Dmitrijs Ledkovs: #takethestage
#stagetaken
I have now permanently settled in the UK.
Though, the data we are looking might be inaccurate. We filed a bug against UDD, which claims that #639407 affects Wheezy while it is in fact fixed as far as the BTS is concerned. If UDD is only wrong in this direction, we can hope for a positive surprise when the UDD bug is fixed. On the other hand, we may also be unpleasently surprised if not.
While talking about the UDD, I would like to mention a new feature its bug search script. It is now possible to filter based on whether or not a package is unblocked. If you take this into account (and assume that all unblocked packages will migrate in a timely manner), our RC bug count drops to about 219. It also gives us a much better view of how many packages that could actually use an unblock. which is now down to about 61.
In case you have been wondering what is up with the removal of RC buggy leaf packages . We have still been looking at those, but for the last couple of times there have been at most one candidate for a given run (obviously not the same package each time). It felt a bit excessive to send an email to debian-devel for just one RC bug.
Just back in from an amazing concert at the
Chicago Symphony Center. Vocalists
Angelique Kidjo,
Dianne Reeves and
Lizz Wright supported by all-star
band of
Geri Allen on piano,
Romero Lubambo on electric and acoustic guitar,
James Genus on electric bass guitar,
Munyungo Jackson on percussion and
Terri Lyne Carrington on
drums (and musical director). The concert alternates between solos and
joint pieces with more joy and soul than I heard in a long time. Great evening.
I finally manage to create an image of the Debian Installer automatically, with no key or password transiting on the Cloud or the network, and without using the ec2-api-tools, which are non-Free. Thanks to Eucalyptus for implementing the attribute InstanceInitiatedShutdownBehavior in euca2ools 2.1.2.
In brief, I start a micro-instance with an additional volume, and I pass it
a script for cloud-init, which will download the Installer on the volume
and shut down the instance. Then, I register the volume as a machine image.
Those machine images of the Installer are to be preseeded via instance
metadata
to install Debian on another volume. I am still struggling with the
pre-configuration. More details will follow in the next article. In the
meantime, here are the commands I a using.
On the local computer, start an instance on the Cloud. Until #696595 is fixed and cloud-init is installed by default, I
use a Ubuntu image.
HELPER_AMI=ami-7609bb77 # Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise amd64 EBS (Asia North-East)
/dev/sdb=:1:false). Pass the script
debigen-install-installer-cloud (see below).
HELPER_INSTANCE=$( euca-run-instances \
--instance-initiated-shutdown-behavior terminate \
--instance-type t1.micro \
--block-device-mapping /dev/sdb=:1:false \
--user-data-file debigen-install-installer-cloud \
$HELPER_AMI
tee /dev/stderr grep INSTANCE awk ' print $2 ')
while [ ! $(euca-describe-instances $HELPER_INSTANCE grep INSTANCE cut -f 6 tee /dev/stderr) = "running" ]
do sleep 30
done
TARGET_VOLUME=$( euca-describe-volumes
grep $HELPER_INSTANCE grep '/dev/sdb'
tee /dev/stderr awk ' print $2 ')
while [ ! $(euca-describe-instances $HELPER_INSTANCE grep INSTANCE cut -f 6 tee /dev/stderr) = "terminated" ]
do sleep 30
done
PV_KERNEL=aki-44992845 # Boot PV-Grub on hd0 (Asia North-East)
TARGET_SNAPSHOT=$( euca-create-snapshot $TARGET_VOLUME
tee /dev/stderr awk ' print $2 ')
while euca-describe-snapshots $TARGET_SNAPSHOT grep -q pending ; do sleep 30 ; done
euca-register \
--name test_di \
--description test_of_debian_installer \
--snapshot $TARGET_SNAPSHOT \
--kernel $PV_KERNEL \
--architecture x86_64
debigen-install-installer-cloud, used above.
#!/bin/sh -ex
mke2fs -L debian-installer /dev/xvdb -F
mount LABEL=debian-installer /mnt/
cd /mnt
ARCH=amd64
DIST=squeeze
DI_VERSION=20110106+squeeze4+b2
MIRROR=jp
BASEURL=http://ftp.$MIRROR.debian.org/debian/dists/$DIST/main/installer-$ARCH/$DI_VERSION/images/netboot/xen
wget $BASEURL/initrd.gz $BASEURL/vmlinuz
mkdir -p boot/grub
cat > boot/grub/menu.lst <<__END__
default 0
timeout 3
title Debian Installer ($DI_VERSION $ARCH)
root (hd0)
kernel /vmlinuz root=LABEL=debian-installer ro console=hvc0 auto=true priority=critical url=http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data DEBIAN_FRONTEND=text
initrd /initrd.gz
__END__
sleep 30
halt
| Week | Squeeze | Wheezy | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| 43 | 284 (213+71) | 468 (332+136) | +184 (+119/+65) |
| 44 | 261 (201+60) | 408 (265+143) | +147 (+64/+83) |
| 45 | 261 (205+56) | 425 (291+134) | +164 (+86/+78) |
| 46 | 271 (200+71) | 401 (258+143) | +130 (+58/+72) |
| 47 | 283 (209+74) | 366 (221+145) | +83 (+12/+71) |
| 48 | 256 (177+79) | 378 (230+148) | +122 (+53/+69) |
| 49 | 256 (180+76) | 360 (216+155) | +104 (+36/+79) |
| 50 | 204 (148+56) | 339 (195+144) | +135 (+47/+90) |
| 51 | 178 (124+54) | 323 (190+133) | +145 (+66/+79) |
| 52 | 115 (78+37) | 289 (190+99) | +174 (+112/+62) |
| 1 | 93 (60+33) | 287 (171+116) | +194 (111/+83) |
| 2 | 82 (46+36) | 271 (162+109) | +189 (+116/+73) |
| 3 | 25 (15+10) | 249 (165+84) | +224 (150/+74) |
| 4 | 14 (8+6) | ||
| 5 | 2 (0+2) | ||
| 6 | release! |
As usual, I've changed my plans for Weblate 1.4. Simply before I got to implementing features I wanted to have there, I've already implemented bunch of other things, which are worth releasing.
So my plan is to release Weblate 1.4 next week with current feature set (you can check list of fixed issues) and focus on 1.5 development then.
Some major features which will be available in Weblate 1.4:
Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Suse Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!
memcheck), a cache profiler (cachegrind), heap profiler (massif) and thread debugger (helgrind) among others. Valgrind also provides a framework which can be used to build other tools.
The Valgrind tool which I find most useful and the one which I have most experience with is memcheck. This tool can detect all manner of memory management problems, including use after free, using uninitialized data, memory leaks, double free. Between them these can result in savings of many hours of staring a core dumps and gdb backtraces.
How Does memcheck Work?
At its core Valgrind is a dynamic binary translation engine, which is used to instrument the code at runtime. In the case of memcheck this is used to track properties of the memory in a process, including aspects such as whether each bit (yes, bit) of memory has been initialized since it was allocated. It also tracks this information as data is loaded into registers, so it can know if a given register is currently tainted with uninitialized data or not. As well as instrumentation through binary translation Valgrind also includes instrumented versions of the C dynamic memory allocation functions which are used to track whether a each bit of memory is currently considered free or allocated, as well as tainting registers when they contain a pointer to memory which has been freed.
A large part of memcheck's functionality is built upon Valgrind's ability to determine when memory has been initialized. However although binary translation can be used to instrument when the application itself has initialized some memory it is not currently possible to instrument the behaviour of system calls, in other words Valgrind cannot automatically determine when memory has been initialised e.g. after a read(2) system call. For this reason Valgrind has baked in knowledge about the behaviour of system calls on various platforms.
For example lets consider the read(2) system call. The prototype of read(2) is:
ssize_t read(int fd, void *buf, size_t count);This system call reads up to
count bytes from the file descriptor fd into the memory pointed to by buf and returns the number of bytes read. Here is the code within Valgrind which handles this system call (found in coregrind/m_syswrap/syswrap-generic.c):
PRE(sys_read)
*flags = SfMayBlock;
PRINT("sys_read ( %ld, %#lx, %llu )", ARG1, ARG2, (ULong)ARG3);
PRE_REG_READ3(ssize_t, "read",
unsigned int, fd, char *, buf, vki_size_t, count);
if (!ML_(fd_allowed)(ARG1, "read", tid, False))
SET_STATUS_Failure( VKI_EBADF );
else
PRE_MEM_WRITE( "read(buf)", ARG2, ARG3 );
POST(sys_read)
vg_assert(SUCCESS);
POST_MEM_WRITE( ARG2, RES );
These two functions are called before and after the system call respectively. The main piece of functionality is the calls to PRE_MEM_WRITE and POST_MEM_WRITE. In this case PRE_MEM_WRITE is used to check that the memory starting at ARG2 (recall that this is the supplied buffer) and extending for ARG3 bytes (the system calls count argument) consists of allocated memory. After
the system call in complete the post function calls POST_MEM_WRITE to indicate to Valgrind that RES bytes of the buffer have know been initialized.
The above is a relatively simple case, but the above two hooks must be supplied for each system call on each platform which Valgrind wishes to support. One of the most problematic system calls is the ioctl(2) system call. The ioctl call takes a file descriptor, a request number and a pointer to a per-ioctl argument structure and implements per-device control requests. There
are literally dozens of devices many with their own specific ioctls. For this reason a sizable portion of Valgrind code is dedicate to decoding the behaviour of the myriad of potential ioctls
and providing pre- and post-call instrumentation for them.
Interacting with the Hypervisor from Userspace
Under Xen the toolstack is a normal userspace process running in the control domain (typically domain 0). As part of its operation the toolstack needs to communicate with the hypervisor and to do this it uses hypercalls. However a userspace process cannot simply make hypercalls on its own, instead it must request that the OS kernel make the hypercall for it. This prevents just any userspace process making a hypercall, since the kernel will first check the privilege of the process making the request.
Under Linux a userspace process makes hypercalls by using the ioctl(2) system call on a special "Privileged Command" (privcmd) device. In this case the toolstack uses the IOCTL_PRIVCMD_HYPERCALL ioctl request which takes a hypercall number and the hypercall arguments as its argument. Other OSes which can be used as a control domain posses similar interfaces.
Making memcheck Work With Xen Toolstacks?
As might be expected the majority of the work to allow Valgrind to work on Xen toolstack processes was teaching it about the IOCTL_PRIVCMD_HYPERCALL ioctl. Fortunately it was not necessary to teach Valgrind about every hypercall but only about those which are used by toolstacks. This is a smallish subset of all hypercalls including the domctl interfaces and a handful of others.
The initial batch of patches cover all of the system calls needed to start new domains, shut them down and migrate them using the XL toolstack. New hypercalls will be added as they are discovered to be missing.
Getting and Using This Functionality
The initial set of patches were accepted into Valgrind's Subversion repository trunk revision 13081 in October 2012 and are expected to be part of the 3.9.0 release.
Until 3.9.0 is released it will be necessary to get this functionality from SVN. Fortunately this is relatively simple and follows the usual autofoo dance. Although the usual caveats regarding running unreleased software apply.
$ svn co svn://svn.valgrind.org/valgrind/trunk valgrind $ cd valgrind $ ./autogen.sh $ ./configure $ make $ sudo make installOnce Valgrind is built and installed simply call it passing the command to be debugged as an option:
# valgrind xl list ==16186== Memcheck, a memory error detector ==16186== Copyright (C) 2002-2012, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al. ==16186== Using Valgrind-3.9.0.SVN and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info ==16186== Command: xl list ==16186== Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s) Domain-0 0 512 4 r----- 332.5 ==16186== ==16186== HEAP SUMMARY: ==16186== in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==16186== total heap usage: 16 allocs, 16 frees, 93,529 bytes allocated ==16186== ==16186== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible ==16186== ==16186== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v ==16186== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 39 from 6)Here we see that
xl list has no leaks! However if I comment out the call to libxl_dominfo_list_free in tools/libxl/xl_cmdimpl.c:main_list() then instead Valgrind reports:
[...] ==16203== HEAP SUMMARY: ==16203== in use at exit: 90,112 bytes in 1 blocks ==16203== total heap usage: 16 allocs, 15 frees, 93,529 bytes allocated ==16203== ==16203== LEAK SUMMARY: ==16203== definitely lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==16203== indirectly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==16203== possibly lost: 90,112 bytes in 1 blocks ==16203== still reachable: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==16203== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks ==16203== Rerun with --leak-check=full to see details of leaked memory ==16203== ==16203== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v ==16203== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 39 from 6) [...]So it has caught the memory leak! Rerunning with the suggests
--leak-check=full goes even further and tells me where the leaked memory was allocated:
[...] ==16204== 90,112 bytes in 1 blocks are possibly lost in loss record 1 of 1 ==16204== at 0x4024480: calloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:593) ==16204== by 0x4050CE4: libxl_list_domain (libxl.c:548) ==16204== by 0x805EEC7: main_list (xl_cmdimpl.c:3931) ==16204== by 0x804D6DD: main (xl.c:285) [...]To ease debugging of domain creation I find it useful to use the
-F option to xl create to stop xl from forking and daemonising. Most xl subcommands do not daemonize and so need no special treatment.
For more information on running Valgrind see the Valgrind Documentation.
Conclusion
Valgrind is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the C programmer, and can be used to catch a large number of hard to debug and common issues before they happen can save many hours of tedious debugging. The ability to use tools such as this on Xen toolstack processes is of enormous benefit and has already found several bugs in the XL toolstack.
What I have been up to over the last couple of years#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import apt
def pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
cache = apt.Cache()
cache.open(None)
thepkgs = []
for pkg in cache:
version = pkg.candidate
if version is None:
version = pkg.installed
if version is None:
continue
record = version.record
if not record.has_key('Npp-MimeType'):
continue
mime_types = record['Npp-MimeType'].split(',')
for t in mime_types:
t = t.rstrip().strip()
if t == mimetype:
thepkgs.append(pkg.name)
return thepkgs
mimetype = "audio/ogg"
if 1 < len(sys.argv):
mimetype = sys.argv[1]
print "Browser plugin packages supporting %s:" % mimetype
for pkg in pkgs_handling_mimetype(mimetype):
print " %s" %pkg
It can be used like this to look up a given MIME type:
% ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype Browser plugin packages supporting audio/ogg: gecko-mediaplayer % ./apt-find-browserplug-for-mimetype application/x-shockwave-flash Browser plugin packages supporting application/x-shockwave-flash: browser-plugin-gnash %In Ubuntu this mechanism is combined with support in the browser itself to query for plugins and propose to install the needed packages. It would be great if Debian supported such feature too. Is anyone working on adding it? Update 2013-01-18 14:20: The Debian BTS request for icweasel support for this feature is #484010 from 2008 (and #698426 from today). Lack of manpower and wish for a different design is the reason thus feature is not yet in iceweasel from Debian.
Debian-ports.org shows now that we're from 20% keeping up to about 60% keeping up. The installed packages went from ~1900 to about 3800 and we even triggered 200 packages from BD-uninstallable to Needs-Build:
wanna-build statistics - Fri Jan 18 06:52:36 CET 2013
-----------------------------------------------------
Distribution unstable:
---------------------
Installed : 3868 (buildd_m68k-ara5: 488, buildd_m68k-arrakis: 20,
buildd_m68k-elgar: 106, buildd_m68k-vivaldi: 80,
tg: 1412, unknown: 1761, wouter: 1)
Needs-Build : 3500
Building : 26 (buildd_m68k-ara5: 1, buildd_m68k-elgar: 1,
buildd_m68k-vivaldi: 1, tg: 23)
Built : 0
Uploaded : 1 (tg: 1)
Failed : 34 (buildd_m68k-ara5: 17, tg: 17)
Dep-Wait : 4 (tg: 4)
Reupload-Wait : 0
Install-Wait : 0
Failed-Removed : 0
Dep-Wait-Removed: 0
BD-Uninstallable: 2320
Auto-Not-For-Us : 188
Not-For-Us : 9
total : 9975
38.78% (3868) up-to-date, 38.79% (3869) including uploaded
35.09% (3500) need building
0.26% ( 26) currently building
0.00% ( 0) already built, but not uploaded
0.38% ( 38) failed/dep-wait
0.00% ( 0) old failed/dep-wait
23.26% (2320) not installable, because of missing build-dep
1.88% (188) need porting or cause the buildd serious grief (Auto)
0.09% ( 9) need porting or cause the buildd serious grief| Series: | Parasol Protectorate #1 |
| Publisher: | Orbit |
| Copyright: | October 2009 |
| ISBN: | 0-316-07165-X |
| Format: | Kindle |
| Pages: | 357 |
The vampire recovered his equanimity quickly enough. He reared away from Alexia, knocking over a nearby tea trolley. Physical contact broken, his fangs reappeared. Clearly not the sharpest of prongs, he then darted forward from the neck like a serpent, diving in for another chomp. "I say!" said Alexia to the vampire. "We have not even been introduced!"Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn't. The frequency with which it works seemed to me to increase as the book went along. The best thing this book has going for it is the character of Alexia Tarabotti. Rather than the typical kick-ass female protagonist of a modern urban fantasy novel, Alexia is not cynical, battle-hardened, or courageously sarcastic. Her attitude for most of the book is something closer to bemusement crossed with exasperation. She sees herself as an outsider, has largely given up on fitting into any sort of proper society, and has little use for the expectations of her family. But she's still embedded within her culture, still shocked (at least momentarily) by breaches in etiquette, and quite able to fit in, if a bit uncomfortably. Her delightfully logical tone and constant open-minded self-analysis is what made this book for me. The plot is fairly straightforward (and has a bit too much anti-science flavor for me). The romance angle, which is reasonably obvious from early on in the book, was entertaining mostly in Alexia's combination of thoughtful analysis (based in part on her father's extensive and not entirely acceptable library) and runaway physical reactions, although I thought the latter was slightly overdone. But all the elements of the story improve noticably towards the end of the book. I was unenthused by the halfway point, but by the time I finished Soulless, I decided I would probably read the sequel. This is more in the enjoyably fun reading pile than a book that I would go to great effort to acquire, and it has a somewhat rocky start, but I enjoyed it and would mildly recommend it. Followed by Changeless. Rating: 7 out of 10
Over the last few days, I ve made some incremental improvements to Hy, but I ve been mostly preparing it for a small talk later on this next week.
I am, however, already considering a bit of a rewrite there is a lot of code sitting in the Hy tree that was intended to use the old modfaker method of Python module generation (which sucked)
I m most interested (I think) in bootstrapping Hy in Hy (no small task) and getting macros in early (really really needed), so, dear lazyweb:
Has anyone split rpython out of PyPy yet? Are there any sort of docs on this?
The idea of rHy is pretty intriguing, I d like to make it happen.
More to come soon (including the slides!)
class HostsController(BaseController): # other stuff here class por2(portlets.Portlet): title = 'Host Attributes' widget = AttributeGrid() widget.host_id = host_id |
class AttributeGrid(jqgrid.jqGridWidget): def prepare(self, **kw): if self.host_id is not None: self.options['postData'] = 'hostid': self.host_id super(AttributeGrid, self).prepare() |
@expose('json') @validate(validators= 'hostid':validators.Int() ) def jqsumdata(self, hostid=0, page=1, rows=1, *args, **kw): conditions = [] if hostid > 0: conditions.append(model.Attribute.host_id == hostid) attributes =model.DBSession.query(model.Attribute).filter(and_(*conditions)) |
class HostsController(BaseController): # other stuff here class por2(portlets.Portlet): title = 'Host Attributes' widget = AttributeGrid() widget.host_id = host_id
class AttributeGrid(jqgrid.jqGridWidget): def prepare(self, **kw): if self.host_id is not None: self.options['postData'] = 'hostid': self.host_id super(AttributeGrid, self).prepare()
@expose('json') @validate(validators= 'hostid':validators.Int() ) def jqsumdata(self, hostid=0, page=1, rows=1, *args, **kw): conditions = [] if hostid > 0: conditions.append(model.Attribute.host_id == hostid) attributes =model.DBSession.query(model.Attribute).filter(and_(*conditions))
Here's a little tutorial on how to modify a plain t-shirt,
inspired by this
one.
What you'll need:
Put the t-shirt on a flat surface, then start cutting out the collar, to
create a new neckline: cut two slits about 2 cm from the collar (from
both sides), then cut out a circle. Flip the tee and do the same on
the back side.
Step 2: the bottom hem
Try your shirt on and mark the desired lenght.
I decided to create a curved hem, to make it more feminine: to do it,
you'll just need to cut an half-moon shape on the bottom line of the
t-shirt.
Step 3: the shoulder strap (optional)
Just to add a little twist, I decided to sew a ribbon as shoulder strap.
You'll just need to measure the required lenght with the tee on, and mark
the place to sew the ribbon.
After sewing the strap, you can also add a little bow on the front side.
Don't throw away the scraps, use them to make a fabric
necklace!
Some resources on t-shirt surgery:
I've been lucky in life. I've known several people who've killed
themselves, but I've been friendly with them rather than friends with them.
Their deaths have saddened me, but haven't left giant gaping holes that
I have trouble imagining filling. I've also been lucky in that I'm not
especially predisposed towards depression, and even luckier that the one
serious episode I had ended well. That luck means I'm not qualified to
speak authoritatively on the topic, but this seems like a good
time to share.
Most of 2002 wasn't great for me. Many of my friends had graduated and
moved away. My PhD, which was what I'd spent the past few years of my life working towards,
was going horribly wrong. The girl I liked didn't like me. Lots of individual small
things that didn't fundamentally matter, but which build up into overall
feelings of isolation and failure at life. I was spending an increasing
number of days not leaving bed and not talking to people. It wasn't that
I couldn't have fun - socialising was still pleasurable, and I didn't
actively avoid people, but it was always tempered with the knowledge
that this was temporary and I'd be returning to the unhappiness
afterwards. I couldn't see any sequence of events that would turn my
life around and restore my happiness. This was how life was, and this
was how life was going to be. I'd irrevocably fucked up, and this was
my future.
Looking back, what strikes me is how reasonable this seemed. I could
point at specific things that were making me unhappy, and nobody could
argue that it was unreasonable to be unhappy about them. There wasn't any
point in speaking to people about it, because what would they be able to
do except agree that I was justifiably unhappy? I thought about suicide.
Not seriously, because overall life still seemed worthwhile, but I could
conceive of a level of further unhappiness that would make it seem like
the best choice. I don't think it would ever have occured to me to speak
to someone about it first. It seemed like it would be the same argument
- I'm justifiably unhappy, I already feel like I'm letting my friends
down, what could they do other than tell me that my feelings are wrong
or make me feel even more guilty? So, when I saw exhortions for people
to speak to someone if they felt suicidal, it seemed like they were
talking to people who hadn't thought this through as well as me. It felt
like I'd thought this all through carefully and rationally and come to a
completely logical decision. If changes in circumstances and further
consideration made it seem like suicide was the better choice, that
would be because it was the better choice. Maybe other people weren't
thinking about this as logically as I was. Maybe they'd have their minds
changed by speaking to a friend or a professional. I wouldn't. Of course, with hindsight I was rationalising the way I already felt rather than making entirely rational decisions. I could have rationalised myself to death even though there were (in my case) straightforward ways to make my life better.
In any case, I've no idea how close I ever got to that point. Things
were at their worst in August - by September I had a new job and new
house, and things just got better from there. In the end, the friends I
was convinced could do nothing for me ended up giving me the opportunity
to find gainful employment and made sure I had somewhere to live.
Without them, things might have been different. As it was, I spent less
than nine months depressed and it was still the most hellish experience
of my life. The thought of returning to that state is terrifying. I was
lucky. I might not be again.
There's no terribly good moral here. If I'd known more about depression
beforehand, I might have been able to identify what was happening to me
and seek professional help. Other than that, I didn't learn anything
about how to avoid or deal with depression. The experience didn't make
me a better person. I've no advice for people in the same situation. The
only thing I gained from it all was the realisation that if I'd
felt any worse and knew that this was what I faced for the rest of my
life, death might not have been the worst choice I had.
Depression is a huge social problem and we deal with it badly. We refuse
to talk about it, and when we do talk about it we mostly limit ourselves
to platitudes about how things will get better or placing the blame on
depressed people for not wanting to talk to those around them. Sometimes
it doesn't get better. Sometimes talking to those around you will make
things worse. People need to be aware of what the effects of depression
are and get better at identifying it in others, rather than assuming
that they'll be able to ask for help themselves. Society as a whole
needs to be better at ensuring that professional support is there for
people who need it. And, unless we can make massive improvements in our
understanding of the causes of depression and effective mechanisms for
countering it, we need to accept that it will cost us friends. Let's
redirect the anger we feel at their choice to avoid a lifetime of misery
into anger at the society that still hasn't done everything it can to
help them. There is finally winter in Prague. And even more special - I've managed to wake up early to get some nice pictures from downtown.
Most of them are from this week, but the first one is from December:
Filed under: English Photography 0 comments Flattr this!
Next.