This issue is about a bit specific situation in Germany and it's (mainly tax-financed) public service broadcasting. If you think you are not interested, please skip this entry. :) Just beginning from scratch... In Germany we have (like most european countries) a public service broadcasting. Starting with 2013 the system collecting the funding of the public service broadcasting changed from GEZ to Beitragsservice.
To make it short (and a bit simplified) ... it changed from "most 'families' have to pay" to "every menage has to pay". This means, even if you don't have any device to use the service of the german public service broadcasting but are a menage, you have to pay for it. This sitiation is even more worse than pay-TV. Don't get me wrong ... I'm neither against public service broadcasting nor against paying for it in principle. In the rare cases I'm watching TV, this is most likely a channel of the public service broadcasting. Same counts for the rest of my small family. Mostly we are watching news and documentations ... also some movies are watched. The kids are watching KiKA, which we like cause it's Ads-free and it's not just some cartoons with hidden violence. So we most likely benefit from public service broadcasting. Anyways ... in common we are not using "TV" as most of the others may do. We still like some sort of the broadcast, but we are missing it cause various reasons. For our luck there is a service called 'Mediathek' provided by the most german public service broadcasting channels. If you missed a broadcast or are prevented for any reason, you may watch the broadcast there. Unfortunately the timeframe you can access the broadcast is very short, in most cases 7 days. This is manifested in the so called Rundfunkstaatsvertrag, more precisely in the 12. Rundfunk nderungsstaatsvertrag. The 'Tagesschau' has a good explanation about the issue. This means, in simple words, the tax payed broadcasts needs to be deleted after a (in my eyes) short time. WTF?!? Why do we wipe work we all payed for it? Guess what ... it was implemented by lobbying from commercial print media and private (e.g. ads-financed) TV-channels. A comment about a related problem, which I agree, can be found here. Another challenge ... How do you know there is a broadcasting your are interested in? How do you know when it is broadcasted? I remember, my parents was subscribed to a daily newspaper, which included an additional TV paper, my parents-in-law bought also one.
As we are neither subscribed to a daily newspaper nor buying a TV paper, we have to solve that differently (beside that a printed paper won't help us I think). When we use the opportunity to watch TV at the evening, I just use an electronical TV paper (-app). If we find something which fits, we are fine .. if not, we do other things. This sounds a bit like an old school behaviour and it is not, how I would like to use a media today. I like using a feedreader. You can subscribe differnt 'channels' of information feeds and it is a way I would love to use TV. In the past I used a tool called 'Mediathek', which is a tool for Mac OSX. With this tool it was easily possible to find broadcasts, you could subscribe to so called 'channels', which means broadcasts of a same series for example. You could also mark them as "unread" und "read" .. something like a feedreader.
On the other way, it was also possible to list recent broadcast per genres and popular broadcast of the recent and the last week. This was very comfortable as this was working for several mediathek sites for german public service broadcasting channels in one central place. For every broadcast you could just view it or download it to view it later. You could even download subscribed channels automatically. After using the Mediathek-App and being satisfied by the Mediathek sites of the german public service broadcasting channels for several years, this week the server(s) behind the App was shut down. What the f....?!? On Twitter the author stated that the shutdown was cause by problems with the copyright law. Das Erste, ZDF and WDR denied that they has anything todo with this recent issue. The question is ... what is the direct cause for shutting down such a good service. This smells a bit like the PirateBay issue, but in this case the content which is Mediathek providing access to isn't pirated, but legal hosted. So where is the real issue? In my mind, the german citizen has payed to produce this content and should have the right to access the content is an usable way. The Mediathek App did provide such a way and it is really pissing me off that this access isn't available anymore, at least for this reason. Actually I don't see any solution to access our payed content in a decent way. Footnote: I think it's obscenely, that publishing houses and commercial broadcaster trying to gain their turnover at the expense of the german citizen by forcing the german legislature to implement Depublication,.

The QNAP TS-XXX NAS boxes are nice little systems but one thing I really miss is a console. Martin Michlmayr has some instructions (TS-119, TS-219, TS-41x) on his excellent Debian On QNAP pages on how to build a suitable adaptor but sadly even though I've managed to get all the parts I've been too lazy to actually solder the thing together (it doesn't help that I nearly always burn myself when I use a soldering iron!). This became more pressing when someone reported that Debian bug #693263 in qcontrol was not fixed in Wheezy since the issue appeared to be in the initramfs hook. Worse it seemed like something in my proposed fix was causing the system to not boot at all! Having finally found the hardware needed to reproduce the issue my first thought was to try netconsole. To do this I edited /etc/initramfs-tools/modules to add:

      mv643xx_eth
      netconsole netconsole=@<IP>/eth0,@<DST-IP>/<DST-MAC>

The option syntax is described in netconsole.txt but briefly: <IP> is the address of the TS-419P II I'm debugging on, and <DST-IP> and <DST-MAC> are the IP and MAC address of another machine on the network. Having done that, running update-initramfs -u and rebooting I can use netcat -u -l -p 6666 on the other machine to see all the kernel messages. So far so good but this doesn't get me any debugging from the userspace portions of the initramfs. To get those we have to get a bit hacky by editing /usr/share/initramfs-tools/init, first to change:

     # Parse command line options
    -for x in $(cat /proc/cmdline); do
    +for x in $(cat /proc/cmdline) debug; do
            case $x in

and secondly:

             debug)
                     debug=y
                     quiet=n
    -                exec >/run/initramfs/initramfs.debug 2>&1
    +                exec >/dev/kmsg 2>&1
                     set -x
                     ;;

The first of these simulates adding debug to the kernel command line (which can't otherwise easily be edited on these systems) and the second redirects the initramfs process's output to the kernel log. The overall effect is that the output of the initramfs processes appears over netcat.

Another gaffe Sorry for pushing this on Saturday, couldn't manage to do it earlier. I'm just glad that other than running my script, updating UDD source (the stats below) and then copying that one line over to here, there's no coherent thought required to publish this. Another gist The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

• In Total: 823
  • Affecting wheezy: 287 That's the number we need to get down to zero before the release. They can be split in two big categories:
    • Affecting wheezy and unstable: 171 Those need someone to find a fix, or to finish the work to upload a fix to unstable:
      • 44 bugs are tagged 'patch'. Please help by reviewing the patches, and (if you are a DD) by uploading them.
      • 10 bugs are marked as done, but still affect unstable. This can happen due to missing builds on some architectures, for example. Help investigate!
      • 123 bugs are neither tagged patch, nor marked done. Help make a first step towards resolution!
    • Affecting wheezy only: 116 Those are already fixed in unstable, but the fix still needs to migrate to wheezy. You can help by submitting unblock requests for fixed packages, by investigating why packages do not migrate, or by reviewing submitted unblock requests.

How do we compare to the Squeeze release cycle?

Week	Squeeze	Wheezy	Diff
43	284 (213+71)	468 (332+136)	+184 (+119/+65)
44	261 (201+60)	408 (265+143)	+147 (+64/+83)
45	261 (205+56)	425 (291+134)	+164 (+86/+78)
46	271 (200+71)	401 (258+143)	+130 (+58/+72)
47	283 (209+74)	366 (221+145)	+83 (+12/+71)
48	256 (177+79)	378 (230+148)	+122 (+53/+69)
49	256 (180+76)	360 (216+155)	+104 (+36/+79)
50	204 (148+56)	339 (195+144)	+135 (+47/+90)
51	178 (124+54)	323 (190+133)	+145 (+66/+79)
52	115 (78+37)	289 (190+99)	+174 (+112/+62)
1	93 (60+33)	287 (171+116)	+194 (111/+83)
2	82 (46+36)
3	25 (15+10)
4	14 (8+6)
5	2 (0+2)
6	release!

Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

If you rip your DVD's with a unix-y name like longish-show-name-season-01-01.m4v then the iPad and iPhone video player only shows the prefix of the file-name to it's string limit, so you only ever see longish-show-na and can never tell what episode is what in the overview list. You can edit the files in iTunes to add meta-data information, but that's annoying and non-unix-y. It is of course easy, but I went down several dead-ends with tools that didn't recognise file-extensions, corrupted files and plain didn't work. The package I had most success with is mp4v2-utils and the mp4tags utility. The help is fairly self-explanatory, but something like

mp4tags -show "Show Name" -season <season> -episode <episode> -type "tvshow"  file.m4v

will mean that when you import your file into iTunes it displays correctly as a TV show (and not a movie), is grouped correctly into series and has a name you can see. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem my Nexus 7 tablet picks up these tags. And both players interfaces remain terrible at indicating which episodes have been watched and which have not. But this has allowed me to re-visit my old box-set of Yes Minister which, despite a few odd references to Quango's still seems as relevant as ever!

The ancient Egyptians were a pretty cool bunch, but their worship of cats really added something to their civilisation (double bonus: their word for cat was mau ). The Internet itself, while undeniably a fantastic resource, reached new heights with the introduction of LOLCats. If you are cat-poor, you can swap your shabby tat for a tabby cat, while if you ve gone a bit overboard you can sell your excess cats to cat converters. However, cats have found minimal employment in systems administration. Until now. As the day job have been early adopters of btrfs, everyone at work has been very interested in the reported hash DoS of btrfs. It has been a topic of considerable discussion around the office. However, it can be a tough topic to explain to people less well versed in the arcana of computer science. Not to be deterred, Barney, our tech writer, took the standard explanation, added some cats, and came up with an explanation of the btrfs hash DoS that your parents can understand. The density of cat-related puns is impressive. (Incidentally, if you don t need cats to understand btrfs hash DoS attacks, and live in the Sydney area, you might be interested in working for Anchor as a sysadmin).

For the year of 2012, I finished and reviewed 60 books, the same number as 2011. Given how stressful and chaotic much of the year was, I count this a major triumph. The hardest part was not the reading but the review writing; the end of the year required a significant push to finish writing reviews of all the books I'd read that year, and at one point I was reviewing things I'd read more than two months earlier. But I can enter 2013 entirely caught-up. This continues to feel like about the right pace, striking a balance between reading enough that I can pursue multiple reading goals at the same time, while leaving enough time for other projects and video games. I gave three novels a 10 out of 10 this year, but the stand-out even among that group was Elizabeth Wein's Code Name Verity. Not only was it my favorite book of the year, but it was one of the best books I've ever read. The other two 10-rated books are also highly recommended, of course: Matt Ruff's fascinating novel of multiple personalities, Set This House in Order; and C.J. Cherryh's SF classic, Cyteen. The latter was a re-read in advance of reading the sequel, Regenesis, which I also recommend if you've read and liked the last third of Cyteen. Other fiction highlights of the year were China Mi ville's Embassytown and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games triology, particularly the third book, Mockingjay. Embassytown continues the trend from Mi ville's The City & The City of tighter, faster-moving novels while moving into space opera and first contact territory. It keeps Mi ville in the top rank of current SFF writers, despite having some suspension of disbelief problems. Collins's world-building in The Hunger Games also has suspension of disbelief problems, but I understood why the series was so popular. I was caught by surprise by its look at violence and its after-effects and was particularly impressed by Mockingjay and Collins's chosen ending. I think this is a popular series that lives up to the hype. There were no 10 ratings in non-fiction this year, but several books nonetheless stood out. John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society is a thought-provoking book that questions the foundation of a consumer-oriented economy while perceptively pointing out how it distorts choices away from public goods. Susan Cain's Quiet is a passionate defense of introversion in an extroverted world. And, finally, Joshua Bloch's Effective Java and Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices are both insightful looks at the good and bad of their respective languages and taught me a great deal as a practicing programmer. One final highlight to mention: Eclipse Phase by Posthuman Studios is an excellent RPG sourcebook, at least from the perspective of interesting world-building. I haven't played it, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it (and have acquired nearly all of the supplements). The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

Yet another yearly summary of my running activities. It seems, indeed, that running has now slightly taken precedence over free software activities in my life and priorities for my free time. To my fellow free software friends: don't worry, I'm not on my way to stop investing my time in Debian. It's quite clear that I'm reducing my involvement, mostly because days only have 24 hours...not because I'm bored or tired by free software development. But, certainly, it became an important thing that running currently has a small priority over Debian nowadays, for me. So, what happened on that front in 2012 for running bubulle? I finally managed to run 2900 km during the year, which is over 400km more than 2011. This is mostly due to the increasing part of running in my daily commute : a typical work week can now be something like this:

• Monday morning, leave home with a big bag and clothes for up to 4 work days (including those I'm wearing) plus running clothes (and shoes).
• Monday evening: come back by running. Either 4km, then 30 minutes train ride, then 3km more....or "the long version": 10km, then 20 minutes train ride, then 3km more.
• Tuesday: go to work by run+train+run, shower, change clothes, work, come back by run+train+run
• Wednesday: ditto
• Thursday: let's have a break. I usually work in another facility where it's less convenient to go by running
• Friday morning: go to work by run+train+run
• Friday evening: come back home with a big bag of dirty clothes

With such an organization, I can end up with weeks where I run up to 50-60 kilometers in 5 days, with peaks that may include 26km in one *work* day. I also end up having room in trains between the runs, I wonder why..:-) And, of course, during week-ends, I spend some parts of my time running too..:-). Indeed, just like for many drugs, I feel sad during days where I haven't run at all and it's usually hard for me to spend more than 2 days without. Indeed, the longest time period without running, this year, has been 9 days, just after the Caen marathon, in June. Mostly because, at that time, I reached a moment where training (and believe me, very boring and hard training) consumed all my motivation. But these moments are indeed very rare and training is mostly *never* boring for me. Mostly because I like running in the nature, in forests, woods, fields, country. Never wearing an MP3 player or any kind of such device toplay music, but just enjoying the outside, whether it's raining, winding, sunny hot. Running (particularly my daily commute) is also the moment where I *think* about my work, my technical activities, my own life, whatever. I think I even sometimes translated some software, mentally, while running..:) Indeed, there have been 205 days in this year where I ran at least once. Last year was 181 so....drug addiction is increasing. So, 2900 kilometers. That's about the distance from my place to Moscow in Russia. 282 hours (11 days18 hours.....9d21h last year). Average speed: 10,3km/h (10,5km/h last year). Cumulated height difference: 33,400 meters (27700m last year). More distance, more time, a bit slower: this is an obvious consequence of more trail running (which includes more difficulties, such as running on volcanoes!). Most active month: November with 331km. Less active month: June with 141km. This year was also a year of records:

• personal best broken in September by....14 seconds....on half-marathon with 1h37'28" after failing a first time by 20 seconds in March
• personal best broken twice in the two marathons I ran. first in June, in Caen, after a very hard 8-week training and in difficult conditions (rain, wind, hard race profile) with 3h38'45". Then, I managed to run a stunning 3h33'35" in October in Val du Rueil (a small town in the Seine river valley). That one will be hard to break now.
• longest distance run, with the "80km" Paris Ecotrail run in March, in 11 hours
• great progress in my other "ultra" race (70km in November) which I ran in 8h22 instead of 9h15 last year

I ran 10 official races during the year : two "ultra" races (70km Le Puy-Firminy in November, by night and 80km Paris Ecotrail in March), two marathons (Caen and Val de Rueil), four half-marathons and two "short" (less than 30km) trail races. How about next^W this year? Well, my goals are currently being secured:

• more trail races than roads races
• Paris 80km Ecotrail again in March. Goal: beat last year's 11 hours
• Le Puy-Firminy 70km again in November. A very nice "small" race (small by number of participants....but the effort is not small!).
• Mont-Blanc "marathon" in late June. Indeed a 42km trail race in Chamonix, starting at 1000m, finishing at 1600m, with a peak at 2300m and 2500m positive vertical gain (1490m negative).
• Another "long" trail race (40-60km) somewhere in April/May
• A "classic" marathon in October/November. Probably somewhere in France. Maybe La Rochelle. That might be the only classic marathon I run this year...unless I decide for another challenge like running two marathons in two consecutive Sundays..:-)
• Do once again my own personal marathon which is just "come back from work by foot".....which nearly equals the distance of a marathon. Something I achieved for the first time in September, in about 5 hours
• Maybe try a 6 or 12 hour race (running for 6 or 12 hours...or more...on a small 1-2km loop). These ones are very friendly ones and the only races where lame runners like me can run along with the best ones, not only for the first 100 meters.

All this of course is assuming that no injury comes up (my ankles are sometimes yelling outbut I'm fortunate enough to not have articulation problems that many runners have, particularly in knees). We'll see on January 1st 2014...:-)

Review: City of Diamond, by Jane Emerson

Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	March 1996
ISBN:	0-88677-704-6
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	624

The setting is deep into the star-faring future of humanity. Humans have settled many other worlds, thanks largely to technology from a race named the Curosa. There is a thriving network of settlement based around a sort of warp conduit network. But, standing apart from most human settlements, are three huge ships: the City of Opal, the City of Pearl, and the City of Diamond. Their inhabitants are devout members of the Redemptionist faith, a merging of Christian (primarily Catholic) belief and Curosa religion. Their ships are gifts from the now-departed Curosa, featuring drives unknown to the rest of humanity that allows them to ignore the normal transport network. They are meant to witness and spread their religion, but now, six centuries later, they primarily trade. Much of this is not apparent at the start. City of Diamond opens with Adrian Mercati, chosen heir of the current dying Protector, dodging people in what seems to be an oddly-organized city. Impudent, occasionally flippant, utterly charming, and in love with danger, he inherits the position of Protector shortly after we meet him. Emerson slowly reveals more of the nature of the ship while Adrian is shocking (and charming) the nobility and the church, and consorting with demons. Or, at least, one demon: Tal, an entirely human-appearing creature except for his eyes, who the Redemptionists claim is born without a soul. Slowly, it becomes clear that he's actually the offspring of an alien and a human, a mating of species whose children cannot socialize as human and behave in ways that seem like human sociopaths. Tal is no exception, but his interests align with Adrian's for the time. To those two viewpoint characters, Emerson adds four more: a low-rank administrator named Spider who works for Tal after Tal saved him from death by recycling, Adrian's politically-arranged bride-to-be from the rival (and even more religious) ship City of Opal, a guard from a French-descended slum on City of Opal, and a dangerously honorable and literal mercenary from an off-shoot culture of humanity that's now only a legend. This is a book that tends to sprawl. There's quite a lot going on, starting with the negotiations between City of Diamond and City of Opal to put to rest the remnants of a civil war and leading to the search for a legendary Curosa artifact on the planet they're both visiting. All of the characters have their own agendas, their own history, and their own goals, and are pursuing them in parallel and occasionally in opposition. Emerson takes the time to let all of this build. Despite that, there is very little in this book that drags or bores, and that's due primarily to the strength of the characters. Every one of the viewpoint characters is unique, bringing a different perspective to the story, and every one of them changes and grow over the course of the story. They also play off of each other in delightful ways. This is a book that makes full use of the fact that three characters make seven character interactions. For example, Tal by himself is logical but just slightly askew, Tal seen by Spider is uncomfortable and worrisome, Tal and Adrian is a dance of mutual amusement and respect, and Tal and Keylinn finding points of commonality is just delightful. I did wish that there was a bit more Keylinn and Tal and a bit less of Spider, but once Emerson built her world, introduced her characters, and got the story moving, there aren't many weak pieces. Part of the fun is figuring out the world background. There are almost no infodumps here; Emerson just starts telling stories of characters in the surroundings in which they find themselves, and the reader is left to piece things together from background description, the occasional explanation from one character to another, and parallels with long-standing SF tropes. It's not a puzzle book, but it is a book of where the reader is dropped as an alien into a fully-developed culture. In both that way and in the use of nobility, religion, and formal hierarchy against a starfaring backdrop, City of Diamond reminds me of the sort of classic space opera that led up to Star Wars but isn't seen as much these days. It's also funny. I was unsurprised to discover that Emerson is a pseudonym for Doris Egan, who (in addition to writing some other SF) is an occasional writer and producer for House. The humor isn't entirely obvious at the start, although Adrian frequently provokes a grin from the start of the book, but Tal's perceptive but obliviously blunt comments become more and more fun as the book progresses, and both Iolanthe (Adrian's bride) and Keylinn (the mercenary, sort of) are a delight. I want to see more of both of them, but sadly the book ends just as they (particularly Iolanthe) are hitting their strides. And that's the biggest problem with City of Diamond: it's a failed (or at least postponed) trilogy. As with Walter Jon Williams's Metropolitan and City on Fire, there were supposed to be more books, but apparently either the publisher lost interest or other projects took precedence. The story does come to something of a conclusion, but most of the major story arcs aren't resolved. Emerson is still bringing more guns onto the set late in the book. None of the villains truly get their just desserts, nor do most of the character arcs fully resolve, although friendships and more have formed satisfyingly by the end of the book. There is obviously far more to both these characters and this universe, including an entire ship that was never visited and an alien whose presence should prove startling. This is a great book: warm, funny, full of interesting characters, and with a nicely complex background universe. If it were complete in itself, or if the sequels had materialized, I would recommend it unreservedly. As is, you will have to weigh your dislike of unfinished stories against its stand-alone merits. But I enjoyed it a great deal. Rating: 7 out of 10

One things I never quite got around to during 2012 was to blog about the awesome relay we ran in early June. This was the race formerly known as MC200 (for Madiston, WI, to Chicago, IL, by way of Milwaukee, WI, for about 200 miles) and is now part of the Ragnar Relay series: Ragnar Chicago. We ran as a so-called ultra team of six runners, as opposed to a regular ream of twelve. The course is cut into 36 segments; on regular teams you get 3, we each had twice that. My first leg was a combined 17 miles in what turned out to be pretty blistering heat in mid-to-late afternoon. My fellow team members were awesome in getting me lots of water an ice, and I managed to hold onto a pace of just over 8 min/miles. One of the harder runs I've had. Next was a wonderful run pretty much exactly at midnight under starry skies---about seven or so miles followed by ten more miles the next morning. We ended up coming third (yay!) beating the next time by about six or seven seconds (!!) over a total time of 25 or 26 hours. It was hard. It was fun. It was exhilirating. It may also have broken me as I haven't really run much since. So good intentions for 2013: get back into the groove.

A while ago I wrote a blog post debunking the idea that swap should be twice as large as RAM [1]. The issue of swap size has come up for discussion in a mailing list so it seems that it s worth another blog post. Swap Size In my previous post I suggested making swap space equal to RAM size for systems with less than 1G of RAM and half RAM size for systems with 2-4G of RAM with a maximum of 2G for any system. Generally it s better to have the kernel Oom handler kill a memory hungry process than to have the entire system go so slow that a hardware reset is needed. I wrote memlockd to lock the important system programs and the shared objects and data files they use into RAM to make it easier to recover from some bad paging situations [2], but even that won t always make it possible to login to a thrashing system in a reasonable amount of time. But it s not always good to reduce swap size. Sometimes if you don t have enough swap then performance sucks in situations where it would be OK if there was more swap. One factor in this regard is that pages mapped read-only from files are discarded when there is great memory pressure and no swap space to page-out the read-write pages. This can mean that you get thrashing among memory for executables and shared objects while there s lots of unused data pages in RAM that can t be paged out. One noteworthy corner case in this regard is Chromium which seems to take a lot of RAM if you have many tabs open for a long time. Another factor is that there is a reasonable amount of memory allocated which will almost never get used (EG all the X based workstations which have 6 gettys running on virtual consoles which will almost never be used). So a system which has a large amount of RAM relative to it s use (EG a single-user workstation with 8G of RAM) can still benefit from having a small amount of swap to allow larger caches. One workstation I run has 8G of RAM for a single user and typically has about 200M of the 1G swap space in use. It doesn t have enough swap to make much difference if really memory hungry programs are run, but having 4G of memory for cache instead of 3.8G might make a difference to system performance. So even systems which can run without using any swap can still be expected to give better performance if there is some swap space for programs that are very inactive. I have some systems with as much 4G of swap, but they are for corner cases where swap is allocated but there isn t a lot of paging going on. For example I have a workstation with 3G of RAM and 4G of swap for the benefit of Chromium. Hardware Developments Disk IO performance hasn t increased much when compared to increases in RAM size over the last ~15 years. A low-end 1988 era hard drive could sustain 512KB/s contiguous transfer rates and had random access times of about 28ms. A modern SATA disk will have contiguous transfer rates getting close to 200MB/s and random access times less than 4ms. So we are looking at about 400* the contiguous performance and about 10* the random access since 1988. In 1988 2MB was a lot of RAM for a PC, now no-one would buy a new PC with less than 4G so we are looking at something like 2000* the RAM size in the same period. When comparing with 1993 (when I first ran a Linux server 24*7) it was 4M of RAM, maybe 15ms random access, and maybe 1MB/s contiguous IO approximately double everything I had in 1988. But I ll use the numbers from 1988 because I m more certain of them even though I never ran an OS capable of proper memory management on the 1988 PC. In the most unrealistically ideal situation paging IO will be a factor of 5* more expensive now relatively than it was in 1988 (RAM size increase by a factor of 2000 divided by contiguous IO performance increase by a factor of 400). But in a more realistic situation (random IO) it will be 200* more expensive relatively than it was. In the early 90s a Linux system with swap use equal or greater than RAM could perform well (my recollection is that a system with 4M of RAM and 4M of active swap performed well and the same system with 8M of active swap was usable). But nowadays there s no chance of a system that has 4G of RAM and 4G of swap in active use being usable in any way unless you have some corner case of an application allocating RAM and not using it much. Note that 4G of RAM doesn t make a big system by today s standards, so it might be reasonable to compare 2M in 1988 to 8G or 16G today. But I think that assuming 4G of RAM for the purpose of comparison makes my point. Using Lots of Swap It is probably possible to have some background Chromium tabs using 4G of paged out RAM with good system performance. I ve had a system use 2G of swap for Chromium and perform well overall. There are surely many other ways that a user can launch processes that use a lot of memory and not use them actively. But this will probably require that the user know how the system works and alter their usage patterns. If you have a lot of swap in use and one application starts to run slowly you really don t want to flip to another application which would only make things worse. If you use tmpfs for /tmp then you need enough swap to store everything that is written to /tmp. There is no real upper limit to how much data that could be apart from the fact that applications and users generally don t want to write big data files that disappear on reboot. I generally only use a tmpfs for /tmp on servers. Programs that run on servers tend not to store a large amount of data in /tmp and that data is usually very temporary, unlike workstation users who store large video files in /tmp and leave them there until the next reboot. Are there any other common corner cases that allow using a lot of swap space without serious performance problems? My Swap Space Allocation When I setup Linux workstations for other people I generally use 1G of swap. For a system that often has multiple users (via the user-switch feature) I use 2G of swap if it only has 3G of RAM (I run many systems which are limited to 3G of RAM by their chipset). For systems that I personally use I generally allocate 4G of swap, this is to cater to excessive RAM use by Chromium and also because I test out random memory hungry programs and can t easily predict how much swap space will be needed a typical end-user desktop system is a lot more predictable than a workstation used for software development. For servers I generally allocate 512M of swap space. That s enough to page out things that aren t used and make space for cache memory. If that turns out to be inadequate then it s probably best to just let the watchdog daemon reboot the system.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/28/swap-space/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/projects/memlockd/

For some time, I have been concerned about the amount of data I store on Google. This post aims to show alternatives to the service. This is primarily for two reasons. The first is simple. I would like to avoid a single point of failure, and the risk that I could be suspended for a number of months with no recourse. The second if more political. I'm worried about the way that certain governments can subpoena information which they may not be able to collect directly. Now, don't get me wrong. Google is good at transparency. They also provide a very useful service that works incredibly well. In fact, the quality of the integration and services provided is the primary reason I have not changed previously. Calendaring is something that I naturally feel shouldn't be hard, but somehow is. Google Calendaring service is rather good, and far outstrips anything open source I've found so far. However, I've managed to migrate to Zoho which offers a very similar level of functionality. It's also very easy to extract your entire calendar from Google, which makes the transition easier. Reader is a service provided to subscribe and read RSS feeds. In the past, I've used Gregarius as a self hosted solution, but this seems to have disappeared recently. I briefly flirted with NetVibes, which works well once you turn off the frustrating 'widget' mode, but has completely failed to address the need to have native tablet apps. In the end, I settled for NewsBlur which also has the clever use of hotkeys for navigation which I found essential in Google's products. Picasa has stood me well for hosting photos for some time. And photo hosting is something I have quite a large amount of professional experience with :) Despite having previously been in competition with them, I can heartily recommend Flickr, even with it's dogmatic reliance to creating a Yahoo! email address for each account. Search still has some way to go to find a viable replacement. I've tried DuckDuckGo, but found it lacking. Much like the mistake that Apple seem to have made with the launch of Apple Maps, there seems to be a misunderstanding that search is actually HARD.
There are two camps when it comes to searching. You can be dumb, or you can be smart. By being dumb, the user can provide enough information to help narrow the results down to a single (or at least manageable) result set. This works fine, and is a traditional model. The opposite is to be smart. Simply get the results right, using a variety of metrics to work out what the user wanted in the first place. This is obviously more difficult, but infinitely more valuable, and is something that Google excels at. The problem lies when you fall in between these stalls. Unfortunately, it seems that there is no viable alternative to the big G at the moment.

Installing an operating system When you want to install a new operating system, the first thing to do is to get an installer medium, which usually involves two steps: downloading an image, and writing it to a medium. There are two major types of media usable for that purpose: optical discs and USB sticks. There used to be a third one, floppy disks, but it is no longer used, and it was conceptually very similar to USB sticks.Power-user If you are a power-user, you probably use USB stick, to be able to reuse them and because they are easier to carry. For you, writing an optical disc or an USB drive is almost the same:

$ wodim image.iso
$ dd if=image.img of=/dev/sdc

Regular user But what would you suggest to a normal user? USB stick? You should not: while it is technically much easier to write an USB stick (just copy blocks from the image to the peripheral file, without any need to use any specific function), desktop file manager make it much harder. Indeed, for a desktop user, burning an ISO image to an optical disk is quite simple: right-click on the image file and choose the burn option. But writing an image to an USB stick? There is no similar option, so that will involve calling a power-user friend, which will tell you to open a terminal and type dd if= . Moral

Power-users

Continue using USB sticks as installation media, but tell regular users to use optical discs until desktop file managers adapt.

Regular users

Use optical discs. If your computer does not have an optical reader, either invite a power user friend, or buy an USB optical reader.

Desktop developers

Please, fix that! Writing an image to an USB stick should not be harder than burning it to an optical disc! People are using more and more computers without an optical reader, and that situation is certainly not new, as it is only similar to that of the time when we were using floppy disks.

I recently had a chance to briefly play with the new Samsung Galaxy Camera [1]. The Galaxy Camera is an Android device with a 4.8 display (the same size as the Samsung Galaxy S3) that has a fairly capable camera (IE nothing like a typical phone camera). It runs Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and the camera has 21* zoom with a 16 megapixel sensor. Camera Features It seems that professional photographers are often annoyed when they see someone with a DSLR set in auto mode. It s widely regarded that auto mode is a waste of a good camera, although the better lenses used with DSLRs will usually give a better result than any compact camera even when it s in auto mode. The problem is that photography is quite complex, in an earlier post about digital cameras I summarised some of the technical issues related to cameras and even without any great detail it became a complex issue [2]. The Galaxy Camera has a reasonably friendly GUI for changing camera settings which even includes help on some of the terms, I expect that most people who use it will end up using most of the features which could make it a good training camera for someone who is going to move to a DSLR. A DSLR version of the Galaxy Camera could also be an interesting product. The camera also has modes such as Waterfall and Panorama , hopefully the settings for those would be exposed to the user so they could devise their own similar groups of settings. I ve seen the phone criticised for the lack of physical controls as the expert mode in software is inherently slower than manually turning dials on a DSLR. But it seems obvious to me that anyone who knows how to use the controls manually should be using a DSLR or bridge camera and anyone who doesn t already know how to do such things will be better suited by the software controls. It supports 120fps video at 720*480 resolution (with a file format stating that it s 30fps to give 1/4 speed) which could be useful. I used to have a LG Viewty smart-phone that did 120fps video but the resolution was too low to be useful. 720*480 is enough resolution to see some detail and has the potential for some interesting video, one use that I ve heard of is filming athletes to allow them to analyse their performance in slow motion. It also does 60fps video at 720p (1280*720) resolution. One down-side to the device is that the lens cover doesn t seem particularly sturdy. It s quite OK for a device that will be stored in a camera case but not so good for a device that will be used as a tablet. I didn t get to poke at the lens cover (people don t like it if you mess with their Christmas presents) but it s design is a couple of thin flaps that automatically retract when the camera is enabled which looks quite weak. I d like to see something solid which doesn t look like it will slide back if the device is treated as roughly as a phone. I think that the lack of a solid lens cover could be the one factor that prevents it from being used as a replacement for a smart phone. Apart from that a Galaxy Camera and a cheap GSM phone could perform all the functions of a high end phone such as the Galaxy S3 while also producing great pictures. It would probably make sense for retailers to bundle a cheap phone with a Galaxy Camera for this purpose. Tablet Features The device boasts WiFi Direct to allow multiple cameras and phones to talk to each other without a regular WiFi access point [3]. I didn t test this and I don t think it would be particularly useful to me, but it seems like a handy feature for less technical users. It can connect to the Internet via Wifi or 3G, supports automatic upload of pictures (it comes with Dropbox support by default like the Galaxy S3), and has a suite of photo and video editing software. I don t expect that any photo editing software that runs on an Android device would be much good (I think that you really need fine cursor control with a mouse and a high resolution screen), but it would probably be handy for sending out a first draft of photos. Most Android apps should just work, the exceptions being apps that rely on a camera that faces the user or full phone functionality. So the Galaxy Camera can do almost anything that an Android phone or tablet can do. Value The RRP for the Galaxy Camera is $599, that puts it in the same price range as a DSLR with a single lens. While that s not a bad price when compared to smart-phones (it s cheaper than the LTE version of the Galaxy S3 phone) it s still quite expensive for a camera that s not a DSLR. Fortunately Kogan is selling it for $469 and has free shipping at the moment [4]. This still makes it more expensive than some of Bridge Cameras which probably have significantly better optical features, but in terms of what the typical user can do with a camera the Galaxy Camera will probably give a much better result. The sensor in the Galaxy Camera is smaller than that in the Nokia 808 PureView [5] (1/2.3 vs 1/1.2 ) so the Nokia PureView should be able to take better pictures in some situations. Unfortunately the Nokia 808 doesn t run Android, I d probably own one if it did. Some of the reviews are rather harsh, the Verge has a harsh but fair review by Aaron Souppouris which makes a number of negative comparisons to cheaper cameras [6]. I really recommend reading Aaron s review as there s a lot of good information there. But I think that Aaron is missing some things, for example he criticises the inclusion of ebook software by saying that he wouldn t read a book on a camera. But the device is a small tablet computer which also has a compact camera included. I can easily imagine someone reading a book or playing Angry Birds on their camera/tablet while in transit to where they are will photograph something. I can also imagine a Galaxy Camera being a valuable tool for a journalist who wants to be able to write short articles and upload pictures and video when out of the office. Aaron concludes by suggesting that the Galaxy Camera is a $200 camera with $300 of editing features. I think of it as $200 in camera hardware with software that allows less skilled users to take full advantage of the hardware and the ability to do all the software/Internet things that you would do on a $450+ smart-phone. Would I Buy One? No. The Galaxy Camera is among other things a great toy, I d love to have one to play with but I can t spare $469 on one. Part of the reason for this is that my wife just bought a DSLR and is getting lessons from a professional photographer, so I really won t get better pictures from a Galaxy Camera. The DSLR on auto mode will allow me to take pictures that will usually be better than a Galaxy Camera can achieve (sometimes you just can t beat a good lens). For more demanding pictures my wife can tweak the DSLR. The 120fps video is a really nice feature, I don t know if my wife s DSLR can do that, but it s a toy feature not something I really need. I ve just bought a Galaxy S3 which is a great little tablet computer (most of the time it won t be used for phone calls). I don t need another 4.8 tablet so a significant part of the use of the Galaxy Camera doesn t apply to me. I recommend the Galaxy Camera to anyone who wants to take good photos but can t get a DSLR and lessons on how to use it properly. But if you would rather get a 35mm camera with interchangeable lenses that runs Android then it might be worth waiting. I expect that the Galaxy Camera will be a great success in the market (it s something you will love when you see it). That will drive the development of similar products, if Samsung doesn t release a 35mm Android camera soon then someone else will (for example Sony develops both high end cameras and Android phones). If my wife didn t have a DSLR then I d probably have bought a Galaxy Camera already. I will recommend it to my parents and many other people I know who want an OK camera and can benefit from a tablet, but don t know how to use a DSLR properly (or don t want to carry a bulky camera).

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Camera
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/08/24/digital-cameras/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiFi_Direct
• [4] http://www.kogan.com/au/buy/samsung-galaxy-camera-ek-gc100-white/
• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_808
• [6] http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/3/3706206/samsung-galaxy-camera-review

A couple of days ago I made a new release of slaughter, to add a new primitive I was sorely missing:

if ( 1 != IdenticalContents( File1 => "/etc/foo" ,
                             File2 => "/etc/bar" ) )
 
   # do something because the file contents differ
 

This allows me to stop blindly over-writing files if they are identical already. As part of that work I figured I should be more "visible", so on that basis I've done two things:

• Mirrored the repository to github
• Shared my live policies, again on github
  • These live policies augment, and expand upon, the existing examples and primitive documentation.

After sanity-checking my policies I'm confident I'm not leaking anything I wish to keep private - but there is some news being disclosed ;) Now that is done I think there shouldn't be any major slaughter-changes for the forseeable future; I'm managing about ten hosts with it now, and being perl it suits my needs. The transport system is flexible enough to suit most folk, and there are adequate facilities for making local additions without touching the core so if people do want to do new things they don't need me to make changes - hopefully. ObQuote: "Yippee-ki-yay" - Die Hard, the ultimate Christmas film.

Review: Dragonhaven, by Robin McKinley

Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	September 2007
Printing:	October 2008
ISBN:	0-441-01643-X
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	338

With a title like Dragonhaven from a well-established fantasy author like Robin McKinley, one's first expectations are probably some variety of medieval fantasy, perhaps with a boy or girl who encounters a rare dragon and befriends them. To some extent, those expectations are right: there is a boy, a rare dragon, and a friendship. But they're mostly wrong. Dragonhaven could easily pass for science fiction if one allowed a bit of handwaving, and the setting is contemporary. Jake is the first-person narrator and the center of this story. He lives with his father and a small group of park rangers and other scientists at Smokehill National Park, one of the few remaining reserves for dragons in the world. McKinley's world is much like ours, with the same politics and governments, except that dragons exist: huge, flying dragons that breathe fire. But they've been hunted to near-extinction, including via an actual war in Australia, and are now dwindling in a small handful of isolated reserves. No one is entirely sure how many are left since, for huge creatures, they're remarkably hard to find and document. The Smokehill staff mostly estimate them from prey kills and other indirect signs. This book is Jake's telling of his story, and McKinley goes to quite a bit of effort to find the right tone for a teenage boy. It's more verbal than written in style, with lots of capital letters, italics, tangents, digressions, and short sentences. He's also trying to tell the story in order without skipping ahead but sometimes failing, which turns into a mechanism to do foreshadowing as he slips in comments or mentions things he wasn't aware of at the time. The voice McKinley constructs is very strong and makes this book read unlike any other books of hers I've read. How much you enjoy the book will probably depend heavily on your opinion of Jake's storytelling style. The story proper starts when Jake, on his first overnight trip in the park, encounters a dying dragon and a dead poacher. This is a catastrophe for the park: the dead poacher will provide ammunition for everyone who thinks dragons are too dangerous and should be wiped out. But for Jake, it's a more immediately life-changing event. The dragon was a mother with newborn infants, one of whom has survived and who promptly bonds with Jake. This may sound like it's moving back into traditional fantasy territory, but it's not. Jake's relationship with Lois (the name he gives the baby dragon) is very unlike fantasy bonds with baby hatchlings and quite a bit like taking care of an actual infant. Except the infant is hot enough to burn the skin. And wants to be in a pouch (McKinley's dragons are marsupial, sort of) and therefore needs to crawl inside Jake's clothing and press against skin. And that's not mentioning the smell. Or the excretions. The vast majority of the book is concerned with Jake raising Lois, so you'd better be prepared for lots of description of this. Thankfully, Jake is not the sort to describe in gruesome detail (at least most of the time), and some of the description is quite funny. I was particularly fond of his account of the Smell being so intense and overwhelming that it became a third person in the room. But still, it is a lot of pages of, essentially, child-rearing, and I got tired of it before it was over. Also frustrating is that Jake obviously has never read any science fiction or fantasy. He doesn't even guess at certain aspects of the situation that are immediately obvious to any experienced SFF reader early on. One of those reveals is dragged out until nearly the end of the book. (I'll refrain from spoiling it, but I'll be very surprised if any regular reader of my reviews takes long to pick up on it.) McKinley does a good job with that part of the plot when Jake finally figures out what's going on, but it was still exasperating to have it take so long. Dragonhaven is already somewhat slow-paced due its detailed descriptions of Lois's rearing, and adding an obvious plot element that the protagonist is too dense to figure out makes the pace feel even slower. About a third of the way into this book, I didn't care for it. It was sort of gross, Lois wasn't very interesting, Jake was more frustrating than entertaining, and nothing was happening. But then it started to win me over, and the last part of the book wasn't bad at all. McKinley's best talent is her ability to mix the fantastic with the quotidian and give them equal weight and importance, to embed the reader so thoroughly with the character that one thinks about all the day-to-day impact of fantastic events that is normally skimmed over in books of this type. If you get engrossed in that angle of Jake and Lois's story, Dragonhaven can be quite enjoyable. When you're waiting for the plot to advance, it's a bit painful. Probably the best thing to do with this book, if you can, is read the first chapter or so and see what you think of Jake's voice. If you enjoy reading it, that's probably a good sign for the rest of the book. I do like McKinley's dragons: she avoids the traps of both making them too human and making them too much like animals, and manages to give Lois (once she's a bit older) a sort of intelligence that's inhuman but still canny and clearly sharper than a dog's. You'll likely get tired, as I did, of Jake's omnipresent headache and Lois's endless upbringing, but there is a payoff in the end. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Perl Best Practices, by Damian Conway

Publisher:	O'Reilly
Copyright:	July 2005
Printing:	April 2011
ISBN:	0-596-00173-8
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	492

I had a rather bad first reaction to this book or, rather, the existence of this book. Some time ago, I started hearing about a new program named perlcritic that served as a lint program for Perl and decided to give it a try. I was taken aback by the flood of diagnostics, but even more taken aback by the fact that most of them were apparently explained only by a reference to a book that I didn't own. It struck me wrong in an open source project and gave me a negative reaction towards the book, which lingered for years. That was exacerbated by discovering that it recommended using use English in some circumstances, something that I consider to be a horrible idea. So, when a coworker recommended it and suggested I really should read it, I was dubious. I'm glad I gave it a chance, since it turns out that nearly all of my objections were based on misunderstandings or false information. (Well, except for the use English part, but more on that in a moment.) Perl Best Practices does provide a lot of advice, explaining that flood of diagnostics, but perlcritic also warns about the same thing repeatedly, inflating a handful of issues into a lot of messages. Most of the recommendations in Perl Best Practices were things I was doing already; most of the rest are entirely sensible. Also, perlcritic does come with complete explanations of its diagnostics once you know where they're hidden (the perldoc of Perl::Critic::Policy modules whose names you can get at by insisting perlcritic divulge them). And, even more delightfully, once I got past my objections, I discovered that Perl Best Practices is one of the best books on coding style that I've read. Coding style is a notoriously difficult subject, since nearly everyone is convinced their personal style is the best (or at least that they don't want to change). Conway acknowledges that up-front, and acknowledges that some things are just arbitrary and consistency with any rule set is better than following some specific rule set. He then spends surprisingly little time on the sorts of things that dominate most coding style discussions (indentation, spacing, commenting, etc.). Instead, this is primarily a book about how to write efficient and transparent Perl code, one that focuses much more on the content and structure of that code than on how it is indented. The best part is that there are no undefended rules here. Perl Best Practices contains 256 separate guidelines, some quite general ("Provide an optimal interface, rather than a minimal one") and some quite specific ("Pass constructor arguments as labeled values, using a hash reference"), but every one of them has a supporting argument and specific reasons behind it. Conway backs up every recommendation with code samples and practical scenarios showing the pluses and minuses of different approaches. This is a book unconcerned with being an authority; rather, it reads like optional advice from a good mentor, complete with insightful discussions on each point raised. You may come away from it disagreeing with Conway's specific recommendation (and I did, in several places), but you'll almost certainly be better-informed about the problem for having read it. Plus, this book is just fun to read. Admittedly, I love this sort of thing; I spend lots of time thinking about coding style in any language, and a lot more time refactoring coding style when working on my own projects to try to achieve clarity and simplicity. But even without sharing my love of the material, I think this book will be a delight for any practicing Perl programmer who hasn't yet read it. Conway clearly has a wealth of experience and years in the trenches of working with other people's Perl code. The examples he draws on are brief, comprehensible, and illuminating. He also gave me a tour of a variety of helper modules and libraries that I didn't know existed. List::Util is the most prominant example; this incredibly helpful supply of list manipulation functions that I've always half-known I wanted but never bothered to write is now part of Perl core (as of 5.7.3), so there's no reason to avoid it. You too can stop using grep when you actually mean first, or rewriting max in ad hoc ways. That does raise two of the rare flaws in this book, though. One is that I disagree (partially) with Conway's willingness to recommend non-core modules. He is a particular champion of the Readonly module over either normal file global variables or use constant, for very good reasons. But making Readonly a prerequisite for all other Perl code that one releases seems a bit annoying (speaking as someone who used to maintain local Perl installations). Maybe this isn't as big of a deal in these days of ubiquitous Linux distributions and willingness to use the CPAN shell, but I still dislike releasing code that depends on a half-dozen (or more) other CPAN modules for reasons of coding convenience and minor readability rather than core functionality. (His advocacy of Sub::Install raised similar objections.) The second flaw is not something Conway could have done anything about: this book is from 2005, and it's now 2012. Now, the Perl ecosystem is now quite mature, so that hampers the book much less than it would a corresponding book about Ruby or even Python. I also aim for compatibility with the oldest thing out there I know someone is still running, so I'm still hesitant to require anything newer than Perl 5.8. But still, this book was written seven years ago, and Perl is now at 5.14. In the meantime, we've seen core language features like given/when added, the addition of state variables, the need for substantial reworking of how Unicode I/O is handled, the addition of the new // operator, and the new package syntax, among many other things. The Perl taught here is a bit dated, and I would love to hear Conway's opinion about when (or if) to use say. Maybe someday we'll get a second edition. There are two other points that I do have to argue with. One is that Conway does advocate, in a limited way, use English. I could almost go along with his recommendation to use it only for those variables that one has to look up, except that in nearly every case there are other options and one can take the much better approach of simply not using those variables at all. But he then writes the remaining examples in the book using $EVAL_ERROR rather than $@, and I'm sorry, but no. One could not construct a more frustrating annoyance for an experienced Perl programmer than sending them on a futile hunt for where the global variable $EVAL_ERROR is defined. One can debate the merits of Larry Wall's original decision to use variables like $_, @_, $?, $!, and $?, but for better or ill this is Perl, and marginal readability gains for inexperienced programmers do not warrant confusing experienced programmers. This is particularly true when the use English variables are completely indistinguishable from normal global variables, and not infrequently look like a global variable that a programmer might choose. The second is more of an amusement that a real disagreement. Conway rightfully points out that Perl OO, and particularly the way that Perl stores object instance data, is awkward, and none of the commonly-used techniques are particularly satisfying. He then introduces a completely new way of doing instance data that, while having some advantages, has a very strange syntax and is utterly unlike how any OO code one finds in the wild is written. While the discussion of the problem that he's trying to solve is still interesting, I think the solutions he proposes will be more of a curiosity than a style that most programmers will adopt. But, those disagreements aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found it so engrossing that I kept reading it straight through a long train ride rather than switching to fiction halfway, like I do with most programming books. I've since recommended it to several other coworkers, and we're in the process of revising our internal Perl coding style based heavily on it. It's the sort of book that I expect to re-read several times to refresh my memory of Conway's analysis. If you've been avoiding this one due to misconceptions like I had, or because you think it might be too dry, or even just because you're afraid it's outdated, I strongly recommend it. If you're worried about the price of a printed (or electronic) book on this topic and you do Perl programming as part of your job, see if your employer will buy you a copy as training. It's worth it. I've been writing Perl professionally for more than fifteen years, and I learned a ton from this book. (And if it inspires you to change your coding style, take a look at perlcritic. It requires some configuration, and getting started is quite frustrating, but it reliably detects a surprisingly high percentage of the issues discussed here and can help a great deal in making the coding style shift stick until you can build new habits.) Rating: 9 out of 10

I'm thankfully in a place where I can afford to give money to charity, and I've slowly built up a set of charities that I give money to. But I've never been that systematic about it. I've had a vague target for how much I want to give, I add new charities when they seem neat, I'll rarely drop a charity when it doesn't seem to be effective, and I probably spread my money out too much. Recently, I followed a chain of blog references and discovered GiveWell, a site that's devoted to doing more in-depth analysis of charities than the basic financial analysis done by sites like Charity Navigator. In particular, they do literature surveys to try to dig into the effectiveness of particular interventions and take a closer look at how effectively a charity can use new donations. After reading quite a bit on their site and some related sites, I sat down yesterday and did a comprehensive review of my goals and principles and then put together a new plan. Some of that may be interesting to other people, so I'll write up that process here. This will be somewhat US-centric, since charities vary a lot by tax regime, but I think some of the general principles will still apply elsewhere. (But most of my specific examples will be US charities.) First, a few basic principles about charitable giving:

1. Charity goals cannot be evaluated uniformly. Different types of organizations need different criteria. I've found that charities divide generally into ones that are trying to accomplish a specific task and ones that are trying to create political change. For the former, small and quiet organizations are often the best. For the latter, the charity has to get to a certain size before it's part of the conversation, and that involves a different set of tradeoffs.
2. When you care about efficiency (number of lives saved or quality of life improvement per dollar spent), don't give money to organizations you've heard about via means other than word of mouth or third-party evaluations. This is for a simple reason: if the charity has successfully made you aware of it, that means they're advertising themselves to you. Advertising generally costs quite a bit of money. That's money they're not spending on whatever they're trying to accomplish. Excellent examples are many of the health research and education charities, such as the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association, or the massive disaster relief organizations like the American Red Cross. These are not efficient organizations. If you're trying to get the most impact for your dollar, this isn't a good place to spend it. As a special case of this, please don't ever give money to any organization that produces TV commercials showing starving children in Africa. If the commercial makes you want to give money, that's great; just don't give it to the organization on TV. TV commercials are extremely expensive, and those organizations are notorious for being some of the least efficient charities in existence (in some cases bordering on scams). You'll be lucky if 50% of your money actually goes to Africa, and the money that is spent probably isn't spent wisely.
3. If your donation gets you a membership that comes with a glossy magazine, remember that means that the organization is spending your money producing that magazine. This is counted as program funding, not administrative costs, in sites like Charity Navigator because the charity probably counts the magazine as part of their educational mission. If you want to subscribe to the magazine and enjoy it, there's not necessarily anything wrong with this. But if you were giving them money to do something else, be aware that money is being used to produce the magazine (and the Christmas cards and the mailing labels and the tote bag) instead of doing things that you might consider program funding. For example, I stopped giving money to the Audubon Foundation because I want my environmental giving to go directly to protecting the environment, not towards printing calendars and making a glossy magazine full of bird pictures. As a counter-example, I consider the Southern Poverty Law Center to be one of the most effective US political charities, despite the fact that they produce a glossy magazine. That's because a large part of their mission is investigative reporting and research, and that magazine is how they publish that research. In this case, I both want to read the magazine and consider the magazine something that I'm happy to fund.
4. Efficiency isn't everything. For some types of charities, the charity has to be huge in order to be effective. This is particularly true of political charities. For example, the ACLU is not a particularly efficient charity and has several fund-raising practices that I dislike. However, what the ACLU does requires that they have extensive media access and respect from legislators and the judicial system. It cannot be done effectively by a smaller and more efficient organization. Similar principles apply to a lot of political and environmental charities, and to some international aid charities such as Doctors without Borders (M decins Sans Fronti res).

If you're looking to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your giving according to objective measures, I highly recommend reading through GiveWell's site. They recommend charities that avoid all the pitfalls above. You've probably never heard of them because they don't spend their money on advertising and marketing. However, keep in mind that efficiency isn't everything. With those principles in mind, and after doing a lot of reading on GiveWell, I redid my charity plan by dividing my giving up into five categories with different goals. Services. There are some things that I use that I think should be paid for by tax dollars but aren't, and are instead funded by charitable donations. I don't consider this charity in the same sense as the rest of this list. Rather, I'm paying for what I use plus some extra so that other people who can't afford it can use the service for free. Efficiency doesn't matter as much because there's usually only one organization supporting the thing that I personally use. Examples include my local PBS (public broadcasting) station, the non-profit that works with city government to support the local library system, and the trust that helps maintain the state parks where I go on vacation. Education. This is a special category for me since I regularly give money to the community college I attended. I know the region and the college and have some idea of what they need and what matters to the students there, so I can make specific choices. I give all the money in this category to the same place. Free software. Here, I know that my donations won't be used as efficiently in terms of quality of life as they could be if sent somewhere else, but this is my community and I want to support it because it's my community. Here, as with education, I have a lot more data and can pick and choose places that I think can use my money. Examples here are the Ada Initiative and the Free Software Foundation. Politics. This is the hardest area for efficiency, since it's so difficult to measure effectiveness in any organization where much of the goal of the organization is to persuade politicians or the general public. I try to measure effectiveness by how many concrete actions the organization takes (rather than press releases), which is easiest for organizations like the ACLU or the EFF that file lawsuits or legal documents and requests. As mentioned above, I think the standout in this area is the Southern Poverty Law Center, but political charities are so targeted that I give to multiple charities to cover my range of interests. I've found environmental charities particularly difficult to evaluate, but the one that appears the most effective to me so far is the Environmental Defense Fund, so that's where I concentrate my environmental money. I used to give to small political charities but have given up on that as basically useless, at least for national politics. I think the charity has to be of a minimum size to get anyone in government to listen to them. Poverty and Health. This is where efficiency matters much more than size. GiveWell's analysis is very interesting here, and sadly shows that most interventions either don't work or at least can't be proven to work. Here, I abandoned nearly all of my traditional large charities and have gone almost entirely with GiveWell's recommendations, with two exceptions. I still cycle money through Kiva (a microfinance support charity) because I have a bit of an emotional attachment to it, although microfinance is looking increasingly suspect as an effective charity method and I may yet drop them. And I still give money to Doctors without Borders because, despite being less efficient, I think their size and history has won them an international credibility that lets them get into areas that smaller, more efficient charities wouldn't be able to help. One of GiveWell's recommendations is my new favorite charity: GiveDirectly. All aid charities run a serious risk of having a colonialist bent, where rich countries come into poor countries and build things or tell them how to do things following the priorities of the rich countries. (This is one of the reasons why I prefer medical charities, since they're less susceptible to this.) GiveDirectly identifies the poorest people in a region (using a very transparent process) and transfers money to them directly using the M-Pesa cell system to spend however they choose, with no strings attached other than some due diligence to protect against fraud. This is refreshingly non-paternalistic and makes me far more comfortable than typical aid projects. Originally, I was going to assign money into those buckets and then break the buckets down further, but I ended up not quite doing that. The services bucket is more driven by the services I use than by an even allocation. Of the rest, it goes approximately three shares to poverty and health, two to politics, and one each to education and free software. I think I've managed to eliminate most of the places where I'm giving money to multiple organizations that do the same thing, but I'm still spreading my money rather widely and could stand to focus it more. That's hard, though; there are a lot of different things that I care about, and political charities in particular aren't very interchangeable. I'm currently not giving locally very much, which might be worth changing. The easiest way to do so would be to find a good local food bank and start donating to them (giving cash, not food). For a more comprehensive list of charities I support, see my charities link page.

Floating and tiling window managers In the X Window System, the window manager is that piece of software that places your windows and allows you to move them, resize them, hide them, etc. If your windows have titles on top of them, with buttons to close them or reduce them, it is thanks to the window manager. There are two major types of window managers:

Floating window managers

They are the most usual window managers, that allow you to place an size your windows freely on the screen, in a way where they are independent of each other, possibly overlapping, just as you would be able to place sheets of paper on your desk.

Tiling window managers

They are a more elitist type of window manager, that adjust the size and position of the windows so there is no overlapping and no space lost between windows, thus tiling the screen.

The frontier between these two types is not very tight, because some floating window managers have limited tiling features, and almost all the tiling window manager have floating modes for programs that are not adapted to tiling. For what it is worth, here is a report on my experience with three tiling window managers. Perhaps it may help people that are still hesitating to switch to tiling window management?Using tiling window managers Five years ago I switched to tiling window management, feeling that managing windows was the window manager's job (a quote from larswm). At that time, I started using wmii, then switched to awesome, and now I am trying i3. For people in a hurry, here is a comparative table:

	wmii	awesome	i3
Configuration	Shell script	Lua script	config file
Scriptability	any language, 9P-based	Lua, API-based	any language, socket-based
Layout	simple, column-based	automatic layout-based	flexible, manual tiling-based
Multi-monitor	sucks	OK	OK
Modern stuff		XCB, Xft, notification area, dock windows	XCB, Xft, notification area
Special features	tag-based workspace system	XDG convention to locate the config file real framework for customization	powerful status bar

wmii wmii is a rather minimalist window manager which used to be part of the suckless project, but is now hosted at Google Code and seems to have lost all its documentation during the move (why is it that all the software I have seen hosted at Google Code or worst, at Launchpad, have almost not documentation, and never, ever a single screenshot?). It uses a column-based layout: you place windows in a number of columns, and for each column you can choose either vertical split, stacking or full column mode. This system is very simple to control flexible enough for most situations, but it does not allow for arbitrary tiling. It is fully scriptable in any language, in an interesting way: it exposes all its functions on a 9P virtual filesystem. In fact, wmii itself only implements window management functions, and all the user interaction logic takes place in a distinct script which calls that functions using that 9P filesystem. wmii comes with a default script, written in shell, which makes it a bit hard to extend, and slow if you start calling external programs such as grep, sed and co. You can script it in any language you like however, and there are some already made implementations in Ruby and Python IIRC. A special feature of wmii is that its workspaces are in fact tags, and that you can tag a window so that it will appear in several ones. While this is interesting, in practice I did not find much use for that feature. It is explicitly minimalist, and the developers used to impose themselves a limit on its numbers of lines of codes (not sure if this is still true with the switch to Google Code). While I was using it, it had no notification area, no support for Xft fonts and it sucked with multiple monitors, which is the reason I switched to awesome. awesome awesome is a very flexible window manager that provides advanced automatic layouts. It has become quite popular, and it has a very well documented wiki. It is not officially a tiling window manager but a framework window manager, and to emphasize on that it start in floating mode by default. I think most people use it in tiling mode however. It uses automatic layouts, that place your windows according to rules, for instance the fair layout, which tiles in columns and rows so that each window occupies a similar space. Thanks to that automation, this system is very easy to control and to get used to, and although it certainly does not allow arbitrary tiling, you can cycle between several available layouts which are suitable for most situations (most of them are entirely automatic, but some have parameters you can modify, such as the number and width of columns), and if you miss one, I think you can even code your own. It is fully scriptable using the Lua language. In fact, just as wmii, the user interaction logic is defined in the configuration file, which allows efficient customization. The Lua API is fully documented, and there is a series of useful libraries to extend the basic configuration in any way you like, which is why awesome calls itself a framework window manager . It is not designed to be minimalist, and it implements some modern stuff, such as using XCB rather than Xlib, a notification area, and specific support for dock or utility-type windows such as GIMP's tools. i3 i3 is a window manager inspired by wmii, although they do not have much in common in my opinion. for what I have seen, I think it would be closer the defunct Ion. It uses a layout based on manual splitting: as you open windows you can choose to split an existing window either vertically or horizontally, leading to arbitrarily complex layouts. In addition to that you can tab or stack windows in containers instead of splitting them. This system is very flexible but it requires more user intervention. In its standard mode of operation, i3 is simply configured in a regular way, which allows to customize the user interaction but not to script it in an arbitrary way. It offers an IPC system that can be used for that however, by the mean of a Unix socket, so it can actually be scripted in any language too if needed, although this possibility is probably not as popular and easy as with wmii and awesome. It implements modern features such as XCB, a notification area and a powerful status bar that uses the standard output of a dedicated program that is easy to replace by your own if you need.

Review: Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels: 1985 2010, by Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo

Publisher:	Nonstop
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	1-933065-39-7
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	288

I like book reviews and lists of best novels, as a follower of my reviews probably noticed, so I couldn't resist when this collection made my radar. A follow-up to the earlier Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels: 1949 1985 by David Pringle (which I have not read), it is a collection of short (two to three pages, generally) reviews of 101 recent SF novels. The date spread is fairly balanced: at least two novels from each year under consideration are featured, and no year gets more than seven or eight. The authors also clearly tried to cover the range of what falls under the science fiction genre, from alternate history through space opera and including novels normally marketed as mainstream, so the result should contain something to everyone's taste. With those characteristics, you may suspect that the "best" part of the title is a bit questionable, and you would be right. "101 of the better novels" would be a more accurate description. While most Hugo and Nebula winners are included here, the section is at times eclectic. But it's eclectic in the spirit of broad inclusiveness: Jumper, Temeraire, or The Hunger Games would normally not be included on this sort of list because they're too popular or "light," but they're here alongside more obscure books (at least for SF readers) like Galatea 2.2, Distance Haze, or My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time. I doubt anyone will seriously argue that this selection should have replaced the Hugo or Nebula short lists, but one doesn't read review collections like this only to hear about books one already knows about. Those books one has either already read or already chosen not to read. The wide-ranging selection makes it likely that something here will be new to most readers. The authors, Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo, are known reviewers in the SF world, and I've read reviews from both of them before. I bought this book largely on the strength of Broderick's name, since I've usually enjoyed his contributions to The New York Review of Science Fiction. Paul Di Filippo was more of a gamble; he's one of the regular reviewers for Asimov's Science Fiction and not one of my favorites. But what I usually disliked about his columns was their focus on obscure small-press titles, graphic novels, and slipstream, so I was hoping that an SF review collection aiming towards the genre mainstream would be more to my taste. The result is mixed. There are things about this selection, and about the reviews, that I enjoyed, and there are other things I found quite annoying. First, the selection. I could (and will in a moment) talk about good and bad selections, but I also have a good statistical metric for at least the alignment of the authors' taste with mine. Of the 107 novels reviewed here (in several case, duologies and trilogies are given single entries), I've read 39, or a little over a third. (Note that I've read every Nebula or Hugo winner in that time period and most of the Hugo nominees, so that will give you a good feel for how broad-ranging this selection is, and how far afield of the normal award slates it goes.) My average rating for those 39 books was 7.49 (including four perfect 10s). By comparison, my average rating for Hugo winners is 6.68 and for Nebula winners is 7.10. There was one 4 (The White Queen) and one 5 (Red Mars), and in both cases I can see why they're here. Of the rest of the books I read I rated them all at least at 6 out of 10. At least among the books I've read, this seems to be a solid selection. Sometimes the details of those selections are odd, though. For example, the authors make an effort to limit the number of selections for each author, a wise choice since they're clearly going by diversity. But if one is operating within that limitation, choosing Ammonite over Slow River for Nicola Griffith, or particularly Ventus over Lady of Mazes or even Permanence for Karl Schroeder, is baffling. There were several similar places where I thought the selection for an author was obscure, minor, or just missed obvious alternatives. Perhaps this was to fill in one of the other breadth criteria, such as balancing number of novels per year or attempting to cover each subgenre. Also, if one is going to divide science fiction and fantasy and try to cover only the science fiction (a division that I think is quite difficult, which is why I don't do it, but it does have the merit of narrowing the field), including The Falling Woman is quite strange. It's a solid book, to be sure, and a Nebula winner. It is also quite straightforward contemporary fantasy involving ghosts and Mayan mythology, without a hint of science-fictional content. Making the protagonists archeologists and scientists doesn't make the book science fiction. The authors try to defend this (unpersuasively to me), but it wasn't the only instance here where I thought their line between science fiction and fantasy was a bit off. That said, there are a lot of great selections here, including books that I love but that aren't frequently picked for this sort of list (The Fortunate Fall, The Time Traveler's Wife, or China Mountain Zhang, for example). It's great to see underappreciated authors like Linda Nagata, Joan Slonczewski, and Karl Schroeder featured. But, of course, one doesn't buy this sort of book just for the list, if for no other reason than that lists aren't copyrightable and one can easily find the complete list of reviewed novels on the Internet (just one example that turned up in a search). Rather, one reads this sort of book for the reviews. And that's where this book moves onto more questionable ground. First, while I realize that everyone has different thresholds for what they consider spoilers and most professional reviewers are more cavalier about them than I am, Broderick and Di Filippo cross any line that I consider reasonable. Most of the reviews are okay, if skirting the limits, but in several places they give away key reveals of books or discuss plot twists right up to, or even including, the ending. The combined review of The Sparrow and Children of God is particularly egregious, containing unambiguous, book-destroying spoilers for The Sparrow. Giving away the ending of Ammonite is only slightly less bad. And those are just two examples I remember. This is not okay. The whole point of this sort of collection is to expose the reader to books they've not yet read but may want to. Proceeding to spoil the book for them in the course of the review is perverse. This alone would make me hesitant to recommend this collection. Second, quite a few of the reviews in this book are, for lack of a better term, emotionally overreaching. Here's an excerpt of a review picked at random (As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem) that will hopefully illustrate:

Lethem's beautifully balanced, metaphorically rich prose propels this blackly jolly fable to a surprising yet satisfying conclusion. By book's end, a sense that the author had accomplished his takeoff taxiing and was now fully in flight for more cosmopolitan cities pervades the pages.

What's "beautifully balanced prose"? Could you recognize it? Does that phrase communicate anything to you other than that the authors liked the book? The whole review collection is written with adjectives and metaphors like this, and after a while it all seems a bit much. It felt like the authors were straining for ways to describe how important or significant the books are and, in the process, lost sight of the basic goal of conveying information about the book. It feels overwrought rather than informative. Even if one is reviewing the books that one considers the pinnacle of achievement in science fiction, a conversational tone with concrete examples and specifics communicates more than impressive but slippery terms like "metaphorically rich." Lest I sound entirely negative, one thing that I did appreciate is that the reviews go to some effort (particularly for their short length) to put the work in the broader context of the field and within the author's oeuvre. Often there's some discussion of previous and subsequent work or related books, and the reviews that feature books from larger series provide good explanations for why those particular books were singled out. Sometimes the number of dangling references was frustrating; authors of these sorts of collections need to remember that most readers will not be as widely read, and reviewing books largely by comparison to other books runs the risk of missing the reader's knowledge entirely. But the reviews convey a real sense of SF as a broad conversation and provide a sense of the breadth and variety of themes and subgenres available. This is one of the fun explorations that this sort of catalog lets the authors and reader do together. Another, more minor, touch that I appreciated was the cover art. Each review leads with an image of the reviewed book's cover (alas, only in black and white for obvious printing reasons). But rather than taking the obvious approach of using the covers of the first releases, or the covers from a particular country, they're chosen from all of the world-wide editions in all their delightful variety. Typical artistic styles for book covers vary drastically between countries, and getting to see a sample of artwork from different markets is a treat. I want to recommend this book. It casts a much broader net than most collections of its kind and provides some needed attention to smaller corners of the genre. I was impressed by the book list before I bought it, and (with the inevitable quibbles) am even more impressed now that I've read it. Broderick and Di Filippo go out of their way to broaden the reader's horizon and open up new avenues for reading, which is one of the best things a review collection can do. But when reviewers don't avoid spoilers, I just can't recommend their work. For me, this is a cardinal sin. Combine that with a writing style that was occasionally overblown and overwritten and the merits don't quite overcome the flaws. I'm glad I read it; it got me excited about reading many books I've already purchased but not gotten to, and I got from it another slew of books to add to my to-purchase list. But I had to read it uncomfortably and lightly, constantly prepared to jump past a review that was too revealing. Rating: 6 out of 10