Tinnitus During the lock-down of March 2020, I became aware of noise in ears and subsequently major hearing loss. It took me quite a while to know that Tinnitus happens to both those who have hearing loss as well as not. I keep running into threads like this and as shared by someone nobody knows what really causes it. I did try some of the apps (an app. called Resound on Android) that is supposed to tackle Tinnitus but it hasn t helped much. There is this but at least for me, right now pretty speculative. Also this, and again highly speculative.

Cooking After mum passed away, I haven t cooked anything. This used to give me pleasure but now just doesn t feel right. Cooking is something you enjoy when you are doing for somebody else and not just for yourself, at least that s how I feel and with that the curiosity to know more recipes. I do wanna buy a wok at sometime but when, how I just don t know.

Books Have been reading books quite a bit. And due to that had to again revisit and understand ISBN. Perhaps I might have shared it before. It really is something, the history of ISBN. And that co-relates with the book I read, Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. Raising Steam is the 40th Book in the Discworld Series and it basically romanticizes and reminisces how the idea of an engine was born, and then a steam engine and how actually Railways started. There has been a lot of history and experiences from the early years of Steam Railway that have been taken and transplanted into the book. Also how Railways is and can be successful if only it is invested wisely and maintenance is done. This is only where imagination and reality come apart as maintenance isn t done and then you have issues. While this is and was in the UK, similar situation exists in India and many other places around the world and doesn t matter whether it is private or public. Exceptions are German, French but then that maybe due to Labor movements that happened and were successful unlike in other places. I could go on but then it will become a different article in itself. Suffice to say there is much to learn and you need serious people to look after it. Both in UK and India we lack that. And not just in Railways but Civil Aviation too, but again that is a story in itself.

Web-series Apart from books, have been seeing web-series that Willow is a good one that I enjoyed even though I hadn t seen the earlier movie. While there has been a flurry of movies and web-series both due to end of year and beginning of 2023 and yet have tried to be a bit partial on what I wanna watch or not. If it has crime, fantasy, drama then usually I like it. For e.g. I saw Blackout and pretty much was engrossed in what will happen next. It also does lead you to ask questions about centralization vs de-centralization for both power and other utilities and does make a case for communities to have their utilities apart from the grid as a fallback. How do we do over decades or centuries about it is a different question perhaps altogether. There were two books that kinda stood out for me, the first was Ian Rankin s Naming of the Dead . The book is about a cynical John Rebus, a man after my own heart. I am probably going to buy a few more of his series. In a way it also tells you why UK is the way it is right now. Another book that I liked was Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde. This is one of the books that Mum would have clearly liked. It is pretty unusual while at the same time very close to 1984 and other such dystopian novels. The main trope of the book is what color you can see and how much you can see. The main character is somebody who can see Red, around the age of 20. One of the interesting aspects of the book is de-facting which closely resembles the Post-Truth world where alternative facts can be made out of air and they don t need any scientific evidence to back them up. In Jasper s world, they don t care about how things work and most of the technology is banned and curiosity is considered harmful and those who show that are murdered one way or the other. Interestingly, the author has just last year decided to start book 2 in the 3 book series that is supposed to be. This also tells why the U.S. is such a precarious situation in a way. A part of it is also due to the media which is in hands of chosen few, the same goes for UK and India, almost an oligopoly.

The Great Escape This is also a book but also about experiences of people, not in 19th-20th century but today that tells you slavery is alive and well and human-trafficking as well. This piece from NPR tells you about an MNC and Indian workers. What I found interesting is that there barely is an mention of the Indian Embassy that is supposed to help Indian people. I do know for a fact that the embassies of India has seen a drastic shortage of both people and materials even since the new Govt. came in place that was nine years ago. Incidentally, BBC shared about the Gujarat riots 2002 and that has been censored in India. They keep quiet about the UK Govt. who did find out that the Chief Minister was directly responsible for the killings and in facts his number 2, Amit Shah had shared that we would do 2002 again in the election cycle barely a month ago. But sadly, no hate speech FIR or any action was taken against Mr. Shah. There have been attempts by people to showcase the documentary. For e.g. JNU tried it and the rowdies from ABVP (arm of BJP) created violence. Even the questions that has been asked by the Wire, GOI will not acknowledge them. Interestingly, all India s edtechs have taken a beating in the last 6-8 months including the biggest BJYU s. Sharing a story from 2021 where things were best and today all of them are at bottom. In fact, the public has been wary as the prices of the courses has kept on increasing and most case studies have been found to be fake. Also the general outlook on jobs and growth has been pessimistic. In fact, most companies have been shedding jobs truckloads, most in the I.T. sector but other sectors as well. Hospitality and other related sectors have taken a huge beating, part of it post-pandemic, part of it Govt s refusal to either spend money or do any positive policies for either infrastructure, education, medical, you name it, they think private sector has all the answers which has been proven to be wrong again and again. I did not want to end on a discordant note but things are the way they are

This is the first of a two-part post, covering high-level thoughts around my motivations and vision. Make sure to check out the second part for my specific goals for 2023. A new year is upon us! My plan was to be 6 months into the journey of starting a business by this point. I made some very tentative progress towards that goal in 2022, registering a company and starting some consulting work, but on the whole I ve found it much harder than expected to gather the necessary energy to begin that journey in earnest.

Reflection I m excited about the next chapter of my career, so the fact that I ve been struggling to get started has been frustrating. The only upside is that the delay has given me plenty of time to reflect on the last few years and what I can learn from them and draw some lessons to help better manage and sustain my energy going forward.

Purpose A large part of what I ve realised is that I should have left Google years ago. It was a great place to work, and I m incredibly grateful for everything I learned and received during my time there. For years it was my dream job, but my happiness had been declining, and instead of taking the (relatively small) risk of leaving to the unknown, I tried several variations of team and role in the hope of restoring the dream. The reality is that a significant chunk of my motivation and energy comes from being able to link my work back to a bigger purpose that delivers concrete positive impact in the world. I felt that link through Google s mission to make information universally accessible and useful for the first 10-11 years, but for the latter 4-5 years my ability to see that link was tenuous at best and trying to push through the challenges presented without that link providing a reliable source of energy is what drove my unhappiness and led to needing a longer break to recharge. I expect the challenges of starting a business to be even greater than what I experienced at Google, so the lesson I m taking from this is that it s crucial for me to understand what the link between my work and the bigger purpose with concrete positive impact in the world that I m aiming to contribute to is.

Community The second factor that I ve slowly come to realise has been missing from my career in the last few years has been participation in a professional community and a variety of enriching interpersonal relationships. As much as I value and need this type of interaction, fostering and sustaining it unfortunately doesn t come naturally to me. Working remotely since 2016 and then taking a 9 month break out of the industry are not particularly helpful contributors to building and maintaining a wide network either! The lesson here is simply that I m going to need to push past my comfort zone in reaching out and introducing myself to a range of people in order to grow my professional network, and equally I need to be diligent and disciplined in making time to maintain and regularly connect with people whom I respect and find energising to interact with.

Personal Influences Lastly, I ve been reflecting on a set of principles that are important to me. These are not so much new lessons, more confirming to myself what I value moving forward. There are many things I could include here, but to keep it somewhat brief, the key influences on my thinking are:

• Independence - I can t entirely explain why or where it comes from, but since the start of my professional career (which I consider to be my consulting/freelancing development during high school) I ve understood that I m far more motivated by building and growing my own business than I am by working for someone else. Working for myself has always felt like the default and sensible course - I m excited to get back to that.
• Openness - Open is better than closed, in terms of software, business model and organisational processes. This continues to be a strong belief and something I want to uphold in my business endeavours. Competition should be based on superior technical quality or service, not artificial constraints or barriers to entry that lock customers and users into a single solution or market. Protocols and networks should be open for wide participation and easily accessible to new entrants and competition.
• People first - This applies both to how we work with each other - respectfully, valuing diversity and with integrity, and to how we apply technology to our world - with consideration for all stakeholders it may affect and awareness of both the intended and potential unintended impacts.

Framework Using Vision, Mission and Strategy as a planning framework has worked quite well for me when building and growing teams over the years, so I plan to re-use it personally to help organise the above reflections into a hopefully cohesive plan than results in some useful 2023 goals.

Vision Software systems contribute direct and meaningful impact to solving real problems in our world. Each word has a fair bit of meaning behind it for me, so breaking it down a little bit:

• software systems - excite me because software is eating the world and has significant potential to do good.
• contribute - Software alone doesn t solve problems, and misapplied can easily make things worse. To contribute software needs to be designed intentionally and evaluated with an awareness of risks it could pose within the complex system that is our modern world.
• direct and meaningful impact - I m not looking for broad outcomes like improving productivity or communication, which apply generally across many problems. I want to see software applied to solve specific blockers whose removal unlocks significant progress towards solving a problem.
• real - as opposed to straightforward problems. The types of issue where the acknowledgement of it as a real problem often ends the sentence as it feels too big to tackle. Climate change and pandemic risk are examples of real problems. Decentralising finance or selling more widgets are not.
• in our world - is mostly filler to round out the sentence nicely, but I do think we should probably sort out the mess we re making on our own planet before trying to colonise anywhere else.

Mission To lead the development and operation of software systems that deliver new opportunities for individuals, businesses and communities to solve the real problems in their community. Again breaking down the intent a little bit:

• lead - having a meaningful impact on real problems is a big job. I won t succeed as a one man band. It will require building and growing a larger team.
• development and operation - development is fun and necessary, but I also wanted to highlight that the ongoing operation and integration of those software systems into the broader social and human systems of our world is an equally important and ongoing need.
• new opportunities - are important to drive and motivate investment in the adoption of technology. Building or operating a system that maintains the status quo is not motivating for me.
• individuals, businesses and communities - aka everyone! But each of these groups (as examples, not specific) will have diverse roles, needs and interactions with the software which must be considered to ensure the system achieves the desired contribution and impact.
• their community - refines the ambition from the vision to an achievable scope of action within which to execute the mission. We won t solve our problems by targeting one big global fix, but if we each participate in solving the problems in our community, collectively it will make a difference.

Strategy Build a sustainable business that provides a home and infrastructure to support a continuous cycle of development, validation and growth of software systems fulfilling the mission and vision above.

• Accumulate meaningful impact via a portfolio of systems rather than one big bet.
• Focus on opportunities that promote the decarbonisation of our economy (the most pressing problem our society faces), but not at the expense of ignoring compelling opportunities to contribute impact to other real problems also.
• Favour the marathon over the sprint - while being first can be fun and convey benefits, it s often the fast-followers who learn from the initial mistakes and deliver lasting change and broader impact.

In keeping with the final bullet point, I aim to evaluate the strategy against a long-term view of success. What excites me about it is that it has the potential to provide structure and clarity for my work while also enabling many future paths - from operating a portfolio of micro-SaaS products that each solve real problems for a specific niche or community, or diving deep into a single compelling opportunity for a year or two, joining with others to partner on shared ventures or some combination of all three and other variations in between.

Your Thoughts I consider this a first draft, which I intend to revise and evolve further over the next 6-12 months. I don t plan major changes to the intent or underlying ideas, but finding the best words to express and convey that intent clearly is not something I expect to get right on the first take. I d love to have your feedback and engagement as I move forward with this strategy - please use the box in the sidebar (or on the front page, if you re on a phone) to be notified when I post new writing, drop me an email with your thoughts or even book a meeting to say hi and discuss something in detail.

Goals for 2023 Next up - check out part two of this post to see my goals for 2023.

Changes in version 0.2.1 (2023-01-25)

• Explicitly set -DTOML_ENABLE_FLOAT16=0 to permit compilation on some architectures stumbling of the type.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

• UPDATES(1/26) The above case is not only the way to do so. There are more alternatives to be taken into account. See https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Wanted#Available_hardware about details. Thanks, feedback from @pabs
• [1] https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi
• [2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianNetDomains
• [3] https://people.debian.org/~gio/dqib/

Changes in Rcpp release version 1.0.10 (2023-01-12)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Unwind protection is enabled by default (I aki in #1225). It can be disabled by defining RCPP_NO_UNWIND_PROTECT before including Rcpp.h. RCPP_USE_UNWIND_PROTECT is not checked anymore and has no effect. The associated plugin unwindProtect is therefore deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
  • The 'finalize' method for Rcpp Modules is now eagerly materialized, fixing an issue where errors can occur when Module finalizers are run (Kevin in #1231 closing #1230).
  • Zero-row data.frame objects can receive push_back or push_front (Dirk in #1233 fixing #1232).
  • One remaining sprintf has been replaced by snprintf (Dirk and Kevin in #1236 and #1237).
  • Several conversion warnings found by clang++ have been addressed (Dirk in #1240 and #1241).
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • The C++20, C++2b (experimental) and C++23 standards now have plugin support like the other C++ standards (Dirk in #1228).
  • The source path for attributes received one more protection from spaces (Dirk in #1235 addressing #1234).
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • Several GitHub Actions have been updated.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

1. there's a post-merge hook in my ikiwiki git repository which calls feed2exec in /home/w-anarcat/source/.git/hooks/ took me a while to find it! I tried post-update and post-receive first, but ikiwiki actually pulls from the bare directory in the source directory, so only post-merge fires (even though it's not a merge)
2. feed2exec then finds new blog posts (if any!) and fires up the new ikiwikitoot plugin which then...
3. posts the toot using the toot command (it just works, why reinvent the wheel), keeping the toot URL
4. finds the Markdown source file associated with the post, and adds the magic mastodon directive
5. commits and pushes the result

• a Containerfile (or Dockerfile if you prefer to name it this way) that defines how to build a container image.
• a .gitlab-ci.yml file that defines what the CI should do. In the example below, we want to build a container image and push it to the GitLab registry associated with the GitLab repo.

$ ls -A
Containerfile  .git  .gitlab-ci.yml
$ cat Containerfile 
FROM debian:stable
RUN  apt-get update
CMD  echo hello world
$ cat .gitlab-ci.yml 
build-container-image:
  stage: build
  image: debian:testing
  before_script:
    - apt-get update
    - apt-get install -y buildah ca-certificates
  script:
    - buildah build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE .
    - buildah login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_JOB_TOKEN $CI_REGISTRY
    - buildah push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE

• We use buildah, but we could have used podman.
• However we don't use docker, because its client/server design makes it cumbersome to use in a CI environment: it requires a separate container to run the Docker daemon, plus setting the DOCKER_HOST variable. Why bother?

$ buildah build --tag $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE .
[...]
STEP 2/3: RUN  apt-get update
error running container: did not get container start message from parent: EOF
Error: building at STEP "RUN apt-get update": netavark: code: 4, msg: iptables v1.8.8 (nf_tables): Could not fetch rule set generation id: Invalid argument

$ cat .gitlab-ci.yml 
build-container-image:
  stage: build
  image: debian:testing
  before_script:
    - apt-get update
    - apt-get install -y buildah ca-certificates
    -  
      # Switch to iptables legacy, as GitLab CI doesn't support nftables.
      apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends iptables
      update-alternatives --set iptables /usr/sbin/iptables-legacy
  script:
    - buildah build -t $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE .
    - buildah login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_JOB_TOKEN $CI_REGISTRY
    - buildah push $CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE

The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise. For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.3.1 (2023-01-14)

• The #define ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER remains active to suppress the (upstream) deprecation warnings, see #391 and #402 for details.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.4.3.0 (2022-12-28) (GitHub Only)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.4.3 (Ship of Theseus)
  • fix corner case in pinv() when processing symmetric matrices
• Protect the undefine of NDEBUG behind additional opt-in define

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2023-01-11)

• The advanceDate function can now selects a business day convention, a time unit and an end-of-month convention
• Calendars routines for Australia, China, South Africa, UK, US have been updated to current versions from QuantLib 1.29.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Changes in version 0.2.0 (2023-01-10)

• Rewritten in C++17 using toml++ for TOML v1.0.0 compliance
• Unchanged interface from R, unchanged (and expanded tests)
• Several small continuous integration upgrades since last release

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

# apt install distcc

STARTDISTCC="true"

# Customize for your environment
ALLOWEDNETS="192.168.2.0/24"

# Specify your network device
LISTENER="192.168.2.146"

# systemctl start distcc

# ufw allow 3632/tcp

export DISTCC_HOSTS='localhost 192.168.2.107 192.168.2.91'

$ make tinyconfig
$ time make -j$(nproc) CC=distcc bzImage

On one thing, however, all were agreed resisters and politicians alike: "planning". The disasters of the inter-war decades the missed opportunities after 1918, the great depression that followed the stock-market crash of 1929, the waste of unemployment, the inequalities, injustices and inefficiencies of laissez-faire capitalism that had led so many into authoritarian temptation, the brazen indifference of an arrogant ruling elite and the incompetence of an inadequate political class all seemed to be connected by the utter failure to organize society better. If democracy was to work, if it was to recover its appeal, it would have to be planned.

What binds Europeans together, even when they are deeply critical of some aspect or other of its practical workings, is what it has become conventional to call in disjunctive but revealing contrast with "the American way of life" the "European model of society".

• When: October 31st, November 1st, November 2nd 2023.
• Where: Dock Europe, Hamburg, Germany.

Android news obfusk (FC Stegerman) performed a thought-provoking review of tools designed to determine the difference between two different .apk files shipped by a number of free-software instant messenger applications. These scripts are often necessary in the Android/APK ecosystem due to these files containing embedded signatures so the conventional bit-for-bit comparison cannot be used. After detailing a litany of issues with these tools, they come to the conclusion that:

It s quite possible these messengers actually have reproducible builds, but the verification scripts they use don t actually allow us to verify whether they do.

This reflects the consensus view within the Reproducible Builds project: pursuing a situation in language or package ecosystems where binaries are bit-for-bit identical (over requiring a bespoke ecosystem-specific tool) is not a luxury demanded by purist engineers, but rather the only practical way to demonstrate reproducibility. obfusk also announced the first release of their own set of tools on our mailing list. Related to this, obfusk also posted to an issue filed against Mastodon regarding the difficulties of creating bit-by-bit identical APKs, especially with respect to copying v2/v3 APK signatures created by different tools; they also reported that some APK ordering differences were not caused by building on macOS after all, but by using Android Studio [ ] and that F-Droid added 16 more apps published with Reproducible Builds in December.

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Debian As mentioned in last months report, Vagrant Cascadian has been organising a series of online sprints in order to clear the huge backlog of reproducible builds patches submitted by performing NMUs (Non-Maintainer Uploads). During December, meetings were held on the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd and 29th, resulting in a large number of uploads and bugs being addressed:

• Chris Lamb: aespipe (#661079, #1020809), cdbackup (#1011428) & xmlrpc-epi (#865688, #1020651)
• Holger Levsen: apr-util (#1006865), lirc (#979024) & ruby-omniauth-tumblr
• Vagrant Cascadian: amavisd-milter (#975954), apophenia (#940013), cfi (#995647), chessx (#881664), cmocka (#991181), desmume (#890312), golang-gonum-v1-plot (#968045), intel-gpu-tools (#945105), jhbuild (#971420), libjama (#986601), libjs-qunit (#976445), liblip (#1001513, #989583), libstatgrab (#961747), mlpost (#977179 and #977180), netcdf-parallel (#972930), netgen-lvs (#955783), perfect-scrollbar (#1000770), python-tomli (#994979), pytsk (#992060), smplayer (#997689), squeak-plugins-scratch (#876771, #942006), stgit (#942009), strace (#896016), surgescript (#992061), sympow (#973601), wxmaxima (#983148), xavs2 (#952493), xaw3d (#991180, #986704) and yard (#972668).

The next sprint is due to take place this coming Tuesday, January 10th at 16:00 UTC.

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Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • OpenRGB (filesystem ordering issue)
  • python-maturin (report an issue regarding random numbers)
  • rav1e (datetime-related issue)
  • weblate (report that the build fails in 2038)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1025415 filed against cctools.
  • #1025801 filed against sphinx (forwarded upstream)
  • #1026381 filed against python-django-health-check.
  • #1026876 filed against jamin.
  • #1026877 filed against opari2.

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Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In October, the following changes were made by Holger Levsen:

• The osuosl167 machine is no longer a openqa-worker node anymore. [ ][ ]
• Detect problems with APT repository signatures [ ] and update a repository signing key [ ].
• reproducible Debian builtin-pho: improve job output. [ ]
• Only install the foot-terminfo package on Debian systems. [ ]

In addition, Mattia Rizzolo added support for the version of diffoscope in Debian stretch which doesn t support the --timeout flag. [ ][ ]

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diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb made the following changes to diffoscope, including preparing and uploading versions 228, 229 and 230 to Debian:

• Fix compatibility with file(1) version 5.43, with thanks to Christoph Biedl. [ ]
• Skip the test_html.py::test_diff test if html2text is not installed. (#1026034)
• Update copyright years. [ ]

In addition, Jelle van der Waa added support for Berkeley DB version 6. [ ] Orthogonal to this, Holger Levsen bumped the Debian Standards-Version on all of our packages, including diffoscope [ ], strip-nondeterminism [ ], disorderfs [ ] and reprotest [ ].

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If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. You can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org