Review: Secrets of Productive People, by Mark Forster

Publisher:	Teach Yourself
Copyright:	2015
ISBN:	1-4736-0885-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	289

Regular readers of my reviews will know that Mark Forster is my favorite writer on time management and productivity. That's mostly because of his flexible toolkit approach that talks about theory and overall goals and then describes multiple ways to get there, rather than presenting a single system that will solve all your problems. There are a lot of writers who explain productivity tips and tricks or describe systems that work for them. There are fewer who can explain why those tricks work (and why they sometimes don't work), and even fewer who can put them into a meaningful analytical framework for thinking about productivity. Forster has several books, but they're a mixed bag. His clearest and most coherent book prior to this one was Do It Tomorrow. Secrets of Productive People is organized differently, chopped up in to small bite-sized chunks with synopses to an extent that it felt a bit choppy to me, but apart from that it's the closest I've seen to an updating of Do It Tomorrow. His other books can be slight (The Pathway to Awesomeness) or downright weird (How to Make Your Dreams Come True). I still have a soft spot for Do It Tomorrow, and I like how it was organized a bit better than this one, but I think Secrets of Productive People has become my new recommendation for where to start with Forster. Secrets of Productive People is divided into five sections: The basics of productivity, the productive attitude, productive projects, aids to productivity, and productivity in action. Each part is divided into several small chapters, which open with a generous helping of quotes about some productivity topic (and I'm going to go back and save some of those), present some easily-digestible related set of thoughts (usually with an exercise), and conclude with a summary. Each chapter is about the length of a long blog post. I think this structure interferes with developing an idea at greater length, but it does make for good reading material in an environment where you're regularly interrupted or only have five or ten minutes. I think I've mentioned in every review that Forster won me over by being willing to talk about the problems with attempting to do too much, not just presenting a system to allow one to accomplish more. Some other books, such as David Allen's famous Getting Things Done, seem to assume you already know what you need to get done, or will easily be able to figure that out when you think for a while, and just need a system to manage all the things you've decided to do. Forster takes the opposite approach, and this book is the clearest yet on this point: most productivity problems are not from being insufficiently efficient, but from doing the wrong things and too many things. You don't need more time; everyone gets the same amount of time. You need to do the right things with the time you have, and that usually means doing fewer things. Readers of Forster's previous books will recognize many of the themes here. Some of the techniques from Do It Tomorrow and some of the exercises from Get Everything Done show up again here. But Forster has streamlined and focused the advice, discarded some things, made his task management recommendations less elaborate and more focused, and spends much more time hammering home the point that the only prioritization that really matters is whether you commit to doing something or don't. The specific task management system he recommends here is one of the variations he's been talking about in his blog and is much simpler than the Do It Tomorrow system: pick five tasks, work on them until you've finished three of them, and then refill to five tasks. I've been using it since reading this book, replacing one of Forster's more elaborate systems from his blog, and it's surprisingly effective. He breaks down in some detail why this works and how to extract additional useful feedback information from it, and now I want to do some of the additional exercises he describes. (That said, I'm still dubious about his advice to not keep any larger to-do list and only rely on your analysis at the time of refilling the list to decide what to do. I use this system with a supplemental, longer list of ideas for future tasks, and that works better for me, although I do have to fight forming a sense of obligation about the things on the longer list. David Allen still has a point that if you don't write down a complete inventory of the things you're worrying about, your brain will try to obsess over them to keep from forgetting them.) The productive projects section told me some things I needed to hear about time commitments. Projects take regular, focused attention, and starting numerous things without giving them that attention is much worse than doing far fewer things but doing them regularly and reliably. I think Forster's coaching on focus and persistence is very valuable; the trick, of course, is building up your willpower for it and learning to say no. This is in-line with recent psychological analysis of multi-tasking and its various negative effects. The working to-do list capped at five things provides enough variety to mentally shift gears if one runs out of steam on some specific project while maintaining enough focus to not leave things behind half-done. The productivity aids section provides a more random collection of tips and tricks, many of which I've seen before in his previous books. I've mostly not tried these, so can't say much about how effective they are, but Forster's ideas almost always sound interesting and plausible. I thought the weakest part of the book was the last section, on applied productivity. Here, Forster takes various life areas (exercise, parenting, finances, writing, etc.) and talks about how the principles of this book can be applied to them. Each area could be a book in itself, and the short essay format of these chapters doesn't do justice to large topics. The result is a rather repetitive section that just stresses analysis, metrics, and repeated, focused attention all valid points, but ones you can pick up from the previous chapters. I don't think these case studies added much value. Do It Tomorrow is still my favorite Forster book to read, but I think Secrets of Productive People is now the best and most polished overview of his time management and productivity approach. If you're interested in this topic and not already sick of Forster from my previous recommendations, this would be a great place to start. I got a lot out of it even with all the time management reading I've previously done, and will probably re-read sections of it and try more of the exercises. Rating: 9 out of 10

I was in such a different place at the beginning of 2016: I was poised to continue to work to help the world find love. Professionally, I was ready to make a much needed transition and find new projects to work on. The year 2016 sucked. It feels like the year was filled with many different versions of the universe saying "Not interested in what you have to offer." At the beginning of the year, I had the energy to try and reach across large disagreements and help find common ground even when compromise was not possible. Now, my blog lies fallow because I cannot find the strength to be vulnerable enough to write what I would choose to say. Certainly a lot of the global changes of the last year have felt like a strong rejection of the world I'd like to see. However, many of the rejections have been personal. Beyond that, most of the people who stood as pillars of support in my life, together helping me find the strength to be vulnerable, are no longer available. When the universe sends such strong messages, it's a good idea to ask whether you are on the right path. I certainly have discovered training I need and things I need to improve in order to avoid making costly mistakes that hurt others. However, among the rejections were clear demonstrations of the value of reaching out with love and compassion. Besides, this is what I'm called to do. It's what I want to do. I certainly will not force it on anyone. But it looks like the next few years may be a hard struggle to find pockets of people interested in that work, finding people who will choose love even in the current world, along with some difficult training to learn from challenges of the last year. Amongst all this, my life if filled with love. There are new connections even as old connections are strained. There is always the hope of finding new ways to connect when the old ones are no longer right. I will rebuild and regain safety. I have the tools to do that. The process is just long and complicated.

Back in 2010, inspired by Juliet, I set about doing 101 things in 1001 days. I had various levels of success, but one of the things I did complete was the aim of watching half of the IMDB Top 250. I didn t stop at that point, but continued to work through it at a much slower pace until I realised that through the Queen s library I had access to quite a few DVDs of things I was missing, and that it was perfectly possible to complete the list by the end of 2016. So I did. I should point out that I didn t set out to watch the list because I m some massive film buff. It was more a mixture of watching things that I wouldn t otherwise choose to, and also watching things I knew were providing cultural underpinnings to films I had already watched and enjoyed. That said, people have asked for some sort of write up when I was done. So here are some random observations, which are almost certainly not what they were looking for.

My favourite film is not in the Top 250 First question anyone asks is What s your favourite film? . That depends a lot on what I m in the mood for really, but fairly consistently my answer is The Hunt for Red October. This has never been in the Top 250 that I ve noticed. Which either says a lot about my taste in films, or the Top 250, or both. Das Boot was in the list and I would highly recommend it (but then I like all submarine movies it seems).

The Shawshank Redemption is overrated I can t recall a time when The Shawshank Redemption was not top of the list. It s a good film, and I ve watched it many times, but I don t think it s good enough to justify its seemingly unbroken run. I don t have a suggestion for a replacement, however.

The list is constantly changing I say I ve completed the Top 250, but that s working from a snapshot I took back in 2010. Today the site is telling me I ve watched 215 of the current list. Last night it was 214 and I haven t watched anything in between. Some of those are films released since 2010 (in particular new releases often enter high and then fall out of the list over a month or two), but the current list has films as old as 1928 (The Passion of Joan of Arc) that weren t there back in 2010. So keeping up to date is not simply a matter of watching new releases.

The best way to watch the list is terrestrial TV There were various methods I used to watch the list. Some I d seen in the cinema when they came out (or was able to catch that way anyway - the QFT showed Duck Soup, for example). Netflix and Amazon Video had some films, but overall a very disappointing percentage. The QUB Library, as previously mentioned, had a good number of DVDs on the list (especially the older things). I ended up buying a few (Dial M for Murder on 3D Bluray was well worth it; it s beautifully shot and unobtrusively 3D), borrowed a few from friends and ended up finishing off the list by a Lovefilm one month free trial. The single best source, however, was UK terrestrial TV. Over the past 6 years Freeview (the free-to-air service here) had the highest percentage of the list available. Of course this requires some degree of organisation to make sure you don t miss things.

Films I enjoyed Not necessarily my favourite, but things I wouldn t have necessarily watched and was pleasantly surprised by. No particular order, and I m leaving out a lot of films I really enjoyed but would have got around to watching anyway.

• Clint Eastwood films - Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby were both excellent but neither would have appealed to me at first glance. I hated Unforgiven though.
• Jimmy Stewart. I m not a fan of It s a Wonderful Life (which I d already watched because it s Lister s favourite film), but Harvey is obviously the basis of lots of imaginary friend movies and Rear Window explained a Simpsons episode (there were a lot of Simpsons episodes explained by watching the list).
• Spaghetti Westerns. I wouldn t have thought they were my thing, but I really enjoyed the Sergio Leone films (A Fistful of Dollars etc.). You can see where Tarantino gets a lot of his inspiration.
• Foreign language films. I wouldn t normally seek these out. And in general it seems I cannot get on with Italian films (except Life is Beautiful), but Amores Perros, Amelie and Ikiru were all better than expected.
• Kind Hearts and Coronets. For some reason I didn t watch this until almost the end; I think the title always put me off. Turned out to be very enjoyable.

Films I didn t enjoy I m sure these mark me out as not being a film buff, but there are various things I would have turned off if I d caught them by accident rather than setting out to watch them.

• Charlie Chaplin. The Kid is the only one I really enjoyed. Nothing else did it for me.
• Italian films. La Strada and Nights of Cabiria in particular. Oh, and 8 . Hated it.
• Who s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I just didn t get it.
• Metropolis. Too damn long.

I ve kept the full list available, if you re curious.

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month):

• Celebrated my 10-year anniversary of contributing to Debian. An excerpt of this post was quoted on LWN.
• Made a number of improvements to AptFS, my FUSE-based filesystem that provides a view on unpacked Debian source packages as regular folders, including move from the popen2 Python module to subprocess and correcting the parsing of package lists.
• Corrected an UnboundLocalError exception in the Finnish social security number generator in faker, a tool to generate test data in Python applications. (#441)
• Made a small change to travis.debian.net (my hosted service for projects that host their Debian packaging on GitHub to use the Travis CI continuous integration platform to test builds on every code change) to fix an issue with malformed YAML.
• Added the ability to specify the clone target to gbp-import-dsc etc. in git-buildpackage, a tool to build Debian packages using Git. (commit)
• Filed three issues against the Redis key-value database:
  • Tests fail on the alpha architecture due to "memory efficiency". (#3666)
  • Please update hiredis (#3687)
  • Correct "whenever" typo. (#3652)

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Review: Magician's Gambit, by David Eddings

Series:	The Belgariad #3
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	June 1983
Printing:	February 1990
ISBN:	0-345-33545-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	305

Magician's Gambit is the third book of the Belgariad, and although it's the best, you probably can't start here. Too much setup has already happened by this point of the story. In retrospect, it's my memories of this book that led me to hang on to this series all these years and pick it up for a re-read. Garion has finally gotten past his whining (mostly), the party puts Ce'Nedra in a hole and leaves her there for a bunch of the book, and the characters finally do something concrete (and significant) in advancement of the plot. Eddings does a good job of avoiding the series problem of saving up all the climactic moments for the end of the story and instead adds a very good middle climax to the story that wraps up the main plot line of the first three books. I think this is also the book that best displays the interestingly quirky ways that Eddings approaches the epic fantasy genre. (Now to figure out how to talk about them without spoiling the story....) One of my favorite bits in this series is the dry voice in the back of Garion's head. I don't want to say too much about it, since discovering the nature of that voice slowly over the series is part of the fun. But this is the book where most of that mystery is revealed, and it's a rather different spin on the wise advisor trope. Garion has more than the usual number of mentor figures, and like many books of this type they function partly as plot devices to force the story down the correct path. One of the things that makes plot devices irritating is that they feel forced on the story from outside. Eddings here pulls a trick to embed that device inside the story, so it feels less like the hand of the author and more like an aspect of the mythology. I'm not sure it would work for everyone, and the execution isn't that sophisticated, but it's entertained me every time I read this series. It helps that the voice is an interesting character in its own right, and one of the few characters in the book who takes Garion seriously and explains things to him. By comparison, Belgarath and Polgara are still annoyingly high-handed and uncommunicative (particularly Polgara). Another highlight of this book is a lovely interlude in Belgarath's home, where we meet some of his colleagues (Beldin is a delight) and Garion finally starts experimenting with his own power. I mostly read this series for the supporting characters, not for Garion, who spends far too much time whining and most of the rest of the time being just neutrally there. But in this book Eddings finally gives him some moments of real awe and discovery, using one of my favorite approaches to the powerful chosen one character: making normally-hard things easy but normally-easy things unintuitive because they think about magic differently than anyone else. Most of the moments when Garion does something that shouldn't be possible are highlights. We also get nearly the final characters for Garion's band, and they're good ones. Relg is mostly amusing in some of his later reactions to specific characters and is a bit tedious in this book, but Errand is a unique idea and one of my favorite characters of the series. He fits well with the tendency of this series to not take itself, or power, or mythology, too seriously. Eddings avoids the trap of making everything Significant and Fraught; characters snark and do things on a whim, power has funny side effects, and the most powerful object in the story is treated in a way that has one both laughing and flinching at the same time. (It's a nice twist on and homage to some of the trappings around the One Ring, while making it far more light-hearted.) There are a few things I could complain about (the gender stereotyping between Garion and Ce'Nedra is so strong, for instance), but they're more minor here than in previous books. I enjoy reading about characters doing things they're very good at, and there's quite a lot of that here. (That said, I do feel like I should mention somewhere that one of the characters is very good at killing Murgos, who are supposedly human. I suppose it wouldn't be epic fantasy without a bit of casual genocide, and to be fair the Murgos in question are mostly trying to track down and kill the party, but the way that's played partly for laughs gets distasteful if one thinks about it too much.) This series is at its best when it balances dramatic prophecy with irreverent poking, gives the protagonists moments of odd and very human joy (Garion's colt!), and celebrates the unlikely and unexpected collection of people (or fable characters) who are drawn together by the story. I think this book hits those notes well, and although the flaws of the previous books are still there, they're muted and don't get as much screen time. Instead, we get some fun foreshadowing, a sense of power and growth, a few moments of delight and awe, and a lot of the sort of exasperated wise-cracking common to experienced people who trust each other and are working together on something hard. Magician's Gambit, and this whole series, will not be to everyone's taste, but it's the first book of the series I can comfortably recommend if you like this sort of thing. Followed by Castle of Wizardry. Rating: 8 out of 10

Whilst I managed to read almost sixty books in 2016 here are ten of my favourites in no particular order. Disappointments this year include Stewart Lee's Content Provider (nothing like his stand-up), Christopher Hitchens' And Yet (his best essays are already published) and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (great exposition, bizarre conclusion). The worst book I finished, by far, was Mark Edward's Follow You Home. Animal QC Gary Bell, QC Subtitled My Preposterous Life, this rags-to-riches story about a working-class boy turned eminent lawyer would be highly readable as a dry and factual account but I am compelled to include it here for its extremely entertaining style of writing. Full of unsurprising quotes that take one unaware: would you really expect a now-Queen's Counsel to "heartily suggest that if you find yourself suffering from dysentery in foreign climes you do not medicate it with lobster thermidor and a bottle of Ecuadorian red?" A real good yarn.

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So You've Been Publically Shamed Jon Ronson The author was initially recommended to me by Brad but I believe I started out with the wrong book. In fact, I even had my doubts about this one, prematurely judging from the title that it was merely cashing-in on a fairly recent internet phenomenon like his more recent shallow take on Trump and the alt-Right but in the end I read Publically Shamed thrice in quick succession. I would particularly endorse the audiobook version: Ronson's deadpan drawl suits his writing perfectly.

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The Obstacle is the Way Ryan Holiday Whilst everyone else appears to be obligated to include Ryan's recent Ego is the Enemy in their Best of 2016 lists I was actually taken by his earlier "introduction by stealth" to stoic philosophy. Certainly not your typical self-help book, this is "a manual to turn to in troubling times". Returning to this work at least three times over the year even splashing out on the audiobook at some point I feel like I learned a great deal, although it is now difficult to pinpoint exactly what. Perhaps another read in 2017 is thus in order

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Layer Cake J.J. Connolly To judge a book in comparison to the film is to do both a disservice, but reading the book of Layer Cake really underscored just how well the film played to the strengths of that medium. All of the aspects that would not have worked had been carefully excised from the screenplay, ironically leaving more rewarding "layers" for readers attempting the book. A parallel adaption here might be No Country for Old Men - I would love to read (or write) a comparative essay between these two adaptions although McCarthy's novel is certainly the superior source material.

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Lying Sam Harris I've absorbed a lot of Sam Harris's uvre this year in the form of his books but moreover via his compelling podcast. I'm especially fond of Waking Up on spirituality without religion and would rank that as my favourite work of his. Lying is a comparatively short read, more of a long essay in fact, where he argues that we can radically simplify our lives by merely telling the truth in situations where others invariably lie. Whilst it would take a brave soul to adopt his approach his case is superlatively well-argued and a delight to read.

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Letters from a Stoic Seneca

Great pleasure is to be found not only in keeping up an old and established friendship but also in beginning and building up a new one. Reading this in a beautifully svelte hardback, I tackled a randomly-chosen letter per day rather than attempting to read it cover-to-cover. Breaking with a life-long tradition, I even decided to highlight sections in pen so I could return to them at ease. I hope it's not too hackneyed to claim I gained a lot from "building up" a relationship with this book. Alas, it is one of those books that is too easy to recommend given that it might make one appear wise and learned, but if you find yourself in a slump, either in life or in your reading habits, it certainly has my approval.

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Solo: A James Bond Novel William Boyd I must have read all of the canonical Fleming novels as a teenager and Solo really rewards anyone who has done so. It would certainly punish anyone expecting a Goldeneye or at least be a little too foreign to be enjoyed. Indeed, its really a pastiche of these originals, both in terms of the time period, general tone (Bond is more somber; more vulnerable) and in various obsessions of Fleming's writing, such as the overly-detailed description of the gambling and dining tables. In this universe, 007's restaurant expenses probably contributed signifcantly to the downfall of the British Empire, let alone his waistline. Bond flicking through a ornithological book at one point was a cute touch

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The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck Mark Manson Certainly a wildcard to include here and not without its problems, The Subtle Art is a curious manifesto on how to approach life. Whilst Manson expouses an age-old philosophy of grounding yourself and ignoring the accumulation of flatscreen TVs, etc. he manages to do so in a fresh and provocative "21st-centry gonzo" style. Highly entertaining, at one point the author posits an alternative superhero ("Disappointment Panda") that dishes out unsolicited and uncomfortable truths to strangers before simply walking away: "You know, if you make more money, that s not going to make your kids love you," or: "What you consider friendship is really just your constant attempts to impress people." Ouch.

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The Fourth Protocol Frederick Forsyth I have a crystal-clear memory from my childhood of watching a single scene from a film in the dead of night: Pierce Brosnan sets a nuclear device to detonate after he can get away but a double-crossing accomplice surreptitiously brings the timetable forward in order that the bomb also disposes of him Anyway, at some point whilst reading The Fourth Protocol it dawned on me that this was that book. I might thus be giving the book more credit due to this highly satisfying connection but I think it stands alone as a superlative political page-turner and is still approachable outside the machinations of the Cold War.

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The Partner John Grisham After indulging in a bit too much non-fiction and an aborted attempt at The Ministry of Fear, I turned to a few so-called lower-brow writers such as Jeffrey Archer, etc. However, it was The Partner that turned out to be a real page-turner for somewhat undefinable reasons. Alas, it appears the rest of the author's output is unfortunately in the same vein (laywers, etc.) so I am hesitant to immediately begin others but judging from various lists online I am glad I approached this one first.

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Shogun: The First Novel of the Asian saga James Clavell Despite its length, I simply couldn't resist returning to Shogun this year although it did fatigue me to the point that I have still yet to commence on its sequel, Tai-Pan. Like any good musical composition, one is always rewarded by returning to a book and I took great delight in uncovering more symbolism throughout (such as noticing that one of the first words Blackthorne learns in Japanese is "truth") but also really savouring the tragic arcs that run throughout the novel, some beautiful phrases ("The day seemed to lose its warmth ") and its wistful themes of inevitability and karma.

Dear Friends, I have shared a few times that I had a privileged childhood. I never had led a hand-to-mouth existence but more than that I was privileged to have made the acquaintance of Jaipur wale Mausaji while I was very young. I have been called miserly by my cousin sisters whenever they write letters to me and I don t answer simply because whatever I feel for them, words feel inadequate and meaningless. The same thing applies in this as well. I am sharing few bits here as there are too many memories of a golden past which will not let me go till I have shared a few of them. First let me start by sharing the relation I had with him. By relation he was my mother s-sister s husband. In English, he would probably be termed as Maternal Uncle although he was much more than that. My one of the first remembrances of him was during Madhu Didi s Shaadi (marriage). Madhu Didi is uncle s daughter and I would have been a impish 4-5 year old at the time. This was the first time I was gonna be part of The Great North Indian Wedding and I didn t know what was in store for me as I had grown in Pune. I remember finishing my semester tests and mummy taking me to Pune Station. I was just excited that I would be travelling somewhere and had no clue what would be happening. We landed in Agra, took another train and landed in Jaipur in the middle of the night at their home at Sangram Colony. While I had known few of the cousins, I was stumped to see so many cousins jumping out of everywhere. The look on my face was one of stupefaction and surprise . The only thing which would closely resemble that would be Bilbo s 111st Birthday party in Lord of the Rings (Part 1). In fact, by a curious quirk/twist of fate, I came to know of a Naniji or somebody like that who by relation was far elder to me, while she was either my age or below my age. As was customary, had to bow down sheepishly. As a somewhat alone boy, to be thrown in this rambunctious bunch and be the babe in the woods, I was quickly chopped and eaten up but had no complaints. I would get into trouble onto a drop of a hat. While Mausiji would threaten me, Mausaji would almost always defend me. While Mausiji could see through me, the twinkle in Mausaji s eyes used to tell me that while he knew what I was upto, for reasons unknown, he would always defend me. Mausaji s Sangram Colony s house became my cricket ground, football ground and all and any ground to play and be. Mausaji and his brothers used to live near each other and the lane they had, had hardly any vehicles on it, so all the cousins could play all they want with me being the longest, perhaps unconsciously trying either to make for lost time or knowing/unknowing this was too good to last. Today s Pokemon generation might not be able to get it but that s alright. They also had a beautiful garden where Mausiji used to grow vegetables. While playing, we sometimes used to hurt her veggies (unconsciously) or just have shower with the garden hose. Mausaji used to enjoy seeing our antics. One of the relatives even had a dog who used to join in the fun sometimes. When mummy and Mausiji expressed concern about the dog biting, Mausaji would gently brush it aside. One of the other things in Didi s marriage is we got a whole lot of sweets. While Mausiji tried to keep us in check with sweets, both Manish Bhaiya and Mausaji used to secrete sweets from time to time. When I was hungry and used to steal food (can t wait till the appointed time) either Bhaiya or Mausaji would help me with the condition I would have to take the blame if and when we got caught as we invariably did. Mausaji s house had a basement where all the secreted sweets and food used to get in. Both me and Manish Bhaiya would be there and we would have a riot in ourselves. We would enjoy the adrenaline when we were stealing the food. As I was pretty young, I was crazy about the Tom and Jerry cartoons that used to come on Television that time. I and Bhaiya used to act like Jerry and/or his cronies while Mausiji would invariably be the Tom with Mausaji all-knowing about it but acting as a mere bystander. I remember him egging me for many of the antics I would do and get in trouble in but as shared would also be defended by him. The basement was also when I was becoming a teenager where Manish Bhaiya showed me his collection and we had a heart-to-heart about birds and bees. While whatever little I had known till that time was from school-friends and my peers at school and I didn t know what was right or wrong. Bhaiya clarified lot of things, concepts which I was either clueless or confused about. When I look back now, it is possible that Mausaji might have instructed Bhaiya to be my tutor as I used to be somewhat angry and lash out by the confusing times. As we used to go there for part of holidays, I remember doing all sorts of antics to make sure I would get an extra day, an extra hour to be there. I never used to understand why we had to go to meet the other relatives when all the fun I could have was right there only, couldn t Mummy know/see that I used to enjoy the most here. Mausaji was a clothier as we understand the term today and a gentleman to the core. He was the co-owner of Rajputana Cloth Store in Jaipur. Many VIP s as well as regular people used to visit him for getting clothes designed and stitched under his watchful eyes. I never saw him raise his voice against any of the personnel working under him and used to be a thorough gentleman to one and all. Later, as I grew up I came to know and see that people would phone up and just ask him to do the needful. He would get the right cloth, stitch it right and people used to trust him for that. He was such an expert on cloth and type of clothes, that by mere touch he could talk/share about what sort of cloth it is. One of his passions was driving and from the money he had saved, he had got an Ambassador Car. Every day or every other day or whenever he felt like it, he used to take either the gang or me with mummy or me with anybody else. Each ride used to be an adventure in itself, with a start beginning and an end. I always used to watch out for the car-rides as I knew we would get sweets or something as well as he would regale us with stories about a place here and there. There was a childlike curiosity and interest in him which was infectious to one and all. The only weakness that he had was he liked to drink wine once in a while. When I was a kid, I was never able to give him company, only few years back, for the first time I was able to share wine with him which was also a memory I treasure. Those who know him closely knew the many up and downs that he went through, but as a gentleman he never let on the hurts he had or didn t curse his fate or anything else that we do when things go bad from our perspective. While there is much to write about him, it will not accomplish anything that is not known about him. I ll add with the private joke that was between him and me. When I was little, I used to call him Mausaji, Samosaji for a) I liked Samosa and b) Samosa has a bit thick skin outside and underneath it s all gravy. In reality though, he was butter all the way. I miss you Mausaji and wish I could turn the clock back and come with Mummy to visit both Mausiji and you. I hope your new journey takes you to even further heights than this life. Savouring the memories mummy and I, hope we meet you again in some new Avataar
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #antics, #growing up, #holidays, #Manish Bhiaya, #Mausaji, #Sangram Colony

Review: Queen of Sorcery, by David Eddings

Series:	The Belgariad #2
Publisher:	Del Rey
Copyright:	November 1982
Printing:	March 1992
ISBN:	0-345-33565-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	322

Queen of Sorcery is the second book in the Belgariad, which is a "one story in five books" sort of series. You could probably take a chance on skipping Pawn of Prophecy, since it's not a very good book, but some parts of the story may be confusing without it. We're now getting into the part of the series where I can start saying some nice things about it, so I should put that in context and not get expectations too high. The Belgariad as a series is fully invested in the stock symbols and stereotypes of Tolkien-derivative fantasy. White is good; black is bad. West is good; east is bad. People are very neatly divided into countries, and national traits are exceptionally strong. The Murgos, the people who serve (although "under the thumb of" would be more accurate, Eddings doesn't spend much time thinking about the difference) the Big Bad of the series, are basically orcs, for all that they're theoretically human. With an unsympathetic reading, it's very easy to see the echos of the Yellow Peril in the war between the west and the east, including the standard trope of fractious, arguing, and diverse western kingdoms against a unified horde from the east. (To be fair, Eddings does undermine the unity a bit with the Nadraks later in the series, and my recollection is that the Mallorean, a follow-on series, undermines it even further.) Given that, I've been trying to figure out why I had fond memories of this series and enjoyed this re-read, since that normally isn't my thing. There are a few elements that are best talked about in the context of the next book, but one element shows up here as the party of heroes, finishing their forced detour in Cherek, head south through Arendia. Eddings is aware that he's stereotyping each nation of people in this world and embraces it so thoroughly that it stops feeling like stereotypes and starts feeling more like a fable. The Arends are a great example. Arendia is pure medieval fantasy world (even more so than the rest of this world). There are knights in castles, large forests reserved for noble hunting, and miserable serfs. The Arends, apart from the serfs, are full of tales of glory and honor, are impulsive and loyal to a fault, and are in the midst of a simmering internal war that's just barely not broken into open fighting. But the Arends know that they have an unhealthy obsession with honor, know that they constantly get themselves into trouble by being absolutist about honor and far too impulsive, and can't seem to help themselves. They bemoan the war while being apparently unable to do anything that would bring it to an end. If you think of them as people, none of this makes much sense. If you think of them as talking animals in a fable, aware of their natures but still governed by them, it starts to strangely work. When they're isolated from their society by joining the protagonists' party (the early part of this series mostly involves collecting people, for reasons explained later in the series, while following the trail of a thief), the characters of Eddings's world start developing a bit more nuance and depth. But even then, it's more within the bounds that one would expect in a long fable, and falls a bit short of human growth. The lion might learn something from the badger, but the lion is still a lion. With that frame, the first half of this book is rather entertaining. Eddings is taking the stereotype of the noble knight from a typical Arthurian romance and treating it like a class of animal in a fable, which I think is subtly delightful. There's even a doomed love triangle (a very chaste one, which is a reminder that this series was probably targeted at YA readers). The reader joins the primary characters in a sense of bemused exasperation. (Well, Garion takes the doomed love triangle much too seriously, but he's young). Unfortunately, the second half of this book is not one of the finest moments in this series. It's mostly a duet of whining. The first half of the whining comes from Garion, who finally discovers one of the many things about himself that's been obvious to the readers since the middle of the first book, and then promptly develops one of the worst cases of pathetic angst you'll encounter. The people who have been lying to him and keeping secrets from him are now all eager to teach him, which grates almost as much, whereas he's determined to never use his abilities. It makes me think the worst of absolutely everyone involved, and it all happens in one of the most depressing and disgusting settings of the book. The second half of the whining comes from Ce'Nedra, who is by far my least favorite character of this series. She's intended to be an obnoxious, spoiled, imperious brat, and also runs headlong into gender roles in this series, which means she's a living mass of irritation and gender stereotypes, made worse by the fact that the protagonists mostly tolerate her and Garion's reactions to her nonsense are also whiny and obnoxious. It's not my favorite bit of reading. Ce'Nedra does get marginally better later in the series, but she's at her worst here, at the same time Garion is at his worst, which makes the last half of this book a real chore. The only real plus side is that the voice in the back of Garion's head gets a few great moments, but more on that in the next book where it starts playing a prominent role. I should note here that Eddings isn't a complete disaster on gender in this series. There are a lot of unexamined stereotypes, but there are also a lot of examined ones, and it's obvious in places that he's trying. Polgara is a major character, women get some agency in this story, and they at least appear (which is never a given in Tolkien-derivative fantasy). But it's pretty obvious that gender roles start from a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" set of expectations and then run into Eddings's general tendency to exaggerate all such divisions to fable levels, which in places isn't pretty. And, well, there are all-female giggly dryads who have to capture men to reproduce and who have a euphoric reaction to chocolate. That's a thing that happens. So you may or may not want to agree with me about the completeness of the disaster. Adjust expectations accordingly. If Queen of Sorcery had stuck with the tone of the first half of the book, I would say that it was doing something oddly interesting and showing some of the charm that made me want to re-read this series. Unfortunately, the second half of the book is a bit of a disaster, full of characters acting in ways that makes them very hard to like. Still, I plowed through this book in a couple nights of reading, so there's something here that draws one through the story. And the next book of the series is considerably better. Followed by Magician's Gambit. Rating: 6 out of 10

A friend of mine choose for $reasons to install the latest OpenSuSE 42.2 release as his new laptop operating system. It's been a while that I had contact with the SuSE Linux distribution. Must be around 12 years or so. The unsual part here is that I've to support a somewhat eccentric, but mostly ordinary user of computers. And to my surprise it's still hard to just plug in your existing stuff and expect it work. I've done so many dirty things to this installation in the last three days, my system egineering heart is bleeding. printing with a Canon Pixma iP100 printer This is a small portable Canon printer, about four years old. It provides a decent quality and its main strength is that it's small and really portable. Sadly the gutenprint driver just pushes through a blank page. No ink wasted on it at all. So the only reasonable other choice was a four year old binary rpm package provided by Canon. It has a file dependency on "libtiff.so.3" which is no longer available in recent GNU/Linux distributions. So I cheated and

- unpacked the tarball
- installed the rpm from the "packages" folder
zypper install cnijfilter-common-3.70-1.x86_64.rpm cnijfilter-ip100series-3.70-1.x86_64.rpm
... and choose to ignore the missing file dependency on libtiff.so.5.
ln -s /usr/lib64/libtiff.so /usr/lib64/libtiff.so.5
- re-ran the ./install.sh which registered the printer with cups and does whatever else
  magic is included in 1906 lines of shell.

To my surprise this driver still works and provides the expected quality. Though it's just a question of time until this setup will break. Be it an incompatible ABI change in libtiff or another lib in use by those Canon provided tools. QGIS and gdal with ECW support While the printer stuff is a rather common use case, having a map viewer for map files in the ECW format is the eccentric part. I found some hints on stackoverflow and subsequently https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/ECW that a non-free library is required and a specific build of gdal. Then QGIS should be able to work with ECW files. Lucky us there is at least a OpenSuSE repository for gdal and QGIS. So I did the following:

zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Application:/Geo/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/Application:Geo.repo
zypper install qgis

Then I had to download the non-free ECW SDK from http://download.hexagongeospatial.com/downloads/erdas-ecw-jp2-sdk-v5.3-%28linux%29 - you'll and up with a '.bin' installer file. The installation process left me with "ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0" folder in my $HOME. I moved that one to /opt. Next step is adding the library to the ldconfig search path.

echo "/opt/ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0/Desktop_Read-Only/lib/x64/release/" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ecw.conf; ldconfig

Now it was "just" about rebuild gdal with ECW support. So I downloaded the required source packages with "zypper source-install gdal", edited the spec somewhere in "/usr/src/" to make the following modifications

--with-ecw=/opt/ERDAS-ECW_JPEG_2000_SDK-5.3.0/Desktop_Read-Only

added to the "./configure" invocation. And somewhere at the top we had to relax the requirement that all installed files have to be referenced inside the package.

%define _unpackaged_files_terminate_build 0

As a last step I had to "rpmbuild -ba" the package and force the installation via zypper once more, because this time we have a file depedency on the libecw stuff and it's obviously not listed in the rpm database. Last but not least I tried to put the gdal build on hold with

zypper addlock gdal libgdal20

to ensure it's not removed on the next update. Other non-free tools Beside of those two issues I had to install a range of other non-free tools, but currently they work without further issues or modifications. One is Teamviewer (i686 multiarch rpm) and the other one is XnViewMP. XnView is also able to show ECW files, but only the smaller ones. It crashes on bigger ones but that's also the case on Windows. Then there is also (required by some Italian map related websites) the ugly Adobe Flash Plugin for Firefox, but that one is sadly still a widespread issue. We also tried to try out the nvidia graphic drivers but at the moment we could only get the build in Intel card to work. Usually the preferred solution from my point of view but sometimes we see rendering glitches and I'm not sure if it's the driver or something else. my personal take away I hate to admit it but it's nothing extraordinary that was requested here. But still it took me the better part of two evenings to figure everything out. And even now it's not properly integrated and doomed to fail any day due to various updates and changes in the surounding ecosystem. I've full sympathy for every average user that would give up after two hours of research and try&error on this journey. For the printer drivers I'm happy to blame Canon. The printer situation as a whole improved from my point of view during the last decade, but it's still a pain in the ass with the very short shelf life you usually see with consumer models. For the ECW case one could discuss if it would be legally possible and helpful to do ugly dlopen() stuff to dynamcially load the shared libs. But then again someone has to make his hands dirty during the build and discussions about the legal use of header files will be the next chapter (hello Oracle). It's just ugly. Actually I know too little about the world of image formats to judge if someone has a good reason to keep this format commercial or not. From my personal point of view it's not useful and maybe even morally wrong. Technically one could argue if it would make sense to keep a local copy of the gdal build in "/opt" and start QGIS with a modified library path to prefer the private gdal build. Not sure if that is any better. On the other hand there are evolving mechanism like flatpack that would ease the handling of such situations. Buth then again we would be catering non-free software. It feels a lot like giving up. While my private working environment is except for firmware blobs free, I now created for someone a real "FrankenSuSE" to satisfy his everyday needs. On the one hand we now have another mostly satisfied user of a mostly free operating system. On the other hand that was only possible by adding a vast amount of non-free software. For sure we did not win the war, I'm not even sure if we've won a single battle here. It's just frustrating to see what is required to get someone up and running. With my personal attitude towards open source software it even feels wrong to invest so much time into fiddling with non-free components. What is still missing We currently lack an image viewer that allows us to print only a selection of an image, which is useful to print parts of a map. That usually works with XnView on Windows but does not work with the Linux version at the moment. I also tried gwenview and geeqie and had the same issue. Not sure if it's maybe a bug in XnView or one of the Qt parts (gwenview is also Qt based). I did not research that yet. Update: I spent quite some time looking into open bug reports for geeqie and gwenview. Seems the feature to print only a section of an image is something new. I've created #374299 (gwenview) and #457 (geeqie). For XnView I expect it's a difference between XnViewMP (the portable version) and the Windows only XnView Classic. Needs to be clarified and it might be worth to try XnView Classic with wine. Maybe printing with wine via cups works, I found at least some results for it on the internet.

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday December 18 and Saturday December 24 2016: Media coverage 100% Of The 289 Coreboot Images Are Now Built Reproducibly by Phoronix, with more details in German by Pro-Linux.de. We have further reports on our Reproducible Builds World summit #2 in Berlin from Rok Garbas of NixOS as well as Clemens Lang of MacPorts Debian infrastructure work Dak now archives buildinfo files thanks to a patch from Chris Lamb. We also have mostly finalised a design of how they will be distributed by the Debian FTP mirror network which we will start implementing soon. This is great for the future of Debianb but unfortunately this also means that we won't have .buildinfo files for Stretch as Debian will not rebuild its source packages and because these binary packages currently in the archive were mostly built with dpkg > 1.18.11. reprepro/5.0.0-1 has added support for dealing with .buildinfo files that are included in .changes files. (Closes: #843402) Reproducible work in other projects The Chromium project is now working on making their build process (mostly) deterministic. Their motivation is to save both "[money] (less hardware is required) and developer time (reduced latency by having less work to do on the TS and CI)". Unreproducible bugs filed

• Chris Lamb:
  • #848721 filed against apt.
  • #848866 filed against libcorelinux.
  • #849314 filed against node-gulp.
  • #849333 filed against faker.
• Dhole:
  • #848633 filed against sugar-toolkit-gtk3.

Reviews of unreproducible packages 39 package reviews have been added, 75 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 2 issue types have been updated:

• Updated captures_build_path
• Added nondeterministic_ordering_in_desktop_files_by_python_sugar3

Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, some FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (1)
• Chris Lamb (7)
• Lucas Nussbaum (4)

diffoscope development diffoscope 66 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included contributions from:

• Emanuel Bronshtein:
  • Use ssh-keygen for comparing OpenSSH public keys
  • Use js-beautify as JavaScript code beautifier for .js files (with tests).
  • Many CSS & HTML improvements.
  • Change all HTTP URLs to HTTPS where applicable.
• anthraxx:
  • Enable the use of ssh-keygen on Arch Linux.
• Maria Glukhova:
  • Add detection of order-only difference in plain text format. (Closes: #848049)
  • Change icc-recognizing regexp to reflect changes in file type description. (Closes: #848814)
• Chris Lamb:
  • Update tests for compatibility with enjarify >= 1.0.3. (Closes: #849142)
  • When skipping tests because the version of an external is too low, print the detected version.
  • Avoid unpacking packages twice when comparing .changes. (Closes: #843531)
  • Add a simple profiling framework (enabled via --profile).
  • Various code quality and reliability improvements.
  • Document how to sign PyPI uploads.

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.029-1 was uploaded to unstable by Chris Lamb. It included no new content from this week, but rather included contributions from previous weeks. reproducible-website development The website is now also accessible via the https://www.reproducible-builds.org URL.

• Clemens Lang:
  • Add the definition of "reproducible", as drafted at the reproducible builds world summit in Berlin. Thanks to all participants in the sessions that worked these out!
• Valerie R Young:
  • Force ordering of titles.
  • Various formatting improvements.
• Holger Levsen:
  • Various usability and formatting improvements.
  • https://www.reproducible-builds.org
• Chris Lamb:
  • Various usability, style and wording improvements.
  • Add Debconf15, Skroutz.gz and MiniDebconfCambridge15 talks to resouces page.

tests.reproducible-builds.org

• We changed the data storage backend from a single sqlite3 database file (651 MB) to a PostgreSQL database. With this change we'll be able to scale a lot more and add testing of the arm64 architecture.
  • Valerie Young wrote most of the code, Mattia Rizzolo reviewed and helped improve the code and Holger deployed it and found some minor bugs which have been fixed.
• We are now testing the arm64 architecture for all packages on all suites, arranged by Holger. Many thanks to codethink for providing us with access to eight 8-core arm64 machines with 64GB memory, which allows us to rebuild Debian very fast!

Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Holger Levsen & Chris Lamb and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC and the mailing lists.

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

Review: The Kingdom of Gods, by N.K. Jemisin

Series:	Inheritance #3
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	2011
Printing:	April 2012
ISBN:	0-316-04394-X
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	567

The Kingdom of Gods is the third and final book of the Inheritance trilogy and rests very heavily on the events of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms. I think it's the best book of the trilogy as well, but this isn't the place to start. The build-up from the previous books is very important to this story. The first book of this series followed Yeine in her introduction to the highly political, abusive, and exploitative world of the Arameri, and her deeper introduction to the complex theology and mythology of Jemisin's constructed world. The second involved fewer theological fireworks and more day-to-day decisions, but it followed the implications of the first book's climax and revealed another important lurking weapon from the past. The Kingdom of Gods returns to a theological focus, this time putting Sieh front and center, and is once again concerned with the fate of the entire world, or even reality itself. Sieh played a significant role in the first book, but only seen from Yeine's perspective. He's the trickster god, the god of childhood, of play and whim and unfairness and practical jokes, of all the chaos and lack of impulse control and impudence of childhood. The Kingdom of Gods opens with him encountering two Arameri children in the abandoned areas under Sky and making an unlikely and impulsive pledge of friendship. One that leads to an unexplained catastrophe, a long blackout, and possibly the end of his existence, since Sieh starts aging. And growing up directly undermines his power. One of the two children turns out to be the heir of the haughty, devious, and deeply racist Arameri, whose position atop the hierarchy of the world has been weakened by earlier events but not shaken entirely. Her relationship with Sieh is much more fraught and complex when both of them are teenagers and Sieh is struggling badly to remain true to himself. But what drives the plot is a deadly new form of magic that is targeting the Arameri family and threatening to bring back world-wide war. This is my favorite book of the trilogy, not so much because it brings a relatively satisfying conclusion (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms wasn't bad at that either), but because for once I like all of the main characters. Yeine and Nahadoth are hit and miss (the second two books of the trilogy make it clear that Nahadoth can be a real asshole), and as mentioned in the review of The Broken Kingdoms, I found Shiny exasperating. But Sieh is fun, even when he's being obnoxious, and both of the kids he befriends are complex and multifaceted. Shahar, with her hard and complex relationship with her mother, is probably my favorite character in the book, but her brother certainly has his moments. I did not like Sieh's maturation process. There are parts of this story that are squirm-inducing, and not in a good way (at least for me). And he does tend to get whiny in places. But he knows everyone in Jemisin's complex mythology, he has a great first-person narrative voice, and there are some very fun moments of interaction with his sibling gods. It says something that I really enjoyed this story even though books about slow, ongoing illness and diminution are rather far from my favorites (and Sieh's aging falls into that category). While there are some beautiful set-pieces here once the shit starts to hit the fan in earnest, the concluding fireworks didn't really work for me. The final confrontation was too abstracted, too indescribable, and too full of ancillary carnage to be the ending I was looking for. (Perhaps because of what I've been playing recently, I keep thinking of it as one of those chaotic, floating, dream-like cut-scene disasters in a Final Fantasy game that's trying to hint at indescribable magic.) But the denouement made me happy, and it fit the characters. And don't miss the glossary at the end of the book that Sieh has scribbled all over. This book includes, as a bonus, a short story: "Not the End": This is the ending that The Broken Kingdoms actually needed. It (plus some key bits in the rest of The Kingdom of Gods) made me feel much better about the end of that book, and added a much-needed light note to the rather heavy bits at the end of this book. And I do love Oree. It's very short, and it's not in any way a standalone story (more of a belated epilogue to the previous novel), but that's all that was needed. (8) Rating: 8 out of 10

I recently needed to get access to a DataEase database; the person I helped was the legitimate owner of the data, but had forgotten the password, as the database was largely from 1996. There are various companies around the world that seem to do this, or something similar (like give you an API), for a usually unspecified fee; they all have very 90s homepages and in general seem like they have gone out of business a long time ago. And I wasn't prepared to wait. For those of you who don't know DataEase, it's a sort-of relational database for DOS that had its heyday in the late 80s and early 90s (being sort of the cheap cousin of dBase); this is before SQL gained traction as the standard query language, before real multiuser database access, and before variable-width field storage. It is also before reasonable encryption. Let's see what we can do. DataEase has a system where tables are mapped through the data dictionary, which is a table on its own. (Sidenote: MySQL pre-8.0 still does not have this.) This is the file RDRRTAAA.DBM; I don't really know what RDRR stands for, but T is the database letter in case you wanted more than one database in the same directory, and AAA, AAB, AAC etc. is a counter so that a table grows to be too big for one file. (There's also .DBA files for structure of non-system tables, and then some extra stuff for indexes.) DBM files are pretty much the classical, fixed-length 80s-style database files; each row has some flags (I believe these are for e.g. row is deleted ) and then just the rows in fixed format right after each other. For instance, here's one I created as part of testing (just the first few lines of the hexdump are shown):

00000000: 0e 00 01 74 65 73 74 62 61 73 65 00 00 00 00 00  ...testbase.....
00000010: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 73 46 cc 29 37 00 09 00 00  .......sF.)7....
00000020: 00 00 00 00 00 43 3a 52 44 52 52 54 41 41 41 2e  .....C:RDRRTAAA.
00000030: 44 42 4d 00 00 01 00 0e 00 52 45 50 4f 52 54 20  DBM......REPORT 
00000040: 44 49 52 45 43 54 4f 52 59 00 00 00 00 00 1c bd  DIRECTORY.......
00000050: d4 1a 27 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 43 3a 52 45  ..'.........C:RE
00000060: 50 4f 54 41 41 41 2e 44 42 4d 00 00 01 00 0e 00  POTAAA.DBM......
00000070: 52 65 6c 61 74 69 6f 6e 73 68 69 70 73 00 00 00  Relationships...

Even without going in-depth, we can see the structure here; there's testbase which maps to C:RDRRTAA.DBM (the RDRR itself), there's a table called REPORT DIRECTORY that maps to C:REPOTAAA.DBM, and then more stuff after that, and so on. However, other tables are not so easily read, because you can ask DataEase to encrypt a table. Let's look at such an encrypted table, like the Users table (containing usernames, passwords not password hashes and some extra information like access level), which is always encrypted:

00000000: 0c 01 9f ed 94 f7 ed 34 ba 88 9f 78 21 92 7b 34  .......4...x!. 4
00000010: ba 88 0f d9 94 05 1e 34 ba 88 a0 78 21 92 7b 34  .......4...x!. 4
00000020: e2 88 9f 78 21 92 7b 34 ba 88 9f 78 21 92 7b 34  ...x!. 4...x!. 4
00000030: ba 88 9f 78 21 92 7b 34 ba 88 9f 78 21 92 7b     ...x!. 4...x!. 

Clearly, this isn't very good encryption; it uses a very short, repetitive key of eight bytes (64 bits). (The data is mostly zero padding, which makes it much easier to spot this.) In fact, in actual data tables, only five of these bytes are set to a non-zero value, which means we have a 40-bit key; export controls? My first assumption here was of course XOR, but through some experimentation, it turned out what you need is actually 8-bit subtraction (with wraparound). The key used is derived from both a database key and a per-table key, both stored in the RDRR; again, if you disassemble, I'm sure you can find the key derivation function, but that's annoying, too. Note, by the way, that this precludes making an attack by just copying tables between databases, since the database key is different. So let's do a plaintext attack. If you assume the plaintext of the bottom row is all padding, that's your key and here's what you end up with:

00000000: 52 79 00 75 73 65 72 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  Ry.user.........
00000010: 00 00 70 61 73 73 a3 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00  ..pass..........
00000020: 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  (...............
00000030: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00                          ........ 

Not bad, eh? Actually the first byte of the key here is wrong as far as I know, but it didn't interfere with the fields, so we have what we need to log in. (At that point, we've won, because DataEase will helpfully decrypt everything transparent for us.) However, there's a twist; if the password is longer than four characters, the entire decryption of the Users table changes. Of course, we could run our plaintext attack against every data table and pick out the information by decoding the structure, but again; annoying. So let's see what it looks like if we choose passs instead:

00000000: 0e 01 9f 7a ae 9e 21 f5 08 63 07 6d a3 a1 17 5d  ...z..!..c.m...]
00000010: 70 cb df 36 7e 7c 91 c5 d8 33 d8 3d 73 71 e7 2d  p..6~ ...3.=sq.-
00000020: 7b 9b 3f a5 db d9 4f 95 a8 03 a7 0d 43 41 b7 fd   .?...O.....CA..
00000030: 10 6b 0f 75 ab a9 1f 65 78 d3 77 dd 13 11 87     .k.u...ex.w....

Distinctly more confusing. At this point, of course, we know at which byte positions the username and password start, so if we wanted to, we could just try setting the start byte of the password to every possible byte in turn until we hit 0x00 (DataEase truncates fields at the first zero byte), which would allow us to get in with an empty password. However, I didn't know the username either, and trying two bytes would mean 65536 tries, and I wasn't up for automating macros through DOSBox. So an active attack wasn't too tempting. However, we can look at the last hex byte (where we know the plaintext is 0); it goes 0x5d, 0x2d, 0xfd... and some other bytes go 0x08, 0xd8, 0xa8, 0x78, and so on. So clearly there's an obfuscation here where we have a per-line offset that decreases with 0x30 per line. (Actually, the increase/decrease per line seems to be derived from the key somehow, too.) If we remove that, we end up with:

00000000: 0e 01 9f 7a ae 9e 21 f5 08 63 07 6d a3 a1 17 5d  ...z..!..c.m...]
00000010: a0 fb 0f 66 ae ac c1 f5 08 63 08 6d a3 a1 17 5d  ...f.....c.m...]
00000020: db fb 9f 05 3b 39 af f5 08 63 07 6d a3 a1 17 5d  ....;9...c.m...]
00000030: a0 fb 9f 05 3b 39 af f5 08 63 07 6d a3 a1 17     ....;9...c.m...

Well, OK, this wasn't much more complicated; our fixed key is now 16 bytes long instead of 8 bytes long, but apart from that, we can do exactly the same plaintext attack. (Also, it seems to change per-record now, but we don't see it here, since we've only added one user.) Again, assume the last line is supposed to be all 0x00 and thus use that as a key (plus the last byte from the previous line), and we get:

00000000: 6e 06 00 75 73 65 72 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  n..user.........
00000010: 00 00 70 61 73 73 12 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00  ..pass..........
00000020: 3b 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ;...............
00000030: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00     ...............

Well, OK, it wasn't perfect; we got pass\x12 instead of passs , so we messed up somehow. I don't know exactly why the fifth character gets messed up like this; actually, it cost me half an hour of trying because the password looked very real but the database wouldn't let me in, but eventually, we just guessed at what the missing letter was supposed to be. So there you have it; practical small-scale cryptanalysis of DOS-era homegrown encryption. Nothing advanced, but the user was happy about getting the data back after a few hours of work. :-)

Some of the content may be NSFW. viewer discretion advised. I have had a life-long fascination with trains. One of my first memories was that of 5-7 year old, clutching my mother or grandmother s hand seeing the steam engine lumbering down whistling and smoking at the same time. I was both afraid and strangely drawn to the iron beast and the first time I knew and then slowly understood that if we come with luggage and the steam-engine comes, it means we are going to travel. I have travelled some, but there are lots to explore still and I do hope that I cover some more of it during my lifetime. The reason I am writing about trains is an article which caught my eye couple of days. Besides seeing the changing geography, the variety of food one can get on train and in stations is one of the primary reasons that Indians love to travel by trains. It is one place where you could have incredible conversations over cup of tea or favourite food and unlike air travel and the famed IFE (In-flight entertainment) people are actually pretty social even with all the gadgets. For those who are wondering, the author was travelling between Jamshedpur, Gujarat to Kolkatta, a train ride which has now gone on my bucket list for the delectable items the author has described To add to the above, it is still cheaper than air travel, although that is changing a bit as Indian Railways seeks to modernize Railways and make it into world-class bullet trains. Indian Railways has a long, rich culture and some of the most interesting nuggets you learn over time adds to the fascination of the Railways. For instance I m sharing this letter which I read first in book and then saw in the New Delhi Railway Museum. The letter I am sharing below was written by a certain Shri Okhil Chandra Sen to the Sahibganj Railway Office in year 1909, almost 38 years before India became independent. I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station. This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report! to papers. If it were not for Mr. Okhil Chandra Sen we would still be running with water bottle (improvement) and jeans/shorts/whatever (again improvement) while the possibility of falling over would always be omnipresent in a hurry. Now we do have toilets and some of the better trains even have Bio-toilets which should make things better as well.(/NSFW) For the plane bit, most of my flights have been domestic flying. Some of my most memorable flights is when flying from Mumbai on a clear sky overlooking the Queen s necklace, loving it and landing in Bangalore during mist or rain or both. Delhi is also good as airports go but nothing much adventurous about it. It was only with the experience of my first international flight, I realized the same feeling again, nervousness and sense of adventure as you meet new people. Nowadays every week I do try and broaden my horizon by seeking and learning a bit about International Travel. In this I came across an article on National Geographic site which also evoked similar feelings. While I can t go back to the past and even if I did (in distant past before I was born), I wouldn t want to improve my financial situation at all (as otherwise I would hit the Grandfather Paradox or/and the Butterfly effect (essentially saying there s no free lunch), it still makes you wonder about a time when people had lot more adventure and lot more moving parts. I do wish they had a much bigger snapshot of that plane so I could really see how people sat in the old aircraft. The low-resolution picture doesn t do justice to the poster and the idea of that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder for an implementation of Butterfly effect. The Grandfather Paradox has been seen plenty of times in fantasy movies like the Back to the Future, Planet of the Apes and many others so will not go there. For the average joe today, s/he has to navigate security,check bags, get her/imself processed through passport control, get boarding pass, get to the gate on-time, get to the aircraft via bridge or bus, get to the seat, somehow make it through the ascent and use your IFE and get snacks and meals till it s time to touch-down and re-do the whole drill again as many times you are connecting. I really admire Gunnar Wolf for the tenacity he showed for the x number of connections he made both ways. While leafing through the interweb today, came across an article . While you can slice and dice the report anyway you want, for me if ever I get a chance again for an International Travel, I would try to see I get a layover at these three airports in order of preference (this is on the basis that none of these airports need a transit visa for the activities shared) a. Changi International Airport It is supposed to have shower amenities, has a movie theatre (+1), free tour of the city (+1) and of course as many Indians do go to Singapore as a destination in itself would have multiple vegetarian options (+2) so would be nice if I need to layover. b. Zurich Airport (ZRH) For passengers with an extended layover, Zurich Airport offers bicycle and inline-skate rentals and excursions to the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne. From business-insider.com. While I m not much of a bicycle and inline-skating freak, if the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne is anything to the scale of Isiko Museum which I shared in a blog post sometime before, it would be worth by itself. I haven t tried to find the site but can imagine, for e.g. if it has a full-scale model of a submarine or train engine, either steam-engines or ones like SNCF or any of the other bullet-trains and early aircraft, it would just blow my mind. When you are talking about transport, there is so much science, business, logistics etc. that I m sure I ll overload with information, photos and any trinkets they have to buy. c. Central Japan International Airport (NGO) It has a 1,000-foot-long sky deck where passengers can watch ships sail into Nagoya Port. There s also a traditional Japanese bathhouse where you can have a relaxing soak while watching the sunset over the bay. BusinessInsider.com Not a bad place to be if you need a layover. Just sink yourself in the bathhouse and see the bay and ships coming in. Luxury indeed. Honourable mention d. Munich Airport (MUC) A nearby visitors park features mini golf and a display of historic aircraft. Business-Insider.com . Now this would have made my list but I guess one would need a Schengen visa to access the visitors park but then if you have that, then why just stay in the Airport itself, could travel through Europe itself and have a longish stop-over. So all in all, it s indeed a fascinating time to be alive, dreaming and just being. Till later. Update I had forgotten to share one more reason why I was writing this article. Although somewhat of a cynic, am hopeful that Pune metro happens. Also, if I had just waited a day, would have been able to add couple of wonderful articles that would make people wanderlust more
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Best Airports, #Central Japan International Airport, #Changi International Airport, #Food, #Loo, #Nostalgia, #NSFW, #Planes, #Steam Engine, #Trains, #Zurich Airport, Indian Railways, memories

Review: Warchild, by Karin Lowachee

Series:	Warchild #1
Publisher:	Warner Aspect
Copyright:	April 2002
ISBN:	0-446-61077-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	451

In a future world of deep space stations and starship trade routes, Jos Musey grew up on a merchant ship with a loving family and typical childhood companions. But, at the age of eight, his ship was taken by pirates and he's taken as a slave. That might have been the end of his story, but after a year of captivity he manages to escape during an alien attack on a distant frontier station. Jos then learns more than he ever expected to learn about the ongoing deep space war between the human military and the aliens and their human sympathizers. From both sides. Warchild feels so much like a collection of 1980s SF tropes that I'm a bit surprised it was published in 2002. Some of those have been part of SF well before the 1980s: the coming-of-age story of a child in space, deep-space combat and merchant fleets, pirates, and sketchy stations. But when one adds the Japanese-inspired philosophy and combat training, with a bit of Karate Kid feel, plus the (oddly bolted on) cyberpunk "burndiving," this book feels deeply embedded in a specific generation of SF storytelling. That's not necessarily a drawback. I like some of those tropes. The martial arts training coupled with careful and patient psychology worked very well for me. It may be a bit stereotyped, but Lowachee is careful to never present it as Asian; it's an alien philosophy and environment, and although it happens to wear its influences on its sleeves, it makes no attempt to tie that to any particular human culture. And the philosophy and, more to the point, the approach Niko takes with Jos is exactly what Jos needs. That section of the book (the second) was by far my favorite. I wish the whole book had been like that. Unfortunately, it's not. The first part is a deeply uncomfortable account of Jos's capture and enslavement (with bonus implied pedophilia). It's thankfully the shortest section of the book, but it's an endless parade of horrors that I didn't enjoy reading. Lowachee took the stylistic choice of writing it in the second person, which is a literary trick that rarely works for me and didn't work here. I'm sure the goal is to make it feel more immediate, but I didn't need this scene to be more immediate, and second person always reads as awkward and forced. If the authors write characters well, I will identify with them, but if I feel like I'm being forced to identify with them, I just start getting irritated. The third part of the book goes in yet a different direction: military SF, complete with hazing, camaraderie, esprit de corps, and bloody combat, with an uncomfortable undertone of constant stress due to Jos's complex and dangerous position. I wanted this to be much shorter and wanted the book to return to the part that I really liked. Unfortunately, that's not to be; the tone of this section is the tone for the rest of the book. To be fair, it's better than I expected it to be, and Jos's recovery and coming-of-age continues in more subtle and more satisfying ways than at first it seemed like it would. But Lowachee complicates and largely breaks a recovery that I was hoping would proceed down a more peaceful path, and replaced a beautiful and interesting (if a bit stereotyped) environment with bog-standard military SF. If you like that sort of thing, there's a lot of that thing here, but I've read a lot of books with that setting and far fewer about an Asian-inspired martial alien philosophy. I think Warchild has a bit too much stuff going on and not enough recovery space. The cyberpunk angle probably gets developed more in later books of the series (the next book is Burndive, which is the name for cyberpunk hacking in this book), but it felt bolted on here. Jos's story has multiple false starts and complications, and Lowachee keeps pulling the rug out from under him again until both he and the reader go a bit numb. The ending mostly works, but it's a brutal resolution to the complex psychological situation Lowachee sets up. This book reminds me a bit of C.J. Cherryh in that the characters seem constantly stressed beyond their ability to cope. I wanted something a bit kinder and softer. Despite that, the psychology and the brief moments of understanding and light are compelling enough that I'm still tempted to read on in this series. The subsequent books follow other characters; maybe they'll be a bit less nasty to their protagonists. Followed by Burndive. Rating: 6 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

Since the past few weeks I have been researching and working on creating a white label version of Lumicall with my mentors Daniel, Juliana and Bruno. Lumicall is a free and convenient app for making encrypted phone calls from Android. It uses the SIP protocol to interoperate with other apps and corporate telephone systems. Think of any app that you use to call others using an SIP ID. What does it mean to make a white label version of Lumicall?
White labelling is the idea of taking the whole or piece of Lumicall s code by business users and tweaking it according to their requirements and functionality they want. The white label version would have client s name, logo, icons, themes etc which reflect their brand. Although, the underlying working of both the applications would be same. Think of it like getting a cake from the local bakery, putting it into a home baking dish and passing it off as something you made in front of your friends and earning all the praise. Except cake is more appealing than apps.
What whitelabelling does is it takes away the pain of collecting cake ingredients, mixing them in right proportion, baking at the right temperature and uses the experience of one cake base to create more and more fancier, prettier, grander cakes. This lets the cool bakers (or the business users of lumicall) to focus on other aspects of the party like decoration, games and drinks (or monetization, publicity and new features)
Now you would wonder who these cool bakers or business users of lumicall would be?

• Existing SIP providers can use white label version of Lumicall to expand their business and launch SIP client. This would provide a one stop shop for them!!
• New SIP clients/developers can use Lumicall white label version to get the underlying working of making encrypted phone calls using SIP protocol, it will help them to focus on other additional functionalities they would like to include.
  
• Moreover, Companies that have existing clients such as shopping apps, social network apps can benefit from integrating lumicall to launch new business ideas

While researching this work that despite the commonalities, there would need to be a unique identifier for any application in the app store. I found that there is difference between the package name and the applicationID. When I create a new project in Android Studio, the applicationId exactly matches the Java-style package name I chose during setup. However, the application ID and package name are independent of each other beyond this point. The thing to keep in mind is that app stores identify as a changed application ID as a different app altogether.

So if I were to make N separate copies of the application code for N clients, it would be a maintenance nightmare, If the build system is Gradle, using product flavors is a trick that will make this maintenance easier. Instead of N separate copies, I would simply have N product flavors. Each flavor corresponds to a customized version of my application. Pro, free, whitelabel, Debug (for development purposes), Release (for production purposes) are the basic flavors I have identified.

Each flavor would use the same source code and files of the application but resources, icons, manifests etc that are specific to each flavor can be defined again in main/src/flavor_name directory under res folders etc. according to the requirement.
Here is a snippet from my build.gradle file::

Note: You have to define at least two flavors to be able to build multiple variants.
Because once you have flavors, you can only build flavored application. You can t just build default configuration anymore. Define an empty flavor, with no applicationIdSuffix at all, and it will use all of the default config section.

This week I d be moving forward with the implementation of whitelabelling using productFlavors in Lumicall.
I would love to hear from someone who has done this before!
Comment here or email me and I promise you an excellent home-made-store-brought cake!
Wishing you all HAPPY HOLIDAYS! !
-U

All photos courtesy KK . If any deviations, would put up labels sharing whose copyright it is. Before I get into all of that, I was curious about Canada and taking the opportunity of debconf happening there in a few months, asked few people what they thought of digital payments, fees and expenses in their country and if plastic cash is indeed used therein. The first to answer was Tyler McDonald (no idea if he is anyway related to the fast-food chain McDonalds which is a worldwide operation.) This is what he had to say/share

You can use credit / debit cards almost everywhere. Restaurant waiters also usually have wireless credit / debit terminals that they will bring to your table for you to settle your bill. How much your bank charges depends on your Canadian bank and the banking plan you are on. For instance, on my plan through the Bank Of Montreal, I get (I think) 20 free transactions a month and then after that I m charged $0.50CDN/piece. However, if I go to a Bank Of Montreal ATM and withdraw cash, there is no service fee for that. There is no service fee for using *credit* cards, only *debit* cards tend to have the fee. I live in a really rural area so I can t always get to a Bank Of Montreal machine for cash. So what I usually end up doing, is either pay by credit and then pay of the balance right away so I don t have to pay interest, or when I do use my bank card to pay for something, I ask if I can get cash back as well. Yes, Canada converted to plastic notes a few years ago. We ve also eliminated the penny. For cashless transactions, you pay the exact amount billed. If you re paying somebody in cash, it is rounded up or down to the nearest 5 cents. And for $1 or $2, instead of notes, we ve moved over to coins. I personally like the plastic notes. They re smoother and feel more durable than the paper notes. I ve had one go through a laundry load by accident and it came out the other side fine.

Another gentleman responded with slightly more information which probably would interest travellers from around the world, not just Indians

Quebec has its own interbank system called Interac (https://interac.ca/en/about/our-company.html). Quebec is a very proud and independent region and for many historical reasons they want to stand on their own, which is why they support their local systems. Some vendors will support only Interac for debit card transactions (at least this was the case when I stayed there the beginning of this decade, it might have changed a bit). *Most* vendors (including supermarkets like Provigo, Metro, etc) will accept major credit and debit cards, although MasterCard isn t accepted as widely there as Visa is. So, if you have one of both, load up your Visa card instead of your MasterCard or get a prepaid Visa card from your bank. They support chip cards everywhere so don t worry about that. If you have a 5 digit pin on any of your cards and a vendor asks you for a 4 digit pin, it will work 90%+ of the times if you just enter the first 4 digits, but it s usually a good idea to go change your pin to a 4 digit just to be safe.

From the Indian perspective all of the above fits pretty neat as we also have Pin and Chip cards (domestically though most ATMs still use the magnetic strip and is suspected that the POS terminals aren t any better.) That would be a whole different story so probably left for another day. I do like the bit about pocketing the change tip. As far as number of free transactions go, it was pretty limited in India for few years before the demonetization happening now. Few years before, I do remember doing as many transactions on the ATM as I please but then ATM s have seen a downward spiral in terms of technology upgradation, maintenance etc. There is no penalty to the bank if the ATM is out-of-order. If there was significant penalty then we probably would have seen banks taking more care of ATM s. It is a slightly more complex topic hence would take a stab at it some other day. Do hope though that the terms for ATM usage for bank customers become lenient similar to Canada otherwise it would be difficult for Indians to jump on the digital band-wagon as you cannot function without cheap, user-friendly technology. The image has been taken from this fascinating article which appeared in Indian Express couple of days back. Coming back to the cheese and wine in the evening. I think we started coming back from Eagle Encounters around 16:30/17:00 hrs Cape Town time. Somehow the ride back was much more faster and we played some Bollywood party music while coming back (all cool). Suddenly remembered that I had to buy some cheese as I hadn t bought any from India. There is quite a bit of a post where I m trying to know/understand if spices can be smuggled (which much later I learnt I didn t need to but that s a different story altogether), I also had off-list conversations with people about cheese as well but wasn t able to get any good recommendations. Then saw that KK bought Mysore Pak (apparently she took a chance not declaring it) which while not being exactly cheese fit right into things. In her own words a South Indian ghee sweet fondly nicknamed the blocks of cholesterol and reason #3 for bypass surgery . KK So with Leonard s help we stopped at a place where it looked like a chain of stores. Each store was selling something. Seeing that, I was immediately transported to Connaught Place, Delhi The image comes from http://planetden.com/food/roundabout-world-connaught-place-delhi which attempts to explain Connaught Place. While the article is okish, it lacks soul and not written like a Delhite would write or anybody who has spent a chunk having spent holidays at CP. Another day, another story, sorry. What I found interesting about the stores while they were next to each other, I also eyed an alcohol shop as well as an Adult/Sex shop. I asked Leonard as to how far we were from UCT and he replied hardly 5 minutes by car and was shocked to see both alcohol and a sex shop. While an alcohol shop some distance away from a college is understandable, there are few and far around Colleges all over India, but adult shops are a rarity. Unfortunately, none of us have any photos of the place as till that time everybody s phone was dead or just going to be dead and nobody had thought to bring a portable power pack to juice our mobile devices. A part of me was curious to see what the sex shop would have and look from inside, but as was with younger people didn t think it was appropriate. All of us except Jaminy and someone else (besides Leonard) decided to stay back, while the rest of us went inside to explore the stores. It took me sometime to make my way to the cheese corner and had no idea which was good and which wasn t. So with no idea of brands therein, the only way to figure out was the pricing. So bought two, one a larger 500 gm cheap piece and a smaller slightly more expensive one just to make sure that the Debian cheese team would be happy. We did have a mini-adventure as for sometime Jaminy was missing, apparently she went goofing off or went to freshen up or something and we were unable to connect with her as all our phones were dead or dying. Eventually we came back to UCT, barely freshened up when it was decided by our group to go and give our share of goodies to the cheese and wine party. When I went up to the room to share the cheese, came to know they needed a volunteer for cutting veggies etc. Having spent years seeing Yan Can Cook and having practised quite a bit tried to do some fancy decoration and some julian cutting but as we got dull knives and not much time, just did some plain old cutting I have to share I had a fascinating discussion about cooking in Pressure Cookers. I was under the assumption that everybody knows how to use Pressure Cookers as they are one of the simplest ways to cook food without letting go of all the nutrients. At least, I believe this to be predominant in the Asian subcontinent and even the chinese have similar vessels for cooking. I use what is called the first generation Pressure Cooker. I have been using a 1.5 l Prestige Pressure Cooker over half a decade, almost used daily without issues. http://www.amazon.in/Prestige-Nakshatra-Aluminium-Pressure-Cooker/dp/B00CB7U1OU There are also induction pressure cookers nowadays in the Indian market and this model https://www.amazon.in/Prestige-Deluxe-Induction-Aluminum-Pressure/dp/B01KZVPNGE/ref=sr_1_2 Basmati is long-grain, aromatic rice which most families used in very special occasions such as festivals, marriages, anything good and pure is associated with the rice. I had also shared my lack of knowledge of industrial Microwave Ovens. While I do get most small Microwave Ovens like these , cooking in industrial ovens I simply have no clue. Anyways, after that conversation I went back, freshened up a bit and sometime later found myself in the middle of this Also at times found myself in middle of this I tried quite a few chocolates but the best one I liked (don t remember the name) was a white caramel chocolate which literally melted into my mouth. Got the whole died and went to heaven experience. Who said gluttony is bad Or this As can be seen the French really enjoy their bread. I do remember a story vaguely (don t remember if it was a children s fairy tale or something) about how the French won a war through their french bread. Or this We also had juices for the teetotaller or who can t handle drinks. Unsurprisingly perhaps, by the end of the session, almost all the different wines were finito while there was still some juices left to go around. From the Indian perspective, it wasn t at all exciting, there were no brawls, everybody was too civilized and everybody staggered off when they met their quota. As I was in holiday spirit, stayed up late, staggered to my room, blissed out and woke up without any headache. Pro tip Drink lots and lots and lots of water especially if you are drinking. It flushes out most of the toxins and also helps in not having after-morning headaches. If I m going drinking, I usually drown myself in at least a litre or two of water, even if I had to the bathroom couple of times before going to bed. All in all, a perfect evening. I was able to connect/talk with some of the gods whom I had wanted to for a long time and they actually listened. Don t remember if I mumbled something or made some sense in small-talk or whatever I did. But as shared, a perfect evening
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #ATM usage, #Canada, #Cheese and Wine party, #Cheese shopping, #Connaught Place Delhi, #Debconf16, #Debit card, #French bread, #Julian cutting, #Mysore Pak, #white caramel chocolate

What we did at the Debian Edu / Skolelinux gathering in November 2016 in Oslo From November 25 to 27 some people met in the hackerspace bitraf in downtown Oslo. On Saturday and Sunday we met in the morning and hacked and translated all day until we went for dinners in the evening. Despite the short time I think we managed to get a lot done and had good fun, so I'm hoping we'll have another gathering in 2017! Debian Edu / Skolelinux is currently in better shape regarding the upcoming Debian release than we ever have been, which is pretty awesome. Today, on December 21st, all our changes are in Stretch, except for debian-edu-artwork.git, which awaits a desktop-base upload to unstable the only thing missing is being able to install Debian Edu using our profiles from official media releasing Debian Edu Stretch on the same day as Debian Stretch would be a huge success though! These are the notes taken in a pad (thanks riseup!) during the meeting: Phil Hands worked on

• improving automated tests of d-i and Debian Edu installations using jenkins.debian.net:
• Managed to get the Main Server install to the point where it should be runnable regularly on jenkins
• Worked around the current breakage in plymouth. Confirmed that the Standalone install is currently
• sabotaged by KDE, despite it supposedly being MATE (this took quite a while).
• Meanwhile, made some small steps towards making the Cucumber setup more flexible when adding new scenarios.

Knut Yrvin worked on

• testing Debian Edu Stretch installations

Ingrid Yrvin worked on

• reviewing translations to Norwegian

Ole-Erik Yrvin worked on

• translating the Debian Edu manual to Norwegian
• translating the Debian Edu Administrators Handbook (ITIL) to Norwegian

Wolfgang Schweer worked on

• fixing PXE installations from installed Debian Edu servers
• fixing desktop entries for our Mate desktop (Xfce benefits as well)
• updating https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Stretch
• testing sitesummary server/client with patch provided by Petter
• testing if MATE functionalities (caja, atril, some mimetypes) are improved compared to jessie (they are)
• filed bug #845997 about wrong mate-session priority.
• discussed pros and cons of various DEs and the choice of DE to install
• tested menu integration/translation for Xfce, LXQt, Plasma and MATE
• gave assistance to install the Debian Edu combi server (workaround plymouth the issue in d-i environment)

Petter Reinholdtsen worked on

• #832342 sitesummary: SiteSummary.pm fails to extract information w/ recent stretch linux-images
• Assisted norwegian translators.

Dominik George worked on

• xrdp
  • xrdp upload to unstable: new upstream version with some fixes, closing four bugs.
  • thus prepare xrdp for the 0.9.1 release that upstream will do, in cooperation with Debian, before the freeze.
  • preparing uploads of guacamole-(client server) to unstable
• guacamole
  • Ported guacamole-server code to OpenSSL 1.1.
  • Did a guacamole-server license/copyright review.
  • Java help needed: https://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2016/11/msg00061.html
• shared some nice/horrible experiences from school IT realities in Germany
• gave a talk/initiated a discussion about Skolelinux Cloud / Skolelinux as a Service / evilly fighting Google Apps for Education
• fixed #834065 (gosa-plugin-sudo: sudoHost does not allow '.' in GOsa, host.domain is not possible to be entered)
• had an online meeting with the Teckids kids who need to teach Debian to their fellows tomorrow because I am in Oslo
• set up some things for the pkg-remote team, which is the new umbrella for greate Debian remote desktop experience, needed by Debian Edu among others

Holger Levsen worked on

• this report
• getting icinga2 back into stretch
• filed #845765 RM: nagios3 -- ROM; unfixed security uploads, no maintainer upload since 2 years
• mentoring people
• discussed some unexplained changes in src:debian-edu and made sure we get a useful debian/changelog entry
• filed #845760 and #845762 against src:blends-dev
• update wiki status pages
• create sitesummary.git pkg testing job
• uploaded sitesummary 0.1.26
• uploaded debian-edu 1.915
• filed #846002 "blends-tasks must be priority:standard and not make a mess out of tasksel menu"
• filed #846003 "debian-cd: please provide different flavor/spins of netinst images"
• filed #846005 "debian-cd: please provide flavor/spin netinst image with blends-tasks installed"
• filed #846006 "debian-cd: please provide flavor/spin netinst image for Debian Edu"
• retitled and updated #474745: "debian-edu-config: please dont enable non-free by default"
• retitled #588510 rename thin-client-server profile to ltsp-server-profile (=found the name !)
• finally, uploaded debian-edu-doc 1.912~20161129

Mike Gabriel was sick and couldnt come to Oslo and worked at home instead:

• smarty3 3.1.30-1 -> unstable
• smarty-gettext 1.5.0-1 -> unstable, split up the plugin from tsmarty2c script. This avoids php-cli being pulled in when the plugin is needed only
• smarty-lexer 3.1.30+dfsg1-1 -> unstable
• argonaut 0.9.8-1 -> unstable (not so much Edu related)
• fusiondirectory 1.0.17-1 -> unstable (not so much Edu related)
• atril 1.16.1-1 -> unstable
• mate-themes 3.22.4-1 -> unstable

Thanks to the Debian sprints programm and our sponsors for supporting the travel of Wolfgang, Dominik, Phil and myself! Mike opted out from reimbursement as he couldn't travel due to sickness.

The Isenkram system I wrote two years ago to make it easier in Debian to find and install packages to get your hardware dongles to work, is still going strong. It is a system to look up the hardware present on or connected to the current system, and map the hardware to Debian packages. It can either be done using the tools in isenkram-cli or using the user space daemon in the isenkram package. The latter will notify you, when inserting new hardware, about what packages to install to get the dongle working. It will even provide a button to click on to ask packagekit to install the packages. Here is an command line example from my Thinkpad laptop:

% isenkram-lookup  
bluez
cheese
ethtool
fprintd
fprintd-demo
gkrellm-thinkbat
hdapsd
libpam-fprintd
pidgin-blinklight
thinkfan
tlp
tp-smapi-dkms
tp-smapi-source
tpb
%

It can also list the firware package providing firmware requested by the load kernel modules, which in my case is an empty list because I have all the firmware my machine need:

% /usr/sbin/isenkram-autoinstall-firmware -l
info: did not find any firmware files requested by loaded kernel modules.  exiting
%

The last few days I had a look at several of the around 250 packages in Debian with udev rules. These seem like good candidates to install when a given hardware dongle is inserted, and I found several that should be proposed by isenkram. I have not had time to check all of them, but am happy to report that now there are 97 packages packages mapped to hardware by Isenkram. 11 of these packages provide hardware mapping using AppStream, while the rest are listed in the modaliases file provided in isenkram. These are the packages with hardware mappings at the moment. The marked packages are also announcing their hardware support using AppStream, for everyone to use: air-quality-sensor, alsa-firmware-loaders, argyll, array-info, avarice, avrdude, b43-fwcutter, bit-babbler, bluez, bluez-firmware, brltty, broadcom-sta-dkms, calibre, cgminer, cheese, colord, colorhug-client, dahdi-firmware-nonfree, dahdi-linux, dfu-util, dolphin-emu, ekeyd, ethtool, firmware-ipw2x00, fprintd, fprintd-demo, galileo, gkrellm-thinkbat, gphoto2, gpsbabel, gpsbabel-gui, gpsman, gpstrans, gqrx-sdr, gr-fcdproplus, gr-osmosdr, gtkpod, hackrf, hdapsd, hdmi2usb-udev, hpijs-ppds, hplip, ipw3945-source, ipw3945d, kde-config-tablet, kinect-audio-setup, libnxt, libpam-fprintd, lomoco, madwimax, minidisc-utils, mkgmap, msi-keyboard, mtkbabel, nbc, nqc, nut-hal-drivers, ola, open-vm-toolbox, open-vm-tools, openambit, pcgminer, pcmciautils, pcscd, pidgin-blinklight, printer-driver-splix, pymissile, python-nxt, qlandkartegt, qlandkartegt-garmin, rosegarden, rt2x00-source, sispmctl, soapysdr-module-hackrf, solaar, squeak-plugins-scratch, sunxi-tools, t2n, thinkfan, thinkfinger-tools, tlp, tp-smapi-dkms, tp-smapi-source, tpb, tucnak, uhd-host, usbmuxd, viking, virtualbox-ose-guest-x11, w1retap, xawtv, xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse, xserver-xorg-input-wacom, xserver-xorg-video-qxl, xserver-xorg-video-vmware, yubikey-personalization and zd1211-firmware If you know of other packages, please let me know with a wishlist bug report against the isenkram-cli package, and ask the package maintainer to add AppStream metadata according to the guidelines to provide the information for everyone. In time, I hope to get rid of the isenkram specific hardware mapping and depend exclusively on AppStream. Note, the AppStream metadata for broadcom-sta-dkms is matching too much hardware, and suggest that the package with with any ethernet card. See bug #838735 for the details. I hope the maintainer find time to address it soon. In the mean time I provide an override in isenkram.