Benjamin Mako Hill: NSF CAREER Award
| Illustrator: | Pauline Baynes |
| Series: | Chronicles of Narnia #3 |
| Publisher: | Collier Books |
| Copyright: | 1952 |
| Printing: | 1978 |
| ISBN: | 0-02-044260-2 |
| Format: | Mass market |
| Pages: | 216 |
There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third Narnia book in original publication order (see my review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for more about reading order). You could arguably start reading here; there are a lot of references to the previous books, but mostly as background material, and I don't think any of it is vital. If you wanted to sample a single Narnia book to see if you'd get along with the series, this is the one I'd recommend. Since I was a kid, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has held the spot of my favorite of the series. I'm happy to report that it still holds up. Apart from one bit that didn't age well (more on that below), this is the book where the story and the world-building come together, in part because Lewis picks a plot shape that works with what he wants to write about. The younger two Pevensie children, Edmund and Lucy, are spending the summer with Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta because their parents are in America. That means spending the summer with their cousin Eustace. C.S. Lewis had strong opinions about child-raising that crop up here and there in his books, and Harold and Alberta are his example of everything he dislikes: caricatured progressive, "scientific" parents who don't believe in fiction or mess or vices. Eustace therefore starts the book as a terror, a whiny bully who has only read boring practical books and is constantly scoffing at the Pevensies and making fun of their stories of Narnia. He is therefore entirely unprepared when the painting of a ship in the guest bedroom turns into a portal to the Narnia and dumps the three children into the middle of the ocean. Thankfully, they're in the middle of the ocean near the ship in the painting. That ship is the Dawn Treader, and onboard is Caspian from the previous book, now king of Narnia. He has (improbably) sorted things out in his kingdom and is now on a sea voyage to find seven honorable Telmarine lords who left Narnia while his uncle was usurping the throne. They're already days away from land, headed towards the Lone Islands and, beyond that, into uncharted seas. MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. Obviously, Eustace gets a redemption arc, which is roughly the first half of this book. It's not a bad arc, but I am always happy when it's over. Lewis tries so hard to make Eustace insufferable that it becomes tedious. As an indoor kid who would not consider being dumped on a primitive sailing ship to be a grand adventure, I wanted to have more sympathy for him than the book would allow. The other problem with Eustace's initial character is that Lewis wants it to stem from "modern" parenting and not reading the right sort of books, but I don't buy it. I've known kids whose parents didn't believe in fiction, and they didn't act anything like this (and kids pick up a lot more via osmosis regardless of parenting than Lewis seems to realize). What Eustace acts like instead is an entitled, arrogant rich kid who is used to the world revolving around him, and it's fascinating to me how Lewis ignores class to focus on educational philosophy. The best part of Eustace's story is Reepicheep, which is just setup for Reepicheep becoming the best part of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Reepicheep, the leader of Narnia's talking mice, first appears in Prince Caspian, but there he's mostly played for laughs: the absurdly brave and dashing mouse who rushes into every fight he sees. In this book, he comes into his own as the courage and occasionally the moral conscience of the party. Caspian wants to explore and to find the lords of his past, the Pevensie kids want to have a sea adventure, and Eustace is in this book to have a redemption arc, but Reepicheep is the driving force at the heart of the voyage. He's going to Aslan's country beyond the sea, armed with a nursemaid's song about his destiny and a determination to be his best and most honorable self every step of the way, and nothing is going to stop him. Eustace, of course, takes an immediate dislike to a talking rodent. Reepicheep, in return, is the least interested of anyone on the ship in tolerating Eustace's obnoxious behavior and would be quite happy to duel him. But when Eustace is turned into a dragon, Reepicheep is the one who spends hours with him, telling him stories and ensuring he's not alone. It's beautifully handled, and my only complaint is that Lewis doesn't do enough with the Eustace and Reepicheep friendship (or indeed with Eustace at all) for the rest of the book. After Eustace's restoration and a few other relatively short incidents comes the second long section of the book and the part that didn't age well: the island of the Dufflepuds. It's a shame because the setup is wonderful: a cultivated island in the middle of nowhere with no one in sight, mysterious pounding sounds and voices, the fun of trying to figure out just what these invisible creatures could possibly be, and of course Lucy's foray into the second floor of a house, braving the lair of a magician to find and read one of the best books of magic in fantasy. Everything about how Lewis sets this scene is so well done. The kids are coming from an encounter with a sea serpent and a horrifically dangerous magic island and land on this scene of eerily normal domesticity. The most dangerous excursion is Lucy going upstairs in a brightly lit house with soft carpet in the middle of the day. And yet it's incredibly tense because Lewis knows exactly how to put you in Lucy's head, right down to having to stand with her back to an open door to read the book. And that book! The pages only turn forward, the spells are beautifully illustrated, and the sense of temptation is palpable. Lucy reading the eavesdropping spell is one of the more memorable bits in this series, at least for me, and makes a surprisingly subtle moral point about the practical reasons why invading other people's privacy is unwise and can just make you miserable. And then, when Lucy reads the visibility spell that was her goal, there's this exchange, which is pure C.S. Lewis:
"Oh Aslan," said she, "it was kind of you to come." "I have been here all the time," said he, "but you have just made me visible." "Aslan!" said Lucy almost a little reproachfully. "Don't make fun of me. As if anything I could do would make you visible!" "It did," said Aslan. "Did you think I wouldn't obey my own rules?"I love the subtlety of what's happening here: the way that Lucy is much more powerful than she thinks she is, but only because Aslan decided to make the rules that way and chooses to follow his own rules, making himself vulnerable in a fascinating way. The best part is that Lewis never belabors points like this; the characters immediately move on to talk about other things, and no one feels obligated to explain. But, unfortunately, along with the explanation of the thumping and the magician, we learn that the Dufflepuds are (remarkably dim-witted) dwarfs, the magician is their guardian (put there by Aslan, no less!), he transformed them into rather absurd shapes that they hate, and all of this is played for laughs. Once you notice that these are sentient creatures being treated essentially like pets (and physically transformed against their will), the level of paternalistic colonialism going on here is very off-putting. It's even worse that the Dufflepuds are memorably funny (washing dishes before dinner to save time afterwards!) and are arguably too dim to manage on their own, because Lewis made the authorial choice to write them that way. The "white man's burden" feeling is very strong. And Lewis could have made other choices! Coriakin the magician is a fascinating and somewhat morally ambiguous character. We learn later in the book that he's a star and his presence on the island is a punishment of sorts, leading to one of my other favorite bits of theology in this book:
"My son," said Ramandu, "it is not for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit."Lewis could have kept most of the setup, kept the delightfully silly things the Dufflepuds believe, changed who was responsible for their transformation, and given Coriakin a less authoritarian role, and the story would have been so much stronger for it. After this, the story gets stranger and wilder, and it's in the last part that I think the true magic of this book lies. The entirety of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a progression from a relatively mundane sea voyage to something more awe-inspiring. The last few chapters are a tour de force of wonder: rejuvenating stars, sunbirds, the Witch's stone knife, undersea kingdoms, a sea of lilies, a wall of water, the cliffs of Aslan's country, and the literal end of the world. Lewis does it without much conflict, with sparse description in a very few pages, and with beautifully memorable touches like the quality of the light and the hush that falls over the ship. This is the part of Narnia that I point to and wonder why I don't see more emulation (although I should note that it is arguably an immram). Tolkien-style fantasy, with dwarfs and elves and magic rings and great battles, is everywhere, but I can't think of many examples of this sense of awe and discovery without great battles and detailed explanations. Or of characters like Reepicheep, who gets one of the best lines of the series:
"My own plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek shall be the head of the talking mice in Narnia."The last section of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is one of my favorite endings of any book precisely because it's so different than the typical ending of a novel. The final return to England is always a bit disappointing in this series, but it's very short and is preceded by so much wonder that I don't mind. Aslan does appear to the kids as a lamb at the very end of the world, making Lewis's intended Christian context a bit more obvious, but even that isn't belabored, just left there for those who recognize the symbolism to notice. I was curious during this re-read to understand why The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is so much better than the first two books in the series. I think it's primarily due to two things: pacing, and a story structure that's better aligned with what Lewis wants to write about. For pacing, both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian have surprisingly long setups for short books. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by contrast, it takes only 35 pages to get the kids in Narnia, introduce all the characters, tour the ship, learn why Caspian is off on a sea voyage, establish where this book fits in the Narnian timeline, and have the kids be captured by slavers. None of the Narnia books are exactly slow, but Dawn Treader is the first book of the series that feels like it knows exactly where it's going and isn't wasting time getting there. The other structural success of this book is that it's a semi-episodic adventure, which means Lewis can stop trying to write about battles and political changes whose details he's clearly not interested in and instead focus wholeheartedly on sense-of-wonder exploration. The island-hopping structure lets Lewis play with ideas and drop them before they wear out their welcome. And the lack of major historical events also means that Aslan doesn't have to come in to resolve everything and instead can play the role of guardian angel. I think The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has the most compelling portrayal of Aslan in the series. He doesn't make decisions for the kids or tell them directly what to do the way he did in the previous two books. Instead, he shows up whenever they're about to make a dreadful mistake and does just enough to get them to make a better decision. Some readers may find this takes too much of the tension out of the book, but I have always appreciated it. It lets nervous child readers enjoy the adventures while knowing that Aslan will keep anything too bad from happening. He plays the role of a protective but non-interfering parent in a genre that usually doesn't have parents because they would intervene to prevent adventures. I enjoyed this book just as much as I remembered enjoying it during my childhood re-reads. Still the best book of the series. This, as with both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, was originally intended to be the last book of the series. That, of course, turned out to not be the case, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is followed (in both chronological and original publication order) by The Silver Chair. Rating: 9 out of 10
screenshot showing power consumption of server
:wq for today.
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during April 2021 (previous month):
django-email-from-template library to upload a Python wheel (.whl) file to PyPI. [...]
libsass-python (a Python implementation of the Sass CSS preprocessor) in order to make the build reproducible. (#319)
libsass-python (a Python implementation of the Sass CSS preprocessor) in order to make the build reproducible. [...
notes.git" repository.
date metadata attribute on reports, restoring the display of months on the homepage. [...]172 and 173 to Debian:
redis (5:6.2.2-1) (to experimental) New upstream release.
python-django:
2.2.20-1 New upstream security release.3.2-1 (to experimental) New major upstream release (release notes).hiredis (1.0.0-2) Build with SSL/TLS support (#987114), and overhaul various aspects of the packaging.
mtools (4.0.27-1) New upstream release.
avahi (CVE-2021-3468), exiv2 (CVE-2021-3482), file-roller (CVE-2020-36314), fluidsynth (CVE-2021-28421), gnuchess (CVE-2021-30184), gpac (CVE-2021-28300), imagemagick (CVE-2021-20309, CVE-2021-20243), ircii (CVE-2021-29376), jetty9 (CVE-2021-28163), libcaca (CVE-2021-30498, CVE-2021-30499), libjs-handlebars, libpano13, libpodofo (CVE-2021-30469, CVE-2021-30470, CVE-2021-30471, CVE-2021-30472), mediawiki, mpv (CVE-2021-30145), nettle (CVE-2021-20305), nginx (CVE-2020-36309), nim (CVE-2021-21372, CVE-2021-21373, CVE-2021-21374), node-glob-parent (CVE-2020-28469), openexr (CVE-2021-3474), python-django-registration (CVE-2021-21416), qt4-x11 (CVE-2021-3481), qtsvg-opensource-src (CVE-2021-3481), ruby-kramdown, scrollz (CVE-2021-29376), syncthing (CVE-2021-21404), thunderbird (CVE-2021-23991, CVE-2021-23992, CVE-2021-23993) & wordpress (CVE-2021-29447).
python-bleach, a whitelist-based HTML sanitisation library.
ChangeFeedbackControl request could have lead to out of bounds memory accesses in the X server. These issues could have led to privilege escalation for authorised clients, particularly on systems where the X server is running as a privileged user. I, therefore, issued both DLA 2627-1 and ELA 405-1 to address this problem.
Having destroyed the third Cherry Stream keyboard in 4 years, I wanted to try
a more substantial keyboard for a change. After some research I decided that I
want a mechanical, wired, tenkeyless keyboard without any fancy LEDs.
At the end I settled for a Keychron C1 with red switches. It meets all
requirements, looks very nice and the price is reasonable.
Surprise!
After the keyboard was delivered, I connected it to my Debian machine and was
unpleasantly surprised to notice that the Function-keys did not work at all.
The keyboard shares the Multimedia keys with the F-keys and you have an fn
key that supposedly switches between the two modes, like you re used to on a
laptop. On Linux, however you cannot access the F-keys at all: pressing fn
+ F1 or F1 makes no difference, you ll always get the Multimedia key.
Switching the keyboard between Windows and Mac mode makes no difference
either, in both modes the F-keys are not accessible.
Apparently Keychron is aware of the problem, because the quick start manual
tells you:
We have a Linux user group on facebook. Please search Keychron Linux Group on facebook. So you can better experience with our keyboard.Customer support at its finest! So at this point you should probably just send the keyboard back, get the refund and buy a proper one with functioning F-keys. The fix Test if this command fixes the issue and enables the
Fn + F-key-combos:
# as root:
echo 2 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode
fn +
F-key (or the other way round). To switch the default mode of the F-keys to
Function- or Multimedia-mode, press and hold fn + X + L for 4 seconds.
If everything works as expected, you can make the change permanent by creating
the file /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf and adding the line:
options hid_apple fnmode=2
hugo serve --baseUrl=http://localhost/
firefox https://localhost:1313/
.gitlab-ci.yml file shipped (but not
currently used) in the repository. If push comes to shove, we can just publish
the site elsewhere and point DNS there.
And, of course, if DNS fails us, then we're in trouble, but that's the
situation anyway: we can always register a new domain name for the status page
when we need to. It doesn't seem like a priority at the moment.
Comments and feedback are welcome!
This article was first published on the Tor Project Blog.
I wrote previously about my DeskPi Pro + 8GB Pi 4 setup. My main complaint at the time was the fact one of the forward facing USB ports broke off early on in my testing. For day to day use that hasn t been a problem, but it did mar the whole experience. Last week I received an unexpected email telling me The new updated PCB Board for your DeskPi order was shipped. . Apparently this was due to problems with identifying SSDs and WiFi/HDMI issues. I wasn t quite sure how much of the internals they d be replacing, so I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be most of them; including the PCB with the broken USB port on my device.
They also provided a set of feet allowing for vertical mounting of the device, which was a nice touch.
The USB/SATA bridge chip in use has changed; the original was:
usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=0562, bcdDevice= 1.09
usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-1: Product: RPi_SSD
usb 2-1: Manufacturer: 52Pi
usb 2-1: SerialNumber: DD5641988389F
usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=1153, bcdDevice= 0.01
usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
usb 2-1: Product: AS2115
usb 2-1: Manufacturer: ASMedia
usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 00000000000000000000
reset_raspberrypi to the /etc/initramfs-tools/modules file - that way this module is available in the initramfs, the appropriate pre-USB reset can happen and everything works just fine again.
The other niggle with the new kernel was a regular set of errors in the kernel log:
mmc1: Timeout waiting for hardware cmd interrupt.
mmc1: sdhci: ============ SDHCI REGISTER DUMP ===========
sdhci_iproc for now - I m not using the wifi so loss of MMC isn t a problem.
Credit to DeskPi for how they handled this. I didn t have to do anything and didn t even realise anything was happening until I got the email with my tracking number and a description of what they were sending out in it. Delivery took less than a week. This is a great example of how to handle a product issue - no effort required on the part of the customer.
| Series: | Beyond #1 |
| Publisher: | Kit Rocha |
| Copyright: | December 2013 |
| ASIN: | B00GIA4GN8 |
| Format: | Kindle |
| Pages: | 270 |
What I loved the most about Sikkim can t be captured on cameras. It can t be taped since it would be intrusive and it can t be replicated because it s unique and impromptu. It could be described, as I attempt to, but more importantly, it s something that you simply have to experience to know.
Now I first heard about this from a friend who claimed he d been offered free rides and Tropicanas by locals after finishing the Ladakh Marathon. And then I found Ronnie s song, whose chorus goes : Dil hai pahadi, thoda anadi. Par duniya ke maya mein phasta nahi (My heart belongs to the mountains. Although a little childish, it doesn t get hindered by materialism). While the song refers his life in Manali, I think this holds true for most Himalayan states.
Maybe it s the pleasant weather, the proximity to nature, the sense of safety from Indian Army being round the corner, independence from material pleasures that aren t available in remote areas or the absence of the pollution, commercialisation, & cutthroat-ness of cities, I don t know, there s just something that makes people in the mountains a lot kinder, more generous, more open and just more alive.
Sikkimese people, are honestly some of the nicest people I ve ever met. The blend of Lepchas, Bhutias and the humility and the truthfulness Buddhism ingrains in its disciples is one that ll make you fall in love with Sikkim (assuming the views, the snow, the fab weather and food, leave you pining for more).
As a product of Indian parenting, I ve always been taught to be wary of the unknown and to stick to the safer, more-travelled path but to be honest, I enjoy bonding with strangers. To me, each person is a storybook waiting to be flipped open with the right questions and the further I get from home, the wilder the stories get. Besides there s something oddly magical about two arbitrary curvilinear lines briefly running parallel until they diverge to move on to their respective paths. And I think our society has been so busy drawing lines and spreading hate that we forget that in the end, we re all just lines on the universe s infinite canvas. So the next time you travel, and you re in a taxi, a hostel, a bar, a supermarket, or on a long walk to a monastery (that you re secretly wishing is open despite a lockdown), strike up a conversation with a stranger. Small-talk can go a long way.
| Publisher: | O'Reilly |
| Copyright: | June 2020 |
| ISBN: | 1-4920-5172-1 |
| Format: | Trade paperback |
| Pages: | 287 |
This is the least important chapter in this book. At least, that's what we've been told by the React team. They didn't specifically say, "this is the least important chapter, don't write it." They've only issued a series of tweets warning educators and evangelists that much of their work in this area will very soon be outdated. All of this will change.This chapter is on suspense and error boundaries, with a brief mention of Fiber. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with this material as a reader who is new to React (and thus presumably the target audience). Should I use this feature? When? Why is this material in the book at all when it's so laden with weird stream-of-consciousness disclaimers? It's a thoroughly odd editorial choice. The testing chapter was similarly disappointing in that it didn't answer any of my concrete questions about testing. My instinct with testing UIs is to break out Selenium and do integration testing with its backend, but the authors are huge fans of unit testing of React applications. Great, I thought, this should be interesting; unit testing seems like a poor fit for UI code because of how artificial the test construction is, but maybe I'm missing some subtlety. Convince me! And then the authors... didn't even attempt to convince me. They just asserted unit testing is great and explained how to write trivial unit tests that serve no useful purpose in a real application. End of chapter. Sigh. I'm not sure what to say about this book. I feel like it has so many serious problems that I should warn everyone away from it, and yet the narrative introduction to React was truly fun to read and got me excited about writing React code. Even though the book largely fell apart as a reference, I still managed to write a working application using it as my primary reference, so it's not all bad. If you like the problem and solution style and want a highly conversational and informal tone (that errs on the side of weird breeziness), this may still be the book for you. Just be aware that the code examples are a trash fire, so if you learn from examples, you're going to have to chase them down via the GitHub repository and hope that they still exist (or get a later edition of the book where this problem has hopefully been corrected). Rating: 6 out of 10
remotes/private/attic/novena 822ca2bb add letter i sent to novena, never published
remotes/private/attic/secureboot de09d82b quick review, add note and graph
remotes/private/attic/wireguard 5c5340d1 wireguard review, tutorial and comparison with alternatives
remotes/private/backlog/dat 914c5edf Merge branch 'master' into backlog/dat
remotes/private/backlog/packet 9b2c6d1a ham radio packet innovations and primer
remotes/private/backlog/performance-tweaks dcf02676 config notes for http2
remotes/private/backlog/serverless 9fce6484 postponed until kubecon europe
remotes/private/fin/cost-of-hosting 00d8e499 cost-of-hosting article online
remotes/private/fin/kubecon f4fd7df2 remove published or spun off articles
remotes/private/fin/kubecon-overview 21fae984 publish kubecon overview article
remotes/private/fin/kubecon2018 1edc5ec8 add series
remotes/private/fin/netconf 3f4b7ece publish the netconf articles
remotes/private/fin/netdev 6ee66559 publish articles from netdev 2.2
remotes/private/fin/pgp-offline f841deed pgp offline branch ready for publication
remotes/private/fin/primes c7e5b912 publish the ROCA paper
remotes/private/fin/runtimes 4bee1d70 prepare publication of runtimes articles
remotes/private/fin/token-benchmarks 5a363992 regenerate timestamp automatically
remotes/private/ideas/astropy 95d53152 astropy or python in astronomy
remotes/private/ideas/avaneya 20a6d149 crowdfunded blade-runner-themed GPLv3 simcity-like simulator
remotes/private/ideas/backups-benchmarks fe2f1f13 review of backup software through performance and features
remotes/private/ideas/cumin 7bed3945 review of the cumin automation tool from WM foundation
remotes/private/ideas/future-of-distros d086ca0d modern packaging problems and complex apps
remotes/private/ideas/on-dying a92ad23f another dying thing
remotes/private/ideas/openpgp-discovery 8f2782f0 openpgp discovery mechanisms (WKD, etc), thanks to jonas meurer
remotes/private/ideas/password-bench 451602c0 bruteforce estimates for various password patterns compared with RSA key sizes
remotes/private/ideas/prometheus-openmetrics 2568dbd6 openmetrics standardizing prom metrics enpoints
remotes/private/ideas/telling-time f3c24a53 another way of telling time
remotes/private/ideas/wallabako 4f44c5da talk about wallabako, read-it-later + kobo hacking
remotes/private/stalled/bench-bench-bench 8cef0504 benchmarking http benchmarking tools
remotes/private/stalled/debian-survey-democracy 909bdc98 free software surveys and debian democracy, volunteer vs paid work
novena: the project is ooold now, didn't seem to fit a LWN
article. it was basically "how can i build my novena now" and "you
guys rock!" it seems like the MNT Reform is the brain child of
the Novena now, and I dare say it's even cooler!secureboot: my LWN editors were critical of my approach, and
probably rightly so - it's a really complex subject and I was
probably out of my depth... it's also out of date now, we did
manage secureboot in Debianwireguard: LWN ended up writing extensive coverage, and
I was biased against Donenfeld because of conflicts in a previous
projectdat: I already had written Sharing and archiving data sets with
Dat, but
it seems I had more to say... mostly performance issues, beaker, no
streaming, limited adoption... to be investigated, I guess?packet: a primer on data communications over ham radio, and the
cool new tech that has emerged in the free software world. those
are mainly notes about Pat, Direwolf, APRS and so
on... just never got around to making sense of it or really using
the tech...performance-tweaks: "optimizing websites at the age of http2",
the unwritten story of the optimization of this website with HTTP/2
and friendsserverless: god. one of the leftover topics at Kubecon, my notes
on this were thin, and the actual subject, possibly even
thinner... the only lie worse than the cloud is that there's no
server at all! concretely, that's a pile of notes about
Kubecon which I wanted to sort
through. Probably belongs in the attic now.astropy: "Python in astronomy" - had a chat with saimn
while writing about sigal, and it
turns out he actually works on free software in astronomy, in
Python... I actually expect LWN to cover this sooner than
later, after Lee Phillips's introduction to SciPyavaneya: crowdfunded blade-runner-themed GPLv3 simcity-like
simulator, i just have that link so farbackups-benchmarks: review of backup software through performance
and features, possibly based on those benchmarks, maybe based
on this list from restic although they refused
casync. benchmark articles are hard though, especially when
you want to "cover them all"... I did write a silly Attic vs
Bup back when those programs existed (2014), in a related
note...ideas/cumin: review of the Cumin automation tool from
WikiMedia Foundation... I ended up using the tool at work and
writing service documentation for itideas/future-of-distros: modern packaging problems and complex
apps, starting from this discussion about the removal of
Dolibarr from Debian, a summary of the thread from liw,
and ideas from joeyh (now from the outside of Debian), then
debates over the power of FTP masters - ugh, glad I
didn't step in that rat's nestideas/on-dying: "what happens when a hacker dies?" rather grim
subject, but a more and more important one... joeyh has ideas
again, phk as well, then there's a protocol for dying
(really grim)... then there are site policies like GitHub,
Facebook, etc... more in the branch, but that one I can't help but
think about now that family has taken a bigger place in my life...ideas/openpgp-discovery: OpenPGP discovery mechanisms (WKD, etc),
suggested by Jonas Meurer (somewhere?), only links to
Mailveloppe, LEAP, WKD (or is it WKS?), another
standard, probably would need to talk about OpenPGP CA now
and how Debian and Tor manage their keyrings... pain in the back.ideas/password-bench: bruteforce estimates for various password
patterns compared with RSA key sizes, spinoff of my smartcard
article, in
the crypto-bench, look at this shiny graph, surely that
must mean an article, right?ideas/prometheus-openmetrics: "Evolving the Prometheus exposition
format into a standard", seems like this happenedideas/telling-time: telling time to users is hard. xclock vs
ttyclock, etc. maybe gameclock and undertime as well? syncing time
is hard, but it turns out showing it is non trivial as
well... basically turning this bug report into an article. for
some reason I linked to this meme, derived from this
meme, presumably a premonition of my stupid idea of writing
undertime TIMEZONES!ideas/wallabako: "talk about wallabako, read-it-later + kobo
hacking", that's it, not even a link to the project!stalled/bench-bench-bench benchmarking http benchmarking tools, a
horrible mess of links, copy-paste from terminals, and ideas about
benchmarking... some of this trickled out into this benchmarking
guide at Tor, but not much more than the list of toolsstalled/debian-survey-democracy: "free software surveys and
Debian democracy, volunteer vs paid work"... A long standing
concern of mine is that all Debian work is supposed to be
volunteer, and paying explicitly for work inside Debian has
traditionally been frowned upon, even leading to serious drama and
dissent (remember Dunc-Tank)? back when I was writing for LWN,
I was also doing paid work for Debian LTS. I also learned
that a lot (most?) Debian Developers were actually being paid by
their job to work on Debian. So I was confused by this apparent
contradiction, especially given how the LTS project has been mostly
accepted, while Dunc-Tank was not... See also this talk at Debconf
16. I had hopes that this study would show the "hunch"
people have offered (that most DDs are paid to work on Debian) but
it seems to show the reverse (only 36% of DDs, and 18% of all
respondents paid). So I am still confused and worried about the
sustainability of Debian.
Every year since 2005 there is a very good, big and interesting Latin
American gathering of free-software-minded people. Of course, Latin
America is a big, big, big place, and it s not like we are the most
economically buoyant region to meet in something equiparable to
FOSDEM.
What we have is a distributed free software conference originally,
a distributed Linux install-fest (which I never liked, I am against
install-fests), but gradually it morphed into a proper conference:
Festival Latinoamericano de Instalaci n de Software Libre (Latin
American Free Software Installation Festival)
This FLISOL was hosted by the always great and always interesting
Rancho Electr nico, our favorite
local hacklab, and has many other interesting
talks.
I like talking about projects where I am involved as a
developer but this time I decided to do otherwise: I presented a
talk on the Jitsi videoconferencing server. Why? Because of the
relevance videoconferences have had over the last year.
So, without further ado Here is a video I recorded locally from the
talk I gave
(MKV), as
well as the slides
(PDF).
Back in 2005 we had Debconf in Helsinki. Earlier in the year I'd ended up invited to Canonical's Ubuntu Down Under event in Sydney, and one of the things we'd tried to design was a reasonable graphical boot environment that could also display status messages. The design constraints were awkward - we wanted it to be entirely in userland (so we didn't need to carry kernel patches), and we didn't want to rely on vesafb[1] (because at the time we needed to reinitialise graphics hardware from userland on suspend/resume[2], and vesa was not super compatible with that). Nothing currently met our requirements, but by the time we'd got to Helsinki there was a general understanding that Paul Sladen was going to implement this.
I had a twitter fight few days back with a gentleman and the article is a result of that fight. Sadly, I do not know the name of the gentleman as he goes via a psuedo name and then again I ve not taken permission from him to quote him in either way. So I will just state the observations I was able to make from the conversations we had. As people who read this blog regularly would know, I am and have been against Railway Privatization which is happening in India. And will be sharing some of the case studies from other countries as to how it panned out for them.
UK railway map with operators
Railway map of Japan with private ownership courtesy Wikimedia commons
U.S. Railway lines with the different owners 
Vaccine issues
Currently, though the issue has been the Vaccine and the pricing of the same. A good article to get a summation of the issues outlined has been shared on Economist. Another article that goes to the heart of the issue is at scroll. To buttress the argument, the SII chairman had shared this few weeks back
Adar Poonawala talking to Vishnu Som on Left, right center, 7th April 2021. 
Prices of AstraZeneca among various states and countries.Internet Freedom and Aarogya Setu App.
Internet Freedom had shared the chilling effects of the Aarogya Setu App. This had also been shared by FSCI in the past, and recently had their handle being banned on Twitter. This was also apparent in a legal bail order which the high court judge gave. While I won t go into the merits and demerits of the bail order, it is astounding for the judge to say that the accused, even though he would be on bail install an app. so he can be surveilled. And this is a high court judge, such a sad state of affairs. We seem to be putting up new lows every day when it comes to judicial jurisprudence. One interesting aspect of the whole case was shared by Aishwarya Iyer. She shared a story that she and her team worked on quint which raises questions on the quality of the work done by Delhi Police. This is of course, up to Delhi Police to ascertain the truth of the matter because unless and until they are able to tie in the PMO s office in for a leak or POTUS s office it hardly seems possible. For e.g. the dates when two heads of state can meet each other would be decided by the secretaries of the two. Once the date is known, it would be shared with the press while at the same time some sort of security apparatus would kick in place. It is incumbent, especially on the host to take as much care as he can of the guest. We all remember that World War 1 (the war to end all wars) started due to the murder of Archduke Ferdinand.
As nobody wants that, the best way is to make sure that a political murder doesn t happen on your watch. Now while I won t comment on what it would be, it would be safe to assume that it would be z+ security along with higher readiness. Especially if it as somebody as important as POTUS. Now, it would be quite a reach for Delhi Police to connect the two dates. They either will have to get creative with the dates or some other way. Otherwise, with practically no knowledge in the public domain, they can t work in limbo. In either case, I do hope the case comes up for hearing soon and we see what the Delhi Police says and contends in the High Court about the same. At the very least, it would be irritating for them to talk of the dates unless they can contend some mass conspiracy which involves the PMO (and would bring into question the constant vetting done by the Intelligence dept. of all those who work in PMO). And this whole case is to kind of shelter to the Delhi riots which happened in which majorly the Muslims died but their deaths lay unaccounted till date
Conclusion In Conclusion, I would like to share a bit of humor because right now the atmosphere is humorless, both with authoritarian tendencies of the Central Govt. and the mass mismanagement of public health which they now have left to the state to do as they fit. The peice I am sharing is from arre, one of my goto sites whenever I feel low.
I ve mostly had the preference of controlling my data rather than depend on someone else. That s one reason why I still believe email to be my most reliable medium for data storage, one that is not plagued/locked by a single entity. If I had the resources, I d prefer all digital data to be broken down to its simplest form for storage, like email format, and empower the user with it i.e. their data.
Yes, there are free services that are indirectly forced upon common users, and many of us get attracted to it. Many of us do not think that the information, which is shared for the free service in return, is of much importance. Which may be fair, depending on the individual, given that they get certain services without paying any direct dime.
Next.
