Russell Coker: Improving Memory
I ve just attended a lecture about improving memory, mostly about mnemonic techniques. I m not against learning techniques to improve memory and I think it s good to teach kids a variety of things many of which won t be needed when they are younger as you never know which kids will need various skills. But I disagree with the assertion that we are losing valuable skills due to digital amnesia .
Nowadays we have programs to check spelling so we can avoid the effort of remembering to spell difficult words like mnemonic, calendar apps on our phones that link to addresses and phone numbers, and the ability to Google the world s knowledge from the bathroom. So the question is, what do we need to remember?
For remembering phone numbers it seems that all we need is to remember numbers that we might call in the event of a mobile phone being lost or running out of battery charge. That would be a close friend or relative and maybe a taxi company (and 13CABS isn t difficult to remember).
Remembering addresses (street numbers etc) doesn t seem very useful in any situation. Remembering the way to get to a place is useful and it seems to me that the way the navigation programs operate works against this. To remember a route you would want to travel the same way on multiple occasions and use a relatively simple route. The way that Google maps tends to give the more confusing routes (IE routes varying by the day and routes which take all shortcuts) works against this.
I think that spending time improving memory skills is useful, but it will either take time away from learning other skills that are more useful to most people nowadays or take time away from leisure activities. If improving memory skills is fun for you then it s probably better than most hobbies (it s cheap and provides some minor benefits in life).
When I was in primary school it was considered important to make kids memorise their times tables . I m sure that memorising the multiplication of all numbers less than 13 is useful to some people, but I never felt a need to do it. When I was young I could multiply any pair of 2 digit numbers as quickly as most kids could remember the result. The big difference was that most kids needed a calculator to multiply any number by 13 which is a significant disadvantage.
What We Must Memorise
Nowadays the biggest memory issue is with passwords (the Correct Horse Battery Staple XKCD comic is worth reading [1]). Teaching mnemonic techniques for the purpose of memorising passwords would probably be a good idea and would probably get more interest from the audience.
One interesting corner-case of passwords is ATM PIN numbers. The Wikipedia page about PIN numbers states that 4-12 digits can be used for PINs [2]. The 4 digit PIN was initially chosen because John Adrian Shepherd-Barron (who is credited with inventing the ATM) was convinced by his wife that 6 digits would be too difficult to memorise. The fact that hardly any banks outside Switzerland use more than 4 digits suggests that Mrs Shepherd-Barron had a point. The fact that this was decided in the 60 s proves that it s not digital amnesia .
We also have to memorise how to use various supposedly user-friendly programs. If you observe an iPhone or Mac being used by someone who hasn t used one before it becomes obvious that they really aren t so user friendly and users need to memorise many operations. This is not a criticism of Apple, some tasks are inherently complex and require some complexity of the user interface. The limitations of the basic UI facilities become more obvious when there are operations like palm-swiping the screen for a screen-shot and a double-tap plus drag for a 1 finger zoom on Android.
What else do we need to memorise?
Authenticating HTTPS clients using TLS certificates has long been very
easy to do. The hardest part, in fact, is to create a PKI infrastructure
robust enough so that compromised (or otherwise no longer desirable)
certificates cannot be used anymore. While setting that up can be fairly
involved, it's all pretty standard practice these days.
But authentication using a private CA is laughably easy. With apache,
you just do something like:
Hello folks! My team spent hours and hours beating our head against a Sonar deployment problem on Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS). I thought I might share our findings so that you won t have to!
As you probably know, Trusty only makes Java Development Kit 1.7 available on the stock installation. The current stable version of the Java is 1.8. The way we install this is to use the 
To make things worse, this option is not, as one might expect, available for editing in a stock Jenkins 2.x installation. In Jenkins 1.x, one would be able to specify which java one wished to use just by specifying openjdk8 in a field. With Jenkins 2.x, the field does not exist unless a configuration option in an unrelated form is set.
So! One should first select Manage Jenkins -> Global Tool Configuration:
Once this form is open, look for the JDK installations button:
Click it very thoroughly just once.
You ll be presented with a form into which you may enter details about the various JDKs your build executors may have access to. You ll refer to them in your job configuration by the value of their Name field, and when executing the build, Jenkins will set JAVA_HOME to the value of the (you guessed it) JAVA_HOME field:
Once these entries are made, they can be selected in two place.
1) on the ZMQ Event Publisher:
2) in the post-build actions under SonarQube analysis with Maven (advanced)
And that s how it s done!
Here s the details from my colleague, Thanh:
At the moment, it contains 
Ready to use today
More confident users will be able to build the ISO and use it immediately by operating all the utilities from the command line. For example, you should be able to 
Once again, Ryan Neily and I met last month for our annual hike. This year, to give our aging knees a break, we visited the 
Ok, it turned out that a combinations of updates has broken 
Earlier this week, I finally got my new machine that came with my 
There are several highlights: The binaries have been patched with several upstream fixes (tex4ht and XeTeX compatibility, as well as various Japanese TeX engine fixes), updated biber and biblatex, and as usual loads of new and updated packages.
Last but not least I want to thank one particular author: His package was removed from TeX Live due to the addition of a rather unusual clause in the license. Instead of simply uploading new packages to Debian with the rather important removed, I contacted the author and asked for clarification. And to my great pleasure he immediately answered with an update of the package with fixed license.
All of us user of these many packages should be grateful to the authors of the packages who invest loads of their free time into supporting our community. Thanks!
Enough now, here as usual the list of new and updated packages with links to their respective CTAN pages. Enjoy.
New packages
This post is long past due, but I figured it is better late than never. At the start of the year, I set a goal to get more involved with attending and speaking at conferences. Through work, I was able to attend the 
My house entered full power saving mode with fall.
Lantern light and all devices shutdown at bedtime.
But, it felt early to need to do this. Comparing with my logbook for last
year, the batteries were indeed doing much worse.
I had added a couple of new batteries to the bank last winter, and they
seemed to have helped at the time, although it's difficult to tell when you
have a couple of good batteries amoung a dozen failing ones.
The bank was set up like this:
I had a great time last week and the 
