Have you ever been traveling, shot a ton of photos and videos, but were annoyed to find it was saturating the terrible wifi you had access to? Maybe you d wish the upload to pause until you get somewhere else, but then pausing syncing on your Nextcloud/Syncthing/Dropbox would also pause other syncing you didn t want to pause. Or you have trouble backing up your laptop when not at home, in a way that won t accidentaly eat up your cell phone data. There are ways to help with this: asynchronous transfer. Here s a lot of background. If you want to see how encrypted, onion-routed UUCP looks, skip ahead to the NNCP section! There is an old saying: When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. We have this wonderful tool called ssh available, and it is pervasive and well-understood, so we tend to use it. But we ve missed out on some benefits of asynchronous processing that we actually used to have more frequently. Of course, we are all used to some asynchronous services in our lives. Email is a popular example: most mail clients work offline and will transmit stored messages when the mail server becomes reachable. Mail servers themselves work that way, too. Many instant messaging platforms do as well. Even some backup systems do. Bacula/Bareos, for instance, spools all backup data to disk on the system connected to the tape drive, and from there to the tape itself. They do this for several reasons, but primarily the fact that if tape drives are not fed with data at their design speed, it can cause physical damage to the tape or even the drive. It causes the drive to have to pause, and seek backwards to reposition for the next write. This creates excessive travel of the tape over the write heads, causing a condition known as tape shine where the tape is damaged prematurely. Here are some problems people often run into when sending data across a network (or the Internet) synchronously:

• One side of the communication is much faster than the other
• Internet issues interrupting communications mid-stream
• Slow Internet causing processes to take much longer than planned, resulting in unexpected results or locking issues
• Physical damage due to performance issues

Of course, there are plenty of situations where synchronous communication is a must. For instance:

• When the status of the transaction at the remote end must be known immediately
• When there is insufficient space to spool a job s data

I suspect that the reason we don t do more asynchronous processing these days, despite it being strong in the Unix heritage, is the lack of modern tools to do it. Let s explore some more. Some of my use cases I run ZFS on all my systems that support it: file server, laptops, workstations, etc. It is only natural to use ZFS send/receive to do backups, and I do. However, when I am traveling, my laptop never gets backed up, because the backups are pulled from the backup system. Sure, there are ways around that; a VPN, for instance. But then we have the situation where sometimes I do not want to send the backup even if I have a working Internet connection: perhaps I m tethered to a mobile connection and it would be expensive to do so, or I m on hotel Wifi that is flaky and slow and I don t want to give up any of its meager bandwidth. I have another backup-related problem. I have a remote server, which until recently was using extremely slow disks. If I made significant changes, the backup would take the better part of a day. That s annoying when I try to back up hourly. So of course I had to implement locking, but then that means none of my other machines would back up that day either. Once I needed to transmit about 2TB of data. My home Internet connection was terribly slow, and I calculated it would take multiple months to do this. So I took to manually copying parts of the data to my laptop, and whenever I d find an airport or coffee shop with faster Internet than at home, I d send off those bits from it. But it took a ton of work. The bespoke asynchronous problem And that ton of work is perhaps why we aren t doing more of this. There s been no great standard solution, so it s all roll your own when you need to. So we just use ssh, because it s easier and usually good enough . But as I wrote in my recent article on airgapped backups, there are reasons to go async. Solutions Wouldn t it be great to be able to queue up data for a machine, and let it get there in whatever way it can? Maybe a fast Internet connection is found, or via Tor, or via copying to a USB stick, or via radio broadcast? It would make many of these scenarios a lot easier. And there are ways for this now, with modern security! We have some tools on Linux for this: git-annex for storage and migration, syrep for synchronization, and NNCP for file transfer and remote execution (could be combined with some of these other tools). Let s dive in to NNCP. NNCP If you already know UUCP, think of NNCP as UUCP brought into the modern era, with modern security and tools. Basically, NNCP permits you to send files to a remote system, request files from a remote system, and pipe data to an NNCP command that requests execution remotely. So you could, say, pipe a zfs send to NNCP which sends it to the remote and pipes it to zfs receive when it gets there. NNCP has a delay-tolerant, resumable protocol that can run over just about any reliable connection: TCP, serial, Tor, radios of various kinds, you name it. But that s not all; it also can dump its queue onto something like a USB stick for transport, or even make a tar-style stream that could be munged however you like. If you want to get fancy, you can assign priorities to data packets, so that, for instance, outbound email will always get sent before that 1TB file you ve got to send also. You can also configure it so that certain carriers handle certain priorities of data; your cell phone would only handle the most urgent, but a USB stick would take anything. NNCP is source-routed; you can tell it that the way that Bob reaches Alice is via Carl, then Betty. Bob can generate a message that will be sent along that route, fully encrypted and authenticated at each step of the way; Carl can t see the content of the message or even anything about it other than its next hop. How this helps Let s revisit some of my scnearios with NNCP. For the laptop being backed up, while traveling it can queue up its backups, or photos, or videos, or whatever. They could be triggered by a command when on a good connection, or automatically. The data could be copied to USB and given to a friend to transmit; perfectly safe due to encryption. Or it could all wait until arriving at home, safely out of your other syncing directories. The NNCP documentation has an example of this. For the server being backed up slowly, that s easily solved; the slow backup would simply be queued up, and transmitted and processed when it s ready. This wouldn t interrupt other backups. How about the 2TB transmission problem? That s also made a lot easier. A command could be run to fill up a USB stick with parts of the queue, then that USB stick plugged in and transmitted whenever at a fast location. Repeat as needed while the slow system continues its upload of the remaining bits. NNCP has a lot of interesting use cases documented as well. If you are already familiar with how public keys work in SSH, then NNCP should be immediately familiar as well. It is a similar concept (though arguably somewhat easier to set up). I am working on setting up a NNCP network, and will have more posts on how to do so once I ve got it going. In the meantime, the documentation for the project is also pretty good.

Jenkins in the Ops space is in general already painful. Lately the deprecation of the multiple-scms plugin caused some headache, becaue we relied heavily on it to generate pipelines in a Seedjob based on structure inside secondary repositories. We kind of started from scratch now and ship parameterized pipelines defined in Jenkinsfiles in those secondary repositories. Basically that is the way it should be, you store the pipeline definition along with code you'd like to execute. In our case that is mostly terraform and ansible. Problem Directory structure is roughly "stage" -> "project" -> "service". We'd like to have one job pipeline per project, which dynamically reads all service folder names and offers those as available parameters. A service folder is the smallest entity we manage with terraform in a separate state file. Now Jenkins pipelines are by intention limited, but you can add some groovy at will if you whitelist the usage in Jenkins. You have to click through some security though to make it work. Jenkinsfile This is basically a commented version of the Jenkinsfile we copy now around as a template, to be manually adjusted per project.

// Syntax: https://jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/
// project name as we use it in the folder structure and job name
def TfProject = "myproject-I-dev"
// directory relative to the repo checkout inside the jenkins workspace
def jobDirectory = "terraform/dev/$ TfProject "
// informational string to describe the stage or project
def stageEnvDescription = "DEV"
/* Attention please if you rebuild the Jenkins instance consider the following:
- You've to run this job at least *thrice*. It first has to checkout the
repository, then you've to add permisions for the groovy part, and on
the third run you can gather the list of available terraform folder.
- As a safeguard the first first folder name is always the invalid string
"choose-one". That prevents accidential execution of a random project.
- If you add new terraform folder you've to run the "choose-one" dummy rollout so
the dynamic parameters pick up the new folder. */
/* Here we hardcode the path to the correct job workspace on the jenkins host, and
   discover the service folder list. We have to filter it slightly to avoid temporary folders created by Jenkins (like @tmp folders). */
List tffolder = new File("/var/lib/jenkins/jobs/terraform $ TfProject /workspace/$ jobDirectory ").listFiles().findAll   it.isDirectory() && it.name ==~ /(?i)[a-z0-9_-]+/  .sort()
/* ensure the "choose-one" dummy entry is always the first in the list, otherwise
   initial executions might execute something. By default the first parameter is
   used if none is selected */
tffolder.add(0,"choose-one")
pipeline  
    agent any
    /* Show a choice parameter with the service directory list we stored
       above in the variable tffolder */
    parameters  
        choice(name: "TFFOLDER", choices: tffolder)
     
    // Configure logrotation and coloring.
    options  
        buildDiscarder(logRotator(daysToKeepStr: "30", numToKeepStr: "100"))
        ansiColor("xterm")
     
    // Set some variables for terraform to pick up the right service account.
    environment  
        GOOGLE_CLOUD_KEYFILE_JSON = '/var/lib/jenkins/cicd.json'
        GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS = '/var/lib/jenkins/cicd.json'
     
stages  
    stage('TF Plan')  
    /* Make sure on every stage that we only execute if the
       choice parameter is not the dummy one. Ensures we
       can run the pipeline smoothly for re-reading the
       service directories. */
    when   expression   params.TFFOLDER != "choose-one"    
    steps  
        /* Initialize terraform and generate a plan in the selected
           service folder. */
        dir("$ params.TFFOLDER ")  
        sh 'terraform init -no-color -upgrade=true'
        sh 'terraform plan -no-color -out myplan'
         
        // Read in the repo name we act on for informational output.
        script  
            remoteRepo = sh(returnStdout: true, script: 'git remote get-url origin').trim()
         
        echo "INFO: job *$ JOB_NAME * in *$ params.TFFOLDER * on branch *$ GIT_BRANCH * of repo *$ remoteRepo *"
     
     
    stage('TF Apply')  
    /* Run terraform apply only after manual acknowledgement, we have to
       make sure that the when     condition is actually evaluated before
       the input. Default is input before when. */
    when  
        beforeInput true
        expression   params.TFFOLDER != "choose-one"  
     
    input  
        message "Cowboy would you really like to run **$ JOB_NAME ** in **$ params.TFFOLDER **"
        ok "Apply $ JOB_NAME  to $ stageEnvDescription "
     
    steps  
        dir("$ params.TFFOLDER ")  
        sh 'terraform apply -no-color -input=false myplan'
         
     
     
 
    post  
            failure  
                // You can also alert to noisy chat platforms on failures if you like.
                echo "job failed"
             
         

job-dsl side of the story Having all those when conditions in the pipeline stages above allows us to create a dependency between successful Seedjob executions and just let that trigger the execution of the pipeline jobs. This is important because the Seedjob execution itself will reset all pipeline jobs, so your dynamic parameters are gone. By making sure we can re-execute the job, and doing that automatically, we still have up to date parameterized pipelines, whenever the Seedjob ran successfully. The job-dsl script looks like this:

import javaposse.jobdsl.dsl.DslScriptLoader;
import javaposse.jobdsl.plugin.JenkinsJobManagement;
import javaposse.jobdsl.plugin.ExecuteDslScripts;
def params = [
    // Defaults are repo: mycorp/admin, branch: master, jenkinsFilename: Jenkinsfile
    pipelineJobs: [
        [name: 'terraform myproject-I-dev', jenkinsFilename: 'terraform/dev/myproject-I-dev/Jenkinsfile', upstream: 'Seedjob'],
        [name: 'terraform myproject-I-prod', jenkinsFilename: 'terraform/prod/myproject-I-prod/Jenkinsfile', upstream: 'Seedjob'],
    ],
]
params.pipelineJobs.each   job ->
    pipelineJob(job.name)  
        definition  
            cpsScm  
                // assume admin and branch master as a default, look for Jenkinsfile
                def repo = job.repo ?: 'mycorp/admin'
                def branch = job.branch ?: 'master'
                def jenkinsFilename = job.jenkinsFilename ?: 'Jenkinsfile'
                scm  
                    git("ssh://git@github.com/$ repo .git", branch)
                 
                scriptPath(jenkinsFilename)
             
         
        properties  
            pipelineTriggers  
                triggers  
                    if(job.upstream)  
                        upstream  
                            upstreamProjects("$ job.upstream ")
                            threshold('SUCCESS')
                         
                     
                 
             
         
     
 

Disadvantages There are still a bunch of disadvantages you've to consider Jenkins Rebuilds are Painful In general we rebuild our Jenkins instances quite frequently. With the approach outlined here in place, you've to allow the groovy script execution after the first Seedjob execution, and then go through at least another round of run the job, allow permissions, run the job, until it's finally all up and running. Copy around Jenkinsfile Whenever you create a new project you've to copy around Jenkinsfiles for each and every stage and modify the variables at the top accordingly. Keep the Seedjob definitions and Jenkinsfile in Sync You not only have to copy the Jenkinsfile around, but you also have to keep the variables and names in sync with what you define for the Seedjob. Sadly the pipeline env-vars are not available outside of the pipeline when we execute the groovy parts. Kudos This setup was crafted with a lot of help by Michael and Eric.

A good backup strategy needs to consider various threats to the integrity of data. For instance:

• Building catches fire
• Accidental deletion
• Equipment failure
• Security incident / malware / compromise

It s that last one that is of particular interest today. A lot of backup strategies are such that if a user (or administrator) has their local account or network compromised, their backups could very well be destroyed as well. For instance, do you ssh from the account being backed up to the system holding the backups? Or rsync using a keypair stored on it? Or access S3 buckets, etc? It is trivially easy in many of these schemes to totally ruin cloud-based backups, or even some other schemes. rsync can be run with delete (and often is, to prune remotes), S3 buckets can be deleted, etc. And even if you try to lock down an over-network backup to be append-only, still there are vectors for attack (ssh credentials, OpenSSL bugs, etc). In this post, I try to explore how we can protect against them and still retain some modern conveniences. A backup scheme also needs to make a balance between:

• Cost
• Security
• Accessibility
• Efficiency (of time, bandwidth, storage, etc)

My story so far About 20 years ago, I had an Exabyte tape drive, with the amazing capacity of 7GB per tape! Eventually as disk prices fell, I had external disks plugged in to a server, and would periodically rotate them offsite. I ve also had various combinations of partial or complete offsite copies over the Internet as well. I have around 6TB of data to back up (after compression), a figure that is growing somewhat rapidly as I digitize some old family recordings and videos. Since I last wrote about backups 5 years ago, my scheme has been largely unchanged; at present I use ZFS for local and to-disk backups and borg for the copies over the Internet. Let s take a look at some options that could make this better. Tape The original airgapped backup. You back up to a tape, then you take the (fairly cheap) tape out of the drive and put in another one. In cost per GB, tape is probably the cheapest medium out there. But of course it has its drawbacks. Let s start with cost. To get a drive that can handle capacities of what I d be needing, at least LTO-6 (2.5TB per tape) would be needed, if not LTO-7 (6TB). New, these drives cost several thousand dollars, plus they need LVD SCSI or Fibre Channel cards. You re not going to be hanging one off a Raspberry Pi; these things need a real server with enterprise-style connectivity. If you re particularly lucky, you might find an LTO-6 drive for as low as $500 on eBay. Then there are tapes. A 10-pack of LTO-6 tapes runs more than $200, and provides a total capacity of 25TB sufficient for these needs (note that, of course, you need to have at least double the actual space of the data, to account for multiple full backups in a set). A 5-pack of LTO-7 tapes is a little more expensive, while providing more storage. So all-in, this is going to be in the best possible scenario nearly $1000, and possibly a lot more. For a large company with many TB of storage, the initial costs can be defrayed due to the cheaper media, but for a home user, not so much. Consider that 8TB hard drives can be found for $150 $200. A pair of them (for redundancy) would run $300-400, and then you have all the other benefits of disk (quicker access, etc.) Plus they can be driven by something as cheap as a Raspberry Pi. Fancier tape setups involve auto-changers, but then you re not really airgapped, are you? (If you leave all your tapes in the changer, they can generally be selected and overwritten, barring things like hardware WORM). As useful as tape is, for this project, it would simply be way more expensive than disk-based options. Fundamentals of disk-based airgapping The fundamental thing we need to address with disk-based airgapping is that the machines being backed up have no real-time contact with the backup storage system. This rules out most solutions out there, that want to sync by comparing local state with remote state. If one is willing to throw storage efficiency out the window maybe practical for very small data sets one could just send a full backup daily. But in reality, what is more likely needed is a way to store a local proxy for the remote state. Then a runner device (a USB stick, disk, etc) could be plugged into the network, filled with queued data, then plugged into the backup system to have the data dequeued and processed. Some may be tempted to short-circuit this and just plug external disks into a backup system. I ve done that for a long time. This is, however, a risk, because it makes those disks vulnerable to whatever may be attacking the local system (anything from lightning to ransomware). ZFS ZFS is, it should be no surprise, particularly well suited for this. zfs send/receive can send an incremental stream that represents a delta between two checkpoints (snapshots or bookmarks) on a filesystem. It can do this very efficiently, much more so than walking an entire filesystem tree. Additionally, with the recent addition of ZFS crypto to ZFS on Linux, the replication stream can optionally reflect the encrypted data. Yes, as long as you don t need to mount them, you can mostly work with ZFS datasets on an encrypted basis, and can directly tell zfs send to just send the encrypted data instead of the decrypted data. The downside of ZFS is the resource requirements at the destination, which in terms of RAM are higher than most of the older Raspberry Pi-style devices. Still, one could perhaps just save off zfs send streams and restore them later if need be, but that implies a periodic resend of a full stream, an inefficient operation. dedpulicating software such as borg could be used on those streams (though with less effectiveness if they re encrypted). Tar Perhaps surprisingly, tar in listed incremental mode can solve this problem for non-ZFS users. It will keep a local cache of the state of the filesystem as of the time of the last run of tar, and can generate new tarballs that reflect the changes since the previous run (even deletions). This can achieve a similar result to the ZFS send/receive, though in a much less elegant way. Bacula / Bareos Bacula (and its fork Bareos) both have support for a FIFO destination. Theoretically this could be used to queue of data for transfer to the airgapped machine. This support is very poorly documented in both and is rumored to have bitrotted, however. rdiff and xdelta rdiff and xdelta can be used as sort of a non-real-time rsync, at least on a per-file basis. Theoretically, one could generate a full backup (with tar, ZFS send, or whatever), take an rdiff signature, and send over the file while keeping the signature. On the next run, another full backup is piped into rdiff, and on the basis of the signature file of the old and the new data, it produces a binary patch that can be queued for the backup target to update its stored copy of the file. This leaves history preservation as an exercise to be undertaken on the backup target. It may not necessarily be easy and may not be efficient. rsync batches rsync can be used to compute a delta between two directory trees and express this as a single-file batch that can be processed by a remote rsync. Unfortunately this implies the sender must always keep an old tree around (barring a solution such as ZFS snapshots) in order to compute the delta, and of course it still implies the need for history processing on the remote. Getting the Data There OK, so you ve got an airgapped system, some sort of runner device for your sneakernet (USB stick, hard drive, etc). Now what? Obviously you could just copy data on the runner and move it back off at the backup target. But a tool like NNCP (sort of a modernized UUCP) offer a lot of help in automating the process, returning error reports, etc. NNCP can be used online over TCP, over reliable serial links, over ssh, with offline onion routing via intermediaries or directly, etc. Imagine having an airgapped machine at a different location you go to frequently (workplace, friend, etc). Before leaving, you put a USB stick in your pocket. When you get there, you pop it in. It s despooled and processed while you want, and return emails or whatever are queued up to be sent when you get back home. Not bad, eh? Future installment I m going to try some of these approaches and report back on my experiences in the next few weeks.

Review: Anti-Social, by Nick Pettigrew

Publisher:	Century
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	1-4735-7639-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	375

Nick Pettigrew was an anti-social behavior officer for council housing for over a decade. This book is a diary of one year in the life of that job. According to the author, the dates, names, and some of the identifying details have been changed but not exaggerated. While it's hard to verify that, and I'm sure a few of the stories have been tweaked to make better narratives, it has a messiness and chaos of half-resolved drama mixed with mundane office tedium that makes it ring true. The subject matter requires some explanation for US readers. Council housing is the UK's version of what the US would call public housing or "the projects," although it's a far larger percentage of the housing stock in the UK than it is in the US. These are buildings built by the government and run by local governments or non-profits to provide housing to working class and poor people at reduced cost compared to the private market. As in the US, new council housing construction has dropped off dramatically; as in the US, a bunch of it has been privatized, although in the UK the Right to Buy law at least sells the housing to the people living in it, as opposed to slumlords. The 1998 UK Crime and Disorder Act collects under anti-social behavior a bunch of low-grade irritations that in the US would fall under public nuisance laws, noise ordinances, and other vague misdemeanors like "creating a public disturbance": essentially, all the irritating and obnoxious things that people subject their neighbors to, but which fall short of obvious criminal behavior like theft or assault. As Pettigrew puts it:

"I just don't want to hear the word 'cunt' shouted repeatedly at 3am every night any more. I don't think that's unreasonable."

That law required the organizations managing council estates to have a procedure to deal with anti-social behavior, and thus the job of an anti-social behavior officer was created. In the US, these sorts of problems are dealt with by the local police, which is a little like trying to get rid of a raccoon by running it over with a balky, thirty-year-old car. The best outcome is that the raccoon gets freaked out by your efforts to get the car to start and leaves. The worst outcome is that you accidentally run over your neighbor's kid while aiming for the raccoon. Either way, neither you nor the car nor your neighbors are going to be happy about the process. An anti-social behavior officer is someone with some authority to do things like install cameras, tell people who don't live somewhere that they need to stop coming there, and start eviction proceedings, but who doesn't carry guns, can't arrest people, and enforces those rules when necessary via court proceedings or calling the police. In other words, it's one of the types of alternative responders whose job is to solve problems rather than stop crimes that we've been talking about in the United States. And although Pettigrew is quite grumpy and cynical about his job (for very understandable reasons explained in this book), my takeaway from another country with even worse problems is that the system sort of works. It's underfunded and poorly managed and nebulous and sometimes very sad, but it also achieves some of what it sets out to do, and you can see the outlines of a better system beneath it. My favorite thing about this book is that it forces the reader to grapple with the actual job in all its messiness, rather than our ideals of what we want the job to be. For example, if you're going to hire a bunch of people to do this job, you need some way to figure out whether they're any good at it, but it's not obvious how to measure success.

One infuriating KPI we're measured on is the final question a resident is asked once their case is closed: "Are you happy with the outcome of your case?" Because unless you evict the problem neighbor within a fortnight, erect a security wall around the complainant's house manned by armed guards, and bake them a cake, the answer will almost certainly be no.

Pettigrew has a background in comedy so he's sarcastically funny rather than strident or didactic, which for me was just the tone I needed to enjoy reading this enough to think deeply about it. The thing that most surprised me, even though it probably shouldn't, was just how many of the problems Pettigrew had to deal with stemmed from drugs. My guess is that a good 75% of the issues he described were a direct result of someone dealing drugs, growing drugs, stealing things to buy drugs, throwing parties with druggie friends, doing bizarre and dangerous things because they were on drugs, not taking care of their property because they were too busy doing drugs, or letting their property be taken over by other people doing or selling drugs. It's just never-ending. The case load is clearly made worse by chronic understaffing and underfunding, and spending more money on giving people more assistance is part of any reasonable solution, but so is reducing the demand. If the pattern of complaints in the US is at all similar (and I bet it is), it's no wonder that the police perceive drugs as central to their job. Pettigrew talks about this at some length in the epilogue, and I think one of his conclusions is worth quoting here:

Years of interacting with class A drug users has shown me that they really don't want to be out hustling to make enough money for their next score of diluted heroin. They want to sit at home, take drugs and when those drugs wear off, take some more. You may view this as a wasted life, and you may well be right, but here's the thing: they are going to do this anyway, whether we decide to criminalize them or not. If, after a lengthy period of honest, mature drug education across the country via schools, further education, government advertising and so on, class A drugs were made legally available on prescription to adults via pharmacies, the vast majority of users would pick up their prescriptions, go home, take their drugs and leave everyone else alone. They couldn't be arsed to break into your car if they didn't have to.

The decriminalization argument is a lot larger than the space of this book review, so I won't get into it further, except to say that if you think that conclusion sounds unreasonable or dangerous or destructive to society, consider reading this book. One of the things that becomes obvious from Pettigrew's diary of incidents is that most people just want to feel safe, and a truly stunning amount of crime and anti-social behavior that makes them feel not safe is a direct or indirect result of people trying to get drugs or to get money to get drugs. The other pattern that's obvious from this book (and obvious from most writing by anyone involved in the justice system) is that the system doesn't really work.

The best way to describe going to court is that it's like paying a visit to a run-down hospital where nobody gets better.

Some of that is because it's not set up to solve problems, and a lot of that is because solving problems is a lot more expensive than we want to admit and we don't want to pony up the resources. I'm probably making this book sound hopelessly depressing, but it's not. It's angry and cynical, but it's also very funny (particularly if you like sarcasm), extremely quotable, insightful, and deeply empathetic. There are people trying their best to help other people despite a system that doesn't reward them for doing so, and surprisingly often they manage to do so. The path to helping more people isn't even that difficult to find. The epilogue of this book is full of solid and straightforward ideas that don't require some novel insight into humanity, just a bunch of hard work. And, while reading about the work of helping people and being exasperated by people, you'll also get to laugh at the bits of office nonsense that are universal.

The old form for monthly one-to-ones used to have two questions "What did you do over the last month?" and "What do you plan to do in the next month?" and my line manager at the time seemed unimpressed when I answered "my job" to both.

I loved this book. It was one of my favorite random finds of the year, and, at least judging from how difficult it is to find in Amazon search results, it's not gotten enough attention in the United States. Highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

Recently, I needed to package a Rust crate libslirp for a Apertis, a Debian derivative. libslirp is used by the newly release UML backend of debos, our Debian image build tool. Unfortunately, this crate hasn t yet been properly packaged for Debian proper, so I could not simply pull the packaging from Debian. Even worse, its build dependencies haven t all been packaged yet. Most importantly, I have only uploaded zbus to Debian today, and at that time none of its dependencies were in Debian either. Another issue with this were that each crate is packaged for Debian as a separate package, making the process a bit more tricky since I d need to import all of the crates into Apertis separately. Doing that takes time and is further complicated by the CI loop we re using which requires the full build process to complete for a package before a pipeline a dependent package can run. Having all that considered, I took a shortcut: I vendored all the build dependencies with the package itself, and here s how. I started with debcargo-conf, where the not-yet-complete packaging lives. With debcargo, I generated the source package as if I were to upload to Debian. Since I ll be vendoring the dependencies, I have removed most of the Rust dependencies and replaced them with those extra dependencies needed by those crates. So, I replaced this: By this: I wanted to keep the delta to the future Debian package at a bare minimum, so I kept the original dh-cargo build process, only making sure the vendored dependencies are found in the right place. The cleanest approach in my view was to use the fact that the 3.0 (quilt) source format allows multiple original tarballs: the main tarball would be the same orig tarball as in Debian, and an extra tarball would contain the vendored code. When we sync with Debian, the extra tarball would be dropped, just as the adjustments to the debian/rules. To generate the vendor tarball, I added this to the rules file: This target, being run manually and not as part of the build process, download the latest dependencies satisfying the requirements in Cargo.toml and rolls them into a vendor tarball. Now, to make dh-cargo use the vendored code, we need to link it into the right place. dh-cargo creates a Cargo registry tree in a subdirectly under debian/ where it symlinks crates from the Rust development packages. This extra code makes sure the vendored dependencies are available there too: An important thing here is that if the build happens on a non-clean system, dh-cargo may have symlinked a system crate already installed so we need to remove that symlink and replace it by ours. We build packages in clean chroots, so this is not that important, otherwise for reproducibility reasons it would be better to create the registry directory from scratch. The final package can be found at the Apertis GitLab.

TL;DR: CPS-conversion and defunctionalization can help you to come up with a constant-stack algorithm. Update: Turns out I inadvertedly plagiarized the talk The Best Refactoring You ve Never Heard Of by James Koppel. Please consider this a form of sincere flattery.

The starting point Today, I ll take you on a another little walk through the land of program transformations. Let s begin with a simple binary tree, with value of unknown type in the leaves, as well as the canonical map function:

data T a = L a   B (T a) (T a)
map1 :: (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map1 f (L x) = L (f x)
map1 f (B t1 t2) = B (map1 f t1) (map1 f t2)

As you can see, this map function is using the program stack as it traverses the tree. Our goal is now to come up with a map function that does not use the stack! Why? Good question! In Haskell, there wouldn t be a strong need for this, as the Haskell stack is allocated on the heap, just like your normal data, so there is plenty of stack space. But in other languages or environments, the stack space may have a hard limit, and it may be advised to not use unbounded stack space. That aside, it s a fun exercise, and that s sufficient reason for me. (In the following, I assume that tail-calls, i.e. those where a function end with another function call, but without modifying its result, do not actually use stack space. Once all recursive function calls are tail calls, the code is equivalent to an imperative loop, as we will see.)

Think? We could now just stare at the problem (rather the code), and try to come up with a solution directly. We d probably think ok, as I go through the tree, I have to remember all the nodes above me so I need a list of those nodes and for each of these nodes, I also need to remember whether I am currently processing the left child, and yet have to look at the right one, or whether I am done with the left child so what do I have to remember about the current node ? ah, my brain spins already. Maybe eventually I figure it out, but why think when we can derive the solution? So let s start with above map1, and rewrite it, in several, mechanical, steps into a stack-less, tail-recursive solution.

Go! Before we set out, let me rewrite the map function using a local go helper, as follows:

map2 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map2 f t = go t
  where
    go :: T a -> T b
    go (L x) = L (f x)
    go (B t1 t2) = B (go t1) (go t2)

This transformation (effectively the static argument transformation ) has the nice advantage that we do not have to pass f around all the time, and that when we copy the function, I only have to change the top-level name, but not the names of the inner functions. Also, I find it more aesthetically pleasing.

CPS A blunt, effective tool to turn code that is not yet using tail-calls into code that only uses tail-calls is use continuation-passing style. If we have a function of type -> t, we turn it into a function of type -> (t -> r) -> r, where r is the type of the result we want at the very end. This means the function now receives an extra argument, often named k for continuation, and instead of returning some x, the function calls k x. We can apply this to our go function. Here, both t and r happen to be T b; the type of finished trees:

map3 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map3 f t = go t (\r -> r)
  where
    go :: T a -> (T b -> T b) -> T b
    go (L x) k  = k (L (f x))
    go (B t1 t2) k  = go t1 (\r1 -> go t2 (\r2 -> k (B r1 r2)))

Note that when initially call go, we pass the identity function (\r -> r) as the initial continuation. Alas, suddenly all function calls are in tail position, and this codes does not use stack space! Technically, we are done, although it is not quite satisfying; all these lambdas floating around obscure the meaning of the code, are maybe a bit slow to execute, and also, we didn t really learn much yet. This is certainly not the code we would have writing after thinking hard .

Defunctionalization So let s continue rewriting the code to something prettier, simpler. Something that does not use lambdas like this. Again, there is a mechanical technique that can help it. It likely won't make the code prettier, but it will get rid of the lambdas, so let s do that an clean up later. The technique is called defunctionalization (because it replaces functional values by plain data values), and can be seen as a form of refinement. Note that we pass around vales of type (T b -> T b), but we certainly don t mean the full type (T b -> T b). Instead, only very specific values of that type occur in our program, So let us replace (T b -> T b) with a data type that contains representatives of just the values we actually use.

1. We find at all values of type (T b -> T b). These are:
   • (\r -> r)
   • (\r1 -> go t2 (\r2 -> k (B r1 r2)))
   • (\r2 -> k (B r1 r2))
2. We create a datatype with one constructor for each of these:

    data K = I   K1   K2

   (This is not complete yet.)
3. We introduce an interpretation function that turns a K back into a (T b -> T b):

   eval :: K -> (T b -> T b)
   eval = (* TBD *)

4. In the function go, instead of taking a parameter of type (T b -> T b), we take a K. And when we actually use the continuation, we have to turn the K back to the function using eval:

   go :: T a -> K a b -> T b
   go (L x) k  = eval k (L (f x))
   go (B t1 t2) k = go t1 K1

   We also do this to the code fragments identified in the first step; these become:
   • (\r -> r)
   • (\r1 -> go t2 K2)
   • (\r2 -> eval k (B r1 r2))
5. Now we complete the eval function: For each constructor, we simply map it to the corresponding lambda from step 1:

   eval :: K -> (T b -> T b)
   eval I = (\r -> r)
   eval K1 = (\r1 -> go t2 K2)
   eval K2 = (\r2 -> eval k (B r1 r2))

6. This doesn t quite work yet: We have variables on the right hand side that are not bound (t2, r1, k). So let s add them to the constructors K1 and K2 as needed. This also changes the type K itself; it now needs to take type parameters.

This leads us to the following code:

data K a b
  = I
    K1 (T a) (K a b)
    K2 (T b) (K a b)
map4 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map4 f t = go t I
  where
    go :: T a -> K a b -> T b
    go (L x) k  = eval k (L (f x))
    go (B t1 t2) k  = go t1 (K1 t2 k)
    eval :: K a b -> (T b -> T b)
    eval I = (\r -> r)
    eval (K1 t2 k) = (\r1 -> go t2 (K2 r1 k))
    eval (K2 r1 k) = (\r2 -> eval k (B r1 r2))

Not really cleaner or prettier, but everything is still tail-recursive, and we are now working with plain data.

We like lists To clean it up a little bit, we can notice that the K data type really is just a list of values, where the values are either T a or T b. We do not need a custom data type for this! Instead of our K, we can just use the following, built from standard data types:

type K' a b = [Either (T a) (T b)]

Now I replace I with [], K1 t2 k with Left t2 : k and K2 r1 k with Right r1 : k. I also, very suggestively, rename go to down and eval to up:

map5 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map5 f t = down t []
  where
    down :: T a -> K' a b -> T b
    down (L x) k  = up k (L (f x))
    down (B t1 t2) k  = down t1 (Left t2 : k)
    up :: K' a b -> T b -> T b
    up [] r = r
    up (Left  t2 : k) r1 = down t2 (Right r1 : k)
    up (Right r1 : k) r2 = up k (B r1 r2)

At this point, the code suddenly makes more sense again. In fact, I can try to verbalize it:

As we traverse the tree, we have to remember for all parent nodes, whether there is still something Left to do when we come back to it (so we remember a T a), or if we are done with that (so we have a T b). This is the list K' a b. We begin to go down the left of the tree (noting that the right siblings are still left to do), until we hit a leaf. We transform the leaf, and then go up. If we go up and hit the root, we are done. Else, if we go up and there is something Left to do, we remember the subtree that we just processed (as that is already in the Right form), and go down the other subtree. But if we go up and there is nothing Left to do, we put the two subtrees together and continue going up.

Quite neat!

The imperative loop At this point we could stop: the code is pretty, makes sense, and has the properties we want. But let s turn the dial a bit further and try to make it an imperative loop. We know that if we have a single tail-recursive function, then that s equivalent to a loop, with the function s parameter turning into mutable variables. But we have two functions! It turns out that if you have two functions a -> r and b -> r that have the same return type (which they necessarily have here, since we CPS-converted them further up), then those two functions are equivalent to a single function taking a or b , i.e. Either a b -> r. This really nothing else than the high-school level algebra rule of r^a r^b = r^{a + b}. So (after reordering the arguments of down to put T b first) we can rewrite the code as

map6 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map6 f t = go (Left t) []
  where
    go :: Either (T a) (T b) -> K' a b -> T b
    go (Left (L x))     k        = go (Right (L (f x))) k
    go (Left (B t1 t2)) k        = go (Left t1) (Left t2 : k)
    go (Right r)  []             = r
    go (Right r1) (Left  t2 : k) = go (Left t2) (Right r1 : k)
    go (Right r2) (Right r1 : k) = go (Right (B r1 r2)) k

Do you see the loop yet? If not, maybe it helps to compare it with the following equivalent imperative looking pseudo-code:

mapLoop :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
mapLoop f t  
  var node = Left t;
  var parents = [];
  while (true)  
    switch (node)  
      Left (L x) -> node := Right (L (f x))
      Left (B t1 t2) -> node := Left t1; parents.push(Left t2)
      Right r1 ->  
        if (parents.len() == 0)  
          return r1;
          else  
          switch (parents.pop())  
            Left t2  -> node := Left t2; parents.push(Right r1);
            Right r2 -> node := Right (B r1 r2)
           
         
       
     
   
 

Conclusion I find it enlightening to see how apparently very different approaches to a problem (recursive, lazy functions and imperative loops) are connected by a series of rather mechanical transformations. When refactoring code, it is helpful to see if one can conceptualize the refactoring as one of those mechanical steps (refinement, type equivalences, defunctionalization, cps conversion etc.) If you liked this post, you might enjoy my talk The many faces of isOrderedTree, which I have presented at MuniHac 2019 and Haskell Love 2020.

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

The people who are pro-Government and in this case pro-Corporate do not have any success stories that they can share. Hence, most of the time the arguments are that the other are bad. For e.g. quite a few people argue that we don t need farmers, we can just order from restaurant. They have completely disassociated the idea that even then you need farmers as unless the farmers put the seed in, till the soil and wait for the rains or have irrigation you won t get ripe vegetables which then has to be taken out, and somehow sold to the wholesaler from where it comes to the restaurant and then to your plate. Sadly, even the farm-to-fork infographics are so depressingly sad, you want to look away. If you see the infographic you see it is just not non-veg but also vegetarian food grains which go under lot of questionable practices. Even, with such scenarios that is done by corporations our people want to go ahead. I will share stories from other countries which tell how they are doing more. The Soldier-Farmer Another sad part of these protests have been soldiers who have been returning their medals. The ones who oppose have the gall to say they should return the cash rewards they got. So just like farmers, seems soldiers also do not need money to survive. They are supposed to live only on air and water. This is after the present Govt. has reduced their pensions after retirement and that too without any discussion

GOI pensions to ex-servicemen

Now I nor anybody else would have minded if these conditions were shared going forward rather than doing it retrospectively. People who usually go to the army are not in it for money but for the adventure and glory they bring. But they do also have a family and have a family responsibility. In most other countries, the soldier and his families are well-looked after. If you know that even after you die, the Government would look after your family, you will do your best. Unfortunately, many veterans in India themselves are asked to help by many war widows as the widows don t get family pensions. The proposal naturally has left many miffed. In fact many of the veterans who used to advise people to join the armed forces now advise young people to pursue civilian life and careers. This is when Indian Army has been ironically having shortage of officers from well over a decade and stresses felt by Army personnel also known for a long time. Even under this nationalistic Government, if it cannot take care of its soldiers, then forget about others. Now it is nobody s argument that India needs to improve its tooth-to-tail ratio but this is the wrong way to go about it. I would probably talk about that some other time as that totally needs its whole place. Even OROP, which was the mandate of this Government hasn t had been done in full as there are quite a few cases in the Supreme Court. Almost all the cases have been heard and only decisions have to be given which the SC for whatever reason doesn t want to give. They just keep changing the date of the hearing. Nowadays, in many suits/cases, the SC asks for fresh hearings even though all the old records are there. This is a newish phenomena which is being observed in SC. Why is it being done? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing for sure has changed, the SC which used to be citizen-focussed or enabler of human rights and used to be held as a beacon for judicial activism has changed but these are other topics which need their own space. Update 16/12/2020 The SC recommends setting up a committee to discuss farmer issues. And this is nothing new. This is called death by committee. When there is already so much literature on the subject, including the works done by Swaminathan Commission. There has been 6 reports which do look at farmer issues in a holistic manner. This is the Supreme Court giving an escape route to GOI. They also have abstained from having a whole session citing Covid. This is when the ruling Govt. is putting a massive 1000 crore on a new building on which the SC has put on hold. And even then the GOI went ahead and did a Bhoomi-Pujan (traditional ceremony when making a new construction from scratch.) Naturally due to the double whammy of both the pension reforms and now the laws to make corporate farming more aggressive has left a deep impact on the soldier-farmer that the state does not think or feel for him. Even the United States farm-aid eloquently describes how corporate farming has made independent farmers suffer. You read that, and it seems it is as the state of our farmers here in India. Even their average land-holding has dropped a bit. I have shared about the state of farmers in India, in two blog posts previously. And it is not just farm owners who have had it bad, even farm workers in U.S. The issue may look to be about the pandemic but goes far deeper. The Israeli Model The Israelis have always used collective farming and do have a large share in farming there. The old model called Kibbutz is what made Israelis self-sufficient in food and water and actually are world-leaders where they export their services to other nations on the same thing. France Just like many other countries, France also seems to have favored farmer co-operatives. Almost 75% of all farmers are in co-operatives. Italy The country world-famous for its wines and cheese are made by its co-operatives. In fact co-ops are the buzzword it seems in Italy, more so in Northern Italy. Asian economies Even Asian economies, especially East Asian economies by and large have been turning to co-operatives. Brazil Now Brazil is almost 40% more than India. In fact, in most of the indices, Brazil beats India handsomely. So one would be forgiven to think that Brazil must have corporate farming. But nothing could be further from the truth. The only downer is that they have high crime in some areas. Otherwise, they are in many ways better than India. In fact, I was surprised a few years ago to learn about Mercsour. I would have to admit though I learned much about Brazil when Debian was holding a debconf about a year back. Otherwise, I had known about the country for number of years but apart from its carnival and samba, hadn t known much about it. I did come to know that most of Latin America also loves spices as much as Indians do. They show that love by using hot sauces. I do one day wanna try one of their sauces to see what makes it tick. I do know they like to barbecue vegetables as much as barbecuing non-veg food. This is going a bit OT but then that s the foodie in me Conclusion I could have shared more countries which have chosen the co-operative way rather than corporate farming and that is simply because they know what is best for their people and what is best even politically. The new farm laws are neither grounded in farmer s welfare nor anything else. The Govt. has been trying to undermine the farmers for years together. In fact, Madhya Pradesh has openly said that they will not allow farmers from other states to sell in their state. Although, even before these laws there was nothing to restrict the farmer from selling his produce anywhere in the country. Angering the farmers is not good politics as was found sometime back but guessing some lessons need to be re-learned. One comment though, on social media I have seen many people especially youngsters having no real understanding of what inflation is all about. For e.g. if you ask them how come we are having a sort of record inflation in a technical recession (there has been a contraction, actually) and you see them putting themselves into bigger and bigger ditches. This does explain in part why the BJP wins in elections. If you do more rhetoric, which BJP is good as, rather than educating people than you are bound to win. You don t need plans, you don t need a vision, just rhetoric will do. What more evidence is needed when the economy is and was in a worse shape even before the pandemic and BJP won. I would probably write about that as that again needs lot of background and understanding as well as related terms.

The Hetzner server that hosts my blog among other things has 2*256G SSDs for the root filesystem. The smartctl and smartd programs report both SSDs as in FAILING_NOW state for the Wear_Leveling_Count attribute. I don t have a lot of faith in SMART. I run it because it would be stupid not to consider data about possible drive problems, but don t feel obliged to immediately replace disks with SMART errors when not convenient (if I ordered a new server and got those results I would demand replacement before going live). Doing any sort of SMART scan will cause service outage. Replacing devices means 2 outages, 1 for each device. I noticed the SMART errors 2 weeks ago, so I guess that the SMART claims that both of the drives are likely to fail within 24 hours have been disproved. The system is running BTRFS so I know there aren t any unseen data corruption issues and it uses BTRFS RAID-1 so if one disk has an unreadable sector that won t cause data loss. Currently Hetzner Server Bidding has ridiculous offerings for systems with SSD storage. Search for a server with 16G of RAM and SSD storage and the minimum prices are only 2E cheaper than a new server with 64G of RAM and 2*512G NVMe. In the past Server Bidding has had servers with specs not much smaller than the newest systems going for rates well below the costs of the newer systems. The current Hetzner server is under a contract from Server Bidding which is significantly cheaper than the current Server Bidding offerings, so financially it wouldn t be a good plan to replace the server now. Monitoring I have just released a new version of etbe-mon [1] which has a new monitor for SMART data (smartctl). It also has a change to the sslcert check to search all IPv6 and IPv4 addresses for each hostname, makes freespace check look for filesystem mountpoint, and makes the smtpswaks check use latest swaks command-line. For the new smartctl check there is an option to treat Marginal alert status from smartctl as errors and there is an option to name attributes that will be treated as marginal even if smartctl thinks they are significant. So now I have my monitoring system checking the SMART data on the servers of mine which have real hard drives (not VMs) and aren t using RAID hardware that obscures such things. Also it s not alerting me about the Wear_Leveling_Count on that particular Hetzner server.

• [1] https://doc.coker.com.au/projects/etbe-mon/

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

One comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

For a while I ve had a problem with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 1 [1] where storage pauses for 30 seconds, it s become more common recently and unfortunately everything seems to depend on storage (ideally a web browser playing a video from the Internet could keep doing so with no disk access, but that s not what happens).

echo 3 > /sys/block/sda/device/timeout

I ve put the above in /etc/rc.local which should make it only take 3 seconds to recover from storage problems instead of 30 seconds, the problem hasn t recurred since that change so I don t know if it works as desired. The Thinkpad is running BTRFS and no data is reported as being lost, so it s not a problem to use it at this time. The bottom of this post has an example of the errors I m getting. A friend said that his searches for such errors shows people claiming that it s a SATA controller or cable problem, which for a SATA device bolted directly to the motherboard means it s likely to be a motherboard problem (IE more expensive to fix than the $289 I paid for the laptop almost 3 years ago). A Lenovo forum discussion says that the X1 Carbon Gen1 uses an unusual connector that s not M.2 SATA and not mSATA [2]. This means that a replacement is going to be expensive, $100US for a replacement from eBay when a M.2 SATA or NVMe device would cost about $50AU from my local store. It also means that I can t use a replacement for anything else. If my laptop took a regular NVMe I d buy one and test it out, if it didn t solve the problem a spare NVMe device is always handy to have. But I m not interested in spending $100US for a part that may turn out to be useless. I bought the laptop expecting that there was nothing I could fix inside it. While it is theoretically possible to upgrade the CPU etc in a laptop most people find that the effort and expense makes it better to just replace the entire laptop. With the ultra light category of laptops the RAM is soldered on the motherboard and there are even less options for replacing things. So while it s annoying that Lenovo didn t use a standard interface for this device (they did so for other models in the range) it s not a situation that I hadn t expected. Now the question is what to do next. The Thinkpad has a SD socket and micro SD cards are getting large capacities nowadays. If it won t boot from a SD card I could boot from USB and then run from SD. So even if the internal SATA device fails entirely it should still be useful. I wonder if I could find a Thinkpad with a similar problem going cheap as I m pretty sure that a Windows user couldn t make any storage device usable the way I can with Linux. I ve looked at prices on auction sites but haven t seen a Thinkpad X1 Carbon going for anywhere near the price I got this one. The nearest I ve seen is around $350 for a laptop with significant damage. While I am a little unhappy at Lenovo s choice of interface, I ve definitely got a lot more than $289 of value out of this laptop. So I m not really complaining.

[315041.837612] ata1.00: status:   DRDY  
[315041.837613] ata1.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
[315041.837616] ata1.00: cmd 61/20:48:28:1e:3e/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 9 ncq dma 
16384 out
                         res 40/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x4 
(timeout)                
[315041.837617] ata1.00: status:   DRDY  
[315041.837618] ata1.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[315041.837621] ata1.00: cmd 60/08:50:e0:26:84/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 10 ncq 
dma 4096 in
                         res 40/00:01:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x4 
(timeout)                
[315041.837622] ata1.00: status:   DRDY  
[315041.837625] ata1: hard resetting link
[315042.151781] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[315042.163368] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) 
succeeded
[315042.163370] ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (SECURITY FREEZE LOCK) 
filtered out
[315042.163372] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered 
out
[315042.183332] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/02:00:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) 
succeeded
[315042.183334] ata1.00: ACPI cmd f5/00:00:00:00:00:a0 (SECURITY FREEZE LOCK) 
filtered out
[315042.183336] ata1.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered 
out
[315042.193332] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[315042.193789] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK 
driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[315042.193791] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] 
[315042.193793] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 Add. Sense: Unaligned write command
[315042.193795] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#10 CDB: Read(10) 28 00 00 84 26 e0 00 00 
08 00
[315042.193797] print_req_error: I/O error, dev sda, sector 8660704
[315042.193810] ata1: EH complete

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2018/02/08/thinkpad-x1-carbon/
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/y7bsjarz

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.

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

The G-Force Wikipedia page says that humans can survive 20G horizontally eyes in for up to 10 seconds and 10G for 1 minute. An accelerator of 14G for 10 seconds (well below the level that s unsafe) gives a speed of mach 4 and an acceleration distance of just under 7km. Launching a 100 metric ton spacecraft in that way would require 14MW at the end of the launch path plus some extra for the weight of the part that contains magnets which would be retrieved by parachute. 14MW is a small fraction of the power used by a train or tram network and brown-outs of the transit network is something that they deal with so such a launch could be powered by diverting power from a transit network. The Rocky Mountains in the US peak at 4.4KM above sea level, so a magnetic launch that starts 2.6KM below sea level and extends the height of the Rocky Mountains would do. A speed of mach 4 vertically would get a height of 96Km if we disregard drag, that s almost 1/4 of the orbital altitude of the ISS. This seems like a more practical way to launch humans into space than a space elevator. The Mass Driver page on Wikipedia documents some of the past research on launching satellites that way, with shorter launch hardware and significantly higher G forces.

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in December) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games

• I updated ufoai, UFO: Alien Invasion, and had to remove its map editor uforadiant because it depends on obsolete GTK 2 libraries. This prevented the removal of the whole game from testing. Upstream is looking for help to port the editor to GTK 3.
• ArmagetronAD, a light cycle game, was updated to version 0.2.9.0.1 and then to 0.2.9.1.0. Apparently the developers had some Corona related spare time and fixed various bugs.
• I could fix a display error in bastet s highscore list, a ncurses falling block game. (#931550)
• At the end of the release cycle I usually update all of my remaining packages which haven t been updated already. Most of the time I check if a package is still Policy compliant with the latest released version of the Debian Policy and I switch to the latest debhelper compatibility level and do some other polishing. This affected the following games: abe, amoebax, late, zangband, brainparty, dangen, and etw.
• I also packaged new versions of berusky, a sokoban game, and freeciv, the famous strategy game and
• sponsored a bug fix update of whichwayisup for Reiner Herrmann and
• did a NMU for fonts-play, patch by Martin Erik Werner, to prevent the removal of Red Eclipse, a first person shooter, from testing.

Debian Java

• Similar to games I also update the remaining Java packages at the end of the release cycle with focus on my own packages but also other team maintained packages which haven t seen updates for quite a long time. Hence I touched libjcommon-java, libjemmy2-java, libjfreechart-java, libcsv-java, electric and dbus-java. I dropped dbus-java-bin because it was of little value for users, the tools were not working as intended and buggy. The project itself is no longer actively developed but it appears there is a fork with new updates. As long as the reverse-dependencies of libdbus-java continue to function I don t plan to switch though.
• updated libxstream-java to fix CVE-2020-26217 and fixed a FTBFS in libmbassador-java.
• New upstream releases this month: libsambox-java, libsejda-java, libtwelvemonkeys-java, pdfsam, jboss-modules and jboss-xnio.

Misc

• The buster update of ublock-origin has been accepted.
• I packaged the latest version of https-everywhere.
• imlib2 failed to build from source on big endian architectures. A trivial patch to declare a variable could solve the problem.
• I also updated byzanz, a screen recorder.

Debian LTS This was my 57. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 12 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• DLA-2447-1. Issued a security update for libxstream-java fixing 1 CVE.
• Triaged the open CVE in webcit as ignored in line with the latest version in Buster. The package was recently removed from Debian.
• Completed the package upgrade of pacemaker. My local tests finished successfully but I will only upload it if I get positive feedback from the users who reported the previous regression. The update would fix all remaining security issues but as with any new version there is a risk of introducing regressions.
• Continued the work on ansible.

ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 8 Jessie . This was my 30. month and I have been paid to work 15 hours on ELTS.

• ELA-326-1. Issued a security update for libxstream-java fixing 1 CVE.
• ELA-329-1. Investigated the eight remaining CVE in jasper. I could fix four CVE. It looks the rest is either not security relevant or can only be observed when jasper is compiled with ASAN.
• Investigated the remaining CVE in phpmyadmin and synced the fixes from Stretch with the released version in Jessie.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

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.