SFB 689 "Spin phenomena in reduced dimensions" funding also renewed for another 4 years!

Yet another piece of exciting news reaches us from Bonn today. After positive evaluation some weeks ago, the collaborative research centre SFB 689 "Spin phenomena in reduced dimensions" has now also officially received a renewal of funding for four more years. Time to celebrate - and then do a lot more of fascinating research!

Deactivating the RC4 cipher in Firefox

This has probably been blogged, reblogged, and reblogged again. Anyway... The RC4 cipher is considered broken, however many https websites still use it as default and Firefox even displays these connections as "high grade encryption". What can you do? Disable RC4 in the Firefox configuration!

1. Call up the configuration page by typing about:config in the address bar.
2. Firefox may pop up a warning along the lines of "here ends your warranty". If it does that, confirm that you'll be careful. 
3. On top of the page, above many config settings, there's now a search bar. Enter RC4
4. As search result you see the various cipher combinations that use this encryption standard (6 lines here). Double-click on each of these 6 lines (e.g. security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_md5) to toggle them from "true" to "false". 
5. That's it, you're done.

Note that if a web site ONLY supports RC4 then you'll end up with a connection error now. You probably shouldn't go there anyway though.

GRK 1570 "Electronic Properties of Carbon Based Nanostructures" extended!

Today's exciting news is that funding for the the Regensburg DFG research training group "Electronic Properties of Carbon Based Nanostructures" (GRK 1570) has been extended until 2018! The program focuses on the experimental and theoretical investigation of carbon-based nanostructures, i.e. devices based on graphene, carbon nanotubes, aromatic molecules or hybrids of those. A large number of projects is involved, with topics as various as e.g. the transport spectroscopy and analysis of electronic interactions in ultra-clean carbon nanotubes (our group), atomic force microscopy based research on forces in molecular electronics, or femtosecond plasmonics in graphene. More details on the research activities can be found on the projects web page, including direct links to the participating research groups. Thanks a lot to everyone who helped making this happen!

Speeding up app-office/libreoffice-bin generation

Since the last app-office/libreoffice-bin upgrade was long-delayed and overall slightly painful, we've modernized behind the scenes. Patrick Lauer a.k.a. bonsaikitten, who is amongst other things already running the commit notification bot irker on #gentoo-commits and the amazing AutoRepoman verifying quality and consistency of the portage tree, has provided me with generous access to two dedicated build chroots for amd64 and x86 libreoffice on a rather fast server. Together we're trying to automatize the upgrade process as much as possible. The app-office/libreoffice-bin-4.1.3.2 packages that I'm uploading right now and that will appear on the mirror servers and in the portage tree within the next 24h are the first result of the new setup. Test and enjoy!
Oh yeah, and since many people have asked me already, the awesome new splash screen was contributed by Denis M. a.k.a. Phr33d0m, see bug 456666. Thanks a lot too!

Gentoo on Facebook

Turns out Gentoo had a Facebook page with >10k "likes" already for quite some time. It was created in 2008 by a developer who later stopped using Facebook at some point, and noone really posted anything "official" there. Well, now's the time to step up public relations a bit... We (as in the people I spoke to on the #gentoo-pr Freenode channel) are not 100% sure so far what to do with it exactly, but there will certainly be occasional news and updates. Also, I'm feeding it with the Gentoo Planet RSS. If you are a Facebook user, head to the page and like us! :)

Lab::Measurement 3.20 released - including Lab::XPRESS

We have uploaded Lab::Measurement 3.20 to CPAN today. This release includes significant new features, in particular in the high-level measurement code and in the instrument readout logic.

The central new feature is Lab::XPRESS. This set of Perl modules builds upon the Instrument layer and provides a replacement and alternative to the Lab::Measurement class and its metadata handling. As detailed in several examples (1, 2, 3), nested loops of parameters, as e.g. gate voltages, combined with arbitrary measurements at each point can now be implemented in a highly flexible but simple way: you describe the logical structure of the measurement, without having to program the loops yourself. This means the actual measurement scripts become simpler and shorter, while remaining highly configurable. The underlying code can automatically take care of many details such as waiting times, timing of measurements, and pause or well-defined abort of the script on key events.

At the Instrument level, foundations have been laid for a centralized caching of instrument parameters. While this defaults off, it can be enabled in an instrument driver. The functionality is useful e.g. if reading out a parameter from the device that does not change on its own, unless explicitly set by a script, is a slow command. This also includes a generic support for asynchronous readout, i.e. first requesting a measurement value and thereby starting a read-out, then later in a separate command reading the result.

In addition, several instrument drivers have been added in varying states of completion, as e.g. the Cryogenic SMS magnet power supply, the Knick S252 voltage source, the Anritsu MG369xB signal generator, and the Keithley 2000 multimeter.

Finally, the TCPraw connection has been deprecated in favour of a new generic Socket implementation which provides a larger feature set. While TCPraw is still available, it internally only calls Socket and will be removed in a future version.

The release package is available from CPAN. Documentation as well as a web view of the Git code repository and a bug tracker are available from the package homepage https://www.labmeasurement.de/.

app-emulation/vmware-workstation-10 and friends

I finally got around to import the ebuilds for the new VMware Workstation and Player versions into the main tree. Thanks a lot to all the contributors on Bugzilla. Right now the ebuilds do not have any keywords yet since I have not tested the installation results at all myself, so if you want to try installing the software, remember you need a license for VMware Workstation, and 10 != 9 :], and then keyword it manually in /etc/portage/package.keywords as follows:

=app-emulation/vmware-modules-279* **
=app-emulation/vmware-workstation-10* **
=app-emulation/vmware-player-6* **

(Obviously this will only work on x86 and amd64, since the software only exists for these architectures.) Feedback of all sorts is welcome on the version bump bugs for VMware Workstation and the kernel modules and for VMware Player.