Review: Shady Characters, by Keith Houston

Publisher:	W.W. Norton
Copyright:	2013
ISBN:	0-393-34972-1
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	250

Subtitled The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks, Shady Characters is one of those delightfully quirky books that examines the history of something you would not normally connect to history. It's an attempt to document, and in some cases reconstruct, the history of several specific punctuation marks. If you've read and enjoyed Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, this is a near-perfect complement, focusing on more obscure marks and adding in a more detailed and coherent history. Houston has some interest in the common and quotidian punctuation marks, with chapters on the hyphen, dash, and quotation mark, but he avoids giving a full-chapter treatment to the most obvious periods and commas. (Although one learns quite a bit about them as asides in other histories.) The rest of the book focuses on the newly-popular (the at symbol), the recognizable but less common (the hash mark, the asterisk and dagger symbols used for footnotes, and the ampersand), and the historical but now obscure (the pilcrow or paragraph mark, and the manicule or pointing finger). He even devotes two chapters to unsuccessful invented punctuation: the interrobang and the long, failed history of irony and sarcasm punctuation. And this is an actual history, not just a collection of anecdotes and curious facts. Houston does a great job of keeping the text light, engaging, and readable, but he's serious about his topic. There are many reproductions of ancient documents showing early forms of punctuation, several serious attempts to adjudicate between competing theories of origin, a few well-marked and tentative forays into guesswork, and an open acknowledgment of several areas where we simply don't know. Along the way, the reader gets a deeper feel for the chaos and arbitrary personal stylistic choices of the days of hand-written manuscripts and the transformation of punctuation by technology. So much of what we now use in punctuation was shaped and narrowed by the practicalities of typesetting. And then modern technology revived some punctuation, such as the now-ubiquitous at sign, or the hash mark that graces every telephone touchpad. I think my favorite part of this history was using punctuation as perspective from which to track the changing relationship between people and written material. It's striking how much early punctuation was primarily used for annotations and commentary on the text, as opposed to making the text itself more readable. Much early punctuation was added after the fact, and then slowly was incorporated into the original manuscript, first via recopying and then via intentional authorial choice. Texts started including their own pre-emptive commentary, and brought the corresponding marks along with the notes. And then printing forced a vast simplification and standardization of punctuation conventions. Full compliments to W.W. Norton, as well, for putting the time and effort into making the paper version of this book a beautiful artifact. Punctuation is displayed in red throughout when it is the focus of the text. Endnotes are properly split from footnotes, with asides and digressions presented properly at the bottom of the page, and numbered endnotes properly reserved solely for citations. There is a comprehensive index, list of figures, and a short and curated list of further readings. I'm curious how much of the typesetting care was preserved in the ebook version, and dubious that all of it would have been possible given the current state of ebook formatting. Typesetting, obscure punctuation, and this sort of popular history of something quotidian are all personal interests of mine, so it's unsurprising I found this book delightful. But it's so well-written and engaging that I can recommend it even to people less interested in those topics. The next time you're in the mood for learning more about a corner of human history that few people consider, I recommend Shady Characters to your attention. Rating: 8 out of 10

Two helpful CMS commands to know if the users on the z/VM host you connect to are managed using DIRMAINT:

• DIRMAINT PW: This will ask you for your current password and then for the new one. This way you can change your own user password instead of having to ask the administrator for it.
• DIRMAINT REVIEW: If you want to see the directory entry for your user (i.e. the configuration of your VM), you can issue this command. It will put the directory onto the card stack, from which you can retrieve it onto your A disk using RETRIEVE <number> <USERNAME> DIRECT A. The number is listed after RDR FILE in CP's output.

Review: Magic's Pawn, by Mercedes Lackey

Series:	Last Herald Mage #1
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	June 1989
ISBN:	0-88677-352-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	349

Continuing my (very slow) re-read of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series. I've read all these books before (this series several times, in fact), but long before I started writing reviews. Vanyel is a legendary hero by the time of Talia (the hero of the first Valdemar series, starting with Arrows of the Queen). Talia was reading stories about him at the start of her story: the mage Herald who defended Valdemar against its enemies in the distant past. This is the first book of the trilogy that tells his story, starting (as Lackey's books often do) from rather inauspicious beginnings. Vanyel is the son of a border lord, and about as poorly suited for it as possible. He's small, pretty, entirely uninterested in the hammer-and-tongs sword fighting the arms master wants to teach him, and also gay, not that he has any idea that's even something that exists and has a name. His only ally was his sister, who is now off serving in Valdemar's military. Most of his life is spent hiding, feeling utterly lost and out of place, and wishing he could be a Bard. This is a Valdemar story, so if you're familiar with the series, you know what's coming next. What might come as a surprise is that "next" is quite some time into the story. Vanyel does not get rescued from his situation by a Companion. Instead, his father decides to exile him to the capital under the care of his aunt, who he's only met once and who didn't think highly of him. He expects to be even more miserable, and shuts emotionally down in anticipation. This is one of those books that I remembered as being better than it actually was, and one of the reasons why I enjoyed it less than I expected is that far too much of this book is devoted to describing Vanyel's mental state. This usually involves various elaborate emo analogies (which can be a failing of this series in general), and it's quite hard to maintain sympathy for Vanyel. Lackey gets us to feel for him at the start of the book, when he's really in a bad situation. But once he gets to the capital, he's his own worst enemy, and it's hard to avoid the desire to shake him. I also didn't remember just how much I disliked Tylendel. I'm sure it will come as a surprise to no one that Vanyel eventually meets someone who draws him out of his shell and gives him a reason to want to live. Unfortunately, that person, despite a positive surface impression, is self-obsessed, unstable, and not above manipulating Vanyel into actions that are so obviously catastrophic that it makes one want to yell at the book. I disliked this part of the book so much that even a Companion's choosing was overshadowed. The book does get a bit better after that truly awful middle, but it never hits the emotional stride that other Valdemar books hit. Lackey does introduce the Tayledras, which will be hugely important in later books in this series (and who are some of my favorite characters), but there too I prefer their later appearances. Vanyel's inability to see a good thing when it hits him in the face, punctuated by being occasionally cruel to the people who try to help him, makes it quite hard to enjoy his slow path to becoming a better person. I remember really liking this trilogy, so I think it gets better. But I also remembered liking Vanyel's claiming, and it didn't do much for me on a re-read. I can only recommend this one as a necessary preface to the later books in the trilogy, and expect to need a high tolerance for constant woe-is-me despair. Followed by Magic's Promise. Rating: 5 out of 10

Review: The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu & Ken Liu

Series:	Three-Body Problem #1
Author:	Liu Cixin ( )
Translator:	Ken Liu
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2006, 2014
Printing:	November 2014
ISBN:	1-4668-5344-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	399

Liu Cixin ( ) is one of the best-known and most popular SF authors in China, but, due to the paucity of translated SF in the English-speaking world, was largely unknown to English-speaking SF readers. That made this translation by Ken Liu (no relation) highly anticipated: a window into a large world of SF by authors most of us have never read. And Ken Liu is an excellent writer in his own right (see, for instance, "The Literomancer" or "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer"), which was a hopeful sign for a good translation. Indeed, the translation is very good. One can tell that the book comes from a different literary tradition, but primarily from unusual (to US readers, at least) emotional focal points for the characters and lots of Chinese history that the author feels little need to explain. (Ken Liu adds translator notes for the bits most likely to lose non-Chinese audiences.) I found the characters a bit odd and occasionally hard to identify with, but I didn't mind: it added to the feeling of exploring a slightly different literary tradition with different character conventions. Unfortunately, the end of the book went entirely off the rails, at least for me. The Three-Body Problem opens during the Cultural Revolution, with the murder of Ye Wenjie's father, a physics professor, and the suicide of her advisor and friend. Two years later, she's at a work camp in inner Mongolia, cutting trees, numb, keeping her head down. But a traveling journalist smuggles in a secret copy of Silent Spring and gives it to her. The book both hardens her own belief in the evil of humanity and gets her into deeper trouble when she agrees to recopy a draft of a letter to the central leadership about the environmental devastation caused by the logging. Ye Wenjie is forced to choose permanent exile to an experimental radar facility on a remote mountain in Mongolia. Ye Wenjie is vital to the slowly-developing plot of the book, but this is the last the reader sees of her for some time. Part II jumps to present time and to a different protagonist: Wang Miao, a distinguished nanotechnology researcher who is recruited by the PLA and the police into a secret war room. Distinguished scientists are killing themselves in frighteningly large numbers, including one that Wang Miao had a crush on. She left a suicide note before overdosing on sleeping pills, one that says only, cryptically, that physics doesn't exist. The government is desperate to figure out what's going on. The "radar" facility and the suicide of scientists are linked, of course, but it takes much of the book for Wang Miao and his colleagues to piece together how. Key clues come in the form of an odd puzzle virtual reality MMORPG that becomes a popular sensation. In it, players find themselves on an alien world whose suns rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals: sometimes far too far away and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. The players can somehow dehydrate themselves and the rest of the population to weather the worst seasons, but life is a constant struggle against apparently unpredictable elements. Despite that, players slowly find ways to build civilizations and attempt to predict the strange cycles of heat and cold. It takes the characters a long time to understand what's happening. Readers will probably be much faster, since they have out-of-band information the characters don't. At first, this game seems entirely unrelated to the suicides of the scientists or, for that matter, to Ye Wenjie, who is easy to almost forget. But they all weave together in a way that's almost compelling. I say almost because the motivations of the characters are quite tangled and interesting, but the science is... awful. Those who have read my other book reviews know that I don't insist on hard science in my SF. Usually I'm willing to roll with it, and I can read past even obvious scientific nonsense. But science is critical to the plot of this book; some very specific actions, with a detailed in-book scientific justifications, are the underpinning of the entire plot. And they make utter nonsense of physics. I've rarely had science in a novel destroy my suspension of disbelief this thoroughly. Physics isn't even alone: biology, chemistry, computing, and astronomy are all in for it as Liu reveals the causes of the book's events. I wanted to be engaged by the conflict of ethics and philosophy that drive the plot, and some of that conflict is quite interesting. But every other page would have another colossal pile of scientific nonsense that would throw me out of the book again, usually in the service of a set piece that missed grand and landed on absurdly silly. Be warned that this book also ends on a bit of a cliff-hanger, and there are two more books in the series. The second has been released in a translated edition, but with a different translator, which is disappointing (Ken Liu did an excellent job); the third isn't out yet. If you can get past the awful science, The Three-Body Problem is doing some interesting things. The characters are a bit wooden and forgettable, but the philosophical problems they encounter are ones I don't see often in western SF. This a refreshing change, and I'm interested enough that I'm still considering picking up the sequels. But the science hurts the book so badly. Followed by The Dark Forest. Rating: 6 out of 10

A few days ago, the French equivalent of Hacker News, called "Le Journal du Hacker", interviewed me about my work on OpenStack, my job at Red Hat and my self-published book The Hacker's Guide to Python. I've spent some time translating it into English so you can read it if you don't understand French! I hope you'll enjoy it.

Hi Julien, and thanks for participating in this interview for the Journal du Hacker. For our readers who don't know you, can you introduce you briefly?

You're welcome! My name is Julien, I'm 31 years old, and I live in Paris. I now have been developing free software for around fifteen years. I had the pleasure to work (among other things) on Debian, Emacs and awesome these last years, and more recently on OpenStack. Since a few months now, I work at Red Hat, as a Principal Software Engineer on OpenStack. I am in charge of doing upstream development for that cloud-computing platform, mainly around the Ceilometer, Aodh and Gnocchi projects.

Being myself a system architect, I follow your work in OpenStack since a while. It's uncommon to have the point of view of someone as implied as you are. Can you give us a summary of the state of the project, and then detail your activities in this project?

The OpenStack project has grown and changed a lot since I started 4 years ago. It started as a few projects providing the basics, like Nova (compute), Swift (object storage), Cinder (volume), Keystone (identity) or even Neutron (network) who are basis for a cloud-computing platform, and finally became composed of a lot more projects. For a while, the inclusion of projects was the subject of a strict review from the technical committee. But since a few months, the rules have been relaxed, and we see a lot more projects connected to cloud-computing joining us. As far as I'm concerned, I've started with a few others people the Ceilometer project in 2012, devoted to handling metrics of OpenStack platforms. Our goal is to be able to collect all the metrics and record them to analyze them later. We also have a module providing the ability to trigger actions on threshold crossing (alarm). The project grew in a monolithic way, and in a linear way for the number of contributors, during the first two years. I was the PTL (Project Technical Leader) for a year. This leader position asks for a lot of time for bureaucratic things and people management, so I decided to leave my spot in order to be able to spend more time solving the technical challenges that Ceilometer offered. I've started the Gnocchi project in 2014. The first stable version (1.0.0) was released a few months ago. It's a timeseries database offering a REST API and a strong ability to scale. It was a necessary development to solve the problems tied to the large amount of metrics created by a cloud-computing platform, where tens of thousands of virtual machines have to be metered as often as possible. This project works as a standalone deployment or with the rest of OpenStack. More recently, I've started Aodh, the result of moving out the code and features of Ceilometer related to threshold action triggering (alarming). That's the logical suite to what we started with Gnocchi. It means Ceilometer is to be split into independent modules that can work together with or without OpenStack. It seems to me that the features provided by Ceilometer, Aodh and Gnocchi can also be interesting for operators running more classical infrastructures. That's why I've pushed the projects into that direction, and also to have a more service-oriented architecture (SOA)

I'd like to stop for a moment on Ceilometer. I think that this solution was very expected, especially by the cloud-computing providers using OpenStack for billing resources sold to their customers. I remember reading a blog post where you were talking about the high-speed construction of this brick, and features that were not supposed to be there. Nowadays, with Gnocchi and Aodh, what is the quality of the brick Ceilometer and the programs it relies on?

Indeed, one of the first use-case for Ceilometer was tied to the ability to get metrics to feed a billing tool. That's now a reached goal since we have billing tools for OpenStack using Ceilometer, such as CloudKitty. However, other use-cases appeared rapidly, such as the ability to trigger alarms. This feature was necessary, for example, to implement the auto-scaling feature that Heat needed. At the time, for technical and political reasons, it was not possible to implement this feature in a new project, and the functionality ended up in Ceilometer, since it was using the metrics collected and stored by Ceilometer itself. Though, like I said, this feature is now in its own project, Aodh. The alarm feature is used since a few cycles in production, and the Aodh project brings new features on the table. It allows to trigger threshold actions and is one of the few solutions able to work at high scale with several thousands of alarms. It's impossible to make Nagios run with millions of instances to fetch metrics and triggers alarms. Ceilometer and Aodh can do that easily on a few tens of nodes automatically. On the other side, Ceilometer has been for a long time painted as slow and complicated to use, because its metrics storage system was by default using MongoDB. Clearly, the data structure model picked was not optimal for what the users were doing with the data. That's why I started Gnocchi last year, which is perfectly designed for this use case. It allows linear access time to metrics (O(1) complexity) and fast access time to the resources data via an index. Today, with 3 projects having their own perimeter of features defined and which can work together Ceilometer, Aodh and Gnocchi finally erased the biggest problems and defects of the initial project.

To end with OpenStack, one last question. You're a Python developer for a long time and a fervent user of software testing and test-driven development. Several of your blogs posts point how important their usage are. Can you tell us more about the usage of tests in OpenStack, and the test prerequisites to contribute to OpenStack?

I don't know any project that is as tested on every layer as OpenStack is. At the start of the project, there was a vague test coverage, made of a few unit tests. For each release, a bunch of new features were provided, and you had to keep your fingers crossed to have them working. That's already almost unacceptable. But the big issue was that there was also a lot of regressions, et things that were working were not anymore. It was often corner cases that developers forgot about that stopped working. Then the project decided to change its policy and started to refuse all patches new features or bug fix that would not implement a minimal set of unit tests, proving the patch would work. Quickly, regressions were history, and the number of bugs largely reduced months after months. Then came the functional tests, with the Tempest project, which runs a test battery on a complete OpenStack deployment. OpenStack now possesses a complete test infrastructure, with operators hired full-time to maintain them. The developers have to write the test, and the operators maintain an architecture based on Gerrit, Zuul, and Jenkins, which runs the test battery of each project for each patch sent. Indeed, for each version of a patch sent, a full OpenStack is deployed into a virtual machine, and a battery of thousands of unit and functional tests is run to check that no regressions are possible. To contribute to OpenStack, you need to know how to write a unit test the policy on functional tests is laxer. The tools used are standard Python tools, unittest for the framework and tox to run a virtual environment (venv) and run them. It's also possible to use DevStack to deploy an OpenStack platform on a virtual machine and run functional tests. However, since the project infrastructure also do that when a patch is submitted, it's not mandatory to do that yourself locally.

The tools and tests you write for OpenStack are written in Python, a language which is very popular today. You seem to like it more than you have to, since you wrote a book about it, The Hacker's Guide to Python, that I really enjoyed. Can you explain what brought you to Python, the main strong points you attribute to this language (quickly) and how you went from developer to author?

I stumbled upon Python by chance, around 2005. I don't remember how I hear about it, but I bought a first book to discover it and started toying with that language. At that time, I didn't find any project to contribute to or to start. My first project with Python was rebuildd for Debian in 2007, a bit later. I like Python for its simplicity, its object orientation rather clean, its easiness to be deployed and its rich open source ecosystem. Once you get the basics, it's very easy to evolve and to use it for anything, because the ecosystem makes it easy to find libraries to solve any kind of problem. I became an author by chance, writing blog posts from time to time about Python. I finally realized that after a few years studying Python internals (CPython), I learned a lot of things. While writing a post about the differences between method types in Python which is still one of the most read post on my blog I realized that a lot of things that seemed obvious to me where not for other developers. I wrote that initial post after thousands of hours spent doing code reviews on OpenStack. I, therefore, decided to note all the developers pain points and to write a book about that. A compilation of what years of experience taught me and taught to the other developers I decided to interview in the book.

I've been very interested by the publication of your book, for the subject itself, but also the process you chose. You self-published the book, which seems very relevant nowadays. Is that a choice from the start? Did you look for an editor? Can you tell use more about that?

I've been lucky to find out about others self-published authors, such as Nathan Barry who even wrote a book on that subject, called Authority. That's what convinced me it was possible and gave me hints for that project. I've started to write in August 2013, and I ran the firs interviews with other developers at that time. I started to write the table of contents and then filled the pages with what I knew and what I wanted to share. I manage to finish the book around January 2014. The proof-reading took more time than I expected, so the book was only released in March 2014. I wrote a complete report on that on my blog, where I explain the full process in detail, from writing to launching. I did not look for editors though I've been proposed some. The idea of self-publishing really convince me, so I decided to go on my own, and I have no regret. It's true that you have to wear two hats at the same time and handle a lot more things, but with a minimal audience and some help from the Internet, anything's possible! I've been reached by two editors since then, a Chinese and Korean one. I gave them rights to translate and publish the books in their countries, so you can buy the Chinese and Korean version of the first edition of the book out there. Seeing how successful it was, I decided to launch a second edition in Mai 2015, and it's likely that a third edition will be released in 2016.

Nowadays, you work for Red Hat, a company that represents the success of using Free Software as a commercial business model. This company fascinates a lot in our community. What can you say about your employer from your point of view?

It only has been a year since I joined Red Hat (when they bought eNovance), so my experience is quite recent. Though, Red Hat is really a special company on every level. It's hard to see from the outside how open it is, and how it works. It's really close to and it really looks like an open source project. For more details, you should read The Open Organization, a book wrote by Jim Whitehurst (CEO of Red Hat), which he just published. It describes perfectly how Red Hat works. To summarize, meritocracy and the lack of organization in silos is what makes Red Hat a strong organization and puts them as one of the most innovative company. In the end, I'm lucky enough to be autonomous for the project I work on with my team around OpenStack, and I can spend 100% working upstream and enhance the Python ecosystem.

Review: Let's Pretend This Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson

Publisher:	Berkley
Copyright:	2012, 2013
Printing:	March 2013
ISBN:	0-425-26101-8
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	366

Let's Pretend This Never Happened, subtitled (A Mostly True Memoir), is the closest that I've ever found to the book form of a stand-up comedy routine. Lawson grew up in rural Texas with a taxidermist father, frequent contact with animals in various forms of distress, an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, and a talent for creatively freaking out about things that never occur to anyone else. But, more importantly, she has a talent for putting down on paper the random thoughts that go through her head so the rest of us can read them. Not to mention excellent comic timing and absolute mastery of the strangely relevant digression. It's always tricky to review comedy. I think tastes differ more wildly in this genre than any other. Things some people find hilarious others will find offensive or just boring. That may be particularly true of Lawson, who, similar to some of the best stand-up comics, specializes in taking off filters and saying all sorts of offensive things that people might think but not say. This kind of comedy is a knife's edge, since it can easily turn into punching down. Lawson avoids this (rather well, in my opinion) by making herself the punch line of most of the jokes. A pretty typical paragraph of the book, so that you know the sort of thing that you're in for:

The following is a series of actual events pulled form my journal that led me to believe that our home was possessed by demons and/or built over an Indian burial ground. (Also, please note that the first part of this chapter actually happens just before the previous chapter, and the last part of it happens just after it. This could be viewed as "clunky and awkward," but I prefer to think of it as "intellectually challenging and chronologically surreal. Like if Memento was a book. About dead dogs and vaginas and puppets made out of squirrel corpses." You can feel free to use that quote if you're reviewing this chapter, or if you're a student and your teacher asks you, "What was the author trying to say here?" That was it. That's what I was trying to say. That and "Use condoms if you're going to have sex, for God's sake. There are a lot of skanks out there." That's not really covered in this book, but it's still good advice.)

That has a little bit of everything this book had for me: Lawson's somewhat surreal worries, the extended digression, a rhythm that's quite compelling once you start reading it, random uncomfortable topics, and the occasional miss that I don't find funny (the last few sentences). It's all mixed together in a slightly breathless rush of narrative momentum. For more samples, Lawson's writing started as a blog and she's still actively blogging, so you can get a good advance sample by reading some of The Bloggess. Her tone there matches the book closely. What makes this book more than only comedy is that Lawson is very open about her struggles with mental illness (anxiety and depression). A lot of the humor comes from "this is the ridiculous nonsense that my brain throws out on a regular basis" and inviting you to laugh along with her, but the undertone is use of humor as a coping mechanism to deal with anxiety spirals. And alongside that coping mechanism is an open-hearted message of "you are not the only person to have completely irrational reactions to the world please laugh along with mine and feel better about yours." Due to that, the best comparison I can make to another book I've read is to Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half. Brosh is more serious in places, more analytical, and a bit better at generalizing to experiences the reader can identify with. (And, of course, more graphical.) Lawson is more madcap, a bit more manic, and focused on absurd situations that don't normally happen to people. I loved this book from beginning to end, and it had me laughing out-loud in multiple places. Despite being a collection of disconnected stories, it has a rhythm and flow that kept me reading. Some books of this kind are best read in small segments with a break between, but I devoured Let's Pretend This Never Happened in large chunks (and had to be careful about reading it in public and laughing too loudly). Check first whether the sense of humor works for you, but if it does, highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

Sharing a scanner over the network using SANE is fairly straightforward. Here's how I shared a scanner on a server (running Debian jessie) with a client (running Ubuntu trusty).

Install SANE The packages you need on both the client and the server are:

• libsane
• sane-utils

You should check whether or your scanner is supported by the latest stable release or by the latest development version. In my case, I needed to get a Canon LiDE 220 working so I had to grab the libsane 1.0.25+git20150528-1 package from Debian experimental.

Test the scanner locally Once you have SANE installed, you can test it out locally to confirm that it detects your scanner:

scanimage -L

This should give you output similar to this:

device  genesys:libusb:001:006' is a Canon LiDE 220 flatbed scanner

If that doesn't work, make sure that the scanner is actually detected by the USB stack:

$ lsusb   grep Canon
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 04a9:190f Canon, Inc.

and that its USB ID shows up in the SANE backend it needs:

$ grep 190f /etc/sane.d/genesys.conf 
usb 0x04a9 0x190f

To do a test scan, simply run:

scanimage > test.ppm

and then take a look at the (greyscale) image it produced (test.ppm).

Configure the server With the scanner working locally, it's time to expose it to network clients by adding the client IP addresses to /etc/sane.d/saned.conf:

## Access list
192.168.1.3

and then opening the appropriate port on your firewall (typically /etc/network/iptables in Debian):

-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.3 -p tcp --dport 6566 -j ACCEPT

Then you need to ensure that the SANE server is running by setting the following in /etc/default/saned:

RUN=yes

if you're using the sysv init system, or by running this command:

systemctl enable saned.socket

if using systemd. I actually had to reboot to make saned visible to systemd, so if you still run into these errors:

$ service saned start
Failed to start saned.service: Unit saned.service is masked.

you're probably just one reboot away from getting it to work.

Configure the client On the client, all you need to do is add the following to /etc/sane.d/net.conf:

connect_timeout = 60
myserver

where myserver is the hostname or IP address of the server running saned.

Test the scanner remotely With everything in place, you should be able to see the scanner from the client computer:

$ scanimage -L
device  net:myserver:genesys:libusb:001:006' is a Canon LiDE 220 flatbed scanner

and successfully perform a test scan using this command:

scanimage > test.ppm

Over the last weekends I finally managed to finish The Talos Principle, all of its endings. Compared to the actual play time I needed for Portal 2, namely about 12 hours, The Talos Principle challenged me much longer, about 36 hours. An enjoyable ride through many different and stunningly created worlds filled with many many puzzles that need to be solved.
Combined with three different endings the games offers great fun for those who love riddle games. Comparing it to my favorite riddle game (series), Myst, the graphics have of course developed and provide stunning views. I haven t played games in a landscape since the Myst series (Portal is indoors), so I was taken by surprise about all the details and love that has been put into the graphics. Maybe its only me because it was the first game of this quality I have played. And above all, I could actually play it on my normal Intel GPU laptop (but surprisingly only on Linux, the Windows version refused to play on my under-powered laptop).
There are only two slightly negative points I have to mention: Due to the nature of very restricted tool set, the riddles feel a bit repetitive. Some of them stand out, but after having played through the A and B worlds, you feel like you have seen that before when entering a new riddle. Still challenging, and that is what I was looking for, but a bit more variation would be nice. Here is a riddle that stood out due to its funny nature.
The game also has a long list of Easter Eggs, some of which I could find, some of which I surely missed. Most funny of those I found was the Developer World where funny characters lounge. Another I found was this money throwing guy called Fork Parker, who happens to be the financial officer of the developers team. Did they really make sooo much money from the game?
Something a bit uncommon or new to me was the fact that there are three (3!) endings, depending on what you choose to do. The first and easiest one is the ending of the good student you collect enough sigils, and follow Elohims words and ascent to eternity rather boring. Reminds me of an old Viennese song how boring it is to be an angel in heaven.
Bit more challenging is the bad student ending: You ignore Elohim s warnings and ascent the tower, solve several more riddles, and via a few more twists manage to escape to the real world. Nice graphics, great ending.
The most challenging ending is the enlighted student ending. To manage to reach this ending, one needs to collect each and everything that is to be found in the game, including all hidden stars and grey sigils. Here I have to mention the second slightly negative point: Finding the stars is rather luck then problem solving ability. Often one needs to guess a location of a reflector, or stumble over a hidden staircase, or press some arbitrary buttons. For my feeling the riddles for the stars were to arbitrary. So I managed to collect several of the stars by myself, but for many I needed hints on how to solve the riddles. Anyway, in case you managed to listen to all recordings, collect all texts, get all stars and collect all sigils from the extra worlds, you might ascend to the last floor of the tower and become a messenger yourself. Not sure if I want to become a messenger there, though.
Just in time with me finishing the game, the developers shipped out an extension called Road to Gehenna . Stunning graphics, even better, waiting ahead now I only need the time!
All in all a great piece of game, lovingly crafted graphics, interesting game play, lots of small levels, which helps people like me who cannot play for hours overnight, but need to do riddles one by one in short gaming sessions. So if you are in for riddle games, watch out for the next offer on Steam. Enjoy.

Review: My Real Children, by Jo Walton

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	May 2014
ISBN:	0-7653-3265-5
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	317

Patricia, the one form of her name that she's never used, is what the staff in the nursing home call her. "VC" is the frequent annotation on her daily chart: very confused. She's old, and forgetful, and trying very hard not to be her mother, and she remembers two lives. Not only remembers but lives: the nursing home isn't the same from day to day. They keep misplacing the lift, and the staff keep changing. But the memories are the strongest. She has two lives, two sets of children, all of whom she recognizes. When someone from one life visits, the other feels like a dream, but both of them persist. Two lives that divided at the most significant decision of her life. My Real Children is one of those books that fits in the broader speculative fiction genre as alternate history, but also has many of the virtues of mimetic fiction. It's the story of one woman's life, told, except for the opening frame, chronologically from start to finish. At the start, it's simple biography, telling Patty's story from childhood, through World War II, until the moment of her fateful decision in 1949. From there the narrative splits, and she lives two lives. And the world splits as well: in one, Kennedy was assassinated by a bomb; in another, the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into something much worse. Much is still unchanged, including the general lives of people Patty knew well in one life and not in another, but the worlds keep diverging from each other and from ours. The exact nature of the divergence is not, however, a significant part of the book. This is not the type of alternate history that is obsessed with the point of change, or even the implications for the world. Rather, this novel is about one woman, one decision, and two very different paths through life. Different friends, different challenges, different careers... different hopes and dreams, and different children. But always the same person, the same sense of practicality, the same ethics. It's beautifully told, striking just the right balance of showing important moments in detail and passing quickly, but smoothly, over some years. And, as with Among Others, Walton strikes the perfect emotional balance, leaving some reactions understated, letting the reader bring their own reactions to the book, and filling it with small bits of telling, factual detail rather than internal monologues. This is also one of the most heart-wrenching books I've ever read. My Real Children is a whole life, and not an easy one, complete with the heartaches and betrayals, the good and bad decisions, care for elderly relatives, dementia, tragedy, and even abuse. And moments of shining joy or profound satisfaction, but made all the more poignant because they're fleeting. The reader knows, in a sense, how the story ends, which casts a shadow over the rest of the book. But, even without that shadow, life can be hard, or cruel, alongside the wonder and joy. And it ends, and the ending is not neat and clean and uplifting, although one can choose how one meets it. This is the story of a life, all of it, and how choices can divide that life, and how they can cast a long shadow over how one later defines oneself. This book hurts. A lot. Enough that I want to warn you in advance I was in tears through the last third of the book. But it hurts because it's so very real and deep, not via a blow-by-blow description of daily actions, but by striding unafraid into the deep complications of choice and consequence. It's also a profoundly feminist book, in a quiet and descriptive way. It shared the Tiptree award for 2015 and fully deserved it. Both of the protagonist's lives are struggles against expectations, around gender, sexuality, and the role of women in society. Those struggles take very different forms, but they share some deep similarities. Walton shows the impact from the bottom up: the effects on specific lives, specific people, specific situations. It's brilliantly done. One can't help but think of The Female Man given the telling of parallel lives, but this is a case study, whereas Russ's novel was a battle cry. It gets under your skin instead of in your face. (Use of subtlety on this topic is easier now, forty years of occasional progress past when Russ wrote her classic.) This is a much harder book to read than Among Others. It's less forgiving, less reassuring, less willing to provide a happy ending. Lives rarely have clean, happy endings; one has to construct them, by choosing the material to build the ending on. But it's a brilliant, profound book, in that way that stories about people in all their complexity can be. Be cautious about your mood when you read this, particularly if you've had the experience of caring for a dying relative, but it's a book I will remember for a very long time. Rating: 9 out of 10

Although I've been writing a bit recently about file-storage, this post is about something much more simple: Just making a random file or two available on an ad-hoc basis. In the past I used to have my email and website(s) hosted on the same machine, and that machine was well connected. Making a file visible just involved running ~/bin/publish, which used scp to write a file beneath an apache document-root. These days I use "my computer", "my work computer", and "my work laptop", amongst other hosts. The SSH-keys required to access my personal boxes are not necessarily available on all of these hosts. Add in firewall constraints and suddenly there isn't an obvious way for me to say "Publish this file online, and show me the root". I asked on twitter but nothing useful jumped out. So I ended up writing a simple server, via sinatra which would allow:

• Login via the site, and a browser. The login-form looks sexy via bootstrap.
• Upload via a web-form, once logged in. The upload-form looks sexy via bootstrap.
• Or, entirely seperately, with HTTP-basic-auth and a HTTP POST (i.e. curl)

This worked, and was even secure-enough, given that I run SSL if you import my CA file. But using basic auth felt like cheating, and I've been learning more Go recently, and I figured I should start taking it more seriously, so I created a small repository of learning-programs. The learning programs started out simply, but I did wire up a simple TOTP authenticator. Having TOTP available made me rethink things - suddenly even if you're not using SSL having an eavesdropper doesn't compromise future uploads. I'd also spent a few hours working out how to make extensible commands in go, the kind of thing that lets you run:

cmd sub-command1 arg1 arg2
cmd sub-command2 arg1 .. argN

The solution I came up with wasn't perfect, but did work, and allow the seperation of different sub-command logic. So suddenly I have the ability to run "subcommands", and the ability to authenticate against a time-based secret. What is next? Well the hard part with golang is that there are so many things to choose from - I went with gorilla/mux as my HTTP-router, then I spend several hours filling in the blanks. The upshot is now that I have a TOTP-protected file upload site:

publishr init    - Generates the secret
publishr secret  - Shows you the secret for import to your authenticator
publishr serve   - Starts the HTTP daemon

Other than a lack of comments, and test-cases, it is complete. And stand-alone. Uploads get dropped into ./public, and short-links are generated for free. If you want to take a peak the code is here:

• https://github.com/skx/go-experiments/tree/master/publishr

The only annoyance is the handling of dependencies - which need to be "go got ..". I guess I need to look at godep or similar, for my next learning project. I guess there's a minor gain in making this service available via golang. I've gained protection against replay attacks, assuming non-SSL environment, and I've simplified deployment. The downside is I can no longer login over the web, and I must use curl, or similar, to upload. Acceptible tradeoff.

Review: The Sea Thy Mistress, by Elizabeth Bear

Series:	Edda of Burdens #3
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	February 2011
ISBN:	0-7653-1884-9
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	334

The Sea Thy Mistress is the third book in the Edda of Burdens series, but the second book (By the Mountain Bound) was a prequel to the first, telling the story of an earlier world and the betrayal that ended it. This one is a direct sequel to All the Windwracked Stars, a complex and idea-rich book that I read more than six years ago. A challenging property of Bear's fiction is that it's short on explanation and doesn't hold your hand. This makes it lean, sharp, and effective if you're fully invested in it and can keep the context in your head. It becomes very hard to understand if you've mostly forgotten the plot of an earlier book. (Once again, I bemoan the death of the previous book synopsis in series fiction.) The Sea Thy Mistress is all about aftermath, loss, despair, unhealed wounds, old grudges, and complicated personal histories, and it relies very heavily on the reader being invested enough in the characters to care about all of those things. I wish I'd read this entire series closer together so that I could retain more of the state. The start of this story was therefore somewhat frustrating, as I scrambled to rebuild my memory of the first book and piece together the large cast. Thankfully, most of the characters are easy to care about. Aethelred reliably brought a smile to my face, and the opening scene of him finding a baby on the sea shore is a great piece of writing. Selene is back; she was one of my favorite characters in the first book. And Bear pulls off something I didn't think she could: the Grey Wolf is also back, for the third book, and he actually won me over. I think he grew up a bit; there's at least less whining and angst, and more effective action. It probably also helped that less of the story was told from his perspective. The Sea Thy Mistress is primarily the story of Cathoair and his son, Cathmar, and their encounter with a truly nasty threat: a goddess who has way more knowledge of how their world works than they do, and is out to destroy it. This review will necessarily be sketchy on details; most of them would partly spoil All the Windwracked Stars. (I suppose I'm spoiling it a bit anyway just by listing characters who are still around.) Cathmar is... not too irritating. He's young and stupid, and the first half of the book is a bit painful as he plays into the hands of the plot with much less information than the reader has available. But I was okay with him by the end of the book. Cathoair is a more complicated matter. I suspect whether you like this book will depend mostly on whether you can find some sympathy for his personal angst and self-destructive behavior, or at least tolerate him long enough to get to the ending. Quite a lot of this book consists of people behaving stupidly and horribly while those who love them stand by helplessly, unable to figure out how to break the cycle. If that sounds frustrating, you have the right impression. I really struggled with the first two-thirds of the book and started regretting reading it. But there is a payoff: one that's uncomfortable, raw, perilous, and sad, but also beautiful and honest and effective. Muire's role in this book may be minor, but it's very memorable. Despite the difficulties of the early book, I was very glad to have read it for the payoff. I'm not sure whether to recommend this or not, but I think it's worth reading if you enjoyed All the Windwracked Stars. If you do read it, though, try to read the whole series in close proximity. You'll want to remember the details between books. I'm now somewhat tempted to go back and re-read the whole series to experience it in context. Rating: 6 out of 10

Weblate is not only useful for translating software, it can help in translating any content. Let's look where our users are using it. Software translation is the most usual use case. This is actually where Weblate was used for first time and still provides great support for that. As an example (and oldest project hosted in Weblate) you can look at phpMyAdmin, where Weblate also helps to keep in sync translation for different maintenance branches. It can also help you in using same terminology in command line utility and graphical one like it is done in Gammu and Wammu translations. Weblate also supports localization of mobile application. Android support was originally implemented for OsmAnd project, but now they also translate iOS application using Weblate. Another use case is for translating documentation. You need to have some infrastructure to do, but there are several free software project to help here as well. For phpMyAdmin documentation or documentation for python module Odorik the Sphinx documentation generator is used, which has support for translation of the documentation. I've recently published quick howto for this setup. Another great tool for translating documentation is Publican, it is Docbook based tool and is used for translating The Debian Administrator's Handbook. Last but not least, you can use Weblate to translate your website. For example website for Weblate itself is translated this way. Did you miss your use case for Weblate? Please let me know. PS: I've heard that one Linux distribution will start using Weblate soon.

Filed under: English phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments

The Limba project does not only have the goal to allow developers to deploy their applications directly on multiple Linux distributions while reducing duplication of shared resources, it should also make it easy for developers to build software for Limba. Limba is worth nothing without good tooling to make it fun to use. That s why I am working on that too, and I want to share some ideas of how things could work in future and which services I would like to have running. I will also show what is working today already (and that s quite something!). This time I look at things from a developer s perspective (since the last posts on Limba were more end-user centric). If you read on, you will also find a nice video of the developer workflow 1. Creating metadata and building the software To make building Limba packages as simple as possible, Limba reuses already existing metadata, like AppStream metadata to find information about the software you want to create your package for. To ensure upstreams can build their software in a clean environment, Limba makes using one as simple as possible: The limba-build CLI tool creates a clean chroot environment quickly by using an environment created by debootstrap (or a comparable tool suitable for the Linux distribution), and then using OverlayFS to have all changes to the environment done during the build process land in a separate directory. To define build instructions, limba-build uses the same YAML format TravisCI uses as well for continuous integration. So there is a chance this data is already present as well (if not, it s trivial to write). In case upstream projects don t want to use these tools, e.g. because they have well-working CI already, then all commands needed to build a Limba package can be called individually as well (ideally, building a Limba package is just one call to lipkgen). I am currently planning DeveloperIPK packages containing resources needed to develop against another Limba package. With that in place and integrated with the automatic build-environment creation, upstream developers can be sure the application they just built is built against the right libraries as present in the package they depend on. The build tool could even fetch the build-dependencies automatically from a central repository. 2. Uploading the software to a repository While everyone can set up their own Limba repository, and the limba-build repo command will help with that, there are lots of benefits in having a central place where upstream developers can upload their software to. I am currently developing a service like that, called LimbaHub . LimbaHub will contain different repositories distributors can make available to their users by default, e.g. there will be one with only free software, and one for proprietary software. It will also later allow upstreams to create private repositories, e.g. for beta-releases. 3. Security in LimbaHub Every Limba package is signed with they key of its creator anyway, so in order to get a package into LimbaHub, one needs to get their OpenPGP key accepted by the service first. Additionally, the Hub service works with a per-package permission system. This means I can e.g. allow the Mozilla release team members to upload a package with the component-ID org.mozilla.firefox.desktop or even allow those user(s) to own the whole org.mozilla.* namespace. This should prevent people hijacking other people s uploads accidentally or on purpose. 4. QA with LimbaHub LimbaHub should also act as guardian over ABI stability and general quality of the software. We could for example warn upstreams that they broke ABI without declaring that in the package information, or even reject the package then. We could validate .desktop files and AppStream metadata, or even check if a package was built using hardening flags. This should help both developers to improve their software as well as users who benefit from that effort. In case something really bad gets submitted to LimbaHub, we always have the ability to remove the package from the repositories as a last resort (which might trigger Limba to issue a warning for the user that he won t receive updates anymore). What works Limba, LimbaHub and the tools around it are developing nicely, so far no big issues have been encountered yet. That s why I made a video showing how Limba and LimbaHub work together at time: Still, there is a lot of room for improvement Limba has not yet received enough testing, and LimbaHub is merely a proof-of-concept at time. Also, lots of high-priority features are not yet implemented. LimbaHub and Limba need help! At time I am developing LimbaHub and Limba alone with only occasional contributions from others (which are amazing and highly welcomed!). So, if you like Python and Flask, and want to help developing LimbaHub, please contact me the LimbaHub software could benefit from a more experienced Python web developer than I am (and maybe having a designer look over the frontend later makes sense as well). If you are not afraid of C and GLib, and like to chase bugs or play with building Limba packages, consider helping Limba development

OK, I already bragged that our book on Operating Systems is finally printed and has, thus, been formally published. What I had not yet mentioned is how we planned its physical distribution. Yes, it is available for sale at some UNAM libraries... But coming to UNAM is sadly an option only for people who are in Mexico City. I have been quite busy, and was unable to come up with anything earlier, but I have finally finished setting up a decent although minimal web page for the book. In it, I mention the possible ways you can get your own printed copy of Fundamentos de sistemas operativos:

• If you are in Mexico, the advised way is to call or mail the library at Instituto de Investigaciones Econ micas (+52-55)5623-0080 or ventiiec@unam.mx.
  They will ship the book (they would ship it overseas, but it'd be too expensive!) and are able to process electronic payment opetions.
  The book printed at UNAM has substantive part of its pages printed in color, and let me tell you... It's worth it.
• If you are not in Mexico or you prefer not to deal with a human, you can buy the book from the on-demand printing service lulu.com.
  For cost reasons, it is printed in black and white, but it is the same content (minus two typos ;-) ). Lulu.com is an international company, so they will get it shipped to you cheaper and faster And I have requested the book to be made available to libraries such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble (and was told it should take a couple of weeks to have it ready there).

Of course, the book is and will always be free for downloading, and its sources are online so you can easily derive from it as well. Enjoy! (and please report me any bugs you see!)

The first updated in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R this morning, and I will push a Debian package. This follows the 0.12.0 release from late July which started to some serious new features. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C++ code. As of today, 461 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analyses go faster and further. This release once again features contributions from a number of new contributors, with Florian Plaza O ate and Dan Dillon joining the fray with several pull requests each. Kurt Hornik also helped with a fix for a bad interaction between very recent R (3.2.2) changes and Rcpp; another related one was also addressed. A big Thanks! to everybody helping with code, bug reports or documentation, See below for a detailed list of changes extracted from the NEWS file.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.1 (2015-09-10)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Correct use of WIN32 instead of _WIN32 to please Windows 10
  • Add an assignment operator to DimNameProxy (PR #339 by Florian)
  • Add vector and matrix accessors .at() with bounds checking (PR #342 by Florian)
  • Correct character vector conversion from single char (PR #344 by Florian fixing issue #343)
  • Correct on use of R_xlen_t back to size_t (PR #348 by Romain)
  • Correct subsetting code to allow for single assignment (PR #349 by Florian)
  • Enable subset assignment on left and righ-hand side (PR #353 by Qiang, fixing issue #345)
  • Refreshed to included tinyformat template library (PR #357 by Dirk, issue #356)
  • Add operator<<() for vectors and matrices (PR #361 by Dan fixing issue #239)
  • Make String and String_Proxy objects comparable (PR #366 and PR #372 by Dan, fixing issue #191)
  • Add a new class Nullable for objects which may be NULL (PR #368 by Dirk and Dan, fixing issue #363)
  • Correct creation and access of large matrices (PR #370 by Florian, fixing issue #369)
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • Correctly reset directory in case of no-rebuilding but Windows code (PR #335 by Dirk)
• Changes in Rcpp Modules:
  • We no longer define multiple Modules objects named World in the unit tests with was seen to have a bad effect with R 3.2.2 or later (PR #351 by Dirk fixing issue #350).
  • Applied patch by Kurt Hornik which improves how Rcpp loads Modules (PR #353 by Dirk)
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • The Rcpp.bib file with bibliographic references was updated.

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I finally gave up and drank the cool-aid of the Bootstrap theme. The main reason was that I noticed the site was basically unusable on any mobile device, including tablet computers like the iPad, which are unfortunately very, very common. Phones wouldn't render the site in a legible way either, unfortunately. The change is rather drastic, so I figured it was important to mention it here. I am not so satisfied pretty exctied with the result: the theme is very basic, if not absent. I actually like that purified form now, and it works across devices now much better. But I do feel I just made my blog look like everyone else that uses Bootstrap. We seem to enter an era where non-graphic designers (like me) are back to building web pages that all look the same, not very different, in a way, from the old days of plain HTML, like the default ikiwiki theme. I did some work to change the look at least minimally, but the top black navbar is really a killer giveaway this is a bootstrap theme. Bootstrap does a lot for the typography, at least when checking the presslabs checklist or the practical typography checklist, but I still had to change the main body width, which helped a lot I think. Anyways, the old Night City theme is still available for download and I could still flip it back on here if I need to.

What changed The new theme keeps the distractions away, but ironically, it's slower than the previous theme even though there are no images and basically no colors at all. On my tests, it now loads in about 3.42 seconds on the "Regular 2G (250Kbps)" simulation of Chromium with 72KB in 12 requests. Whereas my tests with the previous theme were taking 3.25 seconds with 43.5KB in 17 requests. This is due to the Bootstrap CSS, which takes a whopping 19KB itself, but especially because I now load JQuery, which takes a whopping 32.8KB! And that is probably gzip-compressed, as the original is more around 90KB. But at least the thing is readable on phones and tablets now. Compare:

Samsung S3, before

Samsung S3, after I like this: much simpler, purer version on smaller devices. And we see what counts: the freaking text. Of course, on tablets, it doesn't fare as well: the top menu gets wrapped around...

Apple iPad, before

Apple iPad, after Apparently, the fix would be for me to "customize the @grid-float-breakpoint variable" in LESS (which I thought was a pager, but seems to be a CSS preprocessor, graaah). Still, I think it's better that way, more readable, and less crufty.

How it was done After doing a thorough evaluation of all the Bootstrap ikiwiki themes I could find (there are more than 4 at least!), I figured I prefered the Jak Linux one. It seemed to be better implemented than the others, cleaner, and I liked the mean black border on top. Black is cool. Oh, and I liked the subtle footer as well. Subtle is cool. Unfortunately, that theme originally required a custom plugin to have a menu on top, which i thought was silly. So I patched it to make it work with the sidebar plugin, which turned out to be trivially simple: just dump the sidebar content, and make the sidebar page have explicit HTML tags in it that match Bootstrap's required classes. I also added the regular action links in the top navbar, but that does overload it quite a bit. I also did some code cleanups and various other small changes, all of which are available in my personnal git repo.

What doesn't work So of course, there are always problems. The first problem is the extra bandwidth usage. Not sure that can be fixed, other than switching to the upcoming Bootstrap 4, which is smaller than Bootstrap 3, bizarrely. The more annoying problems are weird alignment issues. If the screen gets two narrow without kicking some collapse rules in place (the iPad bug above), the navbar rows overflow and look ugly. Even more bizarre, in some cases the right navbar can just completely disappear, in fact, that's the only fix I could find: to assign the hidden-xs and hidden-sm classes to the navbar-right <UL> element. But then it just goes away, which is pretty darn stupid. Still - I assigned the classes to a few actions that seemed low priority, both in the theme and in the sidebar page. Similarly, the search form at the bottom of the page doesn't seem to want to fit in the footer properly. No idea why and I can't bother to figure that one out. I ended up merging this with the backlinks, tags and trails navigation items. Oh, and amazingly enough: comments are simply not rendered at all right now. Oops. I seemed to have picked the single bootstrap Ikiwiki theme that does *not* have comments rendering... Aaaargh. For now I just copy-pasted stuff from the [ramseydsilva][] theme and it looks pretty ugly, but at least it works. I ended up theming comments the same way i did for Night City, which looks pretty good, but is not in sync with the LESS stuff in Bootstrap. I also add to add back trails, backlinks and favicon... looks like the Jak theme wasn't made for a blog after all... but that's now fixed! Another improvement would be to change the font from the canonical Helvetica to something prettier, like suggested in Practical Typography, in the font recommendations section, or the presslabs checklist. So far I have settled on Mozilla's Fira font (which means, yes, one set of objects is actually loading from the CDN, sorry). Feedback welcome.

Follow me on Identi.ca or Twitter or Diaspora* Don t know Retweet? My last post about it introduced this small Twitter bot whichs aims to retweet every tweets from a Twitter account to another one. Retweet

• Retweet 0.3 on Github
• The Retweet project on Github
• The official documentation of the Retweet project

The new features of this release:

• retweet a tweet only if it was already retweeted a number of times you can specify
• define the duration to wait before processing the next tweet to possibly retweet (useful if you want to control the delay between two tweets).

Retweet was created in order to improve the Journal du hacker Twitter account. The Journal du hacker is a Hacker News-like French-speaking website. Especially useful to broadcast news through a network of Twitter accounts, Retweet was also improved to improve pep8 compliance and code readability (wip). The project is also well documented and should be quite simple to install, configure and use. What about you? If you try it, please tell me what you think about it, opening a bug request or ask for new features. Or just write your comment here ;)

Review: Dark Currents, by Jacqueline Carey

Series:	Agent of Hel #1
Publisher:	Roc
Copyright:	2012
Printing:	October 2013
ISBN:	0-451-41483-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	399

This is another much-belated review. Hopefully I can remember the book well enough to do it justice. Daisy Johanssen has normal urban fantasy problems: her father was an incubus who (somewhat unsurprisingly) didn't stick around, she has to keep careful control of her own demonic side, her father occasionally tries to tempt her to invoke demonic power, and it's possible that she could breach the walls protecting the world from demons and bring about Armageddon. The typical sort of thing. Also, there's an unexplained murder in her home town, a mid-western US resort town whose image does not go well with eldritch murders. Daisy's only official role with the town police department is as a part-time file clerk, but this is urban fantasy, so you know the protagonist is going to be hip-deep in some sort of crime investigation. In this case, that's because the Norse goddess Hel (as distinct from the origin of Daisy's father entirely different thing) also lives here, in a manner of speaking, and Daisy is her liaison. In this case, Hel decides she's the one who should dispense justice. Carey previously has primarily been an epic fantasy writer, and this is her first foray into urban fantasy. (Well, arguably Santa Olivia and its sequel count, but those felt closer to superhero fiction to me.) The language and tone of her epic fantasy is far different than the conventions of either urban fantasy or superhero fiction, and I thought Santa Olivia was somewhat awkward in places. (None of the profanity quite worked, for instance.) Dark Currents felt smoother and more comfortable, aided by a charming mid-western feel. A few of Daisy's first-person narrative quirks wore poorly, such as every reference to "the Seven Deadlies," but Carey did a solid job with a typical out-of-her-depth urban fantasy protagonist. I'm pretty tired of the standard mythology of urban fantasy, and that is a bit of a drawback here: vampires and werewolves both feature, and I think I could happily go ten years before reading another story about vampires or hunky werewolves. Carey adds her own take on ghouls, but it's still pretty similar to lots (and lots) of other series. Thankfully, there's a bit of Norse mythology, a bit of fairy, and one extremely memorable lamia (of the serpent-tail-below-the-waist variety, at least some of the time). Lurine, a reclusive, retired starlet, a friend of Daisy's mother, and Daisy's childhood babysitter, is the lamia in question. She absolutely steals the show. The dynamic between her and Daisy is perfect: Carey resists the urge to ruin it with dark hints or falling-outs to increase tension. Instead, she lets it be a bit quirky, a bit complicated, but full of the reliability of a deep friendship. And Lurine is a wonderful character, the kind that only works as a supporting character because she's best seen through other people's eyes. Daisy's mother just makes the dynamic better. The reader can believe she's the sort of person who would have an ill-advised fling with an incubus, but also the sort of person who could raise a daughter like Daisy without many resources other than sheer grit. She never loses her optimistic outlook on the world, but has enough backbone behind it to make Lurine's friendship with her entirely believable. The plot here is nothing particularly special. Daisy unravels various clues, gets deeper into complicated relationships between various factions, occasionally finds herself in serious trouble, and relies on the help of friends and allies. I would have enjoyed the book more with a lot less Cody and more of the less typical mythology. But the relationships between the female characters, and the sheer persistence of mid-western normality and ordinary life challenges in the face of so much supernatural meddling, help this book stand out from the crowd. Dark Currents is different from most of what Carey has written, and you may be a bit disappointed if you were hoping for the epic sweep of the Kushiel series. But I found myself charmed by it, and will be reading the next book of the series. Followed by Autumn Bones. Rating: 7 out of 10

Piwik told me that people are still sharing my post about the state of GNOME-Software and update notifications in Debian Jessie. So I thought it might be useful to publish a small update on that matter:

• If you are using GNOME or KDE Plasma with Debian 8 (Jessie), everything is fine you will receive update notifications through the GNOME-Shell/via g-s-d or Apper respectively. You can perform updates on GNOME with GNOME-PackageKit and with Apper on KDE Plasma.
• If you are using a desktop-environment not supporting PackageKit directly for example Xfce, which previously relied on external tools you might want to try pk-update-icon from jessie-backports. The small GTK+ tool will notify about updates and install them via GNOME-PackageKit, basically doing what GNOME-PackageKit did by itself before the functionality was moved into GNOME-Software.
• For Debian Stretch, the upcoming release of Debian, we will have gnome-software ready and fully working. However, one of the design decisions of upstream is to only allow offline-updates (= download updates in the background, install on request at next reboot) with GNOME-Software. In case you don t want to use that, GNOME-PackageKit will still be available, and so are of course all the CLI tools.
• For KDE Plasma 5 on Debian 9 (Stretch), a nice AppStream based software management solution with a user-friendly updater is also planned and being developed upstream. More information on that will come when there s something ready to show ;-).

I hope that clarifies things a little. Have fun using Debian 8!

---

UPDATE: It appears that many people have problems with getting update notifications in GNOME on Jessie. If you are affected by this, please try the following:

1. Open dconf-editor and navigate to org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.updates. Check if the key active is set to true
2. If that doesn t help, also check if at org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.updates the frequency-refresh-cache value is set to a sane value (e.g. 86400)
3. Consider increasing the priority value (if it isn t at 300 already)
4. If all of that doesn t help: I guess some internal logic in g-s-d is preventing a cache refresh then (e.g. because I thinks it is on a expensive network connection and therefore doesn t refresh the cache automatically, or thinks it is running on battery). This is a bug. If that still happens on Debian Stretch with GNOME-Software, please report a bug against the gnome-software package. As a workaround for Jessie you can enable unconditional cache refreshing via the APT cronjob by installing apt-config-auto-update.

Xperia X10 My first Android device was The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i [1]. One of the reasons I chose it was for the large 4 screen, nowadays the desirable phones (the ones that are marketed as premium products) are all bigger than that (the Galaxy S6 is 5.1 ) and even the slightly less expensive phones are bigger. At the moment Aldi is advertising an Android phone with a 4.5 screen for $129. But at the time there was nothing better in the price range that I was willing to pay. I devoted a lot of my first review to the default apps for SMS and Email. Shortly after that I realised that the default email app is never going to be adequate (I now use K9 mail) and the SMS app is barely adequate (but I mostly use instant messaging). I ve got used to the fact that most apps that ship with an Android device are worthless, the camera app and the app to make calls are the only built in apps I regularly use nowadays. In the bug list from my first review the major issue was lack of Wifi tethering which was fixed by an update to Android 2.3. Unfortunately Android 2.3 ran significantly more slowly which decreased the utility of the phone. The construction of the phone is very good. Over the last 2 years the 2 Xperia X10 phones I own have been on loan to various relatives, many of whom aren t really into technology and can t be expected to take good care of things. But they have not failed in any way. Apart from buying new batteries there has been no hardware failure in either phone. While 2 is a small sample size I haven t see any other Android device last nearly as long without problems. Unfortunately I have no reason to believe that Sony has continued to design devices as well. The Xperia X10 phones crash more often than most Android phones with spontaneous reboots being a daily occurrence. While that is worse than any other Android device I ve used it s not much worse. My second review of the Xperia X10 had a section about ways of reducing battery use [2]. Wow, I d forgotten how much that sucked! When I was last using the Xperia X10 the Life360 app that my wife and I use to track each other was taking 15% of the battery, on more recent phones the same app takes about 2%. The design of modern phones seems to be significantly more energy efficient for background tasks and the larger brighter displays use more energy instead. My father is using one of the Xperia phones now, when I give him a better phone to replace it I will have both as emergency Wifi access points. They aren t useful for much else nowadays. Samsung Galaxy S In my first review of the Galaxy S I criticised it for being thin, oddly shaped, and slippery [3]. After using it for a while I found the shape convenient as I could easily determine the bottom of the phone in my pocket and hold it the right way up before looking at it. This is a good feature for a phone that s small enough to rotate in my pocket the Samsung Galaxy Note series of phones is large enough to not rotate in a pocket. In retrospect I think that being slippery isn t a big deal as almost everyone buys a phone case anyway. But it would still be better for use on a desk if the bulge was at the top. I wrote about my Galaxy S failing [4]. Two of my relatives had problems with those phones too. Including a warranty replacement I ve seen 4 of those phones in use and only one worked reliably. The one that worked reliably is now being used by my mother, it s considerably faster than the Xperia X10 because it has more RAM and will probably remain in regular use until it breaks. CyanogenMod I tried using CyanogenMod [5]. The phone became defective 9 months later so even though CyanogenMod is great I don t think I got good value for the amount of time spent installing it. I haven t tried replacing the OS of an Android phone since then. I really wish that they would start manufacturing phones that can have the OS replaced as easily as a PC. Samsung Galaxy S3 and Wireless Charging The Galaxy S3 was the first phone I owned which competes with phones that are currently on sale [6]. A relative bought one at the same time as me and her phone is running well with no problems. But my S3 had some damage to it s USB port which means that the vast majority of USB cables don t charge it (only Samsung cables can be expected to work). After I bought the S3 I bought a Qi wireless phone charging device [7]. One of the reasons for buying that is so if a phone gets a broken USB port then I can still use it. It s ironic that the one phone that had a damaged USB port also failed to work correctly with the Qi card installed. The Qi charger is gathering dust. One significant benefit of the S3 (and most Samsung phones) is that it has a SD socket. I installed a 32G SD card in the S3 and now one of my relatives is happily using it as a media player. Nexus 4 I bought a Nexus 4 [8] for my wife as she needed a better phone but didn t feel like paying for a Galaxy S3. The Nexus 4 is a nice phone in many ways but the lack of storage is a serious problem. At the moment I m only keeping it to use with Google Cardboard, I will lend it to my parents soon. In retrospect I made a mistake buying the Nexus 4. If I had spent a little more money on another Galaxy S3 then I would have had a phone with a longer usage life as well as being able to swap accessories with my wife. The Nexus 4 seems reasonably solid, the back of the case (which is glass) broke on mine after a significant impact but the phone continues to work well. That s a tribute to the construction of the phone and also the Ringke Fusion case [9]. Generally the Nexus 4 is a good phone so I don t regret buying it. I just think that the Galaxy S3 was a better choice. Galaxy Note 2 I got a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 in mid 2013 [10]. In retrospect it was a mistake to buy the Galaxy S3, the Note series is better suited to my use. If I had known how good it is to have a larger phone I d have bought the original Galaxy Note when it was first released. Generally everything is good about the Note 2. While it only has 16G of storage (which isn t much by today s standards) it has an SD socket to allow expansion. It s currently being used by a relative as a small tablet. With a 32G SD card it can fit a lot of movies. Bluetooth Speakers I received Bluetooth speakers in late 2013 [11]. I was very impressed by them but ended up not using them for a while. After they gathered dust for about a year I started using them again recently. While nothing has changed regarding my review of the Hive speakers (which I still like a lot) it seems that my need for such things isn t as great as I thought. One thing that made me start using the Bluetooth speakers again is that my phone case blocks the sound from my latest phone and makes it worse than phone sound usually is. I bought Bluetooth speakers for some relatives as presents, the relatives seemed to appreciate them but I wonder how much they actually use them. Nexus 5 The Nexus 5 [12] is a nice phone. When I first reviewed it there were serious problems with overheating when playing Ingress. I haven t noticed such problems recently so I think that an update to Android might have made it more energy efficient. In that review I was very impressed by the FullHD screen and it made me want a Note 3, at the time I planned to get a Note 3 in the second half of 2014 (which I did). Galaxy Note 3 Almost a year ago I bought the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 [13]. I m quite happy with it at the moment but I don t have enough data for a long term review of it. The only thing to note so far is that in my first review I was unhappy with the USB 3 socket as that made it more difficult to connect a USB cable in the dark. I ve got used to the socket and I can now reliably plug it in at night with ease. I wrote about Rivers jeans being the only brand that can fit a Samsung Galaxy Note series phone in the pocket [14]. The pockets of my jeans have just started wearing out and I think that it s partly due to the fact that I bought a Armourdillo Hybrid case [15] for my Note 3. I ve had the jeans for over 3 years with no noticable wear apart from the pockets starting to wear out after 10 months of using the Armourdillo case. I don t think that the Armourdillo case is bad, but the fact that it has deep grooves and hard plastic causes it to rub more on material when I take the phone out of my pocket. As I check my phone very frequently this causes some serious wear. This isn t necessarily a problem given that a phone costs 20* more than a pair of jeans, if the case was actually needed to save the phone then it would be worth having some jeans wear out. But I don t think I need more protection than a gel case offers. Another problem is that the Armourdillo case is very difficult to remove. This isn t a problem if you don t need access to your phone, IE if you use a phone like the Nexus 5 that doesn t permit changing batteries or SD cards. But if you need to change batteries, SD cards, etc then it s really annoying. My wife seems quite happy with her Armoudillo case but I don t think it was a good choice for me. I m considering abandoning it and getting one of the cheap gel cases. The sound on the Note 3 is awful. I don t know how much of that is due to a limitation in the speaker and how much is due to the case. It s quite OK for phone calls but not much good for music. Tablets I m currently on my third tablet. One was too cheap and nasty so I returned it. Another was still cheap and I hardly ever used it. The third is a Galaxy Note 10 which works really well. I guess the lesson is to buy something worthwhile so you can use it. A tablet that s slower and has less storage than a phone probably isn t going to get used much. Phone Longevity I owned the Xperia X10 for 22 months before getting the Galaxy S3. As that included 9 months of using a Galaxy S I only had 13 months of use out of that phone before lending it to other people. The Galaxy S3 turned out to be a mistake as I replaced it in only 7 months. I had the Note 2 for 15 months before getting the Note 3. I have now had the Note 3 for 11 months and have no plans for a replacement any time soon this is the longest I ve owned an Android phone and been totally satisfied with it. Also I only need to use it for another 4 months to set a record for using an Android phone. The Xperia was free as part of a telco contract. The other phones were somewhere between $500 and $600 each when counting the accessories (case, battery, etc) that I bought with them. So in 4 years and 7 months I ve spent somewhere between $1500 and $1800 on phones plus the cost of the Xperia that was built in to the contract. The Xperia probably cost about the same so I ll assume that I spent $2000 on phones and accessories. This seems like a lot. However that averages out to about $1.20 per day (and hopefully a lot less if my Note 3 lasts another couple of years). I could justify $1.20 per day for either the amount of paid work I do on Android phones or the amount of recreational activities that I perform (the Galaxy S3 was largely purchased for Ingress). Conclusion I think that phone companies will be struggling to maintain sales of high end phones in the future. When I chose the Xperia X10 I knew I was making a compromise, the screen resolution was an obvious limitation on the use of the device (even though it was one of the best devices available). The storage in the Xperia was also a limitation. Now FullHD is the minimum resolution for any sort of high-end device and 32G of storage is small. I think that most people would struggle to observe any improvement over a Nexus 5 or Note 3 at this time. I think that this explains the massive advertising campaign for the Galaxy S6 that is going on at the moment. Samsung can t sell the S6 based on it being better than previous phones because there s not much that they can do to make it obviously better. So they try and sell it for the image.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/04/17/more-about-xperia-x10/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/11/21/galaxy-xperia-android-network/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/09/11/back-to-xperia-x10/
• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/12/05/cyanogenmod-galaxy-s/
• [6] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/12/21/galaxy-s3-power-case/
• [7] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/09/20/qi-phone-charging/
• [8] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/05/29/nexus-4/
• [9] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/08/13/nexus-4-ringke-fusion-case/
• [10] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/07/10/samsung-galaxy-note-2/
• [11] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/09/23/hive-bluetooth-speakers/
• [12] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2013/12/23/nexus-5/
• [13] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/10/31/samsung-galaxy-note-3/
• [14] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/11/17/geeky-jeans/
• [15] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2014/03/25/nexus5-armourdillo-hybrid-case/