This actually happened.

Jan 19 00:05:10 darkstar kernel: usb 2-2: Product: ChaosKey-hw-1.0-sw-1.6.

In real life, my hat is uglier, and Keithp is more kindly looking. gimp source

Working with Preferences, AudioManager, RingtoneManager in Android. Sometimes the noise can get too much. Imagine all the people around you at work or in a classroom. All of them have at least one cell phones. Even if they were all to make a tiny blip, the noise would be irritating and disruptive. To avoid devices from interrupting the non-digital life, applications often provide settings that allow users to modify app volumes. My task this week was to enable/disable silent mode in Lumicall. To provide settings for your application, instead of using multiple Views, Preference APIs should be used. Each preference appears as an item in a list and provides the appropriate UI for users to modify the setting. In Lumicall, when settings menu from the menubar is selected, a preference screen is displayed showing various setting options, where I appended a Configure Silent Mode option. The UI for the preference screen is expected to be in Src->xml folder under the name preferences.xml

Snippet from Lumicall s preference.xml for Configure Silent Mode preference screen.

In Lumicall, whenever a SIP message comes in, RingtoneManager Class is used to generate a notification sound & AudioManager Class is used to generate sound for incoming encrypted calls. The difference between the two is that, AudioManager provides access to volume and ringer mode control. Ringer modes like, Normal, silent and vibration. Whereas RingtoneManager provides access to ringtones, notification. So to add a simple -disable/enable silent mode- functionality, I decided to use a CheckboxPreference. For the same goal, a better looking widget would be a SwitchPreference, but It does not work properly with DarkThemes which Lumicall uses. So I decided to use a simple Checkbox instead. The result of all the settings are saved as key value pairs in the default SharedPreferences file which can be retrieved to make changes in the app based on the settings modified by the user.
Every preference has a key and the result associated with it.
To fetch the result from the SharedPreferences file-
boolean silentflag=PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(ctx).getBoolean(org.sipdroid.sipua.ui.Settings.PREF_SILENT_MODE, org.sipdroid.sipua.ui.Settings.DEFAULT_SILENT_MODE); Note, the arguments in getBoolean function is (Key, DefaultValue). Don t forget to pass the Context object, ctx in the statement. I wasted a lot of time figuring that one out and created a non-optimal-working way which I eventually had to remove cos I figured out how to retrieve the result value.
To add a second method of setting silent mode, i.e where the user can enter his work days/time, I wanted to display an activity with required widgets .
To display an activity on a when a preference is selected, intent tags are used. (See the above snippet)
Note that the target package in the intent tags is not the package name of where the java file of the activity is to be found.It s the package name which is your applicationID. Now this activity, like any other activity in android is a combination of an xml and java file.
1. My xml file contains the widgets for user to enter two set of time value in HH:MM format. i.e.the start and end time during which user requires application notifications to be silent it also contains checkboxes for user to select multiple days of the week. 2. The java file associated with this does the following:
2.1 Comparing the Real Time with User s Specified Start and End time
2.2 Checking the current day of the week with the days marked by the user in the checkboxes I have used inbuilt Calendar class and Date class to accomplish this. All done I felt quite proud but this.. this was something that tested my patience and endurance!
As I continue my work, I will keep sharing! Please keep reading!
U

This is an extension to last month s article/sharing where I had shared the changes that had transpired in the last 2-3 months. Now am in a position to share the kind of issues a user can go through in case he is looking for support from IRCTC to help him/her go cashless. If you a new user to use IRCTC services you wouldn t go through this trouble. For those who might have TL;DR issues it s about how hard it can become to get digital credentials fixed in IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) a. 2 months back Indian Prime Minister gave a call incentivizing people to use digital means to do any commercial activities. One of the big organizations which took/takes part is IRCTC which handles the responsibility for e-ticketing millions of Rail tickets for common people. In India, a massive percentage moves by train as it s cheaper than going by Air. A typical fare from say Pune Delhi (capital of India) by second class sleeper would be INR 645/- for a distance of roughly 1600 odd kms and these are monopoly rates, there are no private trains and I m not suggesting anything of that sort, just making sure that people know. An economy class ticket by Air for the same distance would be anywhere between INR 2500-3500/- for a 2 hour flight between different airlines. Last I checked there are around 8 mainstream airlines including flag-carrier Air India. About 30% of the population live on less than a dollar and a half a day which would come around INR 100/-. There was a comment some six months back on getting more people out of the poverty line. But as there are lots of manipulations in numbers for who and what denotes above poor and below poor in India and lot of it has to do with politics it s not something which would be easily fixable. There are lots to be said in that arena but this article is not an appropriate blog-post for that. All in all, it s only 3-5% of the population at the most who can travel via Air if situation demands and around 1-2% who might be frequent, business or leisure travellers. Now while I can thankfully afford an Air Ticket if the situation so demands, my mother gets motion sickness so while together we can only travel by train. b. With the above background, I had registered with IRCTC few years ago with another number (dual-SIM) I had purchased and was thinking that I would be using this long-term (seems to my first big mistake, hindsight 50:50) . This was somewhere in 2006/2007. c. Few months later I found that the other service provider wasn t giving good service or was not upto mark. I was using IDEA (the main mobile operator) throughout those times. d. As I didn t need the service that much, didn t think to inform them that I want to change to another service provider at that point in time (possibly the biggest mistake, hindsight 50:50) e. In July 2016 itself IRCTC cut service fees, f. This was shared as a NEW news item/policy decision at November-end 2016 . g. While I have done all that has been asked by irctc-care haven t still got the issues resolved IRCTC s e-mail id care@irctc.co.in Now in detail This is my first e-mail sent to IRCTC in June 2016

Dear Customer care, I had applied and got username and password sometime back . The
number I had used to register with IRCTC was xxxxxxxxxx (BSNL mobile number not used anymore) . My mobile was lost and along with that the number was also lost. I had filed a complaint with the police and stopped that number as well. Now I have an another mobile number but have forgotten both the password and the security answer that I had given when I had registered . I do have all the conversations I had both with the ticketadmn@irctc.co.in as well as care@irctc.co.in if needed to prove my identity. The new number I want to tie it with is xxxxxxxxxx (IDEA number in-use for last 10 years) I see two options :- a. Tie the other number with my e-mail address b. Take out the e-mail address from the database so that I can fill in
as a new applicant. Looking forward to hear from you.

There was lot of back and forth with various individuals on IRCTC and after a lot of back and forth, this is the final e-mail I got from them somewhere in August 2016, he writes

Dear Customer, We request you to send mobile bill of your mobile number if it is post paid or if it is prepaid then contact to your service provider and they will give you valid proof of your mobile number or they will give you in written on company head letter so that we may update your mobile number to update so that you may reset your password through mobile OTP.
and Kindly inform you that you can update your profile by yourself also. 1.login on IRCTC website
2.after login successfully move courser on my profile tab.
3.then click on update profile
4.re-enter your password then you can update your profile
5.click on user-profile then email id.
6. click on update. Still you face any problem related to update profile please revert to us with the screen shots of error message which you will get at the time of update profile . Thanks & Regards Parivesh Patel
Executive, Customer Care
care@irctc.co.in
http://www.irctc.co.in
[#3730034]

IRCTC s response seemed responsible, valid and thought it would be a cake-walk as private providers are supposed to be much more efficient than public ones. The experience proved how wrong was I trust them with doing the right thing 1. First I tried the twitter handle to see how IDEA uses their twitter handle. 2. The idea customer care twitter handle was mild in its response. 3. After sometime I realized that the only way out of this quagmire would perhaps be to go to a brick-mortar shop and get it resolved face-to-face. I went twice or thrice but each time something or the other would happen. On the fourth and final time, I was able to get to the big Official shop only to be told they can t do anything about this and I would have to the appellate body to get the reply. The e-mail address which they shared (and I found it later) was wrong. I sent a somewhat longish e-mail sharing all the details and got bounce-backs. The correct e-mail address for the IDEA Maharashtra appellate body is appellette.mh@idea.aditybirla.com I searched online and after a bit of hit and miss finally got the relevant address. Then finally on 30th December, 2016 wrote a short email to the service provider as follows

Dear Sir,
I have been using prepaid mobile connection number xxxxxxx taken from IDEA for last 10 odd years. I want to register myself with IRCTC for online railway booking using
my IDEA mobile number. Earlier, I was having a BSNL connection which I discontinued 4 years back, For re-registering myself with IRCTC, I have to fulfill their latest
requirements as shown in the email below . It is requested that I please be issued a letter confirming my
credentials with your esteemed firm. I contacted your local office at corner of Law College Road and
Bhandarkar Road, Pune (reference number Q1 84786060793) who
refused to provide me any letter and have advised me to contact on the
above e-mail address, hence this request is being forwarded to you. Please do the needful at your earliest.

Few days later I got this short e-mail from them

Dear Customer, Greetings for the day! This is with reference to your email regarding services. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused to you and delay in response. We regret to inform you that we are unable to provide demographic details from our end as provision for same is not available with us. Should you need any further assistance, please call our Customer Service help line number 9822012345 or email us at customercare@idea.adityabirla.com by mentioning ten digit Idea mobile number in subject line. Thanks & Regards, Javed Khan Customer Service Team IDEA Cellular Limited- Maharashtra & Goa Circle.

Now I was at almost my wit s end. Few days before, I had re-affirmed my e-mail address to IDEA . I went to the IDEA care site, registered with my credentials. While the https connection to the page is weak, but let s not dwell on that atm. I logged into the site, I went through all the drop-down menus and came across My Account > Raise a request link which I clicked on . This came to a page where I could raise requests for various things. One of the options given there was Bill Delivery. As I wasn t a postpaid user but a prepaid user didn t know if that would work or not I still clicked on it. It said it would take 4 days for that to happen. I absently filed it away as I was somewhat sure that nothing would happen from my previous experience with IDEA. But this time the IDEA support staff came through and shared a toll-free SMS number and message format that I could use to generate call details from the last 6 months. The toll-free number from IDEA is 12345 and the message format is EBILL MON (short-form for month so if it s January would be jan, so on and so forth). After gathering all the required credentials, sent my last mail to IRCTC about a week, 10 days back

Dear Mr. Parivesh Patel, I was out-of-town and couldn t do the needful so sorry for the delay.
Now that I m back in town, I have been able to put together my prepaid
bills of last 6 months which should make it easy to establish my
identity. As had shared before, I don t remember my old password and the old
mobile number (BSNL number) is no longer accessible so can t go
through that route. Please let me know the next steps in correcting the existing IRCTC
account (which I haven t operated ever) so I can start using it to
book my tickets. Look forward to hearing from you.

Haven t heard anything them from them, apart from a generated token number, each time you send a reply happens. This time it was #4763548 The whole sequence of events throws a lot of troubling questions a. Could IRCTC done a better job of articulating their need to me instead of the run-around I was given ? b. Shouldn t there be a time limit to accounts from which no transactions have been done ? I hadn t done a single transaction since registering. When cell service providers including BSNL takes number out after a year of not using a number, why is that account active for so long ? c. As that account didn t have OTP at registration, dunno if it s being used for illegal activities or something. Update This doesn t seem to be a unique thing at all. Just sampling some of the tweets by people at @IRCTC_LTD https://twitter.com/praveen4al/status/775614978258718721 https://twitter.com/vis_nov25/status/786062572390932480 https://twitter.com/ShubhamDevadiya/status/794241443950948352 https://twitter.com/rajeshhindustan/status/798028633759584256 https://twitter.com/ameetsangita/status/810081624343908352 https://twitter.com/grkisback/status/813733835213078528 https://twitter.com/gbalaji_/status/804230235625394177 https://twitter.com/chandhu_nr/status/800675627384721409 , all of this just goes to show how un-unique the situation really is.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #customer-service, #demonetization, #IDEA-aditya birla, #IRCTC, #web-services, rant

May as well start 2017 with a burst of recorded optimism: the last books I bought in 2016 that I'm queuing up to read. The hopoe is that this year I'll actually read more of them! Becky Chambers A Closed and Common Orbit (sff)
T. Kingfisher The Raven and the Reindeer (sff)
Joseph R. Lallo The Book of Deacon Anthology (sff)
M. Louisa Locke Maids of Misfortune (historical)
Rebecca Solnit Hope in the Dark (nonfiction)
K.B. Spangler Maker Space (sff)
K.B. Spangler State Machine (sff)
Steven W. White New World (sff) Most of these are various StoryBundle add-ons that I'd somehow missed downloading the first time (and hence are fairly low priority on the reading list). The rest is a mixed bag of Kindle purchases. I started A Closed and Common Orbit today and could barely put it down. An auspicious start to the new year.

Review: Pawn of Prophecy, by David Eddings

Series:	The Belgariad #1
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	April 1982
Printing:	August 1990
ISBN:	0-345-33551-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	258

I hit a period in November when I felt like reading something entirely undemanding and fun, something that was predictable, comfortable, and guaranteed to be a happy ending. There are times in life for books like that. I've been vaguely thinking of re-reading the Belgariad for a while, which I'd not read since I was in college, and that seemed to fit the bill. Garion is a farm-boy in Sendaria, a quiet and industrious kingdom full of farmers. His only family is his Aunt Pol, who ran the kitchen at Faldor's farm. His life has all the hallmarks of being entirely unremarkable, despite occasional visits by a traveling vagabond, Wolf, who clearly knows his Aunt Pol. But then something extremely important is stolen elsewhere, Wolf and Pol have to leave to pursue it for reasons that are quite murky to Garion, and Pol is unwilling to leave Garion behind. This begins Garion's great adventure, in which he becomes far more important and powerful than he would have ever imagined. That's the promise, at least, and the stock plot of every series like this. And let me be clear up front: the Belgariad is very stock. That's part of what I was in the mood for, but don't come to this series looking for interesting differentiation. It's clearly in the center of the secondary world chosen one fantasy genre, with a great evil, forces of good arrayed against it, and someone who unknowingly has the power to stop evil but has to learn how to use it. If you're in the mood for this, every note will be comfortably familiar; if not, it might be boringly predictable. Unfortunately, this particular book does not cast the Belgariad in a good light. Garion's introduction to this story is intensely irritating, almost entirely because no one will tell him what's going on. Pol is excessively protective (smotheringly so), but shuts down any questions he has and doesn't explain why she's freaking out. (This doesn't become entirely clear until towards the end of the second book.) What little scraps Garion picks up, he has to get by eavesdropping. Even by the end of this book, when Garion has met royalty and started helping with larger political issues (albeit mostly by accident), everyone is keeping him in the dark and he doesn't believe the hints he's gotten. I can't remember how I reacted to this the first time I read this series, but the second time through, it was extremely frustrating. The frustration is stronger because any regular reader of this genre knows exactly what Garion is, although not precisely how the story will play out, and can make fairly good guesses about Pol and Wolf from early in the story. Everyone playing coy doesn't even add legitimate suspense or set up a big reveal. It just made me irritated at Garion's blindness (it's mildly understandable given how foreign the idea is to his life, but he seems remarkably dense even with that), and even more irritated at Wolf and, in particular, Aunt Pol for keeping him so thoroughly in the dark. Garion is very attached to his aunt; on this re-reading, I wasn't entirely sure why. She occasionally shows love and support, and she's certainly wise, but for most of the book she treats him with brusque condescension and tries to keep him as ignorant as possible. Garion's weird entanglement with a black rider that he'd seen for most of his life doesn't make this any better. It's creepy and disturbing, it's not entirely resolved in this book, and Garion is clearly in danger, which wasn't the vibe that I was looking for when starting this re-read. And it's hard to escape the feeling that Garion might have managed to tell someone if all the adult figures in his life weren't so secretive, dismissive, and excessively controlling. So, all in all, an inauspicious beginning. It was good enough to keep me reading when I first read the series, and it was good enough on this re-read, but just barely. The saving grace is Silk and Barak, when the story finally meets them. Those who have read this series will know that they're just the beginning of the party-building process that will take up much of this series (so many Lord of the Rings resonances), but the one thing I will give Eddings is that he writes entertaining supporting characters. Both of them are a bit stereotyped, but they add so much to this story. Silk in particular is a delight and remains a delight throughout the series, adding a much-needed level of snark and sneaky enjoyment that lightens so many of the serious episodes of this story. The Belgariad in general is highly derivative map exploration fantasy, and you shouldn't expect anything deeper. It is, however, enjoyable map exploration fantasy with some entertaining supporting cast members. Sadly, only the glimmers of that are visible from this book. Pawn of Prophecy is mostly an irritating tour of bad parenting techniques, refusal to talk to teenagers, sneaking around to get information that should have been legitimately shared, and taking forever to get around to the mythology that we all know is coming. I therefore can't recommend this book, although one does have to read it in order to read the rest of the series, which as I recall gets considerably better. Followed by Queen of Sorcery. Rating: 5 out of 10

While I try to minimize Politics and Economics as much as I can on this blog, it sometimes surfaces. It is possible that some people may benefit or at least be aware. A bit of background is necessary before I jump into the intricacies of the Maharashtra Real Estate Rules and Regulation Draft Rules 2016 (RERA) . Since ever, but more prominently since 2007/8 potential homeowners from across the country have been suffering at the hands of the builder/promoter for number of years. While it would be wrong to paint all the Real Estate Developers and Builders as cheats (we as in all tenants and homeowners hope there are good ones out there) many Real Estate Builders and promoters have cheated homeowners of their hard-earned money. This has also lessened the secondary (resale) market and tenants like me have to fight over morsels as supply is tight. There were two broad ways in which the cheating is/was done a. Take deposits and run away i.e. fly by night operators Here the only option for a homeowner is to file an FIR (First Information Report) and hope the culprits are caught. 99% of the time the builder/promoter goes somewhere abroad and the potential home buyers/home-owners are left holding the can. This is usually done by small real estate promoters and builders. b. The big boys would take all or most money of the project, may register or not register the flat in your name, either build a quarter or half-finished building and then make excuses. There are some who do not even build. The money given is used by the builder/developer either for his own needs or using that money in some high-profile project which is expensive and may have huge returns. They know that home-owners can t do anything, at the most go to the court which will take more than a decade or two during which time the developer would have interest-free income and do whatever he wants to do. One of the bigger stories which came up this year was when the Indian Cricket Captain, M.S. Dhoni (cricket is a religion in India, and the cricketers gods for millions of Indians) had to end his brand engagement and ambassadorship from Amrapali Housing Group. Apparently, his wife Sakshi was on the Board of directors at Amrapali Housing and had to resign The Government knew of such issues and had been working since last few years. Under the present Government, a Model Agreement and a Model Real Estate Rules and Regulation Bill was passed on 31st March and came into force on 1st May 2016. India, similar to the U.S. and U.K. follows a federal structure. While I have shared this before, most of the laws in India fall in either of three lists, Central List, Concurrent Lists and State Lists. Housing for instance, is a state subject so any laws concerning housing has to be made by the state legislature. Having a statutory requirement to put the bill in 6 months from 1st of May, the Government of Maharashtra chose to put the draft rules in public domain on 12th December 2016, about 10 days ago and there were efforts to let it remain low-key so people do not object as we are still in the throes of demonetisation. By law they should have given 30 days for people to raise objections and give suggestions. The State Government too could have easily asked an extension and as both the State and the Centre are of the same Political Party they would have easily got it. With that, below is the e-mail I sent to suggesstionsonrera@maharashtra.gov.in Sub Some suggestions for RERA biggest suggestion, need to give more time study the implications for house-owners. Respected Sir/Madame, I will be publishing the below mail as a public letter on my blog as well. I am writing as a citizen, a voter, a potential home owner, currently a tenant . If houses supply is not in time, it is us, the tenants who have the most to lose as we have to fight over whatever is in the market. I do also hope to be a home buyer at some point in time so these rules would affect me also somewhere in the hazy future. I came to know through the media that Maharashtra Govt. recently introduced draft rules for RERA Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 . I hope to impress upon you that these proposed Rules and Regulations need to be thoroughly revised and new draft rules shared with the public at large with proper announcement in all newspapers and proper time ( more than a month ) to study and give replies on the said matter. My suggestions and complaints are as under a. The first complaint and suggestion is that the date between the draft regulations and suggestions being invited by members of public is and was too little 12 December 2016 23 December 2016 (only 11 days) for almost 90 pages of Government rules and regulations which needs multiple rounds of re-reading to understand the implications of the draft rules . Add to that unlike the Central Building Legislation, Model Agreement which was prepared by Centre and also given wide publicity, the Maharashtra Govt. didn t do any such publicity to bring it to the
notice of the people. b. I ask where was the hurry to publish these draft rules now when everybody is suffering through the result of cash-crunch on top of other things. If the said draft rules were put up in January 2017, I am sure more people would have responded to the draft rules. Ir raises suspicion in the mind of everybody the timing of sharing the draft rules and the limited time given to people to respond. E.g. When TRAI (Telephone Regulatory Authority of India) asked for suggestion it gives more than a month, and something like housing which is an existential question for everybody, i.e. the poor, the middle and the rich, you have given pretty less time. While I could change my telephone service providers at a moment s notice without huge loss, the same cannot be said either for a house owner (in case of builder) or a tenant as well. This is just not done. c. The documents are at https://housing.maharashtra.gov.in/sitemap/housing/Rera_rules.htm under different sub-headings while the correct structure of the documents can be found at nared s site
http://naredco.in/notifications.asp . At the very least, the documents should have been in proper order. Coming to some of the salient points raised both in the media and elsewhere 1. On page 6 of Part IV-A Ext1.pdf you have written Explanation.-The registration of a real estate project shall not be required,- (i) for the purpose of any renovations or repair or redevelopment which does not involve marketing, advertisement, selling or new allotment of any apartment , plot or building as the case may be under
the real estate project; RERA draft rules What it means is that the house owner and by the same stroke the tenant would have absolutely no voice to oppose any changes made to the structure at any point of time after the building is built. This means the builder is free to build 12-14-16 even 20 stories building when the original plans were for 6-8-10. This rule gives the builder to do free for all till the building doesn t get converted into a society, a process which does and can take years to happen. 2. A builder has to take innumerable permissions from different authorities at each and every stage till possession of a said property isn t handed over to a home buyer and by its extension to the tenant. Now any one of these authorities could sit on the papers and there is no accountability of by when papers would be passed under a competent authority s desk. There was a wide belief that there would be some
rules and regulations framed in this regard but the draft rules are silent on the subject matter. 3. In Draft rule 5. page 8 of Part IV-A Ext1.pdf you write Withdrawal of amounts deposited in separate account.-(1) With regard to the withdrawal of amounts deposited under sub-clause (D) of clause (l) of sub-section (2) of section 4, the following provisions shall apply:- (i) For new projects which will be registered after commencement. Deposit in the escrow account is from now onwards. So what happens to the projects which are ongoing at the moment, either at the registration stage or at building stage, thousands of potential house owners would be left to fend for themselves. There needs to be some recourse for them as well. 3b. Another suggestion is that the house-owners are duly informed when promoters/builders are taking money from the bank and should have the authority to see that proper documents and procedure was followed. It is possible that unscrupulous elements may either bypass it or give some different documents which are not in knowledge of the house-owner, thus defeating the purpose of the escrow account itself. 4. On page 44 of Pt.IV-A Ext.161 in the Model Agreement to be entered
between the Promoter and the Alottee you have mentioned (i)The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee one Apartment No. .. of the type .. of carpet area admeasuring .. sq. metres on floor in the building __________along with (hereinafter referred to as the Apartment ) as shown in the Floor plan thereof hereto annexed and marked Annexures C
for the consideration of Rs. . including Rs. . being the proportionate price of the common areas and facilities appurtenant to the premises, the nature, extent and description of the common/limited common areas and facilities which are more particularly described in the Second Schedule annexed herewith. (the price of the Apartment including the proportionate price of the limited common areas and facilities and parking spaces should be shown separately). (ii) The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee garage bearing Nos ____ situated at _______ Basement and/or stilt and /or ____podium being
constructed in the layout for the consideration of Rs. ____________/- (iii) The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee Car parking spaces bearing Nos ____ situated at _______ Basement and/or stilt and /or ____podium and/or open parking space, being constructed in the layout for the
consideration of Rs. ____________/-. The total aggregate consideration amount for the apartment including garages/car parking spaces is
thus Rs.______/- Draft rules. What has been done here is the parking space has been divorced from sale of the flat . It is against natural justice, logic, common sense as well-known precedents in jurisprudence (i.e. law) In September 2010, the bench of Justices R M Lodha and A K Patnaik had ruled in a judgement stating developers cannot sell parking spaces as independent real-estate units. The court ruled that parking areas are common areas and facilities . This was on behalf of a precedent in Mumbai High Court as well. http://www.reinventingparking.org/2010/09/important-parking-ruling-by-indias.html This has been reiterated again and again in courts as well as consumer
forums http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Cant-charge-flat-buyer-extra-for-parking-slot/articleshow/22475233.cms and has been the norm in several Apartment Acts over multiple states http://apartmentadda.com/blog/2015/02/19/rules-pertaining-to-parking-spaces-in-apartment-complexes/ 5. In case of dispute, the case will high court which is inundated by huge number of pending cases. As recently as August 2016 there was a news item in Indian Express which talks about the spike in pending cases. Putting a case in the high court will weigh heavily on the homeowner, financially and
mentally http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/more-cases-and-increased-staff-strength-putting-pressure-on-bombay-high-court-building-2964796/ It may be better to use the services of National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission'(NCDRC) where there is possibility of quicker justice and quick resolution. There is possibility of group actions taking place which will reduce duplicity of work on behalf of the petitioners. 6. There is neither any clarity, incentive or punitive action against the promoter/builder if s/he delay conveyance to the society in order to get any future developmental and FSI rights. To delay handing over conveyance, the builders delay completion of the last building in a said project. there should be both a compensatory and punitive actions taken against the builder if he is unable to prove any genuine cause for the same. 7. There needs to be the provision with regard to need for developers to make public disclosures pertaining to building approvals. This while I had shared above needs to be explicitly mentioned so house-owners know the promoter/builder are on the right path. 8. There needs to be a provision that prohibits refusal to sell property to any person on the basis of his/her religion, marital status or dietary preferences. 9. There is lot of ambiguity if criminal proceedings can be initiated against a promoter/developer if s/he fails to deliver the flat on time. The developer should be criminally liable if he doesn t give the flat with all the amenities, fixtures and anything which was on agreement signed by both parties and for which the payment has been given in
full at time of possession of a flat. 10. Penalties for the promoter/builder is capped at 10% in case of any wrong-doing. Apart from proving the charge, the onus of which would lie on the house-owner, capping it at 10% is similar to A teacher telling a naughty student, do whatever you want to do, I am only going to hit you 5 times. Such a drafting encourages the Promoter/builder to play mischief. The builder knows his exposure is pretty limited. Liability is limited so he will try to get with whatever he can. Having a high penalty clause will deter him. 11. There was talk and shown in the Center s model agreement the precedent of providing names, addresses and contact details of other allot-tees or home-owners of a building that would have multiple dwelling units . This is nowhere either in the agreement or mentioned anywhere else in the four documents. 12. An addition to the above would be that the details provided should be correct and updated as per the records maintained by the Promoter/builder. 13. Today, there is no way for a potential house-owner to know if the builder had broken any norms or has any cases in court pending against him. There should be a way for the potential house-owner to find out. 14. A builder can terminate a flat purchase agreement by giving just a week s notice on email to the buyer who defaults on an instalment. But the developer can refund the money without interest to the
purchaser at leisure, within six months.Under MOFA (the earlier rules), the developer could cancel the agreement after giving a 15 days notice, and the builder could resell the flat only after refunding money to the original buyer. Under the new draft rules, a builder can immediately sell the flat after terminating the agreement. 15. The new draft rules say a buyer must pay 30% of the total cost while signing the agreement and 45% when the plinth of the building is constructed. The earlier state law stipulated 20% payment when the
agreement is signed with the developer. 16. The Central model agreement and rules proposed a fee of INR Rs 1,000 for filing complaints before housing authority; the state draft has proposed to hike this fee to Rs INR Rs. 10,000/- 17. Reading the Central Model Agreement, key disclosures under Section 4 (2)and Rule 3 (2) of the Central Model Rules have been excluded to be put up on the website of the Authority. These included carpet area of flat, encumbrance certificate (this would have disclosed encumbrances in respect of the land where the real estate project is proposed to be undertaken), copy of the legal title report and sanctioned plan of the building. Due to this house-owner would always be in dark and assume that everything is alright. There have been multiple instances of this over years Some examples http://www.deccanchronicle.com/140920/nation-current-affairs/article/builder-encroaches-%E2%80%98raja-kaluve%E2%80%99 http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/surat-builder-grabs-tribal-land-using-fake-documents/ http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/bmtf-books-exmayor-wife-for-grabbing-ca-site/article7397062.ece http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thane/24-acre-ambernath-plot-usurped-with-fake-docus/articleshow/55654139.cms 18. The Central rule requires a builder to submit an annual report including profit and loss account, balance sheet, cash flow statement, directors report and auditors report for the preceding three financial years, among other things. However, the Maharashtra draft rules are silent on such a requirement. While the above is what I could perceive in the limited amount I came to know. This should be enough to convince that more needs to be done from the house-owner s side. Update Just saw Quint s Op-Ed goes in more detail.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Draft Rules for Real Estate Rules and Regulation (2016), #hurry, #Name, #Response, Amrapali Group, Contact details of other hom-owners in a scheme., M.S. Dhoni

The post continues from the last post shared. Let me get some interesting tit-bits not related to the day-trip out-of-the-way first I don t know whether we had full access to see all parts of fuller hall or not. Couple of days I was wondering around Fuller Hall, specifically next to where clothes were pressed. Came to know of the laundry service pretty late but still was useful. Umm next to where the ladies/gentleman pressed our clothes, there is a stairway which goes down. In fact even on the opposite side there is a stairway which goes down. I dunno if other people explored them or not. I was surprised and shocked to see bars in each room as well as connecting walkways etc. I felt a bit sad, confused and curious and went on to find more places like that. After a while I came up to the ground-level and enquired with some of the ladies therein. I was shocked to know that UCT some years ago (they were not specific) was a jail for people. I couldn t imagine that a place which has so much warmth (in people, not climate) could be evil in a sense. I was not able to get much information out of them about the nature of jail it was, maybe it is a dark past that nobody wants to open up, dunno. There were also two *important* aspects of UCT which Bernelle either forgot, didn t share or I just came to know via the Wikipedia page then but nothing else. 1. MeerKAT Apparently quite a bit of the technology was built-in UCT itself. This would have been interesting for geeks and wanna-be geeks like me 2. The OpenContent Initiative by UCT This would have been also something worth exploring. One more interesting thing which I saw was the French council in Cape Town from outside I would urge to look at the picture in the gallery as the picture I shared doesn t really show all the details. For e.g. the typical large french windows which are the hall-mark of French architecture doesn t show its glory but if you look at 1306 2322 original picture instead of the 202 360 reproduction you will see that. You will also the insignia of the French Imperial Eagle whose history I came to know only after I looked it up on the Wikipedia page on that day. It seemed fascinating and probably would have the same pride as the State Emblem of India has for Indians with the four Asiatic Lions standing in a circle protecting each other. I also like the palm tree and the way the French Council seemed little and yet had character around all the big buildings. What also was interesting that there wasn t any scare/fear-build and we could take photos from outside unlike what I had seen and experienced in Doha, Qatar as far as photography near Western Embassies/Councils were concerned. One of the very eye-opening moments for me was also while I was researching flights from India to South Africa. While perhaps unconsciously I might have known that Middle East is close to India, in reality, it was only during the search I became aware that most places in Middle East by flight are only an hour or two away. This was shocking as there is virtually no mention of one of our neighbours when they are source of large-scale remittances every year. I mean this should have been in our history and geography books but most do not dwell on the subject. It was only during and after that I could understand Mr. Modi s interactions and trade policies with the Middle East. Another interesting bit was seeing a bar in a Sprinbok bus While admittedly it is not the best picture of the bar, I was surprised to find a bar at the back of a bus. By bar I mean a machine which can serve anything from juices to alcoholic drinks depending upon what is stocked. What was also interesting in the same bus is that the bus also had a middle entrance-and-exit. This is something I hadn t seen in most Indian buses. Some of the Volvo buses have but it is rarely used (only except emergencies) . An exhaustive showcase of local buses can be seen here . I find the hand-drawn/cad depictions of all the buses by Amit Pense near to the T. This is also something which I have not observed in Indian inter-city buses (axe to break the window in case of accident and breakable glass which doesn t hurt anyone I presume), whether they are State-Transport or the high-end Volvo s . Either it s part of South African Roads Regulations or something that Springbok buses do for their customers. All of these queries about the different facets I wanted to ask the bus-driver and the attendant/controller but in the excitement of seeing, recording new things couldn t ask In fact one of the more interesting things I looked at and could look day and night is the variety of vehicles on display in Cape Town. In hindsight, I should have bought a couple of 128 GB MMC cards for my mobile rather than the 64 GB one. It was just plain inadequate to capture all that was new and interesting. This truck I had seen about some 100 metres near the Auditorium on Upper Campus. The truck s design, paint was something I had never seen before. It is/was similar to casket trucks seen in movies but the way it was painted and everything made it special. What was interesting is to see the gamut of different vehicles. For instance, there were no bicycles that I saw in most places. There were mostly Japanese/Italian bikes and all sorts of trucks. If I had known before, I would definitely have bought an SD specifically to take snaps of all the different types of trucks, cars etc. that I saw therein. The adage/phrase I should stop in any one place and the whole world will pass me by seemed true on quite a few South African Roads. While the roads were on par or a shade better than India, many of those were wide roads. Seeing those, I was left imagining how the Autobahn in Germany and other high-speed Expressways would look n feel. India has also been doing that with the Pune-Mumbai Expressway and projects like Yamuna Expressway and now the extension Agra Lucknow Expressway but doing this all over India would take probably a decade or more. We have been doing it since a decade and a half. NHDP and PMGSY are two projects which are still ongoing to better the roads. We have been having issues as to should we have toll or no toll issues but that is a discussion for some other time. One of the more interesting sights I saw was the high-arched gothic-styled church from outside. This is near Longstreet as well. I have seen something similar in Goa, Pondicherry but not such high-arches. I did try couple of times to gain entry but one time it was closed, the other time some repairing/construction work was going on or something. I would loved to see it from inside and hopefully they would have had an organ (music) as well. I could imagine to some extent the sort of music that would have come out. Now that Goa has come in the conversation I can t help but state that Seafood enthusiasts/lover/aficionado, or/and Pescatarianism would have a ball of a time in Goa. Goa is on the Konkan coast and while I m eggie, ones who enjoy seafood really have a ball of a time in Goa. Fouthama s Festival which happens in February is particularly attractive as Goan homes are thrown open for people to come and sample their food, exchange recipes and alike. This happens around 2 weeks before the Goan Carnival and is very much a part of the mish-mashed Konkani-Bengali-Parsi-Portugese culture. I better stop here about the Goa otherwise I ll get into reminiscing mode. To put the story and event back on track from where we left of (no fiction hereon), Nicholas was in constant communication with base, i.e. UCT as well as another group who was hiking from UCT to Table Mountain. We waited for the other group to join us till 13:00 hrs. We came to know that they were lost and were trying to come up and hence would take more time. As Bernelle was with them, who was a local and she had two dogs who knew the hills quite well, it was decided to go ahead without them. We came down the same cable-car and then ventured on towards Houtbay. Houtbay has it all, a fisherman s wharf, actual boats with tough-mean looking men with tattoos working on boats puffing cigars/pipes, gaggle of sea-gulls, the whole scene. Sharing a few pictures of the way in-between. I just now had a quick look at the restaurant and it seems they had options for veggies too. Unfortunately, the rating leaves a bit to be desired but then dunno as Indian flavoring is something that takes time to get used too. Zomato doesn t give any idea of from when a restaurant is in business and has too few reviews so not easy to know how the experience would have been. Notice the pattern, the pattern of small houses I saw all the way till Houtbay and back. I do vaguely remember starting a discussion about it on the bus but don t really remember. I have seen (on TV) cities like Miami, Dubai or/and Hong Kong who have big buildings on the beach but both in Konkan as well as Houtbay there were small buildings. I guess a combination of zoning regulations, feel of community, fear of being flooded all play into beaches being the way they are. Also, this probably is good as less stress on the environment. The above picture is taken from Wikipedia from the article Miami Beach, Florida for comparison. The Audi rare car to be seen in India. This car has been associated with Ravi Shastri when he won it in 1985. I was young but still get goosebumps remembering those days. First glance of Houtbay beach and pier. Notice how clean and white the beach is. You can see the wharf grill restaurant in the distance (side-view), see the back of the hop on and hop off bus (a concept which was unknown to me till then). Once I came back and explored on the web came to know this concept is prevalent in many a touristy places around the world. Umm also By sheer happenchance also captured a beautiful looking Indian female . In Hindi, we would call this picture virodabhas or contradiction . this is in afternoon, around 1430 hrs. You have the sun, the clouds, the Mountains, the x number of boats, the pier, the houses, the cars, the shops. It was all crazy and beautiful at the same time. The Biggest Contradiction is seeing the Mountain, the beach and the Sea in the same Picture. Baffled the mind. Konkan though is a bit similar there as well. You have all the three things in some places but that s a different experience altogether as ours is a more tropical weather although is one of the most romantic places in the rains. We were supposed to go on a short cruise to seal/dolphin island but as we were late (as had been waiting for the other group) didn t go and instead just loitered there. IIRC the lookout bar is situated just next to Houtbay Search and Rescue. Although was curious if the Lookout tower was used in case of disappearance. lost people, boats etc. Seal jumping over water, what a miracle ! It looked like the boat we could have been on. I clicked as I especially liked the name Calypso and Calypso . I shared the two links as the mythologies, interpretation differ a bit between Greek and Hollywood culture Can see few Debian folks in the foreground, next to the Pole and the area around. Also can see a bit of the area around. I don t know anything about water sports and after sometime he came out. I was left wondering though, how safe he was in that water. While he was close to the pier and he was just paddling, there weren t big waves still felt a bit of concern. While the act was not to the level we see in the movies, still for the time I hung around, I saw him showing attitude for his younger audiences, eating out of their hands, making funny sounds. Btw he farted a few times, whether that was a put-on or not can t really say but produced a few guffaws from his audience. I dunno why the birds came down for. Mr. Seal was being fed oily small fish parts, dunno if the oil was secreted by the fish themselves or whatever, it just looked oily from distance. There wasn t much activity on the time we went. It probably would have been different on sunrise and would be on sunset. The only activity I saw was on this boat where they were busy fixing and disentangling the lines. I came up with 5-15 different ideas for a story but rejected them as a. Probably all of them have been tried. People have been fishing since the beginning of time and modern fishing probably 200 odd years or so. I have read accounts of fishing companies in early 1800s onwards, so probably all must have been tried. b. More dangerous one, if there is a unique idea, then it becomes more dangerous as writing is an all-consuming process. Writing a blog post (bad or good) takes lots of time. I constantly read, re-read, try and improvise till I can or my patience loses out. In book you simply can t have such luxuries. No parking/tow zone in/near the Houtbay search and rescue. Probably to take out emergency vehicles once something untoward happens. Saved 54 lives, boats towed 154 Salut! Houtbay sea rescue. The only small criticism is for Houtbay there wasn t a single public toilet. We had to ask favor at kraal kraft to use their toilets and there could have been accidents, it wasn t lighted well and water was spilled around. For us, because we were late we missed both the boat-cruise as well as some street shops selling trinkets. Other than that it was all well. We should have stayed till sunset, I am sure the view would have been breath-taking but we hadn t booked the bus till evening. Overall it was an interesting day as we had explored part of Table Mountain, seen the somewhat outrageously priced trinkets there as well as explored Houtbay sea-side as well.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Audi, #Cape Town, #Cruises, #Debconf16, #French Council, #Geography, #Houtbay Sea Rescue, #Jail, #Middle East, #Springbok Atlas, #Vehicles

Disclaimer This is an attempt at humor and hence entirely fictional in nature. While some incidents depicted are true, the context and the story woven around them are by yours truly. None of the Mascots of Debian were hurt during the blog post. I also disavow any responsibility for any hurt (real or imagined) to any past, current and future mascots. The attempt should not be looked upon as demeaning people who are accused of false crimes, tortured and confessions eked out of them as this happens quite a lot (In India for sure, but guess it s the same world over in various degrees). The idea is loosely inspired by Chocolate:Deep Dark Secrets. (2005) On a more positive note, let s start Being a Sunday morning woke up late to find incessant knocking on the door, incidentally mum was not at home. Opening the door, found two official looking gentleman. They asked my name, asked my credentials, tortured and arrested me for Group conspiracy of Malicious Mischief in second and third degrees . The torture was done by means of making me forcefully watch endless reruns of Norbit . While I do love Eddie Murphy, this was one of his movies he could have done without. I guess for many people watching it once was torture enough. I *think* they were nominated for razzie awards dunno if they won it or not, but this is beside the point. Unlike the 20 years it takes for a typical case to reach to its conclusion even in the smallest court in India, due to the torture, I was made to confess (due to endless torture) and was given summary judgement. The judgement was/is as follows a. Do 100 hours of Community service in Debian in 2017. This could be done via blog posts, raising tickets in the Debian BTS or in whichever way I could be helpful to Debian. b. Write a confessional with some photographic evidence sharing/detailing some of the other members who were part of the conspiracy in view of the reduced sentence. So now, have been forced to write this confession As you all know, I won a bursary this year for debconf16. What is not known by most people is that I also got an innocuous looking e-mail titled Pollito for DPL . While I can t name all the names as investigation is still ongoing about how far-reaching the conspiracy is . The email was purportedly written by members of cabal within cabal which are in Debian. I looked at the email header to see if this was genuine and I could trace the origin but was left none the wiser, as obviously these people are far more technically advanced than to fall in simple tricks like this Anyways, secretly happy that I have been invited to be part of these elites, I did the visa thing, packed my bags and came to Debconf16. At this point in juncture, I had no idea whether it was real or I had imagined the whole thing. Then to my surprise saw this Just like the Illuminati the conspiracy was for all to see those who knew about it. Most people were thinking of it as a joke, but those like me who had got e-mails knew better. I knew that the thing is real, now I only needed to bide my time and knew that the opportunity would present itself. And few days later, sure enough, there was a trip planned for Table Mountain, Cape Town . Few people planned to hike to the mountain, while few chose to take the cable car till up the mountain. Quite a few people came along with us and bought tickets for the to and fro to the mountain and back. Incidentally, I was thinking if the South African Govt. were getting the tax or not. If you look at the ticket, there is just a bar-code. In India as well as the U.S. there is TIN Tax Identification Number Few links to share what it is all about . While these should be on all invoices, need to specially check when taking high-value items. In India as shared in the article the awareness, knowledge leaves a bit to be desired. While I m drifting from the incident, it would be nice if somebody from SA could share how things work there. Moving on, we boarded the cable car. It was quite spacious cable car with I guess around 30-40 people or some more who were able to see everything along with the controller. It was a pleasant cacophony of almost two dozen or more nationalities on this 360 degrees moving chamber. I was a little worried though as it essentially is a bucket and there is always a possibility that a severe wind could damage it. Later somebody did share that some frightful incidents had occurred not too long ago on the cable car. It took about 20-25 odd minutes to get to the top of table mountain and we were presented with views such as below The picture I am sharing is actually when we were going down as all the pictures of going up via the cable car were over-exposed. Also, it was pretty crowded on the way up then on the way down so handling the mobile camera was not so comfortable. Once we reached up, the wind was blowing at incredible speeds. Even with my jacket and everything I was feeling cold. Most of the group around 10-12 people looked around if we could find a place to have some refreshments and get some of the energy in the body. So we all ventured to a place and placed our orders I was introduced to Irish Coffee few years back and have had some incredible Irish Coffees in Pune and elsewhere. I do hope to be able to make Irish Coffee at home if and when I have my own house. This is hotter than brandy and is perfect if you are suffering from cold etc if done right, really needs some skills. This is the only drink which I wanted in SA which I never got right . As South Africa was freezing for me, this would have been the perfect antidote but the one there as well as elsewhere were all bleh. What was interesting though, was the coffee caller besides it. It looked like a simple circuit mounted on a PCB board with lights, vibrations and RFID and it worked exactly like that. I am guessing as and when the order is ready, there is an interrupt signal sent via radio waves which causes the buzzer to light and vibrate. Here s the back panel if somebody wants to take inspiration and try it as a fun project Once we were somewhat strengthened by the snacks, chai, coffee etc. we made our move to seeing the mountain. The only way to describe it is that it s similar to Raigad Fort but the plateau seemed to be bigger. The wikipedia page of Table Mountain attempts to share but I guess it s more clearly envisioned by one of the pictures shared therein. I have to say while Table Mountain is beautiful and haunting as it has scenes like these There is something there which pulls you, which reminds you of a long lost past. I could have simply sat there for hours together but as was part of the group had to keep with them. Not that I minded. The moment I was watching this, I was transported to some memories of the Himalayas about 20 odd years or so. In that previous life, I had the opportunity to be with some of the most beautiful women and also been in the most happening places, the Himalayas. I had shared years before some of my experiences I had in the Himalayas. I discontinued it as I didn t have a decent camera at that point in time. While I don t wanna digress, I would challenge anybody to experience the Himalayas and then compare. It is just something inexplicable. The beauty and the rawness that Himalayas shows makes you feel insignificant and yet part of the whole cosmos. What Paulo Cohello expressed in The Valkyries is something that could be felt in the Himalayas. Leh, Ladakh, Himachal , Garwhal, Kumaon. The list will go on forever as there are so many places, each more beautiful than the other. Most places are also extremely backpacker-friendly so if you ask around you can get some awesome deals if you want to spend more than a few days in one place. Moving on, while making small talk @olasd or Nicolas Dandrimont , the headmaster of our trip made small talk to each of us and eked out from all of us that we wanted to have Pollito as our DPL (Debian Project Leader) for 2017. Few pictures being shared below as supporting evidence as well While I do not know who further up than Nicolas was on the coup which would take place. The idea was this If the current DPL steps down, we would take all and any necessary actions to make Pollito our DPL. This has been taken from Pollito s adventure Being a responsible journalist, I also enquired about Pollito s true history as it would not have been complete without one. This is the e-mail I got from Gunnar Wolf, a friend and DD from Mexico

Turns out, Valessio has just spent a week staying at my house And
in any case, if somebody in Debian knows about Pollito s
childhood That is me. Pollito came to our lives when we went to Congreso Internacional de
Software Libre (CISOL) in Zacatecas city. I was strolling around the
very beautiful city with my wife Regina and our friend Alejandro
Miranda, and at a shop at either Ram n L pez Velarde or Vicente
Guerrero, we found a flock of pollitos. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/22.77111/-102.57145 Even if this was comparable to a slave market, we bought one from
them, and adopted it as our own. Back then, we were a young couple Well, we were not that young
anymore. I mean, we didn t have children. Anyway, we took Pollito with
us on several road trips, such as the only time I have crossed an
international border driving: We went to Encuentro Centroamericano de
Software Libre at Guatemala city in 2012 (again with Alejandro), and
you can see several Pollito pics at: http://gwolf.org/album/road-trip-ecsl-2012-guatemala-0 Pollito likes travelling. Of course, when we were to Nicaragua for
DebConf, Pollito tagged along. It was his first flight as a passenger
(we never asked about his previous life in slavery; remember, Pollito
trust no one). Pollito felt much welcome with the DebConf crowd. Of course, as
Pollito is a free spirit, we never even thought about forcing him to
come back with us. Pollito went to Switzerland, and we agreed to meet
again every year or two. It s always nice to have a chat with him. Hugs!

So with that backdrop I would urge fellow Debianities to take up the slogans LONG LIVE THE DPL ! LONG LIVE POLLITO ! LONG LIVE POLLITO THE DPL ! The first step to make Pollito the DPL is to ensure he has a @debian.org (pollito@debian.org) We also need him to be made a DD because only then can he become a DPL. In solidarity and in peace
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #caller, #confession, #Debconf16, #debian, #Fiction, #history, #Pollito, #Pollito as DPL, #Table Mountain, Cabal, memories, south africa

Review: The Broken Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin

Series:	Inheritance #2
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	November 2010
Printing:	September 2011
ISBN:	0-316-04395-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	395

The Broken Kingdoms is a fairly direct sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and depends heavily on the end of that book. It had been a long time since I'd read the previous book (about five years), and I looked up plot summaries to remind myself what happened. It turned out that I probably didn't have to do that; the explanation does come when it's critical. But this book will definitely spoil the end of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Oree is an artist who sells her work to tourists in Shadow, the city beneath the World Tree. It's a good enough living, particularly for a blind immigrant from Nimaro, the area settled by the survivors of the destruction of Maro. Oree is not strictly entirely blind, since she can see magic, but that's not particularly helpful in daily life. She's content to keep that quiet, along with her private paintings that carry a strange magic not found in her public trinkets. One of the many godlings who inhabit Shadow is Oree's former lover, so she has some connection to the powerful of the city. But she prefers her quiet life until, that is, she finds a man at sunrise in a pile of muck and takes him home to clean him up. A man who she ends up taking care of, despite the fact that he never speaks to her, and despite his total lack of desire or apparent capability to take care of himself or avoid any danger. Not that it seems to matter, since he comes back to life every time he dies. If you've read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, you have a pretty good guess at who the man Oree calls Shiny actually is. But that discovery is not the core plot of this book. Someone is killing the godlings. They're not immortal, although they don't age, but killing them should require immense power or the intervention of the Three, the gods who run the metaphysical universe of this series. Neither of those seem to be happening, and still godlings are being murdered. Nahadoth is not amused: the humans and godlings have one month to find the killer before he does something awful to all of them. Then Shiny somehow kills a bunch of priests of Itempas, and the Order is after both him and Oree. Desperate, she turns to her former boyfriend and the godlings for help, and is pulled into the heart of a dark conspiracy. The Broken Kingdoms adds a few new elements to Jemisin's world-building, although it never quite builds up to the level of metaphysics of the previous book. But it's mostly a book about Oree: her exasperated care of Shiny, her attempts to navigate her rapidly complicating life, and her determination to do the right thing for her friends. It's the sort of book that pits cosmic power and grand schemes against the determined inner morality of a single person who is more powerful than she thinks she is. That part of the story I liked quite a lot. Shiny, and Oree's complicated relationship with Shiny, I wasn't as fond of. Oree treats him like a broken and possibly healing person, which is true, but he's also passively abusive in his dark moping. Jemisin tries very hard throughout the book to help the reader try to grasp a bit of what must be going through Shiny's head, and she does succeed at times, but I never much cared for what I found there. And neither Nahadoth nor Yeine, when they finally make their appearance, are very likable. (Yeine in particular I found deeply disappointing and not up to her level of ethics in the first book.) Oree is still quite capable of carrying the story single-handed, and I did like her godling friends. But I felt like the ending required liking Shiny a lot more than I did, or being a lot more sympathetic to Nahadoth and Yeine than I was, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. I enjoyed reading about Oree, but I felt like this story gave her a remarkably depressing ending. This book is also structured with a long middle section where everything seems to get more and more horrible and the antagonists are doing awful things. It's a common structural way to build tension that I rarely like. Even knowing that there's doubtless an upward arc and protagonist triumph coming, those sections are often unpleasant and difficult to read through, and I had that reaction here. The Broken Kingdoms is less of a weird romance than The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (although there is some romance), so you may enjoy it more if you thought that angle was overdone. It does have some interesting world-building, particularly at the godling level, and Lil is one of my favorite characters. I think Oree got a raw deal from the story and would have preferred a different ending, but I'm not sorry I read it. Followed by The Kingdoms of Gods. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Digger, by Ursula Vernon

Publisher:	Sofawolf
Copyright:	October 2013
ISBN:	1-936689-32-4
Format:	Graphic novel
Pages:	837

As Digger opens, the eponymous wombat is digging a tunnel. She's not sure why, or where to, since she hit a bad patch of dirt. It happens sometimes, underground: pockets of cave gas and dead air that leave one confused and hallucinating. But this one was particularly bad, it's been days, she broke into a huge cave system, and she's thoroughly lost. Tripping on an ammonite while running from voices in the dark finally helps her come mostly to her senses and start tunneling up, only to break out at the feet of an enormous statue of Ganesh. A talking statue of Ganesh. Digger is a web comic that ran from 2005 to 2011. The archives are still on the web, so you can read the entire saga for free. Reviewed here is the complete omnibus edition, which collects the entire strip (previously published in six separate graphic novels containing two chapters each), a short story, a bonus story that was published in volume one, a bunch of random illustrated bits about the world background, author's notes from the web version, and all of the full-color covers of the series chapters (the rest of the work is in black and white). Publication of the omnibus was originally funded by a Kickstarter, but it's still available for regular sale. (I bought it normally via Amazon long after the Kickstarter finished.) It's a beautiful and durable printing, and I recommend it if you have the money to buy things you can read for free. This was a very long-running web comic, but Digger is a single story. It has digressions, of course, but it's a single coherent work with a beginning, middle, and end. That's one of the impressive things about it. Another is that it's a fantasy work involving gods, magic, oracles, and prophecies, but it's not about a chosen one, and it's not a coming of age story. Digger (Digger-of-Needlessly-Convoluted-Tunnels, actually, but Digger will do) is an utterly pragmatic wombat who considers magic to be in poor taste (as do all right-thinking wombats), gods to be irritating underground obstacles that require care and extra bracing, and prophecies to not be worth the time spent listening to them. It's a bit like the famous Middle Earth contrast between the concerns of the hobbits and the affairs of the broader world, if the hobbits were well aware of the broader world, able to deal with it, but just thought all the magic was tacky and irritating. Magic and gods do not, of course, go away just because one is irritated by them, and Digger eventually has to deal with quite a lot of magic and mythology while trying to figure out where home is and how to get back to it. However, she is drawn into the plot less by any grand danger to the world and more because she keeps managing to make friends with everyone, even people who hate each other. It's not really an explicit goal, but Digger is kind-hearted, sensible, tries hard to do the right thing, and doesn't believe in walking away from problems. In this world, that's a recipe for eventual alliances from everything from warrior hyenas to former pirate shrews, not to mention a warrior cult, a pair of trolls, and a very confused shadow... something. All for a wombat who would rather be digging out a good root cellar. (She does, at least, get a chance to dig out a good root cellar.) The characters are the best part, but I love everything about this story. Vernon's black and white artwork isn't as detailed as, say, Dave Sim at his best, and some of the panels (particularly mostly dark ones) seemed a bit scribbly. But it's mostly large-panel artwork with plenty of room for small touches and Easter eggs (watch for the snail, and the cave fish graffiti that I missed until it was pointed out by the author's notes), and it does the job of telling the story. Honestly, I like the black and white panels better than the color chapter covers reproduced in the back. And the plot is solid and meaty, with a satisfying ending and some fantastic detours (particularly the ghosts). I think my favorite bits, though, are the dialogue.

"Do you have any idea how long twelve thousand years is?"
"I know it's not long enough to make a good rock."

Digger is snarky in all the right ways, and sees the world in terms of tunnels, digging, and geology. Vernon is endlessly creative in how she uses that to create comebacks, sayings, analysis, and an entire culture. This is one of the best long-form comics I've read: a solid fantasy story with great characters, reliably good artwork, a coherent plot arc, wonderful dialogue, a hard-working and pragmatic protagonist (who happens to be female), and a wonderfully practical sense of morality and ethics. I'm sorry it's over. If you've not already read it, I highly recommend it. Remember tunnel 17! Rating: 9 out of 10

Once again, Ryan Neily and I met last month for our annual hike. This year, to give our aging knees a break, we visited the Salt Marsh Trail for the first time. For an added level of challenge and to access the trail by public transit, we started with the Shearwater Flyer Trail and finished with the Heritage Trail. It was a perfect day both for hiking and photography: cool with cloud cover and a refreshing coastal breeze. The entire hike was over 25 km and took the better part of the day to complete. Good times, great conversations, and I look forward to visiting these beautiful trails again!

Salt Marsh trail hike, 2016. Click to start the slideshow.

Here s the Strava record of our hike:

Migration to the new phone Replicant 4.2 in a Galaxy S III (i9300) New apps, and translations Other apps that I use More to come
Filed under: My experiences and opinion, Tools Tagged: Android, Debian, English, F-Droid

Review: Uprooted, by Naomi Novik

Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	2015
Printing:	2016
ISBN:	0-8041-7904-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	465

Agnieszka lives in a small peasant village on the border of the Wood. The malevolent forest is the source of dark corruption, illnesses that turn people into ravaging monsters, and lures and traps for the unwary who disappear into the Wood. Or, worse, return and appear the same, and then do horrific things, smiling all the time. This neighboring storehouse of horrors is not what occupies Agnieszka's thoughts at the start of the book, however. Instead, it's the village's protector against the Wood: the Dragon. The Dragon is not a flying lizard; he's a man, a wizard who has lived in his tower for living memory and fights back against the Wood with magic. And, once every ten years, he takes a girl from a village. They go to his tower and serve him for ten years, and then leave, generally to move to some far-away city and never return to their village. Each says afterwards that the Dragon never did anything untoward to them. No one entirely believes them. Agnieszka was born in the year that makes her one of the candidates for being taken by the Dragon. But that's not what she's worried about. She's known for certain since she was a small child that her best friend, Kasia, would be the one taken by the Dragon. Kasia was always the exceptional one: the most beautiful, the most talented, the one who stood out among all the girls in the neighboring villages. And she's about to be taken out of Agnieszka's life, to a mysterious and unknown fate. It will hopefully surprise no fantasy reader (and hence not be much of a spoiler) that awkward Agnieszka, who can't keep her dress unstained for more than five minutes and has none of the skills that Kasia has, is the one the Dragon chooses. I think a warning is important here, since I'm about to recommend this book highly. However, it is very fond of its stereotypes. Most of the other wizards are men, and they focus on books and formal understanding of magic. The one female wizard whose magic we see in some detail is a smith described as wearing male clothing. Uprooted then introduces a different type of magic that's much more intuitive, described largely through natural metaphors, and doesn't play well with formal rules... and is practiced by a woman. This is, unfortunately, persistently gendered, although the book never comes right out and calls it female magic. There are also quite a few traditional gender roles scattered through the rest of the book (although it does get a bit of a pass due to its obvious deep roots in traditional fairy tales). Uprooted is still an excellent book despite this, but it's best read when you're in the mood to tolerate this sort of story. If you go in feeling irritated about gender stereotypes, you'll probably get frustrated by the book, overwhelming its merits. Best saved for a forgiving mood (or skipped entirely if this style of story just doesn't sound fun). The beginning of Uprooted is about Agnieszka finding her feet in her bizarre arrangement with the Dragon, who turns out to be nothing like what either her or the reader expected. I think her panic and confusion drags on a little long, but Novik makes up for that by the delightful descriptions of Agnieszka's eventual understanding and the Dragon's frustrated consternation. Fantasy is full of prickly, arrogant wizards, but few have felt quite so human to me as the Dragon. Agnieszka is clearly nothing like he expected or like he's dealt with before, and his path from arrogant contempt to outrage to prickly confusion to uncomfortable respect is a delight. This is, of course, a coming-of-age story for Agnieszka, and by the end the book deals with both the origins of the Wood and some sort of resolution. But the path there wanders through an exploration of a rather interesting magic system, quite a lot of court intrigue, and Agnieszka persistently defying everyone's expectations. As with the introductory panic and confusion, I could have done with less of her awkward bumbling at court (in general, I think the book could have been a bit tighter), but once I reached the second half of the book I couldn't put it down. I've previously read a fair chunk of Novik's Temeraire series, which were fun (at least in spots), but Uprooted is definitely better. There is a fair bit of horror-tinged stuff in this book, as well as the stereotypes mentioned above, so it won't be for everyone. But I usually hate horror of any kind, and I still loved this. Agnieszka is sufficiently positive and solution-focused that the story never falls into the constant fear and panic and disgust that I particularly dislike in horror. If you're in the mood for a good fantasy coming-of-age story coupled with delightful disruption of the life of a prickly, cynical, but surprisingly ethical wizard, give this one a try. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Winds of Change, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Mage Winds #2
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	August 1993
ISBN:	0-88677-563-9
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	475

Winds of Change is a direct sequel to Winds of Fate. This is a more closely connected trilogy than the previous Valdemar books. It's not the sort of thing you want to read out of order. The events of Winds of Fate predictably left the multiple protagonists united and with some breathing space, but none of their problems are resolved. The Heartstone is still a mess; in fact, it may be getting worse. Elspeth needs to learn how to wield the magical power she apparently has. And there are a lot of interpersonal tensions, lingering hurt feelings, and (in the case of Elspeth and Darkwind) a truly prodigious quantity of whining that has to be worked through before the protagonists can feel safe and happy. Winds of Change is the training montage book, and wow did my memory paper over a lot of flaws in this series. This is 475 pages of not much happening, occasionally in very irritating ways. Yes, we do finally meander to a stronger conclusion than the last book, and there is much resolving of old hurts and awkward interactions, as well as a bit of discovery of true love (this is Lackey, after all). But far, far too much of the book is Elspeth and Darkwind sniping at each other, being immature, not communicating, and otherwise being obnoxious while all the people around them try to gently help. Lackey's main characterization flaw for me is that she tends to default into generating characters who badly need to be smacked upside the head, and then does so in ways and for things at odd angles to the reasons why I think they should be smacked. It can make for frustrating reading. The introduction of Firesong as a character about halfway through this book does not help. Firesong is a flamboyant, amazingly egotistical, and stunningly arrogant show-off who also happens to be a magical super-genius and hence has "earned" his arrogance. This is an intentional character design, not my idiosyncratic reaction to the character, since every other character in the book finds him insufferable as well at first. But he's also a deeply insightful healing Adept by, honestly, authorial fiat, so by the end of the novel he's helped patch up everyone's problems and the other characters have accepted his presentation as a character quirk. Sigh. So, okay, one doesn't read popcorn fantasy for its deep characterization or realistic grasp of human subtlety. But this is just way more than I can swallow. Lackey's concept of a healing Adept (which I like a great deal as a bit of world-building) necessarily involves both deep knowledge and deep empathy and connection with other people. Firesong is so utterly full of himself that there's simply no way that he could have the empathy required to do what he is shown to do here. (Lackey does try to explain this away in the book, but the explanation didn't work for me.) Every time he successfully intervenes in other people's emotional lives, he does so with a sudden personality change, some stunning insight that he previously showed no evidence of ability to understand, and somehow only enough arrogance in his presentation to prickle but not to close people's mind to whatever he's trying to say. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Lackey always treats psychology as a bit of a blunt instrument, and one either learns to tolerate that or gives up on her series, but Firesong is flatly the most unbelievable emotional mentor figure in any of her books I've read. (One of the more satisfying, if slight, bits of this series comes up in the next book, where Firesong runs into someone else who can do the same thing but has actually earned the empathy the hard way, and is a bit taken aback by it.) My other complaint with this book is that Lackey adds more chapters from the viewpoint of the big bad of the series. These are deeply unpleasant, since he's a deeply unpleasant person, and seem largely unnecessary. It's vaguely interesting to follow the magical maneuverings from both sides, but there are more of these scenes than strictly necessary for that purpose, and the sheer unmitigated evil of Lackey's evil characters is a bit hard to take. Also, he somehow has vast resources of staff and assistants, and much suspension of disbelief is required to believe that anyone would continue working for this person. It's one thing to imagine people being drawn to a charismatic Hitler type; it's quite another when the boss is a brooding, imperious asshole who roams the hallways and tortures random people to death whenever he's bored. Fear and magic only go so far in maintaining a large following when you do that, and he generates dead bodies at a remarkable rate. The best characters in this series continue to be Nyara, Need, and the gryphons. I'd rather read a book just about them. Need does use a bit too much of Lackey's tough love technique (another recurring theme of this larger series), but from Need that's wholly believable; her gruff and dubious empathy is in line with her character and history and fits a talking sword extremely well. But they, despite having a bit of their own training montage, are a side story here. The climax of the story is moderately satisfying, but the book takes far too long to get to it. I remember liking this series when I first read it, and I still like some aspects of Lackey's world-building and a few of the characters, but it's much weaker than I had remembered. I can't really recommend it. Followed by Winds of Fury. Rating: 5 out of 10

A new release of the distribution that provides Pod::Man and Pod::Text for Perl documentation formatting. The impetus for this release is fixing a rendering bug in Pod::Man that spewed stray bits of half-escaped *roff into the man page for the text "TRUE (1)". This turned out to be due to two interlocking bugs in the dark magic regexes that try to fix up formatting to make man pages look a bit better: incorrect double-markup in both small caps and as a man page reference, and incorrect interpretation of the string "\s0(1)". Both are fixed in this release. podlators 4.00 changed Pod::Man to make piping POD through pod2man on standard input without providing the --name option an error, since there was no good choice for the man page title. This turned out to be too disruptive: the old behavior of tolerating this had been around for too long, and I got several bug reports. Since I think backward compatibility is extremely important for these tools, I've backed down from this change, and now Pod::Man and pod2man just silently use the man page name "STDIN" (which still fixes the original problem of being reproducible). It is, of course, still a good idea to provide the name option when dealing with standard input, since "STDIN" isn't a very good man page title. This release also adds new --lquote and --rquote options to pod2man to set the quote marks independently, and removes a test that relied on a POD construct that is going to become an error in Pod::Simple. You can get the latest release from the podlators distribution page.

During this year s ESSLLI (European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information) I was teaching a course on Algebraic Specification and Verification with CafeOBJ. Now that the course is over I can relax a bit and enjoy the beauty of the surrounding North Tyrol.
For those who couldn t attend the ESSLLI or the course, here are the course materials:

• Day 1 Introduction, with two short programming challenges: esslli-cafeobj-day1.pdf
• Day 2 Advanced topics: esslli-cafeobj-day2.pdf
• Day 3 Advanced topics II and CloudSync: esslli-cafeobj-day3.pdf
• Day 4 Exploiting AC and Hidden Algebras: esslli-cafeobj-day4.pdf
• Day 5 Proving with CafeOBJ CITP: esslli-cafeobj-day5.pdf
• Code for all the lectures and exercises: cafe.zip

Thanks to the participants for the interesting questions and participation. What follows is the original description of the course. Abstract Ensuring correctness of complex systems like computer programs or communication protocols is gaining ever increasing importance. For correctness it does not suffice to consider the finished system, but correctness already on the level of specification is necessary, that is, before the actual implementation starts. To this aim, algebraic specification and verification languages have been conceived. They are aiming at a mathematically correct description of the properties and behavior of the systems under discussion, and in addition often allow to prove (verify) correctness within the same system. This course will give an introduction to algebraic specification, its history, logic roots, and actuality with respect to current developments. Paired with the theoretical background we give an introduction to CafeOBJ, a programming language that allows both specification and verification to be carried out together. The course should enable students to understand the theoretical background of algebraic specification, as well as enable them to read and write basic specifications in CafeOBJ. Description CafeOBJ is a specification language based on three-way extensions to many-sorted equational logic: the underlying logic is order-sorted, not just many-sorted; it admits unidirectional transitions, as well as equations; it also accommodates hidden sorts, on top of ordinary, visible sorts. A subset of CafeOBJ is executable, where the operational semantics is given by a conditional order-sorted term rewriting system. The language system CafeOBJ has been under constant development at the institute of the lecturers since the late 80ies. It is closely related to other algebraic specification languages in the OBJ family, including Maude. The CafeOBJ language and the range of verification methods and tools it supports including its support for inductive theorem proving, verification of behavioral specifications, deductive invariant proof, and reachability analysis of concurrent systems has played a key role in both extending and bringing algebraic specification techniques into contact with many software engineering applications. The following topics will be discussed:

• algebraic foundations: many-sorted algebras, order-sorted algebras, behavioral specification
• computational foundations: rewriting
• programming with CafeOBJ: language elements, modules, simple programs
• CloudSync: presentation of an example cloud synchronization protocol and its verification

To make the lectures not too heavy , we will structure each lecture into two parts: A first part providing an introduction of some theoretical concept, or framework, and a second part dealing with actual programming and implementation. Especially for the second part of each lecture students are encouraged to use their laptops to try out code and experiment.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday August 14 and Saturday August 20 2016: Fasten your seatbelts Important note: we enabled build path variation for unstable now, so your package(s) might become unreproducible, while previously it was said to be reproducible given a specific build path it probably still is reproducible but read on for the details below in the tests.reproducible-builds.org section! As said many times: this is still research and we are working to make it reality. Media coverage Daniel Stender blogged about python packaging and explained some caveats regarding reproducible builds. Toolchain developments Thomas Schmitt uploaded xorriso which now obeys SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. As stated in its man pages:

ENVIRONMENT
[...]
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH  belongs to the specs of reproducible-builds.org.  It
is supposed to be either undefined or to contain a decimal number which
tells the seconds since january 1st 1970. If it contains a number, then
it is used as time value to set the  default  of  --modification-date=,
--gpt_disk_guid,  and  --set_all_file_dates.  Startup files and program
options can override the effect of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.

Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed:

• cadencii/3.3.9+svn20110818.r1732-5 by Ying-Chun Liu, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• cfengine3/3.7.4-3 by Antonio Radici.
• findbugs/3.1.0~preview2-1 by Emmanuel Bourg.
• gcpegg/5.1-14 by Bdale Garbee, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• gnunet-gtk/0.10.1-4 by Bertrand Marc, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• konwert/1.8-12 by Yann Dirson, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• link-grammar/5.3.8-2 by Jeremy Bicha, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• metastudent-data/2.0.1-1 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• pixmap/2.6pl4-20 by Paul Slootman, original patch by Chris Lamb Maria Valentina Marin a.k.a. Akira.
• python-afl/0.5.4-2 by Daniel Stender.
• tf5/5.0beta8-6 by Russ Allbery, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• triplane/1.0.8-2 by Markus Koschanyover, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• vips/8.3.3-1 by Laszlo Boszormenyi, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• xzgv/0.9.1-4 by Theodore Y. Ts'o, original patch by Chris Lamb.

The following updated packages appear to be reproducible now, for reasons we were not able to figure out. (Relevant changelogs did not mention reproducible builds.)

• vulkan/1.0.21.0+dfsg1-1 by Timo Aaltonen.

The following 2 packages were not changed, but have become reproducible due to changes in their build-dependencies: tagsoup tclx8.4. Some uploads have addressed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• cappuccino/0.5.1-4 by Breno Leitao, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• darkice/1.3-0.1 by Nicolas Bouleng.
• flask-restful/0.3.5-1 by Ond ej Nov , original patch by Chris Lamb.
• kodi/16.1+dfsg1-2 by Balint Reczey, original patch by Lukas Rechberger.
• libaws/3.3.2-3 by Nicolas Bouleng.
• liblog4ada/1.3-1 by Nicolas Bouleng.
• libxmlezout/1.06.1-8 by Nicolas Bouleng.
• ruby-rmagick/2.15.4+dfsg-2 by Antonio Terceir, original patch from Chris Lamb.
• taggrepper/0.05-2 by Kumar Appaiah, original patch and original patch from Maria Valentina Marin.
• xotcl/1.6.8-2 by Stefan Sobernig, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #834755 against apt-cacher-ng by Chris Lamb.
• #834976 against auto-apt-proxy by Chris Lamb.
• #834549 against botan1.10 by Chris Lamb.
• #834861 against cookiecutter by Chris Lamb.
• #834779 against dicom3tools by Chris Lamb.
• #834859 against echoping by Chris Lamb.
• #834983 against eyed3 by Chris Lamb.
• #834735 against filepp by Chris Lamb.
• #834957 against flashrom by Chris Lamb.
• #834773 against gkrellm by Chris Lamb.
• #834292 against gr-radar by Chris Lamb.
• #834956 against ircd-irc2 by Chris Lamb.
• #834897 against jpy by Chris Lamb.
• #834452 against libdc0 by Chris Lamb.
• #834324 against libnss-ldap by Reiner Herrmann.
• #834945 against libquvi by Chris Lamb.
• #834534 against librep by Chris Lamb.
• #834537 against mozvoikko by Chris Lamb.
• #834857 against nagios-nrpe by Chris Lamb.
• #834316 against openocd by Reiner Herrmann.
• #834993 against oss4 by Reiner Herrmann.
• #834302 against pd-flite by Reiner Herrmann.
• #834754 against phpab by Chris Lamb.
• #834279 against phpldapadmin by Chris Lamb.
• #834277 against pybit by Chris Lamb.
• #834553 against pyicu by Chris Lamb.
• #834541 against ruby-pg by Chris Lamb.
• #835051 against sheepdog by Chris Lamb.
• #834896 against ttf-tiresias by Chris Lamb.
• #834780 against tuxpaint-config by Chris Lamb.
• #834988 against twitter-bootstrap3 by Chris Lamb.
• #834776 against uhub by Chris Lamb.
• #835061 against varnish by Chris Lamb.

Bug tracker house keeping:

• Chris Lamb pinged 164 bugs he filed more than 90 days ago which have a patch and had no maintainer reaction.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 55 package reviews have been added, 161 have been updated and 136 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been updated:

• Added user_in_documentation_generated_by_gsdoc
• Added locale_differences_in_pom

Weekly QA work FTBFS bugs have been reported by:

• Chris Lamb (16)
• Santiago Vila (2)

diffoscope development Chris Lamb, Holger Levsen and Mattia Rizzolo worked on diffoscope this week. Improvements were made to SquashFS and JSON comparison, the https://try.diffoscope.org/ web service, documentation, packaging, and general code quality. diffoscope 57, 58, and 59 were uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. Versions 57 and 58 were both broken, so Holger set up a job on jenkins.debian.net to test diffoscope on each git commit. He also wrote a CONTRIBUTING document to help prevent this from happening in future. From these efforts, we were also able to learn that diffoscope is now reproducible even when built across multiple architectures:

< h01ger>   https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rb-pkg/unstable/amd64/diffoscope.html shows these packages were built on amd64:
< h01ger>    bd21db708fe91c01ba1c9cb35b9d41a7c9b0db2b 62288 diffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>    366200bf2841136a4c8f8c30bdc87057d59a4cdd 20146 trydiffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>   and on i386:
< h01ger>    bd21db708fe91c01ba1c9cb35b9d41a7c9b0db2b 62288 diffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>    366200bf2841136a4c8f8c30bdc87057d59a4cdd 20146 trydiffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>   and on armhf:
< h01ger>    bd21db708fe91c01ba1c9cb35b9d41a7c9b0db2b 62288 diffoscope_59_all.deb
< h01ger>    366200bf2841136a4c8f8c30bdc87057d59a4cdd 20146 trydiffoscope_59_all.deb

And those also match the binaries uploaded by Chris in his diffoscope 59 binary upload to ftp.debian.org, yay! Eating our own dogfood and enjoying it! tests.reproducible-builds.org Debian related:

• show percentage of results in the last 24/48h (h01ger)
• switch python database backend to SQLAlchemy (Valerie)
• vary build path varitation for unstable and experimental for all architectures. (h01ger)

The last change probably will have an impact you will see: your package might become unreproducible in unstable and this will be shown on tracker.debian.org, while it will still be reproducible in testing. We've done this, because we think reproducible builds are possible with arbitrary build paths. But: we don't think those are a realistic goal for stretch, where we still recommend to use .buildinfo to record the build patch and then do rebuilds using that path. We are doing this, because besides doing theoretical groundwork we also have a practical goal: enable users to independently verify builds. And if they only can do this with a fixed path, so be it. For now To be clear: for Stretch we recommend that reproducible builds are done in the same build path as the "original" build. Finally, and just for our future references, when we enabled build path variation on Saturday, August 20th 2016, the numbers for unstable were:

suite	all	reproducible	unreproducible	ftbfs	depwait	not for this arch	blacklisted
unstable/amd64	24693	21794 (88.2%)	1753 (7.1%)	972 (3.9%)	65 (0.2%)	95 (0.3%)	10 (0.0%)
unstable/i386	24693	21182 (85.7%)	2349 (9.5%)	972 (3.9%)	76 (0.3%)	103 (0.4%)	10 (0.0%)
unstable/armhf	24693	20889 (84.6%)	2050 (8.3%)	1126 (4.5%)	199 (0.8%)	296 (1.1%)	129 (0.5%)

Misc. Ximin Luo updated our git setup scripts to make it easier for people to write proper descriptions for our repositories. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo and Holger Levsen and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC.

Review: Winds of Fate, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Mage Winds #1
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	1991
Printing:	July 1992
ISBN:	0-88677-516-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	460

As a kid working my way through nearly everything in the children's section of the library, I always loved book series, since it meant I could find a lot more of something I liked. But children's book series tended to be linear, with a well-defined order. When I moved into the adult SF section, I encountered a new type of series: one that moves backwards and forwards in time to fill in a broader story. I mention that here because Winds of Fate, although well into the linked series that make up Valdemar, was one of the first Valdemar books I read. (I think it was the first, but my memory is hazy.) Therefore, in my brain, this is where the story of Valdemar "begins": with Elspeth, a country that has other abilities but has forgotten about magic, a rich world full of various approaches to magic, and very pushy magic horses. Talia's story, and particularly Vanyel's, were always backstory, the events that laid the groundwork for Elspeth's story. (I didn't encounter Tarma and Kethry until somewhat later.) Read now in context, this is obviously not the case. The Mage Winds trilogy, of which this is the first book, are clearly sequels to the Arrows of the Queen trilogy. Valdemar was victorious in the first round of war with Ancar, but the Heralds have slowly (and with great difficulty) become aware of their weakness against magic and their surprising lack of it. Elspeth has grown into the role of heir, but she's also one of the few who find it easy to talk about and think about magic (perhaps due to her long association with Kerowyn, who came into Valdemar from the outside world in By the Sword). She therefore takes on the mission of finding an Adept who can return to Valdemar, solve the mystery of whatever is keeping magic out of the kingdom, and start training mages for the kingdom again. Meanwhile, we get the first viewpoint character from the Tayledras: the elf-inspired mages who work to cleanse the Pelagiris forests from magic left over from a long-ago war. They appeared briefly in Vanyel's story, since his aunt was friends with a farther-north tribe of them and Valdemar of the time had contact with mages. Darkwind and his people are far to the south, up against the rim of the Dhorisha crater. Something has gone horribly wrong with Heartstone of the k'Sheyna, his tribe: it cracked when being drained, killing most of the experienced mages including Darkwind's mother, and now it is subtly wrong, twisting and undermining the normal flow of magic inside their Vale. In the aftermath of that catastrophe, Darkwind has forsworn magic and become a scout, putting him sharply at odds with his father. And it's a matter of time before less savory magic users in the area realize how vulnerable k'Sheyna is. Up to this point in the Valdemar series, Lackey primarily did localized world-building to support the stories and characters she was writing about. Valdemar and its Heralds and Companions have been one of the few shared elements, and only rarely did the external magic-using world encounter them. Here, we get the first extended contact between the fairly naive Heralds and experienced mages who understand how they and their Companions fit into the broader system of magic. We also finally get the origin of the Dhorisha Plains and the Tayledras and Shin'a'in, and a much better sense of the broader history of this world. And Need, which started as Kethry's soul-bonded sword and then became Kerowyn's, joins the story in a much more active way. The world-building is a definite feature if you like this sort of thing. It doesn't withstand too much thinking about the typical sword and sorcery lack of technology, but for retroactive coherence constructed from originally scattered stories, it's pretty fun. (I suspect part of why I like the Valdemar world-building is that it feels a lot like large shared universe world-building in comics.) And Need is the high point of the story: she brings a much-needed cynical stubbornness to the cast and is my favorite character in this book. What is not a feature, unfortunately, is the characterization. Darkwind is okay but a largely unremarkable here, more another instance of the troubled but ethical Tayledras type than a clearly defined character. But Elspeth is just infuriating, repeatedly making decisions and taking hard positions that seem entirely unwarranted by the recorded events of the book. This is made worse by how frequently she's shown to be correct in ways that seem like authorial cheating. At times, it feels like she's the heroine by authorial fiat, not because she's doing a particularly good job. I can muster some sympathy for not wanting to follow the plan of the Companions when it became clear they were acting entirely out of character and actively intervening, but she expresses that with petulant, childish insistence rather than reasoned argument. And she suddenly decides Skif is in love with her and treating her like a fragile princess on the basis of absolutely no action that occurs on camera in this book so far as I can tell, and proceeds to treat him like dirt for large sections of the book. That Skif then lives down to this suddenly negative impression doesn't help. This book also has quite a lot of the U-shaped story arc in which everything gets worse and more horrific and more hopeless for the heroes over the course of the book until it turns into torture, and only then do they manage to claw their way back out. I've come to dislike this way of building tension. It's undeniably effective, but the parts of the story near the bottom of the U are difficult and painful reading. I prefer a bit more evenly-spread hurt/comfort storytelling in my popcorn fantasy reading. Winds of Fate is, sadly, not a very good book. Most of the characterization is intensely irritating, the writing is a bit uneven, and the middle section of the book is rather painful to read. For me, though, that's balanced by the world-building and the sense of broadened scope, by Need's abrasive decisiveness, and by some really entertaining reactions to the combination of Elspeth, Need, and her Companion walking naive into the broader world. I still have a fond spot in my heart for it, but I'm hoping the remaining books of the trilogy are better. Rating: 6 out of 10

Ever since it s creation back in the dark ages, APT shipped with it s own build system consisting of autoconf and a bunch of makefiles. In 2009, I felt like replacing that with something more standard, and because nobody really liked autotools, decided to go with CMake. Well, the bazaar branch was never really merged back in 2009. Fast forward 7 years to 2016. A few months ago, we noticed that our build system had trouble with correct dependencies in parallel building. So, in search for a way out, I picked up my CMake branch from 2009 last Thursday and spent the whole weekend working on it, and today I am happy to announce that I merged it into master:

123 files changed, 1674 insertions(+), 3205 deletions(-)

More than 1500 lines less build system code. Quite impressive, eh? This also includes about 200 lines of less code in debian/, as that switched from prehistoric debhelper stuff to modern dh (compat level 9, almost ready for 10). The annoying Tale of Targets vs Files Talking about CMake: I don t really love it. As you might know, CMake differentiates between targets and files. Targets can in some cases depend on files (generated by a command in the same directory), but overall files are not really targets. You also cannot have a target with the same name as a file you are generating in a custom command, you have to rename your target (make is OK with the generated stuff, but ninja complains about cycles because your custom target and your custom command have the same name). Byproducts for the (time) win One interesting thing about CMake and Ninja are byproducts. In our tree, we are building C++ files. We also have .pot templates depending on them, and .mo files depending on the templates (we have multiple domains, and merge the per-domain .pot with the all-domain .po file during the build to get a per-domain .mo). Now, if we just let them depend naively, changing a C++ file causes the .pot file to be regenerated which in turns causes us to build .mo files for every freaking language in the package. Even if nothing changed. Byproducts solve this problem. Instead of just building the .pot file, we also create a stamp file (AKA the witness) and write the .pot file (without a header) into a temporary name and only copy it to its final name if the content changed. The .pot file is declared as a byproduct of the command. The command doing the .pot->.mo step still depends on the .pot file (the byproduct), but as that only changes now if strings change, the .mo files only get rebuild if I change a translatable string. We still need to ensure that that the .pot file is actually built before we try to use it the solution here is to specify a custom target depending on the witness and then have the target containing the .mo build commands depend on that target. Now if you use make, you might now this trick already. In make, the byproducts remain undeclared, though, while in CMake we can now actually express them, and they are used by the Ninja generator and the Ninja build tool if you chose that over make (try it out, it s fast). Further Work Some command names are hardcoded, I should find_program() them. Also cross-building the package does not yet work successfully, but it only requires a tiny amount of patches in debhelper and/or cmake. I also tried building the package on a Fedora docker image (with dpkg installed, it s available in the Fedora sources). While I could eventually get the programs build and most of the integration test suite to pass, there are some minor issues to fix, mostly in the documentation building and GTest department: Fedora ships its docbook stylesheets in a different location, and ships GTest as a pre-compiled library, and not a source tree. I have not yet tested building on exotic platforms like macOS, or even a BSD. Please do and report back. In Debian, CMake is not up-to.date enough on the non-Linux platforms to build APT due to test suite failures, I hope those can be fixed/disabled soon (it appears to be a timing issue AFAICT). I hope that we eventually get some non-Debian backends for APT. I d love that.
Filed under: Debian, Uncategorized