Russ Allbery: Consolidation haul
Ilona Andrews Clean Sweep (sff)
Catherine Asaro Charmed Sphere (sff)
Isaac Asimov The Caves of Steel (sff)
Isaac Asimov The Naked Sun (sff)
Marie Brennan Dice Tales (nonfiction)
Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown Wings on My Sleeve (nonfiction)
Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths Algorithms to Live By (nonfiction)
Tom Clancy The Cardinal of the Kremlin (thriller)
Tom Clancy The Hunt for the Red October (thriller)
Tom Clancy Red Storm Rising (thriller)
April Daniels Sovereign (sff)
Tom Flynn Galactic Rapture (sff)
Neil Gaiman American Gods (sff)
Gary J. Hudson They Had to Go Out (nonfiction)
Catherine Ryan Hyde Pay It Forward (mainstream)
John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (mainstream)
John Irving The Cider House Rules (mainstream)
John Irving The Hotel New Hampshire (mainstream)
Lawrence M. Krauss Beyond Star Trek (nonfiction)
Lawrence M. Krauss The Physics of Star Trek (nonfiction)
Ursula K. Le Guin Four Ways to Forgiveness (sff collection)
Ursula K. Le Guin Words Are My Matter (nonfiction)
Richard Matheson Somewhere in Time (sff)
Larry Niven Limits (sff collection)
Larry Niven The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (sff collection)
Larry Niven The Magic Goes Away (sff)
Larry Niven Protector (sff)
Larry Niven World of Ptavvs (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Gripping Hand (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle Inferno (sff)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God's Eye (sff)
Flann O'Brien The Best of Myles (nonfiction)
Jerry Pournelle Exiles to Glory (sff)
Jerry Pournelle The Mercenary (sff)
Jerry Pournelle Prince of Mercenaries (sff)
Jerry Pournelle West of Honor (sff)
Jerry Pournelle (ed.) Codominium: Revolt on War World (sff anthology)
Jerry Pournelle & S.M. Stirling Go Tell the Spartans (sff)
J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (mainstream)
Jessica Amanda Salmonson The Swordswoman (sff)
Stanley Schmidt Aliens and Alien Societies (nonfiction)
Cecilia Tan (ed.) Sextopia (sff anthology)
Lavie Tidhar Central Station (sff)
Catherynne Valente Chicks Dig Gaming (nonfiction)
J.E. Zimmerman Dictionary of Classical Mythology (nonfiction) This is an interesting tour of a lot of stuff I read as a teenager (Asimov, Niven, Clancy, and Pournelle, mostly in combination with Niven but sometimes his solo work). I suspect I will no longer consider many of these books to be very good, and some of them will probably go back into used bookstores after I've re-read them for memory's sake, or when I run low on space again. But all those mass market SF novels were a big part of my teenage years, and a few (like Mote In God's Eye) I definitely want to read again. Also included is a random collection of stuff my parents picked up over the years. I don't know what to expect from a lot of it, which makes it fun to anticipate. Fall vacation is coming up, and with it a large amount of uninterrupted reading time.
Here s a summary of the bugs against the Debian Policy Manual. Please
consider getting involved, whether or not you re an existing
contributor.
Consensus has been reached and help is needed to write a patch
A rather boring and otherwise uneventful release 0.9.7 of RcppClassic is now at
I d like to start making weekly reports again on my free software efforts. Part of the reason for these reports is for me to see how much time I m putting into free software. Hopefully I can keep these reports up.
This week's energy was provided by Club Mate
Like
I was assigned 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative
and carried over 1 hour from July. I only worked 10 hours, so I will
carry over 6 hours to the next month.
I prepared and released an update on the Linux 3.2 longterm stable
branch (3.2.92), and started work on the next update. I rebased the
Debian linux package on this version, but didn't yet upload it.
Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users. The motivation behind the
Over the past 10 years, I've been a member of a dwindling team of people maintaining
the
This would be a longish piece so please bear and play with tea, coffee, beer or anything stronger that you desire while reading below
I had bought an Android phone, a
The reason I shared about Developer Options in Android is that few days back I noticed that the phone wonks off and has unpredictable behaviour such as not letting me browse the web, do additions or deletions using the google play store and alike . Things came to a head when few days back I saw a fibre-optic
A common way to establish an IPsec tunnel on Linux is to use an
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
DebConf 17 in Montreal
I traveled to
Google offers a lot of software components packaged specifically for Debian and
Debian-like Linux distributions. Examples are: Chrome, Earth and the Hangouts
plugin.
Also, there are many other Internet services doing the same: Spotify, Dropbox,
etc. I m really grateful for them, since this make our life easier.
Problem is that our ecosystem is rather complex, with many distributions and
many versions out there. I guess is not an easy task for them to keep such a
big variety of support variations.
In this particular case, it seems Google doesn t support Debian testing in
their .deb packages. In this case, testing means Debian Buster.
And the same happens with the official Spotify client package.
I ve identified several issues with them, to name a few:
I'm currently trying to make sense of some still image coding
(more details to come at a much later stage!), and for a variety
of reasons, I've chosen to use rANS as the entropy coder. However,
there's an interesting little detail that I haven't actually seen
covered anywhere; maybe it's just because I've missed something,
or maybe because it's too blindingly obvious, but I thought I would
document what I ended up with anyway. (I had hoped for something
even more elegant, but I guess the obvious would have to do.)
For those that don't know rANS coding, let me try to handwave it
as much as possible. Your state is typically a single word
(in my case, a 32-bit word), which is refilled from the input stream
as needed. The encoder and decoder works in reverse order;
let's just talk about the decoder. Basically it works by looking
at the lowest 12 (or whatever) bits of the decoder state, mapping
each of those 2^12 slots to a decoded symbol. More common symbols
are given more slots, proportionally to the frequency. Let me just
write a tiny, tiny example with 2 bits and three symbols instead,
giving four slots: