In recent years, privacy issues have become a growing concern among free-software projects and users. As more and more software tasks become web-based, surveillance and tracking of users is also on the rise. While some software may use advertising as a source of revenue, which has the side effect of monitoring users, the Django community recently got into an interesting debate surrounding a proposal to add user tracking actually developer tracking to the popular Python web framework.

Tracking for funding A novel aspect of this debate is that the initiative comes from concerns of the Django Software Foundation (DSF) about funding. The proposal suggests that "relying on the free labor of volunteers is ineffective, unfair, and risky" and states that "the future of Django depends on our ability to fund its development". In fact, the DSF recently hired an engineer to help oversee Django's development, which has been quite successful in helping the project make timely releases with fewer bugs. Various fundraising efforts have resulted in major new Django features, but it is difficult to attract sponsors without some hard data on the usage of Django. The proposed feature tries to count the number of "unique developers" and gather some metrics of their environments by using Google Analytics (GA) in Django. The actual proposal (DEP 8) is done as a pull request, which is part of Django Enhancement Proposal (DEP) process that is similar in spirit to the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process. DEP 8 was brought forward by a longtime Django developer, Jacob Kaplan-Moss. The rationale is that "if we had clear data on the extent of Django's usage, it would be much easier to approach organizations for funding". The proposal is essentially about adding code in Django to send a certain set of metrics when "developer" commands are run. The system would be "opt-out", enabled by default unless turned off, although the developer would be warned the first time the phone-home system is used. The proposal notes that an opt-in system "severely undercounts" and is therefore not considered "substantially better than a community survey" that the DSF is already doing.

Information gathered The pieces of information reported are specifically designed to run only in a developer's environment and not in production. The metrics identified are, at the time of writing:

• an event category (the developer commands: startproject, startapp, runserver)
• the HTTP User-Agent string identifying the Django, Python, and OS versions
• a user-specific unique identifier (a UUID generated on first run)

The proposal mentions the use of the GA aip flag which, according to GA documentation, makes "the IP address of the sender 'anonymized'". It is not quite clear how that is done at Google and, given that it is a proprietary platform, there is no way to verify that claim. The proposal says it means that "we can't see, and Google Analytics doesn't store, your actual IP". But that is not actually what Google does: GA stores IP addresses, the documentation just says they are anonymized, without explaining how. GA is presented as a trade-off, since "Google's track record indicates that they don't value privacy nearly as high" as the DSF does. The alternative, deploying its own analytics software, was presented as making sustainability problems worse. According to the proposal, Google "can't track Django users. [...] The only thing Google could do would be to lie about anonymizing IP addresses, and attempt to match users based on their IPs". The truth is that we don't actually know what Google means when it "anonymizes" data: Jannis Leidel, a Django team member, commented that "Google has previously been subjected to secret US court orders and was required to collaborate in mass surveillance conducted by US intelligence services" that limit even Google's capacity of ensuring its users' anonymity. Leidel also argued that the legal framework of the US may not apply elsewhere in the world: "for example the strict German (and by extension EU) privacy laws would exclude the automatic opt-in as a lawful option". Furthermore, the proposal claims that "if we discovered Google was lying about this, we'd obviously stop using them immediately", but it is unclear exactly how this could be implemented if the software was already deployed. There are also concerns that an implementation could block normal operation, especially in countries (like China) where Google itself may be blocked. Finally, some expressed concerns that the information could constitute a security problem, since it would unduly expose the version number of Django that is running.

In other projects Django is certainly not the first project to consider implementing analytics to get more information about its users. The proposal is largely inspired by a similar system implemented by the OS X Homebrew package manager, which has its own opt-out analytics. Other projects embed GA code directly in their web pages. This is apparently the option chosen by the Oscar Django-based ecommerce solution, but that was seen by the DSF as less useful since it would count Django administrators and wasn't seen as useful as counting developers. Wagtail, a Django-based content-management system, was incorrectly identified as using GA directly, as well. It actually uses referrer information to identify installed domains through the version updates checks, with opt-out. Wagtail didn't use GA because the project wanted only minimal data and it was worried about users' reactions. NPM, the JavaScript package manager, also considered similar tracking extensions. Laurie Voss, the co-founder of NPM, said it decided to completely avoid phoning home, because "users would absolutely hate it". But NPM users are constantly downloading packages to rebuild applications from scratch, so it has more complete usage metrics, which are aggregated and available via a public API. NPM users seem to find this is a "reasonable utility/privacy trade". Some NPM packages do phone home and have seen "very mixed" feedback from users, Voss said. Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs, said the project is considering using Sentry for centralized reporting, which is a different idea, but interesting considering Sentry is fully open source. So even though it is a commercial service (as opposed to the closed-source Google Analytics), it may be possible to verify any anonymity claims.

Debian's response Since Django is shipped with Debian, one concern was the reaction of the distribution to the change. Indeed, "major distros' positions would be very important for public reception" to the feature, another developer stated. One of the current maintainers of Django in Debian, Rapha l Hertzog, explicitly stated from the start that such a system would "likely be disabled by default in Debian". There were two short discussions on Debian mailing lists where the overall consensus seemed to be that any opt-out tracking code was undesirable in Debian, especially if it was aimed at Google servers. I have done some research to see what, exactly, was acceptable as a phone-home system in the Debian community. My research has revealed ten distinct bug reports against packages that would unexpectedly connect to the network, most of which were not directly about collecting statistics but more often about checking for new versions. In most cases I found, the feature was disabled. In the case of version checks, it seems right for Debian to disable the feature, because the package cannot upgrade itself: that task is delegated to the package manager. One of those issues was the infamous "OK Google" voice activation binary blog controversy that was previously reported here and has since then been fixed (although other issues remain in Chromium). I have also found out that there is no clearly defined policy in Debian regarding tracking software. What I have found, however, is that there seems to be a strong consensus in Debian that any tracking is unacceptable. This is, for example, an extract of a policy that was drafted (but never formally adopted) by Ian Jackson, a longtime Debian developer:

Software in Debian should not communicate over the network except: in order to, and as necessary to, perform their function[...]; or for other purposes with explicit permission from the user.

In other words, opt-in only, period. Jackson explained that "when we originally wrote the core of the policy documents, the DFSG [Debian Free Software Guidelines], the SC [Social Contract], and so on, no-one would have considered this behaviour acceptable", which explains why no explicit formal policy has been adopted yet in the Debian project. One of the concerns with opt-out systems (or even prompts that default to opt-in) was well explained back then by Debian developer Bas Wijnen:

It very much resembles having to click through a license for every package you install. One of the nice things about Debian is that the user doesn't need to worry about such things: Debian makes sure things are fine.

One could argue that Debian has its own tracking systems. For example, by default, Debian will "phone home" through the APT update system (though it only reports the packages requested). However, this is currently not automated by default, although there are plans to do so soon. Furthermore, Debian members do not consider APT as tracking, because it needs to connect to the network to accomplish its primary function. Since there are multiple distributed mirrors (which the user gets to choose when installing), the risk of surveillance and tracking is also greatly reduced. A better parallel could be drawn with Debian's popcon system, which actually tracks Debian installations, including package lists. But as Barry Warsaw pointed out in that discussion, "popcon is 'opt-in' and [...] the overwhelming majority in Debian is in favour of it in contrast to 'opt-out'". It should be noted that popcon, while opt-in, defaults to "yes" if users click through the install process. [Update: As pointed out in the comments, popcon actually defaults to "no" in Debian.] There are around 200,000 submissions at this time, which are tracked with machine-specific unique identifiers that are submitted daily. Ubuntu, which also uses the popcon software, gets around 2.8 million daily submissions, while Canonical estimates there are 40 million desktop users of Ubuntu. This would mean there is about an order of magnitude more installations than what is reported by popcon. Policy aside, Warsaw explained that "Debian has a reputation for taking privacy issues very serious and likes to keep it".

Next steps There are obviously disagreements within the Django project about how to handle this problem. It looks like the phone-home system may end up being implemented as a proxy system "which would allow us to strip IP addresses instead of relying on Google to anonymize them, or to anonymize them ourselves", another Django developer, Aymeric Augustin, said. Augustin also stated that the feature wouldn't "land before Django drops support for Python 2", which is currently estimated to be around 2020. It is unclear, then, how the proposal would resolve the funding issues, considering how long it would take to deploy the change and then collect the information so that it can be used to spur the funding efforts. It also seems the system may explicitly prompt the user, with an opt-out default, instead of just splashing a warning or privacy agreement without a prompt. As Shai Berger, another Django contributor, stated, "you do not get [those] kind of numbers in community surveys". Berger also made the argument that "we trust the community to give back without being forced to do so"; furthermore:

I don't believe the increase we might get in the number of reports by making it harder to opt-out, can be worth the ill-will generated for people who might feel the reporting was "sneaked" upon them, or even those who feel they were nagged into participation rather than choosing to participate.

Other options may also include gathering metrics in pip or PyPI, which was proposed by Donald Stufft. Leidel also proposed that the system could ask to opt-in only after a few times the commands are called. It is encouraging to see that a community can discuss such issues without heating up too much and shows great maturity for the Django project. Every free-software project may be confronted with funding and sustainability issues. Django seems to be trying to address this in a transparent way. The project is willing to engage with the whole spectrum of the community, from the top leaders to downstream distributors, including individual developers. This practice should serve as a model, if not of how to do funding or tracking, at least of how to discuss those issues productively. Everyone seems to agree the point is not to surveil users, but improve the software. As Lars Wirzenius, a Debian developer, commented: "it's a very sad situation if free software projects have to compromise on privacy to get funded". Hopefully, Django will be able to improve its funding without compromising its principles.

Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

I don't often write on this blog, and when I do, it's either tech related, or light life stuff. Over the next few weeks, it's going to get a lot more political. If you currently follow this blog for its technical content, you may be tempted to tune out. I would encourage you to stay and listen. I'm passionate about the technology that I work on; but the greatest problems facing our world today are not ones that will be solved with software. American democracy is in bad shape, and it's because of what we're doing to it. This is not a problem of the Right or of the Left; it is not a problem that began with the election of Donald Trump, and it's not a problem that will go away at the end of his term. It is partly a structural problem with the way our elections work, but more than that it's a problem of how we're splitting into separate tribes, isolating ourselves from those who don't agree with us. As Russ Allbery wrote the morning after the election, everything about how we organize ourselves online today - and how we let Facebook and Twitter organize us - leads us to surround ourselves with people who already think the same way we do. That leaves all of us with huge blind spots for other people in our country, and it stifles the free exchange of ideas that is so essential for a healthy democracy. We need leaders who will work to make America a better and more just place for all our neighbors, not just a two-party system that plays tug-of-war using two different sets of voters that feel shut out. And the way we organize ourselves today (online and off) does not let us recognize those leaders. There's a lot of talk now about Facebook changing how it decides what to show people; and maybe they can manage to help everyone's online experience be a little less of a bubble. But part of the change needs to come from us. We need to be willing to engage, civilly, with people whose perspective is different from ours, and make the effort to understand where the other is coming from. So for the next few weeks, I'm going to talk. And I'm going to listen. I have no unique qualifications to speak about the country's issues. But I do have a perspective of my own, which might be different enough from yours to be useful. I was born and raised in Iowa, and graduated from college there. This election cycle, I learned that Iowa holds the distinction of being the state with the lowest percentage of college-educated whites. I'm part of that statistic, because a few years after graduating I moved to Portland, Oregon - a place that's notoriously so far to the left of what we think of as the middle, that it actually has anarchists who would shamefully use a peaceful protest as cover to commit property crime. So I know a few things about the people in each state, that I think the other should hear. I'm also that rarest of creatures, a Portlander who goes to church (Catholic). But I still choose as my neighbors the weird, wonderful, and welcoming community that we have here, whatever Glenn Beck might think. I have a son, and I worry about what kind of world he'll grow up to live in. I work in software, which means I'm doing a lot better than a lot of people in the country right now; it also means that from where I sit, I see trends already in progress that will have an effect on the working class and the middle class that makes NAFTA look like a gnat's fart in comparison. And so I worry for what kind of world we will all live in, if we don't make some changes fast. Let's have a conversation. No comments enabled on this blog, but you can find me on G+ or on Facebook.

You didn't possibly think my streak of serious posts could last did you?

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Josu Ortega (josue)
• Mathias Behrle (mbehrle)
• Sascha Steinbiss (satta)
• Lucas Kanashiro (kanashiro)
• Vasudev Sathish Kamath (vasudev)
• Dima Kogan (dkogan)
• Rafael Laboissi re (rafael)
• David Kalnischkies (donkult)
• Marcin Kulisz (kula)
• David Steele (steele
• Herbert Parentes Fortes Neto (hpfn)
• Ond ej Nov (onovy)
• Donald Norwood (donald)
• Neutron Soutmun (neutrons)
• Steve Kemp (skx)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Sean Whitton
• Tiago Ilieve
• Jean Baptiste Favre
• Adrian Vondendriesch
• Alkis Georgopoulos
• Michael Hudson-Doyle
• Roger Shimizu
• SZ Lin
• Leo Singer
• Peter Colberg

Congratulations!

A very nice new update to the gtrendsR package by Philippe and myself is now avilable via CRAN. I had only blogged about the initial 1.3.0 release, and we have added a whole slew of new features and fixes. Philippe rewrote a lot of the parsing to make it more robust to different encodings, and to add other features. So in no particular order, we can now sub-group by regions more finely, withstand various misfeatures in returned data sets, generally do better on connections, and more --- and also allow for intra-day, daily and weekly queries! That last part is pretty fun. Here is the code I ran last Saturday to look at the query for Donald Drumpf, a name brought to us via a beautiful John Oliver episode worth watching which ran about nine days ago. So last Saturday, when we were still within the seven day window, I ran

library(gtrendsR)
dp <- gtrends("Donald Drumpf", res="7d")
plot(dp) + ggplot2::ggtitle("The Drumpf") + ggplot2::theme(legend.position="none")

which resulted in the following chart which highlights another nice feature: the ggplot2 object created by the plotting function is returned, so we can locally modify and tune it. Here we set a title and suppress the default legend. As I had not blogged about the interim bug-fix releases 1.3.1 and 1.3.2, here is the set of NEWS entries for the last three releases:

gtrendsR 1.3.3

• A ggplot2 object can now be returned for further customization. plot(gtrends("NHL")) + ggtitle("NHL trend") + theme(legend.position="none")
• Support for hourly and daily data (#67). For example, it is now possible to have hourly data for the last seven days with gtrends("nhl", geo = "CA", res = "7d"). Use ?gtrends for more information about the time resolution supported by the package.
• Support for categorties (#46). Ex.: gtrends("NHL", geo = "US", cat = "0-20") will search only in the sport category.
• Some countries (ex: Hong Kong) were missing from the list (#69).
• Various typos and documentation work.

gtrendsR 1.3.2

• Added support for sub-countries (#25). Ex.: gtrends("NHL", geo = "CA-QC") will return trends data for Qu bec province in Canada. The list of supported sub-countries can be obtained via data(countries).
• Data parsing should work for any data returned by Google Trends (i.e. countries independent).
• Better support for queries using keywords in different languages (#50, #57). Ex.: gtrends(" ", geo = "TW")
• Now able to specify up to five countries (#53) via gtrends("NHL", geo = c("CA", "US"))
• Fixing issue #51 allowing UK-based queries via geo = "GB"

gtrendsR 1.3.1

• Fixing issue #34 where connection verification was not done properly.
• Now able to use more latin character in query. For example: gtrends("montr al").
• Can now deal with data returned other than in English language.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the gtrendsR repo where questions, comments etc should go via the issue tickets system.

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

Edited 2016-03-08: Corrected code snipped and one grammar instance

I like Italian food and Mexican food, he said. Where are you from? she asked. Yemen, but I like Italian food and Mexican food, he answered. You don't like Yemeni food? she asked. Eh, well, it's the thing you grow up with, he replied. Do you know Yemeni food? Yes, she said, I like . Oh, is good if you like meat. If you like vegetables, try . Why wouldn't I like meat? she demanded. You know, every place in Yemen does differently. I like the way they do it in the west of Yemen, near Africa, he said, and proceeded to describe the cooking process.

DebConf15 will be held in Heidelberg, Germany from the 15th to the 22nd of August, 2015. The clock is ticking and our annual conference is approaching. There are less than three months to go, and the Call for Proposals period closes in only a few weeks. This year, we are encouraging people to submit half-length 20-minute events, to allow attendees to have a broader view of the many things that go on in the project in the limited amount of time that we have. To make sure that your proposal is part of the official DebConf schedule you should submit it before June 15th. If you have already sent your proposal, please log in to summit and make sure to improve your description and title. This will help us fit the talks into tracks, and devise a cohesive schedule. For more details on how to submit a proposal see: http://debconf15.debconf.org/proposals.xhtml. Approved Talks We have processed the proposals submitted up to now, and we are proud to announce the first batch of approved talks. Some of them:

• This APT has Super Cow Powers (David Kalnischkies)
• AppStream, Limba, XdgApp: Past, present and future (Matthias Klumpp)
• Onwards to Stretch (and other items from the Release Team) (Niels Thykier for the Release Team)
• GnuPG in Debian report (Daniel Kahn Gillmor)
• Stretching out for trustworthy reproducible builds - creating bit by bit identical binaries (Holger Levsen & Lunar)
• Debian sysadmin (and infrastructure) from an outsider/newcomer perspective (Donald Norwood)
• The Debian Long Term Support Team: Past, Present and Future (Rapha l Hertzog & Holger Levsen)

If you have already submitted your event and haven t heard from us yet, don t panic! We will contact you shortly. We would really like to hear about new ideas, teams and projects related to Debian, so do not hesitate to submit yours. See you in Heidelberg,
DebConf Team

Since 2009, I am persuing a personal programming project. As I am not a professional programmer, I have spent quite a lot of that time exploring options. I have thrown out about three or four prototype implementations already. My last implementation seems to contain enough accumulated wisdom to be actually useful. I am far from finished, but the path I am walking now seems relatively sound. So, what is this project about? I have set myself a rather ambitious goal: I am trying to implement a two-way bridge between visual music notation and braille music code. It is called BMC (Braille Music Compiler). My problem: I am, as some of you might remember, 100% blind. So I am trying to write a translator between something I will never see directly, and its counterpart representation in a tactile encoding I had to learn from scratch to be able to work on this project. Braille music code is probably the most cryptic thing I have ever tried to learn. It basically is a method to represent a 2-dimensional structure like staff-notation as a stream of characters encoded in 6-dot braille. As the goal above states, I am ultimately trying to implement a converter that works both ways. One of my prototypes already implemented reading digital staff notation (MusicXML) and transcribing it to Braille. However, to be able to actually understand all the concepts involved, I ended up starting from the other end of the spectrum with my new implementation: parsing braille music code and emitting digital staff notation (LilyPond and MusicXML). This is a rather unique feature, since while there is commercial (and very expensive) software out there to convert MusicXML to braille music code, there is, as far as I know, no system that allows to input un-annotated braille music code and have it automatically converted to sighted music notation. So the current state of things is, that we are able to read certain braille music code formats, and output either reformatted (to new line-width) braille music code, LilyPond or MusicXML. The ultimate goal is to also implement a MusicXML reader, and convert the data to something that can be output as braille music code. While the initial description might not sound very hard, there are a lot of complications arising from how braille music code works, which make this quite a programming challenge. For one, braille music note and rest values are ambigious. A braille music note or rest that looks like a whole can mean a whole or 16th. A braille music note or rest that looks like a half can mean a half or a 32nd. And so on. So each braille music code value can have two meanings. The actual value can be caluclated with a recursive algorithm that I have worked out from scratch over the years. The original implementation was inspired by Samuel Thibault (thanks!) and has since then evolved into something that does what we need, while trying to do that very fast. Most input documents can be processed in almost no time, however, time signatures with a value > 1 (such as 12/8) tend to make the number of possible choices exploed quite heavily. I have found so far one piece from J.S. Bach (BWV988 Variation 3) which takes about 1.5s on my 3GHz AMD (and the code is already using several CPU cores). Additionally, braille music code supports a form of "micro"-repetitions which are not present in visual staff notation which effectively allow certain musical patterns to be compressed if represented in braille. Another algorithmically interesting part of BMC that I have started to taclke just recently is the linebreaking problem. Braille music code has some peculiar rules when it comes to breaking a measure of musical material into several lines. I ended up adapting Donald E. Knuth's algorithm from Breaking Paragraphs into Lines for fixed-width text. In other words, I am ignoring the stretch/shrink factors, while making use of different penalty values to find the perfect solution for the problem of breaking a paragraph of braille music code into several lines. One thing that I have learnt from my perivous prototype (which was apparently useful enough to already acquire some users) is that it is not enough to just transcribe one format to another. I ultimately want to store meta information about the braille that is presented to the user such that I can implement interactive querying and editing features. Braille music code is complicated, and one of the original motivations to work on software to deal with it was to ease the learning curve. A user of BMC should be able to ask the system for a description of a character at a certain position. The user interface (not implemented yet) should allow to play a certain note interactively, or play the measure under the cursor, or play the whole document, and if possible, have the cursor scroll along while playback plays notes. These features are not implemented in BMC yet, but they have been impleemnted in the previous prototype and their usefulness is apparent. Also, when viewing a MusicXML document in braille music code, certain non-structural changes like adding/removing fingering annotations should be possible while preserving unhandled features of the original MusicXML document. This also has been implemented in the previous prototype, and is a goal for BMC.

Wow, it's been quite a long time since I've posted something here. Everything is going well -- I'm just very, very engrossed with the new job, since I'm still in exponential ramp-up mode. It's lasting for longer than I expected, although my expectations didn't have much basis since this is the first time I've started a new job in 17 years. I'm feeling more and more capable every day, but the combination of a very heavily social learning process, a lot of new technical areas to learn, and not having taken a vacation since last June means that my weekends are spent just passively watching things and zoning. Not sure yet how long that will last, and I don't want to make any predictions, although I do have my first significant vacation coming up next month. Anyway, book reading and buying has continued, although I'm again far behind on writing reviews. With luck, I'll be writing one of those (for posting later) right after writing this post. Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow (non-fiction)
Elizabeth Bear Karen Memory (sff)
Becky Chambers The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (sff)
Fred Clark The Anti-Christ Handbook (non-fiction)
Charles de Lint The Very Best of Charles de Lint (sff)
S.L. Huang A Neurological Study on the Effects... (sff)
S.L. Huang Half Life (sff)
Kameron Hurley The Mirror Empire (sff)
Sophie Lack Dissonance (sff)
Sophie Lack Imbalance (sff)
Susan R. Matthews An Exchange of Hostages (sff)
Kaoru Mori A Bride's Story #1 (graphic novel)
Donald Shoup The High Cost of Free Parking (non-fiction)
Jo Walton The Just City (sff) Pretty nice variety of different stuff from a huge variety of recommendation sources. I've already read the Chambers (and can recommend it). A review will be forthcoming.

I was browsing Eric Kim s street photography blog, when I stumbled across one article about the well-known Gear Acquisition Syndrome that plagues enthusiast photographers. Gear Acquisition Syndrome is the obsession that enthusiasts tend to have for new gear, new gadgets, new stuff, as an excuse for not developing their skills or taking action. You can recognize it by phrases like: If only I had that new gear, I would be better at what I do I can t do that project until I buy this gear My super expensive camera is not good for that, I need an even more expensive one (etc). The article, How to Be Grateful For What You Have is a funny and well argued look on why photographers, or artists in general, can get lost in what they don t have, instead of what they have. The article is a recommended read in itself and delivers the point whether you are into photography or not. That said, inside the article I found three nice links worth noting: The Tiny Collective
A group of photographers that use only their phones as their camera. It s inspiring to see a specific, curated, selection of images made with phones. It definitely makes you wonder why would you need anything but a phone to make great images (answer: phones work great, even old ones). A Guide to Practical Contentment
One of the most simple and effective messages about contentment that I have read. It s not about not wanting things or settling for whatever . It s all about taking a step back and realizing that life is not about absolutes. If you are not a billionaire, that doesn t mean you have failed in life. Perhaps you are just a millionaire, and that s fine :).

( ) if you start in this place of fixing what s wrong with you, you keep looking for what else is wrong with you, what else you need to improve. So maybe now feel like you don t have enough muscles, or six pack abs, or you think your calves don t look good, or if it s not about your body, you ll find something else. So it s this never-ending cycle for your entire life. You never reach it. If you start with a place of wanting to improve yourself and feeling stuck, even if you re constantly successful and improving, you re always looking for happiness from external sources. You don t find the happiness from within, so you look to other things. If you re externally looking for happiness, it s easy to get too into food, or shopping, or partying, or overwork, to try to be happy. If instead, you can find contentment within and not need external sources of happiness, then you ll have a reliable source of happiness.

So, instead of looking at sources of external happiness, why don t you look into sources of internal happiness? It s one of the hardest things to learn how to do, but I m personally slowly getting there. It s life changing. Bonus points: quotes on simplification and minimalism
For extra credit, here are some interesting quotes on the above topics, note that as every internet quote page it might be filled with false quotes. I happen to like the one attributed to Donald Horban, who apparently doesn t exist outside quote pages in the internet. Maybe that s the biggest minimalism? Not existing?

We don t need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.

Anyway, take these with a grain of salt, and just read them as interesting phrases. Just take it easy :).

On Friday October 31, 2014, and Saturday November 1, 2014, around thirty-five graduate students and faculty members attended a Software Carpentry workshop. Attendees came primarily from the Economics department and the Kellogg School of Management, which was also the host and sponsor providing an excellent venue with the Allen Center on the (main) Evanston campus of Northwestern University. The focus of the two-day workshop was an introduction, and practical initiation, to working effectively at the shell, getting introduced and familiar with the git revision control system, as well as a thorough introduction to working and programming in R---from the basics all the way to advanced graphing as well as creating reproducible research documents. The idea of the workshop had come out of discussion during our R/Finance 2014 conference. Bob McDonald of Northwestern, one of this year's keynote speakers, and I were discussing various topic related to open source and good programming practice --- as well as the lack of a thorough introduction to either for graduate students and researcher. And once I mentioned and explained Software Carpentry, Bob was rather intrigued. And just a few months later we were hosting a workshop (along with outstanding support from Jackie Milhans from Research Computing at Northwestern). We were extremely fortunate in that Karthik Ram and Ramnath Vaidyanathan were able to come to Chicago and act as lead instructors, giving me an opportunity to get my feet wet. The workshop began with a session on shell and automation, which was followed by three session focusing on R: a core introduction, a session focused on function, and to end the day, a session on the split-apply-combine approach to data transformation and analysis. The second day started with two concentrated session on git and the git workflow. In the afternoon, one session on visualization with R as well as a capstone-alike session on reproducible research rounded out the second day.

Things that worked The experience of the instructors showed, as the material was presented and an effective manner. The selection of topics, as well as the pace were seen by most students to be appropriate and just right. Karthik and Ramnath both did an outstanding job. No students experienced any real difficulties installing software, or using the supplied information. Participants were roughly split between Windows and OS X laptops, and had generally no problem with bash, git, or R via RStudio. The overall Software Carpentry setup, the lesson layout, the focus on hands-on exercises along with instruction, the use of the electronic noteboard provided by etherpad and, of course, the tried-and-tested material worked very well.

Things that could have worked better Even more breaks for exercises could have been added. Students had difficulty staying on pace in some of the exercise: once someone fell behind even for a small error (maybe a typo) it was sometimes hard to catch up. That is a general problem for hands-on classes. I feel I could have done better with the scope of my two session. Even more cohesion among the topics could have been achieved via a single continually used example dataset and analysis.

Acknowledgments Robert McDonald from Kellogg, and Jackie Milhans from Research Computing IT, were superb hosts and organizers. Their help in preparing for the workshop was tremendous, and the pick of venue was excellent, and allowed for a stress-free two days of classes. We could not have done this without Karthik and Ramnath, so a very big Thank You to both of them. Last but not least the Software Carpentry 'head office' was always ready to help Bob, Jackie and myself during the earlier planning stage, so another big Thank You! to Greg and Arliss.

The annual Debian developer meeting took place in Portland, Oregon, 23 to 31 August 2014. DebConf14 attendees participated in talks, discussions, workshops and programming sessions. Video teams captured a lot of the main talks and discussions for streaming for interactive attendees and for the Debian video archive. Between the video, presentations, and handouts the coverage came from the attendees in blogs, posts, and project updates. We ve gathered a few articles for your reading pleasure: Gregor Herrmann and a few members of the Debian Perl group had an informal unofficial pkg-perl micro-sprint and were very productive. Vincent Sanders shared an inspired gift in the form of a plaque given to Russ Allbery in thanks for his tireless work of keeping sanity in the Debian mailing lists. Pictures of the plaque and design scheme are linked in the post. Vincent also shared his experiences of the conference and hopes the organisers have recovered. Noah Meyerhans adventuring to Debian by train, (Inter)netted some interesting IPv6 data for future road and railwarriors. Hideki Yamane sent a gentle reminder for English speakers to speak more slowly. Daniel Pocock posted of GSoC talks at DebConf14, highlights include the Java Project Dependency Builder and the WebRTC JSCommunicator. Thomas Goirand gives us some insight into a working task list of accomplishments and projects he was able to complete at DebConf14, from the OpenStack discussion to tasksel talks, and completion of some things started last year at DebConf13. Antonio Terceiro blogged about debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project, Ruby, Redmine, and Noosfero. His post also shares the atmosphere of being able to interact directly with peers once a year. Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about a talk he did on debsources which now has its own HACKING file. Juliana Louback penned: DebConf 2014 and How I Became a Debian Contributor. Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph s in-depth summary of DebConf14 is a great read. She discussed Debian Validation & CI, debci and the Continuous Integration project, Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA, and Outsourcing webapp maintenance. Lucas Nussbaum by way of a blog post releases the very first version of Debian Trivia modelled after the TCP/IP Drinking Game. Fran ois Marier s shares additional information and further discussion on Outsourcing your webapp maintenance to Debian. Joachim Breitner gave a talk on Haskell and Debian, created a new tool for binNMUs for Haskell packages which runs via cron job. The output is available for Haskell and for OCaml, and he still had a small amount of time to go dancing. Jaldhar Harshad Vyas was not able to attend DebConf this year, but he did tune in to the videos made available by the video team and gives an insightful viewpoint to what was being seen. J r my Bobbio posted about Reproducible builds in Debian in his recap of DebConf14. One of the topics at hand involved defining a canonical path where packages must be built and a BOF discussion on reproducible builds from where the conversation moved to discussions in both Octave and Groff. New helpers dh_fixmtimes and dh_genbuildinfo were added to BTS. The .buildinfo format has been specified on the wiki and reviewed. Lots of work is being done in the project, interested parties can help with the TODO list or join the new IRC channel #debian-reproducible on irc.debian.org. Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the d-i / debian-cd BoF at DC14, with some of the session video available online. Current jessie D-I needs some help with the testing on less common architectures and languages, and release scheduling could be improved. Future plans: Switching to a GUI by default for jessie, a default desktop and desktop choice, artwork, bug fixes and new architecture support. debian-cd: Things are working well. Improvement discussions are on selecting which images to make I.E. netinst, DVD, et al., debian-cd in progress with http download support, Regular live test builds, Other discussions and questions revolve around which ARM platforms to support, specially-designed images, multi-arch CDs, and cloud-init based images. There is also a call for help as the team needs help with testing, bug-handling, and translations. Holger Levsen reports on feedback about the feedback from his LTS talk at DebConf14. LTS has been perceived well, fits a demand, and people are expecting it to continue; however, this is not without a few issues as Holger explains in greater detail the lacking gatekeeper mechanisms, and how contributions are needed from finance to uploads. In other news the security-tracker is now fixed to know about old stable. Time is short for that fix as once jessie is released the tracker will need to support stable, oldstable which will be wheezy, and oldoldstable. Jonathan McDowell s summary of DebConf14 includes a fair perspective of the host city and the benefits of planning of a good DebConf14 location. He also talks about the need for facetime in the Debian project as it correlates with and improves everyone s ability to work together. DebConf14 also provided the chance to set up a hard time frame for removing older 1024 bit keys from Debian keyrings. Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the State of the ARM BoF at DebConf14 with updates on the 3 current ports armel, armhf and arm64. armel which targets the ARM EABI soft-float ARMv4t processor may eventually be going away, while armhf which targets the ARM EABI hard-float ARMv7 is doing well as the cross-distro standard. Debian is has moved to a single armmp kernel flavour using Device Tree Blobs and should be able to run on a large range of ARMv7 hardware. The arm64 port recently entered the main archive and it is hoped to release with jessie with 2 official builds hosted at ARM. There is talk of laptop development with an arm64 CPU. Buildds and hardware are mentioned with acknowledgements for donated new machines, Banana Pi boards, and software by way of ARM s DS-5 Development Studio - free for all Debian Developers. Help is needed! Join #debian-arm on irc.debian.org and/or the debian-arm mailing list. There is an upcoming Mini-DebConf in November 2014 hosted by ARM in Cambridge, UK. Tianon Gravi posted about the atmosphere and contrast between an average conference and a DebConf. Joseph Bisch posted about meeting his GSOC mentors, attending and contributing to a keysigning event and did some work on debmetrics which is powering metrics.debian.net. Debmetrics provides a uniform interface for adding, updating, and viewing various metrics concerning Debian. Harlan Lieberman-Berg s DebConf Retrospective shared the feel of DebConf, and detailed some of the work on debugging a build failure, work with the pkg-perl team on a few uploads, and work on a javascript slowdown issue on codeeditor. Ana Guerrero L pez reflected on Ten years contributing to Debian.

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 121, No. 3 & 4
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

Another review of a magazine that I finished quite some time ago. Apologies for any inaccuracies or lack of depth in the reviews. There wasn't much in Charles de Lint's reviews in this issue that interested me, but Michelle West covers a great selection of books. Two of them (The Wise Man's Fear and The Quantum Thief) are already on my to-read list; the third, The Postmortal, sounded interesting and would go on my list to purchase if I didn't already have so many good books I've not read. Otherwise, this issue is short on non-fiction. The only other essay entry is a film review from Kathi Maio, which is the typical whining about all things film that F&SF publishes. "Rutger and Baby Do Jotenheim" by Esther M. Friesner: Baby is a former pole dancer with a toy poodle named Mister Snickers, which warns you right away that this story is going to involve a few over-the-top caricatures and more use of the word "piddle" than one might ideally want. Rutger is a mythology professor who tolerates her for the standard reasons in this sort of pairing. They're travelling across country to Baby's sister's wedding when their car breaks down in Minnesota, prompting an encounter with frost giants. As you might expect, this is a sort of fractured fairy tale, except based on Norse mythology instead of the more typical Grimm fare. The fun is in watching these two apparent incompetents (but with enough knowledge of mythology to clue in the reader) reproduce the confrontation between Thor and Utgard-Loki. The fight with old age is particularly entertaining. If you've read any of Friesner's other stories, you know what to expect: not much in the way of deeper meaning, but lots of fun playing with stereotypes and an optimistic, funny outcome. Good stuff. (7) "The Man Inside Black Betty" by Sarah Langan: This story comes with a mouthful of a subtitle: "Is Nicholas Wellington the World's Best Hope?" It's also a story that purports to be written by a fictional character, in this case one Saurub Ramesh (with Langan credited as having done "research"). It's told in the style of first-person journalism, relating the thoughts and impressions of Ramesh as he interviews Nicholas Wellington. The topic is Black Betty: a black hole above Long Island Sound. Wellington is a scientific genius and iconoclast with radical theories of black holes that contradict how the government has been attempting to deal with Black Betty, unsuccessfully. The structure here was well-handled, reminding me a lot of a Michael Lewis article during the financial collapse. Langan has a good feel for how journalism of this type mixes personalities, politics, and facts. But it's all setup and no story. We get some world building, and then it's over, with no resolution except pessimism. Meh. (4) "A Borrowed Heart" by Deborah J. Ross: Ross starts with the trappings of urban fantasy transplanted into a Victorian world: supernatural creatures about, a protagonist who is a high-class prostitute, and sex and a sucubus by the second page. It evolves from there into a family drama and an investigation, always giving the reader the impression that a vampire will jump out at any moment. But the ending caught me entirely by surprise and was far more effective due to its departure from the expected path. Well done. (7) "Bright Moment" by Daniel Marcus: The conflict between terraforming and appreciation for the universe as we find it is an old story pattern in science fiction, and Marcus doesn't add much here. I think the story would have been stronger if he'd found a way to write the same plot with a pure appeal to environmental beauty without the typical stakes-raising. But he does sprinkle the story with a few interesting bits, including a pod marriage and a futuristic version of extreme sports as a way of communing with nature. (6) "The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece" by M. Rickert: This is typical of my reaction to a Rickert story: shading a bit too much towards horror for me, a bit too cryptic, well-written but not really my thing. It's about a corpse painter who does the work of an informal mortician, improving the appearance of bodies for their funerals, and the sheriff who brings him all the dead bodies. It takes an odd macabre twist, and I have no idea what to make of the ending. (4) "Aisle 1047" by Jon Armstrong: Armstrong is best known for a couple of novels, Grey and Yarn, which entangle their stories in the future of marketing and commerce. One may be unsurprised, then, that this short story is on similar themes, with the intensity turned up to the parody point. Tiffan3 is a department-store saleswoman, spouting corporate slogans and advertising copy while trying to push customers towards particular products. The story follows the escalation into an all-out brand war, fought with the bubbly short-cut propaganda of a thirty-second commercial. For me, it fell awkwardly between two stools: it's a little too over-the-top and in love with its own bizarre alternate world to be effective satire, but the world is more depressing than funny and the advertising copy is grating. More of a curiosity than a successful story, I think. (5) "Anise" by Chris DeVito: Stories that undermine body integrity and focus on the fascinated horror of violation of physical boundaries aren't generally my thing, so take that into account in this review. Anise's husband died, but that's not as much of a problem as it used to be. Medical science can resurrect people via a sort of permanent, full-body life support system, making them more cyborg than human. "Anise" is about the social consequences of this technology in a world where a growing number of people have a much different relationship with their body than the typical living person today. It's a disturbing story that is deeply concerned with the physical: sex, blood, physical intimacy in various different forms, and a twisted type of psychological abuse. I think fans of horror will like this more than I did, although it's not precisely horror. It looks at the way one's perception of self and others can change by passing through a profound physical transformation. (5) "Spider Hill" by Donald Mead: I liked this story a lot better. It's about witchcraft and farm magic, about family secrets, and a sort of coming-of-age story (for a girl rather than a boy, for once). The main character is resourceful, determined, but also empathetic and aware of the impact of her actions, which made her more fun to read about. I doubt I'll remember this for too long, but when skimming through it again for a review, I had fond memories of it. (6) "Where Have All the Young Men Gone?" by Albert E. Cowdrey: Cowdrey in his paranormal investigation mode, which I like better than his horror mode. For once, the protagonist isn't even a lower-class or backwoods character. Instead, he's a military historian travelling in Austria who runs across a local ghost story. This is a fairly straightforward ghost investigation that follows a familiar path (albeit to an unusual final destination), but Cowdrey is a good story-teller and I liked the protagonist. (7) "Overtaken" by Karl Bunker: This is the sort of story that delivers its moral with the force of a hammer. It's not subtle. But if you're in the right mood for that, it's one of the better stories of its type. It's about a long-journey starship, crew in hibernation, that's overtaken by a far newer and faster mechanized ship from Earth that's attempting to re-establish contact with the old ships. The story is a conversation between the ship AIs. Save this one until you're in the mood for an old-fashioned defense of humanity. (8) "Time and Tide" by Alan Peter Ryan: Another pseudo-horror story, although I think it's better classified as a haunting. A wardrobe recalls a traumatic drowning in the childhood of the protagonist. As these things tend to do in stories like this, reality and memory start blurring and the wardrobe takes on a malevolent role. Not my sort of thing. (3) "What We Found" by Geoff Ryman: Any new Geoff Ryman story is something to celebrate. This is a haunting story on the boundaries between the scientific method and tribal superstition, deeply entangled with the question of how one recovers from national and familial trauma. How can we avoid passing the evils and madness of one generation down to the next? Much of the story is about family trauma, told with Ryman's exceptional grasp of character, but the science is entangled in an ingenious way that I won't spoil. As with Air, this is in no way science fiction. The science here would have fascinating and rather scary implications for our world, but clearly is not how science actually works. But as an insight into politics, and into healing, I found it a startlingly effective metaphor. I loved every bit of this. By far the best story of the issue. (9) Rating: 7 out of 10

The annoucement below just went to the R-SIG-Finance list. More information is as usual at the R / Finance page: See you in Chicago in May!

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

Although Don Norman was discussing designers attitude to user errors I assert the same is true for programmers when we use static program analysis tools.

The errors, or rather defects in the jargon, that a static analysis tools produce can be considered low cost well formed bug reports available very early in the development process.

When I say low cost it is because they can be found by a machine without a user or fellow developer wasting their time finding them. Well formed comes because the machine can describe exactly how it came to the logical deduction leading to the defect.
IntroductionStatic analysis is in general terms using the computer to examine a program for logic errors beyond those of pure syntax before it is executed. Examining a running program for defects is known as dynamic program analysis and while a powerful tool in its own right is not the topic of discussion.

This analysis has historically been confined to compiled languages as their compilers already had the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the code available for analysis. As an example the C language (released in 1972) had the lint tool (released in 1979) based on the PCC compiler.

Practical early compilers (I am generalising here as the 19070s were a time of white hot innovation in computing and examples of just about any innovation in the field could probably be found) were pretty primitive and produced executables which were less good than hand written assembler output. Due to practical constraints the progress of optimising compilers was not as rapid as might be desired so static analysis was largely used as an external process.

Before progressing I ought to explain why I just mixed the concept of an optimising compiler and static analysis. The act of optimisation within those compilers requires program analysis, from which they can generate defect reports which we all know and love as compiler warnings, also explaining why many warnings only appear at higher optimisation levels where deeper analysis is required.

The attentive reader may now enquire as to why we would need external analysis tools when our compilers already perform the task. The answer stems from the issue that a compiler is trying to reconcile many desirable traits including:

• Produce correct (expected) output from the source code for the target processor
• Produce output which will execute using the smallest amount of resources possible (not just CPU time but memory access and cache usage)
• Generate output in a reasonable amount of time.
• Have a reasonable cost (both developer time and research into new methods) to implement the compiler itself.
• Produce useful diagnostics

Using static analysisOnce the analysis has been performed and a list of defects generated the main problem with this technology rears its ugly head, that of so called "false positives". The analysis is fundamentally an undecidable problem (it is a variation of the halting problem) and relies on algorithms to generate approximate solutions. Because of this some of the identified defects are erroneous.

The level of erroneous defect reports varies depending on the codebase being analysed and how good the analysis tool being used is. It is not uncommon to see false positive rates, even with the best tools, in excess of 10%

Good tools allow for this and provide ways to supply additional context through model files or hints in the source code to suppress the incorrect defect reports. This is analogous to using asserts to explicitly constrain variable values or a type cast to suppress a type warning.

Even once the false positives have been dealt with there comes the problem of defects which while they may be theoretically possible take so many steps to achieve that their probability is remote at best. These defects are often better categorized as a missing constraint and the better analysis tools generate fewer than the more naive implementations.

An issue with some defect reports is that often defects will appear in a small number of modules within programs, generally where the developers already know the code is of poor quality, thus not adding useful knowledge about a project.

As with all code quality tools static analysis can be helpful but is not a panacea code may be completely defect free but still fail to function correctly.
Defect DensityA term that is often used as a metric for code quality is the defect density. This is nothing more than the ratio of defect to thousands of lines of code e.g. a defect density of 0.9 means that there is approximately one defect found in every 1100 lines of code.

The often quoted industry average defect density value is 1, as with all software metrics this can be a useful indicator but should not be used without understanding.

The value will be affected by improvements in the tool as well as how lines of code are counted so is exceptionally susceptible to gaming and long term trends must be treated with scepticism.
Practical examplesI have integrated two distinct static analysis tools into the development workflow for the NetSurf project which I shall present as case studies. These examples show a good open source solution and a commercial offering highlighting the issues with each.

Several other solutions, both open source and commercial, exist many of which have been examined and discarded as either impractical or proving less useful than those selected. However the investigation was not comprehensive and only considered what was practical for the project at the time.
clangThe clang project is a frontend to the LLVM project providing an optimising compiler for the C, C++ and objective C languages. As part of this project the compiler has been enhanced to run a collection of "checkers" which implement various methods of analysis on the code being compiled.

The "scan-build" tool is provided to make the using these features straightforward. This tool generates defect reports as a series of html files which show the analysis results.


Because the scan-build takes in excess of eight minutes on powerful hardware the NetSurf developers are not going to run this tool themselves as a matter of course. To get the useful output without the downsides it was decided to integrate the scan into the CI system code quality checks.

Whenever a git commit happens to the mainline branch and the standard check build completes successfully on all target architectures the scan is performed and the results are published as a list of defects.

The list is accessible directly through the CI interface and also incorporates a trend graph showing how many defects were detected in each build.

Each defect listed has a detail link which reveals the full analysis and logic necessary to cause the defect to occur.

Unfortunately even NetSurf which is a relatively small piece of software (around 200,000 lines of code at time of writing) causes 107 defects to be emitted by scan-build.

All but 25 of the defects are however "Dead Store" where the code has a value assigned but is never checked. These errors are simply not interesting to the developers and are occurring in code generated by a tool.

Of the remaining defects identified the majority are false positives and several (like the example in the image above) are simply improbable requiring a large number of steps to reach.

This shows up the main problem with the scan-build tool in that there is no way to suppress certain checks, mark defects as erroneous or avoid false positives using a model file. This reduces the usefulness of these builds because the developers all need to remember that this list of defects is not relevant.

Most of the NetSurf developers know that the project currently has 107 outstanding issues and if a code change or tool improvement were to change that value we have to manually work through the defect list one by one to check what had changed.
CoverityThe coverity SAVE tool is a commercial offering from a company founded in the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The results of the original novel research has produced a good solution which improved on analysis tools previously available.

The company hosts a gratis service for open source projects, they even provide scans for the Linux kernel so project size does not appear to be an issue.

The challenges faced integrating the coverity tool into the build process differed from clang however the issue of execution time remained and the CI service was used.

The coverity scanning tool is a binary executable which collects data on the build which is then submitted to the coverity service to be analysed. This tool obviously relies upon the developer running the executable to trust coverity to some degree.

A basic examination of the binary was performed and determined the executable was not establishing network connections or performing and observably undesirable behaviour. From this investigation the decision was made that running the tool inside a sandbox environment on a CI build slave was safe. The CI system also submits the collected results in a compressed form directly to the coverity scan service.

Care must be taken to only submit builds according to the services Acceptable Use Policy which limits the submission frequency of NetSurf scans to every other day. To ensure the project stays within the rules the build performed by the CI system is manually controlled and confined to a subset of NetSurf developers.

The results are presented using the coverity connect web technology based defect management tool. Access to the coverity connect interface is controlled by a user management system which precludes publicly publishing the results within the CI system.

Unfortunately NetSurf itself does not currently have good enough JavaScript DOM bindings to support this interface so another browser must be used to view it.

Despite the drawbacks the quality of the analysis results is greatly superior to the clang solution. The false positive rate is very low while finding many real issues which had not been previously detected.

The analysis can be enhanced by use of collection configuration and modelling files which remove intended constructions from consideration reducing the false positive rate to very low levels. The ability to easily and persistently suppress false positives through the web interface is also available.

The false positive management capabilities coupled with a user interface that makes understanding the defect path simple make this solution very practical and indeed the NetSurf developers have removed over 50 actual issues within a relatively short period since the introduction of the tool.

Not all of those defects could be considered serious but they had the effect of encouraging deeper inspection of some very dubious smelling source.
ConclusionsThe principle conclusions of implementing and using static analysis have been:

• It is a powerful tool which aids programmers in improving their software.
• It is not a panacea and bad code can have no defects.
• It can suggest possible defects early in the development cycle.
• It can highlight possibly problematic areas well before they affect a programs users.
• The tool and the infrastructure around it have a large impact on the usefulness of the results.
• The way results are presented has disproportionately significant impact on the usability of the defect reports.
• The open source tools are good, and improving, but coverity currently provides a superior experience.
• Integration into a projects CI system is beneficial.

Seven hours ago I was handing out how to vote cards for the Greens at the 2013 Australian Federal election. I was hoping that either we would have a Labor/Greens coalition or an outright majority for Labor. Unfortunately we got a Liberal majority in the lower house and it looks like some extreme right wing groups may get into the senate (replacements for Family First the anti-Gay party). For some reason the polling station where I was working only had volunteers from the three major parties (Greens, Labor, and Liberal) while other polling stations in the same electorate had volunteers from smaller parties such as the Sex Party and the Socialist Alliance. The volunteers from the Liberal party ate McDonalds outside the polling station and afterwards McDonalds rubbish was left on the ground, the above picture isn t particularly clear because I took it after 6PM when the polls closed. The Liberals didn t care enough to put their rubbish in a bin, it s an externality for them, if they get enough seats in the senate they will surely take the same approach to governing Australia. The Labor people didn t take the effort to clean up the Liberal mess even though it wasn t particularly difficult to do so, I think that s the type of attitude that led to this election defeat. In the case of the McDonalds rubbish in question I put it in the bin so that when the primary school kids return on Monday their school won t be too messy after the election. But in the case of the mess that is being made in Australian politics it will take many more Greens votes to allow us to clean it up.

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, April/May 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 4 & 5
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	192

Williams's editorial this issue is about the tendency of SF to take a rose-colored view of the world, which on the surface seems odd given the tendency of recent SF towards dystopia. But she makes a good point that the portrayal of the past is rose-colored, linking that into the current steampunk trend. She doesn't take the argument quite as far as I'd like, but I'm glad to see editorials raising points like this. I'm inclined to think that a lot of the rose-colored frame of the past is because few of us want to read about real historic conditions at any length, even for edification, because the stench and discomfort isn't fun to read about. Silverberg's column is another discussion of programmatic plot generators, which mostly makes the point that plot ideas are the easy part of writing. James Gunn contributes an extended biography of Isaac Asimov that probably won't be new to long-time genre readers but may fill in some details (although it politely sticks to mostly flattering material). Spinrad's book review column is one of his better ones; it looks at two novels by China Mi ville and two by Ian McDonald and explores differences in world-building. Spinrad predictably makes the case in favor of science fiction with rules and against the New Weird, but the discussion along the way was worth reading. "The Day the Wires Came Down" by Alexander Jablokov: Speaking of steampunk, here's an example. There is even an airship, although the primary technological focus is suspended street cars. Jablokov postulates a city-wide transportation network of suspended carriages called telpher cars, along with a city built around the telpher cables: stores on roofs, windows displaying merchandise to passing cars, and even a history of heated competition and dirty tricks between competing telpher networks. The story is set, as the title would indicate, on the last day of the network. It's being shut down for cost, with some hints that progress is destroying something precious. There is a plot here, revolving around some mysteries of the history of the telpher network and the roles of several people in that history. But the story is primarily a celebration of old technology. It's a rail fan's story recast with a steampunk technology, featuring the same mix of fascination with mechanics and a sense that the intricate details are falling out of common knowledge (and perhaps usefulness). As a story, it's a bit slow-moving, but I enjoyed the elegiac tone. (7) "An Empty House with Many Doors" by Michael Swanwick: This is a very short story, more of an emotional profile, involving a man's reaction to the death of his wife. Oh, and parallel universes. It's sort of the inverse of Niven's classic "All the Myriad Ways." Similar to Niven's story, I found the idea vaguely interesting but the conclusion and emotional reaction unbelievable and alien. (5) "The Homecoming" by Mike Resnick: Resnick tends to yank on the heart-strings rather sharply in his stories, so I knew roughly what to expect when a father comes home to find his son is visiting. A son who, rather against his father's wishes, has been significantly altered to be able to live with aliens. Throw in a mother with serious dementia, and you can probably predict what Resnick does with this. Still, most of the story is a two-sided conversation, and I thought he succeeded in doing justice to both sides, even though one of them was destined to lose. (6) "North Shore Friday" by Nick Mamatas: Illegal Greek immigrants, a family-run system for getting them married off before the INS catch them, government psi probes and eavesdropping on thoughts, joint projects between computer and religion departments, secret government experiments, and even ghosts... this story is a complex mess, with numerous thoughts stuck into small boxes and scattered through the surface story. It's one of those stories where figuring out what's going on, and even how to read the story in a sensible way, is much of the fun. If you find that fun, that is; if not, it will probably be frustrating. I wished there was a bit more plot, but there's something delightful about how much stuff Mamatas packs into it. (6) "Clockworks" by William Preston: This is a prequel to Preston's earlier "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down". Like that story, it's primarily a pulp adventure, but layered with another level of analysis and thoughtfulness that tries to embed the pulp adventure in our understanding of human behavior and the nature of the world, although this one stays a bit more pulp than its predecessor. As with Preston's other story, we don't get directly in the head of the Old Man (here, just called the man, but identifiable from clues in both stories as Doc Savage); instead, the protagonist is a former villain named Simon Lukic who the man hopes to have fixed by operating on his brain. The undercurrent that lies beneath a more typical pulp adventure is the question of whether Lukic is actually healed. I think there was a bit too much daring-do and human perfection, but it's a perfectly servicable pulp story with some depth. (6) "The Fnoor Hen" by Rudy Rucker: If you've read any of Rucker's work before, you probably know what to expect: a mind-boggling blizzard of mathematically-inspired technobabble that turns into vaguely coherent surrealism. (You can probably tell that I'm not much of a fan, although the clear good humor in these stories makes it hard to dislike them too much.) There's a mutated chicken and some sort of alternate mathematical space and then something that seems like magic... I'd be lying if I said that I followed this story. If you like Rucker, this seems like the sort of thing that you'd like. (4) "Smoke City" by Christopher Barzak: At the start of this story, I thought it was going to be an emotional parable about immigration. The progatonist lives two lives: one in our world, and one in the Smoke City of industry, a world of hard labor, pollution, and little reward, with families in both. But nearly all of the story is set within Smoke City, and the parable turns out to be a caustic indictment of industry and its exploitation of labor. I kind of wish Barzak hadn't used rape as a metaphor, but when the captains of industry show up, I can't argue with how deeply and accurately the story shoves in the knife. There isn't much subtlety here, but it's still one of the better stories in this issue. (7) "A Response from EST17" by Tom Purdom: I'm very happy to see Purdom's writing appearing regularly. His stories are always quiet and matter-of-fact, and at first seem to miss emotional zest, but they almost always grow on me. He lets the reader fill in their own emotional reactions to events, and there's always a lot going on. This story is a first-contact story, except that the "humans" here are not human at all. They're automated probes sent by two separate human civilizations, with different programming and different governance algorithms, and they quickly start competing negotiations. The aliens they've discovered similarly have factions, who start talking to the different probes in an elaborate dance of gathering information without giving too much away. The twist is that this pattern has replayed itself many times in the past, and information itself can be a weapon. I enjoyed this one from start to finish. (7) "The One That Got Away" by Esther M. Friesner: Friesner is best known, at least to me, for humorous fantasy, and this story is advertised as such from early on. The first-person protagonist is a prostitute in a seaside town. She's bemused to finally be invited over by a sailor who's been eyeing her all evening, but that sailor has something else in mind than normal business. For much of this story, the fantasy element is unclear; when it finally comes, it was an amusing twist. (7) "The Flow and Dream" by Jack Skillingstead: This is a mildly interesting variation on the old SF story of hibernating humans (on a generation ship or elsewhere) waking up to a transformed world. Here, it's not a ship, it's a planet, and the hiberation was to wait for terraforming rather than for transit. The twist comes from an excessively literal computer and the fun of putting together the pieces. Sadly, the story trails off at the end without much new to say. (5) "Becalmed" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: "Becalmed" takes place immediately before "Becoming One with the Ghosts" and explains the incident that created the situation explored in that story. The first-person protagonist of "Becalmed" is a linguist, an expert in learning alien languages so that the Fleet can understand the civilizations that it runs across. But something went horribly wrong at their last stop, something that she's largely suppressed, and now she's confined to quarters and possibly in deep trouble. As is the ship; they're in foldspace, and they have been for days. "Becalmed" is structed like a mystery, centered around recovering the protagonist's memories. It's also a bit of a legal procedural; the ship is trying to determine what to do with her and to what degree she's responsible. But the heart of the story is a linguistic and cultural puzzle. This is another great SF story from Rusch, whose name on a cover will make me eager to start reading a new magazine. I love both angles on the universe she's built, but I think I like the Fleet even better than the divers. The Fleet captures some of the magic of the original Star Trek, but with much more mature characters, more believable situations, and a more sensible and nuanced version of the Prime Directive. Rusch writes substantial, interesting plots that hold my interest. I'd love to see more like this. (8) Rating: 7 out of 10

Yesterday I was discussing in an online board how to break a decision deadlock in life. There are real deadlocks, but I don t think they are very frequent most of the time, doing a pros and cons analysis is enough to decide what to do. Sometimes our judgement is impaired by lack of objectivity or by our inability to see things from a different point of view (it s hard to think straight when everything seems to be falling apart around you); talking to a friend or relative can help in these situations. But there are times when nothing helps. When you are really stuck and nothing seems to break the deadlock. At these times I give it one or two days, sleep on the issue and if I cannot come up with a decision I assume the alternatives are equivalent to me and just flip a coin. Of course, this will do if you can postpone the decision, giving yourself (and your inner self) time to decide on a course-of-action. But is there some way to speed up the process? During the discussion, someone came up with a rather smart quote by Rothstein character in Boardwalk Empire TV series:

Flip a coin. When it s in the air, you ll know what side you re hoping for.

I found it an interesting way to give your inner self an ultimatum: decide or luck will decide instead. I ve never did it like that, for I would not flip a coin unless it s my last resort. Being such a clever psychological idea, I doubted it originated in the TV series itself, so I went on pursue of the original idea. I found a Danish poet and mathematician called Piet Hein, who wrote a poem about it circa 1969:

A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP Whenever you re called on to make up your mind,
and you re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you re hoping.

And also, there are a Donald Duck comic called Flip Decision circa 1953 that introduces Flipism philosophy, which supports a rather radical anecdotal variant: make all decisions by flipping a coin. Piet Hein or Rothstein character idea is much better than Flipism, of course. Does anyone knows any older sources of the same idea?