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It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the Debian "wheezy" release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.

The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd.

Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 10.000 software packages available (more than 75% of the Debian archive, and more to come!).

Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ, and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.

Due to the very small number of developers, our progress of the project has not been as fast as other successful operating systems, but we believe to have reached a very decent state, even with our limited resources.

We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd over the past decades. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or another. Thanks everybody!

This article appeared originally at GNU Hurd news and it's under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version.

It’s been a manically busy few weeks so I’m not going to write much today, just share some photos from some of the engagement sessions that I’ve photographed recently. In no particular order.

Rachel and Dan are getting married later this year in Cambridge. We went to a nature reserve near Basingstoke for their photo session.

Sarah and Marcus are getting married next month. For their photo session we revisited the site of their first date, and where Marcus had proposed. Right there on that very bench!

Andrew and Callum are getting married this week. When I went into their flat and saw the rows of Doctor Who DVDs on their shelves I knew we were going to get along. We went to a Doctor Who location for this photo session.

Lucy and James got married at the Tithe Barn in Petersfield, but we went to the Queen Elizabeth Country Park for their engagement photo session. The morning sun poured through the mist and created some rather special lighting.

I've now upgraded a few systems. Mostly painless I think so far. My desktop was running testing all along so it's upgrade was automatic. The first systems I upgraded were a couple of VM clients I use for SSH, not much on them and no X or GUI stuff so that went pretty painlessly.

I next tackled a laptop, and that was mostly okay except that I couldn't connect it to the WiFi after the upgrade or mount a SD card or USB stick. That turned out to be a problem in how the ck_connector was started from PAM. All things considered it's not a very visual upgrade, KDE 4 is mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary and the same can be said of most desktop applications too.

Once the laptop was completed it was time to do my better half's desktop system. This is the second most critical system there is so it has to be right or I get complained at. As I'd already done one GUI system I was relatively happy to do this one. Couldn't get Plymouth to work but other than that it's all happy. I do rather have a long list of orphaned and old packages to clean out still.

I've now only got two systems to go, both servers, my home sever and my hosted server, both have no GUI on them so the upgrade won't be as traumatic but they do have Dovecot on them which I gather will take some effort to migrate as the old and new configuration formats are quite different. However I've plenty of time to plan for that.

Today my main machine was down for about 8 hours. Oops.

That meant when I got home, after a long and dull train journey, I received a bunch of mails from various hosts each saying:

• Failed to fetch slaughter policies from rsync://www.steve.org.uk/slaughter

Slaughter is my sysadmin utility which pulls policies/recipies from a central location and applies them to the local host.

Slaughter has a bunch of different transports, which are the means by which policies and files are transferred from the remote "central host" to the local machine. Since git is supported I've now switched my policies to be fetched from the master github repository.

This means:

• All my servers need git installed. Which was already the case.
• I can run one less service on my main box.
• We now have a contest: Is my box more reliable than github?

In other news I've fettled with lumail a bit this week, but I'm basically doing nothing until I've pondered my way out of the hole I've dug myself into.

Like mutt lumail has the notion of "limiting" the display of things:

• Show all maildirs.
• Show all maildirs with new mail in them.
• Show all maildirs that match a pattern.
• Show all messages in the currently selected folder(s)
  • More than one folder may be selected :)
• Shall all unread messages in the currently selected folder(s).

Unfortunately the latter has caused an annoying, and anticipated, failure case. If you open a folder and cause it to only show unread messages all looks good. Until you read a message. At which point it is no longer allowed to be displayed, so it disappears. Since you were reading a message the next one is opened instead. WHich then becomes marked as read, and no longer should be displayed, because we've said "show me new/unread-only messages please".

The net result is if you show only unread messages and make the mistake of reading one .. you quickly cycle through reading all of them, and are left with an empty display. As each message in turn is opened, read, and marked as non-new.

There are solutions, one of which I documented on the issue. But this has a bad side-effect that message navigation is suddenly complicated in ways that are annoying.

For the moment I'm mulling the problem over and I will only make trivial cleanup changes until I've got my head back in the game and a good solution that won't cause me more pain.

It was a great pleasure to see the Reduced Shakespeare Company again last week. They are currently touring the UK with their show “The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged) (revised)” before they take up residence at the Leicester Square Theatre over the summer. This was the third time I’ve seen the Shakespeare show, albeit the first time in the “(revised)” form.

I’ve seen some of their other shows (I wrote about seeing the Complete World of Sports last summer) but have always had a soft spot for the Shakespeare show: It’s funny, but in an incredibly endearing way. The central concept is simple: Three people (Americans! Shock, horror) try to perform all of Shakespeare’s plays in an hour and a half, without realising how impossible their task is.

You don’t have to be familiar with Shakespeare to enjoy the show, although a little GCSE-level knowledge of a play or two helps. For the most part the updates in this revised version are subtle, work well and make sure that the show appeals to everyone.

I was lucky enough to get plucked from the audience by Matt Pearson (right) to run around on stage like an idiot. This means I can chalk up playing Ophelia’s ego alongside a pig and a urine tester in other RSC productions. As I got onto stage Matt Rippy (second from right) managed to work into the melee of dialogue that was flying around that he recognised me from Twitter!

I chatted to the guys briefly afterwards, and got to recommend a local curry house to Gary Fannin (left). One of the great things about RSC shows is that they differ depending on who is performing in them. This cast are great guys and work really well together, so get along to see them.

Lumail <http://lumail.org> received two patches today, one to build on Debian Unstable, and one to build on OpenBSD.

The documentation of the lua primitives is almost 100% complete, and the repository has now got a public list of issues which I'm slowly working on.

Even though I can't reply to messages I'm cheerfully running it on my mail box as a mail-viewer. Faster than mutt. Oddly enough. Or maybe I'm just biased.

First, it needs to be said. Automatic tracing and dumping data into Openstreetmap is not a good idea. This page is something I have been playing with as an aid to manual edits.

This is a simple summary of the steps I used. If you need more information, then you probably should not be doing this.

Source Data

Grab some data for the area of interest from Ordnance Survey.

The Gimp

Find the tile required and open in The Gimp. The following steps should isolate the buildings.

• Select by colour, threshold set to 26, pick the centre of a building, avoiding the antialiased edges.
• Sharpen selection.
• Fill whole selection with black
• Invert Selection
• Fill whole selection with white.
• Save image in bmp format.

Potrace

Make sure that you have the latest potrace that does geojson. With the required tif image from the OS data, run to following command:
potrace -b geojson -L XXXXXX -B YYYYYY -O 1 -a 0 tile.bmp
Replace XXXXXX and YYYYYY with the appropriate offsets for the tile being worked on. The required data is in the package downloaded from OS.

Quantum GIS

• Create a new project with CRS OSGB 1936 / British National Grid. EPSG:27700.
• Load a new vector layer, select the json file from potrace and make sure the CRS is as above. Make sure that the scale is making sense. It would be possible to load another layer of known good data as a check. Be sure to allow on the fly CRS transforms if the data you check against is not OSGB 1936.
• Save the layer as a shapefile. Use the same CRS as the layer for the shapefile.

JOSM

The shapefile can now be loaded into JOSM. The polygons should line up well with the OS OpenData StreetView background images. However, there will still be a lot of manual cleaning up required. Extra nodes need to be deleted and squaring up done.

I am not sure if this actually makes much improvement over simply clicking over the background imagery by hand. Maybe someone else can improve this process a bit more. This is really written as a reminder to myself incase I come back to this later.

All this is done with free software. The initial idea came from the openstreetmap wiki. There is also a python program that can do this called Mapseg, but it is not very fast on my little computer.