Our good friend, Octavio M ndez Octagesimal , passed away due to
complications derived from COVID-2019.
Long-time free software supporter, very well known for his craft and
for his teaching with Blender. Great systems administrator. 45 year
old, father of two small girls, husband of our dear friend Claudia.
We are all broken. We will miss you.
For real, those that can still do it: Stay safe. Stay home.
Update 2020-04-18: I have removed my QOwnNotes repository, since there is a OBS build by upstream that includes builds for Debian/unstable, testing, Buster. So no need for me. Please see https://www.qownnotes.org/installation for details!!
Some time ago I posted about QOwnNotes for Debian. My recent experience with the openSUSE Build System has convinced me to move also the QOwnNotes packages there, which allows me to provide builds for Debian/Buster, Debian/testing, and Debian/sid, all for both i386 and amd64 architectures.
To repeat a bit about QOwnNotes, it is a cross-platform plain text and markdown note taking application. By itself, it wouldn t be something to talk about, we have vim and emacs and everything in between. But QOwnNotes integrates nicely with the Notes application from NextCloud and OwnCloud, as well as providing useful integration with NextCloud like old version of notes, access to deleted files, watching changes, etc.
The new locations for binary packages for both amd64 and i386 architectures are as follows below. To make these repositories work out of the box, you need to import my OBS gpg key: obs-npreining.asc, best to download it and put the file into /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc.
Debian/buster:
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-qownnotes/Debian_10 ./
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-qownnotes/Debian_Testing ./
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-qownnotes/Debian_Unstable ./
I just had a weekend full of very successful serious geekery. On a whim I thought: Wouldn't it be nice if people could interact with my game Kaleidogen also via a telegram bot? This led me to learn about how I write a Telegram bot in Haskell and how I can deploy such a Haskell program to Amazon Lambda. In particular the latter bit might be interesting to some of my readers, so here is how went about it.
KaleidogenBot in action
bootstrap that queries the Lambda Runtime Interface for the next request to handle. The Lambda documentation is phrased as if this runtime has to be a dispatcher that calls the separate function s handler. But it could just do all the things directly.
I found the Haskell package aws-lambda-haskell-runtime which provides precisely that: A function
runLambda :: (LambdaOptions -> IO (Either String LambdaResult)) -> IO ()main :: IO ()
main = runLambda run
where
run :: LambdaOptions -> IO (Either String LambdaResult)
run opts = do
result <- handler (decodeObj (eventObject opts)) (decodeObj (contextObject opts))
either (pure . Left . encodeObj) (pure . Right . LambdaResult . encodeObj) result
data Event = Event
path :: T.Text
, body :: Maybe T.Text
deriving (Generic, FromJSON)
data Response = Response
statusCode :: Int
, headers :: Value
, body :: T.Text
, isBase64Encoded :: Bool
deriving (Generic, ToJSON)
handler :: Event -> Context -> IO (Either String Response)
handler Event body, path context =
Event, listing only the fields I care about), and it will respond with a Response, again as JSON.
The handler can then simply pattern-match on the path to decide what to do. For example this code handles URLs like /img/CAFFEEFACE.png, and responds with an image.
handler :: TC -> Event -> Context -> IO (Either String Response)
handler Event body, path context
Just bytes <- isImgPath path >>= T.decodeHex = do
let pngData = genPurePNG bytes
pure $ Right Response
statusCode = 200
, headers = object [ "Content-Type" .= ("image/png" :: String) ]
, isBase64Encoded = True
, body = T.decodeUtf8 $ LBS.toStrict $ Base64.encode pngData
isImgPath :: T.Text -> Maybe T.Text
isImgPath = T.stripPrefix "/img/" >=> T.stripSuffix ".png"servant, or bridging towards wai apps (amost like wai-lamda, but that still assumes an existing runtime, instead of simply being the runtime). But for my purposes, no extra layers of indirection or abstraction are needed!
aws-lambda-haskell-runtime package, and similar projects like serverless-haskell, solve this using stack and Docker two technologies that are probably great, but I never warmed up to them.
So instead adding layers and complexities, can I solve this instead my making things simpler? If I compiler my bootstrap into a static Linux binary, it should run on any Linux, including Amazon Linux.
Unfortunately, building Haskell programs statically is also notoriously tricky. But it is made much simpler by the work of Niklas Hamb chen and others in the context of the Nix package manager, coordinated in the static-haskell-nix project. The promise here is that once you have set up building your project with Nix, then getting a static version is just one flag away. The support is not completely upstreamed into nixpkgs proper yet, but their repository has a nix file that contains a nixpkgs set with their patches:
let pkgs = (import (sources.nixpkgs-static + "/survey/default.nix") ).pkgs; in$ nix-build -A kaleidogen
/nix/store/ppwyq4d964ahd6k56wsklh93vzw07ln0-kaleidogen-0.1.0.0
$ file result/bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda
result/bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped
$ ls -sh result/bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda
6,7M result/bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambdabootstrap, into a zip file and upload it to Amazon Lambda, then it just works! Creating the zip file is easily scripted using nix:
function-zip = pkgs.runCommandNoCC "kaleidogen-lambda"
buildInputs = [ pkgs.zip ];
''
mkdir -p $out
cp $ kaleidogen /bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda bootstrap
zip $out/function.zip bootstrap
'';nix-build -A function-zip &&
aws lambda update-function-code --function-name kaleidogen \
--zip-file fileb://result/function.zipaws-lambda-deploy; see my workflow file for details.
telegram-api package provides bindigs for the Telegram Bot API (although I had to use the repository version, as the version on Hackage has some bitrot). Slightly simplified I can write a handler for an Update:
handleUpdate :: Update -> TelegramClient ()
handleUpdate Update message = Just m = do
let c = ChatId (chat_id (chat m))
liftIO $ printf "message from %s: %s\n" (maybe "?" user_first_name (from m)) (maybe "" T.unpack (text m))
if "/start" T.isPrefixOf fromMaybe "" (text m)
then do
rm <- sendMessageM $ sendMessageRequest c "Hi! I am @KaleidogenBot. "
return ()
else do
m1 <- sendMessageM $ sendMessageRequest c "One moment "
withPNGFile $ \pngFN -> do
m2 <- uploadPhotoM $ uploadPhotoRequest c
(FileUpload (Just "image/png") (FileUploadFile pngFN))
return ()
handleUpdate _ u =
liftIO $ putStrLn $ "Unhandled message: " ++ show uhandler that I wrote above:
path == "/telegram" =
case eitherDecode (LBS.fromStrict (T.encodeUtf8 (fromMaybe "" body))) of
Left err ->
Right update -> do
runTelegramClient token manager $ handleUpdate Nothing update
pure $ Right Response
statusCode = 200
, headers = object [ "Content-Type" .= ("text/plain" :: String) ]
, isBase64Encoded = False
, body = "Done"
body that contains the original HTTP request body. Which, in this case, is itself JSON, so we have to decode that.
All that is left to do is to tell Telegram where this code lives:
curl --request POST \
--url https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/setWebhook
--header 'content-type: application/json'
--data ' "url": "https://api.kaleidogen.nomeata.de/telegram" '/dev/dri/renderD128. Amazon does not provide that to Lambda code, and neither do the other big Function-as-a-service providers. So I had to swallow my pride and reimplement the rendering in pure Haskell.
So if you think the bot is kinda slow, then that s why. Despite properly optimizing the pure implementation (the inner loop does not do allocations and deals only with unboxed Double# values), the GL shader version is still three times as fast. Maybe in a few years GPU access will be so ubiquitous that it s even on Amazon Lambda; then I can easily use that.
DPL Campaign 2020 On the 12th of March, I posted my self-nomination for the Debian Project Leader election. This is the second time I m running for DPL, and you can read my platform here. The campaign period covered the second half of the month, where I answered a bunch of questions on the debian-vote list. The voting period is currently open and ends on 18 April.
Debian Social
Debian packaging I had the sense that there were fewer upstream releases this month. I suspect that everyone was busy figuring out how to cope during Covid-19 lockdowns taking place all over the world. 2020-03-02: Upload package calamares (3.2.10-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-10: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (29-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-10: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-draw-on-your-screen (5.1-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (31-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-draw-on-your-screen (6-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Update package python3-flask-autoindexing packaging, not releasing due to licensing change that needs further clarification. (GitHub issue #55). 2020-03-28: Upload package gamemode (1.5.1-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package calamares (3.2.21-1) to Debian unstable.
Debian mentoring 2020-03-03: Sponsor package python-jaraco.functools (3.0.0-1) (Python team request). 2020-03-03: Review python-ftputil (3.4-1) (Needs some more work) (Python team request). 2020-03-04: Sponsor package pythonmagick (0.9.19-6) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-23: Sponsor package bitwise (0.41-1) for Debian unstable (Email request). 2020-03-23: Sponsor package gpxpy (1.4.0-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package gpxpy (1.4.0-2) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package celery (4.4.2-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package buildbot (2.7.0-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request).
| Publisher: | The New Press |
| Copyright: | 2019 |
| ISBN: | 1-62097-437-1 |
| Format: | Kindle |
| Pages: | 247 |
What many black women were angry about was how I located myself in what I'd written. I said, blithely as a matter of observable fact, that I am unattractive. Because I am unattractive, the argument went, I have a particular kind of experience of beauty, race, racism, and interacting with what we might call the white gaze. I thought nothing of it at the time I was writing it, which is unusual. I can usually pinpoint what I have said, written, or done that will piss people off and which people will be pissed off. I missed this one entirely.What follows is one of the best essays on the social construction of beauty I've ever read. It barely pauses at the typical discussion of unrealistic beauty standards as a feminist issue, instead diving directly into beauty as whiteness, distinguishing between beauty standards that change with generations and the more lasting rules that instead police the bounds between white and not white. McMillan Cottom then goes on to explain how beauty is a form of capital, a poor and problematic one but nonetheless one of the few forms of capital women have access to, and therefore why black women have fought to be included in beauty despite all of the problems with judging people by beauty standards. And the essay deepens from there into a trenchant critique of both capitalism and white feminism that is both precise and illuminating.
When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture's assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it. I am glad that doing so unsettles folks, including the many white women who wrote to me with impassioned cases for how beautiful I am. They offered me neoliberal self-help nonsense that borders on the religious. They need me to believe beauty is both achievable and individual, because the alternative makes them vulnerable.I could go on. Every essay in this book deserves similar attention. I want to quote from all of them. These essays are about racism, feminism, capitalism, and economics, all at the same time. They're about power, and how it functions in society, and what it does to people. There is an essay about Obama that contains the most concise explanation for his appeal to white voters that I've read. There is a fascinating essay about the difference between ethnic black and black-black in U.S. culture. There is so much more.
We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our delusions about meritocracy. God help my people, but I can talk to hundreds of black folks who have been systematically separated from their money, citizenship, and personhood and hear at least eighty stories about how no one is to blame but themselves. That is not about black people being black but about people being American. That is what we do. If my work is about anything it is about making plain precisely how prestige, money, and power structure our so-called democratic institutions so that most of us will always fail.I, like many other people in my profession, was always more comfortable with the technical and scientific classes in college. I liked math and equations and rules, dreaded essay courses, and struggled to engage with the mandatory humanities courses. Something that I'm still learning, two decades later, is the extent to which this was because the humanities are harder work than the sciences and I wasn't yet up to the challenge of learning them properly. The problems are messier and more fluid. The context required is broader. It's harder to be clear and precise. And disciplines like sociology deal with our everyday lived experience, which means that we all think we're entitled to an opinion. Books like this, which can offer me a hand up and a grounding in the intellectual rigor while simultaneously being engaging and easy to read, are a treasure. They help me fill in the gaps in my education and help me recognize and appreciate the depth of thought in disciplines that don't come as naturally to me. This book was homework, but the good kind, the kind that exposes gaps in my understanding, introduces topics I hadn't considered, and makes the time fly until I come up for air, awed and thinking hard. Highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10
ssh-agent is a program to hold in memory the private keys used by
SSH for public-key authentication. When the agent is running, ssh
forwards to it the signature requests from the server. The agent
performs the private key operations and returns the results to ssh.
It is useful if you keep your private keys encrypted on disk and you
don t want to type the password at each connection. Keeping the agent
secure is critical: someone able to communicate with the agent can
authenticate on your behalf on remote servers.
ssh also provides the ability to forward the agent to a remote
server. From this remote server, you can authenticate to another
server using your local agent, without copying your private key on the
intermediate server. As stated in the manual page, this is
dangerous!
Agent forwarding should be enabled with caution. Users with the
ability to bypass file permissions on the remote host (for the
agent s UNIX-domain socket) can access the local agent through the
forwarded connection. An attacker cannot obtain key material from
the agent, however they can perform operations on the keys that
enable them to authenticate using the identities loaded into the
agent. A safer alternative may be to use a jump host (see -J).
As mentioned, a better alternative is to use the jump host feature:
the SSH connection to the target host is tunneled through the SSH
connection to the jump host. See the manual page and this
blog post for more details.
ssh command will spawn such an
ephemeral agent:
alias assh="ssh-agent ssh -o AddKeysToAgent=confirm -o ForwardAgent=yes"
-o AddKeysToAgent=confirm directive, ssh adds the
unencrypted private key to the agent but each use must be
confirmed.1 Once connected, you get a password prompt for
each signature request:2
Update (2020-04)
In a previous version of this article, the
wrapper around the ssh command was a more complex function.
Alexandre Oliva was kind enough to point me to the simpler
solution above.
Update (2020-04) Guardian Agent is an even safer alternative: it shows and ensures the usage (target and command) of the requested signature. There is also a wide range of alternative solutions to this problem. See for example SSH-Ident, Wikimedia solution and solo-agent.
The following packages will be REMOVED:Wait. "current home is /root"? What did you do? Then I've extracted its package (ar -x zoom_amd64.deb; tar xvf contro.tar.xz; view post*)
zoom*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 45 not upgraded.
After this operation, 269 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
(Reading database ... 362466 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing zoom (3.5.374815.0324) ...
run post uninstall script, action is remove ...
current home is /root
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.64) ...
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.36.0-1) ...
Processing triggers for shared-mime-info (1.15-1) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.24-1) ...
(Reading database ... 361169 files and directories currently installed.)
Purging configuration files for zoom (3.5.374815.0324) ...
run post uninstall script, action is purge ...
current home is /root
#!/bin/bashOuch. When I run apt with sudo, $HOME is /root. So, their maintscript tried to remove files under /root! Did they do any tests? Even if it would work well, touch user's files under $Home is NOT a good idea...
# Program:
# script to be run after package installation
echo "run post install script, action is $1..."
#ln -s -f /opt/zoom/ZoomLauncher /usr/bin/zoom
#$1 folder path
function remove_folder
if [ -d $1 ]; then
rm -rf $1
fi
echo current home is $HOME
remove_folder "$HOME/.cache/zoom"
(snip)
Their linux installer scripts are clueless and icky too:Will Stephenson (@wstephenson) March 31, 2020
_ "/ / "
_ "$ /. / "
_ "$ /. / "
rpm -q --scripts zoom output: https://t.co/HwnvljYyp4
stream_context_set_option($context, array('ssl' => $context_options));
else
$remote_socket = 'tcp://' . $host;
$context_options['SNI_enabled'] = true;
This waterfall is beside my yard. When it's running, I know my
water tanks are full and the spring is not dry.
Also it's computer controlled, for times when I don't want to hear it.
I'll also use the computer control later on to avoid running the pump
excessively and wearing it out, and for some safety features like not
running when the water is frozen.
This is a whole hillside of pipes, water tanks, pumps, solar panels,
all controlled by a GPIO port. Easy enough; the pump controller has a float
switch input and the GPIO drives a 4n35 optoisolator to open or close that
circuit. Hard part will be burying all the cable to the pump. And then all
the landscaping around the waterfall.
There's a bit of lag to turning it on and off. It can take over an hour for
it to start flowing, and around half an hour to stop. The water level has
to get high enough in the water tanks to overcome some airlocks and
complicated hydrodynamic flow stuff. Then when it stops, all that excess
water has to drain back down.
Anyway, enjoy my soothing afternoon project and/or massive rube goldberg
machine, I certainly am.
Before uploading stuff to Debian, I build in a clean chroot, and then
run piuparts, autopkgtest and lintian. For some of my packages this
can take around an hour on my laptop, which is fairly old. Normally I
don t mind waiting, but sometimes I want to put my laptop away, and
then it would be good for things to be faster. It occurred to me that
I could make use of my builds.sr.ht account
to run these tests on more powerful hardware.
This build manifest seems to work:
# BEGIN CONFIGURABLE
sources:
- https://salsa.debian.org/perl-team/modules/packages/libgit-annex-perl.git
environment:
source: libgit-annex-perl
quilt: auto
# END CONFIGURABLE
image: debian/unstable
packages:
- autopkgtest
- devscripts
- dgit
- lintian
- piuparts
- sbuild
tasks:
- setup:
cd $source
source_version=$(dpkg-parsechangelog -SVersion)
echo "source_version=$source_version" >>~/.buildenv
git deborig origtargz
sudo sbuild-createchroot --command-prefix=eatmydata --include=eatmydata unstable /srv/chroot/unstable-amd64-sbuild
sudo sbuild-adduser $USER
- build:
cd $source
dgit --quilt=$quilt sbuild -d unstable --no-run-lintian
- lintian:
lintian $ source _$ source_version _multi.changes
- piuparts:
sudo piuparts --no-eatmydata --schroot unstable-amd64-sbuild $ source _$ source_version _multi.changes
- autopkgtest:
autopkgtest $ source _$ source_version _multi.changes -- schroot unstable-amd64-sbuild
Sonic Mania
A new (upstream) simdjson release was announced by Daniel Lemire earlier this week, and my Twitter mentions have been running red-hot ever since as he was kind enough to tag me. Do look at that blog post, there is some impressive work in there. We wrapped up the (still very simple) rcppsimdjson around it last night and shipped it this morning.
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire. Via some very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. For illustration, I highly recommend the video of the recent talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (which was also voted best talk). The best-case performance is faster than CPU speed as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle use per byte parsed.
This release brings upstream 0.3 (and 0.3.1) plus a minor tweak (also shipped back upstream). Our full NEWS entry follows.
But because Daniel is such a fantastic upstream developer to collaborate with, he even filed a full feature-request maybe you can consider upgrading as issue #8 at our repo containing the fully detailed list of changes. As it is so impressive I will simple quote the upper half of just the major changes:Changes in version 0.0.4 (2020-04-03)
For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.Highlights
- Multi-Document Parsing: Read a bundle of JSON documents (ndjson) 2-4x faster than doing it individually. API docs / Design Details
- Simplified API: The API has been completely revamped for ease of use, including a new JSON navigation API and fluent support for error code and exception styles of error handling with a single API. Docs
- Exact Float Parsing: Now simdjson parses floats flawlessly without any performance loss (https://github.com/simdjson/simdjson/pull/558). Blog Post
- Even Faster: The fastest parser got faster! With a shiny new UTF-8 validator and meticulously refactored SIMD core, simdjson 0.3 is 15% faster than before, running at 2.5 GB/s (where 0.2 ran at 2.2 GB/s).
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
For various personal projects and things, past and present (including my
personal site) I use IkiWiki, which (by modern standards) is a bit of a
pain to set up and maintain. For that reason I find it hard to recommend to
people. It would be nice to fire up a snapshot of an existing IkiWiki instance
to test what the outcome of some changes might be. That's cumbersome enough at
the moment that I haven't bothered to do it more than once. Separately, some
months ago I did a routine upgrade of Debian for the web server running
this site, and my IkiWiki installation broke for the first time in ten
years. I've never had issues like this before.
For all of these reasons I've just dusted off an old experiment of
mine now renamed Opinionated IkiWiki. It's IkiWiki in a
container, configured to be usable out-of-the-box, with some opinionated
configuration decisions made for you. The intention is you should be able to
fire up this container and immediately have a useful IkiWiki instance to work
from. It should hopefully be easier to clone an existing wiki
content, configuration and all for experimentation.
You can check out the source at GitHub,
and
grab container images from quay.io.
Or fire one up immediately at http://127.0.0.1:8080 with something like
podman run --rm -ti -p 8080:8080 \
quay.io/jdowland/opinionated-ikiwiki:latest
For those in hurry: new binary packages that can be used on both Debian/testing and Debian/sid can be obtained for both i386 and amd64 archs here:
Debian/testing:
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-plasma/Debian_Testing ./
deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-plasma/Debian_Unstable ./
/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc.
The sources for the above binaries are available at the OBS site for the debian-plasma sub-project, but I will also try to keep them apt-get-able on my server as before:
deb-src https://www.preining.info/debian unstable kde
A new release 0.4.12 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN today, and was uploaded to Debian as well.
QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language.
This version does relatively little. When QuantLib 1.18 came out, I immediately did my usual bit of packaging it for Debian as well creating binaries via my Ubuntu PPA so that I could test the package against it. And a few call from RQuantLib are now hitting interface functions marked as deprecated leading to compiler nags. So I fixed that in PR #146. And today CRAN sent me email to please fix in the released version so I rolled this up as 0.4.12. Not other changes.
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the new rquantlib-devel mailing list. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.12 (2020-04-01)
- Changes in RQuantLib code:
- Calls deprecated-in-QuantLib 1.18 were updated (Dirk in #146).
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
.co domains.
Leading to this auto linking:
Now I'm not sure if someone enocountered the same issue, or people just registered
random domains just because they could. I found registrations for
.conf files in /etc which could be interesting in an IT environment, but for the sake of playing with
it I registered nsswitch.co at godaddy. I do not want to endorse them in
anyway, but for the first year it's only 13.08EUR right now, which is okay to
pay for a stupid demo. So if you feel like it, you can probably register something stupid for yourself to play around with. I do not intent to renew this domain next year, so
be aware of what happens then with the next owner.
Sometimes, in our day-to-day-interactions, communication becomes disruptive,
resembling a chain of reactions to reactions to reactions. Sometimes we lose the
capacity to express our ideas and feelings. Sometimes communication just gets stuck,
maybe conflict breaks out. When we see these same patterns over and over again, this
might be due to the ever same roles that we adopt and play. Learnt in
childhood, these roles are deeply ingrained in our adult selves, and acted out
as unconscious scripts. Until we notice and work on them.
This is a post inspired by contents from my mediation training.
In the 1960s, Stephen Karpman has thought of a model of human communication
that maps the destructive interactions which occur between people. This map is known as the drama triangle.
Karpman defined three roles that interact with each other. We can play one
role at work, and a different one at home, and another one with our children.
Or we can switch from one role to the other in just one conversation. The three
roles are:
Persecutor Rescuer Assertive Caring
I'm right. I'm good. I have needs. I'm listening.
---------------------- ----------------------
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\/ \/
Victim Vulnerable
I'm blameless. I'm struggling.
Karpman Dreaded Drama Triangle Choy's Winner Triangle
The Assertive "I have needs." has a calling, aims at change, initiates,
and gives feedback. Skills to learn: The Assertive needs to
learn to identify their needs, communicate them, and negotiate with
others on eye level without shaming, punishing, or belittling them. The Assertive needs to learn to give constructive feedback, without dismissing others. (In the workplace, it could be helpful to have a space for this.) The Assertive could benefit from learning to use I-Statements.
The Caring "I'm listening." shows good will and sensitivity, cares, is empathic and
supportive. Skills to learn: The Caring needs to learn to respect the
boundaries of others: trusting their abilities to think, problem solve and
talk for themselves. Therefore, the Caring could benefit from improving their active listening skills. Furthermore the Caring
needs to learn to identify and respect their own boundaries and not to do things only because it makes them feel better about themselves.
The Vulnerable "I'm struggling." has the skill of seeing and naming problems. Skills to learn: The Vulnerable
needs to learn to acknowledge their feelings and needs, practice self-awareness, and self-compassion. They need to untie their self-esteem from the validation of other people. They need to learn to take care of themselves, and to strengthen their problem solving and decision making skills.
What has this got to do with autonomy and power structures?
Each of these interactions is embedded in larger society, and, as said above,
we learn these roles from childhood. Therefore, we perpetually reproduce power
structures, and learnt behavior. I doubt that fixing this on an individual
level is sufficient to transform our interactions outside of small groups,
families or work places. Although that would be a good start.
We can see that the triangle holds together because the Victim, seemingly
devoid of a way to handle their own needs, transfers care of their needs to the
Rescuer, thereby giving up on their autonomy. The Rescuer is provided by the
Victim with a sense of autonomy, knowledge, and power, that only works while
denying the Victim their autonomy. At the same time, the Persecutor denies
everyone else's needs and autonomy, and feels powerful by dismissing others.
I've recently mentioned the importance of autonomy in order to avoid burnout, and as a means to control one's own life.
If the Rescuer can acknowledge being in the triangle, and give the Victim autonomy, by supporting them with
compassion, empathy, and guidance, and at the same time respecting their own
boundaries, we could find even more ways to escape the drama triangle.
Notes
My description of the roles was heavily inspired by the article Escaping Conflict and the Karpman Drama Triangle that has a lot more detail on how to escape the triangle, and how to recognize when we're moving into one of the roles. While the article is informing families living with a person suffering from a spectrum of Borderline Personality Disorder, the content applies to any dysfunctional interaction.
This post is an open question to the wide range of GNU/Linux site admins out there. Possibly some of you have the joy of maintaining GNU/Linux also on user endpoint devices (i.e. user workstations, user notebooks, etc.), not only on corporate servers.
TL;DR; In the context of a customer project, I am researching ways of mimicking (or inventing anew) a feature well known (and sometimes also well hated) from the MS Windows world: Roaming User Profiles. If anyone does have any input on that, please contact me (OFTC/Freenode IRC, Telegram, email). I am curious what your solution may be.
The Use Case Scenario
In my use case, all user machines shall be mobile (notebooks, convertibles, etc). The machines maybe on-site most of the time, but they need offline capabilities so that the users can transparently move off-site and continue their work. At the same time, a copy of the home directory (or the home directory itself) shall be stored on some backend fileservers (for central backups as well as for providing the possibility to the user to login to another machine and be up-and-running +/- out-of-the-box).
The Vision
Initial Login
Ideally, I'd like to have a low level file system feature for this that handles it all. On corporate user logon (which must take place on-site and uses some LDAP database as backend), the user credentials get cached locally (and get re-mapped and re-cached with every on-site login later on), and the home directory gets mounted from a remote server at first.
Shortly after having logged in everything in the user's home gets sync'ed to a local cache in the background without the user noticing. At the end of the sync a GUI user notification would be nice, e.g. like "All user data has been cached locally, you are good to go and leave off-site now with this machine."
Moving Off-Site
A day later, the user may be travelling or such, the user logs into the machine again, the machine senses being offline or on some alien (not corporate) network, but the user can just continue their work, all in local cache.
Several days later, the same user with the same machine returns back to office, logs into the machine again, and immediately after login, all cached data gets synced back to the user's server filespace.
Possible Conflict Policies
Now there might be cases where the user has been working locally for a while and all the profile data received slight changes. The user might have had the possibility to log into other corporate servers from the alien network he*she is on and with that login, some user profile files probably will have gotten changed.
Regarding client-server sync policies, one could now enforce a client-always-wins policy that leads to changes being dropped server-side once the user's mobile workstation returns back on-site. One could also set up a bi-directional sync policy for normal data files, but a client-always-wins policy for configuration files (.files and .folders). Etc.pp.
Request for Feedback and Comments
I could go on further and further with making up edges and corner cases of all this. We had a little discussion on this some days ago on the #debian-devel IRC channel already. Thanks to all contributors to that discussion.
And again, if you have solved the above riddle on your site and are corporate-wise allowed to share the concept, I'd be happy about your feedback.
Plese get in touch!
light+love Vitaly Bragilevsky, in a mail to the GHC Steering Committee, reminded me that the first version of the Haskell programming language was released exactly 30 years ago. On April 1st. So that raises the question: Was Haskell just an April fool's joke that was never retracted?
The cover of the 1.0 Haskell report
> pascal 1 = [1]
> pascal (n+1) = zipWith (+) (x ++ [0]) (0 : x) where x = pascal nNext.