Search Results: "phil"

14 April 2014

Chris Lamb: Race report: Cambridge Duathlon 2014

(This is my first race of the 2014 season.)


I had entered this race in 2013 and found it was effective for focusing winter training. As triathlons do not typically start until May in the UK, scheduling earlier races can be motivating in the colder winter months. I didn't have any clear goals for the race except to blow out the cobwebs and improve on my 2013 time. I couldn't set reasonable or reliable target times after considerable "long & slow" training in the off-season but I did want to test some new equipment and stategies, especially race pacing with a power meter, but also a new wheelset, crankset and helmet. Preparation was both accidentally and deliberately compromised: I did very little race-specific training as my season is based around an entirely different intensity of race, but compounding this I was confined to bed the weekend before. Sleep was acceptable in the preceding days and I felt moderately fresh on race morning. Nutrition-wise, I had porridge and bread with jam for breakfast, a PowerGel before the race, 750ml of PowerBar Perform on the bike along with a "Hydro" PowerGel with caffeine at approximately 30km.
Run 1 (7.5km) A few minutes before the start my race number belt the only truly untested equipment that day refused to tighten. However, I decided that once the race began I would either ignore it or even discard it, risking disqualification. Despite letting everyone go up the road, my first km was still too fast so I dialed down the effort, settling into a "10k" pace and began overtaking other runners. The Fen winds and drag-strip uphill from 3km provided a bit of pacing challenge for someone used to shelter and shorter hills but I kept a metered effort through into transition.
Time
33:01 (4:24/km, T1: 00:47) Last year: 37:47 (5:02/km)
Bike (40km) Although my 2014 bike setup features a power meter, I had not yet had the chance to perform an FTP test outdoors. I was thus was not able to calculate a definitive target power for the bike leg. However, data from my road bike suggested I set a power ceiling of 250W on the longer hills. This was extremely effective in avoiding going "into the red" and compromising the second run. This lends yet more weight to the idea that a power meter in multisport events is "almost like cheating". I was not entirely comfortable with my bike position: not only were my thin sunglasses making me raise my head more than I needed to, I found myself creeping forward onto the nose of my saddle. This is sub-optimal, even if only considering that I am not training in that position. Overall, the bike was uneventful with the only memorable moment provided by a wasp that got stuck between my head and a helmet vent. Coming into transition I didn't feel like I had really pushed myself that hard probably a good sign but the time difference from last year's bike leg (1:16:11) was a little underwhelming.
Time
1:10:45 (T2: 00:58)
Run 2 (7.5km) After leaving transition, my legs were extremely uncooperative and I had great difficulty in pacing myself in the first kilometer. Concentrating hard on reducing my cadence as well as using my rehearsed mental cue, I managed to settle down. The following 4 kilometers were a mental struggle rather than a physical one, modulo having to force a few burps to ease some discomfort, possibly from drinking too much or too fast on the bike. I had planned to "unload" as soon as I reached 6km but I didn't really have it in me. Whilst I am physiologically faster compared to last year, I suspect the lack of threshold-level running over the winter meant the mental component required for digging deep will require some coaxing to return. However, it is said that you have successfully paced a duathlon if the second run faster than the first. On this criterion, this was a success, but it would have been a bonus to have really felt completely completely drained at the end of the day, if only from a neo-Calvinist perspective.
Time
32:46 (4:22/km) / Last year: 38:10 (5:05/km)
Overall
Total time
2:18:19
A race that goes almost entirely to plan is a bit of a paradox there's certainly satisfaction in setting goals and hitting them without issue, but this is a gratification of slow-burning fire rather than the jubilation of a fireworks display. However, it was nice to learn that I managed to finish 5th in my age group despite this race attracting an extremely strong field: as an indicator, the age-group athlete finishing immediately before me was seven minutes faster and the overall winner finished in 1:54:53 (!). The race identified the following areas to work on:
  • Perform an outdoors FTP on my time-trial bike outdoors to develop an optimum power plan.
  • Do a few more brick runs, at least to re-acclimatise the feeling.
  • Schedule another bike fit.
Although not strictly race-related, I also need to find techniques to ensure transporting a bike on public transport is less stressful. (Full results & full 2014 race schedule)

12 April 2014

Russ Allbery: Accumulated haul

Wow, it's been a while since I've done this. In part because I've not had much time for reading books (which doesn't prevent me from buying them). Jared Bernstein & Dean Baker Getting Back to Full Employment (non-fiction)
James Coughtrey Six Seconds of Moonlight (sff)
Philip J. Davis & Reuben Hersh The Mathematical Experience (non-fiction)
Debra Dunbar A Demon Bound (sff)
Andy Duncan & Ellen Klages Wakulla Springs (sff)
Dave Eggers & Jordan Bass The Best of McSweeny's (mainstream)
Siri Hustvedt The Blazing World (mainstream)
Jacqueline Koyanagi Ascension (sff)
Ann Leckie Ancillary Justice (sff)
Adam Lee Dark Heart (sff)
Seanan McGuire One Salt Sea (sff)
Seanan McGuire Ashes of Honor (sff)
Seanan McGuire Chimes at Midnight (sff)
Seanan McGuire Midnight Blue-Light Special (sff)
Seanan McGuire Indexing (sff)
Naomi Mitchinson Travel Light (sff)
Helaine Olen Pound Foolish (non-fiction)
Richard Powers Orfeo (mainstream)
Veronica Schanoes Burning Girls (sff)
Karl Schroeder Lockstep (sff)
Charles Stross The Bloodline Feud (sff)
Charles Stross The Traders' War (sff)
Charles Stross The Revolution Trade (sff)
Matthew Thomas We Are Not Ourselves (mainstream)
Kevin Underhill The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance (non-fiction)
Jo Walton What Makes This Book So Great? (non-fiction) So, yeah. A lot of stuff. I went ahead and bought nearly all of the novels Seanan McGuire had out that I'd not read yet after realizing that I'm going to eventually read all of them and there's no reason not to just own them. I also bought all of the Stross reissues of the Merchant Princes series, even though I had some of the books individually, since I think it will make it more likely I'll read the whole series this way. I have so much stuff that I want to read, but I've not really been in the mood for fiction. I'm trying to destress enough to get back in the mood, but in the meantime have mostly been reading non-fiction or really light fluff (as you'll see from my upcoming reviews). Of that long list, Ancillary Justice is getting a lot of press and looks interesting, and Lockstep is a new Schroeder novel. 'Nuff said. Kevin Underhill is the author of Lowering the Bar, which you should read if you haven't since it's hilarious. I'm obviously looking forward to that. The relatively obscure mainstream novels here are more Powell's Indiespensible books. I will probably cancel that subscription soon, at least for a while, since I'm just building up a backlog, but that's part of my general effort to read more mainstream fiction. (I was a bit disappointed since there were several months with only one book, but the current month finally came with two books again.) Now I just need to buckle down and read. And play video games. And do other things that are fun rather than spending all my time trying to destress from work and zoning in front of the TV.

1 April 2014

Russ Allbery: Review: Asimov's, September 2011

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2011
Editor: Sheila Williams
Issue: Volume 35, No. 9
ISSN: 1065-2698
Pages: 112
Due to various other life priorities, it's been quite a while since I read this magazine. Let's see if I can remember the contents well enough to review it properly. The editorial this issue was about the Readers' Awards. Vaguely interesting, but Williams didn't have much to add beyond announcing the winners. I'm very happy to see Rusch's "Becoming One with the Ghosts" win best novella, though. The Silverberg column was more interesting: some musings and pop history about the Japanese convention of a retired emperor and how that fit into national politics. Di Filippo's book review column is all about short story collections, continuing the trend of Di Filippo mostly being interested in things I don't care about. "The Observation Post" by Allen M. Steele: A bit of alternate history set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but with airships. The protagonist was a radioman aboard a blimp that was patrolling the ocean for Russian vessels sailing to Cuba. A storm forces them down on an island, resulting in an encounter with some claimed tourists who may be Russian spies. The SFnal twist is unlikely to come as much surprise to an experienced reader, and the barb at the end of the story suffers from the same problem. I appreciate the ethical dilemma, but I've also seen it in lots of stories and have a hard time getting fully invested in another version of it. But the story is otherwise competently written. (6) "D.O.C.S." by Neal Barrett, Jr.: Everyone has an author or two that they just don't get. Barrett is one of mine, although this story is a bit less surreal than most of his. I'm fairly sure it's an odd twist on the "death panel" conspiracy theory given a fantastic twist, but it's not entirely forthright about what's going on. Possibly of more interest to those who like Barrett better. (5) "Danilo" by Carol Emshwiller: Emshwiller's stories are always distinctive and not quite like anyone else's, involving odd outsiders and their attempts to make sense of their world. This one involves, as is common, an out-of-the-way village. Lewella claims that she's going to be married to a stranger from the north. No one believes her, although they give her bridal gifts anyway, and then one day she takes her gifts and leaves. The protagonist follows her, to look after her. The rest of the story walks the boundary that Emshwiller often walks, leaving the reader unsure whether the characters are in touch with some deeper reality or insane and suffering, but the ending is even more ambiguous than normal and, at least for me, entirely unsatisfying. (4) "Shadow Angel" by Erick Melton: This is another retread of an old SF idea. This time, it's that piloting through hyperspace involves alternate modes of consciousness and has profound effects on the pilot. The risk of this sort of story is that it turns hallucinatory and a bit incoherent, and I think that happened here. I like the world-building; the glimmers of future politics and trade and the way he weaves alternate timelines into the story caught my interest. But the story wasn't quite coherent enough (although part of this may be reviewing it quite some time after I originally read it). Promising, but not clear, and without quite enough agency for the protagonist. (6) "The Odor of Sanctity" by Ian Creasey: I found this story more memorable. The conceit is that a future society has developed technology that allows the capture and replay of scents, which has created a huge market for special scent experiences and the triggering of memories. The story is set in the Philippines and revolves around a Catholic priest who takes the mission to the poor seriously. He's dying, and several people wonder if it is possible to capture the mythical odor of scantity: the sweet scent said to follow the death of a saint rather than the normal odor of human death. Creasey handles this idea well, blending postulated future technology, the practical and cynical world of the poor streets, and a balance between mystical belief and practical skepticism. Nothing in the story is that surprising, but I was happy with the eventual resolution. (7) "Grandma Said" by R. Neube: This story's protagonist is a cleanser on a frontier planet made extremely dangerous by a virulent alien fungus. It is almost always fatal and very difficult to eradicate. Vic's job is to completely sanitize anything that had been in contact with a victim and maintain the other rules of strict quarantine required to keep the fungal infection from spreading uncontrolled. Nuebe weaves world-building together with Vic's background and adds a twist in the form of deeply unhealthy responses to the constant stress of living near death. Well told, if a bit disturbing. (7) "Stalker" by Robert Reed: Reed has a knack for fascinating and disturbing stories, and this is an excellent example of the type. The protagonist is a manufactured companion who is completely devoted to its owner. Their commercial name is Adorers, but everyone calls them Stalkers. In this case, the protagonist's owner is a serial rapist and murderer; given that, and given how good Reed is at writing these sorts of stories, you can probably imagine how chilling it is. As usual, there is a sharp barb in the ending, and not the one I was expecting. Good if you can handle the graphic violence and disturbing subject material. (7) "Burning Bibles" by Alan Wall: This is an interesting twist on the spy thriller. A three-letter agency in charge of investigating possible terrorist plots becomes suspicious after a warehouse of Bibles burns in mysterious circumstances. The agent they send in is a deaf-mute with special powers of intuition. This prompted some eye-rolling, and there's a lot of magic disability powers here to annoy, but it's played mostly straight after that introduction. The rest is a fairly conventional spy story, despite special empathic powers, but it's one I enjoyed and thought was fairly well-written. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

27 March 2014

Aigars Mahinovs: Photo migration from Flickr to Google Plus

I've been with Flickr since 2005 now, posting a lot of my photos there, so that other poeple from the events, that I usually take photos of, could enjoy them. But lately I've become annoyed with it. It is very slow to uplaod to and even worse to get photos out of it - there is no large shiny button to Download a set of photos, like I noticed in G+. So I decided to try and copy my photos over. I am not abandoning or deleting my Flickr account yet, but we'll see. The process was not as simple as I hoped. There is this FlickrToGpluss website tool. It would have been perfect .. if it worked. In that tool you simply log in to both services, check which albums you want to migrate over and at what photo size and that's it - the service will do the migration directly on their servers. It actually feeds Google the URLs of the Flickr photos so the photos don't even go trought the service itself, only metadata does. Unfortunately I hit a couple snags - first of all the migration stopped progressing a few days and ~20 Gb into the process (out of ~40 Gb). And for the photos that were migrated their titles were empty and their file names were set to Flickr descriptions. Among other things that meant that when you downloaded the album as a zip file with all the photots (which was the feature that I was doing this whole thing for) you got photos in almost random order - namely in the order of their sorted titles. Ugh. So I canceled that migration (by revoking priviledges to that app on G+, there is no other way to see or modify progress there) and sat down to make a manual-ish solution. First, I had to get my photos out of Flickr. For that I took Offlickr and ran it in set mode: 
./Offlickr.py -i 98848866@N00 -p -s -c 32
The "98848866@N00" is my Flickr ID which I got from this nice service, then -p to download photos (and not just metadata), -s to download all sets and -c 32 to do the download in 32 parallel threads. An important thing to do is to take all you photos that are not in a set in Flickr and add them to a new 'nonset" so that those photos are also picked up here, there is an option under Organize to select all non-set photos. It worked great, but there were a couple tiny issues:
  1. There is a bug in Offlickr that it does not honor pages in Flickr sets, so it only downloads first 500 images in each set, fix for that is in that bug;
  2. It also wanted Python2.6 for some reason, but worked fine with Python2.7
  3. With that number of threads sometimes Flickr actually failed to respond with the photo, serving a 500 error page instead. Offlickr does not check return code and happily daves that HTML page as the photo. To work around that I simply deleted the HTML errors and then ran the same Offlickr command again so that it re-downloads the missing files. Had to repeat that a few times to get all of them:
ack-grep -l -R "504 Gateway Time-out" dst/   xargs rm
After all that I had my photos, all 40 Gb of them on my computer. Should I upload them to G+ now? Not yet! See the photos all had lost their original file names. It turns out Flickr simply throws that little nugget of information away. It is nowhere to be found, neither in metadata or the UI or the Exif of the photos. Also some of my photos had clever descriptions that I did not want to loose or re-enter in G+ and also geolocation information. Flickr does not embed that info into the Exif of the image, instead it is provided separately - Offlickr saves that as an XML file next to each image. So I wrote a simple and hacky script to re-embed that info. It did 3 things:
  1. Embed title of the photo into the Description EXIF tag, so that G+ automatically picks it up as title of the photo;
  2. Embed the GEO location information into the proper EXIF tags, so that G+ picks that up automatically;
  3. Create a new file name based on original picture taken datetime and EXIF Canon FileNumber field (if such exists), so that all photos in an album are sequential.
It uses exiftool for the actual heavy lifting. After all that was finished I tested the result by uploading a few images to G+ and testing that their title is being set correctly, that they have a sane file name and that geo information works. After that I just uploaded them all. I tried figuring out the G+ API (they actually have it) but I was unable to pass the tutorial, so I abandoned it and simply uploaded the photos of each set int their own tab via a browser. That took a few hours. But that is much faster that with Flickr. Like 4 MB/s versus 0.5 MB/s faster. And here is the result. So far I kind of like it. We'll see how it goes after a year or so. Now on to an even more fun problem - I now have ~40 Gb of photos from Flickr/G+ and ~100 Gb of photos locally. Those sets partially intersect. I know for a fact that there are photos in Flickr set that are not in my local set and it is pretty obvoious that there are some the other way round. Now I need to find them. Oh and I cann't use simple hashes, because Exif has changed and so have the file names for most of them. And not to forget that I often take a burst of 3-4 pictures, so there are bound to be a some near-duplicate photos in each set too. This shall be fun :)

14 March 2014

Neil Williams: LAVA server on an arndale

(ARMv7 A15 dual core) I ve covered how I set up my home LAVA lab and how I got two iMX.53 boards running, the next step was to sort out the LAVA server. My initial setup relied on using my Thinkpad as the server. This was somewhat convenient as that s how I develop the code, but didn t help me run jobs like health checks because the laptop was usually somewhere other than on the home LAN. There had been a long-standing problem with using LAVA on ARM the uwsgi support didn t compile but the code being used was old. As the same code has been in Debian for a long time, I suspected that this was fixed with a newer version. So as part of migrating LAVA to django1.6, apache2.4, postgres9.3, django-tables2 0.13 and a few other updated dependencies, I have been using the version of uwsgi from Debian unstable for quite a while without problems on x86. A simple tweak to the LAVA setup scripts and a newer version of uwsgi became available and it builds just fine on armhf. (I haven t tried armel because Linaro is ARMv7 or newer and we don t test with ARMv5/ARMv6 boards, so there s no point in trying armel it s not likely to be an issue for this fix though.) (Only the current lava-deployment-tool methods need to actually compile uwsgi directly from upstream without any patches the packaging which will replace l-d-t uses precompiled binaries, just as any admin would expect.) That initial install was on one of the iMX.53 boards, which ran as slowly as anyone who has used an iMX.53 would expect. I haven t run test jobs on that install, it had a hard enough time serving the frontend. Clearly some more cores would be a good step and when an arndale became available for the home lab, the next step was to get a SATA drive onto the arndale, put Debian unstable on that and then deploy LAVA to the arndale using the Debian packages. As a bonus, these packages are built for django1.6 (using an unreleased branch). Sounds simple enough. It works on iMX.53, it should work on an arndale. Well, it does but only after some unexpected faff. arndale, u-boot and SATA I hate u-boot every single time I ever touch it, the little I know about any other u-boot device is completely useless. Uniformity is a good thing infinite permutations are just rope to hang ourselves with cute embedded nonsense hacks and I m bored of that whole scene. So, boot the arndale, interrupt the bootloader to get to the prompt. What s the first thing most people would want? help. Denied this particular u-boot has been compiled without the ability to display any help messages. u-boot has just sunk further into the depths of please can we have something else which is uniform across devices . OK, well maybe I can get by without help. sata init unknown command sata . (Go away, do something else for a bit.) The arndale isn t one of the newest boards in the ARMv7 world, LAVA has been using them for a while, so someone has probably done some work to fix this . nope. There s a workaround a nice detailed guide by Phil Endecott which details that the kernel needs to continue to be loaded from SD and then the SATA can be used for just the rootfs. Mildly annoyed (I was hoping to be able to update the arndale kernel without the hassle of mounting the SD card at all), the rest was straight-forward. Preparing the SATA and installing Debian Due to the complexity of some of the transitions currently ongoing in Debian ahead of the Jessie release freeze, uwsgi is not in Debian testing right now so this install has to be Debian unstable. That s OK, I ve been running Debian unstable on all my machines for several years now usually updating ~5 times a week.

# parted /dev/sda -s unit mb mktable msdos
# parted /dev/sda -s unit mb mkpart primary 1 -- "-0"
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/root/
 (note the in the mkpart command, that catches me out most times I try this. Without it, the special -0 gets interpreted as an option to parted but parted doesn t then tell you how to fix it, it just complains about an unknown option.) The SD image I am using is a LAVA master image, based on Ubuntu, so it was easy to put debootstrap onto it.

# apt-get install debootstrap
# debootstrap --arch=armhf sid /mnt/root/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian
# chroot /mnt/root/
 Inside the chroot, it s Debian as usual:

apt-get update
apt-get install emdebian-archive-keyring
passwd
 emdebian-archive-keyring is a package I (ab)use to sign my LAVA packaging as it has the advantage of being in Debian and Ubuntu going back to the time of Lenny, so it is always available from a repository which has already been authenticated to apt and doesn t involve downloading some random key from a website. I use passwd manually because this rootfs won t be using auto-login, it will have regular users. root passwords can be automated, if necessary. Thinking about login, remember to give the rootfs a usable tty. (The LAVA master image has a nasty habit of mangling editors like nano and vi when used over serial, so I m using echo.) For the arndale you need:

# echo T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttySAC2 115200 vt102 >> ./etc/inittab
# echo >> ./etc/securetty
# echo ttySAC2 >> ./etc/securetty
 Then to make the hostname useful, adapt this to your needs:

echo 127.0.0.1 arndale.codehelp arndale >> ./etc/hosts
 Finally, get the network running at boot and add the LAVA repository:

# echo auto lo eth0 > ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo iface lo inet loopback >> ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo iface eth0 inet dhcp >> ./etc/network/interfaces.d/arndale
# echo deb http://people.linaro.org/~neil.williams/lava sid main >> ./etc/apt/sources.list.d/lava.list
# apt-get update
# exit
 Once the LAVA packaging is finalised, the packages will be uploaded to a normal Linaro PPA, I ll update the packages to use an official download location and we ll move to using sane version string handling. For now, the packages are still in development. Code for the packaging is in Alioth but there are issues with anonymous access to the pkg-linaro-lava repositories currently, so I ve also pushed to http://github.com/Linaro if you are interested in building the packages yourself. See also my packaging guide which is also linked from the Links page on my own site. With that done, time to reboot, set the SATA drive as the rootfs using the horrid u-boot and install LAVA.

# reboot
> setenv bootargs console=tty0 console=ttySAC2,115200n8 drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=edid-1920x1080.fw root=/dev/sda1
> boot
 login
# apt-get install postgresql
 After this operation, 63.0 MB of additional disk space will be used.

# apt-get install lava-server
 After this operation, 231 MB of additional disk space will be used.

# a2dissite 000-default
# a2ensite lava-server
# apache2ctl restart
# service lava-server restart
 Take note of the IP address of your new ARM LAVA server and sign in with your regular details, e.g. using OpenID before creating a temporary superuser:

# lava-server manage createsuperuser --username default --email=user@example.com
 Choose a temporary password, log out, log in as the temporary superuser, promote your regular user to superuser and default owner of unrestricted devices in the django admin interface. Finally, log out and login as regular user to delete the temporary user. (Yes, that probably could do with some improvement remind me later and I ll see if a known user can be promoted from the command line.) See also Senthil s recent post on LAVA unit tests. Getting those to run without so many steps is also on the TODO list. Results
IP Address: 127.0.0.1
Is Master? : True
Uptime: 6:02:23.700000
Architecture: armv7l
Platform: Linux-3.10.1.0-1-linaro-arndale-armv7l-with-debian-jessie-sid
Insignal Arndale evaluation board based on EXYNOS5250
System memory: 1998MiB
 Next! I m working on some code upstream to make it easier to add devices from the command line. The aim is that a set of simple commands will set up an initial device, run a job on that device and submit a result bundle to the LAVA server as job #1. This gives some assurance that everything has gone well. Now I can finally add health checks for the iMX.53 boards and start regular tests on those boards. The cubie boards will wait for a later blog post, there are interesting problems with the bootloader and serial connections. That s a whole different rant.

1 March 2014

John Sullivan: Spritz

Spritz seems like a very interesting way to read quickly. It's the opposite of everything I've read (slowly) about speed reading, which focuses on using peripheral vision and not reading word-by-word. You're supposed to do things like move your eyes straight down the page, taking in whole lines at a time. Interruptions seem like a big problem; interruptions that make me look away, or interruptions in my brain, where I might realize I've not been paying attention for some amount of time. Maybe they should have navigation buttons similar to video players, so you can skip backward 15 seconds at a time. I also do want to go back and review previous pages sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with interruption, so I wouldn't want word-by-word to be the only way to view a text -- especially when reading nonfiction. I might event want it to work in a mode where you hold down the button on the side of your phone or tablet in order to move the words, and then have them automatically pause when you release. It feels like I'd want a lot of short breaks when reading in this style. It should also be free software, but unfortunately I'm guessing it won't be. I hope someone will make a free software application along these lines -- the basics seem pretty basic.

26 February 2014

Vincent Sanders: There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

It is the first of these which I have recently been attempting and I think Phil Karlton might have a good point.
What are we talking about?Web browsers are pretty complex beasties but the basic concept is pretty easy to understand. They fetch a bunch of files that make up a web page and render those source files into something suitable for human consumption.

It is also intuitive that fetching all the files that make up a web page, every time you browse to a new page, might be wasteful, especially if most of the files had not changed from the previous page.

In order to address this browsers hang onto copies of these files in case your browsing needs them again, this is known as a source file cache. Caches are a widely used technique throughout many aspects of computer technology but the basic idea is that they trade one resource for another.

In this case we are trading local storage space (memory or disc) for access time. This type of trade may give large benefits due to the large differences in access times (sometimes known as latency) between local and network resources.

For example, if the source files that make up a web page are a Megabyte in size accessed with a 2013 era PC with a 10Mbit connection to the Internet:
From this example it becomes startlingly obvious why a source cache is so desirable. I have greatly simplified the browsers operation here as they usually implement many layers of additional caching in other areas to make the browsing experience subjectively smoother.

And before the observant reader suggests that we could just make the network faster it ought to be mentioned that due to fundamental physical constraints, like the speed of light, it would be unlikely that the average practical network reply will ever drop much below 150,000 s [1] or some 40 times slower than disc. Still a worthwhile gain.
Knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothingHaving shown the benefits it might be nice to think there are no downsides to caching, this is not the case, as I mentioned we are trading storage for time and as in any trade one must expect there to be overheads.

In the case of a browser we face several obstacles. Firstly not every file that goes to make up a web page can be cached. The HTTP specification contains an entire section on caching which contains numerous rules and operations to ensure that only objects that should be cached are and determines for how long they can be kept before going "stale".

A great deal of this complexity comes from just how desirable caching is to network providers. Many ISPs will have web proxy servers to cache requests for all users to reduce their bandwidth usage, or increasingly, to implement content filtering according to the local government censorship rules. The browsers cache must know how to interact with these proxies without getting erroneous results.

Then comes the problem alluded to in the section title. A browsers cache cannot grow indefinitely. Eventually a system would run out of memory and disc if a browser kept every file. To deal with this the cache is limited sometimes by the number of files it holds, but more commonly by size both in memory and on disc.

The caching structure used by a web browser is hierarchical in that it will first evict (move) files from memory to a backing store (disc) and when the disc cache size limit is exceeded files are evicted to the next tier. Which in this case, will involve deleting the local copy (invalidating) and requiring performing a fetch from the network if the file is needed again.

Tardis at the Beeb by Sarah G from flikrWhen the cache size is exceeded the decision is made about what to remove from the cache using a cache strategy or algorithm. The aim of this decision is to discard the data that will not be required again for the longest time.

If we had a blue box with a madman inside, who we could persuade to bring our browsing history back from the future, implementing b l dy's algorithm might be possible. Failing a perfect solution we are reduced to making a judgement based on the information available to us.

This involves computing a cost for replacing each entry in the cache and evicting those with the lowest values. The selected algorithm has a large impact on the effectiveness of the cache and often needs fine tuning for the task at hand.
Never has so little been measured so muchHaving established that caching is useful and that we need to make decisions on what to keep it follows that those decisions must be based on information. This information consists of two main groups:
Maintaining all of this information is a significant part of the overheads involved with caching and a compromise must be struck between having the necessary information to make good caching choices and the cost maintaining that data.
Cache metricsMost cache implementations maintain at least some basic metrics, at the very least how much storage is being used so a decision on if evicting entries from the cache to reclaim space is necessary.

It is also common to keep a record of how well the cache is performing. The cache efficiency (the hit rate) is usually measured as the ratio of successful accesses provided from the cache (a cache hit) to the total number of requests to the cache.

A perfect cache would have all hits and no misses (a hit rate of 1) while using as little storage as possible (but as already noted that requires a special madman). The hit rate can be used to automatically change the behaviour of the eviction algorithm, perhaps using more storage if the hit rate drops too low or changing the eviction frequency.
MetadataEach object must carry with it the data necessary to regain its state when retrieved from the cache. This information is essential for the correct operation of the cache but in of itself provides no direct value.

In the case of browser source data this includes all the headers sent in the original network fetch. These headers are themselves just metadata sent along with the object by the web server which must be preserved.

Two particularly useful value for making a good eviction decision are how long it has been since the object was last used and how many times it has been used. This is because an object that was cached a long time ago and then never used again is much less valuable than one that has recently been repeatedly used.
An ImplementationIt is all very well talking about the general solution but a full understanding can only be gained by examining a real implementation. The NetSurf cache was chosen as it is a suitably small amount of code but still demonstrates all the major design features.
InterfaceThe cache deals with all source data and provides the browser with a single unified object request interface regardless of if the source data can be cached or not. This is useful to hide the implementation details allowing for changes without affecting the rest of the browsers code.

The implementation effectively consists of two lists of objects, those that can be cached and those that cannot. Each object on these lists is reference counted against one or more users and while there is at least one user the source data is maintained in memory.

Objects determined to be non cached are always directly fetched from their source and are immediately released once they have no users remaining.

For cacheable objects an attempt is made to fulfil the request in descending order:
  1. from objects already in memory.
  2. from the backing store.
  3. from a network fetch.
Irrespective of the source of the data the remaining operations on the object (determining freshness etc.) are exactly as if the request had been fulfilled from the network. This approach means the use of the cache is transparent to the object users.
WriteoutObjects are placed in the backing store asynchronously to any other operations. When an object has been fetched from the network a background task is scheduled for when the browser is otherwise idle.

This writeout task constructs a list of all cacheable objects not yet in the backing store, associates a cost value with each object and then proceeds to write those objects to the backing store in highest to lowest value order.
CleaningA periodically scheduled task deals with ensuring the cache is cleaned. This consists of destroying stale objects and arranging fresh objects are not using more memory than the configuration permits.

Memory usage is reduced within the cleaning task by discarding the source data for objects already held in the backing store (where the data can be retrieved relatively cheaply)

Additional memory may be recovered by simply discarding unused objects held only in memory. These objects are usually those which have only recently become unused otherwise the writeout task would have committed them to the backing store.

The most recently used objects are statistically likely to be used again soon, because of this there is a high risk of a cache miss associated with discarding these objects. In order to mitigate this undesirable effect the cleaning heuristic favours using more memory than configured for short periods rather than discarding from memory.
Backing storeThe backing store is a simple key-value database. Each source data object and its metadata (its headers etc.) is associated with a unique key (the URL used to fetch it). The backing store is simply required to store and retrieve the object data associated with the given URL.

The backing store implementation in NetSurf is pluggable, this flexibility is required for dealing with the greatly varying capabilities and limits of the various systems the browser is required to execute on.

A novel aspect of this backing store interface is that if an implementation returns the wrong object it is not considered an error and is simply treated as a cache miss. This is possible because the metadata contains the URL of the stored object enabling object verification.

This behaviour is permitted because techniques which significantly improve key-value store performance (principally key hashing) become available if they are not required to always give the correct answer.

The backing store is also required to manage its size within the configured limits and deal with any filesystem behaviour details.

The reference backing store is trivial in that it performs a hash operation on the input URL, encodes the result with base64url encoding and uses that as the object filename. The length of the hash can be configured allowing use of the reference implementation in any situation where using the filesystem as a database is acceptable.

The reference backing store default hash is SHA-1 yielding almost unique [2] 160 bit key values stored in much the same way as the git DVCS. Note we are not using this hash for its cryptographic properties and at worst a collision will result in the cache being a tiny amount less efficient.
ConclusionHopefully this has shown what a browser source file cache is, why it is useful and a basic understanding of how they are implemented.

I will admit I have glossed over some of the more challenging aspects especially in relation to actually implementing the cache strategy but I hope that the reader will forgive those omissions of detail in a quest for a little more clarity of the general principles.

I would like to thank John-Mark Bell for implementing the NetSurf cache and to Melodie Parry for proof reading and providing feedback.

[1] Speed of light is 3x10^8m/s earth circumference is 4x10^7m, divide circumference by speed gives 133,000 s which gives longest round trip time from anywhere on surface of earth to point furthest from. So assuming a whole megabyte can be transferred in one round trip and allowing for some overhead the lower bound estimate of 150,000 s looks reasonable.

[2] Mathematically speaking this hash would allow us to say that with the current estimated 1x10^11 URLs on the internet the likelihood of a collision is still vanishingly small (at least 1x10^-15)

22 February 2014

Vasudev Kamath: First experience of driving in Bangalore

So finally I did it, I managed to ride the 2-wheeler in Bangalore roads!. Officially I've got a license to drive 2 and 4 wheelers back in 2011 but I was never confident enough to ride the vehicle on road and in traffic. Partially this is because I don't own a vehicle and I've never practiced driving, and partially because of road and traffic conditions in India I was bit afraid to do so. So today morning my roommate and me planned to go to temple in the early morning. We got up at 530 in the morning and we were ready to drive to Mahalaxmi Layout at 615. Since during this time traffic is very less I asked my roommate shall I drive and he agreed!. So I drove the bike from Malleshwaram to Mahalaxmi Layout and it was fun. I did had hick up in uphill driving as my mind was not co-ordinating well with breaks and gear. I did have hickups in first gear too but I guess this will be alright once I get hold of things. I'm still not having enough confidence to drive during the peak hours because people are not at all following traffic rules. They just change the lane without any hints or just come to middle of road from side roads without looking at other side to see if there is a vehicle is coming from other side of the road (yes they don't have courtesy to wait). And finally they can shout at persons who is actually following rules. In general very less people have traffic discipline in India. But I will adapt to this once I start driving so I'm now all set to get my 2 wheeler soon and ride on!

10 February 2014

Mario Lang: Neurofunkcasts

I have always loved Drum and Bass. In 2013 I rediscovered my love for Darkstep and Neurofunk, and found that these genres have developed quite a lot in the recent years. Some labels like Black Sun Empire and Evol Intent produce mixes/sets on a regular basis as podcasts these days. This article aggregates some neurofunk podcasts I like a lot, most recent first. Enjoy 33 hours and 57 minutes of fun with dark and energizing beats. Thanks to BSE Contrax and Evol Intent for providing such high quality sets. You can also see the Python source for the program that was used to generate this page.

8 February 2014

Enrico Zini: original-sin

Original sin I feel that I was somewhat born innocent, an animal with sound, primal instincts. But if I remained that way, I wouldn't be able to function in a complex society, so I got education. Education taught me what is expected from me in order to be accepted by my peers[1]. Education taught me more than that: it also taught me to enjoy what a complex society can give me: art, science, history, philosophy, adding depth of meaning and correlations to my perceptions and memories. Education wasn't perfect, though. Some of my educators obsessed about some of the expectations, and gave me rules to follow that aren't really needed to interact with a society. Sit down for hours in silence without complaining. Don't talk back to figures of authority, even when they are abusing me. Don't ever feel that my efforts in a task have been enough, because there is always something more that I could have done. Do what people expect me to do, regardless of what I wish to do. Do what I need to do, not what I want to do. So I grew up with a set of arbitrary expectations that weren't needed to function in a society, and weren't in any way meeting any of my needs, yet I still felt them as a part of me, putting every effort into meeting them that I would put in making myself happy. I like to call this set of learned arbitrary, unneeded expectations "neurosis". I like this as an interpretation of the "original sin" myth: in order to go from an innocent animal to a member of a complex society, I acquired a set of neuroses that make me behave in a meaningless way. Or, rephrased going along with the myth, that rob me of my innocence. In some environments like BDSM, many have a name for an unnegotiated practice forced on a person: they call it "abuse". It made sense to accept that I have been abused many times while being educated, because my educators also had their own baggage of parasite expectations, of neuroses. And since I don't currently know how I can ever be sure that I freed myself from all my neuroses, I feel like I should accept that it is possible that I do and will abuse others; by accepting it as a possibility, I hope at least to be able to realise as soon as possible that I am doing it, and try to stop. I have now realised that my life is far simpler and more rewarding when expectations are negotiated between all the parties involved. I have recently spent a substantial amount of my energy in recognising and renegotiating many of the expectations and the neuroses that I had learnt while growing up, and, who knows, perhaps this effort will continue throughout my life. So there you go, an agnostic atheist freeing himself of his original sin, and regaining his paradise lost one step at a time, alive, on earth. And enjoying every moment of it. [1] I suspect that is why people educated in a high class society tend to be accepted more easily by a high class society: they conform to the right set of expectations. But I digress.

5 February 2014

Andrew Shadura: Clearlooks-Ph nix update

Once upon a time, GTK+ 3.0 was released. That release brought at least one Bad Thing : incompatibility with GTK+ 2.x themes. At the same time, previously popular Clearlooks theme hasn t been ported. Many people didn t like that, but only one decided to DTRT to do the Right Thing. Jean-Philippe Fleury wrote Clearlooks-Ph nix (originally, Clearwaita), a GTK+ 3 theme which was supposed to have a look and feel as close as possible to the original Clearlooks. He based his work on an engine of a new GTK+ default, Adwaita theme. Quite soon, however, GTK+ 3 theme API has changed, and it became easily possible to rewrite the theme without using any additional theming engines, with just plain GTK+ stuff involved. Then GTK+ 3.6 came and broke the API once more. Jean-Philippe fixed stuff to work with newer GTK+ again, and everyone was happy again. But Empire striked back: GTK+ 3.8 brought more disruptive changes, rendering menus as ugly as never before. Unfortunately, Jean-Philippe was unable to cope with changes alone, he set up a mailing list to collectively develop Clearlooks-Ph nix, but that didn t help, and no fix has been released during more than half a year. As a maintainer and a user of Clearlooks-Ph nix, I had to do something with this, as more and more things needed recent GTK+ 3 to work. After spending some time studying CSS code and playing with its knobs, I found a solution which proved to be quite simple, and uploaded an updated package. Unfortunately, the changes aren t in the upstream package yet. Now, with GTK+ 3.10, stuff is not quite working again. Some changes in GTK+ internals lead to menu bars not being coloured properly. At the moment of this writing, an updated package is already available in unstable.

30 January 2014

Russell Coker: The Movie Experience

Phandroid has one of many articles about a man being detained for wearing Google Glass in a cinema [1]. The article states as a fact that it s probably not smart to bring a recording device into a movie theater which is totally bogus. I ve visited a government office where recording devices were prohibited, they provided a locker for me to store everything that could be used for electronic storage outside their main security zone, that s what you do when you ban recording devices. Any place that doesn t have such facilities really isn t banning recording. The Gadgeteer has the original story with more detail with an update showing that the Department of Homeland Security were responsible for detaining the victim [2]. There are lots of issues here with DHS continuing to do nothing good and more bad things than most people suspect and with the music and film industry organisations attacking innocent people. But one thing that seems to be ignored is that movies are a recreational activity, so it s an experience that they are selling not just a movie. Any organisation that wants to make money out of movies really should be trying to make movies fun. The movie experience has always involved queuing, paying a lot of money for tickets ($20 per seat seems common), buying expensive drinks/snacks, and having to waste time on anti-piracy adverts. Now they are adding the risk of assault, false-arrest, and harassment under color of law to the down-sides of watching a movie. Downloading a movie via Bittorrent takes between 20 minutes and a few hours (depending on size and internet connectivity). Sometimes it can be quicker to download a movie than to drive to a cinema and if you are organising a group to watch a movie it will definitely be easier to download it. When you watch a movie at home you can pause it for a toilet break and consume alcoholic drinks while watching (I miss the Dutch cinemas where an intermission and a bar were standard features). It s just a better experience to download a movie via Bittorrent. I ve previously written about the way that downloading movies is better than buying a DVD [3], now they are making the cinema a worse experience too. I sometimes wonder if groups like the MPAA are actually trying to make money from movies or whether they just want to oppress their audiences for fun or psychological research. I could imagine someone like the young Phillip Zimbardo working for the MPAA and doing experiments to determine how badly movie industry employees can treat their customers before the customers revolt. Anyone who watches a Jack Ryan movie (or any movie with a Marty-Stu/Gary-Stu character) obviously doesn t even want to experience the stress of an unhappy ending to a movie. It seems obvious that such people won t want the stress of potentially being assaulted in the cinema. In terms of economics it seems a bad idea to do anything about recording in the cinema. When I was 11 I was offered the opportunity to watch a movie that had been recorded by a video camera in the US before it was released in Australia, I wasn t interested because watching a low quality recording wouldn t be fun. It seems to me that if The Pirate Bay (the main site for Bittorrent downloads of movies) [4] was filled with awful camera recordings of movies then it would discourage people from using it. A quick search shows some camera recordings on The Pirate Bay, it seems that if you want to download a movie of reasonable quality then you have to read the Wikipedia page about Pirated Movie Release Types [5] to make sure that you get a good quality download. But if you buy a DVD in a store or visit a cinema then you are assured of image and sound quality. If the movie industry were smarter they would start uploading camera recordings of movies described as Blue-Ray rips to mess with Bittorrent users and put newbies off downloading movies.
Related posts:
  1. Censorship, Piracy, and Movie Ideas Flame has written a satirical post about the different methods...
  2. the next feature for a spy movie I have noticed that motion sensors on burglar alarms don t...
  3. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i First Experience I have just got a new Xperia X10i for my...

28 January 2014

Bits from Debian: Debian.org enabled for SIP federation and WebRTC, XMPP/Jabber to follow

Debian System Administrators working in conjunction with pkg-voip team member Daniel Pocock have set up a SIP proxy and TURN server for debian.org. Specifically, the SIP proxy provides a way for Debian Developers to use their Debian email ID as a SIP address for making calls to other project members and exchanging calls with any other domain that is enabled for SIP. The repro SIP proxy from reSIProcate has been chosen for this project. The TURN server provides a mechanism for users of SIP or XMPP (Jabber) to relay audio and video streams through a public IP address when necessary, eliminating many of the quality issues that arise when NAT devices block the media streams in one or both directions. The service allows the users to connect directly with the SIP device or softphone of their choosing, including many of those packaged in Debian such as Jitsi and Empathy or third party solutions like Lumicall or CSipSimple on Android. The SIP proxy also includes a WebRTC interface, allowing Debian Developers to immediately try WebRTC voice and video calls without installing or configuring any software of their own other than a web browser. A second stage of the project involves providing an XMPP (Jabber) server with similar capabilities for federated communications between debian.org users and other domains. Further details will be announced in the weeks ahead. It is a significant feature of the Debian Project philosophy that we can operate the entire project using free software, specifically, using software available in Debian packages running on our own infrastructure and without a dependency on third party cloud solutions.These new services for project members fulfill those expectations. It is particularly relevant for situations where real-time communication (voice or video) collaboration takes place with third parties such as applicants for Google Summer of Code, Outreach Program for Women, sponsors, media and other free software projects. Project specific details and a user guide are available now on the Debian Wiki at http://wiki.debian.org/UnifiedCommunications/DebianDevelopers

Andrew Pollock: [life] Day 1, first day of Kindergarten

Yesterday was the first day of my new routine, except I haven't really established the new routine yet. I think that's going to take a few weeks. It was, however, the first day of Zoe's new routine, she started Kindergarten. "Kindergarten" is a bit of an ambiguous term, even within Australia, it seems. Back when I went to school, there was "pre-school", which was, as best I can determine, what "Kindergarten" is now, except a year later. It was optional, half a week, and the year preceding the start of primary ("elementary") school. I think every other state was already doing an extra year of school (which I think they called "Kindergarten", "Kinder", or something starting with "K") so Queensland blew up "pre-school", created "Prep" and now that's the first year of primary school. Zoe will start "Prep" next year. Then the Queensland education boffins realised that kids were missing out on the stuff that "pre-school" used to offer, so they reintroduced it in the form of "Kindergarten" (by Queensland standards). It's supposed to be play-based, and isn't really "long day care". Zoe does Monday, Tuesday and every other Wednesday, from 8:30am until 2:20pm. I'd only heard about C&K from a friend after moving back to Brisbane, so we were very fortunate to secure a place without having camped out on a waiting list from birth. We got very lucky, and ended up getting multiple offers, but we're pretty thrilled with the one that Zoe got into. It's a relatively new facility, right next to a state school and some bushland. They take the kids on excursions into the bushland, and up to the state school where there's some chickens. The Kindergarten facility itself is really lovely. Anyway, yesterday was Zoe's first day. I biked there yesterday morning (without Zoe) and it took me about 11 minutes. It took me more like 15 minutes to pick her up with the bike trailer. It's uphill on the way there, but not too much of a slog. It's been really great that Zoe's BFF from day care, Megan, also scored a place in the same Kindergarten, as I think this will help the transition for both girls greatly. I was able to stay for an extended period of time to help settle Zoe in, and I was able to leave without her being particularly distressed. I then biked home, running a few errands along the way. I then got stuck into a woodworking project (I'm trying to make a little wooden clothesline for Zoe). It turns out trying to cut a halved joint with a hand saw and chisel is a lot of work. I've managed to aggravate an old rotator cuff injury and the two pieces are a tad too tight, so I'm thinking I'll redo it and cut the joint out with an electric router instead. I probably spent at least a couple of hours faffing around with that. So I banged away with a hammer and chisel for a bit, got a haircut, had a late lunch and next thing I knew it was 2pm and time to head back on the bike to pick up Zoe. She was still asleep on her stretcher when I arrived to pick her up, which wasn't that surprising, since she tends to sleep later and longer at day care. I got a good opportunity to chat with her teacher about her first day and then gently woke her up with a kiss, and we headed home. I introduced Zoe to one of our new neighbours, and after a snack, we drove into Fortitude Valley where I had to pick up some mail from my post office box. When we got back home, I started on dinner while Zoe watched a little bit of TV. I spontaneously invited my cousin over to join us for dinner, and we walked down to the Hawthorne Garage for a babyccino after dinner. It was a good day. I realised that I'm going to have to be super regimented with my time on the days Zoe is in Kindergarten, because 2pm is going to roll around very quickly. "Scarcity brings clarity", as Sergey says...

17 January 2014

Chris Lamb: Captain Phillips: Pontius Pirate

https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/phillips_b.jpg Somalia's chief exports appear to be morally-ambiguous Salon articles about piracy and sophomoric evidence against libertarianism. However, it is the former topic that Captain Phillips concerns itself with, inspired by the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama container ship in 2009. What is truth? In the end, Captain Phillips does not rise above Pontius Pilate in providing an answer, but it certainly tries using more refined instruments than irony or leaden sarcasm. This motif pervades the film. Obviously, it is based on a "true story" and brings aboard that baggage, but it also permeates the plot in a much deeper sense. For example, Phillips and the US Navy lie almost compulsively to the pirates, whilst the pirates only really lie once (where they put Phillips in greater danger). Notice further that Phillips only starts to tell the truth when he thinks all hope is lost. These telling observations become even more fascinating when you realise that they must be based on the testimony of the, well, liars. Clearly, deception is a weapon to be monopolised and there are few limits on what good guys can or should lie about if they believe they can save lives.
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/phillips_c.jpg

Even Phillip's nickname ("Irish") is a falsehood he straight-up admits he is an American citizen.

Futhermore, there is an utterly disarming epilogue where Phillips is being treated for shock by clinical efficient medical staff. Not only will this scuttle any "blanket around the shoulders" clich but is probably a highly accurate portrayal of what actually happens post-trauma. This echoes the kind of truth Werner Herzog aims for in his filmmaking as well his guilt-inducing duality between uncomfortable lingering and compulsive viewing. Lastly, a starter for a meta-discussion: can a film based on real-world events even be "spoilered"? Hearing headlines on the radio before you read your newspaper hardly robs you of a literary journey... Captain Phillips does have some quotidian problems. Firstly, the only tool for ratcheting up tension is for the Somalians to launch verbal broadsides at the Americans, with each compromise somehow escalating the situation. This technique is effective but well before the climatic rescue scene where it is really needed it has been subject to the most extreme diminishing returns. (I cannot be the first to notice the "Africans festooned with guns shouting incomphensively" trope I hope it is based on a Babel-esque mechanism of disorientation from miscommunication rather than anything more unsavoury.)
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/phillips_a.jpg

The racist idea that Africans prefer an AK-47 rotated about the Z-axis is socially constructed.

Secondly, the US Navy acts like a teacher with an Ofsted inspector observing quietly from the corner of the classroom; far too well-behaved it suspends belief, with no post-kill gloating or even the tiniest of post-arrest congratulations. Whilst nobody wants to see the Navy overreact badly to other military branches getting all the glory, nobody wants to see a suspiciously bland recruitment vehicle either. Paradoxically, this hermetic treatment made me unduly fascinated by them as if they were part of some military "uncanny valley". Two quick observations:
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/phillips_d.jpg

The drone footage: I'd love to write an essay about how Call of Duty might have influenced (or even be) cinema.

Finally, despite the title, the film is actually about two captains; the skillful liar Phillips and ... well, that's the real problem. Whilst Captain Muse is certainly no caricatured Hook, we are offered little depth beyond a "You're not just a fisherman" faux-revelation that leads nowhere. I was left inventing reasons for his akrasia so that he made any sense whatsoever. One could charitably argue that the film attempts to stay objective on Muse, but the inability for the film to take any obvious ethical stance actually seems to confuse and then compromise the narrative. What deeper truth is actually being revealed? Is this film or documentary? Worse still, the moral vacuum is invariably filled by the viewer's existing political outlook: are Somali pirates victims of circumstance who are forced into (alas, regrettable) swashbuckling adventures to pacify plank-threatening warlords? Or are they violent and dangerous criminals who habour an irrational resentment against the West, flimsily represented by material goods in shipping containers? Your improvised answer to this Rorschach test will always sit more haphazardly in the film than any pre-constructed treatment ever could. 6/10

Chris Lamb: Review: Captain Phillips (2013)

https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/phillips_b.jpg Somalia's chief exports appear to be morally-ambiguous Salon articles about piracy and sophomoric evidence against libertarianism. However, it is the former topic that Captain Phillips concerns itself with, inspired by the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama container ship in 2009. What is truth? In the end, Captain Phillips does not rise above Pontius Pilate in providing an answer, but it certainly tries using more refined instruments than irony or leaden sarcasm. This motif pervades the film. Obviously, it is based on a "true story" and brings aboard all that well-travelled baggage, but it also permeates the plot in a much deeper sense. For example, Phillips and the US Navy lie almost compulsively to the pirates, whilst the pirates only really lie once where they put Phillips in greater danger. Notice further that Phillips only starts to tell the truth when he thinks all hope is lost. These telling observations become even more fascinating when you realise that they must be based on the testimony of the, well, liars. Clearly, deception is a weapon to be monopolised and there are few limits on what good guys can or should lie about if they believe they can save lives.
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/phillips_c.jpg

Even Phillip's nickname ("Irish") is a falsehood he straight-up admits he is an American citizen.

Lastly, there is an utterly disarming epilogue where Phillips is being treated for shock by clinical efficient medical staff. Not only will it scuttle any "blanket around the shoulders" clich but is probably a highly accurate portrayal of what actually happens post-trauma. This echoes the kind of truth Werner Herzog often aims for in his filmmaking as well his guilt-inducing duality between uncomfortable lingering and compulsive viewing. Another angle worthy of discussion: can a film based on real-world events even be "spoilered"? Hearing headlines on the before you read the newspaper hardly robs you of a literary journey... Captain Phillips does have some quotidian problems. Firstly, the only tool for ratcheting up tension is for the Somalians to launch verbal broadsides at the Americans, with each compromise somehow escalating the situation further. This technique is genuinely effective but well before the climatic rescue scene where it is really needed it has been subject to the most extreme diminishing returns. (I cannot be the first to notice the "Africans festooned with guns shouting incomphensively" trope I hope it is based on a Babel-esque mechanism of disorientation and miscommunication rather than anything, frankly, unsavoury.)
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/phillips_a.jpg

The racist idea that Africans prefer a AK-47 rotated about the Z-axis is socially constructed.

Secondly, the US Navy acts like a teacher with an Ofsted inspector observing quietly from the corner of the classroom; far too well-behaved it suspends belief, with no post-kill gloating or even the tiniest of post-arrest congratulations. Whilst nobody wants to see the Navy overreact badly to other military branches getting all the glory, nobody wants to see a suspiciously bland recruitment vehicle either. Paradoxically, this hermetic treatment made me unduly fascinated by them, as if they were part of some military "uncanny valley". Two quick observations:
https://chris-lamb.co.uk/wp-content/2014/phillips_d.jpg

The drone footage: I'd love to read (or write) an essay about how Call of Duty might have influenced cinema.

Finally, despite the title, the film is actually about two captains; the skillful liar Phillips and ... well, that's the real problem. Whilst Captain Muse is certainly no caricatured Hook, we are offered little depth beyond a "You're not just a fisherman" faux-revelation that leads nowhere. I was left inventing reasons for his akrasia so that he made any sense whatsoever. One could charitably argue that the film attempts to stay objective on Muse, but the inability for the film to take any obvious ethical stance actually seems to confuse and then compromise the narrative. What deeper truth is actually being revealed? Is this film or documentary? Worse still, the moral vacuum is invariably filled by the viewer's existing political outlook: are Somali pirates victims of circumstance who are forced into (alas, regrettable) swashbuckling adventures to pacify plank-threatening warlords? Or are they violent and dangerous criminals who habour an irrational resentment against the West, flimsily represented by material goods in shipping containers? Your improvised answer to this Rorschach test will always sit more haphazardly in the film than any pre-constructed treatment ever could. 6/10

14 January 2014

Daniel Pocock: PostFinance gives back my money

14 days with no response to written requests for a refund of the error. After a few hours of objective scrutiny on this blog, however, the money was put back: Thanks to all those who provided comments, especially Philipp Kern who found the paper form that reveals how bad the online standing order form really is, it is quite possible that was a factor in convincing PostFinance to take some responsibility. It is also possible that the contact center staff were not even aware of the way the standing order form is viewed by the customer, they may have been looking at some alternative form that had been generated by regurgitating the user input. These are just some examples of the problems that occur (and require thorough and professional analysis) when business processes go online and nobody has a paper trail to prove what they really meant.

1 January 2014

Russ Allbery: 2013 Book Reading in Review

What a strange year. 2013 was marked by a whole sequence of entirely unexpected events, including multiple major work upheavals. For large chunks of the year, I had very little time or emotional energy for personal reading goals, and particularly for writing reviews. I declared personal amnesty on most of my intentions halfway through the year, and all the totals will reflect that. On the plus side (although not for reading and reviews), it was a great year for video games. Next year, there will be no specific goals. Between continuing work fallout, a very busy project schedule, my intent to keep playing a lot of video games, and various other personal goals I want to take on, I'm going to take the pressure off of reading. Things will be read and reviews will be written (and I'm going to make more of an effort to write reviews shortly after reading books), but I'm not going to worry about how many. The below statistics are confined to the books I reviewed in 2013. I read six more books that I've not yet reviewed, due to the chaos at the end of the year. Those will be counted in 2014. There were no 10 out of 10 books this year, partly due to the much lower reading totals and partly due to my tendency this year to turn to safe comfort reading, which is reliably good but unlikely to be exceptional. There were, however, several near-misses that were worth calling out. My favorite book of the year was Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which narrowly missed a 10 for me due to some fundamental problems with the plot premise. But this is still an excellent book: the best novel about the practice of science and philosophy that I've ever read. Also deserving mention are K.E. Lane's And Playing the Role of Herself, lovely and intelligent lesbian romance that's likely to appeal even to people who would not normally try that genre, and Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars. The latter isn't quite at the level of Kay's earlier Under Heaven, but it's still an excellent work of alternate historical fiction in a memorable setting. A special honorable mention goes to Lisa O'Donnell's The Death of Bees. It requires a lot of warnings for very dark subject matter and a rather abrupt ending, but it's been a long time since I've cared that much about the characters of a book. My favorite non-fiction book of the year was Gary J. Hudson's They Had to Go Out, a meticulously researched account of a tragic Coast Guard mission. The writing is choppy, the editing could have been better, and it's clear that the author is not a professional writer, but it's the sort of detailed non-fiction account that can only be written by someone who's been there and lived through similar experiences. Also worth mentioning is Mark Jason Dominus's Higher Order Perl, which was the best technical book I read all year and which I found quite inspiring for my own programming. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

29 December 2013

Russ Allbery: Review: The Incrementalists

Review: The Incrementalists, by Steven Brust & Skyler White
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: September 2013
ISBN: 0-7653-3422-4
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 304
The Incrementalists are a secret society that has been in continuous existence for forty thousand years. The members are immortal... sort of (more on that in a moment). They are extremely good at determining what signals, triggers, and actions have the most impact on people, and adept at using those triggers to influence people's behavior. And they're making the world better. Not in any huge, noticeable way, just a little bit, here and there. Incrementally. Brust and White completely had me with this concept. There are several SF novels about immortals, but (apart from the vampire subgenre) they mostly stay underground and find ways to survive without trying to change the surrounding human society. I love the idea of small, incremental changes, and I was looking forward to reading a book about how that would work. How do they choose what to do? How do they find the right place to push? What long-term goals would such an organization pursue, and what governance structure would they use? I'm still wondering about most of those things, sadly, since that isn't what this novel is about at all. I should be fair: a few of those questions hover in the background. There are some political arguments (that parallel arguments on Brust's blog), and a tiny bit about governance. But mostly this is a sort of romance, a fight over identity, and an extensive exploration of the mental "garden" that the Incrementalists use and build to hold their memories and share information with each other. The story revolves around two Incrementalists: Phil, who is one of the leaders and has one of the longest continuous identities of any of the group, and Renee, a new recruit by Phil who picks up the memories and capabilities (sort of) of the recently-deceased Incrementalist Celeste. Phil is the long-term insider, although a fairly laid-back one. Renee is the outsider, the one to which the story is happening at the beginning, who is taught how the Incrementalists' system works. The Incrementalists is told in alternating first-person viewpoint sections by Phil and Renee (making me wonder if the characters were each written by one of the authors). Once I got past my disappointment over this book not being quite what I wanted, the identity puzzles that Brust and White play with here caught my attention. The underlying "magic" of the Incrementalists is based on the "memory palace" concept of storing memories via visualizations, but takes it into something akin to personal alternate worlds. Their immortality isn't through physical immortality, but rather the ability to store their memories and personality in their garden, which is their term for the memory palace, and then have it imposed on someone else: a combination of reincarnation, mental takeover, and mental merging. This makes for complex interpersonal relationships and complex interactions between memory, belief, and identity, not to mention some major ethical issues, which come to a head in Phil and Renee's relationship and Celeste's lingering meddling. I think Brust and White are digging into some interesting questions of character here. There's a lot of emphasis in The Incrementalists on the ease with which people can be manipulated, and the Incrementalists themselves are far from immune. Choice and personal definition are both questionable concepts given how much influence other people have, how many vulnerabilities everyone carries with them, and how much one's opinions are governed by one's life history. That makes identity complex, and raises the question of whether one can truly define oneself. But, while all these ideas are raised, I think The Incrementalists dances around them more than engages them directly. It's similar to the background hook: yes, these people are slowly improving the world, and we see a little bit of that (and a little bit of them manipulating people for their own convenience), but the story doesn't fully engage with the idea. There's a romance, a few arguments, some tension, some world-building, but I don't feel like this book ever fully committed to any of them. One of the occasional failure modes of Brust for me is insufficient explanation and insufficient clarity, and I hit that here. My final impression of The Incrementalists is interesting, enjoyable, but vaguely disappointing. It's still a good story with some interesting characters and nice use of the memory palace concept, and I liked Renee throughout (although I think the development of the love story is disturbingly easy and a little weird). But I can't strongly recommend it, and I'm not sure if it's worth seeking out. Rating: 7 out of 10

9 December 2013

Pau Garcia i Quiles: Going to FOSDEM 2014

Once more, I m going to FOSDEM 2014, the largest Free/Libre/Open Source Software event in Europe (5,000 attendants every year). fosdem-logo As usual, I will be in charge of the Desktops DevRoom, together with our friends from Gnome (Christophe Fergeau), Unity (Didier Roche), Enlightenment (Philippe Caseiro) and others. See you in Brussels 1-2 February 2014! BTW, have you already submitted your talk proposal for the Desktops DevRoom? The deadline (15th December) is very close! Do not wait any more!!! See the details here: FOSDEM 2014 Desktops DevRoom Call for Talks

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