Search Results: "ema"

30 January 2021

Emmanuel Kasper: Playing Tetris over serial console

Today I played Tetris over a serial console connection, on a Vax 4000 running OpenBSD. I haven't felt that 1337 since a long time.
I am going to get rid of that Vax system though. If that's your stuff, contact me privately.

asciinema in its greatness:

29 January 2021

Jamie McClelland: So... is Signal good or bad?

After Facebook updated their Whatsapp privacy policy, and a certain rich capitalist who doesn't like Facebook for reasons different then mine told the world to use Signal, Signal's downloads went up by 4,200%. As often happens when something becomes popular, the criticisms start to fly! For the record, I currently think promoting Signal is an important tactical strategy for the left. [I also think we should promote and install federated chat apps like conversations and element and delta chat whereever it is possible.] Here are some of the main criticisms I hear that I think are a distraction: Here are some criticisms that I think are nuanced: These last two are not exactly two sides of the same coin, but they are related. How Signal manages to balance privacy and protection from abuse will be the real test as to whether promoting Signal continues to be a useful strategy for the left.

27 January 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: A Deadly Education

Review: A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik
Series: The Scholomance #1
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 2020
ISBN: 0-593-12849-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 319
Some children are born with magic, which grows as they mature. Magic attracts maleficaria: extremely deadly magical beasts that want to feast on that magic. Having innate magical ability is therefore a recipe for endless attacks from monsters and a death at a young age. This was true even for the enclaves, which are the rich, gated communities of the magical world. Hence, the Scholomance. This is a boarding school for magic users placed in the Void and protected against maleficaria as completely as possible while still letting the students graduate and leave after their senior year. Students are sent there via a teleportation spell with a weight allowance, taught magic by automated systems and magical artifacts, and left on their own to make alliances and survive. Or not survive; protected as well as possible still means that there are maleficaria everywhere, sneaking past the wards of the graduation hall and looking for snacks. The school sends cleansing fire through the halls at certain times; the rest of the time, the students either learn enough magic to defeat maleficaria themselves, form alliances with those who can, or die to feed the magic of the school. Enter Galadriel, or El as she prefers. She's not an enclave kid; she's the grumpy, misfit daughter of a hippie mother whose open-hearted devotion to healing and giving away her abilities make her the opposite of the jealously guarded power structures of the enclaves. El has no resources other than what she can muster on her own. She also has her mother's ethics, which means that although she has an innate talent for malia, drawing magic from the death of other living things, she forces herself to build her mana through rigorously ethical means. Like push-ups. Or, worse, crochet. At the start of the book, El is in her third year of four, and significantly more of her classmates are alive than normally would be. That's because of her classmate, Orion Lake, who has made a full-time hobby of saving everyone from maleficaria. His unique magical ability frees him from the constraints of mana or malia that everyone else is subject to, and he uses that to be a hero, surrounded by adoring fans. And El is thoroughly sick of it. This book is so good in so many different ways that I don't know where to start. Obviously, A Deadly Education is a twist on the boarding school novel, both the traditional and the magical kind. This is not a genre in which I'm that well-read, but even with my lack of familiarity, I noticed so many things Novik does to improve the genre tropes, starting with not making the heroic character with the special powers the protagonist. And getting rid of all the adults, which leaves way more space for rich social dynamics between the kids (complex and interesting ones that are entangled with the social dynamics outside of the school, not some simplistic Lord of the Flies take). Going alone anywhere in the school is dangerous, as is sitting at the bad tables in the cafeteria, so social cliques become a matter of literal life and death. And the students aren't just trying to survive; the ones who aren't part of enclaves are jockeying for invitations or trying to build the power to help their family and allies form their own. El is the first-person narrator of the story and she's wonderful. She's grumpy, cynical, and sarcastic, which is often good for first-person narrators, but she also has a core of ethics from her mother, and from her own decisions, that gives her so much depth. She is the type of person who knows exactly how much an ethical choice will cost her and how objectively stupid it is, and then will make it anyway out of sheer stubbornness and refuse to take credit for it. I will happily read books about characters like El until the end of time. Her mother never appears in this book, and yet she's such a strong presence because El's relationship with her matters, to both El and to the book. El could not be more unlike her mother in both personality and in magical focus, and she's exasperated by the sheer impracticality of some of her mother's ideals. And yet there's a core of love and understanding beneath that, a level at which El completely understands her mother's goals, and El relies on it even when she doesn't realize she's doing so. I don't think I've ever read a portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship this good where one of the parties isn't even present. And I haven't even gotten to the world-building, and the level to which Novik chases down and explores all the implications of this ridiculous murder machine of a school. I will offer this caveat: If you poke at the justification for creating this school in the way it was built, it's going to teeter a lot. That society thought this school was the best solution to its child mortality problem is just something you have to roll with. But once you accept that, the implications are handled so very well. The school is an inhuman character in its own right, with exasperating rules that the students learn and warn each other about. It tries to distract you with rare spellbooks or artifact materials because it's trying to kill you. The language tapes whisper horrific stories of your death. The back wall of your room is a window to the Void, from which you can demand spellbooks. You'll even get them in languages that you understand, for a generous definition of understand that may have involved glancing at one page of text, so be careful not to do that! The school replaces all of the adult teachers in the typical boarding school novel and is so much more interesting than any of them because it adds the science fiction thrill of setting as character. The world-building does mean a lot of infodumping, so be prepared for that. El likes to explain things, tell stories, and over-analyze her life, and reading this book is a bit like reading the journal of a teenage girl. For me, El's voice is so strong, authentic, stubborn, and sarcastically funny that I scarcely noticed the digressions into background material. And the relationships! Some of the turns will be predictable, since of course El's stubborn ethics will be (eventually) rewarded by the story, but the dynamic that develops between El and Orion is something special. It takes a lot to make me have sympathy with the chosen one boy hero, but Novik pulls it off without ever losing sight of the dynamics of class and privilege that are also in play. And the friendships El develops almost accidentally by being stubbornly herself are just wonderful, and the way she navigates them made me respect her even more. The one negative thing I will say about this book is that I don't think Novik quite nailed the climax. Some of this is probably because this is the first book of a series and Novik wanted to hold some social developments in reserve, but I thought El got a bit sidelined and ended up along for the ride in an action-movie sequence. Still, it's a minor quibble, and it's clear from the very end of the book that El is going to get more attention and end up in a different social position in the next book. This was a wholly engrossing and enjoyable story with a satisfying climax and only the barb of a cliffhanger in the very last line. It's the best SFF novel published in 2020 that I've read so far (yes, even better than Network Effect). Highly recommended, and I hope it gets award recognition this year. Followed by The Last Graduate (not yet published at the time of this review). Rating: 9 out of 10

26 January 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: The City We Became

Review: The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin
Series: The Great Cities Trilogy #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: March 2020
ISBN: 0-316-50985-X
Format: Kindle
Pages: 449
At an unpredictable point after a city has accumulated enough history, character, and sense of itself, it is born as a living creature. It selects an avatar who both embodies the city and helps it be born. But in that moment of birth, a city is at its most vulnerable, and that is when the Enemy attacks. The birth of cities and the Enemy attacks have happened for millennia, so the cities that have survived the process have developed a system. The most recently born goes to assist the avatar with the birthing process and help fight off Enemy attacks. But the process has become riskier and the last two cities have failed to be born, snuffed out in natural disasters despite that support. Now, it's New York City's turn. It selects its avatar and survives the initial assault with the help of S o Paulo. But something still goes wrong, and it is severely injured in the process. Complicating matters, now there are five more avatars, one for each borough, who will have to unite to fight off the Enemy. And, for the first time, the Enemy has taken human form and is attacking with reason and manipulation and intelligence, not just force. The City We Became has a great premise: take the unique sense of place that defines a city and turn it into a literalized character in a fantasy novel. The avatars are people who retain their own lives and understanding (with one exception that I'll get to in a moment), but gain an awareness of the city they represent. They can fight and repair their city through sympathetic magic and metaphor made real. The prelude that introduces this concept (adapted from Jemisin's earlier short story "The City Born Great") got too gonzo for me, but once Jemisin settles into the main story and introduces avatars with a bit more distance from the city they represent, the premise clicked. The execution, on the other hand, I thought was strained. The biggest problem is that the premise requires an ensemble cast of five borough avatars, the primary avatar, S o Paulo, and the Enemy. That's already a lot, but for the story to work each avatar has to be firmly grounded in their own unique experience of New York, which adds family members, colleagues, and roommates. That's too much to stuff into one novel, which means characters get short shrift. For example, Padmini, the avatar of Queens, gets a great introductory scene and a beautiful bit of characterization that made her one of my favorite characters, but then all but disappears for the remainder of the book. She's in the scenes, but not in a way that matters. Brooklyn and Aislyn get moments of deep characterization, but there's so much else going on that they felt rushed. And what ever happened to Manny's roommate? The bulk of the characterization in this book goes to Broncha, the Bronx avatar, a Lenape woman and a tough-as-nails administrator of a community art museum and maker space. The dynamics between her and her co-workers, her mentorship of Veneza, and her early encounters with the Woman in White are my favorite parts of the book. I thought she and Brooklyn were a useful contrast: two very different ways of finding a base of power in the city without letting go of one's ideals. But before we get to Broncha, we first meet Manny, the Manhattan avatar. Thematically, I thought what Jemisin did here was extremely clever. Manny's past is essentially erased at the start of the book, so he's making sense of this world in the same way the reader is. It makes him a useful reader insert character and parallels the typical tourist experience of arriving in Manhattan and trying to use it to make sense of New York. He's disconnected from the rest of the city because he's the dangerous newcomer with power but not a lot of understanding, which works with my model of the political dynamics of Manhattan. Unfortunately, he's not an interesting person. I appreciated what was happening at the metaphorical layer, but Manny veers between action hero and exposition prompt, and his amnesia meant I never got enough sense of him as a character to care that much about what happened to him. I thought his confrontation with the Woman in White near the start of the book, which establishes the major villain of the book, felt clunky and forced compared to her later encounters with the other characters. The Woman in White, though, is a great villain. It's clear from earlier on that the Enemy is Lovecraftian, but the Woman in White mixes mad scientist glee, manic enthusiasm, and a child-like amusement at the weirdness of humanity into the more typical tropes of tentacles, corruption, and horrific creatures. One of my qualms about reading this book is that I'm not a horror fan and don't enjoy the mental images of unspeakable monsters, but the Woman in White puts such a fascinating spin on them that I enjoyed the scenes in which she appeared. I think the book was at its best when she was trying to psychologically manipulate the characters or attack them with corrupted but pre-existing power structures. I was less interested when it turned into an action-movie fight against animated monsters. The other place Jemisin caught me by surprise is too much of a spoiler to describe in detail (and skip the next paragraph in its entirety if you want to avoid all spoilers): Jemisin didn't take the moral conflict of the book in the direction I was expecting. This book is more interested in supporting the people who are already acting ethically than in redeeming people who make bad choices. That produces a deus ex machina ending that's a bit abrupt, but I appreciated the ethical stance. Overall, I thought the premise was great but the execution was unsteady and a bit overstuffed. There are some great characters and some great scenes, but to me they felt disjointed and occasionally rushed. You also need to enjoy characters taking deep pride in the feel of a specific place and advocating for it with the vigor of a sports rivalry, along with loving descriptions of metaphors turned into magical waves of force. But, if you can roll with that, there are moments of real awe. Jemisin captured for me the joy that comes from a deeply grounded sense of connection to a place. Recommended, albeit with caveats, if you're in the mood for reading about people who love the city they live in. This is the first book of a planned trilogy and doesn't resolve the main conflict, but it reaches a satisfying conclusion. The title of the next book has not yet been announced at the time of this review. Rating: 7 out of 10

22 January 2021

Enrico Zini: Assembling the custom runner

This post is part of a series about trying to setup a gitlab runner based on systemd-nspawn. I published the polished result as nspawn-runner on GitHub. The plan Back to custom runners, here's my plan: The scripts Here are the scripts based on Federico's work: base.sh with definitions sourced by all scripts: 
MACHINE="run-$CUSTOM_ENV_CI_JOB_ID"
ROOTFS="/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/buster"
OVERLAY="/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/$MACHINE"
config.sh doing nothing: 
#!/bin/sh
exit 0
prepare.sh starting the machine: 
#!/bin/bash
source $(dirname "$0")/base.sh
set -eo pipefail
# trap errors as a CI system failure
trap "exit $SYSTEM_FAILURE_EXIT_CODE" ERR
logger "gitlab CI: preparing $MACHINE"
mkdir -p $OVERLAY
systemd-run \
  -p 'KillMode=mixed' \
  -p 'Type=notify' \
  -p 'RestartForceExitStatus=133' \
  -p 'SuccessExitStatus=133' \
  -p 'Slice=machine.slice' \
  -p 'Delegate=yes' \
  -p 'TasksMax=16384' \
  -p 'WatchdogSec=3min' \
  systemd-nspawn --quiet -D $ROOTFS \
    --overlay="$ROOTFS:$OVERLAY:/"
    --machine="$MACHINE" --boot --notify-ready=yes
run.sh running the provided scripts in the machine: 
#!/bin/bash
logger "gitlab CI: running $@"
source $(dirname "$0")/base.sh
set -eo pipefail
trap "exit $SYSTEM_FAILURE_EXIT_CODE" ERR
systemd-run --quiet --pipe --wait --machine="$MACHINE" /bin/bash < "$1"
cleanup.sh stopping the machine and removing the writable overlay directory: 
#!/bin/bash
logger "gitlab CI: cleanup $@"
source $(dirname "$0")/base.sh
machinectl stop "$MACHINE"
rm -rf $OVERLAY
Trying out the plan I tried a manual invocation of gitlab-runner, and it worked perfectly: 
# mkdir /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/build/
# mkdir /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cache/
# gitlab-runner exec custom \
    --builds-dir /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/build/ \
    --cache-dir /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cache/ \
    --custom-config-exec /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/config.sh \
    --custom-prepare-exec /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/prepare.sh \
    --custom-run-exec /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/run.sh \
    --custom-cleanup-exec /var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cleanup.sh \
    tests
Runtime platform                                    arch=amd64 os=linux pid=18662 revision=775dd39d version=13.8.0
Running with gitlab-runner 13.8.0 (775dd39d)
Preparing the "custom" executor
Using Custom executor...
Running as unit: run-r1be98e274224456184cbdefc0690bc71.service
executor not supported                              job=1 project=0 referee=metrics
Preparing environment
Getting source from Git repository
Executing "step_script" stage of the job script
WARNING: Starting with version 14.0 the 'build_script' stage will be replaced with 'step_script': https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/26426
Job succeeded
Deploy The remaining step is to deploy all this in /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml: 
concurrent = 1
check_interval = 0
[session_server]
  session_timeout = 1800
[[runners]]
  name = "nspawn runner"
  url = "http://gitlab.siweb.local/"
  token = " "
  executor = "custom"
  builds_dir = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/build/"
  cache_dir = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cache/"
  [runners.custom_build_dir]
  [runners.cache]
    [runners.cache.s3]
    [runners.cache.gcs]
    [runners.cache.azure]
  [runners.custom]
    config_exec = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/config.sh"
    config_exec_timeout = 200
    prepare_exec = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/prepare.sh"
    prepare_exec_timeout = 200
    run_exec = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/run.sh"
    cleanup_exec = "/var/lib/gitlab-runner-custom-chroots/cleanup.sh"
    cleanup_exec_timeout = 200
    graceful_kill_timeout = 200
    force_kill_timeout = 200
Next steps My next step will be polishing all this in a way that makes deploying and maintaining a runner configuration easy.

20 January 2021

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2020

A Debian LTS logo Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In December, we put aside 2100 EUR to fund Debian projects. The first project proposal (a tracker.debian.org improvement for the security team) was received and quickly approved by the paid contributors, then we opened a request for bids and the bid winner was announced today (it was easy, we had only one candidate). Hopefully this first project will be completed until our next report. 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 December, 12 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation December was a quiet month as we didn t have a team meeting nor any other unusual activity and we released 43 DLAs. The security tracker currently lists 30 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 25 packages needing an update. This month we are pleased to welcome Deveryware as new sponsor! Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

19 January 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: The Secret Barrister

Review: The Secret Barrister, by The Secret Barrister
Publisher: Picador
Copyright: 2018
Printing: 2019
ISBN: 1-5098-4115-6
Format: Kindle
Pages: 344
The Secret Barrister is a survey and critique of the criminal legal system of England and Wales. The author is an anonymous barrister who writes a legal blog of the same name (which I have not read). A brief and simplified primer for those who, like me, are familiar with the US legal system but not the English one: A barrister is a lawyer who argues cases in court, as distinct from a solicitor who does all the other legal work (and may make limited court appearances). If you need criminal legal help in England and Wales, you hire a solicitor, and they are your primary source of legal advise. If your case goes to court, your solicitor will generally (not always) refer the work of arguing your case before a judge and jury to a barrister and "instruct" them in the details of your argument. The job of the barrister is then to handle the courtroom trial, offer trial-specific legal advice, and translate your defense (or the crown's prosecution) into persuasive courtroom arguments. Unlike the United States, with its extremely sharp distinction between prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys, criminal barristers in England and Wales argue both prosecutions and defenses depending on who hires them. (That said, the impression I got from this book is that the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service is moving England closer to the US model and more prosecutions are now handled by barristers employed directly by the CPS, whom I assume do not take defense cases.) Barristers follow the cab-rank rule, which means that, like a taxicab, they are professionally obligated to represent people on a first-come, first-serve basis and are not allowed to pick and choose clients. (Throughout, I'm referencing the legal system of England and Wales because the author restricts his comments to it. Presumably this is because the Scottish and Northern Irish? legal systems are different yet again in ways I do not know.) If details like this sound surprising, you can see the appeal of this book to me. It's easy, in the US, to have a vast ignorance about the legal systems of other countries or even the possibility of different systems, which makes it hard to see how our system could be improved. I had a superficial assumption that since US law started as English common law, the US and English legal systems would be substantially similar. And they are to an extent; they're both adversarial rather than inquisitorial, for example (more on that in a moment). But the current system of criminal prosecution evolved long after US independence and thus evolved differently despite similar legal foundations. Those differences are helpful for this American to ponder the road not taken and the impact of our respective choices. That said, explaining the criminal legal system to Americans isn't the author's purpose. The first fifty pages are that beginner's overview, since apparently even folks who live in England are confused by the ubiquity of US legal dramas (not that those are very accurate representations of the US legal system either). The rest of the book, and its primary purpose, is an examination of the system's failings, starting with the magistrates' courts (which often use lay judges and try what in the US would be called misdemeanors, although as discussed in this book their scope is expanding). Other topics include problems with bail, how prosecution is structured, how victims and witnesses are handled, legal aid, sentencing, and the absurd inadequacy of compensation for erroneous convictions. The most useful part of this book for me, apart from the legal system introduction, was the two chapters the author spends arguing first for and then against replacing an adversarial system with an inquisitorial system (the French criminal justice system, for example). When one is as depressed about the state of one's justice system as both I and the author are, something radically different sounds appealing. The author first makes a solid case for the inquisitorial system and then tries to demolish it, still favoring the adversarial system, and I liked that argument construction. The argument in favor of an adversarial system is solid and convincing, but it's also depressing. It's the argument of someone who has seen the corruption, sloppiness, and political motivations in an adversarial system and fears what would happen if they were able to run rampant under a fig leaf of disinterested objectivity. I can't disagree, particularly when starting from an adversarial system, but this argument feels profoundly cynical. It reminds me of the libertarian argument for capitalism: humans are irredeemably awful, greed and self-interest are the only reliable or universal human motives, and therefore the only economic system that can work is one based on and built to harness greed, because expecting any positive characteristics from humans collectively is hopelessly naive. The author of this book is not quite that negative in their argument for an adversarial system, but it's essentially the same reasoning: the only way a system can be vaguely honest is if it's constantly questioned and attacked. It can never be trusted to be objective on its own terms. I wish the author had spent more time on the obvious counter-argument: when the system is designed for adversarial combat, it normalizes and even valorizes every dirty tactic that might result in a victory. The system reinforces our worst impulses, not to mention grinding up and destroying people who cannot afford their own dirty tricks. The author proposes several explanations for the problems they see in the criminal legal system, including "tough on crime" nonsense from politicians that sounds familiar to this American reader. Most problems, though, they trace back to lack of funding: of the police, of the courts, of the prosecutors, and of legal aid. I don't know enough about English politics to have an independent opinion on this argument, but the stories of outsourcing to the lowest bidder, overworked civil servants, ridiculously low compensation rates, flawed metrics like conviction rates, and headline-driven political posturing that doesn't extend to investing in necessary infrastructure like better case-tracking systems sounds depressingly familiar. This is one of those books where I appreciated the content but not the writing. It's not horrible, but the sentences are ponderous and strained and the author is a bit too fond of two-dollar words. They also have a dramatic and self-deprecating way of describing their own work that I suspect they thought was funny but that I found grating. By the end of this book, I was irritated enough that I can't recommend it. But the content was interesting, even the critique of a political system that isn't mine, and it prompted some new thoughts on the difficulties of creating a fair justice system. If you can deal with the author's writing style, you may also enjoy it. Rating: 6 out of 10

17 January 2021

Wouter Verhelst: On Statements, Facts, Hypotheses, Science, Religion, and Opinions

The other day, we went to a designer's fashion shop whose owner was rather adamant that he was never ever going to wear a face mask, and that he didn't believe the COVID-19 thing was real. When I argued for the opposing position, he pretty much dismissed what I said out of hand, claiming that "the hospitals are empty dude" and "it's all a lie". When I told him that this really isn't true, he went like "well, that's just your opinion". Well, no -- certain things are facts, not opinions. Even if you don't believe that this disease kills people, the idea that this is a matter of opinion is missing the ball by so much that I was pretty much stunned by the level of ignorance. His whole demeanor pissed me off rather quickly. While I disagree with the position that it should be your decision whether or not to wear a mask, it's certainly possible to have that opinion. However, whether or not people need to go to hospitals is not an opinion -- it's something else entirely. After calming down, the encounter got me thinking, and made me focus on something I'd been thinking about before but hadn't fully forumlated: the fact that some people in this world seem to misunderstand the nature of what it is to do science, and end up, under the claim of being "sceptical", with various nonsense things -- see scientology, flat earth societies, conspiracy theories, and whathaveyou. So, here's something that might (but probably won't) help some people figuring out stuff. Even if it doesn't, it's been bothering me and I want to write it down so it won't bother me again. If you know all this stuff, it might be boring and you might want to skip this post. Otherwise, take a deep breath and read on... Statements are things people say. They can be true or false; "the sun is blue" is an example of a statement that is trivially false. "The sun produces light" is another one that is trivially true. "The sun produces light through a process that includes hydrogen fusion" is another statement, one that is a bit more difficult to prove true or false. Another example is "Wouter Verhelst does not have a favourite color". That happens to be a true statement, but it's fairly difficult for anyone that isn't me (or any one of the other Wouters Verhelst out there) to validate as true. While statements can be true or false, combining statements without more context is not always possible. As an example, the statement "Wouter Verhelst is a Debian Developer" is a true statement, as is the statement "Wouter Verhelst is a professional Volleybal player"; but the statement "Wouter Verhelst is a professional Volleybal player and a Debian Developer" is not, because while I am a Debian Developer, I am not a professional Volleybal player -- I just happen to share a name with someone who is. A statement is never a fact, but it can describe a fact. When a statement is a true statement, either because we trivially know what it states to be true or because we have performed an experiment that proved beyond any possible doubt that the statement is true, then what the statement describes is a fact. For example, "Red is a color" is a statement that describes a fact (because, yes, red is definitely a color, that is a fact). Such statements are called statements of fact. There are other possible statements. "Grass is purple" is a statement, but it is not a statement of fact; because as everyone knows, grass is (usually) green. A statement can also describe an opinion. "The Porsche 911 is a nice car" is a statement of opinion. It is one I happen to agree with, but it is certainly valid for someone else to make a statement that conflicts with this position, and there is nothing wrong with that. As the saying goes, "opinions are like assholes: everyone has one". Statements describing opinions are known as statements of opinion. The differentiating factor between facts and opinions is that facts are universally true, whereas opinions only hold for the people who state the opinion and anyone who agrees with them. Sometimes it's difficult or even impossible to determine whether a statement is true or not. The statement "The numbers that win the South African Powerball lottery on the 31st of July 2020 are 2, 3, 5, 19, 35, and powerball 14" is not a statement of fact, because at the time of writing, the 31st of July 2020 is in the future, which at this point gives it a 1 in 24,435,180 chance to be true). However, that does not make it a statement of opinion; it is not my opinion that the above numbers will win the South African powerball; instead, it is my guess that those numbers will be correct. Another word for "guess" is hypothesis: a hypothesis is a statement that may be universally true or universally false, but for which the truth -- or its lack thereof -- cannot currently be proven beyond doubt. On Saturday, August 1st, 2020 the above statement about the South African Powerball may become a statement of fact; most likely however, it will instead become a false statement. An unproven hypothesis may be expressed as a matter of belief. The statement "There is a God who rules the heavens and the Earth" cannot currently (or ever) be proven beyond doubt to be either true or false, which by definition makes it a hypothesis; however, for matters of religion this is entirely unimportant, as for believers the belief that the statement is correct is all that matters, whereas for nonbelievers the truth of that statement is not at all relevant. A belief is not an opinion; an opinion is not a belief. Scientists do not deal with unproven hypotheses, except insofar that they attempt to prove, through direct observation of nature (either out in the field or in a controlled laboratory setting) that the hypothesis is, in fact, a statement of fact. This makes unprovable hypotheses unscientific -- but that does not mean that they are false, or even that they are uninteresting statements. Unscientific statements are merely statements that science cannot either prove or disprove, and that therefore lie outside of the realm of what science deals with. Given that background, I have always found the so-called "conflict" between science and religion to be a non-sequitur. Religion deals in one type of statements; science deals in another. The do not overlap, since a statement can either be proven or it cannot, and religious statements by their very nature focus on unprovable belief rather than universal truth. Sure, the range of things that science has figured out the facts about has grown over time, which implies that religious statements have sometimes been proven false; but is it heresy to say that "animals exist that can run 120 kph" if that is the truth, even if such animals don't exist in, say, Rome? Something very similar can be said about conspiracy theories. Yes, it is possible to hypothesize that NASA did not send men to the moon, and that all the proof contrary to that statement was somehow fabricated. However, by its very nature such a hypothesis cannot be proven or disproven (because the statement states that all proof was fabricated), which therefore implies that it is an unscientific statement. It is good to be sceptical about what is being said to you. People can have various ideas about how the world works, but only one of those ideas -- one of the possible hypotheses -- can be true. As long as a hypothesis remains unproven, scientists love to be sceptical themselves. In fact, if you can somehow prove beyond doubt that a scientific hypothesis is false, scientists will love you -- it means they now know something more about the world and that they'll have to come up with something else, which is a lot of fun. When a scientific experiment or observation proves that a certain hypothesis is true, then this probably turns the hypothesis into a statement of fact. That is, it is of course possible that there's a flaw in the proof, or that the experiment failed (but that the failure was somehow missed), or that no observance of a particular event happened when a scientist tried to observe something, but that this was only because the scientist missed it. If you can show that any of those possibilities hold for a scientific proof, then you'll have turned a statement of fact back into a hypothesis, or even (depending on the exact nature of the flaw) into a false statement. There's more. It's human nature to want to be rich and famous, sometimes no matter what the cost. As such, there have been scientists who have falsified experimental results, or who have claimed to have observed something when this was not the case. For that reason, a scientific paper that gets written after an experiment turned a hypothesis into fact describes not only the results of the experiment and the observed behavior, but also the methodology: the way in which the experiment was run, with enough details so that anyone can retry the experiment. Sometimes that may mean spending a large amount of money just to be able to run the experiment (most people don't have an LHC in their backyard, say), and in some cases some of the required materials won't be available (the latter is expecially true for, e.g., certain chemical experiments that involve highly explosive things); but the information is always there, and if you spend enough time and money reading through the available papers, you will be able to independently prove the hypothesis yourself. Scientists tend to do just that; when the results of a new experiment are published, they will try to rerun the experiment, partially because they want to see things with their own eyes; but partially also because if they can find fault in the experiment or the observed behavior, they'll have reason to write a paper of their own, which will make them a bit more rich and famous. I guess you could say that there's three types of people who deal with statements: scientists, who deal with provable hypotheses and statements of fact (but who have no use for unprovable hypotheses and statements of opinion); religious people and conspiracy theorists, who deal with unprovable hypotheses (where the religious people deal with these to serve a large cause, while conspiracy theorists only care about the unprovable hypotheses); and politicians, who should care about proven statements of fact and produce statements of opinion, but who usually attempt the reverse of those two these days :-/ Anyway... [[!img Error: Image::Magick is not installed]]

Junichi Uekawa: Yesterday was our monthly Debian meeting.

Yesterday was our monthly Debian meeting. We do one every month for Tokyo and Kansai combined, because it's online and no reason to split for now. I presented what I learnt about nodejs packaging in Debian. This time, I started using Emacs for presentation, presenting PDF file. This week I switched most of my login shells to emacsclient, and experimenting. It's interesting how much things break, and how much I depended on .bashrc and .profile being loaded. But most things work and I don't need most things outside of emacs...

16 January 2021

Abhijith PA: Transition from Thunderbird to Mutt

I was going OK with Thunderbird and enigmail(though it have many problems). Normally I go through changelogs before updating packages and rarely do a complete upgrage of my machine. Couple of days ago I did a complete upgrade of system which updated my Thunderbird to latest version and throwing of enigmail plugin for using their native openPGP support. There is a blog from Mozilla which I should ve read earlier. Thunderbird s builtin openPGP functionality is still in experimental, atleast not ready for my workflow. I could ve downgrade to version 68. But I chose to move to my secondary MUA, mutt. I was using mutt for emails and newsletters that I check twice in a year a so. So I started configuring mutt to handle my big mailboxes. It took three evenings to configure mutt to my workflow. Though the basic setup can be done in less than an hour it is the small nitpicks consumed much of my time. Currently I have isync to pull and keep mails offline. Mutt to read, msmtp to send, abook as the email address book and urlview to see the links in mail. I am still learning notmuch and virtual mailbox ways to filter. Mutt There are ton of articles out there to configure mutt and all related things to it. But I find certain configs very hard to get. So I will write down those. So far, everything going okay.

Cons
  • some times mbsync throws EOF and secret key not found error.
  • searching is still a pain in mutt
  • nano s spell checker also check things which I am replying to.

More to come Well for now I moved mail from part of the Thunderbird. But Thunderbird was more than a MUA to me. It was my RSS reader, calendar and to-do list manager. I will write more about those once I make a complete transition.

15 January 2021

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.6: Some Updates

rcpp logo The Rcpp team is proud to announce release 1.0.6 of Rcpp which arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian too. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days. This marks the first release on the new six-months cycle announced with release 1.0.5 in July. As reminder, interim dev or rc releases will often be available in the Rcpp drat repo; this cycle there were four. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. As of today, 2174 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further (which is an 8.5% increase just since the last release), along with 207 in BioConductor. This release features six different pull requests from five different contributors, mostly fixing fairly small corner cases, plus some minor polish on documentation and continuous integration. Before releasing we once again made numerous reverse dependency checks none of which revealed any issues. So the passage at CRAN was pretty quick despite the large dependency footprint, and we are once again grateful for all the work the CRAN maintainers do.

Changes in Rcpp patch release version 1.0.6 (2021-01-14)
  • Changes in Rcpp API:
    • Replace remaining few uses of EXTPTR_PTR with R_ExternalPtrAddr (Kevin in #1098 fixing #1097).
    • Add push_back and push_front for DataFrame (Walter Somerville in #1099 fixing #1094).
    • Remove a misleading-to-wrong comment (Mattias Ellert in #1109 cleaning up after #1049).
    • Address a sanitizer report by initializing two private bool variables (Benjamin Christoffersen in #1113).
    • External pointer finalizer toggle default values were corrected to true (Dirk in #1115).
  • Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
    • Several URLs were updated to https and/or new addresses (Dirk).
  • Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
    • Added GitHub Actions CI using the same container-based setup used previously, and also carried code coverage over (Dirk in #1128).
  • Changes in Rcpp support functions:
    • Rcpp.package.skeleton() avoids warning from R. (Dirk)

Thanks to my CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Bugs reports are welcome at the GitHub issue tracker as well (where one can also search among open or closed issues); questions are also welcome under rcpp tag at StackOverflow which also allows searching among the (currently) 2616 previous questions. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub. My sincere thanks to my current sponsors for me keeping me caffeinated.

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

13 January 2021

Antoine Beaupr : New phone: Pixel 4a

I'm sorry to announce that I gave up on the Fairphone series and switched to a Google Phone (Pixel 4a) running CalyxOS.

Problems in fairy land My fairphone2, even if it is less than two years old, is having major problems:
  • from time to time, the screen flickers and loses "touch" until I squeeze it back together
  • the camera similarly disconnects regularly
  • even when it works, the camera is... pretty bad: low light is basically unusable, it's slow and grainy
  • the battery can barely keep up for one day
  • the cellular coverage is very poor, in Canada: I lose signal at the grocery store and in the middle of my house...
Some of those problems are known: the Fairphone 2 is old now. It was probably old even when I got it. But I can't help but feel a little sad to let it go: the entire point of that device was to make it easy to fix. But alas, because it's sold only in Europe, local stores don't carry replacement parts. To be fair, Fairphone did offer to fix the device, but with a 2 weeks turnaround, I had to get another phone anyways. I did actually try to buy a fairphone3, from Clove. But they did some crazy validation routine. By email, they asked me to provide a photo copy of a driver's license and the credit card, arguing they need to do this to combat fraud. I found that totally unacceptable and asked them to cancel my order. And because I'm not sure the FP3 will fix the coverage issues, I decided to just give up on Fairphone until they officially ship to the Americas.

Do no evil, do not pass go, do not collect 200$ So I got a Google phone, specifically a Pixel 4a. It's a nice device, all small and shiny, but it's "plasticky" - I would have prefered metal, but it seems you need to pay much, much more to get that (in the Pixel 5). In any case, it's certainly a better form factor than the Fairphone 2: even though the screen is bigger, the device itself is actually smaller and thinner, which feels great. The OLED screen is beautiful, awesome contrast and everything, and preliminary tests show that the camera is much better than the one on the Fairphone 2. (The be fair, again, that is another thing the FP3 improved significantly. And that is with the stock Camera app from CalyxOS/AOSP, so not as good as the Google Camera app, which does AI stuff.)

CalyxOS: success The Pixel 4a not not supported by LineageOS: it seems every time I pick a device in that list, I manage to miss the right device by one (I bought a Samsung S9 before, which is also unsupported, even though the S8 is). But thankfully, it is supported by CalyxOS. That install was a breeze: I was hesitant in playing again with installing a custom Android firmware on a phone after fighting with this quite a bit in the past (e.g. htc-one-s, lg-g3-d852). But it turns out their install instructions, mostly using a AOSP alliance device-flasher works absolutely great. It assumes you know about the commandline, and it does require to basically curl sudo (because you need to download their binary and run it as root), but it Just. Works. It reminded me of how great it was to get the Fairphone with TWRP preinstalled... Oh, and kudos to the people in #calyxos on Freenode: awesome tech support, super nice folks. An amazing improvement over the ambiance in #lineageos! :)

Migrating data Unfortunately, migrating the data was the usual pain in the back. This should improve the next time I do this: CalyxOS ships with seedvault, a secure backup system for Android 10 (or 9?) and later which backs up everything (including settings!) with encryption. Apparently it works great, and CalyxOS is also working on a migration system to switch phones. But, obviously, I couldn't use that on the Fairphone 2 running Android 7... So I had to, again, improvised. The first step was to install Syncthing, to have an easy way to copy data around. That's easily done through F-Droid, already bundled with CalyxOS (including the privileged extension!). Pair the devices and boom, a magic portal to copy stuff over. The other early step I took was to copy apps over using the F-Droid "find nearby" functionality. It's a bit quirky, but really helps in copying a bunch of APKs over. Then I setup a temporary keepassxc password vault on the Syncthing share so that I could easily copy-paste passwords into apps. I used to do this in a text file in Syncthing, but copy-pasting in the text file is much harder than in KeePassDX. (I just picked one, maybe KeePassDroid is better? I don't know.) Do keep a copy of the URL of the service to reduce typing as well. Then the following apps required special tweaks:
  • AntennaPod has an import/export feature: export on one end, into the Syncthing share, then import on the other. then go to the queue and select all episodes and download
  • the Signal "chat backup" does copy the secret key around, so you don't get the "security number change" warning (even if it prompts you to re-register) - external devices need to be relinked though
  • AnkiDroid, DSub, Nextcloud, and Wallabag required copy-pasting passwords
I tried to sync contacts with DAVx5 but that didn't work so well: the account was setup correctly, but contacts didn't show up. There's probably just this one thing I need to do to fix this, but since I don't really need sync'd contact, it was easier to export a VCF file to Syncthing and import again.

Known problems One problem with CalyxOS I found is that the fragile little microg tweaks didn't seem to work well enough for Signal. That was unexpected so they encouraged me to file that as a bug. The other "issue" is that the bootloader is locked, which makes it impossible to have "root" on the device. That's rather unfortunate: I often need root to debug things on Android. In particular, it made it difficult to restore data from OSMand (see below). But I guess that most things just work out of the box now, so I don't really need it and appreciate the extra security. Locking the bootloader means full cryptographic verification of the phone, so that's a good feature to have! OSMand still doesn't have a good import/export story. I ended up sharing the Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files directory and importing waypoints, favorites and tracks by hand. Even though maps are actually in there, it's not possible for Syncthing to write directly to the same directory on the new phone, "thanks" to the new permission system in Android which forbids this kind of inter-app messing around. Tracks are particularly a problem: my older OSMand setup had all those folders neatly sorting those tracks by month. This makes it really annoying to track every file manually and copy it over. I have mostly given up on that for now, unfortunately. And I'll still need to reconfigure profiles and maps and everything by hand. Sigh. I guess that's a good clearinghouse for my old tracks I never use... Update: turns out setting storage to "shared" fixed the issue, see comments below!

Conclusion Overall, CalyxOS seems like a good Android firmware. The install is smooth and the resulting install seems solid. The above problems are mostly annoyances and I'm very happy with the experience so far, although I've only been using it for a few hours so this is very preliminary.

12 January 2021

John Goerzen: The Good, Bad, and Scary of the Banning of Donald Trump, and How Decentralization Makes It All Better

It is undeniable that banning Donald Trump from Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites is a benefit for the moment. It may well save lives, perhaps lots of lives. But it raises quite a few troubling issues. First, as EFF points out, these platforms have privileged speakers with power, especially politicians, over regular users. For years now, it has been obvious to everyone that Donald Trump has been violating policies on both platforms, and yet they did little or nothing about it. The result we saw last week was entirely forseeable and indeed, WAS forseen, including by elements in those companies themselves. (ACLU also raises some good points) Contrast that with how others get treated. Facebook, two days after the coup attempt, banned Benjamin Wittes, apparently because he mentioned an Atlantic article opposed to nutcase conspiracy theories. The EFF has also documented many more egregious examples: taking down documentation of war crimes, childbirth images, black activists showing the racist messages they received, women discussing online harassment, etc. The list goes on; YouTube, for instance, has often been promoting far-right violent videos while removing peaceful LGBTQ ones. In short, have we simply achieved legal censorship by outsourcing it to dominant corporations? It is worth pausing at this point to recognize two important princples: First, that we do not see it as right to compel speech. Secondly, that there exist communications channels and other services that nobody is calling on to suspend Donald Trump. Let s dive into those a little bit. There have been no prominent calls for AT&T, Verizon, Gmail, or whomever provides Trump and his campaign with cell phones or email to suspend their service to him. Moreover, the gas stations that fuel his vehicles and the airports that service his plane continue to provide those services, and nobody has seriously questioned that, either. Even his Apple phone that he uses to post to Twitter remains, as far as I know, fully active. Secondly, imagine you were starting up a small web forum focused on raising tomato plants. It is, and should be, well within your rights to keep tomato-haters out, as well as people that have no interest in tomatoes but would rather talk about rutabagas, politics, or Mars. If you are going to host a forum about tomatoes, you have the right to keep it a forum about tomatoes; you cannot be forced to distribute someone else s speech. Likewise in traditional media, a newspaper cannot be forced to print every letter to the editor in full. In law, there is a notion of a common carrier, that provides services to the general public without discrimination. Phone companies and ISPs fall under this. Facebook, Twitter, and tomato sites don t. But consider what happens if Facebook bans you. You might be using Facebook-owned Whatsapp to communicate with family and friends, and suddenly find yourself unable to ask someone to pick you up. Or your treasured family photos might be in Facebook-owned Instagram, lost forever. It s not just Facebook; similar things happen with Google, locking people out of their phones and laptops, their emails, even their photos. Is it right that Facebook and Google aren t regulated as common carriers? Perhaps, or perhaps we need some line of demarcation between their speech-to-the-public services (Facebook timeline posts, YouTube) and private communication (Whatsapp, Gmail). It s a thorny issue; should government be regulating speech instead? That s also fraught. So is corporate control. Decentralization Helps Dramatically With email, you get to pick your email provider (yes, there are two or three big ones, but still plenty of others). Each email provider will have its own set of things it considers acceptable, and its own set of other servers and accounts it s willing to exchange mail with. (It is extremely common for mail providers to choose not to accept mail from various other mail servers based on ISP, IP address, reputation, and so forth.) What if we could do something like that for Twitter and Facebook? Let you join whatever instance you like. Maybe one instance is all about art and they don t talk about politics. Or another is all about Free Software and they don t have advertising. And then there are plenty of open instances that accept anything that s respectful. And, like email, people of one server can interact with those using another just as easily as if they were using the same one. Well, this isn t hypothetical; it already exists in the Fediverse. The most common option is Mastodon, and it so happens that a month ago I wrote about its benefits for other reasons, and included some links on getting started. There is no reason that we must all let our online speech be controlled by companies with a profit motive to keep hate speech on their platforms. There is no reason that we must all have a single set of rules, or accept strong corporate or government control, either. The quality of conversation on Mastodon is far higher than either Twitter or Facebook; decentralization works and it s here today.

9 January 2021

Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2020

As a reader of Planet Debian I see a bunch of updates at the start of each month about what people are up to in terms of their Free Software activities. I m not generally active enough in the Free Software world to justify a monthly report, but I did a report of my Free Software Activities for 2019 and thought I d do another for 2020. I ended up not doing as much as last year; I put a lot of that down to fatigue about the state of the world and generally not wanting to spend time on the computer at the end of the working day.

Conferences 2020 was unsurprisingly not a great year for conference attendance. I was fortunate enough to make it to FOSDEM and CopyleftConf 2020 - I didn t speak at either, but had plenty of interesting hallway track conversations as well as seeing some good talks. I hadn t been planning to attend DebConf20 due to time constraints, but its move to an entirely online conference meant I was able to attend a few talks at least. I have to say I don t like virtual conferences as much as the real thing; it s not as easy to have the casual chats at them, and it s also harder to carve out the exclusive time when you re at home. That said I spoke at NIDevConf this year, which was also fully virtual. It s not a Free Software focussed conference, but there s a lot of crossover in terms of technologies and I spoke on my experiences with Go, some of which are influenced by my packaging experiences within Debian.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software happen within Debian. As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team. Some of this involved chasing up other project teams who had been slow to respond - folks, if you re running a service that stores personal data about people then you need to be responsive to requests about it. The Debian Keyring was possibly my largest single point of contribution. We re in a roughly 3 month rotation of who handles the keyring updates, and I handled 2020.02.02, 2020.03.24, 2020.06.24, 2020.09.24 + 2020.12.24 For Debian New Members I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. If that changes I ll look at stepping in to help, but I don t see that happening. I continue to be involved in Front Desk, having various conversations throughout the year with the rest of the team, but there s no doubt Mattia and Pierre-Elliott are the real doers at present. In terms of package uploads I continued to work on gcc-xtensa-lx106, largely doing uploads to deal with updates to the GCC version or packaging (5, 6 + 7). sigrok had a few minor updates, libsigkrok 0.5.2-2, libsigrokdecode 0.5.3-2 as well as a new upstream release of Pulseview 0.4.2-1 and a fix to cope with change to QT 0.4.2-2. Due to the sigrok-firmware requirement on sdcc I also continued to help out there, updating to 4.0.0+dfsg-1 and doing some fixups in 4.0.0+dfsg-2. Despite still not writing an VHDL these days I continue to try and make sure ghdl is ok, because I found it a useful tool in the past. In 2020 that meant a new upstream release, 0.37+dfsg-1 along with a couple of more minor updates (0.37+dfsg-2 + 0.37+dfsg-3. libcli had a new upstream release, 1.10.4-1, and I did a long overdue update to sendip to the latest upstream release, 2.6-1 having been poked about an outstanding bug by the Reproducible Builds folk. OpenOCD is coming up to 4 years since its last stable release, but I did a snapshot upload to Debian experimental (0.10.0+g20200530-1) and a subsequent one to unstable (0.10.0+g20200819-1). There are also moves to produce a 0.11.0 release and I uploaded 0.11.0~rc1-1 as a result. libjaylink got a bump as a result (0.2.0-1) after some discussion with upstream.

OpenOCD On the subject of OpenOCD I ve tried to be a bit more involved upstream. I m not familiar enough with the intricacies of JTAG/SWD/the various architectures supported to contribute to the core, but I pushed the config for my HIE JTAG adapter upstream and try and review patches that don t require in depth hardware knowledge.

Linux I ve been contributing to the Linux kernel for a number of years now, mostly just minor bits here and there for issues I hit. This year I spent a lot of time getting support for the MikoTik RB3011 router upstreamed. That included the basic DTS addition, fixing up QCA8K to support SGMII CPU connections, adding proper 802.1q VLAN support to QCA8K and cleaning up an existing QCOM ADM driver that s required for the NAND. There were a number of associated bugfixes/minor changes found along the way too. It can be a little frustrating at times going round the review loop with submitting things upstream, but I do find it quite satisfying when it all comes together and I have no interest in weird vendor trees that just bitrot over time.

Software in the Public Interest I haven t sat on the board of SPI since 2015 but I was still acting as the primary maintainer of the membership website (with Martin Michlmayr as the other active contributor) and hosting it on my own machine. I managed to finally extricate myself from this role in August. I remain a contributing member.

Personal projects 2020 finally saw another release (0.6.0, followed swiftly by 0.6.1 to allow the upload of 0.6.1-1 to Debian) of onak. This release finally adds various improvements to deal with the hostility shown to the OpenPGP keyserver network in recent years, including full signature verification as an option. I fixed an oversight in my Digoo/1-wire temperature decoder and a bug that turned up on ARM but not MIPS in my mqtt-arp code. I should probably package it for Debian (even if I don t upload it), as I m running it on my RB3011 now.

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: puppetserver 6: a Debian packaging post-mortem

I have been a Puppet user for a couple of years now, first at work, and eventually for my personal servers and computers. Although it can have a steep learning curve, I find Puppet both nimble and very powerful. I also prefer it to Ansible for its speed and the agent-server model it uses. Sadly, Puppet Labs hasn't been the most supportive upstream and tends to move pretty fast. Major versions rarely last for a whole Debian Stable release and the upstream .deb packages are full of vendored libraries.1 Since 2017, Apollon Oikonomopoulos has been the one doing most of the work on Puppet in Debian. Sadly, he's had less time for that lately and with Puppet 5 being deprecated in January 2021, Thomas Goirand, Utkarsh Gupta and I have been trying to package Puppet 6 in Debian for the last 6 months. With Puppet 6, the old ruby Puppet server using Passenger is not supported anymore and has been replaced by puppetserver, written in Clojure and running on the JVM. That's quite a large change and although puppetserver does reuse some of the Clojure libraries puppetdb (already in Debian) uses, packaging it meant quite a lot of work. Work in the Clojure team As part of my efforts to package puppetserver, I had the pleasure to join the Clojure team and learn a lot about the Clojure ecosystem. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the Clojure dependencies needed for puppetserver were already in the archive. Unfortunately, when Apollon Oikonomopoulos packaged them, the leiningen build tool hadn't been packaged yet. This meant I had to rebuild a lot of packages, on top of packaging some new ones. Since then, thanks to the efforts of Elana Hashman, leiningen has been packaged and lets us run the upstream testsuites and create .jar artifacts closer to those upstream releases. During my work on puppetserver, I worked on the following packages:
List of packages
  • backport9
  • bidi-clojure
  • clj-digest-clojure
  • clj-helper
  • clj-time-clojure
  • clj-yaml-clojure
  • cljx-clojure
  • core-async-clojure
  • core-cache-clojure
  • core-match-clojure
  • cpath-clojure
  • crypto-equality-clojure
  • crypto-random-clojure
  • data-csv-clojure
  • data-json-clojure
  • data-priority-map-clojure
  • java-classpath-clojure
  • jnr-constants
  • jnr-enxio
  • jruby
  • jruby-utils-clojure
  • kitchensink-clojure
  • lazymap-clojure
  • liberator-clojure
  • ordered-clojure
  • pathetic-clojure
  • potemkin-clojure
  • prismatic-plumbing-clojure
  • prismatic-schema-clojure
  • puppetlabs-http-client-clojure
  • puppetlabs-i18n-clojure
  • puppetlabs-ring-middleware-clojure
  • puppetserver
  • raynes-fs-clojure
  • riddley-clojure
  • ring-basic-authentication-clojure
  • ring-clojure
  • ring-codec-clojure
  • shell-utils-clojure
  • ssl-utils-clojure
  • test-check-clojure
  • tools-analyzer-clojure
  • tools-analyzer-jvm-clojure
  • tools-cli-clojure
  • tools-reader-clojure
  • trapperkeeper-authorization-clojure
  • trapperkeeper-clojure
  • trapperkeeper-filesystem-watcher-clojure
  • trapperkeeper-metrics-clojure
  • trapperkeeper-scheduler-clojure
  • trapperkeeper-webserver-jetty9-clojure
  • url-clojure
  • useful-clojure
  • watchtower-clojure
If you want to learn more about packaging Clojure libraries and applications, I rewrote the Debian Clojure packaging tutorial and added a section about the quirks of using leiningen without a dedicated dh_lein tool. Work left to get puppetserver 6 in the archive Unfortunately, I was not able to finish the puppetserver 6 packaging work. It is thus unlikely it will make it in Debian Bullseye. If the issues described below are fixed, it would be possible to to package puppetserver in bullseye-backports though. So what's left? jruby Although I tried my best (kudos to Utkarsh Gupta and Thomas Goirand for the help), jruby in Debian is still broken. It does build properly, but the testsuite fails with multiple errors: jruby testsuite failures aside, I have not been able to use the jruby.deb the package currently builds in jruby-utils-clojure (testsuite failure). I had the same exact failure with the (more broken) jruby version that is currently in the archive, which leads me to think this is a LOAD_PATH issue in jruby-utils-clojure. More on that below. To try to bypass these issues, I tried to vendor jruby into jruby-utils-clojure. At first I understood vendoring meant including upstream pre-built artifacts (jruby-complete.jar) and shipping them directly. After talking with people on the #debian-mentors and #debian-ftp IRC channels, I now understand why this isn't a good idea (and why it's not permitted in Debian). Many thanks to the people who were patient and kind enough to discuss this with me and give me alternatives. As far as I now understand it, vendoring in Debian means "to have an embedded copy of the source code in another package". Code shipped that way still needs to be built from source. This means we need to build jruby ourselves, one way or another. Vendoring jruby in another package thus isn't terribly helpful. If fixing jruby the proper way isn't possible, I would suggest trying to build the package using embedded code copies of the external libraries jruby needs to build, instead of trying to use the Debian libraries.2 This should make it easier to replicate what upstream does and to have a final .jar that can be used. jruby-utils-clojure This package is a first-level dependency for puppetserver and is the glue between jruby and puppetserver. It builds fine, but the testsuite fails when using the Debian jruby package. I think the problem is caused by a jruby LOAD_PATH issue. The Debian jruby package plays with the LOAD_PATH a little to try use Debian packages instead of downloading gems from the web, as upstream jruby does. This seems to clash with the gem-home, gem-path, and jruby-load-path variables in the jruby-utils-clojure package. The testsuite plays around with these variables and some Ruby libraries can't be found. I tried to fix this, but failed. Using the upstream jruby-complete.jar instead of the Debian jruby package, the testsuite passes fine. This package could clearly be uploaded to NEW right now by ignoring the testsuite failures (we're just packaging static .clj source files in the proper location in a .jar). puppetserver jruby issues aside, packaging puppetserver itself is 80% done. Using the upstream jruby-complete.jar artifact, the testsuite fails with a weird Clojure error I'm not sure I understand, but I haven't debugged it for very long. Upstream uses git submodules to vendor puppet (agent), hiera (3), facter and puppet-resource-api for the testsuite to run properly. I haven't touched that, but I believe we can either: Without the testsuite actually running, it's hard to know what files are needed in those packages. What now Puppet 5 is now deprecated. If you or your organisation cares about Puppet in Debian,3 puppetserver really isn't far away from making it in the archive. Very talented Debian Developers are always eager to work on these issues and can be contracted for very reasonable rates. If you're interested in contracting someone to help iron out the last issues, don't hesitate to reach out via one of the following: As for I, I'm happy to say I got a new contract and will go back to teaching Economics for the Winter 2021 session. I might help out with some general Debian packaging work from time to time, but it'll be as a hobby instead of a job. Thanks The work I did during the last 6 weeks would be not have been possible without the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, who were gracious enough to contract me. My particular thanks to Faidon Liambotis, Moritz M hlenhoff and John Bond. Many, many thanks to Rob Browning, Thomas Goirand, Elana Hashman, Utkarsh Gupta and Apollon Oikonomopoulos for their direct and indirect help, without which all of this wouldn't have been possible.
  1. For example, the upstream package for the Puppet Agent vendors OpenSSL.
  2. One of the problems of using Ruby libraries already packaged in Debian is that jruby currently only supports Ruby 2.5. Ruby libraries in Debian are currently expected to work with Ruby 2.7, with the transition to Ruby 3.0 planned after the Bullseye release.
  3. If you run Puppet, you clearly should care: the .deb packages upstream publishes really aren't great and I would not recommend using them.

7 January 2021

John Goerzen: This Is How Tyrants Go: Alone

I remember reading an essay a month or so ago sadly I forget where talking about how things end for tyrants. If I were to sum it up, it would be with the word alone. Their power fading, they find that they had few true friends or believers; just others that were greedy for power or riches and, finding those no longer to be had, depart the sinking ship. The article looked back at examples like Nixon and examples from the 20th century in Europe and around the world. Today we saw images of a failed coup attempt. But we also saw hope. Already senior staff in the White House are resigning. Ones that had been ardent supporters. In the end, just 6 senators supported the objection to the legitimate electors. Six. Lindsay Graham, Mike Pence, and Mitch McConnel all deserted Trump. CNN reports that there are serious conversations about invoking the 25th amendment and removing him from office, because even Republicans are to the point of believing that America should not have two more weeks of this man. Whether those efforts are successful or not, I don t know. What I do know is that these actions have awakened many people, in a way that nothing else could for four years, to the dangers of Trump and, in the end, have bolstered the cause of democracy. Hard work will remain but today, Donald Trump is in the White House alone, abandoned by allies and blocked by Twitter. And we know that within two weeks, he won t be there at all. We will get through this.

6 January 2021

Urvika Gola: Dog tails and tales from 2020

There is no denying in the fact that 2020 was a challenging year for everybody, including animals. In India, animals such as dogs who mostly filled their bellies at street food stalls, were starving as there were no street eateries operating during a long long lockdown. I was in my home town, New Delhi, working from home like most of us. During the month of July 2020, a dog near the place I live (we fondly called her Brownie) delivered 7 pups in wilderness. I would never forget my first sight of them, inside a dirty, garbage filled land there were the cutest, cleanest, tiniest ball of fur! All of them were toppled as the land s surface was uneven.. The first instinct was to put them all together on a flat surface. After the search mission completed, this was the sight..
Brownie and her litter put together in the same land where she gave birth.
The next day, I sought help from a animal-lover person to build a temporary shed for the puppies! We came and changed sheets, cleaned the surroundings and put fresh water for Brownie until
..it started raining heavily one night and we were worried if the shed would sustain the heavy rainfall.
Next morning the first thing was to check on the pups, luckily, the pups were fine however, the entire area and their bed was damp.
Without any second thought, the pups were moved from there to a safe house shelter as it was predicted that the rains will continue for a few more weeks due to monsoon. Soon, 2 months went by, from observing the pups crawl over, their eyes open and to their first bark, despite the struggles, it was an beautiful experience.
Brownie weaned off the pups and thus, they were ready for adoption! However, my biggest fear was, will anyone come forward to adopt them??

With such thoughts parallelly running in my mind, I started to post about adoption for these 7 pups.
To my biggest surprise, one by one, 5 amazing humans came forward and decided to give these pups a better life than what they would get on the streets of India. I wouldn t be able to express in words how grateful I will to be all the five dog parents who decided to adopt an Indian Street Puppy/Indies/Desi Puppy, opening up the space in their hearts and homes for the pups!

One of the 5 adopted pups is adopted by a person who hails from USA, but currently working in India. It s so heartwarming to see, that in India, despite so much awareness created against breeders and their methods, people still prefer to go for foreign bred puppy and disregard Indian/Desi Dogs.. On the other hand, there are foreigners who value the life of a Indian/Desi Dog : )

The 5 Adopted Pups who now have a permanent loving family!

The adorable, Robin !
Don and his new big brother!
The naughty and handsome, Swayze !
First Pup who got adopted Pluto
Playful and Beautiful, Bella !
If this isn t perfect, I don t know what is! God had planned loving families for them and they found it..
However, Its been almost six months now, that we haven t found a permanent home for 2 of the 7 pups, but they have the perfect foster family taking care of them right now.

UP FOR ADOPTION Delhi/NCR
Meet Momo and Beesa,
2 out of the 7 pups, who are still waiting for a forever home, currently living with a loving foster family.

Vaccinations, Deworming is done.
Female pups, 6 months old.

Now as winters are here, Along with one of my friend, who is also fostering the two pups, arranged gunny sack bags for our street, stray dogs. Two NGOs namely, Lotus Indie Foundation and We Exist Foundation who work Animal Welfare in India, were providing dog beds to ground volunteers like us. We are fortunate that they selected us and helped us to make winters less harsh for the stray dogs. However, the cold is such, I also purchased dog coats as well and put in on a few furries. After hours of running behind dogs and convincing them to wear coats, we managed to put it on a few.
Brownie, the mom dog!
This is a puppy!
She did not let us put coat on her
Another topic that needs more sensitivity is Sterilization/Neutering of dogs, that s a viable method cited by the Government to control dog population and end suffering of puppies who die under the wheels of cars. However, the implementation of this is worrisome, as it s not as robust. In a span of 6 months, I managed to get 5 dog sterilized in my area, number is not big but I feel it s a good start as an individual When I see them now, healthier, happier, running around, with no fear of getting attacked by dogs, I can t express the content I feel. For 2 of the dogs (Brownie and her friend) I got it done personally from a private vet. For the other 3, I got it done via Municipal Corporations who do it for free for dogs, you d have to call them and they come with dog catchers and a van and drop them back in the same area, but volunteers like us have to be very vigilant and active during the whole process to follow up with them.
Dogs getting dropped off after sterilization.
My 2020 ended with this, I am not sure why I am I even writing this in my blog where mostly I focused on my technical work and experiences, but this pandemic was challenging was everybody and what we planned couldn t happen, but because of 2020, because of the pandemic, I was on WFH in my city and I was able to help a few dogs in my area have a healthy life ahead!

What I learned during this entire adventure was, there are a lot of sweet, sensitive, caring people that we are just yet to meet. Along the way, we will also meet insensitive and discouraging people, who are unwilling to change or listen, ignore them and continue your good.

Have 1 person by your side, it s so much stronger than 10 against you. Silver lining! Hope you all had some positive experiences despite the adversity faced by every single one of us.

5 January 2021

Russell Coker: Planet Linux Australia

Linux Australia have decided to cease running the Planet installation on planet.linux.org.au. I believe that blogging is still useful and a web page with a feed of Australian Linux blogs is a useful service. So I have started running a new Planet Linux Australia on https://planet.luv.asn.au/. There has been discussion about getting some sort of redirection from the old Linux Australia page, but they don t seem able to do that. If you have a blog that has a reasonable portion of Linux and FOSS content and is based in or connected to Australia then email me on russell at coker.com.au to get it added. When I started running this I took the old list of feeds from planet.linux.org.au, deleted all blogs that didn t have posts for 5 years and all blogs that were broken and had no recent posts. I emailed people who had recently broken blogs so they could fix them. It seems that many people who run personal blogs aren t bothered by a bit of downtime. As an aside I would be happy to setup the monitoring system I use to monitor any personal web site of a Linux person and notify them by Jabber or email of an outage. I could set it to not alert for a specified period (10 mins, 1 hour, whatever you like) so it doesn t alert needlessly on routine sysadmin work and I could have it check SSL certificate validity as well as the basic page header.
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Russ Allbery: New year haul

For once, I've already read and reviewed quite a few of these books. Elizabeth Bear Machine (sff)
Timothy Caulfield Your Day, Your Way (non-fiction)
S.A. Chakraborty The City of Brass (sff)
John Dickerson The Hardest Job in the World (non-fiction)
Tracy Deonn Legendborn (sff)
Lindsay Ellis Axiom's End (sff)
Alix E. Harrow The Once and Future Witches (sff)
TJ Klune The House in the Cerulean Sea (sff)
Maria Konnikova The Biggest Bluff (non-fiction)
Talia Levin Culture Warlords (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee Phoenix Extravagent (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee, et al. The Vela (sff)
Michael Lewis Flash Boys (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis Losers (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis The Undoing Project (non-fiction)
Megan Lindholm Wizard of the Pigeons (sff)
Nathan Lowell Quarter Share (sff)
Adrienne Martini Somebody's Gotta Do It (non-fiction)
Tamsyn Muir Princess Florinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (sff)
Naomi Novik A Deadly Education (sff)
Margaret Owen The Merciful Crow (sff)
Anne Helen Peterson Can't Even (non-fiction)
Devon Price Laziness Does Not Exist (non-fiction)
The Secret Barrister The Secret Barrister (non-fiction)
Studs Terkel Working (non-fiction)
Kathi Weeks The Problem with Work (non-fiction)
Reeves Wiedeman Billion Dollar Loser (non-fiction) Rather a lot of non-fiction in this batch, much more than usual. I've been in a non-fiction mood lately. So many good things to read!

4 January 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: The Once and Future Witches

Review: The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow
Publisher: Redhook Books
Copyright: October 2020
ISBN: 0-316-42202-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 515
Once upon a time there were three sisters. They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white as knuckle-bones on the banks. The sisters had no mother and a no-good father, but they had each other; it might have been enough. But the sisters were banished from their kingdom, broken and scattered.
The Once and Future Witches opens with Juniper, the youngest, arriving in the city of New Salem. The year is 1893, but not in our world, not quite; Juniper has witch-ways in her pocket and a few words of power. That's lucky for her because the wanted posters arrived before she did. Unbeknownst to her or to each other, her sisters, Agnes and Bella, are already in New Salem. Agnes works in a cotton mill after having her heart broken one too many times; the mill is safer because you can't love a cotton mill. Bella is a junior librarian, meek and nervous and uncertain but still fascinated by witch-tales and magic. It's Bella who casts the spell, partly by accident, partly out of wild hope, but it was Juniper arriving in the city who provided the final component that made it almost work. Not quite, not completely, but briefly the lost tower of Avalon appears in St. George's Square. And, more importantly, the three sisters are reunited. The world of the Eastwood sisters has magic, but the people in charge of that world aren't happy about it. Magic is a female thing, contrary to science and, more importantly, God. History has followed a similar course to our world in part because magic has been ruthlessly suppressed. Inquisitors are a recent memory and the cemetery has a witch-yard, where witches are buried unnamed and their ashes sown with salt. The city of New Salem is called New Salem because Old Salem, that stronghold of witchcraft, was burned to the ground and left abandoned, fit only for tourists to gawk at the supposedly haunted ruins. The women's suffrage movement is very careful to separate itself from any hint of witchcraft or scandal, making its appeals solely within the acceptable bounds of the church. Juniper is the one who starts to up-end all of that in New Salem. Juniper was never good at doing what she was told. This is an angry book that feels like something out of another era, closer in tone to a Sheri S. Tepper or Joanna Russ novel than the way feminism is handled in recent work. Some of that is the era of the setting, before women even had the right to vote. But primarily it's because Harrow, like those earlier works, is entirely uninterested in making excuses or apologies for male behavior. She takes an already-heated societal conflict and gives the underdogs magic, which turns it into a war. There is likely a better direct analogy from the suffrage movement, but the comparison that came to my mind was if Martin Luther King, Jr. proved ineffective or had not existed, and instead Malcolm X or the Black Panthers became the face of the Civil Rights movement. It's also an emotionally exhausting book. The protagonists are hurt and lost and shattered. Their moments of victory are viciously destroyed. There is torture and a lot of despair. It works thematically; all the external solutions and mythical saviors fail, but in the process the sisters build their own strength and their own community and rescue themselves. But it's hard reading at times if you're emotionally invested in the characters (and I was very invested). Harrow does try to balance the losses with triumphs and that becomes more effective and easier to read in the back half of the book, but I struggled with the grimness at the start. One particular problem for me was that the sisters start the book suspicious and distrustful of each other because of lies and misunderstandings. This is obvious to the reader, but they don't work through it until halfway through the book. I can't argue with this as a piece of characterization it made sense to me that they would have reacted to their past the way that they did. But it was still immensely frustrating to read, since in the meantime awful things were happening and I wanted them to band together to fight. They also worry over the moral implications of the fate of their father, whereas I thought the only problem was that the man couldn't die more than once. There too, it makes sense given the moral framework the sisters were coerced into, but it is not my moral framework and it was infuriating to see them stay trapped in it for so long. The other thing that I found troubling thematically is that Harrow personalizes evil. I thought the more interesting moral challenge posed in this book is a society that systematically abuses women and suppresses their power, but Harrow gradually supplants that systemic conflict with a villain who has an identity and a backstory. It provides a more straightforward and satisfying climax, and she does avoid the trap of letting triumph over one character solve all the broader social problems, but it still felt too easy. Worse, the motives of the villain turn out to be at right angles to the structure of the social oppression. It's just a tool he's using, and while that's also believable, it means the transfer of the narrative conflict from the societal to the personal feels like a shying away from a sharper political point. Harrow lets the inhabitants of New Salem off too easily by giving them the excuse of being manipulated by an evil mastermind. What I thought Harrow did handle well was race, and it feels rare to be able to say this about a book written by and about white women. There are black women in New Salem as well, and they have their own ways and their own fight. They are suspicious of the Eastwood sisters because they're worried white women will stir up trouble and then run away and leave the consequences to fall on black women... and they're right. An alliance only forms once the white women show willingness to stay for the hard parts. Black women are essential to the eventual success of the protagonists, but the opposite is not necessarily true; they have their own networks, power, and protections, and would have survived no matter what the Eastwoods did. The book is the Eastwoods' story, so it's mostly concerned with white society, but I thought Harrow avoided both making black women too magical or making white women too central. They instead operate in parallel worlds that can form the occasional alliance of mutual understanding. It helps that Cleopatra Quinn is one of the best characters of the book. This was hard, emotional reading. It's the sort of book where everything has a price, even the ending. But I'm very glad I read it. Each of the three sisters gets their own, very different character arc, and all three of those arcs are wonderful. Even Agnes, who was the hardest character for me to like at the start of the book and who I think has the trickiest story to tell, becomes so much stronger and more vivid by the end of the book. Sometimes the descriptions are trying a bit too hard and sometimes the writing is not quite up to the intended goal, but some of the descriptions are beautiful and memorable, and Harrow's way of weaving the mythic and the personal together worked for me. This is a more ambitious book than The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and while I think the ambition exceeded Harrow's grasp in a few places and she took a few thematic short-cuts, most of it works. The characters felt like living and changing people, which is not easy given how heavily the story structure leans on maiden, mother, and crone archetypes. It's an uncompromising and furious book that turns the anger of 1970s feminist SF onto themes that are very relevant in 2021. You will have to brace yourself for heartbreak and loss, but I think it's fantasy worth reading. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

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