iMore has an insightful article about Apple s transition to the ARM instruction set for new Mac desktops and laptops [1]. I d still like to see them do something for the server side. Umair Haque wrote an insightful article about How the American Idiot Made America Unlivable [2]. We are witnessing the destruction of a once great nation. Chris Lamb wrote an interesting blog post about comedy shows with the laugh tracks edited out [3]. He then compares that to social media with the like count hidden which is an interesting perspective. I m not going to watch TV shows edited in that way (I ve enjoyed BBT inspite of all the bad things about it) and I m not going to try and hide like counts on social media. But it s interesting to consider these things. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting Locus article suggesting that we could have full employment by a transition to renewable energy and methods for cleaning up the climate problems we are too late to prevent [4]. That seems plausible, but I think we should still get a Universal Basic Income. The Thinking Shop has posters and decks of cards with logical fallacies and cognitive biases [5]. Every company should put some of these in meeting rooms. Also they have free PDFs to download and print your own posters. gayhomophobe.com [6] is a site that lists powerful homophobic people who hurt GLBT people but then turned out to be gay. It s presented in an amusing manner, people who hurt others deserve to be mocked. Wired has an insightful article about the shutdown of Backpage [7]. The owners of Backpage weren t nice people and they did some stupid things which seem bad (like editing posts to remove terms like lolita ). But they also worked well with police to find criminals. The opposition to what Backpage were doing conflates sex trafficing, child prostitution, and legal consenting adult sex work. Taking down Backpage seems to be a bad thing for the victims of sex trafficing, for consenting adult sex workers, and for society in general. Cloudflare has an interesting blog post about short lived certificates for ssh access [8]. Instead of having user s ssh keys stored on servers each user has to connect to a SSO server to obtain a temporary key before connecting, so revoking an account is easy.

• [1] https://www.imore.com/mac-moving-apple-silicon-not-arm
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/y7yfxyqu
• [3] https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/the-comedy-is-over
• [4] https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
• [5] https://thethinkingshop.org/
• [6] https://gayhomophobe.com/
• [7] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-backpage-vicious-battle-feds/
• [8] https://blog.cloudflare.com/public-keys-are-not-enough-for-ssh-security/

Only a short update on the current status of my KDE/Plasma package for Debian sid and testing:

• Frameworks 5.72
• Plasma 5.19.4
• Apps 20.04.3
• Digikam 7.0.0
• Ark CVE-2020-16116 fixed in version 20.04.3-1~np2

Hope that helps a few people. See this post for how to setup archives. Enjoy.

So even after years and years of experience, core tools still find ways to surprise me. Today I tried to do some timestamp comparisons with mawk (vnl-filter, to be more precise), and ran into a detail of the language that made it not work. Not a bug, I guess, since both mawk and gawk are affected. I'll claim "language design flaw", however. Let's say I'm processing data with unix timestamps in it (seconds since the epoch). gawk and recent versions of mawk have strftime() for that:

$ date
Wed Jul 29 15:31:13 PDT 2020
$ date +"%s"
1596061880
$ date +"%s"   mawk ' print strftime("%H",$1) '
15

And let's say I want to do something conditional on them. I want only data after 9:00 each day:

$ date +"%s"   mawk 'strftime("%H",$1) >= 9  print "Yep. After 9:00" '

That's right. No output. But it is 15:31 now, and I confirmed above that strftime() reports the right time, so it should know that it's after 9:00, but it doesn't. What gives? As we know, awk (and perl after it) treat numbers and strings containing numbers similarly: 5+5 and ="5"+5= both work the same, which is really convenient. This can only work if it can be inferred from context whether we want a number or a string; it knows that addition takes two numbers, so it knows to convert ="5"= into a number in the example above. But what if an operator is ambiguous? Then it picks a meaning based on some internal logic that I don't want to be familiar with. And apparently awk implements string comparisons with the same < and > operators, as numerical comparisons, creating the ambiguity I hit today. strftime returns strings, and you get silent, incorrect behavior that then demands debugging. How to fix? By telling awk to treat the output of strftime() as a number:

$ date +"%s"   mawk '0+strftime("%H",$1) >= 9  print "Yep. After 9:00" '
Yep. After 9:00

With the benefit of hindsight, they really should not have reused any operators for both number and string operations. Then these ambiguities wouldn't occur, and people wouldn't be grumbling into their blogs decades after these decisions were made.

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi. After having had some success with a sysroot in having a Qt5 cross-build environment that includes QtWebEngine, the next step is packaging the sysroot so it can be available both to build the cross-build environment, and to do cross-development with it. The result is this Debian source package which takes a Raspberry Pi OS disk image, provisions it in-place, extracts its contents, and packages them. Yes. You may want to reread the last paragraph. It works directly in the disk image to avoid a nasty filesystem issue on emulated 32bit Linux over a 64bit mounted filesystem. This feels like the most surreal Debian package I've ever created, and this saga looks like one of the hairiest yaks I've ever shaved. Integrating this monster codebase, full of bundled code and hacks, into a streamlined production and deployment system has been for me a full stack nightmare, and I have a renewed and growing respect for the people in the Qt/KDE team in Debian, who manage to stay on top of this mess, so that it all just works when we need it.

So a few months ago kiddo one dropped an apparently fairly large cup of coffee onto her one and only trusted computer. With a few months (then) to graduation (which by now happened), and with the apparent genuis bar verdict of it s a goner a new one was ordered. As it turns out this supposedly dead one coped well enough with the coffee so that after a few weeks of drying it booted again. But give the newer one, its apparent age and whatnot, it was deemed surplus. So I poked around a little on the interwebs and conclude that yes, this could work. Fast forward a few months and I finally got hold of it, and had some time to play with it. First, a bootable usbstick was prepared, and the machine s content was really (really, and check again: really) no longer needed, I got hold of it for good. tl;dr It works just fine. It is a little heavier than I thought (and isn t air supposed to be weightless?) The ergonomics seem quite nice. The keyboard is decent. Screen-resolution on this pre-retina simple Air is so-so at 1440 pixels. But battery live seems ok and e.g. the camera is way better than what I have in my trusted Lenovo X1 or at my desktop. So just as a zoom client it may make a lot of sense; otherwise just walking around with it as a quick portable machine seems perfect (especially as my Lenovo X1 still (ahem) suffers from one broken key I really need to fix ). Below are some lightly edited notes from the installation. Initial steps were quick: maybe an hour or less? Customizing a machine takes longer than I remembered, this took a few minutes here and there quite a few times, but always incremental.

Initial Steps

• Download of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS image: took a few moments, even on broadband, feels slower than normal (fast!) Ubuntu package updates, maybe lesser CDN or bad luck
• Startup Disk Creator using a so-far unused 8gb usb drive
• Plug into USB, recycle power, press Option on macOS keyboard: voila
• After a quick hunch no to live/test only and yes to install, whole disk
• install easy, very few questions, somehow skips wifi
• so activate wifi manually and everythings pretty much works

Customization

• First deal with fn and ctrl key swap. Install git and followed this github repo which worked just fine. Yay. First (manual) Linux kernel module build needed need in half a decade? Longer?
• Fire up firefox, go to download chrome , install chrome. Sign in. Turn on syncing. Sign into Pushbullet and Momentum.
• syncthing which is excellent. Initially via apt, later from their PPA. Spend some time remembering how to set up the mutual handshakes between devices. Now syncing desktop/server, lenovo x1 laptop, android phone and this new laptop
• keepassx via apt and set up using Sync/ folder. Now all (encrypted) passwords synced.
• Discovered synergy now longer really free, so after a quick search found and installed barrier (via apt) to have one keyboard/mouse from desktop reach laptop.
• Added emacs via apt, so far empty , so config files yet
• Added ssh via apt, need to propagate keys to github and gitlab
• Added R via add-apt-repository --yes "ppa:marutter/rrutter4.0" and add-apt-repository --yes "ppa:c2d4u.team/c2d4u4.0+". Added littler and then RStudio
• Added wajig (apt frontend) and byobu, both via apt
• Created ssh key, shipped it to server and github + gitlab
• Cloned (not-public) dotfiles repo and linked some dotfiles in
• Cloned git repo for nord-theme for gnome terminal and installed it; also added it to RStudio via this repo
• Emacs installed, activated dotfiles, then incrementally install a few elpa-* packages and a few M-x package-install including nord-theme, of course
• Installed JetBrains Mono font from my own local package; activated for Gnome Terminal and Emacs
• Install gnome-tweak-tool via apt, adjusted a few settings
• Ran gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode 'sloppy'
• Set up camera following this useful GH repo
• At some point also added slack and zoom, because, well, it is 2020
• STILL TODO:
  • docker
  • bother with email setup?,
  • maybe atom/code/ ?

Many people labour under the assumption that pop culture is trivial and useless while only 'high' art can grant us genuine and eternal knowledge about the world. Given that we have a finite time on this planet, we are all permitted to enjoy pop culture up to a certain point, but we should always minimise our interaction with it, and consume more moral and intellectual instruction wherever possible. Or so the theory goes. What these people do not realise is that pop and mass culture can often provide more information about the world, humanity in general and what is even more important ourselves. This is not quite the debate around whether high art is artistically better, simply that pop culture can be equally informative. Jeremy Bentham argued in the 1820s that "prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry", that it didn't matter where our pleasures come from. (John Stuart Mill, Bentham's intellectual rival, disagreed.) This fundamental question of philosophical utilitarianism will not be resolved here. However, what might begin to be resolved is our instinctive push-back against pop culture. We all share an automatic impulse to disregard things we do not like and to pretend they do not exist, but this wishful thinking does not mean that these cultural products do not continue to exist when we aren't thinking about them and, more to our point, continue to influence others and even ourselves. Take, for example, the recent trend for 'millennial pink'. With its empty consumerism, faux nostalgia, reductive generational stereotyping, objectively ugly sthetics and tedious misogyny (photographed with Rose Gold iPhones), the very combination appears to have been deliberately designed to annoy me, curiously providing circumstantial evidence in favour of intelligent design. But if I were to immediately dismiss millennial pink and any of the other countless cultural trends I dislike simply because I find them disagreeable, I would be willingly keeping myself blind to their underlying ideology, their significance and their effect on society at large. If I had any ethical or political reservations I might choose not to engage with them economically or to avoid advertising them to others, but that is a different question altogether. Even if we can't notice this pattern within ourselves we can first observe it in others. We can all recall moments where someone has brushed off a casual reference to pop culture, be it Tiger King, TikTok, team sports or Taylor Swift; if you can't, simply look for the abrupt change of tone and the slightly-too-quick dismissal. I am not suggesting you attempt to dissuade others or even to point out this mental tic, but merely seeing it in action can be highly illustrative in its own way. In summary, we can simultaneously say that pop culture is not worthy of our time relative to other pursuits while consuming however much of it we want, but deliberately dismissing pop culture doesn't mean that a lot of other people are not interacting with it and is therefore undeserving of any inquiry. And if that doesn't convince you, just like the once-unavoidable millennial pink, simply sticking our collective heads in the sand will not mean that wider societal-level ugliness is going to disappear anytime soon. Anyway, that's a very long way of justifying why I plan to re-watch TNG.

A bugfix release of our (still small) ttdo package arrived on CRAN overnight. As introduced last fall, the ttdo package extends the most excellent (and very minimal / zero depends) unit testing package tinytest by Mark van der Loo with the very clever and well-done diffobj package by Brodie Gaslam to give us test results with visual diffs: This release corrects a minor editing error spotted by the ever-vigilant John Blischak. The NEWS entry follow.

Changes in ttdo version 0.0.6 (2020-07-27)

• Correct a minor editing mistake spotted by John Blischak.

CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. Please use the GitHub repo and its issues for any questions. 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.

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

Hmm, this is the latest I ve posted my monthly updates yet (nearly by a month!). June was both crazy on the incoming side, and at the same time I just wasn t that productive (at least since then I caught up a lot). In theory, lockdown means that I spend less time in traffic, in shops or with friends and have more time to do stuff, in practice I go to bed later and later and waste more time watching tv shows and playing mobile games. A cycle that I have at least broken free from since June.

Debian Package Uploads 2020-06-04: Upload package btfs (2.21-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-06-04: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-disconnect-wifi (24-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-06-18: Sponsor package gamemode (1.5.1-5) for Debian unstable (Games team request). 2020-06-21: Upload package calamares (3.2.26-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-06-21: Upload package s-tui (1.0.1-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-06-29: Sponsor package libinih (48-1~bpo10+1) for Debian buster-backports. 2020-06-30: Upload packge calamares (3.2.26-1~bpo10+1) to Debian buster-backports. 2020-06-30: Upload package toot (0.27.0-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-06-30: Upload package calamares (3.2.26.1-1) to Debian unstable.

Sometimes I enjoy reading the source code to projects I like, use, or am about to install for the first time. This was something I used to do on a very regular basis, looking for security issues to report. Nowadays I don't have so much free time, but I still like to inspect the source code to new applications I install, and every now and again I'll find the time to look at the source to random projects. Reading code is good. Reading code is educational. One application I've looked at multiple times is redis, which is a great example of clean and well-written code. That said when reading the redis codebase I couldn't help noticing that there were a reasonably large number of typos/spelling mistakes in the comments, so I submitted a pull-request:

• https://github.com/redis/redis/pull/6058

Sadly that particular pull-request didn't receive too much attention, although a previous one updating the configuration file was accepted. I was recently reminded of these pull-requests when I was when I was doing some other work. So I figured I'd have a quick scan of a couple of other utilities. In the past I'd just note spelling mistakes when I came across them, usually I'd be opening each file in a project one by one and reading them from top to bottom. (Sometimes I'd just open files in emacs and run "M-x ispell-comments-and-strings", but more often I'd just notice them with my eyes). It did strike me that if I were to do this in a more serious fashion it would be good to automate it. So this time round I hacked up a simple "dump comments" utility, which would scan named files and output the contents of any comments (be they single-line, or multi-line). Once I'd done that I could spell-check easily:

 $ go run dump-comments.go *.c > comments
 $ aspell -c comments

Anyway the upshot of that was a pull-request against git:

• https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/685

We'll see if that makes its way live sometime. In case I get interested in doing this again I've updated my sysbox-utility collection to have a comments sub-command. That's a little more robust and reliable than my previous hack:

$ sysbox comments -pretty=true $(find . -name '*.c')
..
..

The comments sub-command has support for:

• Single-line comments, for C, as prefixed with //.
• Multi-line comments, for C++, as between /* and */.
• Single-line comments, for shell, as prefixed with #.
• Lua comments, both single-line (prefixed with --) and multiline between --[[ and --]].

Adding new support would be trivial, I just need a start and end pattern to search against. Pull-requests welcome:

• https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Review: The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	February 2019
Printing:	February 2020
ISBN:	1-4668-7113-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	366

January is a tidally-locked planet divided between permanent night and permanent day, an unfortunate destination for a colony starship. Now, humans cling to a precarious existence along the terminator, huddling in two wildly different cities and a handful of smaller settlements, connected by a road through the treacherous cold. The novel opens with Sophie, a shy university student from the dark side of the city of Xiosphant. She has an overwhelming crush on Bianca, her high-class, self-confident roommate and one of the few people in her life to have ever treated her with compassion and attention. That crush, and her almost non-existent self-esteem, lead her to take the blame for Bianca's petty theft, resulting in what should have been a death sentence. Sophie survives only because she makes first contact with a native intelligent species of January, one that the humans have been hunting for food and sport. Sadly, I think this is enough Anders for me. I've now bounced off two of her novels, both for structural reasons that I think go deeper than execution and indicate a fundamental mismatch between what Anders wants to do as an author and what I'm looking for as a reader. I'll talk more about what this book is doing in a moment, but I have to start with Bianca and Sophie. It's difficult for me to express how much I loathed this relationship and how little I wanted to read about it. It took me about five pages to peg Bianca as a malignant narcissist and Sophie's all-consuming crush as dangerous codependency. It took the entire book for Sophie to figure out how awful Bianca is to her, during which Bianca goes through the entire abusive partner playbook of gaslighting, trivializing, contingent affection, jealous rage, and controlling behavior. And meanwhile Sophie goes back to her again, and again, and again, and again. If I hadn't been reading this book on a Kindle, I think it would have physically hit a wall after their conversation in the junkyard. This is truly a matter of personal taste and preference. This is not an unrealistic relationship; this dynamic happens in life all too often. I'm sure there is someone for whom reading about Sophie's spectacularly poor choices is affirming or cathartic. I've not personally experienced this sort of relationship, which doubtless matters. But having empathy for someone who is making awful and self-destructive life decisions and trusting someone they should not be trusting and who is awful to them in every way is difficult work. Sophie is the victim of Bianca's abuse, but she does so many stupid and ill-conceived things in support of this twisted relationship that I found it very difficult to not get angry at her. Meanwhile, Anders writes Sophie as so clearly fragile and uncertain and devoid of a support network that getting angry at her is like kicking a puppy. The result for me was spending nearly an entire book in a deeply unpleasant state of emotional dissonance. I may be willing to go through that for a close friend, but in a work of fiction it's draining and awful and entirely not fun. The other viewpoint character had the opposite problem for me. Mouth starts the book as a traveling smuggler, the sole survivor of a group of religious travelers called the Citizens. She's practical, tough, and guarded. Beneath that, I think the intent was to show her as struggling to come to terms with the loss of her family and faith community. Her first goal in the book is to recover a recording of Citizen sacred scripture to preserve it and to reconnect with her past. This sounds interesting on the surface, but none of it gelled. Mouth never felt to me like someone from a faith community. She doesn't act on Citizen beliefs to any meaningful extent, she rarely talks about them, and when she does, her attitude is nostalgia without spirituality. When Mouth isn't pursuing goals that turn out to be meaningless, she aimlessly meanders through the story. Sophie at least has agency and makes some important and meaningful decisions. Mouth is just there, even when Anders does shattering things to her understanding of her past. Between Sophie and Bianca putting my shoulders up around my ears within the first few pages of the first chapter and failing to muster any enthusiasm for Mouth, I said the eight deadly words ("I don't care what happens to these people") about a hundred pages in and the book never recovered. There are parts of the world-building I did enjoy. The alien species that Sophie bonds with is not stunningly original, but it's a good (and detailed) take on one of the alternate cognitive and social models that science fiction has dreamed up. I was comparing the strangeness and dislocation unfavorably to China Mi ville's Embassytown while I was reading it, but in retrospect Anders's treatment is more decolonialized. Xiosphant's turn to Circadianism as their manifestation of order is a nicely understated touch, a believable political overreaction to the lack of a day/night cycle. That touch is significantly enhanced by Sophie's time working in a salon whose business model is to help Xiosphant residents temporarily forget about time. And what glimmers we got of politics on the colony ship and their echoing influence on social and political structures were intriguing. Even with the world-building, though, I want the author to be interested in and willing to expand the same bits of world-building that I'm engaged with. Anders didn't seem to be. The reader gets two contrasting cities along a road, one authoritarian and one libertine, which makes concrete a metaphor for single-axis political classification. But then Anders does almost nothing with that setup; it's just the backdrop of petty warlord politics, and none of the political activism of Bianca's student group seems to have relevance or theoretical depth. It's a similar shallowness as the religion of Mouth's Citizens: We get a few fragments of culture and religion, but without narrative exploration and without engagement from any of the characters. The way the crew of the Mothership was assembled seems to have led to a factional and racial caste system based on city of origin and technical expertise, but I couldn't tell you more than that because few of the characters seem to care. And so on. In short, the world-building that I wanted to add up to a coherent universe that was meaningful to the characters and to the plot seemed to be little more than window-dressing. Anders tosses in neat ideas, but they don't add up to anything. They're just background scenery for Bianca and Sophie's drama. The one thing that The City in the Middle of the Night does well is Sophie's nervous but excited embrace of the unknown. It was delightful to see the places where a typical protagonist would have to overcome a horror reaction or talk themselves through tradeoffs and where Sophie's reaction was instead "yes, of course, let's try." It provided an emotional strength to an extended first-contact exploration scene that made it liberating and heart-warming without losing the alienness. During that part of the book (in which, not coincidentally, Bianca does not appear), I was able to let my guard down and like Sophie for the first time, and I suspect that was intentional on Anders's part. But, overall, I think the conflict between Anders's story-telling approach and my preferences as a reader are mostly irreconcilable. She likes to write about people who make bad decisions and compound their own problems. In one of the chapters of her non-fiction book about writing that's being serialized on Tor.com she says "when we watch someone do something unforgivable, we're primed to root for them as they search desperately for an impossible forgiveness." This is absolutely not true for me; when I watch a character do something unforgivable, I want to see repudiation from the protagonists and ideally some clear consequences. When that doesn't happen, I want to stop reading about them and find something more enjoyable to do with my time. I certainly don't want to watch a viewpoint character insist that the person who is doing unforgivable things is the center of her life. If your preferences on character and story arc are closer to Anders's than mine, you may like this book. Certainly lots of people did; it was nominated for multiple awards and won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. But despite the things it did well, I had a truly miserable time reading it and am not anxious to repeat the experience. Rating: 4 out of 10

First off - nothing I'm going to talk about in this post is novel or overly surprising, I just haven't found a clear writeup of it before. I'm not criticising any design decisions or claiming this is an important issue, just raising something that people might otherwise be unaware of.

With that out of the way: Automatic deduplication of data is a feature of modern filesystems like zfs and btrfs. It takes two forms - inline, where the filesystem detects that data being written to disk is identical to data that already exists on disk and simply references the existing copy rather than, and offline, where tooling retroactively identifies duplicated data and removes the duplicate copies (zfs supports inline deduplication, btrfs only currently supports offline). In a world where disks end up with multiple copies of cloud or container images, deduplication can free up significant amounts of disk space.

What's the security implication? The problem is that deduplication doesn't recognise ownership - if two users have copies of the same file, only one copy of the file will be stored[1]. So, if user a stores a file, the amount of free space will decrease. If user b stores another copy of the same file, the amount of free space will remain the same. If user b is able to check how much free space is available, user b can determine whether the file already exists.

This doesn't seem like a huge deal in most cases, but it is a violation of expected behaviour (if user b doesn't have permission to read user a's files, user b shouldn't be able to determine whether user a has a specific file). But we can come up with some convoluted cases where it becomes more relevant, such as law enforcement gaining unprivileged access to a system and then being able to demonstrate that a specific file already exists on that system. Perhaps more interestingly, it's been demonstrated that free space isn't the only sidechannel exposed by deduplication - deduplication has an impact on access timing, and can be used to infer the existence of data across virtual machine boundaries.

As I said, this is almost certainly not something that matters in most real world scenarios. But with so much discussion of CPU sidechannels over the past couple of years, it's interesting to think about what other features also end up leaking information in ways that may not be obvious.

(Edit to add: deduplication isn't enabled on zfs by default and is explicitly triggered on btrfs, so unless it's something you've enabled then this isn't something that affects you)

[1] Deduplication is usually done at the block level rather than the file level, but given zfs's support for variable sized blocks, identical files should be deduplicated even if they're smaller than the maximum record size

comments

"I grew up on a farm" is something I sometimes what I tell people. It isn't true, but it is a useful shorthand. What is true is that my parents both come from a farming background, my father's family up in Scotland, my mother's down in Yorkshire. Every summer my sisters and myself would have a traditional holiday at the seaside, which is what people do in the UK (Blackpool, Scarborough, Great Yarmouth, etc). Before, or after, that we'd spend the rest of the summer living on my grandmother's farm. I loved spending time on the farm when I was a kid, and some of my earliest memories date from that time. For example I remember hand-feeding carrots to working dogs (alsatians) that were taller than I was. I remember trying to ride on the backs of those dogs, and how that didn't end well. In fact the one and only time I can recall my grandmother shouting at me, or raising her voice at all, was when my sisters and I spent an afternoon playing in the coal-shed. We were filthy and covered in coal-dust from head to toe. Awesome! Anyway the only reason I bring this up is because I have a little bit of a farming background, largely irrelevant in my daily life, but also a source of pleasant memories. Despite it being an animal farm (pigs, sheep, cows) there was also a lot of home-grown food, which my uncle Albert would deliver/sell to people nearby out of the back of a van. That same van that would be used to ferry us to see the fireworks every November. Those evenings were very memorable too - they would almost always involve flasks of home-made vegetable soup. Nowadays I live in Finland, and earlier in the year we received access to an allotment - a small piece of land (10m x 10m) for 50/year - upon which we can grow our own plants, etc. My wife decided to plant flowers and make it look pretty. She did good. I decided to plant "food". I might not have done this stuff from scratch before, but I was pretty familiar with the process from my youth, and also having the internet to hand to make the obvious searches such as "How do you know when you can harvest your garlic?" Before I started I figured it couldn't be too hard, after all if you leave onions/potatoes in the refrigerator for long enough they start to grow! It isn't like you have to do too much to help them. In short it has been pretty easy and I'm definitely going to be doing more of it next year. I've surprised myself by enjoying the process as much as I have. Every few days I go and rip up the weeds, and water the things we've planted. So far I've planted, and harvested, Radish, Garlic, Onions, and in a few more weeks I'll be digging up potatoes. I have no particular point to this post, except to say that if you have a few hours spare a week, and a slab of land to hand upon which you can dig and plant I'd recommend it. Sure there were annoyances, and not a single one of the carrot-seeds I planted showed any sign of life, but the other stuff? The stuff that grew? Very tasty, om nom nom .. (It has to be said that when we received the plot there was a jungle growing upon it. Once we tidied it all up we found raspberries, roses, and other things. The garlic I reaped was already growing so I felt like a cheat to harvest it. That said I did plant a couple of bulbs on my balcony so I could say "I grew this from scratch". Took a while, but I did indeed harvest my own garlic.)

I released version 2.4 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. There are two notable changes in this release:

1. I fixed two regressions introduced in the last release. Sorry about the breakage!
2. I improved support for hledger. I believe all syntax differences in hledger are supported now.

Here are the changes in 2.4:

• Fix regressions introduced in version 2.3
  • Handle price directives with comments
  • Don't assume implicit conversion when price is on second posting
• Improve support for hledger
  • Fix parsing of hledger tags
  • Support commas as decimal markers
  • Support digit group marks through commodity and D directives
  • Support end aliases directive
  • Support regex aliases
  • Recognise total balance assertions
  • Recognise sub-account balance assertions
• Add support for define directive
• Convert all uppercase metadata tags to all lowercase
• Improve handling of ledger lots without cost
• Allow transactions without postings
• Fix parsing issue in commodity declarations
• Support commodities that contain quotation marks
• Add --version option to show version
• Document problem of mixing apply and include

Thanks to Kirill Goncharov for pointing out one regressions, to Taylor R Campbell for for a patch, to Stefano Zacchiroli for some input, and finally to Simon Michael for input on hledger! You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub

I'm buying rather too many books at the moment and not reading enough of them (in part because I got back into Minecraft and in part because I got a bit stuck on a few difficult books). I think I've managed to get myself unstuck again, though, and have started catching up on reviews. 2020. It's kind of a lot. And I'm not even that heavily affected. Katherine Addison The Angel of the Crows (sff)
Marie Brennan A Natural History of Dragons (sff)
Kacen Callender Queen of the Conquered (sff)
Jo Clayton Diadem from the Stars (sff)
Jo Clayton Lamarchos (sff)
Jo Clayton Irsud (sff)
Clifford D. Conner The Tragedy of American Science (nonfiction)
Kate Elliott Unconquerable Sun (sff)
Rory Fanning & Craig Hodges Long Shot (nonfiction)
Michael Harrington Socialism: Past & Future (nonfiction)
Nalo Hopkinson Brown Girl in the Ring (sff)
Kameron Hurley The Stars Are Legion (sff)
N.K. Jemisin Emergency Skin (sff)
T. Kingfisher A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking (sff)
T. Kingfisher Nine Goblins (sff)
Michael Lewis The Fifth Risk (nonfiction)
Paul McAuley War of the Maps (sff)
Gretchen McCulloch Because Internet (nonfiction)
Hayao Miyazaki Nausica of the Valley of the Wind (graphic novel)
Annalee Newitz The Future of Another Timeline (sff)
Nick Pettigrew Anti-Social (nonfiction)
Rivers Solomon, et al. The Deep (sff)
Jo Walton Or What You Will (sff)
Erik Olin Wright Stardust to Stardust (nonfiction) Of these, I've already read and reviewed The Fifth Risk (an excellent book).

Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop, by Radley Balko

Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Copyright:	2013
ISBN:	1-61039-212-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	336

As the United States tries, in fits and starts, to have a meaningful discussion about long-standing police racism, brutality, overreach, corruption, and murder, I've realized that my theoretical understanding of the history of and alternative frameworks for law enforcement is woefully lacking. Starting with a book by a conservative white guy is not the most ideal of approaches, but it's what I already had on hand, and it won't be the last book I read and review on this topic. (Most of my research so far has been in podcast form. I don't review those here, but I can recommend Ezra Klein's interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Paul Butler, and, most strongly, sujatha baliga.) Rise of the Warrior Cop is from 2013 and has had several moments of fame, no doubt helped by Balko's connections to the conservative and libertarian right. One of the frustrating facts of US politics is that critiques of the justice system from the right (and from white men) get more media attention than critiques from the left. That said, it's a generally well-respected book on the factual history of the topic, and police brutality and civil rights are among the points on which I have stopped-clock agreements with US libertarians. This book is very, very libertarian. In my callow youth, I was an ardent libertarian, so I've read a lot of US libertarian literature. It's a genre with its own conventions that become obvious when you read enough of it, and Rise of the Warrior Cop goes through them like a checklist. Use the Roman Republic (never the Roman Empire) as the starting point for any political discussion, check. Analyze the topic in the context of pre-revolutionary America, check. Spend considerable effort on discerning the opinions of the US founders on the topic since their opinions are always relevant to the modern world, check. Locate some point in the past (preferably before 1960) where the political issue was as good as it has ever been, check. Frame all changes since then as an erosion of rights through government overreach, check. Present your solution as a return to a previous era of respect for civil rights, check. Once you start recognizing the genre conventions, their prevalence in libertarian writing is almost comical. The framing chapters therefore leave a bit to be desired, but the meat of the book is a useful resource. Starting with the 1970s and its use as a campaigning tool by Nixon, Balko traces a useful history of the war on drugs. And starting with the 1980s, the number of cites to primary sources and the evidence of Balko's own research increases considerably. If you want to know how US police turned into military cosplayers with body armor, heavy weapons, and armored vehicles, this book provides a lot of context and history. One of the reasons why I view libertarians as allies of convenience on this specific issue is that drug legalization and disgust with the war on drugs have been libertarian issues for decades. Ideologically honest libertarians (and Balko appears to be one) are inherently skeptical of the police, so when the police overreach in an area of libertarian interest, they notice. Balko makes a solid argument, backed up with statistics, specific programs, legislation, and court cases, that the drug war and its accompanying lies about heavily-armed drug dealers and their supposed threat to police officers was the fuel for the growth of SWAT teams, no-knock search warrants, erosion of legal protections for criminal defendants, and de facto license for the police to ignore the scope and sometimes even the existence of warrants. This book is useful support for the argument that fears for the safety of officers underlying the militarization of police forces are imaginary. One telling point that Balko makes repeatedly and backs with statistical and anecdotal evidence is that the police generally do not use raid tactics on dangerous criminals. On the contrary, aggressive raids are more likely to be used on the least dangerous criminals because they're faster, they're fun for the police (they provide an adrenaline high and let them play with toys), and they're essentially risk-free. If the police believe someone is truly dangerous, they're more likely to use careful surveillance and to conduct a quiet arrest at an unexpected moment. The middle-of-the-night armed break-ins with battering rams, tear gas, and flash-bangs are, tellingly, used against the less dangerous suspects. This is part of Balko's overall argument that police equipment and tactics have become untethered from any realistic threat and have become cultural. He traces an acceleration of that trend to 9/11 and the resulting obsession with terrorism, which further opened the spigot of military hardware and "special forces" training. This became a point of competition between police departments, with small town forces that had never seen a terrorist and had almost no chance of a terrorist incident demanding their own armored vehicles. I've encountered this bizarre terrorism justification personally; one of the reasons my local police department gave in a public hearing for not having a policy against shooting at moving vehicles was "but what if terrorism?" I don't believe there has ever been a local terrorist attack. SWAT in such places didn't involve the special training or dedicated personnel of large city forces; instead, it was a part-time duty for normal police officers, and frequently they were encouraged to practice SWAT tactics by using them at random for some otherwise normal arrest or search. Balko argues that those raids were more exciting than normal police work, leading to a flood of volunteers for that duty and a tendency to use them as much as possible. That in turn normalizes disconnecting police tactics from the underlying crime or situational risk. So far, so good. But despite the information I was able to extract from it, I have mixed feelings about Rise of the Warrior Cop as a whole. At the least, it has substantial limitations. First, I don't trust the historical survey of policing in this book. Libertarian writing makes for bad history. The constraints of the genre require overusing only a few points of reference, treating every opinion of the US founders as holy writ, and tying forward progress to a return to a previous era, all of which interfere with good analysis. Balko also didn't do the research for the historical survey, as is clear from the footnotes. The citations are all to other people's histories, not to primary sources. He's summarizing other people's histories, and you'll almost certainly get better history by finding well-respected historians who cover the same ground. (That said, if you're not familiar with Peel's policing principles, this is a good introduction.) Second, and this too is unfortunately predictable in a libertarian treatment, race rarely appears in this book. If Balko published the same book today, I'm sure he would say more about race, but even in 2013 its absence is strange. I was struck while reading by how many examples of excessive police force were raids on west coast pot farms; yes, I'm sure that was traumatic, but it's not the demographic I would name as the most vulnerable to or affected by police brutality. West coast pot growers are, however, mostly white. I have no idea why Balko made that choice. Perhaps he thought his target audience would be more persuaded by his argument if he focused on white victims. Perhaps he thought it was an easier and less complicated story to tell. Perhaps, like a lot of libertarians, he doesn't believe racism has a significant impact on society because it would be a market failure. Perhaps those were the people who more readily came to mind. But to talk about police militarization, denial of civil rights, and police brutality in the United States without putting race at the center of both the history and the societal effects leaves a gaping hole in the analysis. Given that lack of engagement, I also am dubious of Balko's policy prescriptions. His reform suggestions aren't unreasonable, but they stay firmly in the centrist and incrementalist camp and would benefit white people more than black people. Transparency, accountability, and cultural changes are all fine and good, but the cultural change Balko is focused on is less aggressive arrest tactics, more use of mediation, and better physical fitness. I would not object to those things (well, maybe the last, which seemed odd), but we need to have a discussion about police white supremacist organizations, the prevalence of spousal abuse, and the police tendency to see themselves not as public servants but as embattled warriors who are misunderstood by the naive sheep they are defending. And, of course, you won't find in Rise of the Warrior Cop any thoughtful wrestling with whether there are alternative approaches to community safety, whether punitive rather than restorative justice is effective, or whether crime is a symptom of deeper societal problems we could address but refuse to. The most radical suggestion Balko has is to legalize drugs, which is both the predictable libertarian position and, as we have seen from recent events in the United States, far from the only problem of overcriminalization. I understand why this book is so frequently mentioned on-line, and its author's political views may make it more palatable to some people than a more race-centered or radical perspective. But I don't think this is the best or most useful book on police violence that one could read today. I hope to find a better one in upcoming reviews. Rating: 6 out of 10

Teaching consent is ongoing, but it starts when children are very young. It involves both teaching children to pay attention to and respect others' consent (or lack thereof) and teaching children that they should expect their own bodies and their own space to be respected---even by their parents and other relatives. And if children of two or four can be expected to read the nonverbal cues and expressions of children not yet old enough to talk in order to assess whether there is consent, what excuse do full grown adults have?

Small children have no sense of shame or disgust or fear of their bodies. A body is what it is. It does what it does.

About commonly accepted violation of children boundaries

Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave towards them and how they will respond when someone passes those limits.[1] They are built out of a mix of conclusions, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning.[2][3] This concept or life skill has been widely referenced in self-help books and used in the counseling profession since the mid-1980s.[4]

Final call to participate in the LTS survey After 6 years of existence, we, the Debian LTS contributors, wanted to run a survey to learn more about how Debian LTS is used and perceived. Please take a few minutes to participate in the survey at https://surveys.debian.net/...! Also, please hurry up, the survey will close at the end of July 27th on Samoa, which is in roughly 48h from now.

Review: Paladin's Grace, by T. Kingfisher

Publisher:	Red Wombat Studio
Copyright:	2020
ASIN:	B0848Q8JVW
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	399

Stephen was a paladin. Then his god died. He was a berserker, an unstoppable warrior in the service of his god. Now, well, he's still a berserker, but going berserk when you don't have a god to control the results is not a good idea. He and his brothers were taken in by the Temple of the Rat, where they serve as guards, watch out for each other, and try to get through each day with an emptiness in their souls where a god should be. Stephen had just finished escorting a healer through some of the poorer parts of town when a woman runs up to him and asks him to hide her. Their awkward simulated tryst is sufficient to fool the two Motherhood priests who were after her for picking flowers from the graveyard. Stephen then walks her home and that would have been the end of it, except that neither could get the other out of their mind. Despite first appearances, and despite being set in the same world and sharing a supporting character, this is not the promised sequel to Swordheart (which is apparently still coming). It's an entirely different paladin story. T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon's nom de plume when writing for adults) has a lot of things to say about paladins! And, apparently, paladin-involved romances. On the romance front, Kingfisher clearly has a type. The general shape of the story will be familiar from Swordheart and The Wonder Engine: An independent and occasionally self-confident woman with various quirks, a hunky paladin who is often maddeningly dense, and a lot of worrying on both sides about whether the other person is truly interested in them and if their personal liabilities make a relationship a horrible idea. This is not my preferred romance formula (it provokes the occasional muttered "for the love of god just talk to each other"), but I liked this iteration of it better than the previous two, mostly because of Grace. Grace is a perfumer, a trade she went into by being picked out of a lineup of orphans by a master perfumer for her sense of smell. One of Kingfisher's strengths as a writer is showing someone get lost in their routine day-to-day competence. When mixed with an inherently fascinating profession, this creates a great reading experience. Grace is also an abuse survivor, which made the communication difficulties with Stephen more interesting and subtle. Grace has created space and a life for herself, and her unwillingness to take risks on changes is a deep part of her sense of self and personal safety. As her past is slowly revealed, Kingfisher puts the reader in a position to share Stephen's anger and protectiveness, but then consistently puts Grace's own choices, coping mechanisms, and irritated refusal to be protected back into the center of the story. She has to accept some help as she gets entangled in the investigation of a highly political staged assassination attempt, but both that help and the relationship come on her own terms. It's very well-done. The plot was enjoyable enough, although it involved a bit too much of constantly rising stakes and turns for the worst for my taste, and the ending had a touch of deus ex machina. Like Kingfisher's other books, though, the delight is in the unexpected details. Stephen knitting socks. Grace's frustrated obsession with why he smells like gingerbread. The beautifully practical and respectful relationship between the Temple of the Rat and Stephen's band of former paladins. (After only two books in which they play a major role, the Temple of the Rat is already one of my favorite fantasy religions.) Everything about Bishop Beartongue. Grace's friend Marguerite. And a truly satisfying ending. The best part of this book, though, is the way Grace is shown as a complete character in a way that even most books with well-rounded characterization don't manage. Some things she does make the reader's heart ache because of the hints they provide about her past, but they're also wise and effective safety mechanisms for her. Kingfisher gives her space to be competent and prickly and absent-minded. She has a complete life: friends, work, goals, habits, and little rituals. Grace meets someone and falls in love, but one can readily imagine her not falling in love and going on with her life and that result wouldn't be tragic. In short, she feels like a grown adult who has made her own peace with where she came from and what she is doing. The book provides her an opportunity for more happiness and more closure without undermining her independence. I rarely see this in a novel, and even more rarely done this well. If you haven't read any of Kingfisher's books and are in the mood for faux-medieval city romance involving a perfumer and a bit of political skulduggery, this is a great place to start. If you liked Swordheart, you'll probably like Paladin's Grace; like me, you may even like it a bit more. Recommended, particularly if you want something light and heart-warming. Rating: 8 out of 10

I have been using the community editions of IntelliJ and PyCharm for a while now for Python or Perl projects. But it started to annoy me that for Debian packaging bits it would revert into a fancy version of notepad. Being fed up with it, I set down and spent the last week studying how to write a plugin to fix this.

After a few prototypes, I have now released IDEA-debpkg v0.0.3 (Link to JetBrain s official plugin listing with screenshots). It provides a set of basic features for debian/control like syntax highlighting, various degree of content validation, folding of long fields, code completion and CTRL + hover documentation. For debian/changelog, it is mostly just syntax highlighting with a bit of fancy linking for now. I have not done anything for debian/rules as I noted there is a Makefile plugin, which will have to do for now.

The code is available from github and licensed under Apache-2.0. Contributors, issues/feature requests and pull requests are very welcome. Among things I could help with are:

• Icons both for the plugin and for the file types. Currently it is just colored text, which is as far as my artistic skills got with the space provided.
• Color and text formatting for syntax highlighting.
• Reports of papercut or features that would be very useful to prioritize.
• Review of the CTRL + hover documentation. I am hoping for something that is help for new contributors but I am very unlikely to have gotten it right (among other because I wrote most of it to get it done rather than getting it right )

I hope you will take it for spin if you have been looking for a bit of Debian packaging support to your PyCharm or other IDEA IDE. Please do file bugs/issues if you run into issues, rough edges or unhelpful documentation, etc.

Following on from the blog post the other day in some sense: someone has asked on the debian-user list: "I do not understand from the given page (https://www.debian.org/CD/verify) how to use .sign files and gpg in order to check verify the authenticity of debian cds. I understand the part with using sha256sum or sha512sum or md5sum to check whether the files were downloaded correctly."

Distributed with the CD and other media images on Debian CD mirrors, there are files like MD5SUM, MD5SUM.sign, SHA256SUM, SHA256SUM.sign and so on.

SHA512SUM is a plain text list of the SHA512SUMs for each of the files in the directory. SHA512SUM.sign is the GPG-signed version of that file. This allws for non-repudiation - if the signature is valid, then the plain text file has been signed by the owner of that key. Nothing has tampered with the checksums file since it was signed.


gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS will verify the .sign signature file against the signed file.

gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS
gpg: Signature made Sun 10 May 2020 00:16:52 UTC
gpg: using RSA key DF9B9C49EAA9298432589D76DA87E80D6294BE9B

The signature is as given on the Debian CD verification page given above.


gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys DF9B9C49EAA9298432589D76DA87E80D6294BE9B

and you then get:

gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.sign SHA512SUMS
gpg: Signature made Sun 10 May 2020 00:16:52 UTC
gpg: using RSA key DF9B9C49EAA9298432589D76DA87E80D6294BE9B
gpg: Good signature from "Debian CD signing key " [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: DF9B 9C49 EAA9 2984 3258 9D76 DA87 E80D 6294 BE9B

My own key isn't in the Debian CD signing key ring - but this does now show me that this is a good signature from the primary key fingerprint as given.

Repeating the exercise from the other day and producing a Debian amd64 netinst file using jigdo, I can now check the checksum on the local .iso file against the checksum file distributed by Debian. If they match, it's a good sign that the CD I've generated is bit for bit identical. For my locally generated file:

sha512sum debian-10.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso
ec69e4bfceca56222e6e81766bf235596171afe19d47c20120783c1644f72dc605d341714751341051518b0b322d6c84e9de997815e0c74f525c66f9d9eb4295 debian-10.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso

and for the file checksum as distributed by Debian:

less SHA512SUMS grep *iso
ec69e4bfceca56222e6e81766bf235596171afe19d47c20120783c1644f72dc605d341714751341051518b0b322d6c84e9de997815e0c74f525c66f9d9eb4295 debian-10.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso

and they match!