason for the complex nature of Malayalam script. These marks can get distributed over the left and right of the base consonant. See the table below:

As seen in the table, the signs ു, ൂ, ൃ ([u] ,[uː], [rɨ] ) changes the shape of the base consonant grapheme. It was not until the 1971 orthographic reformation these signs got detached from the base grapheme. You can see the detached form as well in the rows 5,6 and 7 of the above table.

How does the vowel sign for ‘ു’ [u] and ‘ൂ’ [uː] affect the base consonant?

In the exhaustive script set of Malayalam there are in fact 8 ways in which ‘ു’ [u] and ‘ൂ’ [uː] sign marks change the shape of base consonant grapheme. These 8 forms (u- 4 forms and uː – 4 forms) are consolidated below.

‘ു’ [u] sign induces 4 types of shape variations to base consonant.

• ക(ka) , ര(ra) gets modified by a shape we hereby call as hook. The same shape change applies to all conjuncts that ends with ക as in ങ്ക(n̄ka), ക്ക(kka), സ്ക(ska) and സ്ക്ക(skka). As the conjuncts that ends with ര(ra) assumes a special shape the hook shaped sign does not apply to them.
• ഗ(ga), ഛ(ʧʰa), ജ(ʤa), ത(t̪a), ഭ(bʱa), ശ(ʃa), ഹ(ɦa) gets modified by a shape that resembles a tail that comes back to right after moving left. Those conjuncts which end with these consonants also assume the same tail shape when when ‘ു’ [u] vowel sign appear after them.
• ണ(ɳa) and ന(na/n̪a) changes their shape with an inward closed loop. Those conjuncts which end with these consonants also assume the same loop shape when when ‘ു’ [u] vowel sign appear after them. For example ണ്ണ(ɳɳa), ന്ന(nna), ക്ന(kna) etc.
• All other 24 consonants use the drop shape. As it is the most popular among all [u] signs, it is often mistakenly used instead of the other signs mentioned above. This case is indicated in the red circle in figure captioned u sign forms on wall writings.

‘ൂ’ [uː] sign induces 4 types of shape variations to base consonants.

• ക(ka) , ര(ra), ഗ(ga), ഛ(ʧʰa), ജ(ʤa), ത(t̪a), ഭ(bʱa), ശ(ʃa), ഹ(ɦa) can have two alternate uː sign forms. First shape is hook and tail shape while the second one is hook and rounded tail.
  • Hook and rounded tail is more popular with the consonants ക(ka) , ര(ra) and ഭ(bʱa)
  • Hook and tail is more popular with the consonants ഗ(ga), ഛ(ʧʰa), ജ(ʤa), ത(t̪a), ശ(ʃa) and ഹ(ɦa)
• The outward open loop shape is assumed by the ‘ൂ’ [uː] sign mark when associated with the consonants ണ(ɳa) and ന(na/n̪a)
• All other 24 consonants use the double-drop shape. As it is the most popular among all [u] signs, it is often mistakenly used instead of the other signs mentioned above

Note: The sign shape names drop, double-drop, hook, hook and tail, hook and rounded tail, tail, closed loop and open loop are author’s own choice. Hence there is no citations to literature.

Early texts on Malayalam script and orthography

Modern textbooks do not detail the ‘ു’ [u] and ‘ൂ’ [uː] vowel sign forms. The earliest available reference to the script of Malayalam and its usage is the book from 1772, Alphabetum grandonico-malabaricum sive samscrudonicum.It was a text book meant to be used by western missionaries to Kerala to learn the Malayalam script and its language of description is Latin. Alphabetum describes various vowel sign forms but it does not give any indication on the hook and tail form. ക(ka) , ര(ra), ഗ(ga), ഛ(ʧʰa), ജ(ʤa), ത(t̪a), ഭ(bʱa), ശ(ʃa), ഹ(ɦa) etc. uses the hook and rounded tail form only. This being the first ever compilation of Malayalam script usage, that too by a non-native linguist, there are chances for unintended omissions about which I am not sure of.

The metal types used in this book were movable, and were the first of its kind to be used to print a Malayalam book. The same types were used to print the first ever complete book in Malayalam script – Samkshepavedartham.

Excerpt from Alphabetum grandonico-malabaricum sive samscrudonicum describing the usage of ‘ു’ [u] and ‘ൂ’ [uː] signs

Grammar of Malayalam- George Mathan

Contemporary usage of orthographic styles

The early attempts to describe the script of Malayalam with all its complexity is seen in these books in the initial days of printing era. Much later, in 1971 reformed script orthography was introduced to the language and culture aiming at overcoming the technological limitation of Malayalam typewriters. But the language users never abandoned the then existing style variants. Now we see around us a mix of all these styles.

Note: This is a translation of an earlier blog post written in Malayalam

* થ્રી બિલબોર્ડ્સ આઉટસાઇડ ઇબિંગ, મિસૂરી (૨૦૧૮)

* જસ્ટિસ લીગ (૨૦૧૭)

* બ્લેડ રનર ૨૦૪૯ (૨૦૧૭)

આ છે, છેલ્લાં ૩ મહિનામાં જોયેલી ફિલમો. આ સિવાય પાસપોર્ટ ગુજરાતી ફિલમ બે દિવસ પહેલાં યુટ્યુબ પર મળી ગઇ, એકંદરે ઠીક કહેવાય. બ્લેડ રનર અને થ્રી બિલબોર્ડ્સ.. જોયા પછી જે ઝણઝણાટી થાય એવું બહુ ઓછી ફિલમોમાં થાય છે. જસ્ટિસ લીગ પણ ધાર્યા કરતા તો સરસ નીકળી છે. હવે કદાચ એવેન્જર્સ ૨૭ એપ્રિલે જોવા જઇશું એવો પ્લાન છે. રેવાનું ટ્રેલર જોયા પછી લાગે છે, એ ફિલમ સ્કિપ થશે. રતનપુર બાકી છે, અને ટ્રેલર પરથી સારી લાગી છે, એટલે જોવાનો ક્યાંકથી પ્રબંધ કરવો પડશે.

A branch of the Indian government, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, is trying once again to censor Internet and Freedom of Speech. This time, it ordered to form a committee of 10 members who will frame regulations for online media/ news portals and online content.

This order includes these following Terms of Reference for the committee.

• To delineate the sphere of online information dissemination which needs to be brought under regulation, on the lines applicable to print and electronic media.
• To recommend appropriate policy formulation for online media / news portals and online content platforms including digital broadcasting which encompasses entertainment / infotainment and news/media aggregators keeping in mind the extant FDI norms, Programme & Advertising Code for TV Channels, norms circulated by PCI, code of ethics framed by NBA and norms prescribed by IBF; and
• To analyze the international scenario on such existing regulatory mechanisms with a view to incorporate the best practices.

What are the immediate problems posed by this order?

If one reads carefully, one can see how vague are the terms, and specifically how they added the term online content into it.

online content means everything we can see/read/listen do over cyberspace. In the last few years, a number of new news organizations came up in India, whose fearless reporting have caused a lot of problems for the government and their friends. Even though they managed to censor publishing (sometimes self censored) news in the mainstream Indian media, but all of these new online media houses and individual bloggers and security researchers and activists kept informing the mass about the wrongdoings of the people in power.

With this latest attempt to restrict free speech over the internet, the government is trying to increase its reach even more. Broad terms like online content platforms or online media or news/media aggregators will include every person and websites under its watch. One of the impacts of mass indiscriminate surveillance like this is that people are shamed into reading and thinking only what is in line with the government, or popular thought .

How do you determine if some blog post or update in a social media platform is news or not? For me, most of things I read on the internet are news to me. I learn, I communicate my thoughts over these various platforms on cyberspace. To all those computer people reading this blog post, think about the moment when you will try to search about “how to do X in Y programming language?” on Internet, but, you can not see the result because that is blocked by this censorship.

India is also known for random blockades of different sites over the years. The Government also ordered to kill Internet for entire states for many days. For the majority of internet blockages, we, the citizens of India were neither informed the reasons nor given a chance to question the legality of those bans. India has been marked as acountry under surveillance by Reporters Without Borders back in 2012.

Also remember that this is the same Government, which was trying to fight at its best in the Supreme Court of India last year, to curb the privacy of every Indian citizen. They said that Indian citizens do not have any right to privacy. Thankfully the bench declared the following:

The right to privacy is protected as an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and as a part of the freedoms guaranteed by Part III of the Constitution.

Privacy is a fundamental right of every Indian citizen.

However, that fundamental right is still under attack in the name of another draconian law The Aadhaar act. A case is currently going on in the Supreme Court of India to determine the constitutional validity of Aadhaar. In the recent past, when journalists reported how the Aadhaar data can be breached, instead of fixing the problems, the government is criminally investigating the journalists.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Different governments across the world kept trying (and they will keep trying again and again) to curb free speech and press freedom. They are trying to draw borders and boundaries inside of cyberspace, and restrict the true nature of what is it referring to here?.

In 1996, late John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and I think that fits in naturally in the current discussion.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. -- John Perry Barlow

How can you help to fight back censorship?

Each and every one of us are affected by this, and we all can help to fight back and resist censorship. The simplest thing you can do is start talking about the problems. Discuss them with your neighbor, talk about it while commuting to the office. Explain the problem to your children or to your parents. Write about it, write blog posts, share across all the different social media platforms. Many of your friends (from other fields than computer technology) may be using Internet daily, but might not know about the destruction these laws can cause and the censorship imposed on the citizens of India.

Educate people, learn from others about the problems arising. If you are giving a talk about a FOSS technology, also talk about how a free and open Internet is helping all of us to stay connected. If that freedom goes away, we will lose everything. At any programming workshop you attend, share these knowledge with other participants.

In many cases, using tools to bypass censorship altogether is also very helpful (avoiding any direct confrontation). The Tor Project is a free software and open network which helps to keep freedom and privacy of the users. By circumventing surveillance and censorship, one can use it more for daily Internet browsing. The increase in Tor traffic will help all of the Tor network users together. This makes any attempt of tracking individuals even more expensive for any nation state actors. So, download the Tor Browser today and start using it for everything.

In this era of Public private partnership from hell, Cory Doctorow beautifully explained how internet is the nervous system of 21st century, and how we all can join together to save the freedom of internet. Listen to him, do your part.

Header image copyright: Peter Massas (CC-BY-SA)

dgplug summer training 2018 will start at 13:30 UTC, 17th June. This will be the 11th edition. Like every year, we have modified the training based on the feedback and, of course, there will be more experiments to try and make it better.

What happened differently in 2017?

We did not manage to get all the guest sessions mentioned, but, we moved the guest sessions at the later stage of the training. This ensured that only the really interested people were attending, so there was a better chance of having an actual conversation during the sessions. As we received mostly positive feedback on that, we are going to do the same this year.

We had much more discussions among the participants in general than in previous years. Anwesha and I wrote an article about the history of the Free Software and we had a lot of discussion about the political motivation and freedom in general during the training.

We also had an amazing detailed session on Aadhaar and how it is affecting (read destroying) India, by Kiran Jonnalagadda.

Beside, we started writing a new book to introduce the participants to Linux command line. We tried to cover the basics of Linux command line and the tools we use on a day to day basis.

Shakthi Kannan started Operation Blue Moon where he is helping individuals to get things done by managing their own sprints. All information on this project can be found in the aforementioned Github link.

What are the new plans in 2018?

We are living in an era of surveillance and the people in power are trying to hide facts from the people who are being governed. There are a number of Free Software projects which are helping the citizens of cyberspace to resist and bypass the blockades. This year we will focus on these applications and how one can start contributing to the same projects in upstream. A special focus will be given to The Tor project, both from users’ and developers’ point of views.

In 2017, a lot of people asked help to start learning Go. So, this year we will do a basic introduction to Go in the training. Though, Python will remain the primary choice for teaching.

How to join the training?

First, join our mailing list, and then join the IRC channel #dgplug on Freenode.

I dream of a day, and it is not a crazy dream, when everybody on this planet who wants to know all about that is presently known about something, will be able to do so regardless of where he or she is. And and I dream of a day where the right to know is understood as a natural human right, that extends to every being on the planet who is governed by anything. The right to know what it’s government is doing and how and why. -- John Perry Barlow

I met John Perry Barlow only once in my life, during his PyCon US 2014 keynote. I remember trying my best to stay calm as I walked towards him to start a conversation. After some time, he went up on the stage and started speaking. Even though I spoke with him very briefly, I still felt like I knew him for a long time.

This Saturday, April 7th, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Freedom of the Press Foundation organized the John Perry Barlow Symposium at the Internet Archive to celebrate the life and leadership of John Perry Barlow, or JPB as he was known to many of his friends and followers.

The event started around 2:30AM IST, and Anwesha and /me woke up at right time to attend the whole event. Farhaan and Saptak also took part in watching the event live.

Cory Doctorow was set to open the event but was late due to closing down of SFO runways (he later mentioned that he was stuck for more than 5 hours). In his stead, Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started the event. There were two main panel sessions, with 4 speakers in each, and everyone spoke about how Barlow inspired them, or about Internet freedom, and took questions after. But, before those sessions began, Ana Barlow spoke about her dad, and about how many people from different geographies were connected to JPB, and how he touched so many people’s lives.

The first panel had Mitch Kapor, Pam Samuelson, Trevor Timm on the stage. Mitch started talking with JPB’s writing from 1990s and how he saw the future of Internet. He also reminded us that most of the stories JPB told us, were literally true :D. He reminded us even though EFF started as a civil liberties organization, but how Wall Street Journal characterized EFF as a hacker defense fund. Pam Samuelson spoke next starting with a quote from JPB. Pam mentioned The Economy of Ideas published in 1994 in the Wired magazine as the Barlow’s best contribution to copyrights.

Cory Doctorow came up on stage to introduce the next speaker, Trevor Timm, the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). He particularly mentioned SecureDrop project and the importance of it. I want to emphasize one quote from him.

It’s been observed that many people around the world, billions of people struggle under bad code written by callow silicon valley dude bros, those who hack up a few lines of code and then subject billions of people to it’s outcomes without any consideration of ethics.

Trevor talked about the initial days of Freedom of the Press Foundation, and how JPB was the organizational powerhouse behind the organization. On the day FPF was launched, JPB and Daniel Ellsberg wrote an article for Huffingtonpost, named Crowd Funding the Right to Know.

When a government becomes invisible, it becomes unaccountable. To expose its lies, errors, and illegal acts is not treason, it is a moral responsibility. Leaks become the lifeblood of the Republic.

After few months of publishing the above mentioned article, one government employee was moved by the words, and contacted FPF board members (through Micah Lee). Later when his name become public, Barlow posted the following tweet.

Next, Edward Snowden himself came in as the 4th speaker in the panel. He told a story which is not publicized much. He went back to his days in NSA where even though he was high school drop out, he had a high salary and very comfortable life. As he gained access to highly classified information, he realized that something was not right.

I realized what was legal, was not necessarily what was moral. I realized what is being made public, was not the same of what was true. -- Edward Snowden.

He talked about how EFF and JPB’s work gave direction of many decisions of his life. Snowden read Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and perhaps that was the first seed of radicalization in his life. How Barlow choose people over living a very happy and easy life, shows his alliance with us, the common people of the world.

After the first panel of speakers, Cory again took the stage to talk about privacy and Internet. He spoke about why building technology which are safe for world is important in this time of the history.

After a break of few minutes, the next panel of speakers came up on the stage, the panel had Shari Steele, John Gilmore, Steven Levy, Joi Ito.

Shari was the first speaker in this group. While started talking about the initial days of joining EFF, she mentioned how even without knowing about JPB before, only one meeting converted Shari into a groupie. Describing the first big legal fight of EFF, and how JPB wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace during that time. She chose a quote from the same:

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Later, John Gilmore pointed out a few quotes from JPB on LSD and how the American society tries to control everything. John explained why he thinks Barlow’s ideas were correct when it comes to psychedelic drugs and the effects on human brains. He mentioned how JPB cautioned us about distinguishing the data, information and the experience, in ways that are often forgotten today.

Next, Steven Levy kept skipping many different stories, choosing to focus on how amazingly Barlow decided to express his ideas. The many articles JPB wrote, helped to transform the view of web in our minds. Steven chose a quote from JPB’s biography (which will be published in June) to share with us:

If people code out for eight minutes like I did and then come back, they usually do so as a different person than the one who left. But I guess my brain doesn’t use all that much oxygen because I appeared to be the same guy, at least from the inside. For eight minutes, however, I had not just been gratefully dead, I had been plain, flat out, ordinary dead. It was then I decided the time had finally come for me to begin working on my book. Looking for a ghost writer was not really the issue. At the time, my main concern was to not be a ghost before the book itself was done.

I think Steven Levy chose the right words to describe Barlow in the last sentence of his talk:

Reading that book, makes me think that how much we are going to miss Barlow’s voice in this scary time for tech when our consensual hallucination is looking more and more like a bad trip.

When you talk to Dalai Lama, just like when you talk to John Perry Barlow, there is a deep sense of humor that comes from knowing how f***** up the world is, how unjust the world is, how terrible it is, but still being so connected to true nature, that it is so funny. -- Joi Ito

Joi mentioned that Barlow not only gave a direction to us by writing the declaration of the independence of cyberspace, but, he also created different organizations to make sure that we start moving that direction.

Amelia Barlow was the last speaker of the day. She went through the 25 Principles of Adult Behavior.

The day ended with a marching order from Cory Doctorow. He asked everyone to talk more about the Internet and technologies and how they are affecting our lives. If we think that everyone can understand the problems, that will be a very false hope. Most people still don’t think much about freedom and how the people in power control our lives using the same technologies we think are amazing. Talking to more people and helping them to understand the problem is a good start to the path of having a better future. And John Perry Barlow showed us how to walk on that path with his extraordinary life and willfulness of creating special bonds with everyone around him.

I want to specially thank the Internet Archive for hosting the event and allowing the people like uswe who are in the cyberspace to actually get the feeling of being in the room with everyone else.

Recording of the event Header image copyright: EFF

સ્ટ્રાવા એપ સાથે સૌથી મોટી તકલીફ ઘણી વખત જીપીએસના લોચા છે. આ એપ ફોનના જીપીએસ પર આધારિત છે અને ફોનનું જીપીએસ તેમાં રહેેલી ચીપ પર. તેમાં આવતી ચીપ કઇ કંપનીની છે, તે આધારિત છે ફોનની કિંમત પર. એટલે સસ્તો ફોન, સસ્તું પરિણામ. જોકે એનો અર્થ એ નહી કે સ્ટ્રાવામાં મુશ્કેલી આવે જ. છતાં પણ આવે તો,

૧. મોબાઇલમાં બેટ્રી ઓપ્ટિમાઇઝર સ્ટ્રાવા એપ માટે બંધ કરી દેવું.
૨. શક્ય હોય તો મોબાઇલ નેટવર્ક સ્ટ્રાવા શરૂ કર્યા પછી બંધ કરી દેવું. જેથી વધુ બેટ્રી ન વપરાય અને જીપીએસ મોબાઇલ ટાવરને પકડે નહી.
૩. સ્ટ્રાવા ડેસ્કટોપ પર અંતર અને ઉંચાઇ ખોટી આવે તો સુધારી શકાય છે. વધુમાં, રાઇડ-રનને કટ-ક્રોપ પણ કરી શકાય છે.
૪. ગારમિન કે જીપીએસ ઘડિયાળ વાપરવી

બીજા કોઇ સૂચનો? અહીં જણાવવા વિનંતી!
 

The Tor network provides a safer way to access the Internet, without local ISP and government recording your every step on the Internet. We can use the same network to chat over IRC. For many FOSS contributors and activists across the world, IRC is a very common medium for a chat. In this blog post, we will learn about how to use ZNC with Tor for IRC.

Introducing ZNC

ZNC is an IRC bouncer program, which will allow your IRC client to stay detached from the server, but still receive and log the messages, so that when you connect a client later on, you will receive all the messages.

In this tutorial, we will use znc-1.6.6 (packaged in Fedora and EPEL). I am also going to guess that you already figured out the basic usage of ZNC.

Installing the required tools

$ sudo dnf install znc tor torsocks

Tor provides a SOCKS proxy at port 9050 (default value), but, ZNC cannot use a SOCKS proxy easily. We will use torify command from torsocks package to use the SOCKS proxy.

ZNC service over Tor network

As a first step, we will make sure that we have the listener at the ZNC service listening as an Onion service. First, we will edit our /etc/tor/torrc file and add the following.

HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/
HiddenServicePort 8001 127.0.0.1:8001
HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient stealth hidden_service

After this, when we start the tor service, we will be able to find the .onion address and the HidServAuth value from the /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname file.

# cat /var/lib/tor/hidden_service/hostname 
34aaaiwlmrandom8.onion SomeO/+yOOPjvaluetext # client: hidden_service

Now, I will be using a user account ftor in the server to run ZNC. The configuration files for ZNC is at /home/ftor/.znc directory.

I have the following values in the ~/.znc/configs/znc.conf file for the listener.

<Listener listener0>
        AllowIRC = true
        AllowWeb = true
        Host = 127.0.0.1
        IPv4 = true
        IPv6 = false
        Port = 8001
        SSL = false
        URIPrefix = /
</Listener>

Here, I am making sure that the listener only listens to the localhost. We already mapped the port 8001 of localhost to our Onion service. This way the web frontend of ZNC is only available over Tor.

Now you can start service, I will keep it running in the foreground along with debugging messages to make sure that things are working.

$ torify znc --debug

Connecting from web client

I am using xchat as the IRC client. I also have Tor installed on my local computer and added the following line the /etc/tor/torrc file so that my system can find and connect to the Onion service.

HidServAuth 34aaaiwlmrandom8.onion SomeO/+yOOPjvaluetext

If you just want to connect to the ZNC web frontend using the Tor Browser, then you will have to add the same line the Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Tor/torrc inside of the Tor Browser.

Connecting to OFTC network

Now we will connect to the OFTC IRC network. The Tor Project itself has all the IRC channels on this network. Make sure that you have a registered IRC nickname on this network.

Add the following configuration in the ZNC configuration file.

        <Network oftc>
                Encoding = ^UTF-8
                FloodBurst = 4
                FloodRate = 1.00
                IRCConnectEnabled = true
                JoinDelay = 0
                Nick = yournickname
                Server = irc4.oftc.net +6697

                <Chan #tor>
                        Buffer = 500
                </Chan>
        </Network>

Now let us start xchat with torify so that it can find our onion service.

$ torify xchat

Next, we will add our new ZNC service address as a new server, remember to have the password as zncusername/networkname:password. In the above case, the network name is oftc.

After adding the new server as mentioned above, you should be able to connect to it using xchat.

Connecting to Freenode network

Freenode provides an Onion service to it’s IRC network. This means your connection from the client (ZNC in this case) to the server is end-to-end encrypted and staying inside of the Onion network itself. But, using this will require some extra work.

Creating SSL certificate for Freenode

On the server, we will have to create an SSL certificate.

$ openssl req -x509 -sha256 -nodes -days 1200 -newkey rsa:4096 -out user.pem -keyout user.pem

Remember to keep the name of the output file as user.pem, I had to spend a few hours debugging thanks to a wrong filename.

We will have to find the fingerprint of the certificate by using the following command.

$ openssl x509 -sha1 -noout -fingerprint -in user.pem | sed -e 's/^.*=//;s/://g;y/ABCDEF/abcdef/'
eeeee345b4d9d123456789fa365f4b4b684b6666

Now connect to Freenode normally using your regular client (xchat in my case), and add this fingerprint to your nickname.

/msg NickServ CERT ADD eeeee345b4d9d123456789fa365f4b4b684b6666

You should be able to see the details using whois.

/whois yournick

Enable SASL and Cert module in ZNC

Next, we will move the certificate file to the right location so that ZNC can use it.

$ cp user.pem ~/.znc/users/<yourzncuser>/moddata/cert/user.pem

Remember to put the right ZNC username in the above command.

Add the following configuration for freenode network in the ZNC configuration file and restart ZNC.

        <Network freenode>
                FloodBurst = 4
                FloodRate = 1.00
                IRCConnectEnabled = true
                JoinDelay = 0
                LoadModule = simple_away
                LoadModule = cert
                LoadModule = sasl
                Nick = yourusername
                Server = freenodeok2gncmy.onion +6697
                TrustedServerFingerprint = 57:2d:6f:dc:90:27:0e:17:b6:89:46:4f:6a:a4:37:6e:e9:20:e1:cd:ee:f5:42:cd:3c:5a:a8:6d:17:16:f8:71


                <Chan #znc>
                </Chan>
        </Network>

Remember to update the nickname. At the end of the blog post, I will explain more about the server fingerprint.

Next, go to the \*status tab in your client, and give the following commands to load cert and sasl modules.

/query *status
loadmod cert
loadmod sasl
/msg *sasl Mechanism EXTERNAL
/query *status
Jump

The Jump command will try to reconnect to the Freenode IRC server. You should be able to see the debug output in the server for any error.

The story of the server fingerprint for Freenode

Because Freenode’s SSL certificate is not an EV certificate for the .onion address, ZNC will fail to connect normally. We will have to add the server fingerprint to the configuration so that we can connect. But, this step was failing for a long time, and the excellent folks in #znc helped me to debug the issue step by step. It seems the fingerprint given on the Freenode site is an old one, and we need the current fingerprint. We also have an issue filed on a related note.

Finally, you may want to run the ZNC as a background process on the server.

$ torify znc

Tools versions

• ZNC 1.6.6
• tor 0.3.2.10
• torsocks 2.2.0

If you have queries, feel free to join #znc on Freenode and #tor on OFTC network and ask for help.

Updated post

I have updated the post to use torify command. This will make running znc much simpler than the tool mentined previously.

I recently read Jérôme Petazzoni’s blog post about a tool called AppSwitch which made some Twitter waves on the busy interwebz. I was intrigued. It turns out that it was something that I was familiar with. When I met Dinesh back in 2015 at Linux Plumbers in Seattle, he had presented me with a grand vision of how applications needs to be free of any networking constraints and configurations and a uniform mechanism should evolve that make such configurations transparent (I’d rather say opaque now). There are layers over layers of network related abstractions. Consider a simple network call made by a java application. It goes through multiple layers in userspace (though the various libs, all the way to native calls from JVM and eventually syscalls) and then multiple layers in kernel-space (syscall handlers to network subsytems and then to driver layers and over to the hardware). Virtualization adds 4x more layers.  Each point in this chain does have a justifiable unique configuration point. Fair point. But from an application’s perspective, it feels like fiddling with the knobs all the time :

Christmas Settings: https://xkcd.com/1620/

For example, we have of course grown around iptables and custom in-kernel and out of kernel load balancers and even enhanced some of them to exceptional performance (such as XDP based load balancing).  But when it comes to data path processing, doing nothing at all is much better than doing something very efficiently. Apps don’t really have to care about all these myriad layers anyway. So why not add another dimension to this and let this configuration be done at the app level itself? Interesting.. 

I casually asked Dinesh to see how far the idea had progressed and he ended up giving me a single binary and told me that’s it! It seems AppSwitch had been finally baked in the oven.

First Impressions

So there is a single static binary named ax which runs as an executable as well as in a daemon mode. It seems AppSwitch is distributed as a docker image as well though. I don’t see any kernel module (unlike what Jerome tested). This is definitely the userspace version of the same tech.

I used the ax docker image.  ax was both installed and running with one docker-run command.

$ docker run -d --pid=host --net=none -v /usr/bin:/usr/bin -v /var/run/appswitch:/var/run/appswitch --privileged docker.io/appswitch/ax 

Based on the documentation, this little binary seems to do a lot — service discovery, load balancing, network segmentation etc.  But I just tried the basic features in a single-node configuration.

Let’s run a Java webserver under ax.

# ax run --ip 1.2.3.4 -- java -jar SimpleWebServer.jar

This starts the webserver and assigns the ip 1.2.3.4 to it. Its like overlaying the server’s own IP configurations through ax such that all request are then redirected through 1.2.3.4. While idling, I didn’t see any resource consumption in the ax daemon. If it was monitoring system calls with auditd or something, I’d have noticed some CPU activity. Well, the server didn’t break, and when accessed via a client run through ax, it starts serving just fine.

# ax run --ip 5.6.7.8 -- curl -I 1.2.3.4

HTTP/1.0 500 OK
Date: Wed Mar 28 00:19:25 PDT 2018
Server: JibbleWebServer/1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT
Content-Length: 58 Last-modified: Wed Mar 28 00:19:25 PDT 2018 

Naaaice! Why not try connecting with Firefox. Ok, wow, this works too!

I tried this with a Golang http server (Caddy) that is statically linked.  If ax was doing something like LD_PRELOAD, that would trip it up. This time I tried passing a name rather than the IP and ran it as regular user with a built-in --user option

# ax run --myserver --user suchakra -- caddy -port 80

# ax run --user suchakra -- curl -I myserver
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Etag: "p6f4lv0"
Last-Modified: Fri, 30 Mar 2018 19:25:07 GMT
Server: Caddy
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2018 01:52:28 GMT

So no kernel module tricks, it seems. I guess this explains why Jerome called it “Network Stack from the future”. The future part here is applications and with predominant containerized deployments, the problems of microservices networking have really shifted near to the apps.

We need to get rid of the overhead caused by networking layers and frequent context switches happening as a single containerized app communicates with another one. AppSwitch could potentially just eliminate this all together and the communication would actually resemble traditional socket based IPC mechanisms with an advantage of a zero overhead read/write cost once the connection is established. I think I would want to test this out thoroughly sometime in the future if i get some time off from my bike trips

How does it work?

Frankly I don’t know in-depth, but I can guess. All applications, containerized or not, are just a bunch of executables linked to libs (or built statically) running over the OS. When they need OS’s help, they ask. To understand an application’s behavior or to morph it, OS can help us understand what is going on and provide interfaces to modify its behavior. Auditd for example, when configured, can allow us to monitor every syscall from a given process. Programmable LSMs can be used to set per-resource policies through kernel’s help. For performance observability, tracing tools have traditionally allowed an insight into what goes on underneath. In the world of networking, we again take the OS’s help – routing and filtering strategies are still defined through iptables with some advances happening in BPF-XDP. However, in the case of networking, calls such as connect(), accept() could be intercepted purely in userspace as well. But doing so robustly and efficiently without application or kernel changes with reasonable performance has been a hard academic problem for decades [1][2]. There must be some other smart things at work underneath in ax to keep this robust enough for all kinds of apps. With interception problem solved, this would allow ax to create a map and actually perform the ‘switching’ part (which I suppose justifies the AppSwitch name). I have tested it presently on a Java, Go and a Python server. With network syscall interception seemingly working fine, the data then flows like hot knife on butter. There may be some more features and techniques that I may have missed though. Going through ax --help it seems there are some options for egress, WAN etc, but I haven’t played it with that much. 

Some Resources

• Slack Channel : https://slofile.com/slack/appswitch
• DockerHub (containerized binary):  https://hub.docker.com/r/appswitch/ax/ (you need to request to be added to repo)

References

[1] Practical analysis of stripped binary code [link]
[2] Analyzing Dynamic Binary Instrumentation Overhead [link]

Few months ago, I was talking to Siva. He is part of Tamil Heritage Activities. They take people to Mahabalipuram often and explain all its great history.

They are looking for a mobile app to auto explain about the nearby place, by getting the geolocation of the person.

if you goto near to tiger cave of mahabalipuram, the app should explain all about tiger cave. The data can be provided from a wikipedia page or some custom webservice.

We can extend the same to any place. Like, extending the same for all the temples in kanchipuram or even all over world.

Wikipedia and wikidata can be great starting points for providing required information.

Now, we are looking for android/ios developers to develop this as an open source mobile application.

If you are interested in this, mail me on tshrinivasan@gmail.com or reply here.

Thanks.

This is a serious post. Or is it?

Hidden away in the farthest corner of the planet, its slopes covered in mist and darkness and its peaks lost in the clouds, stands the formidable Mount GNOME. Perched atop the mountain is a castle as menacing as the mountain itself – its towering walls made of stones as cold as death, and the wind howling through the courtyard like a dozen witches screaming for blood.

Living inside the imposing blackness are a group of feral savages, of whom very little is known to the world outside. The deathly walls of the castle bear testimony to their skull-crushing barbarism, and their vile customs have laid waste to the surrounding slopes and valleys. Mortally fearful of invoking their mad wrath, no human traveller has dared to come near the vicinity of their territory. Shrouded in anonymity, they draw their name from the impregnable mountain that they inhabit – they are the GNOME people.

Legend has it that they are unlike any human settlement known to history. Some say that they are barely human. They are like a foul amorphous mass that glides around Mount GNOME, filling the air with their fiendish thoughts, and burning every leaf and blade of grass with their fierce hatred. Living in an inferno of collectivism, the slightest notion of individuality is met with the harshest of punishments. GNOMEies are cursed with eternal bondage to the evil spirits of the dark mountain.

Happy Easter!

આ શ્રેણીમાં ચોથી પોસ્ટ. ગઇકાલે ત્રીજી પોસ્ટ કરી ત્યારે નિઝિલે કહ્યું કે સ્ટ્રાવા ઓપનસ્ટ્રીટમેપનો નકશો વાપરે છે તે સારું કહેવાય. હા. સ્ટ્રાવાનો નકશો અધૂરો જોઇને જ મારું ઓપનસ્ટ્રીટમેપનું યોગદાન શરૂ થયેલું. આપણી ફેવરિટ જગ્યાઓ જેવી કે માસ્ટરમાઇન્ડ, સિક્રેટ સ્પાઇસ (બી.આર.એમ.ની જગ્યા), વિવિધ ચા વાળાઓ, આજુ-બાજુના બિલ્ડિંગો, અગત્યના પોઇન્ટ્સ વગેરે સ્ટ્રાવાને કારણે જ ઉમેરવામાં આવ્યા છે. સ્ટ્રાવા મોબાઇલ એપ્સમાં ગુગલ મેપ્સ વાપરે છે, જે ખટકે છે, પણ ઠીક છે. સ્ટ્રાવના જીપીએસ તમે ઓપનસ્ટ્રીટમેપમાં અપલોડ કરી શકો છો. જોકે હું ઓફરોડિંગ કરતો નથી એટલે આ તક હજુ મળી નથી. હાઇકિંગ અને ટ્રેકિંગ કરતા લોકોએ અહીં યોગદાન આપવા જેવું છે.

આ પણ જુઓ:
* ભાગ ૧: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/strava
* ભાગ ૨: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/strava-2
* ભાગ ૩: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2018/03/26/strava-3/

૧૨ વર્ષ પહેલાં આ બ્લોગ શરૂ થયેલો આ બ્લોગ હજુ ટીનએજર્સ બન્યો નથી. હજુ સુધી તો બ્લોગ-બ્લોગિંગમાં મઝા આવે છે. જોઇએ હવે ક્યારે આ મઝા પૂરી થાય છે. બ્લોગ-રનિંગ-સાયકલિંગ-જીવન. કોને અગ્રતા આપવી એ હજુ નક્કી નથી, પણ અત્યારે આ ચાર વસ્તુઓ લગભગ સમાંતર ચાલે છે. કોઇક વખત એમાંથી કોઇ આગળ નીકળે છે અને કોઇ પાછળ રહી જાય છે. પણ, એકંદરે ચારેયમાંથી કોઇ હાંફ્યું નથી.

એક સંબંધિત અને સરસ સમાચાર: ચંદ્રકાંત બક્ષી અને અન્ય કેટલાય લેખકોના મસ્ત ફોટાઓ સંજયભાઇએ વિકિપીડિયામાં અપલોડ કર્યા છે. કેટલાય વર્ષોની ઇચ્છા ફળી છે. સંજયભાઇ અને અનંતનો આભાર અને તેમના પરથી કેટલાય લોકો પ્રેરણા લે તેવી ઇચ્છા!

આ પણ જુઓ:
* ૩ વર્ષ: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/3-years-2/
* ૪ વર્ષ: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/not-yet-missing-blog/
* ૫ વર્ષ: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/towards-6th-year/
* ૬ વર્ષ: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/happy-birthday-my-blog/
* ૮ વર્ષ: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/આઠ-વર્ષ/
* ૧૦ વર્ષ: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/10-years-blog/

આ પોસ્ટ સ્ટ્રાવા શ્રેણીમાં ત્રીજી પોસ્ટ છે. આ વાત છે એક સાથે બે-ત્રણ ડિવાઇસ-મોબાઇલ-ગારમિન કે પછી ઘડિયાળોમાં સ્ટ્રાવાની એક્ટિવિટી રેકોર્ડ કરીને અપલોડ કરતા લોકો માટે. અમુક લોકોને પોતાની એક્ટિવિટી એટલી હદે ગમે કે ગમે તે થાય તેને રેકોર્ડ કરીને અપલોડ કરવી જ. ઘણી વખત એવું થાય કે ફોન કે પછી ગારમિન છેલ્લી ઘડીએ દગો દે અને રાઇડ કે રન રેકોર્ડ જ ન થાય (મારી સાથે એવું એક-બે વખત બન્યું છે, એમાં પણ એક વખત તો રેસમાં). આવું ટાળવા માટે લોકો બે ડિવાઇસ (દા.ત. ગારમિન અને ફોન બંનેમાં) રેકોર્ડ કરે. રેકોર્ડ કરે તો વાંધો નહી પણ સ્ટ્રાવા પર પણ અપલોડ કરે. એટલે એવું આવે, “કાર્તિક મિસ્ત્રી ગ્રુપ રાઇડ વિથ કાર્તિક મિસ્ત્રી”. એટલે કે હું સાઇકલ ચલાવું છું, મારી સાથે! હા, આવી રાઇડ અપલોડ થાય તો પણ વાંધો નહી પણ બંને રાઇડમાંથી એક રાઇડ તો દૂર કરો! પણ લોકો સમજતા જ નથી

આવા લોકો માટે અમે એક ક્લબ બનાવી છે, Yes, You can safely delete ride uploaded twice!! આજે જ જોડાઓ!

PS: લાગતા વળગતાઓને સૂચના ન આપ્યા બદલ ક્ષમા!

આ પણ જુઓ:
* ભાગ ૧: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/strava
* ભાગ ૨: https://kartikm.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/strava-2