Here s my (twenty-seventh) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 36th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/
Just churning through the backlog again this month. Ugh.
Anyway, I did the following stuff in Debian:
Uploads and bug fixes:
ruby2.7 (2.7.5-1) - New upstream version fixing 3 new CVEs.
Other $things:
Mentoring for newcomers.
Moderation of -project mailing list.
Ubuntu
This was my 11th month of actively contributing to Ubuntu.
Now that I ve joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/
I mostly worked on different things, I guess.
I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s
no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or
will start to list stuff from next year onward, as I was doing before. :D
Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support).
This was my twenty-seventh month as a Debian LTS and eighteenth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 40.00 hours for LTS and 60.00 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:
(since I had a 3-week vacation, I wanted to wrap things up that were pending and so I worked for 20h more for LTS, which I ll compensate the next month!)
Issued DLA 2854-1, fixing CVE-2017-18635, for novnc.
For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1:0.4+dfsg+1+20131010+gitf68af8af3d-6+deb9u1.
Issued ELA 536-1, fixing CVE-2021-43818, for lxml.
For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version Prior to version 4.6.5, the HTML Cleaner in lxml.html lets certain.
Started working on src:samba for CVE-2020-25717 to CVE-2020-25722 and CVE-2021-23192 for jessie and stretch, both.
The version difference b/w the suites are a bit too much for the patch(es) to be easily backported. I ve talked to Anton to work something out. \o/
Found the problem w/ libjdom1-java. Will have to roll the regression upload.
I ve prepared the patch but needs some testing to be finally rolled out. Same for stretch.
Other (E)LTS Work:
Front-desk duty from 29-11 to 05-12 and 20-12 to 26-12 for both LTS and ELTS.
In my two most recent posts, I listed the memoirs and biographies and followed this up with the non-fiction I enjoyed the most in 2021. I'll leave my roundup of 'classic' fiction until tomorrow, but today I'll be going over my favourite fiction.
Books that just miss the cut here include Kingsley Amis' comic Lucky Jim, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (although see below for McCarthy's Blood Meridian) and the Complete Adventures of Tintin by Herg , the latter forming an inadvertently incisive portrait of the first half of the 20th century.
Like ever, there were a handful of books that didn't live up to prior expectations. Despite all of the hype, Emily St. John Mandel's post-pandemic dystopia Station Eleven didn't match her superb The Glass Hotel (one of my favourite books of 2020). The same could be said of John le Carr 's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which felt significantly shallower compared to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy again, a favourite of last year. The strangest book (and most difficult to classify at all) was undoubtedly Patrick S skind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and the non-fiction book I disliked the most was almost-certainly Beartown by Fredrik Bachman.
Two other mild disappointments were actually film adaptions. Specifically, the original source for Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac didn't match Alfred Hitchock's 1958 masterpiece, as did James Sallis' Drive which was made into a superb 2011 neon-noir directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. These two films thus defy the usual trend and are 'better than the book', but that's a post for another day.
A Wizard of Earthsea (1971)
Ursula K. Le Guin
How did it come to be that Harry Potter is the publishing sensation of the century, yet Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea is only a popular cult novel? Indeed, the comparisons and unintentional intertextuality with Harry Potter are entirely unavoidable when reading this book, and, in almost every respect, Ursula K. Le Guin's universe comes out the victor.
In particular, the wizarding world that Le Guin portrays feels a lot more generous and humble than the class-ridden world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Just to take one example from many, in Earthsea, magic turns out to be nurtured in a bottom-up manner within small village communities, in almost complete contrast to J. K. Rowling's concept of benevolent government departments and NGOs-like institutions, which now seems a far too New Labour for me. Indeed, imagine an entire world imbued with the kindly benevolence of Dumbledore, and you've got some of the moral palette of Earthsea.
The gently moralising tone that runs through A Wizard of Earthsea may put some people off:
Vetch had been three years at the School and soon would be made Sorcerer; he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
Still, these parables aimed directly at the reader are fairly rare, and, for me, remain on the right side of being mawkish or hectoring. I'm thus looking forward to reading the next two books in the series soon.
Blood Meridian (1985)
Cormac McCarthyBlood Meridian follows a band of American bounty hunters who are roaming the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s. Far from being remotely swashbuckling, though, the group are collecting scalps for money and killing anyone who crosses their path. It is the most unsparing treatment of American genocide and moral depravity I have ever come across, an anti-Western that flouts every convention of the genre. Blood Meridian thus has a family resemblance to that other great anti-Western, Once Upon a Time in the West: after making a number of gun-toting films that venerate the American West (ie. his Dollars Trilogy), Sergio Leone turned his cynical eye to the western.
Yet my previous paragraph actually euphemises just how violent Blood Meridian is. Indeed, I would need to be a much better writer (indeed, perhaps McCarthy himself) to adequately 0utline the tone of this book. In a certain sense, it's less than you read this book in a conventional sense, but rather that you are forced to witness successive chapters of grotesque violence... all occurring for no obvious reason. It is often said that books 'subvert' a genre and, indeed, I implied as such above. But the term subvert implies a kind of Puck-like mischievousness, or brings to mind court jesters licensed to poke fun at the courtiers. By contrast, however, Blood Meridian isn't funny in the slightest. There isn't animal cruelty per se, but rather wanton negligence of another kind entirely. In fact, recalling a particular passage involving an injured horse makes me feel physically ill.
McCarthy's prose is at once both baroque in its language and thrifty in its presentation. As Philip Connors wrote back in 2007, McCarthy has spent forty years writing as if he were trying to expand the Old Testament, and learning that McCarthy grew up around the Church therefore came as no real surprise. As an example of his textual frugality, I often looked for greater precision in the text, finding myself asking whether who a particular 'he' is, or to which side of a fight some two men belonged to. Yet we must always remember that there is no precision to found in a gunfight, so this infidelity is turned into a virtue. It's not that these are fair fights anyway, or even 'murder': Blood Meridian is just slaughter; pure butchery. Murder is a gross understatement for what this book is, and at many points we are grateful that McCarthy spares us precision.
At others, however, we can be thankful for his exactitude. There is no ambiguity regarding the morality of the puppy-drowning Judge, for example: a Colonel Kurtz who has been given free license over the entire American south. There is, thank God, no danger of Hollywood mythologising him into a badass hero. Indeed, we must all be thankful that it is impossible to film this ultra-violent book... Indeed, the broader idea of 'adapting' anything to this world is, beyond sick.
An absolutely brutal read; I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Bodies of Light (2014)
Sarah MossBodies of Light is a 2014 book by Glasgow-born Sarah Moss on the stirrings of women's suffrage within an arty clique in nineteenth-century England. Set in the intellectually smoggy cities of Manchester and London, this poignant book follows the studiously intelligent Alethia 'Ally' Moberly who is struggling to gain the acceptance of herself, her mother and the General Medical Council. You can read my full review from July.
House of Leaves (2000)
Mark Z. DanielewskiHouse of Leaves is a remarkably difficult book to explain. Although the plot refers to a fictional documentary about a family whose house is somehow larger on the inside than the outside, this quotidian horror premise doesn't explain the complex meta-commentary that Danielewski adds on top. For instance, the book contains a large number of pseudo-academic footnotes (many of which contain footnotes themselves), with references to scholarly papers, books, films and other articles. Most of these references are obviously fictional, but it's the kind of book where the joke is that some of them are not. The format, structure and typography of the book is highly unconventional too, with extremely unusual page layouts and styles.
It's the sort of book and idea that should be a tired gimmick but somehow isn't. This is particularly so when you realise it seems specifically designed to create a fandom around it and to manufacturer its own 'cult' status, something that should be extremely tedious. But not only does this not happen, House of Leaves seems to have survived through two exhausting decades of found footage: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are, to an admittedly lesser degree, doing much of the same thing as House of Leaves.
House of Leaves might have its origins in Nabokov's Pale Fire or even Derrida's Glas, but it seems to have more in common with the claustrophobic horror of Cube (1997). And like all of these works, House of Leaves book has an extremely strange effect on the reader or viewer, something quite unlike reading a conventional book. It wasn't so much what I got out of the book itself, but how it added a glow to everything else I read, watched or saw at the time. An experience.
Milkman (2018)
Anna Burns
This quietly dazzling novel from Irish author Anna Burns is full of intellectual whimsy and oddball incident. Incongruously set in 1970s Belfast during The Irish Troubles, Milkman's 18-year-old narrator (known only as middle sister ), is the kind of dreamer who walks down the street with a Victorian-era novel in her hand.
It's usually an error for a book that specifically mention other books, if only because inviting comparisons to great novels is grossly ill-advised. But it is a credit to Burns' writing that the references here actually add to the text and don't feel like they are a kind of literary paint by numbers. Our humble narrator has a boyfriend of sorts, but the figure who looms the largest in her life is a creepy milkman an older, married man who's deeply integrated in the paramilitary tribalism. And when gossip about the narrator and the milkman surfaces, the milkman beings to invade her life to a suffocating degree.
Yet this milkman is not even a milkman at all. Indeed, it's precisely this kind of oblique irony that runs through this daring but darkly compelling book.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014)
Claire North
Harry August is born, lives a relatively unremarkable life and finally dies a relatively unremarkable death. Not worth writing a novel about, I suppose. But then Harry finds himself born again in the very same circumstances, and as he grows from infancy into childhood again, he starts to remember his previous lives. This loop naturally drives Harry insane at first, but after finding that suicide doesn't stop the quasi-reincarnation, he becomes somewhat acclimatised to his fate. He prospers much better at school the next time around and is ultimately able to make better decisions about his life, especially when he just happens to know how to stay out of trouble during the Second World War.
Yet what caught my attention in this 'soft' sci-fi book was not necessarily the book's core idea but rather the way its connotations were so intelligently thought through. Just like in a musical theme and varations, the success of any concept-driven book is far more a product of how the implications of the key idea are played out than how clever the central idea was to begin with. Otherwise, you just have another neat Borges short story: satisfying, to be sure, but in a narrower way.
From her relatively simple premise, for example, North has divined that if there was a community of people who could remember their past lives, this would actually allow messages and knowledge to be passed backwards and forwards in time. Ah, of course! Indeed, this very mechanism drives the plot: news comes back from the future that the progress of history is being interfered with, and, because of this, the end of the world is slowly coming. Through the lives that follow, Harry sets out to find out who is passing on technology before its time, and work out how to stop them.
With its gently-moralising romp through the salient historical touchpoints of the twentieth century, I sometimes got a whiff of Forrest Gump. But it must be stressed that this book is far less certain of its 'right-on' liberal credentials than Robert Zemeckis' badly-aged film. And whilst we're on the topic of other media, if you liked the underlying conceit behind Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle yet didn't enjoy the 'variations' of that particular tale, then I'd definitely give The First Fifteen Lives a try. At the very least, 15 is bigger than 7.
More seriously, though, The First Fifteen Lives appears to reflect anxieties about technology, particularly around modern technological accelerationism. At no point does it seriously suggest that if we could somehow possess the technology from a decade in the future then our lives would be improved in any meaningful way. Indeed, precisely the opposite is invariably implied. To me, at least, homo sapiens often seems to be merely marking time until we can blow each other up and destroying the climate whilst sleepwalking into some crisis that might precipitate a thermonuclear genocide sometimes seems to be built into our DNA. In an era of cli-fi fiction and our non-fiction newspaper headlines, to label North's insight as 'prescience' might perhaps be overstating it, but perhaps that is the point: this destructive and negative streak is universal to all periods of our violent, insecure species.
The Goldfinch (2013)
Donna Tartt
After Breaking Bad, the second biggest runaway success of 2014 was probably Donna Tartt's doorstop of a novel, The Goldfinch. Yet upon its release and popular reception, it got a significant number of bad reviews in the literary press with, of course, an equal number of predictable think pieces claiming this was sour grapes on the part of the cognoscenti. Ah, to be in 2014 again, when our arguments were so much more trivial.
For the uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman that centres on Theo Decker, a 13-year-old whose world is turned upside down when a terrorist bomb goes off whilst visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother among other bystanders. Perhaps more importantly, he makes off with a painting in order to fulfil a promise to a dying old man: Carel Fabritius' 1654 masterpiece The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years (and almost 800 pages), the painting becomes the only connection to his lost mother as he's flung, almost entirely rudderless, around the Western world, encountering an array of eccentric characters.
Whatever the critics claimed, Tartt's near-perfect evocation of scenes, from the everyday to the unimaginable, is difficult to summarise. I wouldn't label it 'cinematic' due to her evocation of the interiority of the characters. Take, for example: Even the suggestion that my father had close friends conveyed a misunderstanding of his personality that I didn't know how to respond it's precisely this kind of relatable inner subjectivity that cannot be easily conveyed by film, likely is one of the main reasons why the 2019 film adaptation was such a damp squib. Tartt's writing is definitely not 'impressionistic' either: there are many near-perfect evocations of scenes, even ones we hope we cannot recognise from real life. In particular, some of the drug-taking scenes feel so credibly authentic that I sometimes worried about the author herself.
Almost eight months on from first reading this novel, what I remember most was what a joy this was to read. I do worry that it won't stand up to a more critical re-reading (the character named Xandra even sounds like the pharmaceuticals she is taking), but I think I'll always treasure the first days I spent with this often-beautiful novel.
Beyond Black (2005)
Hilary Mantel
Published about five years before the hyperfamous Wolf Hall (2004), Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black is a deeply disturbing book about spiritualism and the nature of Hell, somewhat incongruously set in modern-day England. Alison Harte is a middle-aged physic medium who works in the various towns of the London orbital motorway. She is accompanied by her stuffy assistant, Colette, and her spirit guide, Morris, who is invisible to everyone but Alison.
However, this is no gentle and musk-smelling world of the clairvoyant and mystic, for Alison is plagued by spirits from her past who infiltrate her physical world, becoming stronger and nastier every day. Alison's smiling and rotund persona thus conceals a truly desperate woman: she knows beyond doubt the terrors of the next life, yet must studiously conceal them from her credulous clients.
Beyond Black would be worth reading for its dark atmosphere alone, but it offers much more than a chilling and creepy tale. Indeed, it is extraordinarily observant as well as unsettlingly funny about a particular tranche of British middle-class life. Still, the book's unnerving nature that sticks in the mind, and reading it noticeably changed my mood for days afterwards, and not necessarily for the best.
The Wall (2019)
John LanchesterThe Wall tells the story of a young man called Kavanagh, one of the thousands of Defenders standing guard around a solid fortress that envelopes the British Isles. A national service of sorts, it is Kavanagh's job to stop the so-called Others getting in. Lanchester is frank about what his wall provides to those who stand guard: the Defenders of the Wall are conscripted for two years on the Wall, with no exceptions, giving everyone in society a life plan and a story.
But whilst The Wall is ostensibly about a physical wall, it works even better as a story about the walls in our mind. In fact, the book blends together of some of the most important issues of our time: climate change, increasing isolation, Brexit and other widening societal divisions. If you liked P. D. James' The Children of Men you'll undoubtedly recognise much of the same intellectual atmosphere, although the sterility of John Lanchester's dystopia is definitely figurative and textual rather than literal.
Despite the final chapters perhaps not living up to the world-building of the opening, The Wall features a taut and engrossing narrative, and it undoubtedly warrants even the most cursory glance at its symbolism. I've yet to read something by Lanchester I haven't enjoyed (even his short essay on cheating in sports, for example) and will be definitely reading more from him in 2022.
The Only Story (2018)
Julian BarnesThe Only Story is the story of Paul, a 19-year-old boy who falls in love with 42-year-old Susan, a married woman with two daughters who are about Paul's age. The book begins with how Paul meets Susan in happy (albeit complicated) circumstances, but as the story unfolds, the novel becomes significantly more tragic and moving.
Whilst the story begins from the first-person perspective, midway through the book it shifts into the second person, and, later, into the third as well. Both of these narrative changes suggested to me an attempt on the part of Paul the narrator (if not Barnes himself), to distance himself emotionally from the events taking place. This effect is a lot more subtle than it sounds, however: far more prominent and devastating is the underlying and deeply moving story about the relationship ends up. Throughout this touching book, Barnes uses his mastery of language and observation to avoid the saccharine and the maudlin, and ends up with a heart-wrenching and emotive narrative. Without a doubt, this is the saddest book I read this year.
Review: The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson
Publisher:
Del Rey
Copyright:
2020
ISBN:
0-593-13506-7
Format:
Kindle
Pages:
327
Cara is valuable because, in most places, she's dead.
In the world of Earth Zero, as the employees of the Eldridge Institute call
it, a scientific genius named Adam Bosch developed the ability to travel
between parallel worlds. This ability is not limitless, however. One
restriction is that the parallel world has to be very close; large
divergences of history render them unreachable. The other restriction is
that anyone who attempts to travel to a world in which the local version
of themselves is still alive is rejected: physically mangled in ways that
result in a very short remaining lifespan.
Earth Zero has not found a way to send information between worlds without
sending people there physically to collect it. Those people are
traversers, and their value lies in how many of their parallel selves have
died. Each death in one of the 380 worlds Earth Zero can reach means
another world that person can traverse to. They are the transportation
system for a network of information-gathering nodes, whose collected
contents are mined for stock tips, political cautions, and other
information of value. Cara is dead on 372 worlds, and thus provides
valuable savings on employee salaries.
These related worlds are not so much post-apocalyptic as a continuation of
current wealth disparity trends, although it's also clear that the climate
has gotten worse. The Eldridge Institute, which controls traversing, is
based in Wiley City, a walled, climate-controlled arcology of skyscrapers
with a dome that filters out the dangerous sun. Its citizens are rich,
with the best social support that money can buy. They are not interested
in immigrants, unless they are extremely valuable.
Cara is not from Wiley City. She is from Ashtown, the encampment in the
desert outside of Wiley City's walls. That's part of the explanation for
her death rate; in Ashtown, there are only a few ways to survive,
particularly if one is not from the stiflingly religious Rurals, and most
of them are dependent on being in the good graces of the local warlord and
his Mad-Max-style enforcers. Being a traverser gets Cara out of Ashtown
and into Wiley City, but not as a citizen, although that's dangled vaguely
as a possible future prize. She's simply an employee, on a work permit,
who enjoys the comforts of Wiley City for exactly as long as she's useful.
Meanwhile, she juggles the demands of her job, her attraction to her
watcher Dell, and her family in Ashtown. She is profoundly, aggressively
cynical.
Cara is also not precisely who people think she is.
The Space Between Worlds pulls off a beautifully elegant
combination of two science fiction subgenres: parallel universes and time
travel. Both have been part of science fiction for decades, but normally
parallel universes are substantially different from each other. Major
historical events go differently, Nazis win World War II, Spock has a
goatee, etc. Minor deviations are more often the subject of time travel
stories, as travelers attempt to tweak the past and influence the future.
Johnson instead provides the minor variations and small divergences of
time travel stories in a parallel world framework, with no actual time
travel involved or possible. The resulting story shows the same ripple
effect of small differences, but the future remains unwritten and
unconstrained, which avoids the stiflingly closed feeling of most time
travel plots.
Against that backdrop is set a story of corporate and personal intrigue,
but one with a far deeper understanding of class and place than almost all
of science fiction. Cara is not from Ashtown in the normal sense of
science fiction novels written by comfortably middle-class white authors
about protagonists from the wrong side of the tracks, who show their merit
and then never look back. Cara is from Ashtown in a way that means she
misses the taste of its dirt and understands its people and feels seen
there. Wiley City knows very well that she's from Ashtown, and doesn't
let her forget it.
This type of ambiguous relationship with place and wealth, and deep
connection to where one comes from, is so rare in science fiction, and
it's beautifully written here. Cara wants to be in Wiley City over the
alternative; the potential loss of her job is a real threat. But at the
same time she is not at home there, because she is not visible there.
Everything is slightly off, she has no one she can really talk to, and her
reactions don't quite fit. No one understands her the way that her family
in Ashtown does. And yet, by living in Wiley City, she is becoming less
at home in Ashtown as well. She is becoming an outsider.
It takes about 70 pages for the story in The Space Between Worlds
to really get started. Those first 70 pages is very important background
information that the rest of the story builds on, but they weren't that
engrossing. Once the story kicks into gear, though, it's a tense,
complicated story that I had a hard time predicting and an even harder
time putting down. It's not perfect (more on that in a moment), but
Johnson weaves together Cara's sense of place, her family connections, her
sense of self, and her internal moral compass to create a memorable
protagonist in a page-turning plot with a satisfying payoff. She uses our
ability to look in on several versions of each character to give them
additional satisfying heft and depth. Esther, Cara's highly religious
sister, is the most delightful character in this book, and that's saying a
lot coming from someone who usually doesn't like highly religious
characters.
I do have some world-building quibbles, and came up with more when I
mulled over the book after finishing it, so you may need to strengthen
your suspension of disbelief. The passive information gathering via
traversing made a lot of sense; the bulk import of raw materials via the
industrial hatch makes less sense given the constraints of the world.
(Who is loading those materials into the other side? Or are they somehow
traversing them directly out of the ground? Wouldn't someone notice?)
The plot also partly hinges on a bit of lost technology that is extremely
difficult to square with the rest of the setting, and felt like a
transparent justification for introducing Mad Max elements into the
setting.
The quibble I noticed the most may be unavoidable given the setting:
alternate worlds with slightly different versions of the same characters
creates a potential explosion in cast size, which Johnson deals with by
focusing on the cross-world variations of a small number of characters. I
like all of those characters, but it does give the story a bit of an
incestuous feel. The politics of every world revolve around the same ten
people, and no one else seems to matter (or usually even has a name).
That said, a small cast is a better problem to have than a confusing cast.
Johnson does a great job helping the reader keep all the characters and
relationships straight across their alternate world variations. I didn't
realize until after I finished the book how difficult that probably was,
which is the sign of a job well done.
I do also have to complain about how completely dense Cara is when it
comes to Dell, but I won't say any more than that to avoid spoilers.
There are some things I figured out way before Cara did, though,
and that made her behavior rather frustrating.
This is an extremely impressive first novel that does some lovely things
with genre and even more impressive things with social class and mobility.
It's a little rough in places, you have to bear with the first 70 pages,
and the ending, while a fitting conclusion to the emotional arc, seemed
wildly unbelievable to me given the events of the plot. But it's very
much worth reading despite those flaws. Johnson respects her characters
and their culture and their world, and it shows.
This was one of the best science fiction novels I read in 2021.
(Content warning for physical and emotional partner abuse.)
Rating: 8 out of 10
Some time back I wrote up a description of my proposed (and implemented) solution for making hibernation work under Linux even within the bounds of the integrity model. It's been a while, so here's an update.
The first is that localities just aren't an option. It turns out that they're optional in the spec, and TPMs are entirely permitted to say they don't support them. The only time they're likely to work is on platforms that support DRTM implementations like TXT. Most consumer hardware doesn't fall into that category, so we don't get to use that solution. Unfortunate, but, well.
The second is that I'd ignored an attack vector. If the kernel is configured to restrict access to PCR 23, then yes, an attacker is never able to modify PCR 23 to be in the same state it would be if hibernation were occurring and the key certification data will fail to validate. Unfortunately, an attacker could simply boot into an older kernel that didn't implement the PCR 23 restriction, and could fake things up there (yes, this is getting a bit convoluted, but the entire point here is to make this impossible rather than just awkward). Once PCR 23 was in the correct state, they would then be able to write out a new swap image, boot into a new kernel that supported the secure hibernation solution, and have that resume successfully in the (incorrect) belief that the image was written out in a secure environment.
This felt like an awkward problem to fix. We need to be able to distinguish between the kernel having modified the PCRs and userland having modified the PCRs, and we need to be able to do this without modifying any kernels that have already been released[1]. The normal approach to determining whether an event occurred in a specific phase of the boot process is to "cap" the PCR - extend it with a known value that indicates a transition between stages of the boot process. Any events that occur before the cap event must have occurred in the previous stage of boot, and since the final PCR value depends on the order of measurements and not just the contents of those measurements, if a PCR is capped before userland runs, userland can't fake the same PCR value afterwards. If Linux capped a PCR before userland started running, we'd be able to place a measurement there before the cap occurred and then prove that that extension occurred before userland had the opportunity to interfere. We could simply place a statement that the kernel supported the PCR 23 restrictions there, and we'd be fine.
Unfortunately Linux doesn't currently do this, and adding support for doing so doesn't fix the problem - if an attacker boots a kernel that doesn't cap a PCR, they can just cap it themselves from userland. So, we're faced with the same problem: booting an older kernel allows the system to be placed in an identical state to the current kernel, and a fake hibernation image can be written out. Solving this required a PCR that was being modified after kernel code was running, but before userland was started, even with existing kernels.
Thankfully, there is one! PCR 5 is defined as containing measurements related to boot management configuration and data. One of the measurements it contains is the result of the UEFI ExitBootServices() call. ExitBootServices() is called at the transition from the UEFI boot environment to the running OS, and the kernel contains code that executes before it. So, if we measure an assertion regarding whether or not we support restricted access to PCR 23 into PCR 5 before we call ExitBootServices(), this will prevent userspace from spoofing us (because userspace will only be able to extend PCR 5 after the firmware extended PCR 5 in response to ExitBootServices() being called). Obviously this depends on the firmware actually performing the PCR 5 extension when ExitBootServices() is called, but if firmware's out of spec then I don't think there's any real expectation of it being secure enough for any of this to buy you anything anyway.
My current tree is here, but there's a couple of things I want to do before submitting it, including ensuring that the key material is wiped from RAM after use (otherwise it could potentially be scraped out and used to generate another image afterwards) and, uh, actually making sure this works (I no longer have the machine I was previously using for testing, and switching my other dev machine over to TPM 2 firmware is proving troublesome, so I need to pull another machine out of the stack and reimage it).
[1] The linear nature of time makes feature development much more frustrating
As a follow-up to yesterday's post listing my favourite memoirs and biographies I read in 2021, today I'll be outlining my favourite works of non-fiction.
Books that just missed the cut include: The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell for its thrilleresque narrative of a modern-day Robin Hood (and if you get to the end, a completely unexpected twist); Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide to the American Status System as an amusing chaser of sorts to Kate Fox's Watching the English; John Carey's Little History of Poetry for its exhilarating summation of almost four millennia of verse; David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for numerous historical insights, not least its rejoinder to our dangerously misleading view of ancient barter systems; and, although I didn't treasure everything about it, I won't hesitate to gift Pen Vogler's Scoff to a number of friends over the next year. The weakest book of non-fiction I read this year was undoubtedly Roger Scruton's How to Be a Conservative: I much preferred The Decadent Society for Ross Douthat for my yearly ration of the 'intellectual right'.
I also very much enjoyed reading a number of classic texts from academic sociology, but they are difficult to recommend or even summarise. These included One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. 'These are heavy books', remarks John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible...
All round-up posts for 2021: Memoir/biography, Non-fiction (this post) & Fiction (coming soon).
Hidden Valley Road (2020)
Robert Kolker
A compelling and disturbing account of the Galvin family six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia which details a journey through the study and misunderstanding of the condition. The story of the Galvin family offers a parallel history of the science of schizophrenia itself, from the era of institutionalisation, lobotomies and the 'schizo mother', to the contemporary search for genetic markers for the disease... all amidst fundamental disagreements about the nature of schizophrenia and, indeed, of all illnesses of the mind. Samples of the Galvins' DNA informed decades of research which, curiously, continues to this day, potentially offering paths to treatment, prediction and even eradication of the disease, although on this last point I fancy that I detect a kind of neo-Victorian hubris that we alone will be the ones to find a cure. Either way, a gentle yet ultimately tragic view of a curiously 'American' family, where the inherent lack of narrative satisfaction brings a frustration and sadness of its own.
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021)
Cat Flyn
In this disarmingly lyrical book, Cat Flyn addresses the twin questions of what happens after humans are gone and how far can our damage to nature be undone. From the forbidden areas of post-war France to the mining regions of Scotland, Islands of Abandonment explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live in an attempt to give us a glimpse into what happens when mankind's impact on nature is, for one reason or another, forced to stop. Needless to say, if anxieties in this area are not curdling away in your subconscious mind, you are probably in some kind of denial.
Through a journey into desolate, eerie and ravaged areas in the world, this artfully-written study offers profound insights into human nature, eschewing the usual dry sawdust of Wikipedia trivia. Indeed, I summed it up to a close friend remarking that, through some kind of hilarious administrative error, the book's publisher accidentally dispatched a poet instead of a scientist to write this book. With glimmers of hope within the (mostly) tragic travelogue, Islands of Abandonment is not only a compelling read, but also a fascinating insight into the relationship between Nature and Man.
The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Robert O. Paxton
Everyone is absolutely sure they know what fascism is... or at least they feel confident choosing from a buffet of features to suit the political mood. To be sure, this is not a new phenomenon: even as 'early' as 1946, George Orwell complained in Politics and the English Language that the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable . Still, it has proved uncommonly hard to define the core nature of fascism and what differentiates it from related political movements. This is still of great significance in the twenty-first century, for the definition ultimately determines where the powerful label of 'fascist' can be applied today.
Part of the enjoyment of reading this book was having my own cosy definition thoroughly dismantled and replaced with a robust system of abstractions and common themes. This is achieved through a study of the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome and Paris. Moreover, unlike Strongmen (see above), fascisms that failed to gain meaningful power are analysed too, including Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Curiously enough, Paxton's own definition of fascism is left to the final chapter, and by the time you reach it, you get an anti-climatic feeling of it being redundant. Indeed, whatever it actually is, fascism is really not quite like any other 'isms' at all, so to try and classify it like one might be a mistake.
In his introduction, Paxton warns that many of those infamous images associated with fascism (eg. Hitler in Triumph of the Will, Mussolini speaking from a balcony, etc.) have the ability to induce facile errors about the fascist leader and the apparent compliance of the crowd. (Contemporary accounts often record how sceptical the common man was of the leader's political message, even if they were transfixed by their oratorical bombast.) As it happens, I thus believe I had something of an advantage of reading this via an audiobook, and completely avoided re-absorbing these iconic images. To me, this was an implicit reminder that, however you choose to reduce it to a definition, fascism is undoubtedly the most visual of all political forms, presenting itself to us in vivid and iconic primary images: ranks of disciplined marching youths, coloured-shirted militants beating up members of demonised minorities; the post-war pictures from the concentration camps...
Still, regardless of you choose to read it, The Anatomy of Fascism is a powerful book that can teach a great deal about fascism in particular and history in general.
What Good are the Arts? (2005)
John CareyWhat Good are the Arts? takes a delightfully sceptical look at the nature of art, and cuts through the sanctimony and cant that inevitably surrounds them. It begins by revealing the flaws in lofty aesthetic theories and, along the way, debunks the claims that art makes us better people. They may certainly bring joy into your life, but by no means do the fine arts make you automatically virtuous. Carey also rejects the entire enterprise of separating things into things that are art and things that are not, making a thoroughly convincing case that there is no transcendental category containing so-called 'true' works of art.
But what is perhaps equally important to what Carey is claiming is the way he does all this. As in, this is an extremely enjoyable book to read, with not only a fine sense of pace and language, but a devilish sense of humour as well. To be clear, What Good are the Arts? it is no crotchety monograph: Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art? (1897) is hilarious to read in similar ways, but you can't avoid feeling its cantankerous tone holds Tolstoy's argument back. By contrast, Carey makes his argument in a playful sort of manner, in a way that made me slightly sad to read other polemics throughout the year. It's definitely not that modern genre of boomer jeremiad about the young, political correctness or, heaven forbid, 'cancel culture'... which, incidentally, made Carey's 2014 memoir, The Unexpected Professor something of a disappointing follow-up.
Just for fun, Carey later undermines his own argument by arguing at length for the value of one art in particular. Literature, Carey asserts, is the only art capable of reasoning and the only art with the ability to criticise. Perhaps so, and Carey spends a chapter or so contending that fiction has the exclusive power to inspire the mind and move the heart towards practical ends... or at least far better than any work of conceptual art.
Whilst reading this book I found myself taking down innumerable quotations and laughing at the jokes far more than I disagreed. And the sustained and intellectual style of polemic makes this a pretty strong candidate for my favourite overall book of the year.
Have you ever wondered what a security probe of a computer sounded
like? I d guess probably not, because on the face of it that doesn t
make a whole lot of sense. But there was a time when I could very
clearly discern the sound of a computer being scanned. It sounded
like a small mechanical heart beat: Click-click
click-click click-click
Prior to 2010, I had a computer under my desk with what at the time
were not unheard-of properties: Its storage was based on a stack of
spinning metal platters (a now-antiquated device known as a hard
drive ), and it had a publicly routable IPv4 address with an
unfiltered connection to the Internet. Naturally it ran Linux and an
ssh server. As was common in those days, service logging was handled
by a syslog daemon. The syslog daemon would sort log messages based
on various criteria and record them somewhere. In most simple
environments, somewhere was simply a
file on local storage.
When writing to a local file, syslog daemons can be optionally
configured to use the
fsync()
system call to ensure that writes are flushed to disk. Practically
speaking, what this meant is that a page of disk-backed memory would
be written to the disk as soon as an event occurred that triggered a
log message. Because of potential performance implications, fsync()
was not typically enabled for most log files. However, due to the
more sensitive nature of authentication logs, it was often enabled for
/var/log/auth.log.
In the first decade of the 2000 s, there was a fairly unsophisticated
worm loose on the Internet that would
probe sshd
with some
common username/password combinations.
The worm would pause for a second or so between login attempts, most
likely in an effort to avoid automated security responses. The effect
was that a system being probed by this worm would generate disk write
every second, with a very distinct audible signature from the hard
drive.
I think this situation is a fun demonstration of a side-channel data
leak. It s primitive and doesn t leak very much information, but it
was certainly enough to make some inference about the state of the
system in question. Of course, side-channel leakage issues have been
a concern for ages, but I like this one for its simplicity. It was
something that could be explained and demonstrated easily, even to
somebody with relatively limited understanding of how computers
work , unlike, for instance
measuring electromagnetic emanations from CPU power management units.
For a different take on the sounds of a computing infrastructure,
Peep (The Network Auralizer)
won an award at a USENIX conference long, long ago. I d love to see a
modern deployment of such a system. I m sure you could build
something for your cloud deployment using something like
AWS EventBridge or
Amazon SQS fairly easily.
For more on research into actual real-world side-channel attacks, you
can read
A Survey of Microarchitectural Side-channel Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Defenses in Cryptography
or
A Survey of Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attacks and Discussion on their Case-Progressing Potential for Digital Forensics.
Just as I did for 2020, I won't publically disclose exactly how many books I read in 2021, but they evidently provoked enough thoughts that felt it worth splitting my yearly writeup into separate posts. I will reveal, however, that I got through more books than the previous year, and, like before, I enjoyed the books I read this year even more in comparison as well.
How much of this is due to refining my own preferences over time, and how much can be ascribed to feeling less pressure to read particular books? It s impossible to say, and the question is complicated further by the fact I found many of the classics I read well worth of their entry into the dreaded canon.
But enough of the throat-clearing. In today's post I'll be looking at my favourite books filed under memoir and biography, in no particular order.
Books that just missed the cut here include: Bernard Crick's celebrated 1980 biography of George Orwell, if nothing else because it was a pleasure to read; Hilary Mantel's exhilaratingly bitter early memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003); and Patricia Lockwood's hilarious Priestdaddy (2017). I also had a soft spot for Tim Kreider's We Learn Nothing (2012) as well, despite not knowing anything about the author in advance, likely a sign of good writing. The strangest book in this category I read was definitely Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart. Based on a highly-recommended 2018 essay in the New Yorker, its rich broth of genuine yearning for a departed mother made my eyebrows raise numerous times when I encountered inadvertent extra details about Zauner's relationships.
Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (2020)
Laura Tunbridge
Whilst it might immediately present itself as a clickbait conceit, organising an overarching narrative around just nine compositions by Beethoven turns out to be an elegant way of saying something fresh about this grizzled old bear. Some of Beethoven's most famous compositions are naturally included in the nine (eg. the Eroica and the Hammerklavier piano sonata), but the book raises itself above conventional Beethoven fare when it highlights, for instance, his Septet, Op. 20, an early work that is virtually nobody's favourite Beethoven piece today. The insight here is that it was widely popular in its time, played again and again around Vienna for the rest of his life. No doubt many contemporary authors can relate to this inability to escape being artistically haunted by an earlier runaway
success.
The easiest way to say something interesting about Beethoven in the twenty-first century is to talk about the myth of Beethoven instead. Or, as Tunbridge implies, perhaps that should really be 'Beethoven' in leaden quotation marks, given so much about what we think we know about the man is a quasi-fictional construction. Take Anton Schindler, Beethoven's first biographer and occasional amanuensis, who destroyed and fabricated details about Beethoven's life, casting himself in a favourable light and exaggerating his influence with the composer. Only a few decades later, the idea of a 'heroic' German was to be politically useful as well; the Anglosphere often need reminding that Germany did not exist as a nation-state prior to 1871, so it should be unsurprising to us that the late nineteenth-century saw a determined attempt to create a uniquely 'German' culture ex nihilo. (And the less we say about Immortal Beloved the better, even though I treasure that film.) Nevertheless, Tunbridge cuts through Beethoven's substantial legacy using surgical precision that not only avoids feeling like it is settling a score, but it also does so in a way that is unlikely to completely alienate anyone emotionally dedicated to some already-established idea of the man to bring forth the tediously predictable sentiment that Beethoven has 'gone woke'.
With Alex Ross on the cult of Wagner, it seems that books about the 'myth of X' are somewhat in vogue right now. And this pattern within classical music might fit into some broader trend of deconstruction in popular non-fiction too, especially when we consider the numerous contemporary books on the long hangover of the Civil Rights era (Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, etc.), the multifarious ghosts of Empire (Akala's Natives, Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland, etc.) or even the 'transmogrification' of George Orwell into myth.
But regardless of its place in some wider canon, A Life in Nine Pieces is beautifully printed in hardback form (worth acquiring for that very reason alone), and it is one of the rare good books about classical music that can be recommended to both the connoisseur and the layperson alike.
Sea State (2021)
Tabitha Lasley
In her mid-30s and jerking herself out of a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley left London and put all her savings into a six-month lease on a flat within a questionable neighbourhood in Aberdeen, Scotland. She left to make good on a lukewarm idea for a book about oil rigs and the kinds of men who work on them: I wanted to see what men were like with no women around, she claims. The result is Sea State, a forthright examination of the life of North Sea oil riggers, and an unsparing portrayal of loneliness, masculinity, female desire and the decline of industry in Britain. (It might almost be said that Sea State is an update of a sort to George Orwell's visit to the mines in the North of England.)
As bracing as the North Sea air, Sea State spoke to me on multiple levels but I found it additionally interesting to compare and contrast with Julian Barnes' The Man with Red Coat (see below). Women writers are rarely thought to be using fiction for higher purposes: it is assumed that, unlike men, whatever women commit to paper is confessional without any hint of artfulness. Indeed, it seems to me that the reaction against the decades-old genre of autofiction only really took hold when it became the domain of millennial women. (By contrast, as a 75-year-old male writer with a firmly established reputation in the literary establishment, Julian Barnes is allowed wide latitude in what he does with his sources and his writing can be imbued with supremely confident airs as a result.) Furthermore, women are rarely allowed metaphor or exaggeration for dramatic effect, and they certainly aren t permitted to emphasise darker parts in order to explore them... hence some of the transgressive gratification of reading Sea State.
Sea State is admittedly not a work of autofiction, but the sense that you are reading about an author writing a book is pleasantly unavoidable throughout. It frequently returns to the topic of oil workers who live multiple lives, and Lasley admits to living two lives herself: she may be in love but she's also on assignment, and a lot of the pleasure in this candid and remarkably accessible book lies in the way these states become slowly inseparable.
Twilight of Democracy (2020)
Anne Applebaum
For the uninitiated, Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine who won a Pulitzer-prize for her 2004 book on the Soviet Gulag system. Her latest book, however, Twilight of Democracy is part memoir and part political analysis and discusses the democratic decline and the rise of right-wing populism. This, according to Applebaum, displays distinctly authoritarian tendencies, and who am I to disagree? Applebaum does this through three main case studies (Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States), but the book also touches on Hungary as well.
The strongest feature of this engaging book is that Appelbaum's analysis focuses on the intellectual classes and how they provide significant justification for a descent into authoritarianism. This is always an important point to be remembered, especially as much of the folk understanding of the rise of authoritarian regimes tends to place exaggerated responsibility on the ordinary and everyday citizen: the blame placed on the working-class in the Weimar Republic or the scorn heaped upon 'white trash' of the contemporary Rust Belt, for example.
Applebaum is uniquely poised to discuss these intellectuals because, well, she actually knows a lot of them personally. Or at least, she used to know them. Indeed, the narrative of the book revolves around two parties she hosted, both in the same house in northwest Poland. The first party, on 31 December 1999, was attended by friends from around the Western world, but most of the guests were Poles from the broad anti-communist alliance. They all agreed about democracy, the rule of law and the route to prosperity whilst toasting in the new millennium. (I found it amusing to realise that War and Peace also starts with a party.) But nearly two decades later, many of the attendees have ended up as supporters of the problematic 'Law and Justice' party which currently governs the country. Applebaum would now cross the road to avoid them, and they would do the same to her, let alone behave themselves at a cordial reception. The result of this autobiographical detail is that by personalising the argument, Applebaum avoids the trap of making too much of high-minded abstract argument for 'democracy', and additionally makes her book compellingly spicy too.
Yet the strongest part of this book is also its weakest. By individualising the argument, it often feels that Applebaum is settling a number of personal scores. She might be very well justified in doing this, but at times it feels like the reader has walked in halfway through some personal argument and is being asked to judge who is in the right. Furthermore, Applebaum's account of contemporary British politics sometimes deviates into the cartoonish: nothing was egregiously incorrect in any of her summations, but her explanation of the Brexit referendum result didn't read as completely sound.
Nevertheless, this lively and entertaining book that can be read with profit, even if you disagree with significant portions of it, and its highly-personal approach makes it a refreshing change from similar contemporary political analysis (eg. David Runciman's How Democracy Ends) which reaches for that more 'objective' line.
The Man in the Red Coat (2019)
Julian Barnes
As rich as the eponymous red coat that adorns his cover, Julian Barnes quasi-biography of French gynaecologist Samuel-Jean Pozzi (1846 1918) is at once illuminating, perplexing and downright hilarious. Yet even that short description is rather misleading, for this book evades classification all manner number of ways.
For instance, it is unclear that, with the biographer's narrative voice so obviously manifest, it is even a biography in the useful sense of the word. After all, doesn't the implied pact between author and reader require the biographer to at least pretend that they are hiding from the reader? Perhaps this is just what happens when an author of very fine fiction turns his hand to non-fiction history, and, if so, it represents a deeper incursion into enemy territory after his 1984 metafictional Flaubert's Parrot. Indeed, upon encountering an intriguing mystery in Pozzi's life crying out for a solution, Barnes baldly turns to the reader, winks and states: These matters could, of course, be solved in a novel. Well, quite.
Perhaps Barnes' broader point is that, given that's impossible for the author to completely melt into air, why not simply put down your cards and have a bit of fun whilst you're at it? If there's any biography that makes the case for a rambling and lightly polemical treatment, then it is this one.
Speaking of having fun, however, two qualities you do not expect in a typical biography is simply how witty they can be, as well as it having something of the whiff of the thriller about it. A bullet might be mentioned in an early chapter, but given the name and history of Monsieur Pozzi is not widely known, one is unlikely to learn how he lived his final years until the closing chapters. (Or what happened to that turtle.) Humour is primarily incorporated into the book in two main ways: first, by explicitly citing the various wits of the day ( What is a vice? Merely a taste you don t share. etc.), but perhaps more powerful is the gentle ironies, bon mots and observations in Barnes' entirely unflappable prose style, along with the satire implicit in him writing this moreish pseudo-biography to begin with.
The opening page, with its steadfast refusal to even choose where to begin, is somewhat characteristic of Barnes' method, so if you don't enjoy the first few pages then you are unlikely to like the rest. (Indeed, the whole enterprise may be something of an acquired taste. Like Campari.) For me, though, I was left wryly grinning and often couldn't wait to turn the page. Indeed, at times it reminded me of a being at a dinner party with an extremely charming guest at the very peak of his form as a wit and raconteur, delighting the party with his rambling yet well-informed discursive on his topic de jour. A significant book, and a book of significance.
Recently I purchased a small telescope to look at solar spots. When choosing a mount, I checked whether it can be controlled with OSS.
In this context INDI is mentioned everywhere and my desired mount was supported. indi and kstars are already part of Debian, so apt install , selecting my mount, . oh, wait, the menu shows it, but I can not select it.
Ok, that was the time when I learned about the difference of indi and indi-3rdparty. The indi package just contains a few drivers and others are available from a different repository. This split has been done either due to different release cycles of the driver, a different OSS license of it, or just due to binary blobs without source being part of some drivers.
Fine, there are already packages of the 3rdparty-repository available from an Ubuntu PPA, so it should be no problem to add them do Debian as well.
Some manufacturers freely distribute at least the specification of their API so that others are able to write the corresponding software. Some manufacturers even write their own driver. Examples are:
Skywatcher (mounts who can be controlled by the Skywatcher Protocol)
Shelyak to control some spectrographs
Radio Astronomy Supplies SpectraCyber hydrogen line spectrometer
Vixen, for controlling Vixen Starbook and Vixen Starbook Ten
Starlight Express, SX CCDs, SX wheel and SX Active Optics
A minor part actually does not have binary blobs but distributes the sources of their software. Unfortunately they have licenses that are not compatible with DFSG and those packages still need to go to non-free. Examples are:
Finger Lakes Instrumentation (FLI), L.L.C.
Lunatico Astronomia
Astrojolo
Astromechanics
But there also seem to exist lots of manufacturers of astronomically accessories, especially cameras, that just distribute some binary blobs to talk to their hardware. This is sad, but at the moment it is just the way it is and such package need to go to non-free.
Luckily their blobs are accompanied with corresponding licenses. At least those manufacturers understand how software licenses work and packaging their SDK is just straight forward. Examples are:
SBIG Astronomical Instruments
Moravian Instruments Inc.
Player One Astronomy
However, when looking at the license information of some Ubuntu packages, several of them were distributed under a CC license. This is not a common license for software, so I wanted to get a confirmation whether these information are correct.
Unfortunately most of such manufacturers don t want to disclose their licenses. For whatever reason they distribute their tarballs without any hint and emails to their support channels are just ignored. Examples of such bad behaviour are:
Altaircam
QSI (was bought by Atik)
Atik
Touptek
QHY
However the best answer comes from the Levenhuk support. My question about the license of their SDK was answered by:
I am afraid we cannot disclose any further information except the software file that is available on our website.
So strictly speaking nobody is allowed to use their software. I wonder whether such competence also becomes visible in their products. I will never really know as there are more than enough OSS friendly manufacturers available.
Anyway, most of the indi-3rdparty drivers are now available and I got lots of suggestions about hardware I need to buy in the future :-).
Zinnia Gray lives in rural Ohio and is obsessed with Sleeping Beauty, even
though the fairy tale objectively sucks. That has a lot to do with having
Generalized Roseville Malady, an always-fatal progressive amyloidosis
caused by teratogenic industrial waste. No one with GRM has ever lived to
turn twenty-two. A Spindle Splintered opens on Zinnia's
twenty-first birthday.
For her birthday, her best (and only) friend Charm (Charmaine Baldwin)
throws her a party at the tower. There aren't a lot of towers in Ohio;
this one is a guard tower at an abandoned state penitentiary occasionally
used by the local teenagers, which is not quite the image one would get
from fairy tales. But Charm fills it with roses, guests wearing cheap
fairy wings, beer, and even an honest-to-god spinning wheel. At the end
of the night, Zinnia decides to prick her finger on the spindle on a whim.
Much to both of their surprise, that's enough to trigger some form of
magic in Zinnia's otherwise entirely mundane world. She doesn't fall
asleep for a thousand years, but she does get dumped into an actual
fairy-tale tower near an actual princess, just in time to prevent her from
pricking her finger.
This is, as advertised on the tin, a fractured fairy tale, but it's one
that barely introduces the Sleeping Beauty story before driving it
entirely off the rails. It's also a fractured fairy tale in which the
protagonist knows exactly what sort of story she's in, given that she
graduated early from high school and has a college degree in folk studies.
(Dying girl rule #1: move fast.) And it's one in which the fairy
tale universe still has cell reception, if not chargers, which means you
can text your best friend sarcastic commentary on your multiversal
travels. Also, cell phone pictures of the impossibly beautiful princess.
I should mention up-front that I have not watched Spider-Man: Into
the Spider-Verse (yes, I know, I'm sure it's wonderful, I just don't
watch things, basically ever), which is a quite explicit inspiration for
this story. I'm therefore not sure how obvious the story would be to
people familiar with that movie. Even with my familiarity with the
general genre of fractured fairy tales, nothing plot-wise here was all
that surprising. What carries this story is the characters and the
emotional core, particularly Zinnia's complex and sardonic feelings about
dying and the note-perfect friendship between Zinnia and Charm.
"You know it wasn't originally a spinning wheel in the story?" I
offer, because alcohol transforms me into a chatty Wikipedia page.
A Spindle Splintered is told from Zinnia's first-person
perspective, and Zinnia is great. My favorite thing about Harrow's
writing is the fierce and complex emotions of her characters. The overall
tone is lighter than The Once and Future
Witches or The Ten Thousand Doors of
January, but Harrow doesn't shy away from showing the reader Zinnia's
internal thought process about her illness (and her eye-rolling bemusement
at some of the earlier emotional stages she went through).
Dying girl rule #3 is no romance, because my entire life is one
long trolley problem and I don't want to put any more bodies on the
tracks. (I've spent enough time in therapy to know that this isn't "a
healthy attitude towards attachment," but I personally feel that
accepting my own imminent mortality is enough work without also having
a healthy attitude about it.)
There's a content warning for parents here, since Harrow spends some time
on the reaction of Zinnia's parents and the complicated dance between
hope, despair, smothering, and freedom that she and they had to go
through. There were no easy answers and all balances were fragile, but
Zinnia always finds her feet. For me, Harrow's character writing is like
emotional martial arts: rolling with punches, taking falls, clear-eyed
about the setbacks, but always finding a new point of stability to punch
back at the world. Zinnia adds just enough teenage irreverence and
impatience to blunt the hardest emotional hits. I really enjoy reading
it.
The one caution I will make about that part of the story is that the focus
is on Zinnia's projected lifespan and not on her illness specifically.
Harrow uses it as setup to dig into how she and her parents would react to
that knowledge (and I thought those parts were done well), but it's told
from the perspective of "what would you do if you knew your date of
death," not from the perspective of someone living with a disability. It
is to some extent disability as plot device, and like the fairy tale that
it's based on, it's deeply invested in the "find a cure" approach to the
problem. I'm not disabled and am not the person to ask about how well a
story handles disability, but I suspect this one may leave something to be
desired.
I thought the opening of this story is great. Zinnia is a great
first-person protagonist and the opening few chapters are overflowing with
snark and acerbic commentary. Dumping Zinnia into another world but
having text messaging still work is genius, and I kind of wish Harrow had
made that even more central to the book. The rest of the story was good
but not as good, and the ending was somewhat predictable and a bit of a
deus ex machina. But the characters carried it throughout, and I
will happily read more of this. Recommended, with the caveat about
disability and the content warning for parents.
Followed by A Mirror Mended, which I have already pre-ordered.
Rating: 8 out of 10
i3lock is a popular X11 screen lock utility. As far as
customization goes, it only allows one to set a background from a PNG
file. This limitation is part of the design of i3lock: its primary
goal is to keep the screen locked, something difficult enough with
X11. Each additional feature would increase the attack surface and
move away from this goal.1 Many are frustrated with these
limitations and extend i3lock through simple wrapper scripts or by
forking it.2 The first solution is usually safe, but the
second goes against the spirit of i3lock.
XSecureLock is a less-known alternative to i3lock. One of the
most attractive features of this locker is to delegate the screen
saver feature to another process. This process can be anything as long
it can attach to an existing window provided by XSecureLock, which
won t pass any input to it. It will also put a black window below it
to ensure the screen stays locked in case of a crash.
XSecureLock is shipped with a few screen savers, notably one using
mpv to display photos or videos, like the Apple TV aerial
videos. I have written my own saver using Python and GTK.3
It shows a background image, a clock, and the current
weather.4
Custom screen saver for XSecureLock
I add two patches over XSecureLock:
Sleep before mapping screen saver window. This patch prevents a
flash of black when starting XSecureLock by waiting a bit for the
screen saver to be ready before displaying it. As I am also using a
custom dimmer fading to the expected background before locking,
the flash of black was quite annoying for me. I have good hope this
patch will be accepted upstream.
Do not mess with DPMS/blanking. This patch prevents
XSecureLock from blanking the screen. I think this is solely the
role of the X11 DPMS extension. This makes the code simpler. I am
unsure if this patch would be accepted by upstream.
XSecureLock also delegates the authentication window to another
process, but I was less comfortable providing a custom one as it is a
bit more security-sensitive. While basic, the shipped authentication
application is fine by me.
I think people should avoid modifying i3lock code and use
XSecureLock instead. I hope this post will help a bit.
This Reddit post enumerates many of these alternatives.
Using GTK makes it a bit difficult to use some low-level
features, like embedding an application into an existing window.
However, the high-level features are easier, notably drawing an
image and a text with a shadow.
Weather is retrieved by another script running on a
timer and written to a file. The screen saver watches this file
for updates.
This is my collection of utility functions, Autoconf macros, test
programs, and other support infrastructure for my other packages. Changes
in this release:
Fix IN6_ARE_ADDR_EQUAL Autoconf probe on macOS, where it needs an
include of string.h. Patch from Julien LIE.
Fix RRA_PROG_CC_FLAG and RRA_PROG_LD_FLAG for Clang. Previously they
would not reject unknown flags since unknown flags to Clang are only a
warning by default. Thanks, Julien LIE.
Disable vertical code alignment in perltidyrc. Code that should be
aligned should use the magical #<<< comments. The default alignment
is much too aggressive and makes the formatting unstable.
Disable -Wreserved-identifier in RRA_PROG_CC_WARNING_FLAGS for Clang,
since it produces false positives with FD_ZERO and similar macros
defined in system headers under Clang 13.0.
Update .clang-format for Clang 13.0.
I go a few years between battles with
perltidy, then dive in again,
try to see if anything has gotten better, make a few tweaks, and leave
vaguely frustrated. I've been so spoiled by Python's
black that, despite
knowing how much harder Perl is to parse, I keep hoping for the same
thing.
If anyone knows how to get perltidy to format long method calls the way
black does, namely:
or some other weirdness, I'd love to hear it.
Also this time around I discovered that changing the indent for
continuation lines also changes the outdent for labels, because those are
totally the same thing. A very perltidy sort of problem.
Disabling vertical alignment (which makes code formatting very unstable
and fiddly because perltidy is AMAZINGLY aggressive about what it tries to
vertically align) means that perltidy instead aggressively breaks all of
your vertical alignment. I just want => to line up, but not the
arguments to any random function call or the equal signs for every random
assignment. Is this too much to ask? (To be fair, black doesn't do this
either, but for some reason it feels more important to line up fat commas
in Perl than hash constructors in Python.)
I should probably go file bugs against perltidy, and I admit I have not
done that and thus there's no reason to expect anyone to know about my
wishes. What I want seems different enough from how the program works
that I'm not sure that would be appreciated, but I'm probably wrong.
Anyway, you can get the latest version of rra-c-util from
its distribution page.
Shattered Pillars is the second book in the Eternal Sky series,
which begins with Range of Ghosts. You
should read them in order, and ideally close together, since they (along
with the next book) form a single continuous story.
I made the horrible mistake of reading the first book of an Elizabeth Bear
series and then letting four years go by before reading the second one.
Bear's trademark style is to underexplain things to the point that it can
be hard to follow the plot when you remember it, let alone after more than
sufficient time to forget even the general shape of the plot. I therefore
spent most of this book (and a bit of Internet searching) trying to dig up
pieces of my memory and reconstruct the story. Learn from my error and
read the trilogy as one novel if you're going to read it.
Please, authors and publishers, put a short plot synopsis at the start of
series books. No, your hints about what happened previously that you
weave into the first two chapters are not as good as a one-page plot
synopsis. No, I don't want to have to re-read the first book; do you have
any idea how many books I own but haven't read? No, the Internet doesn't
provide plot synopses for every book. Give me a couple of paragraphs and
help me enjoy your fiction! Argh.
Possible spoiler warnings for the first book are in order because I don't
remember the first book well enough to remember what plot details might be
a spoiler.
As Shattered Pillars opens, Temur, Samarkar, and their companions
have reached the western city of Asitaneh, seeking help from Temur's
grandfather to rescue Edene from the Nameless. This will require
breaching the Nameless fortress of Ala-Din. That, in turn, will entangle
Temur and Samarkar in the politics of the western caliphate, where
al-Sepehr of the Nameless is also meddling. Far to the east, from where
Samarkar came, a deadly plague breaks out in the city of Tsarepheth, one
that follows an eerily reliable progression and is even more sinister than
it may first appear. Al-Sepehr's plans to sow chaos and war using ancient
evil magic and bend the results to his favor continue apace. But one of
the chess pieces he thought he controlled has partly escaped his grasp.
Behind all of this lurks the powers of Erem and its scorching, blinding,
multi-sunned sky. Al-Sepehr believes he understands those powers well
enough to use them. He may be wrong.
This is entirely the middle book of a trilogy, in that essentially
nothing is resolved here. All the pieces in motion at the start of this
book are still in motion at the end of this book. We learn a lot more
about the characters, get some tantalizing and obscure glances at Erem,
and end the book with a firmer idea of the potential sides and powers in
play, but there is barely any plot resolution and no proper intermediate
climax. This is a book to read as part of a series, not on its own.
That said, I enjoyed this book considerably more than I would have
expected given how little is resolved. Bear's writing is vivid and
engrossing and made me feel like I was present in this world even when
nothing apparently significant was happening. And, as usual, her
world-building is excellent if you like puzzles, stray hints, and
complicated, multi-faceted mythology. This is a world in which the sky
literally changes depending on which magical or mythological system reigns
supreme in a given area, which in the Erem sections give it a science
fiction flavor. If someone told me Bear could merge Silk Road historical
fantasy with some of the feel of planetary romance (but far more
sophisticated writing), I would have been dubious, but it works.
Perhaps the best thing about this book is that all of the characters feel
like adults. They make complex, nuanced decisions in pursuit of their
goals, thoughtfully adjust to events, rarely make obviously stupid
decisions, and generally act like the intelligent and experienced people
that they are. This is refreshing in epic fantasy, where the plot tends
to steamroll the characters and where often there's a young chosen one at
the center of the plot whose courage and raw power overcomes repeated
emotional stupidity. Shattered Pillars is careful, precise, and
understated where epic fantasy is often brash, reckless, and
over-explained. That plus the subtle and deep world-building makes this
world feel older and more complex than most series of this sort.
There's also a magical horse, who is delightfully uninterested in
revealing anything about where it came from or why it's magical, and who
was probably my favorite character of the book. Hrahima, the giant
tiger-woman, is a close second. I was intrigued to learn more about her
complicated relationship with her entirely separate mythology, and hope
there's more about that the third book.
The villain is still hissable, but a bit less blatantly so on camera. It
helps that the scenes from the villains' perspective primarily focus on
his more interesting servants. One of the problems with this book, and I
think one of the reasons why it feels so transitional and intermediate, is
that there are a lot of viewpoint characters and a lot of
scene-switching. We're kept up-to-date with four separate threads of
events, generally with more than one viewpoint character in each of those
threads, and at times (particularly with the wizards of Tsarepheth) I had
trouble keeping all the supporting characters straight. Hopefully the
third book will quickly merge plot lines and bring some of this complexity
together.
I wish I'd read this more closely to Range of Ghosts. Either that
or a plot synopsis would have helped me enjoy it more. But this is solid
epic fantasy by one of SFF's better writers, and now I'm invested in the
series again. Some unfortunate logistics are currently between me and the
third book, but it won't be four years before I finish the series.
Followed by Steles of the Sky.
Rating: 7 out of 10
If your workstation is using full-disk encryption, you may want to
jump directly to your desktop environment after entering the
passphrase to decrypt the disk. Many display managers like GDM and
LightDM have an autologin feature. However, only GDM can run
Xorg with standard user privileges.
Here is an alternative using startx and a systemd service:
The unit starts after systemd-user-sessions.service, which enables
user logins after boot by removing the /run/nologin file.
With User=bernat, the unit is started with the identity of the
specified user. This implies that Xorg does not run with elevated
privileges.
With PAMName=login, the executed process is registered as a PAM
session for the login service, which includes pam_systemd.
This module registers the session to the systemd login manager.
To be effective, we also need to allocate a TTY with
TTYPath=/dev/tty8. When the TTY is active, the user is granted
additional access to local devices notably display, sound, keyboard,
mouse. These additional rights are needed to get Xorg working
rootless.1 The TERM environment variable is unset because
it would be set to linux by systemd as a result of attaching the
standard input to the TTY. Moreover, we inform pam_systemd we want
an X11 session with Environment=XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11. Otherwise,
logind considers the session idle unless it receives input on
the TTY. Software relying on the idle hint from logind would be
ineffective.2
The UtmpIdentifier=tty8 and UtmpMode=user directives are just
a nice addition to register the session in /var/run/utmp.
The last step is to execute Xorg through startx. For logind to
allow Xorg to take control of the local devices, chvt 8 switches
to the allocated TTY.3StandardOutput=journal, combined
with the -verbose 3 -logfile /dev/null flags for Xorg, puts the
logs from the X server into the journal instead of using a file.
While equal to the default value, the Restart=no directive
highlights we do not want this unit to be restarted. This ensures
the loginless session is only available on boot. By default,
startx runs xinitrc. If you want to run Kodi instead, add
/usr/bin/kodi-standalone between startx and --.
Drop this unit in /etc/systemd/system/x11-autologin.service and
enable it with systemctl enable x11-autologin.service. Xorg is now
running rootless and logging into the journal. After using it for a
few months, I didn t notice any regression compared to LightDM with
autologin.
For more information on how logind provides access to
devices, see this blog post. The method names do not match the
current implementation, but the concepts are still correct. Xorg
takes control of the session when the TTY is active.
Xorg could change the type of the session itself after
taking control of it, but it does not.
There is some code in Xorg to do that, but it is
executed too late and fails with: xf86OpenConsole: VT_ACTIVATE
failed: Operation not permitted.
For those, who haven't realized, yet: MATE 1.26 has now been uploaded to Debian and should be available in Debian testing to all happy testers.
During December, me and the whole family, we had been infected with Covid-19. All of us have recovered well, by now. In fact, I was very happy about a proper fever which I haven't had in years. (Fever is a well-known form of cancer prevention / prophylaxis). Drinking a lot (of warm water!), not eating for five days, and additionally following some health practices from the natural healing context supported the recovery process really well.
The MATE 1.26 DEB package preparations had been done while sitting in bed with my hot water bottle in the back and a pot of honeyed thyme tea next to me on the window sill. Things were getting too boring while being sick, so the monotonous wrapping up of +/- 40 desktop environment DEB packages was a welcome change then (and not too complex for the reduced brain activity of mine, either).
Hope, that MATE 1.26 in Debian works well for many Debian users. I also plan to bring MATE 1.26 to bullseye-backports soon (second half of January, probably).
light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org)
Many developers manage their user-specific application configuration also
known as dotfiles in a version control system such as git. This allows
for keeping track of changes and synchronizing the dotfiles across different
machines. Searching on github, you ll find thousands of dotfile
repositories.
As your dotfiles are sprinkled all over your home directory, managing them in
a single repository is not trivial, i.e. how do you make sure that your
.bashrc, .tmux.conf, etc. that life in your dotfile repository appear in
the proper places in your home directory? The most common solution is to use
symlinks so that the .tmux.conf in your home directory is just a symlink
pointing to the appropriate file in your dotfile repository:
This leads immediately to another problem: how do you manage the symlinks? For
the longest time I just manually maintained the symlinks on the various
machines, but this approach does not scale well with the number of dotfiles
and machines you re using this repository on. Often, people write their own
shell scripts that help them with the maintenance of the symlinks, but at
least the solutions I ve seen so far did not convince me.
Last year I stumbled upon GNU Stow, an unpretentious little tool that
does not reveal at first sight how useful it would be for the job. The
description on the website says:
GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct packages of software
and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes
them appear to be installed in the same place.
Right.
How does it work?
In stow s terminology, a package is a set of files and directories that
need to be installed in a particular directory structure. The target
directory is the root of the tree in which the package appear to be
installed.
When you stow a package, stow creates symlinks in the target directory
that point into the package.
Let s say I have my dotfiles repository in ~/git/dotfiles/. Within this
repository, I have a tmux package, containing the .tmux.conf dotfile:
$ pwd
/home/venthur/git/dotfiles
$ find tmux
tmux # the package
tmux/.tmux.conf # the dotfile
The target directory is my home directory, as this is where the symlinks
need to be created. I can now stow the tmux package into the target
directory like so:
$ stow --target=/home/venthur tmux
and stow will create the appropriate symlinks to the contents of the package
into the target directory:
$ ls -l ~/.tmux.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 venthur venthur 342. Jun 2021 /home/venthur/.tmux.conf -> git/dotfiles/tmux/.tmux.conf
Note that the name of the package (i.e. the name of the directory) does not
matter as stow points the symlinks into the package, so you can choose
it freely. I usually use the name of the program that the configuration
belongs to as the package name.
Your package can also contain several files or even a complex directory
structure. Let s look at the configuration for neovim, which lives below
~/.config/nvim/:
At this point we should mention that the target directory for my dotfiles will
always be my home directory, so the contents of the packages are either the
configuration files or the directory structure as they live in my home
directory.
Deleting a package from the parent directory
You can also remove (unstow) a package from the target directory again, using
the --delete parameter:
$ ls -l ~/.tmux.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 venthur venthur 3418. Dez 22:53 /home/venthur/.tmux.conf -> git/dotfiles/tmux/.tmux.conf
$ stow --target=/home/venthur --delete tmux/
$ ls -l ~/.tmux.conf
ls: cannot access '/home/venthur/.tmux.conf': No such file or directory
Stowing several packages at once
Since your dotfile repository will likely contain more than one package, it
makes sense to combine the individual stow commands into one, so instead of
stowing everything individually,
Note that I use */ instead of * to match all directories (i.e. packages),
since my dotfiles repository also contains a README.md and a makefile.
Putting it all together
My dotfiles repository contains a makefile that allows me to
create/update or delete all symlinks at once:
The --restow parameter tells stow to unstow the packages first before
stowing them again, which is useful for pruning obsolete symlinks from the
target directory.
Et voil ! Whenever I make a change in my dotfiles repository that involves
creating or deleting a dotfile (or a package), I simply call:
$ make
and everything is updated. To delete all dotfile-related symlinks from this
machine, I simply run:
Debian comes with tons of fonts for all kinds of purposes,
you can easily list them (almost) all with: apt-cache search ^fonts-.
However, sometimes they are not in their latest version, or as a user you would like
to get access to new fonts that are not present in Debian stable yet.
With the tool fnt you can easily preview, and install
fonts from Debian sid and Google Web Fonts (that's about 2,000 fonts that are DSFG compliant).
Any user can use the tool to install fonts only for the user itself, or the
system administrator can run it as root to install the fonts system wide.
The package fnt is already in Bookworm,
so if you run Debian testing you can use it to get, test and use many fonts that are in their way
of being packaged in Debian:
ITP #973779fnt install scheherazadenew RFP #944140fnt install arsenal RFP #757249fnt install ekmukta RFP #724629fnt install firasans RFP #766211fnt install orbitron RFP #803690fnt install pompiere RFP #754784fnt install raleway RFP #827735fnt install reemkufi RFP #986999fnt install redhat display,mono,text
If you want to learn more you can have a look at the wiki page about fonts
(https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts),
and if you want to contribute or maintain fonts in Debian,
don't hesitate to join the Fonts Team!
This year I finally bought an e-reader: a "Kobo Libra H2O": a 7" 300ppi
screen with an adjustable colour temperature front light, waterproof,
physical buttons on a "margin"/spine which pushes the case dimensions up
to 8", which is sadly a little too big for most jeans pockets.
In fact this is the second time I've bought one. Sarah and I bought a pair
of Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2nd generation) readers as Honeymoon
gifts for each other in 2013. Sarah took to hers, but after giving mine a try
and reading a couple of books on it I ended up giving it to my Father-in-law.
The main problem I had with it was the colour temperature of the backlight: it
was too blue and "clinical".
It's interesting to me to realise how the environment that I read in can become
indelibly linked to the memory of that book. One book in particular that I read
on the Kindle was James Smythe's "The Machine", a modern twist on a classic
horror story. This was perfectly complemented by the somewhat pallid, sick
colour of the backlight, especially on its lowest brightness settings. It didn't
go so well with other stories.
Broken Libra H2O e-reader
I got on much better with the Libra H2O. For me, e-books and e-reading has not
replaced traditional paper books, but complemented them, giving me an opportunity
to read in contexts and situations where I couldn't manage with a real book (such
as in the pitch black, lying on my back with a toddler on my chest). I feel that
being able to read more often thanks to the e-reader has spurred me on to read
even paper books more frequently as well.
Unfortunately the screen broke, about 10 months after I bought it! After a bit
of soul-searching on what to do about replacing it, and briefly considering the
latest Amazon Paperwhite (which now has a 300ppi display and adjustable-colour
temperature front-light). This looks like a very nice e-reader: no physical
buttons which is a bit of a shame but narrower without the margin/spine of the
Kobo, so possibly more pocket-friendly. On the other hand, I really felt that I
wanted to avoid giving Amazon the money, for a whole variety of reasons.
Libra 2 e-reader. Spot the difference?
So I instead settled on the "Kobo Libra 2", which is a slight refresh of the
Libra H2O, but almost identical. I'm going to pair it with a nice cover for when
its not in use and hopefully it will last longer than its predecessor.
My current favourite feature on the Libra 2, that I don't remember on the H2O
and I'm fairly sure doesn't exist on Kindles is it supports a "night mode",
which is effectively a reverse video, white-on-black mode. This is fantastic
for keeping the light levels down at night. I was already using the backlight
at about 2% brightness and occasionally found even that too bright.
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 937 other packages on CRAN, and downloaded over 22 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN).
This release brings another bug fix release 10.7.5 by Conrad in the long-term support 10.7.* series we started with 0.10.7.0 on September 30. As the bug fixes can come a little quicker than the desired monthly cadence CRAN aims for, we skipped a few of those release for CRAN only but of course still provide them via the Rcpp drat repo.
The full set of changes (since the last CRAN release 0.10.7.3.0) follows. It includes the nice fixes to the fields type mentioned right after the last release.
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.10.7.5.0 (2021-12-16)
Upgraded to Armadillo release 10.7.5
fix aliasing bug in diagmat()
fix detection of 2x2 triangular matrices
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.10.7.4.0 (2021-11-23)
Upgraded to Armadillo release 10.7.4
faster handling of diagonal matrices by inv_sympd(), pinv(), rank()
more robust detection of incorrect data format by .load()
Correct dimensions setting in import/export of arma::field types, protected by #define (Jonathan Berrisch in #352 fixing #351)
Add unit tests for fields both with and without new #define (Dirk)
Our project funding work continues with an active bid on the work of packaging a recent gradle in Debian. This month the bidder has been estimating the scope of the entire project.
The Grow Your Ideas project page also has some ambitious initiatives that may evolve into a funded project. The project ideas on that page range from a new wiki for Debian, a more efficient reimbursement process, and the implementation of PPAs for Debian.
We continue to looking forward to hearing about Debian project proposals from various Debian stakeholders. This month has seen work on a survey that will go out to Debian Developers to gather feedback on what they think should be the priorities for funding in the project.
Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article.
Debian LTS contributors
In November 13 contributors were paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available below. If you re interested in participating in the LTS or ELTS teams, we welcome participation from the Debian community. Simply get in touch with Jeremiah if you are interested in participating.
Adrian Bunk did 62h out of 56h assigned for November and 6h from October.
Jeremiah Foster is coordinating/managing the LTS team did 29h (out of 10h assigned and 10h from October for LTS administration), and spent 9 hours on Projects funded directly through the project funding program.
Lee Garrett did 9 hours out 60 assigned and carried over 51h into December
Utkarsh Gupta did 30 (out of 40h assigned), thus carrying over 10h to December.
Evolution of the situation
In November we released 31 DLAs.
The security tracker currently lists 23 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 16 packages needing an update.
Thanks to our sponsors
Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.
In my two most recent posts, I listed the 
Some time back I wrote up a 
For those, who haven't realized, yet: MATE 1.26 has now been uploaded to Debian and should be available in Debian testing to all happy testers.
During December, me and the whole family, we had been infected with Covid-19. All of us have recovered well, by now. In fact, I was very happy about a proper fever which I haven't had in years. (Fever is a well-known form of cancer prevention / prophylaxis). Drinking a lot (of warm water!), not eating for five days, and additionally following some health practices from the natural healing context supported the recovery process really well.
The MATE 1.26 DEB package preparations had been done while sitting in bed with my hot water bottle in the back and a pot of honeyed thyme tea next to me on the window sill. Things were getting too boring while being sick, so the monotonous wrapping up of +/- 40 desktop environment DEB packages was a welcome change then (and not too complex for the reduced brain activity of mine, either).
Hope, that MATE 1.26 in Debian works well for many Debian users. I also plan to bring MATE 1.26 to bullseye-backports soon (second half of January, probably).
light+love
Many developers manage their user-specific application configuration also
known as dotfiles in a version control system such as 
Debian comes with tons of fonts for all kinds of purposes,
you can easily list them (almost) all with: 
