Rama II This would be more of a short post about the current book I am reading. Now people who have seen Arrival would probably be more at home. People who have also seen Avatar would also be familiar to the theme or concept I am sharing about. Now before I go into detail, it seems that Arthur C. Clarke wanted to use a powerful god or mythological character for the name and that is somehow the RAMA series started. Now the first book in the series explores an extraterrestrial spaceship that earth people see/connect with. The spaceship is going somewhere and is doing an Earth flyby so humans don t have much time to explore the spaceship and it is difficult to figure out how the spaceship worked. The spaceship is around 40 km. long. They don t meet any living Ramans but mostly automated systems and something called biots. As I m still reading it, I can t really say what happens next. Although in Rama or Rama I, the powers that be want to destroy it while in the end last they don t. Whether they could have destroyed it or not would be whole another argument. What people need to realize is that the book is a giant What IF scenario.

Aliens If there were any intelligent life in the Universe, I don t think they will take the pain of visiting Earth. And the reasons are far more mundane than anything else. Look at how we treat each other. One of the largest democracies on Earth, The U.S. has been so divided. While the progressives have made some good policies, the Republicans are into political stunts, consider the political stunt of sending Refugees to Martha s Vineyard. The ex-president also made a statement that he can declassify anything just by thinking about it. Now understand this, a refugee is a legal migrant whose papers would be looked into by the American Govt. and till the time he/she/their application is approved or declined they can work, have a house, or do whatever to support themselves. There is a huge difference between having refugee status and being an undocumented migrant. And it isn t as if the Republicans don t know this, they did it because they thought they will be able to get away with it. Both the above episodes don t throw us in a good light. If we treat others like the above, how can we expect to be treated? And refugees always have a hard time, not just in the U.S, , the UK you name it. The UK just some months ago announced a controversial deal where they will send Refugees to Rwanda while their refugee application is accepted or denied, most of them would be denied. The Indian Government is more of the same. A friend, a casual acquaintance Nishant Shah shared the same issues as I had shared a few weeks back even though he s an NRI. So, it seems we are incapable of helping ourselves as well as helping others. On top of it, we have the temerity of using the word alien for them. Now, just for a moment, imagine you are an intelligent life form. An intelligent life-form that could coax energy from the stars, why would you come to Earth, where the people at large have already destroyed more than half of the atmosphere and still arguing about it with the other half. On top of it, we see a list of authoritarian figures like Putin, Xi Jinping whose whole idea is to hold on to power for as long as they can, damn the consequences. Mr. Modi is no different, he is the dumbest of the lot and that s saying something. Most of the projects made by him are in disarray, Pune Metro, my city giving an example. And this is when Pune was the first applicant to apply for a Metro. Just like the UK, India too has tanked the economy under his guidance. Every time they come closer to target dates, the targets are put far into the future, for e.g. now they have said 2040 for a good economy. And just like in other countries, he has some following even though he has a record of failure in every sector of the economy, education, and defense, the list is endless. There isn t a single accomplishment by him other than screwing with other religions. Most of my countrymen also don t really care or have a bother to see how the economy grows and how exports play a crucial part otherwise they would be more alert. Also, just like the UK, India too gave tax cuts to the wealthy, most people don t understand how economies function and the PM doesn t care. The media too is subservient and because nobody asks the questions, nobody seems to be accountable :(.

Religion There is another aspect that also has been to the fore, just like in medieval times, I see a great fervor for religion happening here, especially since the pandemic and people are much more insecure than ever before. Before, I used to think that insecurity and religious appeal only happen in the uneducated, and I was wrong. I have friends who are highly educated and yet still are blinded by religion. In many such cases or situations, I find their faith to be a sham. If you have faith, then there shouldn t be any room for doubt or insecurity. And if you are not in doubt or insecure, you won t need to talk about your religion. The difference between the two is that a person is satiated himself/herself/themselves with thirst and hunger. That person would be in a relaxed mode while the other person would continue to create drama as there is no peace in their heart. Another fact is none of the major religions, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or even Hinduism has allowed for the existence of extraterrestrials. We have already labeled them as aliens even before meeting them & just our imagination. And more often than not, we end up killing them. There are and have been scores of movies that have explored the idea. Independence day, Aliens, Arrival, the list goes on and on. And because our religions have never thought about the idea of ET s and how they will affect us, if ET s do come, all the religions and religious practices would panic and die. That is the possibility why even the 1947 Roswell Incident has been covered up . If the above was not enough, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans would always be a black mark against humanity. From the alien perspective, if you look at the technology that they have vis-a-vis what we have, they will probably think of us as spoilt babies and they wouldn t be wrong. Spoilt babies with nuclear weapons are not exactly a healthy mix

Earth To add to our fragile ego, we didn t even leave earth even though we have made sure we exploit it as much as we can. We even made the anthropocentric or homocentric view that makes man the apex animal and to top it we have this weird idea that extraterrestrials come here or will invade for water. A species that knows how to get energy out of stars but cannot make a little of H2O. The idea belies logic and again has been done to death. Why we as humans are so insecure even though we have been given so much I fail to understand. I have shared on numerous times the Kardeshev Scale on this blog itself. The above are some of the reasons why Arthur C. Clarke s works are so controversial and this is when I haven t even read the whole book. It forces us to ask questions that we normally would never think about. And I have to repeat that when these books were published for the first time, they were new ideas. All the movies, from Stanley Kubrick s 2001: Space Odyssey, Aliens, Arrival, and Avatar, somewhere or the other reference some aspect of this work. It is highly possible that I may read and re-read the book couple of times before beginning the next one. There is also quite a bit of human drama, but then that is to be expected. I have to admit I did have some nice dreams after reading just the first few pages, imagining being given the opportunity to experience an Extraterrestrial spaceship that is beyond our wildest dreams. While the Governments may try to cover up or something, the ones who get to experience that spacecraft would be unimaginable. And if they were able to share the pictures or a Livestream, it would be nothing short of amazing. For those who want to, there is a lot going on with the New James Webb Telescope. I am sure it would give rise to more questions than answers.

In June I travelled to see Nine Inch Nails perform two nights at the Eden Project in Cornwall. It'd been eight years since I last saw them live and when they announced the Eden shows, I thought it might be the only chance I'd get to see them for a long time. I committed, and sods law, a week or so later they announced a handful of single-night UK club shows. On the other hand, on previous tours where they'd typically book two club nights in each city, I've attended one night and always felt I should have done both, so this time I was making that happen. Newquay For personal reasons it's been a difficult year so it was nice to treat myself to a mini holiday. I stayed in Newquay, a seaside town with many similarities to the North East coast, as well as many differences. It's much bigger, and although we have a thriving surfing community in Tynemouth, Newquay have it on another level. They also have a lot more tourism, which is a double-edged sword: in Newquay, besides surfing, there was not a lot to do. There's a lot of tourist tat shops, and bars and cafes (som very nice ones), but no book shops, no record shops, very few of the quaint, unique boutique places we enjoy up here and possibly take for granted. If you want tie-dyed t-shirts though, you're sorted. Nine Inch Nails have a long-established, independently fan-run forum called Echoing The Sound. There is now also an official Discord server. I asked on both whether anyone was around in Newquay and wanted to meet up: not many people were! But I did meet a new friend, James, for a quiet drink. He was due to share a taxi with Sarah, who was flying in but her flight was delayed and she had to figure out another route. Eden Project The Eden Project, the venue itself, is a fascinating place. I didn't realise until I'd planned most of my time there that the gig tickets granted you free entry into the Project on the day of the gig as well as the day after. It was quite tricky to get from Newquay to the Eden project, I would have been better off staying in St Austell itself perhaps, so I didn't take advantage of this, but I did have a couple of hours total to explore a little bit at the venue before the gig on each night. Friday 17^th (sunny) Once I got to the venue I managed to meet up with several names from ETS and the Discord: James, Sarah (who managed to re-arrange flights), Pete and his wife (sorry I missed your name), Via Tenebrosa (she of crab hat fame), Dave (DaveDiablo), Elliot and his sister and finally James (sheapdean), someone who I've been talking to online for over a decade and finally met in person (and who taped both shows). I also tried to meet up with a friend from the Debian UK community (hi Lief) but I couldn't find him! Support for Friday was Nitzer Ebb, who I wasn't familiar with before. There were two men on stage, one operating instruments, the other singing. It was a tough time to warm up the crowd, the venue was still very empty and it was very bright and sunny, but I enjoyed what I was hearing. They're definitely on my list. I later learned that the band's regular singer (Doug McCarthy) was unable to make it, and so the guy I was watching (Bon Harris) was standing in for full vocal duties. This made the performance (and their subsequent one at Hellfest the week after) all the more impressive. (Day) and night one, Thursday, was very hot and sunny and the band seemed a little uncomfortable exposed on stage with little cover. Trent commented as such at least once. The setlist was eclectic: and I finally heard some of my white whale songs. Highlights for me were The Perfect Drug, which was unplayed from 1997-2018 and has now become a staple, and the second ever performance of Everything, the first being a few days earlier. Also notable was three cuts in a row from the last LP, Bad Witch, Heresy and Love Is Not Enough.

• ninlive.com recordings for Friday
• setlist.fm page for Friday (nerdy song stats etc)

Saturday 18^th (rain) Day/night 2, Friday, was rainy all day. Support was Yves Tumor, who were an interesting clash of styles: a Prince/Bowie-esque inspired lead clashing with a rock-out lead guitarist styling himself similarly to Brian May. I managed to find Sarah, Elliot (new gig best-buddy), Via and James (sheapdean) again. Pete was at this gig too, but opted to take a more relaxed position than the rail this time. I also spent a lot of time talking to a Canadian guy on a press pass (both nights) that I'm ashamed to have forgotten his name. The dank weather had Nine Inch Nails in their element. I think night one had the more interesting setlist, but night two had the best performance, hands down. Highlights for me were mostly a string of heavier songs (in rough order of scarcity, from common to rarely played): wish, burn, letting you, reptile, every day is exactly the same, the line begins to blur, and finally, happiness in slavery, the first UK performance since 1994. This was a crushing set. A girl in front of me was really suffering with the cold and rain after waiting at the venue all day to get a position on the rail. I thought she was going to pass out. A roadie with NIN noticed, and came over and gave her his jacket. He said if she waited to the end of the show and returned his jacket he'd give her a setlist, and true to his word, he did. This was a really nice thing to happen and really gave the impression that the folks who work on these shows are caring people. Night two did have some gentler songs and moments to remember: a re-arranged Sanctified (which ended a nineteen-year hiatus in 2013) And All That Could Have Been (recorded 2002, first played 2018), La Mer, during which the rain broke and we were presented with a beautiful pink-hued rainbow. They then segued into Less Than, providing the comic moment of the night when Trent noticed the rainbow mid-song; now a meme that will go down in NIN fan history.

• ninlive.com recordings for Saturday
• setlist.fm page for Saturday

Wrap-up This was a blow-out, once in a lifetime trip to go and see a band who are at the top of their career in terms of performance. One problem I've had with NIN gigs in the past is suffering gig flashback to them when I go to other (inferior) gigs afterwards, and I'm pretty sure I will have this problem again. Doing both nights was worth it, the two experiences were very different and each had its own unique moments. The venue was incredible, and Cornwall is (modulo tourist trap stuff) beautiful.

To protect web resources with Kerberos you may use Apache HTTPD with mod_auth_gssapi however, all web scripts (e.g., PHP) run under Apache will have access to the Kerberos long-term symmetric secret credential (keytab). If someone can get it, they can impersonate your server, which is bad. The gssproxy project makes it possible to introduce privilege separation to reduce the attack surface. There is a tutorial for RPM-based distributions (Fedora, RHEL, AlmaLinux, etc), but I wanted to get this to work on a DPKG-based distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, Trisquel, PureOS, etc) and found it worthwhile to document the process. I m using Ubuntu 22.04 below, but have tested it on Debian 11 as well. I have adopted the gssproxy package in Debian, and testing this setup is part of the scripted autopkgtest/debci regression testing. First install the required packages:

root@foo:~# apt-get update
root@foo:~# apt-get install -y apache2 libapache2-mod-auth-gssapi gssproxy curl

This should give you a working and running web server. Verify it is operational under the proper hostname, I ll use foo.sjd.se in this writeup.

root@foo:~# curl --head http://foo.sjd.se/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 

The next step is to create a keytab containing the Kerberos V5 secrets for your host, the exact steps depends on your environment (usually kadmin ktadd or ipa-getkeytab), but use the string HTTP/foo.sjd.se and then confirm using something like the following.

root@foo:~# ls -la /etc/gssproxy/httpd.keytab
-rw------- 1 root root 176 Sep 18 06:44 /etc/gssproxy/httpd.keytab
root@foo:~# klist -k /etc/gssproxy/httpd.keytab -e
Keytab name: FILE:/etc/gssproxy/httpd.keytab
KVNO Principal
---- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
   2 HTTP/foo.sjd.se@GSSPROXY.EXAMPLE.ORG (aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96) 
   2 HTTP/foo.sjd.se@GSSPROXY.EXAMPLE.ORG (aes128-cts-hmac-sha1-96) 
root@foo:~# 

The file should be owned by root and not be in the default /etc/krb5.keytab location, so Apache s libapache2-mod-auth-gssapi will have to use gssproxy to use it.

Then configure gssproxy to find the credential and use it with Apache.

root@foo:~# cat<<EOF > /etc/gssproxy/80-httpd.conf
[service/HTTP]
mechs = krb5
cred_store = keytab:/etc/gssproxy/httpd.keytab
cred_store = ccache:/var/lib/gssproxy/clients/krb5cc_%U
euid = www-data
process = /usr/sbin/apache2
EOF

For debugging, it may be useful to enable more gssproxy logging:

root@foo:~# cat<<EOF > /etc/gssproxy/gssproxy.conf
[gssproxy]
debug_level = 1
EOF
root@foo:~#

Restart gssproxy so it finds the new configuration, and monitor syslog as follows:

root@foo:~# tail -F /var/log/syslog &
root@foo:~# systemctl restart gssproxy

You should see something like this in the log file:

Sep 18 07:03:15 foo gssproxy[4076]: [2022/09/18 05:03:15]: Exiting after receiving a signal
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo systemd[1]: Stopping GSSAPI Proxy Daemon 
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo systemd[1]: gssproxy.service: Deactivated successfully.
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo systemd[1]: Stopped GSSAPI Proxy Daemon.
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo gssproxy[4092]: [2022/09/18 05:03:15]: Debug Enabled (level: 1)
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo systemd[1]: Starting GSSAPI Proxy Daemon 
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo gssproxy[4093]: [2022/09/18 05:03:15]: Kernel doesn't support GSS-Proxy (can't open /proc/net/rpc/use-gss-proxy: 2 (No such file or directory))
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo gssproxy[4093]: [2022/09/18 05:03:15]: Problem with kernel communication! NFS server will not work
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo systemd[1]: Started GSSAPI Proxy Daemon.
Sep 18 07:03:15 foo gssproxy[4093]: [2022/09/18 05:03:15]: Initialization complete.

The NFS-related errors is due to a default gssproxy configuration file, it is harmless and if you don t use NFS with GSS-API you can silence it like this:

root@foo:~# rm /etc/gssproxy/24-nfs-server.conf
root@foo:~# systemctl try-reload-or-restart gssproxy

The log should now indicate that it loaded the keytab:

Sep 18 07:18:59 foo systemd[1]: Reloading GSSAPI Proxy Daemon 
Sep 18 07:18:59 foo gssproxy[4182]: [2022/09/18 05:18:59]: Received SIGHUP; re-reading config.
Sep 18 07:18:59 foo gssproxy[4182]: [2022/09/18 05:18:59]: Service: HTTP, Keytab: /etc/gssproxy/httpd.keytab, Enctype: 18
Sep 18 07:18:59 foo gssproxy[4182]: [2022/09/18 05:18:59]: New config loaded successfully.
Sep 18 07:18:59 foo systemd[1]: Reloaded GSSAPI Proxy Daemon.

To instruct Apache or actually, the MIT Kerberos V5 GSS-API library used by mod_auth_gssap loaded by Apache to use gssproxy instead of using /etc/krb5.keytab as usual, Apache needs to be started in an environment that has GSS_USE_PROXY=1 set. The background is covered by the gssproxy-mech(8) man page and explained by the gssproxy README.

When systemd is used the following can be used to set the environment variable, note the final command to reload systemd.

root@foo:~# mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/apache2.service.d
root@foo:~# cat<<EOF > /etc/systemd/system/apache2.service.d/gssproxy.conf
[Service]
Environment=GSS_USE_PROXY=1
EOF
root@foo:~# systemctl daemon-reload

The next step is to configure a GSS-API protected Apache resource:

root@foo:~# cat<<EOF > /etc/apache2/conf-available/private.conf
<Location /private>
  AuthType GSSAPI
  AuthName "GSSAPI Login"
  Require valid-user
</Location>

Enable the configuration and restart Apache the suggested use of reload is not sufficient, because then it won t be restarted with the newly introduced GSS_USE_PROXY variable. This just applies to the first time, after the first restart you may use reload again.

root@foo:~# a2enconf private
Enabling conf private.
To activate the new configuration, you need to run:
systemctl reload apache2
root@foo:~# systemctl restart apache2

When you have debug messages enabled, the log may look like this:

Sep 18 07:32:23 foo systemd[1]: Stopping The Apache HTTP Server 
Sep 18 07:32:23 foo gssproxy[4182]: [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: Client [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: (/usr/sbin/apache2) [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: connected (fd = 10)[2022/09/18 05:32:23]: (pid = 4651) (uid = 0) (gid = 0)[2022/09/18 05:32:23]:
Sep 18 07:32:23 foo gssproxy[4182]: message repeated 4 times: [ [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: Client [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: (/usr/sbin/apache2) [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: connected (fd = 10)[2022/09/18 05:32:23]: (pid = 4651) (uid = 0) (gid = 0)[2022/09/18 05:32:23]:]
Sep 18 07:32:23 foo systemd[1]: apache2.service: Deactivated successfully.
Sep 18 07:32:23 foo systemd[1]: Stopped The Apache HTTP Server.
Sep 18 07:32:23 foo systemd[1]: Starting The Apache HTTP Server 
Sep 18 07:32:23 foo gssproxy[4182]: [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: Client [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: (/usr/sbin/apache2) [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: connected (fd = 10)[2022/09/18 05:32:23]: (pid = 4657) (uid = 0) (gid = 0)[2022/09/18 05:32:23]:
root@foo:~# Sep 18 07:32:23 foo gssproxy[4182]: message repeated 8 times: [ [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: Client [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: (/usr/sbin/apache2) [2022/09/18 05:32:23]: connected (fd = 10)[2022/09/18 05:32:23]: (pid = 4657) (uid = 0) (gid = 0)[2022/09/18 05:32:23]:]
Sep 18 07:32:23 foo systemd[1]: Started The Apache HTTP Server.

Finally, set up a dummy test page on the server:

root@foo:~# echo OK > /var/www/html/private

To verify that the server is working properly you may acquire tickets locally and then use curl to retrieve the GSS-API protected resource. The "--negotiate" enables SPNEGO and "--user :" asks curl to use username from the environment.

root@foo:~# klist
Ticket cache: FILE:/tmp/krb5cc_0
Default principal: jas@GSSPROXY.EXAMPLE.ORG
Valid starting Expires Service principal
09/18/22 07:40:37 09/19/22 07:40:37 krbtgt/GSSPROXY.EXAMPLE.ORG@GSSPROXY.EXAMPLE.ORG
root@foo:~# curl --negotiate --user : http://foo.sjd.se/private
OK
root@foo:~#

The log should contain something like this:

Sep 18 07:56:00 foo gssproxy[4872]: [2022/09/18 05:56:00]: Client [2022/09/18 05:56:00]: (/usr/sbin/apache2) [2022/09/18 05:56:00]: connected (fd = 10)[2022/09/18 05:56:00]: (pid = 5042) (uid = 33) (gid = 33)[2022/09/18 05:56:00]:
Sep 18 07:56:00 foo gssproxy[4872]: [CID 10][2022/09/18 05:56:00]: gp_rpc_execute: executing 6 (GSSX_ACQUIRE_CRED) for service "HTTP", euid: 33,socket: (null)
Sep 18 07:56:00 foo gssproxy[4872]: [CID 10][2022/09/18 05:56:00]: gp_rpc_execute: executing 6 (GSSX_ACQUIRE_CRED) for service "HTTP", euid: 33,socket: (null)
Sep 18 07:56:00 foo gssproxy[4872]: [CID 10][2022/09/18 05:56:00]: gp_rpc_execute: executing 1 (GSSX_INDICATE_MECHS) for service "HTTP", euid: 33,socket: (null)
Sep 18 07:56:00 foo gssproxy[4872]: [CID 10][2022/09/18 05:56:00]: gp_rpc_execute: executing 6 (GSSX_ACQUIRE_CRED) for service "HTTP", euid: 33,socket: (null)
Sep 18 07:56:00 foo gssproxy[4872]: [CID 10][2022/09/18 05:56:00]: gp_rpc_execute: executing 9 (GSSX_ACCEPT_SEC_CONTEXT) for service "HTTP", euid: 33,socket: (null)

The Apache log will look like this, notice the authenticated username shown.

127.0.0.1 - jas@GSSPROXY.EXAMPLE.ORG [18/Sep/2022:07:56:00 +0200] "GET /private HTTP/1.1" 200 481 "-" "curl/7.81.0"

Congratulations, and happy hacking!

I today released version 0.06.4 of my WAP WML browser wApua and also uploaded that release to Debian Unstable. It s a bugfix release and the first upstream release since 2017. It fixes the recognition of WAP WML pages with more recent DTD location URLs ending in .dtd instead of .xml (and some other small difference). No idea when these URLs changed, but I assume they have been changed to look more like the URLs of other DTDs. The old URLs of the DTD still work, but more recent WAP pages (yes, they do exist :-) seem to use the new DTD URLs, so there was a need to recognise them instead of throwing an annoying warning. Thanks to Lian Begett for the bug report!

William MacAskill has been on a book tour for What We Owe to the Future, which has put effective altruism back in the news. That plus the decision by GiveWell to remove GiveDirectly from their top charity list got me thinking about charity again. I think effective altruism, by embracing long-termism, is falling into an ethical trap, and I'm going to start heavily discounting their recommendations for donations. Background Some background first for people who have no idea what I'm talking about. Effective altruism is the idea that we should hold charities accountable for effectiveness. It's not sufficient to have an appealing mission. A charity should demonstrate that the money they spend accomplishes the goals they claimed it would. There is a lot of debate around defining "effective," but as a basic principle, this is sound. Mainstream charity evaluators such as Charity Navigator measure overhead and (arguable) waste, but they don't ask whether the on-the-ground work of the charity has a positive effect proportional to the resources it's expending. This is a good question to ask. GiveWell is a charity research organization that directs money for donors based on effective altruism principles. It's one of the central organizations in effective altruism. GiveDirectly is a charity that directly transfers money from donors to poor people. It doesn't attempt to build infrastructure, buy specific things, or fund programs. It identifies poor people and gives them cash with no strings attached. Long-termism is part of the debate over what "effectiveness" means. It says we should value impact on future generations more highly than we tend to do. (In other words, we should have a much smaller future discount rate.) A sloppy but intuitive expression of long-termism is that (hopefully) there will be far more humans living in the future than are living today, and therefore a "greatest good for the greatest number" moral philosophy argues that we should invest significant resources into making the long-term future brighter. This has obvious appeal to those of us who are concerned about the long-term impacts of climate change, for example. There is a lot of overlap between the communities of effective altruism, long-termism, and "rationalism." One way this becomes apparent is that all three communities have a tendency to obsess over the risks of sentient AI taking over the world. I'm going to come back to that. Psychology of control GiveWell, early on, discovered that GiveDirectly was measurably more effective than most charities. Giving money directly to poor people without telling them how to spend it produced more benefits for those people and their surrounding society than nearly all international aid charities. GiveDirectly then became the baseline for GiveWell's evaluations, and GiveWell started looking for ways to be more effective than that. There is some logic to thinking more effectiveness is possible. Some problems are poorly addressed by markets and too large for individual spending. Health care infrastructure is an obvious example. That said, there's also a psychological reason to look for other charities. Part of the appeal of charity is picking a cause that supports your values (whether that be raw effectiveness or something else). Your opinions and expertise are valued alongside your money. In some cases, this may be objectively true. But in all cases, it's more flattering to the ego than giving poor people cash. At that point, the argument was over how to address immediate and objectively measurable human problems. The innovation of effective altruism is to tie charitable giving to a research feedback cycle. You measure the world, see if it is improving, and adjust your funding accordingly. Impact is measured by its effects on actual people. Effective altruism was somewhat suspicious of talking directly to individuals and preferred "objective" statistical measures, but the point was to remain in contact with physical reality. Enter long-termism: what if you could get more value for your money by addressing problems that would affect vast numbers of future people, instead of the smaller number of people who happen to be alive today? Rather than looking at the merits of that argument, look at its psychology. Real people are messy. They do things you don't approve of. They have opinions that don't fit your models. They're hard to "objectively" measure. But people who haven't been born yet are much tidier. They're comfortably theoretical; instead of having to go to a strange place with unfamiliar food and languages to talk to people who aren't like you, you can think hard about future trends in the comfort of your home. You control how your theoretical future people are defined, so the results of your analysis will align with your philosophical and ideological beliefs. Problems affecting future humans are still extrapolations of problems visible today in the world, though. They're constrained by observations of real human societies, despite the layer of projection and extrapolation. We can do better: what if the most serious problem facing humanity is the possible future development of rogue AI? Here's a problem that no one can observe or measure because it's never happened. It is purely theoretical, and thus under the control of the smart philosopher or rich western donor. We don't know if a rogue AI is possible, what it would be like, how one might arise, or what we could do about it, but we can convince ourselves that all those things can be calculated with some probability bar through the power of pure logic. Now we have escaped the uncomfortable psychological tension of effective altruism and returned to the familiar world in which the rich donor can define both the problem and the solution. Effectiveness is once again what we say it is. William MacAskill, one of the originators of effective altruism, now constantly talks about the threat of rogue AI. In a way, it's quite sad. Where to give money? The mindset of long-termism is bad for the human brain. It whispers to you that you're smarter than other people, that you know what's really important, and that you should retain control of more resources because you'll spend them more wisely than others. It's the opposite of intellectual humility. A government funding agency should take some risks on theoretical solutions to real problems, and maybe a few on theoretical solutions to theoretical problems (although an order of magnitude less). I don't think this is a useful way for an individual donor to think. So, if I think effective altruism is abandoning the one good idea it had and turning back into psychological support for the egos of philosophers and rich donors, where does this leave my charitable donations? To their credit, GiveWell so far seems uninterested in shifting from concrete to theoretical problems. However, they believe they can do better by picking projects than giving people money, and they're committing to that by dropping GiveDirectly (while still praising them). They may be right. But I'm increasingly suspicious of the level of control donors want to retain. It's too easy to trick oneself into thinking you know better than the people directly affected. I have two goals when I donate money. One is to make the world a better, kinder place. The other is to redistribute wealth. I have more of something than I need, and it should go to someone who does need it. The net effect should be to make the world fairer and more equal. The first goal argues for effective altruism principles: where can I give money to have the most impact on making the world better? The second goal argues for giving across an inequality gradient. I should find the people who are struggling the most and transfer as many resources to them as I can. This is Peter Singer's classic argument for giving money to the global poor. I think one can sometimes do better than transferring money, but doing so requires a deep understanding of the infrastructure and economies of scale that are being used as leverage. The more distant one is from a society, the more dubious I think one should be of one's ability to evaluate that, and the more wary one should be of retaining any control over how resources are used. Therefore, I'm pulling my recurring donation to GiveWell. Half of it is going to go to GiveDirectly, because I think it is an effective way of redistributing wealth while giving up control. The other half is going to my local foodbank, because they have a straightforward analysis of how they can take advantage of economy of scale, and because I have more tools available (such as local news) to understand what problem they're solving and if they're doing so effectively. I don't know that those are the best choices. There are a lot of good ones. But I do feel strongly that the best charity comes from embracing the idea that I do not have special wisdom, other people know more about what they need than I do, and deploying my ego and logic from the comfort of my home is not helpful. Find someone who needs something you have an excess of. Give it to them. Treat them as equals. Don't retain control. You won't go far wrong.

The server running this blog is a RockPro64 sitting in my living room. Besides WordPress (the blogging software), I run various other services on it:

• Bepasty for sharing files,
• Ikiwiki for taking notes,
• Quassel for staying connected to IRC chat servers,
• Radicale for synchronizing my calendar and tasks,
• Shaarli for sharing bookmarks, and
• Tiny Tiny RSS for reading other people s blogs.

Most of these are for my personal use, and a few of them have pages for public viewing (linked at the top of this page). Despite running a server, I don t really consider myself to be a system administrator (or sysadmin for short). I generally try to avoid doing system administration work as much as possible. I think this is due to a number of reasons:

• It is not part of my educational or professional background (which mainly consists of embedded software engineering).
• I think that I lack the kind of discipline needed to be a sysadmin. For example, taking notes of the commands that you are running, or testing things before you do them on a production server. I m likely to just run commands, and lose track of my notes.
• And finally a type of laziness. I just don t want to spend a lot of time and effort setting up or maintaining some services.

These reasons might be surprising to some, but they also suggest that an alternative approach:

• I do have a server running in my home, but I don t consider myself a sysadmin.
• I have a different kind of discipline than the one I described above.
• I m willing to spend time and effort to improve things, but I want to do it in a different way than usual.

So my approach is this: if I want to run an additional service, enhance an existing one, or fix a bug, I don t do those changes directly on my server. Instead, I will make (or suggest, or request) the change somewhere upstream of my server:

• In the various Debian packages of the services I have installed.
• In FreedomBox configuration and integration of those packages.
• Or even directly to the upstream software development.

So basically my system administration task turns into a software development task instead. And (in my opinion) there are much better tools available for this: source control systems such as git, test suites and Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines, and code review processes. These make it easier to keep track of and understand the changes, and reduce the possibility of making a catastrophic mistake. Besides this, there is one other major advantage to working upstream: the work is not just benefiting the server running in my home, but many others. Anyone who is using the same software or packages will also get the improvements or bug fixes. And likewise, I get to benefit from the work done by many other contributors. Some final notes about this approach:

• The software I am running is very standardized, specifically to what is available in Debian and FreedomBox. This limits the number of services available: for example, I could not easily run a Mastodon server with this approach. Also, I am not maintaining any custom configurations for my own services.
• I am presenting these ideas as they occur to me, and specific to my situation. But there are similar concepts out there, for example Infrastructure as Code .

Back in November I wrote up a list of 25 things I would 3D print. Let's revisit the list and see how things have developed. Stuff I won't print

• Some kind of 45 leaning prong to dry bottles and flasks on
• A tea tray and coasters
• Small tins to keep loose-leaf tea in

It was pointed out to me that you can't safely print things to store food in with most materials, as their porous/layered nature facilitates the growth of bacteria. So, I'll rule out those items.

A vinyl record.

The size of the grooves in a vinyl record are smaller than conventional FDM printers can achieve. Things I've printed

a replacement prop arm/foot for my computer keyboard

Someone has modelled the exact part I need, and it worked great: https://www.printables.com/model/59132-lenovo-keyboard-kt-1255

replacement bits for an Early Learning Centre Build It Deluxe Set

I was amazed to find that someone has already modelled one of these, too, and it worked beautifully: https://www.printables.com/model/79243-elc-build-it-compatible-bolt

Little kids trinkets. Pacman ghosts

So far, I've tried to print useful, functional things, but on a few occasions I've printed a little Pacman ghost when testing printer calibration or similar. I've mostly used these models: https://www.printables.com/model/199425-pac-man-ghost-v2

• Lego storage/sorters
• DIY bits-and-bobs sorter/storage (nuts and bolts etc)

I learned about a Slicer setting sometimes called "Vase mode" and found this interesting system of modular drawers that are designed to be printed in Vase mode, so I gave them a go: https://www.printables.com/model/139570-fast-printing-modular-drawer-system-vase-mode I printed one and four drawers for it and gave it to my daughter. It might be used for sorting Lego, or possibly as a chest-of-drawers for a dolls house.

A free-standing inclined vinyl record display stand

https://www.printables.com/model/174711-vinyl-stand-for-kallax

A bracket to install a Gotek drive in my Amiga 500

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2745049 Summary From my original list of 25 things to print, I've done 7 of them and determined 4 are not viable. The things in this list I've printed have been off-the-shelf models that other people have constructed. The things I haven't printed are designs I will do myself, which is one reason I haven't printed them yet: building your own designs is the hard part!

More ICFP-inspired experiments using the rec-def library: In Norman Ramsey s very nice talk about his Functional Pearl Beyond Relooper: Recursive Translation of Unstructured Control Flow to Structured Control Flow , he had the following slide showing the equation for the dominators of a node in a graph:

Norman Ramsey shows a formula

He said it s ICFP and I wanted to say the dominance relation has a beautiful set of equations you can read all these algorithms how to compute this, but the concept is simple . This made me wonder: If the concept is simple and this formula is beautiful shouldn t this be sufficient for the Haskell programmer to obtain the dominator relation, without reading all those algorithms? Before we start, we have to clarify the formula a bit: If a node is an entry node (no predecessors) then the big intersection is over the empty set, and that is not a well-defined concept. For these nodes, we need that big intersection to return the empty set, as entry nodes are not dominated by any other node. (Let s assume that the entry nodes are exactly those with no predecessors.) Let s try, first using plain Haskell data structures. We begin by implementing this big intersection operator on Data.Set, and also a function to find the predecessors of a node in a graph: Now we can write down the formula that Norman gave, quite elegantly: Does this work? It seems it does: But not surprising if you have read my previous blog posts it falls over once we have recursion: So let us reimplement it with Data.Recursive.Set. The hope is that we can simply replace the operations, and that now it can suddenly handle cyclic graphs as well. Let s see: It does! Well, it does return a result but it looks strange. Clearly node 3 and 4 are also dominated by 1, but the result does not reflect that. But the result is a solution to Norman s equation. Was the equation wrong? No, but we failed to notice that the desired solution is the largest, not the smallest. And Data.Recursive.Set calculates, as documented, the least fixed point. What now? Until the library has code for RDualSet a, we can work around this by using the dual formula to calculate the non-dominators. To do this, we

• use union instead of intersection
• delete instead of insert,
• S.empty, use the set of all nodes (which requires some extra plumbing)
• subtract the result from the set of all nodes to get the dominators

and thus the code turns into: And with this, now we do get the correct result:

ghci> domintors3 [(1,2),(1,3),(2,4),(3,4),(4,3)]
fromList [(1,[1]),(2,[1,2]),(3,[1,3]),(4,[1,4])]

We worked a little bit on how to express the beautiful formula to Haskell, but at no point did we have to think about how to solve it. To me, this is the essence of declarative programming.

At this week s International Conference on Functional Programming I showed my rec-def Haskell library to a few people. As this crowd appreciates writing compilers, and example from the realm of program analysis is quite compelling.

To Throw or not to throw Here is our little toy language to analyze: It has variables, lambdas and applications, non-recursive (lazy) let bindings and, so that we have something to analyze, a way to throw and to catch exceptions:

type Var = String

data Exp
  = Var Var
    Throw
    Catch Exp
    Lam Var Exp
    App Exp Exp
    Let Var Exp Exp

Given such an expression, we would like to know whether it might throw an exception. Such an analysis is easy to write: We traverse the syntax tree, remembering in the env which of the variables may throw an exception:

canThrow1 :: Exp -> Bool
canThrow1 = go M.empty
  where
    go :: M.Map Var Bool -> Exp -> Bool
    go env (Var v)       = env M.! v
    go env Throw         = True
    go env (Catch e)     = False
    go env (Lam v e)     = go (M.insert v False env) e
    go env (App e1 e2)   = go env e1   go env e2
    go env (Let v e1 e2) = go env' e2
      where
        env_bind = M.singleton v (go env e1)
        env' = M.union env_bind env

The most interesting case is the one for Let, where we extend the environment env with the information about the additional variable env_bind, which is calculated from analyzing the right-hand side e1. So far so good:

ghci> someVal = Lam "y" (Var "y")
ghci> canThrow1 $ Throw
True
ghci> canThrow1 $ Let "x" Throw someVal
False
ghci> canThrow1 $ Let "x" Throw (App (Var "x") someVal)
True

Let it rec To spice things up, let us add a recursive let to the language:

data Exp
   
    LetRec [(Var, Exp)] Exp

How can we support this new constructor in canThrow1? Let use naively follow the pattern used for Let: Calculate the analysis information for the variables in env_bind, extend the environment with that, and pass it down:

    go env (LetRec binds e) = go env' e
      where
        env_bind = M.fromList [ (v, go env' e)   (v,e) <- binds ]
        env' = M.union env_bind env

Note that, crucially, we use env', and not just env, when analyzing the right-hand sides. It has to be that way, as all the variables are in scope in all the right-hand sides. In a strict language, such a mutually recursive definition, where env_bind uses env' which uses env_bind is basically unthinkable. But in a lazy language like Haskell, it might just work. Unfortunately, it works only as long as the recursive bindings are not actually recursive, or if they are recursive, they are not used:

ghci> canThrow1 $ LetRec [("x", Throw)] (Var "x")
True
ghci> canThrow1 $ LetRec [("x", App (Var "y") someVal), ("y", Throw)] (Var "x")
True
ghci> canThrow1 $ LetRec [("x", App (Var "x") someVal), ("y", Throw)] (Var "y")
True

But with genuine recursion, it does not work, and simply goes into a recursive cycle:

ghci> canThrow1 $ LetRec [("x", App (Var "x") someVal), ("y", Throw)] (Var "x")
^CInterrupted.

That is disappointing! Do we really have to toss that code and somehow do an explicit fixed-point calculation here? Obscuring our nice declarative code? And possibly having to repeat work (such as traversing the syntax tree) many times that we should only have to do once?

rec-def to the rescue Not with rec-def! Using RBool from Data.Recursive.Bool instead of Bool, we can write the exact same code, as follows:

import qualified Data.Recursive.Bool as RB

canThrow2 :: Exp -> Bool
canThrow2 = RB.get . go M.empty
  where
    go :: M.Map Var RBool -> Exp -> R Bool
    go env (Var v)       = env M.! v
    go env Throw         = RB.true
    go env (Catch e)     = RB.false
    go env (Lam v e)     = go (M.insert v RB.false env) e
    go env (App e1 e2)   = go env e1 RB.  go env e2
    go env (Let v e1 e2) = go env' e2
      where
        env_bind = M.singleton v (go env e1)
        env' = M.union env_bind env
    go env (LetRec binds e) = go env' e
      where
        env_bind = M.fromList [ (v, go env' e)   (v,e) <- binds ]
        env' = M.union env_bind env

And it works!

ghci> canThrow2 $ LetRec [("x", App (Var "x") someVal), ("y", Throw)] (Var "x")
False
ghci> canThrow2 $ LetRec [("x", App (Var "x") Throw), ("y", Throw)] (Var "x")
True

I find this much more pleasing than the explicit naive fix-pointing you might do otherwise, where you stabilize the result at each LetRec independently: Not only is all that extra work hidden from the programmer, but now also a single traversal of the syntax tree creates, thanks to the laziness, a graph of RBool values, which are then solved under the hood .

The issue with x=x There is one downside worth mentioning: canThrow2 fails to produce a result in case we hit x=x:

ghci> canThrow2 $ LetRec [("x", Var "x")] (Var "x")
^CInterrupted.

This is, after all the syntax tree has been processed and all the map lookups have been resolved, equivalent to

ghci> let x = x in RB.get (x :: RBool)
^CInterrupted.

which also does not work. The rec-def machinery can only kick in if at least one of its function is used on any such cycle, even if it is just a form of identity (which I ~ought to add to the library~ since have added to the library):

ghci> idR x = RB.false   x
ghci> let x = idR x in getR (x :: R Bool)
False

And indeed, if I insert a call to idR in the line

        env_bind = M.fromList [ (v, idR (go env' e))   (v,e) <- binds ]

then our analyzer will no longer stumble over these nasty recursive equations:

ghci> canThrow2 $ LetRec [("x", Var "x")] (Var "x")
False

It is a bit disappointing to have to do that, but I do not see a better way yet. I guess the def-rec library expects the programmer to have a similar level of sophistication as other tie-the-know tricks with laziness (where you also have to ensure that your definitions are productive and that the sharing is not accidentally lost).

Introduction: an immutable OS The Steam Deck runs SteamOS, a single-user operating system based on Arch Linux. Although derived from a standard package-based distro, the OS in the Steam Deck is immutable and system updates replace the contents of the root filesystem atomically instead of using the package manager. An immutable OS makes the system more stable and its updates less error-prone, but users cannot install additional packages to add more software. This is not a problem for most users since they are only going to run Steam and its games (which are stored in the home partition). Nevertheless, the OS also has a desktop mode which provides a standard Linux desktop experience, and here it makes sense to be able to install more software. How to do that though? It is possible for the user to become root, make the root filesytem read-write and install additional software there, but any changes will be gone after the next OS update. Modifying the rootfs can also be dangerous if the user is not careful. Ways to add additional software The simplest and safest way to install additional software is with Flatpak, and that s the method recommended in the Steam Deck Desktop FAQ. Flatpak is already installed and integrated in the system via the Discover app so I won t go into more details here. However, while Flatpak works great for desktop applications not every piece of software is currently available, and Flatpak is also not designed for other types of programs like system services or command-line tools. Fortunately there are several ways to add software to the Steam Deck without touching the root filesystem, each one with different pros and cons. I will probably talk about some of them in the future, but in this post I m going to focus on one that is already available in the system: systemd-sysext. About systemd-sysext This is a tool included in recent versions of systemd and it is designed to add additional files (in the form of system extensions) to an otherwise immutable root filesystem. Each one of these extensions contains a set of files. When extensions are enabled (aka merged ) those files will appear on the root filesystem using overlayfs. From then on the user can open and run them normally as if they had been installed with a package manager. Merged extensions are seamlessly integrated with the rest of the OS. Since extensions are just collections of files they can be used to add new applications but also other things like system services, development tools, language packs, etc. Creating an extension: yakuake I m using yakuake as an example for this tutorial since the extension is very easy to create, it is an application that some users are demanding and is not easy to distribute with Flatpak. So let s create a yakuake extension. Here are the steps: 1) Create a directory and unpack the files there:

$ mkdir yakuake
$ wget https://steamdeck-packages.steamos.cloud/archlinux-mirror/extra/os/x86_64/yakuake-21.12.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
$ tar -C yakuake -xaf yakuake-*.tar.zst usr

2) Create a file called extension-release.NAME under usr/lib/extension-release.d with the fields ID and VERSION_ID taken from the Steam Deck s /etc/os-release file.

$ mkdir -p yakuake/usr/lib/extension-release.d/
$ echo ID=steamos > yakuake/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.yakuake
$ echo VERSION_ID=3.3.1 >> yakuake/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.yakuake

3) Create an image file with the contents of the extension:

$ mksquashfs yakuake yakuake.raw

That s it! The extension is ready. A couple of important things: image files must have the .raw suffix and, despite the name, they can contain any filesystem that the OS can mount. In this example I used SquashFS but other alternatives like EroFS or ext4 are equally valid. NOTE: systemd-sysext can also use extensions from plain directories (i.e skipping the mksquashfs part). Unfortunately we cannot use them in our case because overlayfs does not work with the casefold feature that is enabled on the Steam Deck. Using the extension Once the extension is created you simply need to copy it to a place where systemd-systext can find it. There are several places where they can be installed (see the manual for a list) but due to the Deck s partition layout and the potentially large size of some extensions it probably makes more sense to store them in the home partition and create a link from one of the supported locations (/var/lib/extensions in this example):

(deck@steamdeck ~)$ mkdir extensions
(deck@steamdeck ~)$ scp user@host:/path/to/yakuake.raw extensions/
(deck@steamdeck ~)$ sudo ln -s $PWD/extensions /var/lib/extensions

Once the extension is installed in that directory you only need to enable and start systemd-sysext:

(deck@steamdeck ~)$ sudo systemctl enable systemd-sysext
(deck@steamdeck ~)$ sudo systemctl start systemd-sysext

After this, if everything went fine you should be able to see (and run) /usr/bin/yakuake. The files should remain there from now on, also if you reboot the device. You can see what extensions are enabled with this command:

$ systemd-sysext status
HIERARCHY EXTENSIONS SINCE
/opt      none       -
/usr      yakuake    Tue 2022-09-13 18:21:53 CEST

If you add or remove extensions from the directory then a simple systemd-sysext refresh is enough to apply the changes. Unfortunately, and unlike distro packages, extensions don t have any kind of post-installation hooks or triggers, so in the case of Yakuake you probably won t see an entry in the KDE application menu immediately after enabling the extension. You can solve that by running kbuildsycoca5 once from the command line. Limitations and caveats Using systemd extensions is generally very easy but there are some things that you need to take into account:

1. Using extensions is easy (you put them in the directory and voil !). However, creating extensions is not necessarily always easy. To begin with, any libraries, files, etc., that your extensions may need should be either present in the root filesystem or provided by the extension itself. You may need to combine files from different sources or packages into a single extension, or compile them yourself.
2. In particular, if the extension contains binaries they should probably come from the Steam Deck repository or they should be built to work with those packages. If you need to build your own binaries then having a SteamOS virtual machine can be handy. There you can install all development files and also test that everything works as expected. One could also create a Steam Deck SDK extension with all the necessary files to develop directly on the Deck
3. Extensions are not distribution packages, they don t have dependency information and therefore they should be self-contained. They also lack triggers and other features available in packages. For desktop applications I still recommend using a system like Flatpak when possible.
4. Extensions are tied to a particular version of the OS and, as explained above, the ID and VERSION_ID of each extension must match the values from /etc/os-release. If the fields don t match then the extension will be ignored. This is to be expected because there s no guarantee that a particular extension is going to work with a different version of the OS. This can happen after a system update. In the best case one simply needs to update the extension s VERSION_ID, but in some cases it might be necessary to create the extension again with different/updated files.
5. Extensions only install files in /usr and /opt. Any other file in the image will be ignored. This can be a problem if a particular piece of software needs files in other directories.
6. When extensions are enabled the /usr and /opt directories become read-only because they are now part of an overlayfs. They will remain read-only even if you run steamos-readonly disable !!. If you really want to make the rootfs read-write you need to disable the extensions (systemd-sysext unmerge) first.
7. Unlike Flatpak or Podman (including toolbox / distrobox), this is (by design) not meant to isolate the contents of the extension from the rest of the system, so you should be careful with what you re installing. On the other hand, this lack of isolation makes systemd-sysext better suited to some use cases than those container-based systems.

Conclusion systemd extensions are an easy way to add software (or data files) to the immutable OS of the Steam Deck in a way that is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the system. Creating them can be more or less easy depending on the case, but using them is extremely simple. Extensions are not packages, and systemd-sysext is not a package manager or a general-purpose tool to solve all problems, but if you are aware of its limitations it can be a practical tool. It is also possible to share extensions with other users, but here the usual warning against installing binaries from untrusted sources applies. Use with caution, and enjoy!

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1016 packages other packages on CRAN, downloaded 26.2 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 493 times according to Google Scholar. This new release (made yesterday) brings three changes. First, it updates the release to the upstream 11.2.4 bugfix release made days ago by Conrad. Second, it contains support for the deprecation transition we are managing in issue #391. In short, the (convenient but non-standard) initialization via use of << has been deprecated upstream. Until all packages are updated, we override this in the RcppArmadillo but aim to become compliant . Out of the over 1000 packages, a mere 25 need small adjustments. I reached out email and PRs, and the response has been great. Eight packages are already updated on CRAN, and several others have already in integrated or merged the change. Lastly, Conrad pointed out that the fastLm() example and application can be written more concisely by using arma::dot(). The full set of changes (since the last CRAN release 0.11.2.3.1) follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.11.2.4.0 (2022-09-09)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 11.2.4 (Classic Roast)
  • fix handling of std::move() involving matrices constructed with auxiliary memory
• In the fastLm() examples, use arma::dot() to compute to the inner product (as proposed by Conrad), plus small edits
• Support optional #define named RCPPARMADILLO_FORCE_DEPRECATE to suppress use of ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER permitting use and development under deprecation

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Politics I have been reading books, both fiction and non-fiction for a long long time. My first book was a comic most probably when I was down with Malaria when I was a kid. I must be around 4-5 years old. Over the years, books have given me great joy and I continue to find nuggets of useful information, both in fiction as well as non-fiction books. So here s to sharing something and how that can lead you to a rabbit hole. This entry would be a bit NSFW as far as language is concerned. NYPD Red 5 by James Patterson First of all, have no clue as to why James Patterson s popularity has been falling. He used to be right there with Lee Child and others, but not so much now. While I try to be mysterious about books, I would give a bit of heads-up so people know what to expect. This is probably more towards the Adult crowd as there is a bit of sex as well as quite a few grey characters. The NYPD Red is a sort of elite police task force that basically is for celebrities. In the book series, they do a lot of ass-kissing (figuratively more than literally). Now the reason I have always liked fiction is that however wild the assumption or presumption is, it does have somewhere a grain of truth. And each and every time I read a book or two, that gets cemented. One of the statements in the book told something about how 9/11 took a lot of police personnel out of the game. First, there were a number of policemen who were patrolling the Two Towers, so they perished literally during the explosion. Then there were policemen who were given the cases to close the cases (bring the cases to conclusion). When you are investigating your own brethren or even civilians who perished 9/11 they must have experienced emotional trauma and no outlet. Mental health even in cops is the same and given similar help as you and me (i.e. next to none.) But both of these were my assumptions. The only statement that was in the book was they lost a lot of bench strength. Even NYFD (New York Fire Department). This led me to me to With Crime At Record Lows, Should NYC Have Fewer Cops? This is more right-wing sentiment and in fact, there have been calls to defund the police. This led me to https://cbcny.org/ and one specific graph. Unfortunately, this tells the story from 2010-2022 but not before. I was looking for data from around 1999 to 2005 because that will tell whether or not it happened. Then I remembered reading in newspapers the year or two later how 9/11 had led NYC to recession. I looked up online and for sure NY was booming before 9/11. One can argue that NYC could come down and that is pretty much possible, everything that goes up comes down, it s a law of nature but it would have been steady rather than abrupt. And once you are in recession, the first thing to go is personnel. So people both from NYPD and NYFD were let go, even though they were needed the most then. As you can see, a single statement in a book can take you to places & time literally. Edit: Addition 11th September There were quite a few people who also died from New York Port Authority and they also lost quite a number of people directly and indirectly and did a lot of patrolling of the water bodies near NYC. Later on, even in their department, there were a lot of early retirements.

Kosovo A couple of days back I had a look at the Debconf 2023 BOF that was done in Kosovo. One of the interesting things that happened during the BOF is when a woman participant chimed in and asks India to recognize Kosovo. Immediately it triggered me and I opened the Kosovo Wikipedia page to get some understanding of the topic. Reading up on it, came to know Russia didn t agree and doesn t recognize Kosovo. Mr. Modi likes Putin and India imports a lot of its oil from Russia. Unrelatedly, but still useful, we rejected to join IPEF. Earlier, we had rejected China s BRI. India has never been as vulnerable as she is now. Our foreign balance has reached record lows. Now India has been importing quite a bit of Russian crude and has been buying arms and ammunition from them. We are also scheduled to buy a couple of warships and submarines etc. We even took arms and ammunition from them on lease. So we can t afford that they are displeased with India. Even though Russia has more than friendly relations with both China and Pakistan. At the same time, the U.S. is back to aiding Pakistan which the mainstream media in India refuses to even cover. And to top all of this, we have the Chip 4 Alliance but that needs its own article, truth be told but we will do with a paragraph Edit Addition 11th September Seems Kosovo isn t unique in that situation, there are 3-4 states like that. A brief look at worldpopulationreview tells you there are many more.

Chip 4 Alliance For almost a decade I have been screaming about this on my blog as well as everywhere that chip fabrication is a national security thing. And for years, most people deny it. And now we have chip 4 alliance. Now to understand this, you have to understand that China for almost a decade, somewhere around 2014 or so came up with something called the big fund . Now one can argue one way or the other how successful the fund has been, but it has, without doubt, created ripples so strong that the U.S., Taiwan, Japan, and probably South Korea will join and try to stem the tide. Interestingly, in this grouping, South Korea is the weakest in the statements and what they have been saying. Within the group itself, there is a lot of tension and China would use that and there are a number of unresolved issues between the three countries that both China & Russia would exploit. For e.g. the Comfort women between South Korea and Japan. Or the 1985 Accord Agreement between Japan and the U.S. Now people need to understand this, this is not just about China but also about us. If China has 5-6x times India s GDP and their research budget is at the very least 100x times what India spends, how do you think we will be self-reliant? Whom are we fooling? Are we not tired of fooling ourselves In diplomacy, countries use leverage. Sadly, we let go of some of our most experienced negotiators in 2014 and since then have been singing in the wind

Accessibility, Jitsi, IRC, Element-Desktop The Wikipedia page on Accessibility says the following Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both direct access (i.e. unassisted) and indirect access meaning compatibility with a person s assistive technology. Now IRC or Internet Relay Chat has been accessible for a long time. I know of even blind people who have been able to navigate IRC quite effortlessly as there has been a lot of work done to make sure all the joints speak to each other so people with one or more disabilities still can use, and contribute without an issue. It does help that IRC and many clients have been there since the 1970s so most of them have had more than enough time to get all the bugs fixed and both text-to-speech and speech-to-text work brilliantly on IRC. Newer software like Jitsi or for that matter Telegram is lacking those features. A few days ago, discovered on Telegram I was shared that Samsung Voice input is also able to do the same. The Samsung Voice Input works wonder as it translates voice to text, I have not yet tried the text-to-speech but perhaps somebody can and they can share whatever the results can be one way or the other. I have tried element-desktop both on the desktop as well as mobile phone and it has been disappointing, to say the least. On the desktop, it is unruly and freezes once in a while, and is buggy. The mobile version is a little better but that s not saying a lot. I prefer the desktop version as I can use the full-size keyboard. The bug I reported has been there since its Riot days. I had put up a bug report even then. All in all, yesterday was disappointing

Review: Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #20
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	1996
Printing:	February 2014
ISBN:	0-06-227628-X
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	402

Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel and not a very good place to start. I recommend at least reading Soul Music first for a proper introduction to Susan, and you may want to start with Mort. When we last saw Susan, she was a student at the Quirm College for Young Ladies. Now she's a governess for two adorable youngsters, a job that includes telling them stories and dealing quite capably with monsters in the cellar. (She uses a poker.) It also includes answering questions like whether the Hogfather really exists or whether the presents just come from your parents.

"Look at it this way, then," she said, and took a deep mental breath. "Wherever people are obtuse and absurd... and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach... and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering... yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather.

Meanwhile, the Auditors, last seen meddling with Death in Reaper Man, approach the Assassin's Guild in Ankh-Morpork to hire the assassination of the Hogfather. This rather unusual assignment falls to Mister Teatime, an orphan who was taken in by the guild at an early age and trained to be an assassin. Teatime is a little unnerving, mostly because he enjoys being an assassin. Rather a lot. Hogfather has two major things to recommend it: it's a Death novel, and it features Susan, who is one of my favorite Discworld characters. It also has two major strikes against it, at least for me. The first is relatively minor but, for me, the most irritating. A bit of the way into the story, Pratchett introduces the Oh God of Hangovers fair, that's a good pun and then decides that's a good excuse for nausea and vomiting jokes. A lot of nausea and vomiting jokes. Look. I know a lot of people don't mind this. But I beg authors (and, even more so, filmmakers and cartoonists) to consider whether a joke that some of your audience might like is worth making other parts of your audience feel physically ill while trying to enjoy your work. It's not at all a pleasant experience, and while I handle it better in written form, it still knocks me out of the story and makes me want to skip over scenes with the obnoxious character who won't shut up about it. Thankfully this does stop by the end of the book, but there are several segments in the middle that were rather unpleasant. The second is that Pratchett tries to convince the reader of the mythical importance of the Santa Claus myth (for which Hogfather is an obvious stand-in, if with a Discworld twist), an effort for which I am a highly unsympathetic audience. I'm with Susan above, with an extra helping of deep dislike for telling children who trust you something that's literally untrue. Pratchett does try: he has Death makes a memorable and frequently-quoted point near the end of the book (transcribed below) that I don't entirely agree with but still respect. But still, the book is very invested in convincing Susan that people believing mythology is critically important to humanity, and I have so many problems with the literalness of "believing" and the use of trusting children for this purpose by adults who know better. There are few topics that bring out my grumpiness more than Santa Claus. Grumbling aside, though, I did enjoy this book anyway. Susan is always a delight, and I could read about her adventures as a governess for as long as Pratchett wanted to write them. Death is filling in for the Hogfather for most of the book, which is hilarious because he's far too good at it, in his painfully earnest and literal way, to be entirely safe. I was less fond of Albert's supporting role (who I am increasingly coming to dislike as a character), but the entire scene of Death as a mall Santa is brilliant. And Teatime is an effective, creepy villain, something that the Discworld series doesn't always deliver. The powers arrayed on Discworld are so strong that it can be hard to design a villain who effectively challenges them, but Teatime has a sociopathic Professor Moriarty energy with added creepiness that fills that role in this book satisfyingly. As is typical for Pratchett (at least for me), the plot was serviceable but not the highlight. Pratchett plays in some interesting ways with a child's view of the world, the Unseen University bumbles around as a side plot, and it comes together at the end in a way that makes sense, but the journey is the fun of the story. The conclusion felt a bit gratuitous, there mostly to wrap up the story than something that followed naturally from the previous plot. But it does feature one of the most quoted bits in Discworld:

"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little " YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. "They're not the same at all!" YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point " MY POINT EXACTLY.

Here's the thing, though: Susan is right. They're not the same sort of thing at all, and Pratchett doesn't present an argument that they are. Death's response is great, but it's also a non sequitur: it is true and correct but has nothing to do with Susan's argument. Justice is not a lie in the sense that Santa Claus is a lie: justice is something that humans can create, just like humans can create gift-giving or a tradition of imaginative story-telling. But this is not at all the same thing as encouraging children to believe in the literal existence of a fat man in red who comes down chimneys to deliver gifts by magic. And Death isn't even correct in Discworld! If one pays careful attention to the story, the consequences he's thinks would follow from the Auditors' attempt on the Hogfather not only don't happen, the exact opposite happens. This is the point of the Unseen University subplot, and it's also what happened in Reaper Man. The Auditors may be trying to kill mythology, but what the books show is that the real danger comes from the backlash. The force they're meddling with is far more powerful and persistent than they are. Death appears to be, by the stated events of the story, completely incorrect in his analysis of Discworld's metaphysics. Maybe Pratchett knows this? He did write a story that contradicts Death's analysis if one reads it carefully. But if so, this is not obvious from the text, or from Susan's reaction to Death's speech, which makes the metaphysics weirdly unsatisfying. So, overall, a mixed bag. Most of the book is very fun, but the metaphysics heavily rest on a pet peeve of mine, and I really could have done without the loving descriptions of the effects of hangovers. This is one of the more famous Discworld novels for the above quote, and on its own this is deserved (it's a great quote), but I think the logic is muddled and the story itself contradicts the implications. A rather odd reading experience. Followed by Jingo in publication order, and Thief of Time thematically. Rating: 7 out of 10

I have just deleted two forks I had of the GitLab project in my gitlab.com account. I did this after receiving a warning that quotas would now start to be enforced. It didn't say that I was going over quota, so I actually had to go look in the usage quotas page, which stated I was using 5.6GB of storage. So far so good, I'm not going to get billed because I'm below the 10GB threshold. But still, I found that number puzzling. That's a lot of data! Maybe wallabako? I build images there in CI... Or the ISOs in stressant? Nope. The biggest disk users were... my forks of gitlab-ce and gitlab-ee (now respectively called gitlab-foss and gitlab-ee, but whatever). CE was taking up roughly 1GB and EE was taking up the rest. So I deleted both repos, which means that the next time I want to contribute a fix to their documentation which is as far as I managed to contribute to GitLab I will need to re-fork those humongous repositories. Maybe I'm reading this wrong. Maybe there's a bug in the quotas system. Or, if I'm reading this right, GitLab is actually double-billing people: once for the source repository, and once for the fork. Because surely repos are not duplicating all those blobs on disk... right? RIGHT? Either case, that's rather a bad move on their part, I feel like. With GitHub charging 4$/user/month, it feels like GitLab is going to have to trouble to compete by charging 20$/user/month as a challenger... (Update: as noted in the comments by Jim Sorenson, this is actually an issue with older versions of GitLab. Deleting and re-forking the repos will actually fix the issue so, in a way, I did exactly what I should. Another workaround is to run the housekeeping jobs on the repo, although I cannot confirm this works myself.) But maybe it's just me: I'm not an economist, surely there's some brilliant plan here I'm missing... In the meantime, free-ish alternatives include Quay.io (currently free for public repos) and sr.ht (2$/mth, but at least not open-core, unfortunately no plan for a container registry). And of course, you can painfully self-host GitLab, sr.ht, gitea, pagure, or whatever it is the current fancy gitweb.

Our local Debian user group gathered on Sunday August 28th¹ at the very hackish Foulab for the August 2022 edition of our "Debian & Stuff" meetings. As always, the event was a success and we had lots of fun. Nine people showed up, including some new faces and people I hadn't seen in a while: On my side, although I was badly sleep-deprived ², I still managed to be somewhat productive! One of the WiFi Access Points we use in our 4-apartment LAN had been boot-looping for a few weeks, after a failed sysupgrade to the latest version of OpenWRT. lavamind and I suspect the flash got corrupted in a way or another during the upgrade process... Lucky for us, this model has a serial port and runs U-Boot. After a bit of tinkering, some electrical tape and two different serial adapters³, we managed to identify the pin layout and got a shell on the machine. The device has a reset button, but since the kernel panic was happening too soon in the boot process, we weren't able to get into OpenWRT's failsafe mode this way. Once we had serial access, wiping the flash and re-installing OpenWRT fixed our problem. A quick ansible-playbook run later, the device was back to being usable and configured :) I was too tired to keep track of what others did, but I took some nice pictures of the pizza we got, and of this nice blow-up Tux wearing a Foulab t-shirt. Enjoy! As always, thanks to the Debian project for granting us a budget to rent the venue and to buy some food.

History Before I start, the game I was talking about is called Cell To Singularity. Now I haven t gone much in the game as I have shared but think that the Singularity it refers to is the Technological Singularity that people think will happen. Whether that will happen or not is open to debate to one and all. This is going to be a bit long one. Confession Time :- When I was sharing in the blog post, I had no clue that we actually had sessions on it in this year s Debconf. I just saw the schedule yesterday and then came to know. Then I saw Guido s two talks, one at Debconf as well as one as Froscon. In fact, saw the Froscon talk first, and then the one at Debconf. Both the talks are nearly the same except for a thing here or a thing there. Now because I was not there so my understanding and knowledge would be disadvantageously asymmetrical to Guido and others who were there and could talk and share more. Having a Debian mobile or Debian on the mobile could also make Debian more popular and connectable to the masses, one of the things that were not pointed out in the Debian India BOF sadly. At the same time, there are some facts that are not on the table and hence not thought about. Being a B.Com person, I have been following not just the technical but also how the economics work and smartphone penetration in India is pretty low or historically been very low, say around 3-4% while the majority that people use, almost 90-95% of the market uses what are called non-smartphones or dumbphones. Especially during the pandemic and even after that the dumbphones market actually went up while smartphones stagnated and even came down. There is a lot of inventory at most of the dealers that they can t get rid of. From a dealer perspective, it probably makes more sense to buy and sell dumbphones more in number as the turnaround of capital is much faster and easier than for smartphones. I have seen people spend a number of hours and rightly so in order to make their minds up on a smartphone while for a dumbphone, it is a 10-minute thing. Ask around, figure out who is selling at the cheapest, and just buy. Most of these low-end phones are coming from China. In fact, even in the middle and getting even into smartphones, the Chinese are the masters from whom we buy, even as they have occupied Indian territory. In the top five, Samsung comes at number three of four (sharing about Samsung as a fan and having used them.) even though battery times are atrocious, especially with Android 12L. The only hope that most of the smartphone manufacturers have is lowering the sticker prices and hoping that 5G Adoption picks up and that is what they are betting on but that comes with its own share of drawbacks as can be seen.

GNOME, MATE, memory leaks, Payments FWIW, while I do have GNOME and do use a couple of tools from the GNOME stack, I hate GNOME with a passion. I have been a mate user for almost a decade now and really love the simplicity that mate has vis-a-vis GNOME. And with each release, MATE has only become better. So, it would be nice if we can have MATE on the mobile phone. How adaptive the apps might be on the smaller area, I dunno. It would be interesting to find out if and how people are looking at debugging memory leaks on mobile phones. Although finding memory leaks on any platform is good, finding them and fixing them on a mobile phone is pretty much critical as most phones have fixed & relatively small amounts of memory and it is and can get quickly exhausted. One of the things that were asked in the Q&A was about payments. The interesting thing is both UK and India are the same or markedly similar in regard as far as contactless payments being concerned. What most Indians have or use is basically UPI which is basically backed by your bank. Unlike in some other countries where you have a selection of wallets and even temporary/permanent virtual accounts whereby you can minimize your risks in case your mobile gets stolen or something, here we don t have that. There are three digital wallets that I know Paytm Not used (have heard it s creepy, but don t really know), Google pay (Unfortunately, this is the one I use, they bought multiple features, and in the last couple of years have really taken the game away from Paytm but also creepy.). The last one is Samsung Pay (haven t really used it as their find my phone app. always crashes, dunno how it is supposed to work.) But I do find that the apps. are vulnerable. Every day there is some or other news of fraud happening. Previously, only States like Bihar and Jharkhand used to be infamous for cybercrime as a hub, but now even States like Andhra Pradesh have joined and surpassed them :(. People have lost lakhs and crores, this is just a few days back. Some more info. on UPI can be found here and GitHub has a few implementation examples that anybody could look at and run away with it.

Balancing on three things For any new mobile phone to crack the market, it has to balance three things. One, achieve economies of scale. Unless, that is not taken care of or done, however good or bad the product might be, it remains a niche and dies after some time. While Guido shared about Openmoko and N900, one of the more interesting bits from a user perspective at least was the OLPC project. There are many nuances that the short article didn t go through. While I can t say for other countries, at least in India, no education initiative happens without corruption. And perhaps Nicholas s hands were tied while other manufacturers would and could do to achieve their sales targets. In India, it flopped because there was no way for volunteers to buy or get OLPC unless they were part of a school or college. There was some traction in FOSS communities, but that died down once OLPC did the partnership with MS-Windows, and proverbially broke the camel s back. FWIW, I think the idea, the concept, and even the machine were far ahead of their time. The other two legs are support and Warranty Without going into any details, I can share and tell there were quite a few OLPC type attempts using conventional laptops or using Android and FOSS or others or even using one of the mainstream distributions but the problems have always been polishing, training and support. Guido talked about privacy as a winning feature but fails to take into account that people want to know that their privacy isn t being violated. If a mobile phone answers to Hey Google does it mean it was passively gathering, storing, and sending info to third parties, we just don t know. The mobile phone could be part of the right to repair profile while at the same time it can force us to ask many questions about the way things currently are and going to be. Six months down the line all the flagships of all companies are working on being able to take and share through satellites (Satellite Internet) and perhaps maybe a few non-flagships. Of course, if you are going to use a satellite, then you are going to drain that much more quickly. In all and every event there are always gonna be tradeoffs. The Debian-mobile mailing list doesn t seem to have many takers. The latest I could find there is written by Paul Wise. I am in a similar boat (Samsung; SM-M526B; Lahaina; arm64-v8a) v12. It is difficult to know which release would work on your machine, make sure that the building from the source is not tainted and pristine and needs a way to backup and restore if you need to. I even tried installing GNURoot Debian and the Xserver alternative they had shared but was unable to use the touch interface on the fakeroot instance . The system talks about a back key but what back key I have no clue.

Precursor Events Debconf 2023 As far as precursor events are concerned before Debconf 23 in India, all the festivals that we have could be used to showcase Debian. In fact, the ongoing Ganesh Chaturthi would have been the perfect way to showcase Debian and apps. according to the audience. Even the festival of Durga Puja, Diwali etc. can be used. When commercial organizations use the same festivals, why can t we? What perhaps we would need to figure out is the funding part as well as getting permissions from Municipal authorities. One of the things for e.g. that we could do is buy either a permanent 24 monitor or a 34 TV and use that to display Debian and apps. The bigger, the better. Something that we could use day to day and also is used for events. This would require significant amounts of energy so we could approach companies, small businesses and individuals both for volunteering as well as helping out with funding. Somebody asked how we could do online stuff and why it is somewhat boring. What could be done for e.g. instead of 4-5 hrs. of things, break it into manageable 45 minute pieces. 4-5 hrs. is long and is gonna fatigue the best of people. Make it into 45-minute negotiable chunks, and intersphere it with jokes, hacks, anecdotes, and war stories. People do not like or want to be talked down to but rather converse. One of the things that I saw many of the artists do is have shows and limit the audience to 20-24 people on zoom call or whatever videoconferencing system you have and play with them. The passive audience enjoys the play between the standup guy and the crowd he works on, some of them may be known to him personally so he can push that envelope a bit more. The same thing can be applied here. Share the passion, and share why we are doing something. For e.g. you could do smem -t -k less and give a whole talk about how memory is used and freed during a session, how are things different on desktop and ARM as far as memory architecture is concerned (if there is). What is being done on the hardware side, what is on the software side and go on and on. Then share about troubleshooting applications. Valgrind is super slow and makes life hell, is there some better app ? Doesn t matter if you are a front-end or a back-end developer you need to know this and figure out the best way to deal with in your app/program. That would have lot of value. And this is just an e.g. to help trigger more ideas from the community. I am sure others probably have more fun ideas as to what can be done. I am stopping here now otherwise would just go on, till later. Feel free to comment, feedback. Hope it generates some more thinking and excitement on the grey cells.

OK, you re probably thinking. John, you talk a lot about things like Gopher and personal radios, and now you want to talk about building a reliable network out of USB drives? Well, yes. In fact, I ve already done it.

What is sneakernet? Normally, sneakernet is a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to using disconnected storage to transport data or messages. By disconnect storage I mean anything like CD-ROMs, hard drives, SD cards, USB drives, and so forth. There are times when loading up 12TB on a device and driving it across town is just faster and easier than using the Internet for the same. And, sometimes you need to get data to places that have no Internet at all. Another reason for sneakernet is security. For instance, if your backup system is online, and your systems being backed up are online, then it could become possible for an attacker to destroy both your primary copy of data and your backups. Or, you might use a dedicated computer with no network connection to do GnuPG (GPG) signing.

What about reliable sneakernet, then? TCP is often considered a reliable protocol. That means that the sending side is generally able to tell if its message was properly received. As with most reliable protocols, we have these components:

1. After transmitting a piece of data, the sender retains it.
2. After receiving a piece of data, the receiver sends an acknowledgment (ACK) back to the sender.
3. Upon receiving the acknowledgment, the sender removes its buffered copy of the data.
4. If no acknowledgment is received at the sender, it retransmits the data, in case it gets lost in transit.
5. It reorders any packets that arrive out of order, so that the recipient s data stream is ordered correctly.

Now, a lot of the things I just mentioned for sneakernet are legendarily unreliable. USB drives fail, CD-ROMs get scratched, hard drives get banged up. Think about putting these things in a bicycle bag or airline luggage. Some of them are going to fail. You might think, well, I ll just copy files to a USB drive instead of move them, and once I get them onto the destination machine, I ll delete them from the source. Congratulations! You are a human retransmit algorithm! We should be able to automate this! And we can.

Enter NNCP NNCP is one of those things that almost defies explanation. It is a toolkit for building asynchronous networks. It can use as a carrier: a pipe, TCP network connection, a mounted filesystem (specifically intended for cases like this), and much more. It also supports multi-hop asynchronous routing and asynchronous meshing, but these are beyond the scope of this particular article. NNCP s transports that involve live communication between two hops already had all the hallmarks of being reliable; there was a positive ACK and retransmit. As of version 8.7.0, NNCP s ACKs themselves can also be asynchronous meaning that every NNCP transport can now be reliable. Yes, that s right. Your ACKs can flow over tapes and USB drives if you want them to. I use this for archiving and backups. If you aren t already familiar with NNCP, you might take a look at my NNCP page. I also have a lot of blog posts about NNCP. Those pages describe the basics of NNCP: the packet (the unit of transmission in NNCP, which can be tiny or many TB), the end-to-end encryption, and so forth. The new command we will now be interested in is nncp-ack.

The Basic Idea Here are the basic steps to processing this stuff with NNCP:

1. First, we use nncp-xfer -rx to process incoming packets from the USB (or other media) device. This moves them into the NNCP inbound queue, deleting them from the media device, and verifies the packet integrity.
2. We use nncp-ack -node $NODE to create ACK packets responding to the packets we just loaded into the rx queue. It writes a list of generated ACKs onto fd 4, which we save off for later use.
3. We run nncp-toss -seen to process the incoming queue. The use of -seen causes NNCP to remember the hashes of packets seen before, so a duplicate of an already-seen packet will not be processed twice. This command also processes incoming ACKs for packets we ve sent out previously; if they pass verification, the relevant packets are removed from the local machine s tx queue.
4. Now, we use nncp-xfer -keep -tx -mkdir -node $NODE to send outgoing packets to a given node by writing them to a given directory on the media device. -keep causes them to remain in the outgoing queue.
5. Finally, we use the list of generated ACK packets saved off in step 2 above. That list is passed to nncp-rm -node $NODE -pkt < $FILE to remove those specific packets from the outbound queue. The reason is that there will never be an ACK of ACK packet (that would create an infinite loop), so if we don t delete them in this manner, they would hang around forever.

You can see these steps follow the same basic outline on upstream s nncp-ack page. One thing to keep in mind: if anything else is running nncp-toss, there is a chance of a race condition between steps 1 and 2 (if nncp-toss gets to it first, it might not get an ack generated). This would sort itself out eventually, presumably, as the sender would retransmit and it would be ACKed later.

Further ideas NNCP guarantees the integrity of packets, but not ordering between packets; if you need that, you might look into my Filespooler program. It is designed to work with NNCP and can provide ordered processing.

An example script Here is a script you might try for this sort of thing. It may have more logic than you need really, you just need the steps above but hopefully it is clear.

#!/bin/bash
set -eo pipefail
MEDIABASE="/media/$USER"
# The local node name
NODENAME=" hostname "
# All nodes.  NODENAME should be in this list.
ALLNODES="node1 node2 node3"
RUNNNCP=""
# If you need to sudo, use something like RUNNNCP="sudo -Hu nncp"
NNCPPATH="/usr/local/nncp/bin"
ACKPATH=" mktemp -d "
# Process incoming packets.
#
# Parameters: $1 - the path to scan.  Must contain a directory
# named "nncp".
procrxpath ()  
    while [ -n "$1" ]; do
        BASEPATH="$1/nncp"
        shift
        if ! [ -d "$BASEPATH" ]; then
            echo "$BASEPATH doesn't exist; skipping"
            continue
        fi
        echo " *** Incoming: processing $BASEPATH"
        TMPDIR=" mktemp -d "
        # This rsync and the one below can help with
        # certain permission issues from weird foreign
        # media.  You could just eliminate it and
        # always use $BASEPATH instead of $TMPDIR below.
        rsync -rt "$BASEPATH/" "$TMPDIR/"
        # You may need these next two lines if using sudo as above.
        # chgrp -R nncp "$TMPDIR"
        # chmod -R g+rwX "$TMPDIR"
        echo "     Running nncp-xfer -rx"
        $RUNNNCP $NNCPPATH/nncp-xfer -progress -rx "$TMPDIR"
        for NODE in $ALLNODES; do
                if [ "$NODE" != "$NODENAME" ]; then
                        echo "     Running nncp-ack for $NODE"
                        # Now, we generate ACK packets for each node we will
                        # process.  nncp-ack writes a list of the created
                        # ACK packets to fd 4.  We'll use them later.
                        # If using sudo, add -C 5 after $RUNNNCP.
                        $RUNNNCP $NNCPPATH/nncp-ack -progress -node "$NODE" \
                           4>> "$ACKPATH/$NODE"
                fi
        done
        rsync --delete -rt "$TMPDIR/" "$BASEPATH/"
        rm -fr "$TMPDIR"
    done
 
proctxpath ()  
    while [ -n "$1" ]; do
        BASEPATH="$1/nncp"
        shift
        if ! [ -d "$BASEPATH" ]; then
            echo "$BASEPATH doesn't exist; skipping"
            continue
        fi
        echo " *** Outgoing: processing $BASEPATH"
        TMPDIR=" mktemp -d "
        rsync -rt "$BASEPATH/" "$TMPDIR/"
        # You may need these two lines if using sudo:
        # chgrp -R nncp "$TMPDIR"
        # chmod -R g+rwX "$TMPDIR"
        for DESTHOST in $ALLNODES; do
            if [ "$DESTHOST" = "$NODENAME" ]; then
                continue
            fi
            # Copy outgoing packets to this node, but keep them in the outgoing
            # queue with -keep.
            $RUNNNCP $NNCPPATH/nncp-xfer -keep -tx -mkdir -node "$DESTHOST" -progress "$TMPDIR"
            # Here is the key: that list of ACK packets we made above - now we delete them.
            # There will never be an ACK for an ACK, so they'd keep sending forever
            # if we didn't do this.
            if [ -f "$ACKPATH/$DESTHOST" ]; then
                echo "nncp-rm for node $DESTHOST"
                $RUNNNCP $NNCPPATH/nncp-rm -debug -node "$DESTHOST" -pkt < "$ACKPATH/$DESTHOST"
            fi
        done
        rsync --delete -rt "$TMPDIR/" "$BASEPATH/"
        rm -rf "$TMPDIR"
        # We only want to write stuff once.
        return 0
    done
 
procrxpath "$MEDIABASE"/*
echo " *** Initial tossing..."
# We make sure to use -seen to rule out duplicates.
$RUNNNCP $NNCPPATH/nncp-toss -progress -seen
proctxpath "$MEDIABASE"/*
echo "You can unmount devices now."
echo "Done."

---

This post is also available on my webiste, where it may be periodically updated.

Culture Just before I start, I would like to point out that this post may or would probably be NSFW. Again, what is SFW (Safe at Work) and NSFW that so much depends on culture and perception of culture from wherever we are or wherever we take birth? But still, to be on the safe side I have put it as NSFW. Now there have been a few statements and ideas that gave me a pause. This will be a sort of chaotic blog post as I am in such a phase today. For e.g. while I do not know which culture or which country this comes from, somebody shared that in some cultures one can talk/comment May your poop be easy and with a straight face. I dunno which culture is this but if somebody asked me that I would just die from laughing or maybe poop there itself. While I can understand if it is a constipated person, but a whole culture? Until and unless their DNA is really screwed, I don t think so but then what do I know? I do know that we shit when we have extreme reactions of either joy or fear. And IIRC, this comes from mammal response when they were in dangerous situations and we got the same as humans evolved. I would really be interested to know which culture is that. I did come to know that the Japanese do wish that you may not experience hard work or something to that effect while ironically they themselves are becoming extinct due to hard work and not enough relaxation, toxic workplace is common in Japan according to social scientists and population experts. Another term that I couldn t figure out is The Florida Man Strikes again and this term is usually used when somebody does something stupid or something weird. While it is exclusively used in the American context, I am curious to know how that came about. Why does Florida have such people or is it an exaggeration? I have heard the term e.g. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas . Think it is also called Sin city although why just Vegas is beyond me?

Omicron-8712 Blood pressure machine I felt so stupid. I found another site or e-commerce site called Wellness Forever. They had the blood pressure machine I wanted, an Omron-8172. I bought it online and they delivered the same within half an hour. Amazon took six days and in the end, didn t deliver it at all. I tried taking measurements from it yesterday. I have yet to figure out what it all means but I did get measurements of 109 SYS, 88 DIA and Pulse is 72. As far as the pulse is concerned, guess that is normal, the others just don t know. If only I had known this couple of months ago. I was able to register the product as well as download and use the Omron Connect app. For roughly INR 2.5k you have a sort of health monitoring system. It isn t Star Trek Tricorder in any shape or form but it will have to do while the tricorder gets invented. And while we are on the subject let s not forget Elizabeth Holmes and the scam called Theranos. It really is something to see How Elizabeth Holmes modeled so much of herself on Steve Jobs mimicking how he left college/education halfway. A part of me is sad that Theranos is not real. Joe Scott just a few days ago shared some perspectives on the same just a few days ago. The idea in itself is pretty seductive, to say the least, and that is the reason the scam went on for more than a decade and perhaps would have been longer if some people hadn t gotten the truth out. I do see potentially, something like that coming on as A.I. takes a bigger role in automating testing. Half a decade to a decade from now, who knows if there is an algorithm that is able to do what is needed? If such a product were to come to the marketplace at a decent price, it would revolutionize medicine, especially in countries like India, South Africa, and all sorts of remote places. Especially, with all sorts of off-grid technologies coming and maturing in the marketplace. Before I forget, there is a game called Cell on Android that tells or shares about the evolution of life on earth. It also shares credence to the idea that life has come 6 times on Earth and has been destroyed multiple times by asteroids. It is in the idle sort of game format, so you can see the humble beginnings from the primordial soup to various kinds of cells and bacteria to finally a mammal. This is where I am and a long way to go.

Indian Bureaucracy One of the few things that Britishers gave to India, is the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy tests us in myriad ways. It would be full 2 months on 5th September and I haven t yet got a death certificate. And I need that for a sundry number of things. The same goes for a disability certificate. What is and was interesting is my trip to the local big hospital called Sassoon Hospital. My mum had shared incidents that occurred in the 1950s when she and the family had come to Pune. According to her, when she was alive, while Sassoon was the place to be, it was big and chaotic and you never knew where you are going. That was in 1950, I had the same experience in 2022. The term/adage the more things change, the more they remain the same seems to be held true for Sassoon Hospital. Btw, those of you who think the Devil exists, he is totally a fallacy. There is a popular myth that the devil comes to deal that he/she/they come to deal with you when somebody close to you passes, I was waiting desperately for him when mum passed. Any deal that he/she/they would have offered me I would have gladly taken, but all my wait was all for nothing. While I believe evil exists, that is manifested by humans and nobody else. The whole idea and story of the devil is just to control young children and nothing beyond that

Debconf 2023, friends, JPEGOptim, and EV s Quite a number of friends had gone to Albania this year as India won the right to host Debconf for the year 2023. While I did lurk on the Debconf orga IRC channel, I m not sure how helpful I would be currently. One news that warmed my heart is some people would be coming to India to check the site way before and make sure things go smoothly. Nothing like having more eyes (in this case bodies) to throw at a problem and hopefully it will be sorted. While I have not been working for the last couple of years, one of the things that I had to do and have been doing is moving a lot of stuff online. This is in part due to the Government s own intention of having everything on the cloud. One of the things I probably may have shared it more than enough times is that the storage most of these sites give is like the 1990s. I tried jpegoptim and while it works, it degrades the quality of the image quite a bit. The whole thing seems backward, especially as newer and newer smartphones are capturing more data per picture (megapixel resolution), case in point Samsung Galaxy A04 that is being introduced. But this is not only about newer phones, even my earlier phone, Samsung J-5/500 which I bought in 2016 took images at 5 MB. So it is not a new issue but a continuous issue. And almost all Govt. sites have the upper band fixed at 1 MB. But this is not limited to Govt. sites alone, most sites in India are somewhat frozen in the 1990s. And it isn t as if resources for designing web pages using HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Python, or Java aren t available. If worse comes to worst, one can even use amp to make his, her or their point. But this is if they want to do stuff. I would be sharing a few photos with commentary, there are still places where I can put photos apart from social media

Friends Last week, Saturday suddenly all the friends decided to show up. I have no clue one way or the other why but am glad they showed up.

Mahendra, Akshat, Shirish and Sagar Sukhose (Mangesh s friend) at Bal Gandharva..

Electric scooter as shared by Akshat seen in Albania

Somebody making a real-life replica of Wall Street on F.C. Road (Commercial, all glass)

Ganesh Idol near my house

Wearing new clothes

I will have to be a bit rapid about what I am sharing above so here goes nothing

1. The first picture shows Mahendra, Akshat, me, and Sagar Sukhose (Mangesh s friend). The picture was taken by Mangesh Diwate. We talked quite a bit of various things that could be done in Debian. A few of the things that I shared were (bringing more stuff from BSD to Debian, I am sure there s still quite a lot of security software that could be advantageous to have in Debian.) The best person to talk to or guide about this would undoubtedly be Paul Wise or as he is affectionally called Pabs. He is one of the shy ones and yet knows so much about how things work. The one and only time I met him is 2016. The other thing that we talked about is porting Debian to one of the phones. This has been done in the past and done by a Puneitie some 4-5 years back. While I don t recollect the gentleman s name, I remember that the porting was done on a Motorola phone as that was the easiest to do. He had tried some other mobile but that didn t work. Making Debian available on phone is hard work. Just to have an idea, I went to the xda developers forum and found out that while M51 has been added, my specific phone model is not there. A Samsung Galaxy M52G Android (samsung; SM-M526B; lahaina; arm64-v8a) v12 . You look at the chat and you understand how difficult the process might be. One of the other ideas that Akshat pitched was Debian Astro, this is something that is close to the heart of many, including me. I also proposed to have some kind of web app or something where we can find and share about the various astronomy and related projects done by various agencies. While there is a NASA app, nothing comes close to JSR and that site just shares stuff, no speculation. There are so many projects taken or being done by the EU, JAXA, ISRO, and even middle-east countries are trying but other than people who are following some of the developments, we hear almost nothing. Even the Chinese have made some long strides but most people know nothing about the same. And it s sad to know that those developments are not being known, shared, or even speculated about as much as say NASA or SpaceX is. How do we go about it and how do we get people to contribute or ask questions around it would be interesting. 2. The second picture was something that was shared by Akshat. Akshat was sharing how in Albania people are moving on these electric scooters . I dunno if that is the right word for it or what. I had heard from a couple of friends who had gone to Vietnam a few years ago how most people in Vietnam had modified their scooters and they were snaking lines of electric wires charging scooters. I have no clue whether they were closer to Vespa or something like above. In India, the Govt. is in partnership with the oil, gas, and coal mafia just as it was in Australia (the new Govt. in Australia is making changes) the same thing is here. With the humongous profits that the oil sector provides the petro states and others, Corruption is bound to happen. We talk and that s the extent of things. 3. The third picture is from a nearby area called F.C. Road or Fergusson College Road. The area has come up quite sharply (commercially) in the last few years. Apparently, Mr. Kushal is making a real-life replica of Wall Street which would be given to commercial tenants. Right now the real estate market is tight in India, we will know how things pan out in the next few years. 4. Number four is an image of a Ganesh idol near my house. There is a 10-day festival of the elephant god that people used to celebrate every year. For the last couple of years because of the pandemic, people were unable to celebrate the festival as it is meant to celebrate. This time some people are going overboard while others are cautious and rightfully so. 5. Last and not least, one of the things that people do at this celebration is to have new clothes, so I shared a photo of a gentleman who had bought and was wearing new clothes. While most countries around the world are similar, Latin America is very similar to India in many ways, perhaps Gunnar can share. especially about religious activities. The elephant god is known for his penchant for sweets and that can be seen from his rounded stomach, that is also how he is celebrated. He is known to make problems disappear or that is supposed to be his thing. We do have something like 4 billion gods, so each one has to be given some work or quality to justify the same

It's been a while since I posted one of these! Or, really, much of anything else. Busy and distracted this summer and a bit behind on a wide variety of things at the moment, although thankfully not in a bad way. Sara Alfageeh & Nadia Shammas Squire (graphic novel)
Travis Baldree Legends & Lattes (sff)
Leigh Bardugo Six of Crows (sff)
Miles Cameron Artifact Space (sff)
Robert Caro The Power Broker (nonfiction)
Kate Elliott Servant Mage (sff)
Nicola Griffith Spear (sff)
Alix E. Harrow A Mirror Mended (sff)
Tony Judt Postwar (nonfiction)
T. Kingfisher Nettle & Bone (sff)
Matthys Levy & Mario Salvadori Why Buildings Fall Down (nonfiction)
Lev Menand The Fed Unbound (nonfiction)
Courtney Milan Trade Me (romance)
Elie Mystal Allow Me to Retort (nonfiction)
Quenby Olson Miss Percy's Pocket Guide (sff)
Anu Partanen The Nordic Theory of Everything (nonfiction)
Terry Pratchett Hogfather (sff)
Terry Pratchett Jingo (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Last Continent (sff)
Terry Pratchett Carpe Jugulum (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Fifth Elephant (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Truth (sff)
Victor Ray On Critical Race Theory (nonfiction)
Richard Roberts A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel (sff)
Nisi Shawl & Latoya Peterson (ed.) Black Stars (sff anthology)
John Scalzi The Kaiju Preservation Society (sff)
James C. Scott Seeing Like a State (nonfiction)
Mary Sisson Trang (sff)
Mary Sisson Trust (sff)
Benjanun Sriduangkaew And Shall Machines Surrender (sff)
Lea Ypi Free (nonfiction)
It's been long enough that I've already read and reviewed some of these. Already read and pending review are the next two Pratchett novels in my slow progress working through them. Had to catch up with the Tor.com re-read series. So many books and quite definitely not enough time at the moment, although I've been doing better at reading this summer than last summer!

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding No any major updates on running projects.
Two 1, 2 projects are in the pipeline now.
Tryton project is in a review phase. Gradle projects is still fighting in work. In July, we put aside 2389 EUR to fund Debian projects. We re looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article. Debian LTS contributors In July, 14 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 0.00h (out of 14.00h assigned, thus carrying over 14.00h to the next month).
• Andreas R nnquist did 0.00h (out of 0.00h assigned and 10.50h from previous period, thus carrying over 10.50h to the next month).
• Anton Gladky did 23.00h (out of 25.00h assigned, thus carrying over 2.00h to the next month).
• Ben Hutchings did 3.00h (out of 24.00h assigned, thus carrying over 21.00h to the next month).
• Dominik George did 0.00h (out of 0.00h assigned and 22.17h from previous period, thus carrying over 22.17h to the next month).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 72.00h (out of 35.75h assigned).
• Enrico Zini did 0.00h (out of 0.00h assigned and 8.00h from previous period, thus carrying over 8.00h to the next month).
• Markus Koschany did 35.75h (out of 35.75h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 8.00h (out of 0.00h assigned and 12.00h from previous period, thus carrying over 4.00h to the next month).
• Roberto C. S nchez did 14.25h (out of 29.25h assigned and 2.75h from previous period, thus carrying over 17.75h to the next month).
• Stefano Rivera did 8.00h (out of 6.25h assigned and 20.75h from previous period, thus carrying over 19.00h to the next month).
• Sylvain Beucler did 3.50h (out of 35.75h assigned, thus carrying over 32.25h to the next month).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 20.00h (out of 35.75h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 35.75 available hours, thus carrying them over to the next month).

Evolution of the situation In July, we have released 3 DLAs. July was the period, when the Debian Stretch had already ELTS status, but Debian Buster was still in the hands of security team. Many member of LTS used this time to update internal infrastructure, documentation and some internal tickets. Now we are ready to take the next release in our hands: Buster! Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 83 months)
  • GitHub (for 74 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 51 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 94 months)
  • Linode (for 88 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 78 months)
  • Plat Home (for 77 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 33 months)
  • Deveryware (for 20 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 15 months)
  • EDF SA (for 4 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 99 months)
  • The Positive Internet Company (for 99 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 93 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 85 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 84 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 78 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 68 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 62 months)
  • CINECA (for 52 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 46 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 35 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 33 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 27 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 27 months)
  • Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 21 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 18 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 17 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 16 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 8 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 5 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 99 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 99 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 96 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 96 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 95 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 93 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 93 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 93 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 93 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 92 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 88 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 83 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 81 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 75 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 75 months)
  • Tesorion (for 75 months)
  • Bearstech (for 67 months)
  • LiHAS (for 67 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 61 months)
  • Supagro (for 57 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 55 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 41 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 33 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 30 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 26 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 20 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 17 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 12 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 11 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 10 months)
  • Alter Way (for 3 months)