Fifteen years have passed since I started my career in IT which is quite some time. I've been playing with computers for 25 years now, which makes me quite knowledgeable about the field, for sure.However, while I was fully prepared to bargain with computers, I was not prepared to do so with humans. The whole career management thing was unknown to me. I had no useful skills to navigate within the enterprise organization. I had to learn the ropes the hard way, failing along the way. It hurt.Almost ten years ago, I had the chance to meet a new colleague Alexis Monville. Alexis was a team facilitator, and I started to work with him on many non-technical levels. He taught me a lot about agility and team organization. Working on this set of new skills changed how I envisioned my work and how I fit into the company.

Alexis Monville

I worked on those aspects of my job because I decided to be in charge of my career rather than keeping things boring. That was one of the best decisions I ever made. Growing the social aspect of my profession allowed me to develop and find aspiring jobs and missions.Getting to that point takes a lot of time and effort, and it's pretty hard to do it alone. My friend Alexis wrote an excellent book titled I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge. I'm proud to have been the first reviewer the book before it was released a few weeks ago.Many developers out there are stuck in a place where they are not excited by their colleagues' work and whose managers do not appropriately recognize their achievement. It would be best for them if they did something about that.

The book!

This book is an excellent piece for engineers who wants to break the cycle of frustration. It covers many situations I encountered across my professional life those last years, giving good insights into how to solve them.To paraphrase Alexis, the answers to your career management problems are not on StackOverflow they're not technical issues. However, you can still solve them with the right tools. That's where I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge shines. It gives you leads, solutions, and exercise to get out of this kind of situation. It helps increase your impact and satisfaction at work.I love this book, and I wish I had access to it years ago. Developing technical leadership is not easy and requires a mindset shift. Having a way to bootstrap yourself with this is a luxury.If you're a software engineer at the beginning of your career or struggling with your current professional situation, I profoundly recommend reading this book! You'll get a fast track on your career, for sure.

I recently took part in an interview with Vladimir Bejdo, an intern at the Software Freedom Conservancy, in order to talk about the Reproducible Builds project, my own participation in software freedom, the importance of reproducibility in software development and to have a brief discussion on the issues facing free software as a whole:

VB: To start off with, it might be useful to first ask you this how would you relate the importance of reproducibility to a user who is non-technical? CL: I sometimes use the analogy of the food supply chain to quickly relate our work to non-technical audiences. The multiple stages of how our food reaches our plates today (such as seeding, harvesting, picking, transportation, packaging, etc.) can loosely translate to how software actually ends up on our computers, particularly in the way that if any of the steps in the multi-stage food supply chain has an issue then it quickly becomes a serious problem. For example, even if we could guarantee that only the most wholesome apples were picked in our orchards, if they became tainted on the way to the supermarket it will be a real problem for us at the end of the day. We may not even be able to even tell by simply inspecting our Pink Ladies or Honeycrisps, and washing them thoroughly under the tap may not be enough either. In an ideal world, we would be able to personally inspect the provenance of our food at all of the stages of manufacturing and transportation. But at some point, we must place our trust in the process and in brands, as well as various regulatory bodies to ensure that potential problems in our food are minimized, possibly even paying a time/effort premium by growing our own or buying direct from local markets in order to minimize the number of steps, etc. However, when we use free software we can do better: Reproducible builds are a set of software development practices, ideas and tools that create an independently-verifiable path all the way from the original source code to what actually runs on our machines. Reproducible builds can reveal the injection of back-doors introduced by the hacking of developers own computers, build servers and package repositories, and also expose where volunteers or companies have been coerced into making changes via blackmail, court order, and so on. With reproducible builds, there is no longer any need to trust any particular source of authority. In the same way that, say, a Mr Smith might check that his calculator is giving him the right answer to 2+2=4 by asking enough of his friends to check theirs too, users and developers of a reproducible build can verify the software they are using by creating a collective consensus instead.

The full interview can be found on the Conservancy webpages.

Review: Behind the Throne, by K.B. Wagers

Series:	Indranan War #1
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	August 2016
ISBN:	0-316-30859-5
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	416

Hail is a gunrunner, an outlaw and criminal, someone who knows how to survive violence and navigate by personal loyalty. That world knows her as Cressen Stone. What her colleagues don't know is that she's also an Imperial Princess. Hailimi Mercedes Jaya Bristol left that world twenty years earlier in secret pursuit of her father's killer and had no intention of returning. But her sisters are dead, her mother's health is failing, and two Imperial Trackers have been sent to bring her back to her rightful position as heir. I'm going to warn up-front that the first half of this novel was rough to the point of being unreadable. Wagers tries much too hard to establish Hail as a reluctant heroine torn between her dislike of royal protocols and her grief and anger at the death of her sisters. The result is excessively melodramatic and, to be frank, badly written. There are a lot of passages like this:

His words slammed into me, burning like the ten thousand volts of a Solarian Conglomerate police Taser.

(no, there's no significance to the Solarian Conglomerate here), or, just three paragraphs later:

The air rushed out of my lungs. Added grief for a niece I'd never known. One more log on the pyre set to burn my freedom to ashes. The hope I'd had of getting out of this mess was lost in that instant, and I couldn't do anything but stare at Emmory in abject shock.

Given how much air rushes out of Hail's lungs and how often she's struck down with guilt or grief, it's hard to believe she doesn't have brain damage. Worse, Hail spends a great deal of the first third of the book whining, which given that the book is written in first person gets old very quickly. Every emotion is overwritten and overstressed as Hail rails against obvious narrative inescapability. It's blatantly telegraphed from the first few pages that Hail is going to drop into the imperial palace like a profane invasion force and shake everything up, but the reader has to endure far too long of Hail being dramatically self-pitying about the plot. I almost gave up on this book in irritation (and probably should have). And then it sort of grew on me, because the other thing Wagers is doing (also not subtly) is a story trope for which I have a particular weakness: The fish out of water who nonetheless turns out to be the person everyone needs because she's systematically and deliberately kind and thoughtful while not taking any shit. Hail left Pashati young and inexperienced, with a strained relationship with her mother and a habit of letting her temper interfere with her ability to negotiate palace politics. She still has the temper, but age, experience, and confidence mean that she's decisive and confident in a way she never was before. The second half of this book is about Hail building her power base and winning loyalty by being loyal and decent. It's still not great writing, but there's something there I enjoyed reading. Wagers's setting is intriguing, although it makes me a bit nervous. The Indranan Empire was settled by colonists of primarily Indian background. The court trappings, mythology, and gods referenced in Behind the Throne are Hindu-derived, and I suspect (although didn't confirm) that the funeral arrangements are as well. Formal wear (and casual wear) for women is a sari. There's a direct reference to the goddess Lakshimi (not Lakshmi, which Wikipedia seems to indicate is the correct spelling, although transliteration is always an adventure). I was happy to see this, since there are more than enough SF novels out there that seem to assume only western countries go into space. But I'm never sure whether the author did enough research or has enough personal knowledge to pull off the references correctly, and I personally wouldn't know the difference. The Indranan Empire is also matriarchal, and here Wagers goes for an inversion of sexism that puts men in roughly the position women were in the 1970s. They can, in theory, do most jobs, but there are many things they're expected not to do, there are some explicit gender lines in power structures, and the role of men in society is a point of political conflict. It's skillfully injected as social background, with a believable pattern of societal prejudice that doesn't necessarily apply to specific men in specific situations. I liked that Wagers did this without giving the Empire itself any feminine-coded characteristics. All admirals are women because the characters believe women are obviously better military leaders, not because of some claptrap about nurturing or caring or some other female-coded reason from our society. That said, this gender role inversion didn't feel that significant to the story. The obvious "sexism is bad, see what it would be like if men were subject to it" message ran parallel to the main plot and never felt that insightful to me. I'm therefore not sure it was successful or worth the injection of sexism into the reading experience, although it certainly is different from the normal fare of space empires. I can't recommend Behind the Throne because a lot of it just isn't very good. But I still kind of want to because I sincerely enjoyed the last third of the book, despite some lingering melodrama. Watching Hail succeed by being a decent, trustworthy, loyal, and intelligent person is satisfying, once she finally stops whining. The destination is probably not worth the journey, but now that I've finished the first book, I'm tempted to grab the second. Followed by After the Crown. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Can't Even, by Anne Helen Petersen

Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	0-358-31659-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	230

Like many other people, I first became aware of Anne Helen Petersen's journalism when her Buzzfeed article "How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation" went viral. Can't Even is the much-awaited (at least by me) book-length expansion of that thesis: The United States is, as a society, burning out, and that burnout is falling on millennials the hardest. We're not recognizing the symptoms because we think burnout looks like something dramatic and flashy. But for most people burnout looks less like a nervous breakdown and more like constant background anxiety and lack of energy.

Laura, who lives in Chicago and works as a special ed teacher, never wants to see her friends, or date, or cook she's so tired, she just wants to melt into the couch. "But then I can't focus on what I'm watching, and end up unfocused again, and not completely relaxing," she explained. "Here I am telling you I don't even relax right! I feel bad about feeling bad! But by the time I have leisure time, I just want to be alone!"

Petersen explores this idea across childhood, education, work, family, and parenting, but the core of her thesis is the precise opposite of the pervasive myth that millennials are entitled and lazy (a persistent generational critique that Petersen points out was also leveled at their Baby Boomer parents in the 1960s and 1970s). Millennials aren't slackers; they're workaholics from childhood, for whom everything has become a hustle and a second (or third or fourth) job. The struggle with "adulting" is a symptom of the burnout on the other side of exhaustion, the mental failures that happen when you've forced yourself to keep going on empty so many times that it's left lingering damage. Petersen is a synthesizing writer who draws together the threads of other books rather than going deep on a novel concept, so if you've been reading about work, psychology, stress, and productivity, many of the ideas here will be familiar. But she's been reading the same authors that I've been reading (Tressie McMillan Cottom, Emily Guendelsberger, Brigid Schulte, and even Cal Newport), and this was the book that helped me pull those analyses together into a coherent picture. That picture starts with the shift of risk in the 1970s and 1980s from previously stable corporations with long-lasting jobs and retirement pensions onto individual employees. The corresponding rise in precarity and therefore fear led to a concerted effort to re-establish a feeling of control. Baby Boomers doubled down on personal responsibility and personal capability, replacing unstructured childhood for their kids with planned activities and academic achievement. That generation, in turn, internalized the need for constant improvement, constant grading, and constant achievement, accepting an implied bargain that if they worked very hard, got good grades, got into good schools, and got a good degree, it would pay off in a good life and financial security. They were betrayed. The payoff never happened; many millennials graduated into the Great Recession and the worst economy since World War II. In response, millennials doubled down on the only path to success they were taught. They took on more debt, got more education, moved back in with their parents to cut expenses, and tried even harder.

Even after watching our parents get shut out, fall from, or simply struggle anxiously to maintain the American Dream, we didn't reject it. We tried to work harder, and better, more efficiently, with more credentials, to achieve it.

Once one has this framework in mind, it's startling how pervasive the "just try harder" message is and how deeply we've internalized it. It is at the center of the time management literature: Getting Things Done focuses almost entirely on individual efficiency. Later time management work has become more aware of the importance of pruning the to-do list and doing fewer things, but addresses that through techniques for individual prioritization. Cal Newport is more aware than most that constant busyness and multitasking interacts poorly with the human brain, and has taken a few tentative steps towards treating the problem as systemic rather than individual, but his focus is still primarily on individual choices. Even when tackling a problem that is clearly societal, such as the monetization of fear and outrage on social media, the solutions are all individual: recognize that those platforms are bad for you, make an individual determination that your attention is being exploited, and quit social media through your personal force of will. And this isn't just productivity systems. Most of public discussion of environmentalism in the United States is about personal energy consumption, your individual carbon footprint, household recycling, and whether you personally should eat meat. Discussions of monopoly and monopsony become debates over whether you personally should buy from Amazon. Concerns about personal privacy turn into advocacy for using an ad blocker or shaming people for using Google products. Articles about the growth of right-wing extremism become exhortations to take responsibility for the right-wing extremist in your life and argue them out of their beliefs over the dinner table. Every major systemic issue facing society becomes yet another personal obligation, another place we are failing as individuals, something else that requires trying harder, learning more, caring more, doing more. This advice is well-meaning (mostly; sometimes it is an intentional and cynical diversion), and can even be effective with specific problems. But it's also a trap. If you're feeling miserable, you just haven't found the right combination of time-block scheduling, kanban, and bullet journaling yet. If you're upset at corporate greed and the destruction of the environment, the change starts with you and your household. The solution is in your personal hands; you just have try a little harder, work a little harder, make better decisions, and spend money more ethically (generally by buying more expensive products). And therefore, when we're already burned out, every topic becomes another failure, increasing our already excessive guilt and anxiety. Believing that we're in control, even when we're not, does have psychological value. That's part of what makes it such a beguiling trap. While drafting this review, I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Robert Sapolsky on poverty and stress, and one of the points he made is that, when mildly or moderately bad things happen, believing you have control is empowering. It lets you recast the setback as a larger disaster that you were able to prevent and avoid a sense of futility. But when something major goes wrong, believing you have control is actively harmful to your mental health. The tragedy is now also a personal failure, leading to guilt and internal recrimination on top of the effects of the tragedy itself. This is why often the most comforting thing we can say to someone else after a personal disaster is "there's nothing you could have done." Believing we can improve our lives if we just try a little harder does work, until it doesn't. And because it does work for smaller things, it's hard to abandon; in the short term, believing we're at the mercy of forces outside our control feels even worse. So we double down on self-improvement, giving ourselves even more things to attempt to do and thus burning out even more. Petersen is having none of this, and her anger is both satisfying and clarifying.

In writing that article, and this book, I haven't cured anyone's burnout, including my own. But one thing did become incredibly clear. This isn't a personal problem. It's a societal one and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats. We gravitate toward those personal cures because they seem tenable, and promise that our lives can be recentered, and regrounded, with just a bit more discipline, a new app, a better email organization strategy, or a new approach to meal planning. But these are all merely Band-Aids on an open wound. They might temporarily stop the bleeding, but when they fall off, and we fail at our new-found discipline, we just feel worse.

Structurally, Can't Even is half summaries of other books and essays put into this overall structure and half short profiles and quotes from millennials that illustrate her point. This is Petersen's typical journalistic style if you're familiar with her other work. It gains a lot from the voices of individuals, but it can also feel like argument from anecdote. If there's a epistemic flaw in this book, it's that Petersen defends her arguments more with examples than with scientific study. I've read enough of the other books she cites, many of which do go into the underlying studies and statistics, to know that her argument is well-grounded, but I think Can't Even works better as a roadmap and synthesis than as a primary source of convincing data. The other flaw that I'll mention is that although Petersen tries very hard to incorporate poorer and non-white millennials, I don't think the effort was successful, and I'm not sure it was possible within the structure of this book. She frequently makes a statement that's accurate and insightful for millennials from white, middle-class families, acknowledges that it doesn't entirely apply to, for example, racial minorities, and then moves on without truly reconciling those two perspectives. I think this is a deep structural problem: One's experience of American life is very different depending on race and class, and the phenomenon that Petersen is speaking to is to an extent specific to those social classes who had a more comfortable and relaxing life and are losing it. One way to see the story of the modern economy is that white people are becoming as precarious as everyone else already was, and are reacting by making the lives of non-white people yet more miserable. Petersen is accurately pointing to significant changes in relationships with employers, productivity, family, and the ideology of individualism, but experiencing that as a change is more applicable to white people than non-white people. That means there are, in a way, two books here: one about the slow collapse of the white middle class into constant burnout, and a different book about the much longer-standing burnout of being non-white in the United States and our systemic failure to address the causes of it. Petersen tries to gesture at the second book, but she's not the person to write it and those two books cannot comfortably live between the same covers. The gestures therefore feel awkward and forced, and while the discomfort itself serves some purpose, it lacks the insight that Petersen brings to the rest of the book. Those critiques aside, I found Can't Even immensely clarifying. It's the first book that explained to me in a way I understood what's so demoralizing and harmful about Instagram and its allure of cosplaying as a successful person. It helped me understand how productivity and individual political choices fit into a system that emphasizes individual action as an excuse to not address collective problems. And it also gave me a strange form of hope, because if something can't go on forever, it will, at some point, stop.

Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But if we have the endurance and aptitude and wherewithal to work ourselves this deeply into the ground, we also have the strength to fight. We have little savings and less stability. Our anger is barely contained. We're a pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves. Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.

Nothing will change without individual people making different decisions and taking different actions than they are today. But we have gone much too far down the path of individual, atomized actions that may produce feelings of personal virtue but that are a path to ineffectiveness and burnout when faced with systemic problems. We need to make different choices, yes, but choices towards solidarity and movement politics rather than personal optimization. There is a backlash coming. If we let it ground itself in personal grievance, it could turn ugly and take a racist and nationalist direction. But that's not, by in large, what millennials have done, and that makes me optimistic. If we embrace the energy of that backlash and help shape it to be more inclusive, just, and fair, we can rediscover the effectiveness of collective solutions for collective problems. Rating: 8 out of 10

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In November, 239.25 work hours have been dispatched among 13 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 12.0h (out of 12h assigned).
• Adrian Bunk did 13h (out of 22.75h assigned and 19.5h from October) and gave back 6.5h, thus carrying over 22.75h to December.
• Ben Hutchings did 11.5h (out of 16h assigned and 4.5h from October), thus carrying over 9h to December.
• Brian May did 10h (out of 10h assigned).
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 22.75h (out of 22.75h assigned).
• Holger Levsen did 8.0h coordinating/managing the LTS team.
• Markus Koschany did 12h (out of 22.75h assigned), thus carrying over 10.75h to December.
• Ola Lundqvist did 1h (out of 12h assigned), thus carrying over 11h to December.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 20.5h (out of 22.75h assigned), thus carrying over 2.25h to December.
• Sylvain Beucler did 22.75h (out of 22.75h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 22.75h (out of 22.75h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 22.75h (out of 22.75h assigned).

Evolution of the situation In November we held the last LTS team meeting for 2020 on IRC, with the next one coming up at the end of January.
We announced a new formalized initiative for Funding Debian projects with money from Freexian s LTS service.
Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. Please contact Holger if you are interested! We re also glad to welcome two new sponsors, Moxa, a device manufacturer, and a French research lab (Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod). The security tracker currently lists 37 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 40 packages needing an update. Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 63 months)
• GitHub (for 53 months)
• Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 31 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• Blablacar (for 78 months)
• Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 74 months)
• Linode (for 68 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 57 months)
• Plat Home (for 56 months)
• University of Oxford (for 13 months)
• Silver sponsors:
• The Positive Internet Company (for 79 months)
• Domeneshop AS (for 78 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 72 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 64 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 64 months)
• Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 58 months)
• Exonet B.V. (for 47 months)
• Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 41 months)
• CINECA (for 31 months)
• Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 25 months)
• Cloudways Ltd (for 14 months)
• Dinahosting SL (for 12 months)
• Platform.sh (for 7 months)
• Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 6 months)
• Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd.
• Bronze sponsors:
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 79 months)
• Evolix (for 78 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 76 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 75 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 74 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 73 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 73 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 72 months)
• NUMLOG (for 72 months)
• WinGo AG (for 71 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 68 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 63 months)
• Adfinis AG (for 60 months)
• Tesorion (for 55 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 54 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 54 months)
• Bearstech (for 46 months)
• LiHAS (for 46 months)
• People Doc (for 42 months)
• Catalyst IT Ltd (for 40 months)
• Supagro (for 36 months)
• Demarcq SAS (for 34 months)
• Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 21 months)
• TouchWeb SAS (for 12 months)
• SPiN AG (for 9 months)
• CoreFiling (for 5 months)
• Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod

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I have a secret: risotto doesn't have to involve standing over a pot, stirring for 30 minutes. There is a better way. I've made risotto using the "stir 5ever" method and frankly this one is half the work and just as good. I took inspiration from Kenji Lopez-Alt, who describes how you can make risotto with only a few minutes of stirring at the end! Yes, this is a secret too good to keep to myself. The linked recipe is too rich for a weeknight dinner, at least for my tastes, so I've included my typical modifications below, which omits the heavy cream. I usually make mushroom risotto, because all the ingredients are long-lived pantry ingredients, which means I can make this on a whim without having to grocery shop!

pic.twitter.com/9gD4OGLZDs e. hashman (@ehashdn) December 17, 2020

Mushroom risotto Serves 3 as a main course. Active time: 25m. Total time: 45m. Ingredients:

• 1oz (28g) dried mushrooms, such as porcini (or morels!)
• 3 cups chicken or vegetable stock
• 1 cups short-grained rice (I use arborio)
• cup white wine
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp unsalted butter
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 small onion, small diced
• 3oz (85g) grated Parmesan cheese
• herbs for garnish (optional)

Recipe:

1. Leave mushrooms to rehydrate in 1 cup of hot water for at least 10 minutes.
2. Set a wide saucepan (about 3.5qts) or skillet on medium heat.
3. Mix stock and wine for a total of 4 cups. You can used homemade stock (the best), boxed, or reconstitute from bouillon (my usual). If you use bouillon, I find you get the best flavour if you use a mix, so I tend to use half "no-chicken" and half "organic chicken" of the Better than Bouillon brand. Let this cool if you used boiling water; you don't want it to be too hot.
4. Mix the rice and stock in a large bowl, agitating it to release the starch. Reserve stock and set the rice in a strainer to drain.
5. Small dice an onion. Add olive oil and butter to the pan, and then add the onion. Cook the onion until it's translucent, but don't brown it.
6. Increase the heat to high and add the rice to the pan to toast until it becomes a little bit brown, stirring occasionally, about 3-4 minutes. Set a timer so it doesn't burn
7. Meanwhile, drain the mushrooms, making sure you reserve the broth. Chop mushrooms and mince the garlic. Once the rice is toasted, add mushrooms and garlic and stir.
8. Stir the reserved stock. Add all of the mushroom liquid and all but 1 cup of the starchy stock to the pan. Bring to a boil.
9. Once it has reached a boil, cover, reduce to the lowest heat, and allow the rice to simmer undisturbed for 10 minutes. In the meantime, you can grate the cheese.
10. After 10 minutes, stir the rice once, shake the pan to ensure it is level, and return to the heat for 10 more minutes. Sit back, relax, and bask in the very little stirring you are doing.
11. At this point, the rice should be nearly cooked. Give it a stir, and add the remaining cup of broth. Stir until fully incorporated, turn the heat up to high, and cook until the risotto reaches your preferred consistency. I like mine rather thick.
12. Once the rice is fully cooked, turn off the heat and stir in the grated cheese a bit at a time, reserving some for garnish. Taste, and season with salt and pepper.
13. Garnish with the grated cheese, and perhaps some herbs. Serve and enjoy!

Variations No mushrooms: Okay, okay, you hate mushrooms! Sorry! You can leave them out. Don't bother with the mushrooms, and add broth to make up for the lost liquid. Mushroom lover: Alternatively, if you love mushrooms and you have fresh ones available, use &frac13 to a pound (150-225g) chopped fresh mushrooms instead of dried. Add them at the same time you add the onions to ensure all the liquid cooks off. Milanese, with stuff: One of my favourite variations on this dish is a version with shrimp, asparagus, and saffron. Leave the mushrooms out, increase the wine to or even 1 cup (seafood likes a little extra acidity), ensure you have a total of 5 cups of broth, and add a few strands of saffron. Chop asparagus and shrimp, season with salt and pepper, saut them with some butter or olive oil in a separate pan so they don't overcook, and fold them in at the very end, after you've added the cheese. I MUST SUFFER: This was too easy? Want to stir more??? Fine, have it your $*!#ing way. I'm sure you can be creative and come up with something on your own...

Despite having worked on a number of ARM platforms I ve never actually had an ARM based development box at home. I have a Raspberry Pi B Classic (the original 256MB rev 0002 variant) a coworker gave me some years ago, but it s not what you d choose for a build machine and generally gets used as a self contained TFTP/console server for hooking up to devices under test. Mostly I ve been able to do kernel development with the cross compilers already built as part of Debian, and either use pre-built images or Debian directly when I need userland pieces. At a previous job I had a Marvell MACCHIATObin available to me, which works out as a nice platform - quad core A72 @ 2GHz with 16GB RAM, proper SATA and a PCIe slot. However they re still a bit pricey for a casual home machine. I really like the look of the HoneyComb LX2 - 16 A72 cores, up to 64GB RAM - but it s even more expensive. So when I saw the existence of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 I was interested. Firstly, the Pi 4 is a proper 64 bit device (my existing Pi B is ARMv6 which means it needs to run Raspbian instead of native Debian armhf), capable of running an upstream kernel and unmodified Debian userspace. Secondly the Pi 4 has a USB 3 controller sitting on a PCIe bus rather than just the limited SoC USB 2 controller. It s not SATA, but it s still a fairly decent method of attaching some storage that s faster/more reliable than an SD card. Finally 8GB RAM is starting to get to a decent amount - for a headless build box 4GB is probably generally enough, but I wanted some headroom. The Pi comes as a bare board, so I needed a case. Ideally I wanted something self contained that could take the Pi, provide a USB/SATA adaptor and take the drive too. I came across the pre-order for the DeskPi Pro, decided it was the sort of thing I was after, and ordered one towards the end of September. It finally arrived at the start of December, at which point I got round to ordering a Pi 4 from CPC. Total cost ~ 120 for the case + Pi.

The Bad First, let s get the bad parts out of the way. I managed to break a USB port on the Desk Pi. It has a pair of forward facing ports, I plugged my wireless keyboard dongle into it and when trying to remove it the solid spacer bit in the socket broke off. I ve never had this happen to me before and I ve been using USB devices for 20 years, so I m putting the blame on a shoddy socket. The first drive I tried was an old Crucial M500 mSATA device. I have an adaptor that makes it look like a normal 2.5 drive so I used that. Unfortunately it resulted in a boot loop; the Pi would boot its initial firmware, try to talk to the drive and then reboot before even loading Linux. The DeskPi Pro comes with an m2 adaptor and I had a spare m2 drive, so I tried that and it all worked fine. This might just be power issues, but it was an unfortunate experience especially after the USB port had broken off. (Given I ended up using an M.2 drive another case option would have been the Argon ONE M.2, which is a bit more compact.)

The Annoying The case is a little snug; I was worried I was going to damage things as I slid it in. Additionally the construction process is a little involved. There s a good set of instructions, but there are a lot of pieces and screws involved. This includes a couple of FFC cables to join things up. I think this is because they ve attempted to make a compact case rather than allowing a little extra room, and it does have the advantage that once assembled it feels robust without anything loose in it. I hate the need for an external USB3 dongle to bridge from the Pi to the USB/SATA adaptor. All the cases I ve seen with an internal drive bay have to do this, because the USB3 isn t brought out internally by the Pi, but it just looks ugly to me. It s hidden at the back, but meh. Fan control is via a USB/serial device, which is fine, but it attaches to the USB C power port which defaults to being a USB peripheral. Raspbian based kernels support device tree overlays which allows easy reconfiguration to host mode, but for a Debian based system I ended up rolling my own dtb file. I changed

#include "bcm283x-rpi-usb-peripheral.dtsi"

to

#include "bcm283x-rpi-usb-host.dtsi"

in arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dts and then I did:

cpp -nostdinc -I include -I arch -undef -x assembler-with-cpp \
    arch/arm/boot/dts/bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dts > rpi4.preprocessed
dtc -I dts -O dtb rpi4.preprocessed -o bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb

and the resulting bcm2711-rpi-4-b.dtb file replaced the one in /boot/firmware. This isn t a necessary step if you don t want to use the cooling fan in the case, or the front USB ports, and it s not really anyone s fault, but it was an annoying extra step to have to figure out. The DeskPi came with a microSD card that was supposed to have RaspiOS already on it. It didn t, it was blank. In my case that was fine, because I wanted to use Debian, but it was a minor niggle.

The Good I used Gunnar s pre-built Pi Debian image and it Just Worked; I dd d it to the microSD as instructed and the Pi 4 came up with working wifi, video and USB enabling me to get it configured for my network. I did an apt upgrade and got updated to the Buster 10.7 release, as well as the latest 5.9 backport kernel, and everything came back without effort after a reboot. It s lovely to be able to run Debian on this device without having to futz around with self-compiled kernels. The DeskPi makes a lot of effort to route things externally. The SD slot is brought out to the front, making it easy to fiddle with the card contents without having to open the case to replace it. All the important ports are brought out to the back either through orientation of the Pi, or extenders in the case. That means the built in Pi USB ports, the HDMI sockets (conveniently converted to full size internally), an audio jack and a USB-C power port. The aforementioned USB3 dongle for the bridge to the drive is the only external thing that s annoying. Thermally things seem good too. I haven t done a full torture test yet, but with the fan off the system is sitting at about 40 C while fairly idle. Some loops in bash that push load up to above 2 get the temperature up to 46 C or so, and turning the fan on brings it down to 40 C again. It s audible, but quieter than my laptop and not annoying. I liked the way the case came with everything I needed other than the Pi 4 and a suitable disk drive. There was an included PSU (a proper USB-C PD device, UK plug), the heatsink/fan is there, the USB/SATA converter is there and even an SD card is provided (though that s just because I had a pre-order). Speaking of the SD, I only needed it for initial setup. Recent Pi 4 bootloaders are capable of booting directly from USB mass storage devices. So I upgraded using the RPi EEPROM Recovery image (which just needs extracted to the SD FAT partition, no need for anything complicated - boot with it and the screen goes all green and you know it s ok), then created a FAT partition at the start of the drive for the kernel / bootloader config and a regular EXT4 partition for root. Copies everything over, updated paths, took out the SD and it all just works happily.

Summary My main complaint is the broken USB port, which feels like the result of a cheap connector. For a front facing port expected to see more use than the rear ports I think there s a reasonable expectation of robustness. However I m an early adopter and maybe future runs will be better. Other than that I m pretty happy. The case is exactly the sort of thing I wanted; I was looking for something that would turn the Pi into a box that can sit on my desk on the network and that I don t have to worry about knocking wires out of or lots of cables hooking bits up. Everything being included made it very convenient to get up and running. I still haven t poked the Pi that hard, but first impressions are looking good for it being a trouble free ARM64 dev box in the corner, until I can justify a HoneyComb.

For my PhD work, I've been working on preparing an experimental branch of StrIoT for merging down to the main branch. This has been a long-lived branch (a year!) within which I've been exploring some ideas. Some of the code I want to keep, and some I don't. The history of the experimental branch is consequently messy. Looking it over and considering what a reviewer needs to see, there's a lot of things that are irrelevant and potentially distracting. And so, I've been going through an iterative process of steadily whittling down the history to the stuff that matters: some strings of commits are dropped, others squashed together, and others re-ordered. The resulting branch is a historic fiction. This is common practice. Joey Hess ruminated about it 5 years ago in "our beautiful fake histories", pointing out that the real history is also useful, and perhaps worth preserving. After a recent conversation with my supervisor I realised the situation was analagous to writing a research paper (or a thesis): the process of getting to the conclusion which the thesis documents is messy, with false starts, wrong directions, and plenty of roads-not-travelled. The eventual write-up focusses on the path that lead to the conclusion, and a lot of the side-quest stuff disappears. The "true history" then, is captured elsewhere: in lab books, diaries and the like, and these have their own value. So do my messy exploratory branches, before they've been cleaned up for merging.

After almost two years of development, version 3.0 of QSoas is finally out ! It brings in a number of new features. An expert mode for fitting Undoubtedly the most important feature in the new version is a complete upgrade of the fit system, which now features an expert mode, turned on by using the /expert=true option with the fit commands. The expert mode features a command prompt that looks like the normal command prompt, in which it is possible:

• to fix/unfix, set, reset and load ans save parameters;
• export parameters or computed datasets;
• launch the fit;
• select fit engines and configure them;
• list of all the fits that were run in the session with their starting and finishing parameters (see picture), and reuse them;
• run scripts;
• fit data completely non-interactively;
• and, last but not least, perform parameter space exploration, which consists in running (automatically) a number of fits with different (random) starting parameters to maximize the chances of finding out the best parameters for the fit, avoiding local minima.

The latter feature is very important when running fits with many parameters. In that case, there are a number of local minima, and it is necessary to try a number of different starting parameters to really find the best parameters. The new parameter space exploration feature makes it much easier than before, with an interface that allows easily finding the best parameters tried so far and reuse them. A new documentation system Another very important update is the inclusion of a new, offline, documentation system. The documentation features browsing via table of contents, a command index and text search. It also features the possibility to copy commands from the help to the command prompt, or even run them directly. To top it all, it comes with a series of startup tips that might teach you a thing or two about QSoas (try hitting Show random to learn new tricks !). Many other features For the full list of changes, please see the changelog. Apart from the changes described above, these are my favorites:

• running the command from the menu now gives a dialog box for selecting all the arguments and options, which is very useful to discover the possibilities of the various commands;
• features that make the statistics and meta-data much easier to use with commands like apply-formula, like automatic code completion;
• a new system for permanently storing meta-data using record-meta;
• a new fit for fitting implicit equations, in which one cannot express \(y = f(x)\), but only \(f(x,y)=0\);
• and, of course, a brand shiny new logo by Marta Meneghello !

To get the new version, you can just download the source code from the downloads page, where you can also purchase precompiled versions for Windows and MacOS. You can also clone the source from the GitHub repository. About QSoasQSoas is a powerful open source data analysis program that focuses on flexibility and powerful fitting capacities. It is released under the GNU General Public License. It is described in Fourmond, Anal. Chem., 2016, 88 (10), pp 5050 5052. Current version is 3.0. You can download its source code there (or clone from the GitHub repository) and compile it yourself, or buy precompiled versions for MacOS and Windows there.

Review: Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch

Publisher:	Riverhead Books
Copyright:	2019
ISBN:	0-7352-1095-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	276

If you're familiar with linguistics as a field of scientific study (as opposed to the tool-based fields of grammar or writing advice), you'll be familiar with the dichotomy between written and spoken language. We may spend more time thinking about written language since it is central to most types of education and carries much of the intellectual and social weight of society. Linguists, however, see spoken language as more fundamental, since speech is wired into our brains and universal in human societies. Written language is a recent and somewhat artificial invention. One also learns from linguistics that spoken language does not follow many of the rules of written language that we painstakingly memorized in school. In casual speech, people split infinitives, speak in partial and run-on sentences, ignore nit-picking pronoun case rules, and rarely notice or care about the difference between less and fewer. Spoken language does have rules, but they're more subtle and nuanced than the grammar rules we learn in school. (I think the real fun of linguistics is separating the rules that native speakers follow effortlessly from the artificial rules used as education markers.) This is, in part, because nearly all spoken language is informal, whereas nearly all written language is formal. Enter the Internet, and enter this book. For the first time in human history we have both an explosion of informal writing and easy availability of that writing to linguists for study. Informal writing is not entirely new, of course. We've had personal letters for nearly as long as we've had writing, not to mention private notes, diaries, and other writing intended for tiny audiences. But consider who wrote private letters and, on top of that historical filter, whose private letters were preserved for linguistic research. Until relatively recently, only the upper classes were literate and had access to the infrastructure to write and send letters. Someone's letters or private notes were unlikely to be preserved unless they were someone famous and important, and thus often well-educated and more likely to take a more formal tone in writing. If you compare this to the Internet-driven blizzard of work and personal email, SMS conversations, chatrooms, and social media posts, the difference is obvious in both volume and level of informality. We're all on the Internet, we all read and write with a frequency that would be staggering to the average person from even fifty years ago, and while one may take a bit of additional care with a tricky email to one's manager, the SMS message to one's friend is as informal of a use of language as a conversation over coffee. Gretchen McCulloch is a professional linguist and Because Internet is about exactly this phenomenon: the new conventions of informal writing, how it has changed and evolved, and the new subtleties and shortcuts we've invented to make written communication easier. That goes beyond words and grammar to encompass punctuation, emoji and emoticons, memes and reaction gifs, and even the subtleties of timing, whitespace, and the construction of virtual places via our choices in how and where we write. This topic is my catnip, so it's not surprising I love this book. I've been heavily involved with online communities that communicate in writing since 1993 (making me, in McCulloch's classification, an Old Internet Person; each wave of introduction to the Internet has its own conventions that can be in conflict with later waves). I've now spent more than half my life carrying out most of my social activity and most of my closest friendships primarily in writing, so I found a lot of satisfaction in a linguistic study that takes that seriously rather than treating it as a curiosity. But, even better, I was amazed at how much I didn't know, in part because I am from a specific wave. I have a deep intuition for the Usenet conventions, but not as good of an understanding of the ones from AIM and LiveJournal one wave later (the Full Internet People). And I had a lot to learn about the conventions of the Instagram and Snapchat cluster (the Post Internet People, who have never known life without the Internet). One of the things that struck me while reading this book is how most of the language innovations that McCulloch describes are addressing the old complaint that written communication is inferior to face-to-face conversation because it lacks emotional nuance. My knee-jerk reply is that, no, written communication is full of emotional nuance and the complainer is just bad at reading it, but that's somewhat unfair. A better statement of the problem is that there is not a standardized language for emotional nuance in written communication, in part because it's so new in human history. Most humans are extremely good at reading facial expressions and body language for emotional cues, and those physical expressions are largely subconscious, reliable, and similar among different people (particularly within a culture; one can get in trouble with body language variations across cultures). This is not true of writing. With friends I've talked to over chat for twenty-five years, I can read volumes about their emotional state in a couple of short lines of text. But with strangers, despite decades of Internet communications, I will still misread cues and misinterpret simple intentions. The other standard response to this complaint is that it is possible to put extensive emotional nuance into formal writing. Just get better at writing! This is true, but unhelpful. There's a reason why we give book contracts to people who are very good at investing formal writing with emotional nuance. It's difficult, time-consuming, and requires a great deal of practice. That may be appropriate for formal, paid writing, but it won't do for informal writing, which by definition needs to be as effortless as possible. It's therefore unsurprising that once millions of people were using the Internet regularly for informal writing, they started adding new mechanisms, shortcuts, and conventions for emotional nuance. The standardization is growing, but conventions still vary widely between waves of Internet users. One of the most fascinating parts of this book for me was McCulloch's explanation of why periods (and, to a lesser extent, capital letters) in short chat messages are perceived by younger users as harsh or passive-aggressive. I still have the formal writing mindset of treating proper capitalization and punctuation as a point of pride, but McCulloch makes an excellent argument for letting go of my biases and understanding how and why language is changing. The realization I had while reading this is that many of the changes that look like sloppiness or laziness to someone trained in formal writing have the effect of giving language greater dynamic range. If one always uses periods uniformly, the period becomes meaningless except as a sentence boundary (which is redundant with newlines in most short informal chat messages). If one normally doesn't use it, and then suddenly starts using it, the period can carry semantic weight. It can convey a snippy tone of voice, a note of annoyance, or other subtle shades of meaning. I still use periods in most of my Slack messages because habits are hard to break, but I'm remembering to leave them off some of the time and paying more attention to what emotional weight they're carrying when present. Because Internet is therefore the rare book that meets the bar of changing my day-to-day behavior. "lol" is another excellent example that McCulloch spends some time on. It started life as LOL, an abbreviation for "laughing out loud," and that's still how it's stuck in my head. But, as McCulloch explains, it no longer means that to newer waves of Internet users. It now carries a far more complicated and nuanced meaning that has very little to do with physical laughter and that doesn't easily translate to a single word or sentence. I went from being mildly irritated by and mildly superior towards the ubiquitous "lol" to realizing that it's a fascinating new word that carries primarily emotional nuance and that I don't understand well enough to read or use properly (yet). One more example of the type of analysis McCulloch brings to this book: emoji. The tendency when talking about emoji is to treat them as rebuses (pictures that stand in for a word, or at least a specific concept). They are sometimes used that way, but McCulloch argues that they more often function in the same role that gestures play in informal speech, including the gestures that have no simple name and no independent meaning outside of the context of the words being said at the same time. This seems obvious in retrospect, but before reading Because Internet I had never thought about what a gesture is, what function it plays in speech, and how that could be translated into informal written communication. If you're as interested in this area as I am, this is great stuff. I'd seen several mentions of this book go past on Twitter and kept holding off because I had lots of things to read and was worried it would only cover the superficial things I already knew as a long-time Internet user who has listened to a few lectures on linguistics. That was not the case at all. I learned so much from this book and had a delightful time reading it. If you're also interested in these topics, recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

It s the end of CentOS as we know it Earlier this week, the CentOS project announced the shift to CentOS stream. In a nutshell, this means that they will discontinue being a close clone of RHEL along with security updates, and instead it will serve as a development branch of RHEL. As you can probably imagine (or gleam from the comments in that post I referenced), a lot of people are unhappy about this. One particular quote got my attention this morning while catching up on this week s edition of Linux Weekly News, under the distributions quotes section:

I have been doing this for 17 years and CentOS is basically my life s work. This was (for me personally) a heart wrenching decision. However, i see no other decision as a possibility. If there was, it would have been made.Johnny Hughes

I feel really sorry for this person and can empathize, I ve been in similar situations in my life before where I ve poured all my love and energy into something and then due to some corporate or organisational decisions (and usually poor ones), the project got discontinued and all that work that went into it vanishes into the ether. Also, 17 years is really long to be contributing to any one project so I can imagine that this must have been especially gutting.

Throw me a freakin bone here I m also somewhat skeptical of how successful CentOS Stream will really be in any form of a community project. It seems that Red Hat is expecting that volunteers should contribute to their product development for free, and then when these contributors actually want to use that resulting product, they re expected to pay a corporate subscription fee to do so. This seems like a very lop-sided relationship to me, and I m not sure it will be sustainable in the long term. In Red Hat s announcement of CentOS Stream, they kind of throw the community a bone by saying In the first half of 2021, we plan to introduce low- or no-cost programs for a variety of use cases - it seems likely that this will just be for experimental purposes similar to the Windows Insider program and won t be of much use for production users at all. Red Hat does point out that their Universal Base Image (UBI) is free to use and that users could just use that on any system in a container, but this doesn t add much comfort to the individuals and organisations who have contributed huge amounts of time and effort to CentOS over the years who rely on a stable, general-purpose Linux system that can be installed on bare metal.

Way forward for CentOS users Where to from here? I suppose CentOS users could start coughing up for RHEL subscriptions. For many CentOS use cases that won t make much sense. They could move to another distribution, or fork/restart CentOS. The latter is already happening. One of the original founders of the CentOS project, Gregory Kurtzer, is now working on Rocky Linux, which aims to be a new free system built from the RHEL sources. Some people from Red Hat and Canonical are often a bit surprised or skeptical when I point out to them that binary licenses are also important. This whole saga is yet another data point, but it proves that yet again. If Red Hat had from the beginning released RHEL with free sources and unobfuscated patches, then none of this would ve been necessary in the first place. And while I wish Rocky Linux all the success it aims to achieve, I do not think that working for free on a system that ultimately supports Red Hat s selfish eco-system is really productive or helpful. The fact is, Debian is already a free enterprise-scale system already used by huge organisations like Google and many others, which has stable releases, LTS support and ELTS offerings from external organisations if someone really needs it. And while RHEL clones have come and gone through the years, Debian s mission and contract to its users is something that stays consistent and I believe Debian and its ideals will be around for as long as people need Unixy operating systems to run anywhere (i.e. a very long time). While we sometimes fall short of some of our technical goals in Debian, and while we don t always agree on everything, we do tend to make great long-term progress, and usually in the right direction. We ve proved that our method of building a system together is sustainable, that we can do so reliably and timely and that we can collectively support it. From there on it can only get even better when we join forces and work together, because when either individuals or organisations contribute to Debian, they can use the end result for both private or commercial purposes without having to pay any fee or be encumbered by legal gotchas. Don t get caught by greedy corporate motivations that will result in you losing years of your life s work for absolutely no good reason. Make your time and effort count and either contribute to Debian or give your employees time to do so on company time. Many already do and reap the rewards of this, and don t look back. While Debian is a very container and virtualization friendly system, we ve managed to remain a good general-purpose operating system that manages to span use cases so vast that I d have to use a blog post longer than this one just to cover them. And while learning a whole new set of package build chain, package manager and new organisational culture and so on can be uhm, really rocky at the start, I d say that it s a good investment with Debian and unlikely to be time that you ll ever felt was wasted. As Debian project leader, I m personally available to help answer any questions that someone might have if they are interested in coming over to Debian. Feel free to mail leader_AT_debian.org (replace _AT_ with @) or find me on the oftc IRC network with the nick highvoltage. I believe that together, we can make Debian the de facto free enterprise system, and that it would be to the benefit of all its corporate users, instead of tilting all the benefit to just one or two corporations who certainly don t have your best interests in mind.

Issues with Farm Laws While I have written about the farm laws a bit sometime back. The issue is still in the nation s eye and that is due to the policies which have been done. I have been reading up on it quite a bit and also have been seeing what has been happening in here and now. The problems are with the three bills themselves which I have shared as below Click to access farmers-produce-trade-and-commerce-promotion-and-facilation-bill.pdf Click to access farmers-empowerment-and-protection-bill.pdf Click to access essential-commodities-bill-2020.pdf Biggest issue with the laws While there are many issues with the laws themselves but for me the biggest issue is that the fundamental right of the farmer to get justice via civil courts has been railroaded. From the laws itself. Standard disclaimer not a lawyer, please consult one for any issues per-se.

Farmers-produce-trade-and-commerce (promotion and facilitation-bill) 2020 Page 4 Chapter 3 Section 8 (1)8. (1) In case of any dispute arising out of a transaction between the farmer and a trader under section 4, the parties may seek a mutually acceptable solution through conciliation by filing an application to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate who shall refer such dispute to a Conciliation Board to be appointed by him for facilitating the binding settlement of the dispute. (2) Every Board of Conciliation appointed by the Sub-Divisional Magistrate under sub-section (1), shall consist of a chairperson and such members not less than two and not more than four, as the Sub-Divisional Magistrate may deem fit.10 (5) If the parties to the transaction under sub-section (1) are unable to resolve the dispute within thirty days in the manner set out under this section, they may approach the Sub-Divisional Magistrate concerned who shall be the Sub-Divisional Authority for settlement of such dispute. (8) Any party aggrieved by the order of the Sub-Divisional Authority may prefer an appeal before the Appellate Authority (Collector or Additional Collector nominated by the Collector) within thirty days of such order who shall dispose of the appeal within thirty days from the date of filing of such appeal. 10. (1) Any person aggrieved by an order under section 9 may, prefer an appeal within sixty days from the date of such order, to an officer not below the rank of Joint Secretary to the Government of India to be nominated by the Central Government for this purpose: Page 6 of the bill. 13. No suit, prosecution or other legal proceedings shall lie against the Central Government or the State Government, or any officer of the Central Government or the State Government or any other person in respect of anything which is in good faith done or intended to be done under this Act or of any rules or orders made thereunder. Page 7 of the bill, 15. No civil court shall have jurisdiction to entertain any suit or proceedings in respect of any matter, the cognizance of which can be taken and disposed of by any authority empowered by or under this Act or the rules made thereunder. Now the same laws have been reiterated for the farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020. The problem is that too much power is being put into the hands of the executive. All the three, whether it is SDM (Sub-Divisional Magistrate) , the Appellate Authority or the Government Secretary directly are subservient to the whims and fancies of the Central Govt. They after all get their salaries from the Govt. itself. So there will be no independent oversight to any injustices done to the farmer. The third bill i.e. the Essential Commodities Bill, 2020 does away with stock limits on traders and big players like Adani and Ambani. This means that both these players can take and keep produce at their end thereby forcing consumers like you and me who at the retail end would have to pay higher prices for fruits and vegetables while from the producer they will take at the lowest price possible. While I have shared is just one of the points. That is the reason why even the Supreme Court bar association which almost never takes part in politics has been forced to take sides with the farmers. In many ways, one is forced to remember the Emergency Update 11/12/20 Came across this article on the wire which tells how everybody s rights, not just the farmer s rights are being shod over. I think it depicts correctly the signs of time to come. While arguing on SM, also came to know about Article 300 (1), thanks to Sachin Kumar which shows multiple instances where Government was sued because somebody was working in official capacity and did mistakes, malafide or otherwise and it was the state who was made to pay. FWIW, today farmers from Maharashtra, my state arrived at Delhi border where they were also kept at bay. I did come across an infographic which shows how the various states have fared. Most tellingly, is the state of Bihar. It was in 2006 (one of the most backward states) where APMC was taken off. While others have tried to paint a flattering picture of Bihar, they have failed to share that in the interim 15 odd years, there hasn t been any sort of infrastructure created for farmers which is the reason it is still the lowest earner. These are the last available figures we have about the farmer s income. From 2014 to 2020 there hasn t been any update.

Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Household 2013 Copyright GOI,

This concludes just one portion of the bill. I will take other parts of the bill. I may dwell on some other parts as and when I have the time. A cartoon which depicts the current issue

I stand with farmers Copyright Sanitary Panels

Too much democracy Amitabh Kant Yesterday, the Niti Aayog chief Amitabh Kant remarked that we are too much of a democracy at an event called for Atmanirbhar Bharat which is basically a coinage for import substitution. Whether this is desirable or not I have argued and if needed will re-argue the same later as well. What is and was interesting were the gentleman s context, the media reactions and our overall Democracy Index which has been going downhill for quite some years. Now the gentleman who is the Niti Aayog chief and who is supposed to have the ear of the Prime Minister had opined it in an event organized by Swarajya Magazine (a far-right magazine) known to be Islamophobic and all things undemocratic. It has been a target of defundthehate campaign and with good reason. But that s a different story altogether. His full statement was as below

Tough reforms are very difficult in the Indian context, as we are too much of a democracy but the government has shown courage and determination in pushing such reforms across sectors, including mining, coal, labour and agriculture. Niti Aayog chief. The upper quotation remarks and the statement has been from the article in Indian Express which I have linked to. I have archived it as a pdf just in case the link goes dead. Yesterday, after the statement became viraled, tweets of media houses which shared the tweet suddenly become unavailable. Seems too much democracy, became too little democracy all of a sudden. I think Mr. Amitabh Kant didn t visualize as the opposition as well as most people who are on Twitter to share their opinion on the same. Few examples

Too much Democracy copyright Satish Acharya

Too much democracy Illustration and Copyright Alok

Sterlite protest 13 dead, 100 injured Copyright Business Standard too much democracy

Erosion of Democracy V-dem institute Copyright The Hindu Web Team

The last one requires a bit more information. This comes from V-Dem Institute which is an independent research institute based out of Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. I am gonna leave the methods they use for another day as the blog post itself has become rather big/large. Apart from that is the Economists own Democracy Index -2019 Click to access democracy-index-2019.pdf Now for many people, both the V-Dem report and the Economist Index are some sort of attack against India. Doesn t matter that in V-Dem 200+ countries have been taken a variety of indicators and data or the Economist which has data from 150+- countries. Somehow India is supposed to be bigger than all these countries, they do think that other countries data specifically our neighbor China or any other neighbor, those are all accurate. How the dissonance is, has to be gauged from statements of various people. Update 11/12/20 Sadly, the newest V-Dem report marks India as getting into authoritarianism. Gag on Press and Media owners I had shared about the gag on the press especially with respect to western media or reports or anything. This news made its way to straitstimes which normally covers a wide-range of stories covering East Asia vis-a-vis India/South-East Asia. What has also been a big worry that most of the media has been in the hands of a few people. Caravan ran a story on the same in 2016, it has been four years, god only knows what the current situation might be. Any wonder that there is dearth of investigative journalism in India.

India media ownership 2016 Copyright Caravan

Incidentally, a reporter called Akarshan Uppal, who is a reporter on a channel called IBN24 had showecased just few days back how Adani has got land which was shot down for land change use in 2017 to 2020 around 100 acres. There seem to be very less details as to how the land was acquired, whose land it was etc. etc. The reporter was supposedly following a story on drugs on which he was attacked and is now lying in hospital.

Akarshan Uppal Reporter, IBN24 Copyright IBN24

While it would take a whole article/blog post to talk about either Adani or Ambani, in the recent case, the land that has been taken over by Adani is 100 acres and there are private rail lines. And all of this was secret till few days back. The place where these massive godowns/silos have been made are Panipat s Jondhan Kalan and Naultha villages in Haryana. This is Adani AgiLogistics. Almost 7 odd companies have registered and come up in the last couple of years. As can be seen, almost all have come up within the last 2-3 years. Seems to be a lot of coincidence, isn t it?

Personal Anecdote on Data Collection and child marriages in India.

Around 1995 -96 when Internet had started to become a thing in India, there had been quite a few non-profits which were working on various issues. One of those which I initially came in contact with and which I found to be a bit absurd was non-profit which was working in the field of women against Violence. Now it is and was not the concept or the idea which was absurd to me, it was what these women were doing. Instead of the traditional ways in which you counsel women and try and figure out issues, these women were collecting data points from newspapers and magazines. This was way way before data science became a thing in India. They had their own structure where a story about violence against women which would be above the fold would be 5 points, the one below 2.5 points, in inner pages, it would be less and less. Patriarchy at that time was so strong, even today is but at that time it was such, that it felt a waste of time. I did consult them but never said that but did privately feel the above. In hindsight, they were doing the right thing and yet even today crimes against women goes unreported and is suppressed by both State and Central Governments as well as NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau). Interestingly, just few days back, the case against M.J. Akbar by Priya Ramani had taken a back seat and the defamation case by M.J. Akbar was taken forward. Even then, Priya Ramani s counsel s arguments were such that the court wound up in half an hour when they were expecting to do a whole day hearing. The next hearing would be happening today which I will look at in few hours from now. Why Priya Ramani was singled out rather than other tweets may probably be because she is an NRI and most NRI s usually do not want to be part of the bureaucratic Indian court system. This is also the reason that most companies from outside India especially those who are into startups prefer to change ownership, IPR etc. to their own or any country outside India which does make a loss to the exchequer. But this again is a story for another day. At the end, while I did not want to end on a negative note, it seems in many ways status-quo remains. For e.g. 2 years back, a BJP candidate (part of the ruling dispensation) had made a controversy saying that if they win the police won t interfere in child marriages. This is and was in Rajasthan where they have been trying to eradicate it forever. Till date, neither the NHRC (National Human Rights Commission) nor NCW (National Commission for Women) has taken cognizance of the statement. This is our state of democracy.

Business Insider has an informative article about the way that Google users can get locked out with no apparent reason and no recourse [1]. Something to share with clients when they consider putting everything in the cloud . Vice has an interestoing article about people jailbreaking used Teslas after Tesla has stolen software licenses that were bought with the car [2]. The Atlantic has an interesting article titled This Article Won t Change Your Mind [3]. It s one of many on the topic of echo chambers but has some interesting points that others don t seem to cover, such as regarding the benefits of groups when not everyone agrees. Inequality.org has lots of useful information about global inequality [4]. Jeffrey Goldberg has an insightful interview with Barack Obama for the Atlantic about the future course of American politics and a retrospective on his term in office [5]. A Game Designer s Analysis Of QAnon is an insightful Medium article comparing QAnon to an augmented reality game [6]. This is one of the best analysis of QAnon operations that I ve seen. Decrypting Rita is one of the most interesting web comics I ve read [7]. It makes good use of side scrolling and different layers to tell multiple stories at once. PC Mag has an article about the new features in Chrome 87 to reduce CPU use [8]. On my laptop I have 1/3 of all CPU time being used when it is idle, the majority of which is from Chrome. As the CPU has 2 cores this means the equivalent of 1 core running about 66% of the time just for background tabs. I have over 100 tabs open which I admit is a lot. But it means that the active tabs (as opposed to the plain HTML or PDF ones) are averaging more than 1% CPU time on an i7 which seems obviously unreasonable. So Chrome 87 doesn t seem to live up to Google s claims. The movie Bad President starring Stormy Daniels as herself is out [9]. Poe s Law is passe. Interesting summary of Parler, seems that it was designed by the Russians [10]. Wired has an interesting article about Indistinguishability Obfuscation, how to encrypt the operation of a program [11]. Joerg Jaspert wrote an interesting blog post about the difficulties packagine Rust and Go for Debian [12]. I think that the problem is many modern languages aren t designed well for library updates. This isn t just a problem for Debian, it s a problem for any long term support of software that doesn t involve transferring a complete archive of everything and it s a problem for any disconnected development (remote sites and sites dealing with serious security. Having an automatic system for downloading libraries is fine. But there should be an easy way of getting the same source via an archive format (zip will do as any archive can be converted to any other easily enough) and with version numbers.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/y4mnsech
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/yxctvs7t
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/glvopyp
• [4] https://inequality.org/
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/y3a8o87s
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/yxcxoc6z
• [7] http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yyr3fquz
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jk2i3HTMpw
• [10] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1327253991936454663.html
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/y22gfbaw
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/y4rg4wps

I have an Asustor (Nimbuster 4 / AS5304T) NAS at home, which allows me to perform regular backups. Unfortunately, I couldn't manage to find a way to configure remote backups from the NAS to rsync.net using the "Remote Sync" option of the "Backup & Restore" app provided in the ADM OS of the Asustor NAS. I'm used to using rsync -e ssh commands and would have expected some such configuration to be possible... it may just be some UI issue, but I couldn't find how to add one for rsync.net. I've then used the following workaround : the NAS can run a "Linux VM" (LXC ?) with the provided "Linux Center" app. It allows me to run a regular Debian installation inside this Linux guest. On which I installed backupninja, which performs backups over rsync, from the NAS filesystem, to the rsync.net remote. Along the way I had to overcome a few issues, whose documentation may be useful to others :

• the Debian server Linux guest created with the "Linux Center" app can be accessed using SSH with the admin/admin login/pwd (couldn't find a clue in the docs or the UI)
• the "Mount shared folder" option in the Debian guest configuration leads to the "/.share/" mountpoint which exibits the NAS filesystem under the Linux guest. This allows to retrieve files being backedup to the NAS to be copied out with rsync
• backupninja provides an rsync handler which allows to backup files with rsync, but some default options weren't valid (see debian bug #976650).
• the Seagate ironwolf HD less that 4TB aren't compatible with IHM (Ironwolf Health Management), even if the "Storage Manager" app tends to mislead you.

FTP master Unfortunately a day only has 24h. As the freeze is approaching, I had to concentrate a bit more on keeping my packages in shape. So this month I only accepted nine packages. The good news, I rejected no package. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 328. Debian LTS This was my seventy-seventh month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 22.75h. During that time I did LTS uploads of:

• [DLA 2446-1] moin security update for two CVEs
• [DLA 2451-1] libvncserver security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2459-1] golang-1.7 security update for two CVEs
• [DLA 2460-1] golang-1.8 security update for three CVEs
• [DLA 2468-1] tcpflow security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2469-1] qemu security update for five CVEs

I also started to work on x11vnc and slirp. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Debian ELTS This month was the twenty ninth ELTS month. During my allocated time I uploaded:

• ELA-319-1 for libass
• ELA-320-1 for tcpflow
• ELA-321-1 for qemu

Unfortunately I also had to give back some hours. Last but not least I did some days of frontdesk duties. Other stuff This month I uploaded new upstream versions of:

• golang-github-apparentlymart-go-cidr
• golang-github-apparentlymart-go-versions
• golang-github-bmatcuk-doublestar
• golang-github-cactus-go-statsd-client
• golang-github-cyberdelia-heroku-go
• golang-github-gin-contrib-cors
• golang-github-gin-contrib-gzip
• golang-github-jarcoal-httpmock
• golang-github-mattetti-filebuffer
• golang-github-nrdcg-goinwx
• golang-github-phpdave11-gofpdi
• golang-github-terra-farm-udnssdk
• meep
• golang-github-rs-zerolog

I fixed one or two bugs in:

• libctl

I improved packaging of:

• bottlerocket
• ent
• golang-github-abdullin-seq
• golang-github-bruth-assert
• golang-github-cnf-structhash
• golang-github-crossdock-crossdock-go
• golang-github-dchest-uniuri
• golang-github-deanthompson-ginpprof
• golang-github-dreamitgetit-statuscake
• golang-github-facebookgo-inject
• golang-github-facebookgo-structtag
• golang-github-gin-contrib-static
• golang-github-goji-httpauth
• golang-github-grafana-grafana-plugin-model
• golang-github-hansrodtang-randomcolor
• golang-github-hashicorp-terraform-svchost
• golang-github-icrowley-fake
• golang-github-jackc-fake
• golang-github-joyent-gocommon
• golang-github-joyent-gosdc
• golang-github-joyent-gosign
• golang-github-mitchellh-go-linereader
• golang-github-paypal-gatt
• golang-github-pearkes-cloudflare
• golang-github-pearkes-dnsimple
• golang-github-robfig-go-cache
• golang-github-sean pager
• golang-github-sean seed
• golang-github-shurcool-gopherjslib
• golang-github-vividcortex-mysqlerr
• golang-github-xlab-handysort
• golang-github-yudai-golcs
• golang-github-yvasiyarov-newrelic-platform-go
• golang-github-zenazn-goji
• golang-github-rs-xid

and there have been even some new packages:

• golang-github-rhnvrm-simples3
• golang-github-ua-parser-uap-go
• golang-github-knadh-koanf

As it is again this time of the year, I would also like to draw some attention to the Debian Med Advent Calendar. Like the past years, the Debian Med team starts a bug squashing event from the December 1st to 24th. Every bug that is closed will be registered in the calendar. So instead of taking something from the calendar, this special one will be filled and at Christmas hopefully every Debian Med related bug is closed. Don t hesitate, start to squash :-). The announcement on the mailing list can be found here.

TL;DR: Some mildly tricky tricks allow you to select subgoals by name, like in Isabelle. This leads to more readable proofs, and proofs that are more robust against changes.

The need for case names Consider the following Coq proof, right out of the respected Software Foundations book, Chapter Inductively Defined Propositions (and slightly simplified):

Lemma star_app: forall T (s1 s2 : list T) (re : reg_exp T),
  s1 =~ Star re ->
  s2 =~ Star re ->
  s1 ++ s2 =~ Star re.
Proof.
  intros T s1 s2 re H1.
  remember (Star re) as re'.
   generalize dependent s2.
  induction H1.
  - (* MEmpty *) discriminate.
  - (* MChar *) discriminate.
  - (* MApp *) discriminate.
  - (* MUnionL *) discriminate.
  - (* MUnionR *) discriminate.
  - (* MStar0 *)
    injection Heqre' as Heqre''. intros s H. apply H.
  - (* MStarApp *)
    injection Heqre' as Heqre''.
    intros s3 H1. rewrite <- app_assoc.
    apply MStarApp.
    + apply H1_.
    + apply IHexp_match2.
      * rewrite Heqre''. reflexivity.
      * apply H1.
Qed.

This is a very typical example for a proof by induction over an inductively defined relation (in this case, the relations s =~ re which indicates that the string s matches the regular expression re): After some preparation, the invocation of a tactic like induction (could also be inversion or others) creates a number of new goals, one of for each rule of the relation. Then the modern(!) Coq user uses proof bullets to focus the goals, one after another, in order, to solve them. We can see from this example that proof bullets (which were a big improvement) are not quite satisfactory, and the author of this proof felt the need to annotate each subproof with the case it corresponds to. But these are mere comments! This is unsatisfactory, as there is nothing keeping them correct as my proof changes. And anyone who came to Coq from Isabelle is just flabbergasted that the state of art in Coq is still at that level So, wouldn t it be great if

• I could focus goals by their name (e.g. MEmpty)
• Focus them in any order (so that refactoring of my data types do not break my proofs)
• This even worked when simultaneously inducting over or inverting multiple relations?

Simulating named goals in Coq Well, with a few tricks we can! It just takes three simple steps:

1. I load a small file full of hacks (explained below):

   Require Import NamedCases.

2. This allows me to prefix the type of the constructors of the inductive relations (i.e. the rules of the relation) with case <name>, , as follows:

   Reserved Notation "s =~ re" (at level 80).
   Inductive exp_match  T  : list T -> reg_exp T -> Prop :=
       MEmpty:
       case empty,
       [] =~ EmptyStr
       MChar:
       case char,
       forall x,
       [x] =~ (Char x)
       MApp:
       case app,
       forall s1 re1 s2 re2
       (H1 : s1 =~ re1)
       (H2 : s2 =~ re2),
       (s1 ++ s2) =~ (App re1 re2)
       MUnionL:
       case union_l,
       forall s1 re1 re2
       (H1 : s1 =~ re1),
       s1 =~ (Union re1 re2)
       MUnionR:
       case union_r,
       forall re1 s2 re2
       (H2 : s2 =~ re2),
       s2 =~ (Union re1 re2)
       MStar0:
       case star0,
       forall re,
       [] =~ (Star re)
       MStarApp:
       case star_app,
       forall s1 s2 re
       (H1 : s1 =~ re)
       (H2 : s2 =~ (Star re)),
       (s1 ++ s2) =~ (Star re)
     where "s =~ re" := (exp_match s re).

   This is the definition from the Software Foundations book; only the case <name>, lines are added.
3. Now I can change the proof: After the induction tactic I use ; name_cases to name the cases, and then I can use the relatively new named goal focusing feature ([name]: , which I suggested two years ago, and was implemented by Th o Zimmermann) to focus a specific case:

   Lemma star_app2: forall T (s1 s2 : list T) (re : reg_exp T),
     s1 =~ Star re ->
     s2 =~ Star re ->
     s1 ++ s2 =~ Star re.
   Proof.
     intros T s1 s2 re H1.
     remember (Star re) as re'.
      generalize dependent s2.
     induction H1; name_cases.
     [empty]:  
        discriminate.
      
     [char]:  
        discriminate.
      
     [app]:  
        discriminate.
      
     [unionL]:  
        discriminate.
      
     [unionR]:  
       discriminate.
      
     [star0]:  
       injection Heqre' as Heqre''. intros s H. apply H.
      
     [starApp]:  
       injection Heqre' as Heqre''.
       intros s3 H1. rewrite <- app_assoc.
       apply MStarApp; clear_names.
       + apply H1_.
       + apply IHexp_match2.
         * rewrite Heqre''. reflexivity.
         * apply H1.
       
   Qed.

   The comments have turned into actual names!

Goal focusing is now just much more reliable. For example, let me try to discharge the boring cases by using ; try discriminate after the induction. This means there are suddenly only two goals left. With bullets, the first bullet would now suddenly focus a different goal, and my proof script would likely fail somewhere. With named goals, I get a helpful error message No such goal: empty and I can t even enter the first subproof. So let me delete these goals and, just to show off, focus the remaining goals in the wrong order:

Lemma star_app: forall T (s1 s2 : list T) (re : reg_exp T),
  s1 =~ Star re ->
  s2 =~ Star re ->
  s1 ++ s2 =~ Star re.
Proof.
  intros T s1 s2 re H1.
  remember (Star re) as re'.
   generalize dependent s2.
  induction H1; name_cases; try discriminate.
  [starApp]:  
    injection Heqre' as Heqre''.
    intros s3 H1. rewrite <- app_assoc.
    apply MStarApp; clear_names.
    + apply H1_.
    + apply IHexp_match2.
      * rewrite Heqre''. reflexivity.
      * apply H1.
    
  [star0]:  
    injection Heqre' as Heqre''. intros s H. apply H.
   
Qed.

I did not explain the clear_names tactic yet that I had to use after apply MStarApp. What I am showing here is a hack, and it shows these case names are extra hypothesis (of a trivially true type CaseName), and this tactic gets rid of it.

Even better than Isabelle The above even works when there are multiple inductions/inversions involved. To give an example, let s introduce another inductive predicate, and begin proving a lemma that one can do by induction on one and inversion on the other predicate.

Inductive Palindrome  T  : list T -> Prop :=
  EmptyPalin:
  case emptyP,
  Palindrome []
  SingletonPalin:
  case singletonP,
  forall x,
  Palindrome [x]
  GrowPalin:
  case growP,
  forall l x,
  Palindrome l -> Palindrome ([x] ++ l ++ [x])
.
Lemma palindrome_star_of_two:
  forall T (s : list T) x y,
  Palindrome s -> s =~ Star (App (Char x) (Char y)) ->
  s = [] \/ x = y.
Proof.
  intros T s x y HPalin HRe.
  induction HPalin; inversion HRe; name_cases.

At this point we have four open goals. Can you tell why there are four, and which ones they are? Luckily, Show Existentials will tell us their names (and Coq 8.13 will just show them in the proof state window). These names not only help us focus the goal in a reliable way; they even assist us in understanding what goal we have to deal with. For example, the last goal arose from the GrowP rule and the StarApp rule. Neat!

  [emptyP_star0]:  
    left. reflexivity.
   
  [emptyP_starApp]:  
     left. reflexivity.
   
  [singletonP_starApp]:  
    inversion HRe; clear HRe.
    inversion H5; clear H5.
    inversion H10; clear H10.
    inversion H11; clear H11.
    subst.
    inversion H3.
   
 [growP_starApp]:  
    admit. (* I did not complete the proof *)
  

Under the hood (the hack) The above actually works, but it works with a hack, and I wish that Coq s induction tactic would just do the right thing here. I hope eventually this will be the case, and this section will just be curiosity but until, it may actually be helpful.

1. The trick¹ is to leave markers in the proof state. We use a dedicate type CaseName, and a hypothesis name : CaseName indicates that this goal arose from the that case.

   Inductive CaseName := CaseNameI.

   With this, we can write StarApp: forall (starApp : CaseName), to name this case.
2. For a little bit of polish, we can introduce notation for that:

   Notation "'case' x , t" := (forall  x : CaseName , t) (at level 200).

   This allows us to use the syntax you saw above.
3. To easily discharge these CaseName assumptions when using the introduction forms, I wrote these tactics:

   Ltac clear_names := try exact CaseNameI.
   Ltac named_constructor  := constructor; [ exact CaseNameI   idtac .. ].
   Ltac named_econstructor := econstructor; [ exact CaseNameI   idtac .. ].

4. Finally I wrote the tactic name_cases. What it does is relatively simple:

   For each subgoal: Take all hypotheses of type CaseName, concatenate their names, change the name of the current goal to that, and clear these hypotheses

   Unfortunately, my grasp of Coq tactic programming is rather rudimentary, and the only way I manged to solve this is a horrible monster of Ltac2, including hand-rolled imperative implementations of string concatenation and a little nested Ltac1 tactic within. You have been warned:

   From Ltac2 Require Import Ltac2.
   From Ltac2 Require Option.
   Set Default Proof Mode "Classic".
   Ltac name_cases := ltac2:(
     (* Horribly manual string manipulations. Does this mean I should
        go to the Ocaml level?
     *)
     let strcpy s1 s2 o :=
       let rec go := fun n =>
         match Int.lt n (String.length s2) with
           true => String.set s1 (Int.add o n) (String.get s2 n); go (Int.add n 1)
           false => ()
         end
       in go 0
     in
     let concat := fun s1 s2 =>
       let l := Int.add (Int.add (String.length s1) (String.length s2)) 1 in
       let s := String.make l (Char.of_int 95) in
       strcpy s s1 0;
       strcpy s s2 (Int.add (String.length s1) 1);
       s
     in
     Control.enter (let rec go () :=
       lazy_match! goal with
         [ h1 : CaseName, h2 : CaseName  - _ ] =>
         (* Multiple case names? Combine them (and recurse) *)
         let h := concat (Ident.to_string h1) (Ident.to_string h2) in
         Std.clear [h1; h2];
         let h := Option.get (Ident.of_string h) in
         assert ($h := CaseNameI);
         go ()
         [ _ : CaseName  - _ ] =>
         (* A single case name? Set current goal name accordingly. *)
         ltac1:(
           (* How to do this in ltac2? *)
           lazymatch goal with
             [ H : CaseName  - _ ] => refine ?[H]; clear H
           end
         )
         [  - _ ] =>
         Control.backtrack_tactic_failure "Did not find any CaseName hypotheses"
       end
     in go)
   ).

   If someone feels like re-implementing this in a way that is more presentable, I ll be happy to update this code (and learn something along the way

That s all it takes!

Conclusion With some mild hackery, we can get named cases in Coq, which I find indispensable in managing larger, evolving proofs. I wonder why this style is not more common, and available out of the box, but maybe it is just not known well enough? Maybe this blog post can help a bit here.

---

1. I have vague recollections of seeing at least parts of this trick on some blog some years ago, and I do not claim originality here.

This time a year ago, I visited Toronto, Canada for my first (and hopefully not last) time, for the Red Hat Java team's face-to-face meetings. The hotel we were staying in was right next to Nathan Phillip's Square, which is an open-air Ice Rink for the winter months. I love Ice Skating and rarely took opportunities to do it (even before Covid-19) so I decided to take full advantage of the locality. Skating was free, but boot rental was not, so I bought some new skates. That meant an interesting problem getting them home on the plane. I think I got out there about 5 times over 5 days. It was busy during the day and very quiet at other times. 8am worked pretty well. My local Ice Rink has been intermittently open over the year as and when the Lockdown rules have allowed it, but the combination of cold air, indoor circulation and strenuous activity seem to me to be very unsafe, so I won't risk it. In Newcastle, the Centre for Life usually puts an outdoor rink on around Christmas, which is very expensive to skate on. Unfortunately they've decided against it this year. Toronto was great for more than just Ice Skating! I had a fantastic time meeting my team members; good food, good drink (especially Ice Wine); The CN Tower; a funky music instrument shop, and the first Teenage Engineering OP-1 I've ever seen in the flesh; not much Maple syrup, which surprised me. Good coffee. A comfortable-feeling city. It'll probably be a long while before I travel for work (or anything else) quite like this again. I'm glad to have made the most of it, whilst I could!

Version 2.0 of ZFS has been released, it s now known as OpenZFS and has a unified release for Linux and BSD which is nice. One new feature is persistent L2ARC (which means that when you use SSD or NVMe to cache hard drives that cache will remain after a reboot) is an obvious feature that was needed for a long time. The Zstd compression invented by Facebook is the best way of compressing things nowadays, it s generally faster while giving better compression than all other compression algorithms and it s nice to have that in the filesystem. The PAM module for encrypted home directories is interesting, I haven t had a need for directory level encryption as block device encryption has worked well for my needs. But there are good use cases for directory encryption. I just did a quick test of OpenZFS on a VM, the one thing it doesn t do is let me remove a block device accidentally added to a zpool. If you have a zpool with a RAID-Z array and mistakenly add a new disk as a separate device instead of replacing a part of the RAID-Z then you can t remove it. There are patches to allow such removal but they didn t appear to get in to the OpenZFS 2.0.0 release. For my use ZFS on Linux 0.8.5 has been working fairly well and apart from the inability to remove a mistakenly added device I haven t had any problems with it. So I have no immediate plans to upgrade existing servers. But if I was about to install a new ZFS server I d definitely use the latest version. People keep asking about license issues. I m pretty sure that Oracle lawyers have known about sites like zfsonlinux.org for years, the fact that they have decided not to do anything about it seems like clear evidence that it s OK for me to keep using that code.

The Linux Foundation has published its annual report today. LWN calls it glossy and yeah, boy, it is shiny. So shiny that people that work in the publishing industry immediately see this has been produced with the Adobe toolchain which - unfortunately - is one of the big suites of software not yet available for Linux. Checking the PDF file metadata reveals the keywords "open source, open standards, open hardware, open data". That is what the Linux Foundation is about. Good stuff. The PDF producer meta data for the annual report PDF has been set to "Linux kernel 0.12.1 for Workgroups" and the PDF creator meta data element to "Sharp Zaurus XR-5000 (Maemo5) Edition". Somebody thought to better hide the real data and had some tongue-in-cheek ideas. Kudos. But nicer would have been to use Open Source software to produce the report, not? Running strings 2020-Linux-Foundation-Annual-Report_113020.pdf grep Adobe wc -l gives us 1229 lines and confirms the suspicion of the toolchain. A stale /Title (Annual Report 2020) /Producer (macOS Version 10.15.7 \(Build 19H15\) Quartz PDFContext) has been forgotten in the document to tell us about the platform. So, ladies and gentlemen, the Linux Foundation 2020 annual report has been produced on a Mac. Running Adobe Creative Cloud on MacOS Catalina 10.15.7. Which is proprietary software. Its kernel (and some userland pieces) are based on BSD. Not Linux.

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The image on the front page also struck me as a bit odd ... using a ballpoint pen on the laptop screen? Unbranded laptop. Unbranded cup in the foreground. Kid in the background not paying attention to his tablet. All of that cries stock image so loud it hurts. Google currently finds ~560 uses of the picture and any editorial use nicely tells us that it is Dragana Gordic / Shutterstock. The image is "Smiling mom working at home with her child on the sofa while writing an email. Young woman working from home, while in quarantine isolation during the Covid-19 health crisis". See the Daily Mail for a wonderful example of the working mum in context. I hope, if her laptop had been powered on, it would have run Linux. I mean, what else would still run on an old white MacBook with an Intel "Core 2 Duo" processor from 2008? Continue reading "No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report"