Usual regular update of the TeX Live packages. Now that Debian/unstable is back to full development speed thanks to the end of the bit gcc transition, probably this TeX Live update will be lost between the hundreds of others. Anyway a few interesting changes are still in there. Most importantly the fix for unicode-math that was broken for a short time, and for the Japanese users it seems that the LaTeX3 packages have gained support for upTeX. Good to hear. Of course, these are not the only updates and newcomers, see the list below. Updated packages abc, acro, alegreya, animate, arabxetex, babel-bosnian, babel-french, babel-greek, babel-latin, babel-welsh, beamer-FUBerlin, bidi, bigfoot, blochsphere, bxjscls, chemformula, chemmacros, chet, classicthesis, crossrefware, csplain, ctable, ctanify, datetime2, datetime2-basque, detlev-cm, disser, doclicense, drm, dtxgen, dtxtut, dvips, ecclesiastic, eledmac, embrac, etex-pkg, etoc, factura, fbb, fithesis, font-change, fontname, glossaries, gothic, greek-fontenc, IEEEtran, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexconfig, lettrine, luatexja, mathastext, mcf2graph, media9, metrix, mhequ, minted, moderntimeline, newtx, ocgx2, pagecolor, pdftex, pgf, pstricks, reledmac, resphilosophica, roboto, shdoc, siunitx, suftesi, tetex, tex4ht, texlive-scripts, tikz-bayesnet, translations, ucharcat, udesoftec, ulthese, unicode-math, ut-thesis, withargs, xint. New packages checklistings, cleanthesis, easyreview, fei, medstarbeamer, mfirstuc, nevelok, old-arrows, proofread, uassign, xebaposter. Enjoy.

Review: How to Make Your Dreams Come True, by Mark Forster

Publisher:	Hodder
Copyright:	2002
Printing:	2006
ISBN:	0-340-78629-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	208

Mark Forster is my favorite time management author. His books are less comprehensive systems and more collections of tips, mental shortcuts, and ways of thinking about time management and prioritization that tend to resonate for me. I've already read and reviewed several other books by Forster, but hadn't read this one because it was thoroughly out of print (at least in the US). When it turned up for the Kindle, I decided to give it a try, if for no other reason than completionism. After reading How to Make Your Dreams Come True, I can see why it fell out of print. It's a rather odd book, and quite different from Forster's other work. The topic is still time management, if you squint at it properly, but in the form of a philosophical discussion of life goals and becoming an artist who creates one's own life. Forster structures the book as a series of dialogues between Forster in the present and his own future self and takes the mental exercise surprisingly seriously, even comparing his own coaching technique with that of his future self. The levels of meta get even deeper towards the end of the book, where Forster writes a dialogue between his future self and his even more future self. Those drift into philosophy of life, high-level (and personal) life goals, and some speculations about the reason for existence. The primary concept Forster is exploring is the difference between push, pull, and drift modes of life. He argues that a lot of time management falls into the category of push systems: you're exerting effort to push yourself along towards goals. In this book, he argues that this is a starting point but not a technique to stop on. Instead, one should try to move to pull mode, where one has a compelling and detailed vision of where one wants to be, repeatedly developing and refining it, and then lets that vision pull you through life. The advantages, in his conception, over the push form of time management is that this requires less expenditure of effort, feels more natural, and lets one be more flexible and nimble in how one achieves one's goals. It can be tricky, however, to avoid settling into the middle ground of drift mode, where one does not have a goal in mind and doesn't act towards anything in particular. I found the idea interesting and mildly useful, but Forster's presentation of it seemed too convinced of its own correctness. The exercises he proposes don't seem interesting to me; the dialogues with one's future self in particular felt very gimmicky. I admire his ability to invent some of the interactions he came up with, but I don't think it would be a useful technique for me, or as universal as he seems to think it could be. Forster talks quite a lot about reducing effort in his blog (somewhat less in his other books), and seems constantly convinced that he's found a new way to reduce the sense of effort around time management. After having tried a few of these, I suspect that new systems feel less effortful than older systems, and that it's the constant changing of systems that reduces the feeling of effort more than the details of any specific system. I can develop a lot of enthusiasm about a new system for tracking work, and enthusiasm makes everything feel like it requires less effort. Other than that central idea, and quite a lot of philosophy that didn't particularly speak to me, this book reiterates a few of Forster's ideas in a less specific framework: adopt a process and trust it, use it for long enough to give it a chance to work, keep refreshing your vision, and try to reach a flow where you're not exerting lots of effort to force yourself to do things. Good ideas, but better, and more practically, presented in Forster's other books. I'd characterize this as an odd and minor work. I like Forster's writing in general and still only read this for the sake of completeness. His other books offer more practical and actionable ideas. Unless this idea and method of presentation really speaks to you, I think you'll get more out of other books. Rating: 5 out of 10

This was my ninth month working on Debian LTS. I was assigned 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. Front desk I spent another week in the 'front desk' role, largely overlapping with DebConf. I investigated which new CVEs affected LTS-supported packages in squeeze, recorded this in the secure-testing repository, and mailed the package maintainers to give them a chance to handle the updates. I found that one claimed security flaw in glusterfs was actually harmless for all supported Debian releases. conntrack conntrack had one new issue (CVE-2015-6496, possible remote DoS if certain kernel modules aren't loaded). I didn't find a way to reproduce it, but it still seemed to be applicable to squeeze (but for fewer protocols). I was able to backport the upstream fix without difficulty, after which I uploaded and issued DLA-295-1. DebConf I attended the LTS BoF at DebConf 15 to discuss the plans for wheezy LTS. Raphael just posted a summary of these discussions. linux-2.6 I spent some time on kernel security fixes, but haven't uploaded an update yet. That will probably come in September.

Review: The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	April 2014
ISBN:	1-4299-4640-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	446

Maia is the child of the current emperor of the Elflands, but not a favored one. He's the half-goblin son of a political marriage to a goblin princess, quickly orphaned away from the capital and kept in seclusion well out of the way of his father and court politics. And in the care of his cousin Setheris: cruel and abusive companionship. Then the airship Wisdom of Choharo crashes with no survivors, killing everyone in the line of succession. Except Maia. Maia is in no way prepared to be emperor, but the rules of succession are clear: he is now emperor. We all know from medieval history, both real and fantastic, that clear rules rarely got in the way of aggressive political maneuvering, but Maia's short-term survival is helped considerably by complex factions at play at court (of which he is almost wholly ignorant), and a certain lack of bloodthirstiness in elven politics. Rather than disposing of the unexpected heir, people instead start maneuvering to manipulate and control him. The current Lord Chancellor is the first, beginning his play in the message sent informing Maia of his father's death, and his cousin isn't far behind, but they're only the first two. Meanwhile, Maia, who had never been trained for any sort of court life, has to learn nearly everything about his new life: how to interact with servants, the rituals of court, his new duties, and all of the factions in play. One might expect that Maia would quickly be reduced to a pawn of one faction or another, but he has two secret weapons. One is that he is a legitimately nice person with a strongly developed sense of empathy. Early on, he lucks into some opportunities to show this and wins some popularity and some allies of his own, particularly among those people not used to being treated with respect. And two, he's had enough of his cousin controlling and abusing him. He's determined to make his own decisions and not take orders from someone else, and now has enough nominal power to possibly pull this off. The Goblin Emperor is a fantasy of political agency, and a story about political maneuvering, tricky decisions, navigating alliances, and learning politics. There isn't a lot of action here: most of the plot happens in conversation. The tension is high Maia's situation is precarious but it mostly involves second-guessing his decisions and actions, and hoping that his weaknesses and ignorance don't get him into too much trouble. That is an extremely tricky book to write. Addison had to walk a tightrope between letting Maia's new responsibilities come unrealistically easily, making him seem like a Chosen One with special plot powers, and having readers get too frustrated with realistically bad decisions and lose their desire to read about him. Addison walks that tightrope magnificently. I liked Maia throughout this book, and that's the strength of it. He never felt like the typical fantasy coming of age hero who is magically protected by the plot. He's just a genuine, honest person, reacting to his own past as best he can, making the best decisions he knows how to make. He makes mistakes, but Addison wisely avoids making those mistakes cringe-worthy or too obvious. Instead, they're like bad moves in a chess match: they create problems but also some opportunities, and they're realistically recoverable. And it's a delight to see Maia bring empathy and a disinterested outside perspective to the hothouse mess of court politics and come up with some very creative solutions. Obviously, the situation that allows Maia to succeed is artificial. This is a fantasy: Maia happens to be just the right person the empire needs, and that's clearly an authorial construction. It may be impossible to write a political story about a well-meaning, naive outsider that isn't a tragedy without a bit of cheating. But Addison hides the cheating well. Maia may be very lucky in the empire he inherits, but it feels coherent and believable. By the end of the book, Maia has dealt with everything from international diplomacy to the incredibly complex negotiations around further heirs to the empire. And (realistically) he doesn't stay lucky throughout the book: eventually, no matter how careful he tries to be, he angers some powerful people. I enjoyed every step along the way, and would have happily read more about Maia. In my personal ranking, this was second only to Ancillary Sword in the nominees for the 2015 Hugo, and I wouldn't disagree too strongly with someone who argued it was better. It's not a typical sort of fantasy, but it's one I enjoyed very much. Recommended. One warning: consider going to the back of the book and reading the glossary at the start. There may be some mild spoilers in there, but it also explains the title conventions in the empire, and some of those titles look very much like proper names. If, like me, you don't read this until the end of the book, you may find yourself horribly confused by several apparently similarly-named characters. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Let's Pretend This Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson

Publisher:	Berkley
Copyright:	2012, 2013
Printing:	March 2013
ISBN:	0-425-26101-8
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	366

Let's Pretend This Never Happened, subtitled (A Mostly True Memoir), is the closest that I've ever found to the book form of a stand-up comedy routine. Lawson grew up in rural Texas with a taxidermist father, frequent contact with animals in various forms of distress, an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, and a talent for creatively freaking out about things that never occur to anyone else. But, more importantly, she has a talent for putting down on paper the random thoughts that go through her head so the rest of us can read them. Not to mention excellent comic timing and absolute mastery of the strangely relevant digression. It's always tricky to review comedy. I think tastes differ more wildly in this genre than any other. Things some people find hilarious others will find offensive or just boring. That may be particularly true of Lawson, who, similar to some of the best stand-up comics, specializes in taking off filters and saying all sorts of offensive things that people might think but not say. This kind of comedy is a knife's edge, since it can easily turn into punching down. Lawson avoids this (rather well, in my opinion) by making herself the punch line of most of the jokes. A pretty typical paragraph of the book, so that you know the sort of thing that you're in for:

The following is a series of actual events pulled form my journal that led me to believe that our home was possessed by demons and/or built over an Indian burial ground. (Also, please note that the first part of this chapter actually happens just before the previous chapter, and the last part of it happens just after it. This could be viewed as "clunky and awkward," but I prefer to think of it as "intellectually challenging and chronologically surreal. Like if Memento was a book. About dead dogs and vaginas and puppets made out of squirrel corpses." You can feel free to use that quote if you're reviewing this chapter, or if you're a student and your teacher asks you, "What was the author trying to say here?" That was it. That's what I was trying to say. That and "Use condoms if you're going to have sex, for God's sake. There are a lot of skanks out there." That's not really covered in this book, but it's still good advice.)

That has a little bit of everything this book had for me: Lawson's somewhat surreal worries, the extended digression, a rhythm that's quite compelling once you start reading it, random uncomfortable topics, and the occasional miss that I don't find funny (the last few sentences). It's all mixed together in a slightly breathless rush of narrative momentum. For more samples, Lawson's writing started as a blog and she's still actively blogging, so you can get a good advance sample by reading some of The Bloggess. Her tone there matches the book closely. What makes this book more than only comedy is that Lawson is very open about her struggles with mental illness (anxiety and depression). A lot of the humor comes from "this is the ridiculous nonsense that my brain throws out on a regular basis" and inviting you to laugh along with her, but the undertone is use of humor as a coping mechanism to deal with anxiety spirals. And alongside that coping mechanism is an open-hearted message of "you are not the only person to have completely irrational reactions to the world please laugh along with mine and feel better about yours." Due to that, the best comparison I can make to another book I've read is to Allie Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half. Brosh is more serious in places, more analytical, and a bit better at generalizing to experiences the reader can identify with. (And, of course, more graphical.) Lawson is more madcap, a bit more manic, and focused on absurd situations that don't normally happen to people. I loved this book from beginning to end, and it had me laughing out-loud in multiple places. Despite being a collection of disconnected stories, it has a rhythm and flow that kept me reading. Some books of this kind are best read in small segments with a break between, but I devoured Let's Pretend This Never Happened in large chunks (and had to be careful about reading it in public and laughing too loudly). Check first whether the sense of humor works for you, but if it does, highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

Just a few days ago another great font designer has passed away, Adrian Frutiger, 24 May 1928 10 September 2015. Famous in particular for his fonts Frutiger, Avenir, and the Univers family. His fonts are used throughout the worlds for visual communication like road signs. Much has been written about him: Linotype s excellent obituary, Adam Twardoch, David Airey, New York Times article. For an interview conducted with Frutiger in 1999, see this Eye Magazine article. An interesting article on Frutiger s typefaces by Charles Bigelow.
Here I want to recall a different quality of Adrian Frutiger his interest in the visual language of symbols, their development and interaction. His book Der Mensch und seine Zeichen (Signs and Symbols) is a profound study on the development, history, and use of all kind of symbols. In this book, translated into many languages, Frutiger explores the depth and breath of symbols, but the most important part for him, easily to be seen from the German title, is the human part ( Der Mensch ). Symbols are created, changed, and used by and for humans. His studies exhibit connections between various cultures when it comes to sign usage and design.
He also explores signets as modern sign language, and their importance for visual communcation and identity building.
The book also discusses the development of the Roman alphabet, and of course passes the Univers font family.
My favorite piece is this overlay of a s from different fonts, to show that there is a common pattern in these fonts.
He concludes this book with a very wise statement:

Zum Festhalten des Gedankens, zur Vermittlung der Aussage gen gen seit langem schon die Alphabet-Zeichen nicht mehr allein. Orientierung und Kommunikation sind heute unm glich ohne Schemata, Zeichen und Signale. Der geschriebene Ausdruck wird durch die Bildvermittlung notwendig erg nzt.

SInce long the alphabet letters alone do not suffice to take hold of thoughts and to transmit statements. Nowadays, orientation and communication are impossible without schemata, signs and signals. The written expression is necessarily enhanced through image transmission.

(my translation) After Hermann Zapf, this is now the second loss of the typographic world in this year. We will miss both of them.

Hi, Craige.

We've been hard working with the Gnocchi team these last months to store your metrics, and I guess it's time to show off a bit. So far Gnocchi offers scalable metric storage and resource indexation, especially for OpenStack cloud but not only, we're generic. It's cool to store metrics, but it can be even better to have a way to visualize them! Prototyping We very soon started to build a little HTML interface. Being REST-friendly guys, we enabled it on the same endpoints that were being used to retrieve information and measures about metric, sending back text/html instead of application/json if you were requesting those pages from a Web browser. But let's face it: we are back-end developers, we suck at any kind front-end development. CSS, HTML, JavaScript? Bwah! So what we built was a starting point, hoping some magical Web developer would jump in and finish the job. Obviously it never happened. Ok, so what's out there? It turns out there are back-end agnostic solutions out there, and we decided to pick Grafana. Grafana is a complete graphing dashboard solution that can be plugged on top of any back-end. It already supports timeseries databases such as Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. That was largely enough for that my fellow developer Mehdi Abaakouk to jump in and start writing a Gnocchi plugin for Grafana! Consequently, there is now a basic but solid and working back-end for Grafana that lies in the grafana-plugins repository. With that plugin, you can graph anything that is stored in Gnocchi, from raw metrics to metrics tied to resources. You can use templating, but no annotation yet. The back-end supports Gnocchi with or without Keystone involved, and any type of authentication (basic auth or Keystone token). So yes, it even works if you're not running Gnocchi with the rest of OpenStack. It also supports advanced queries, so you can search for resources based on some criterion and graphs their metrics. I want to try it! If you want to deploy it, all you need to do is to install Grafana and its plugins, and create a new datasource pointing to Gnocchi. It is that simple. There's some CORS middleware configuration involved if you're planning on using Keystone authentication, but it's pretty straightforward just set the cors.allowed_origin option to the URL of your Grafana dashboard. We added support of Grafana directly in Gnocchi devstack plugin. If you're running DevStack you can follow the instructions which are basically adding the line enable_service gnocchi-grafana. Moving to Grafana core Mehdi just opened a pull request a few days ago to merge the plugin into Grafana core. It's actually one of the most unit-tested plugin in Grafana so far, so it should be on a good path to be merged in the future and have support of Gnocchi directly into Grafana without any plugin involved.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Media coverage Motherboard published an article on the project inspired by the talk at the Chaos Communication 15. Journalists sadly rarely pick their headlines. The sensationalist How Debian Is Trying to Shut Down the CIA got started a few rants here and there. One from OpenBSD developper Ted Unangst lead to a good email contact and some thorough comments. Toolchain fixes

• Emmanuel Bourg uploaded maven-ant-helper/7.11 which improved the reproducibility of the Javadoc by removing the timestamps and using the English locale.
• Thomas Schmitt uploaded libisoburn/1.4.0-2 which adds to the ISO image creator xorriso new flags for -alter_date to avoid update ctimes. Report by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
• Florian Schlichting uplodaded libmodule-build-perl/0.421400-2 which makes linked file ordering deterministic. Original patch by Niko Tyni.

The modified version of gettext has been removed from the experimental toolchain. Fixing individual package seems a better approach for now. Chris Lamb sent two patches for abi-compliance-checker: one to drop the timestamp from generated HTML reports and another to make umask and timestamps deterministic in the abi tarball. Bugs submitted by Dhole lead to a discussion on the best way to adapt pod2man now that we have SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH specified. There is really a whole class of issues that are currently undiscovered waiting for tests running on a different date. This is likely to should happen soon. Chris Lamb uploaded a new version of debhelper in the reproducible repository, cherry-picking a fix for interactions between ddebs and udebs. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: aspic, django-guardian, erlang-sqlite3, etcd, libnative-platform-java, mingw-ocaml, nose2, oar, obexftp, py3cairo, python-dugong, python-secretstorage, python-setuptools, qct, qdox, recutils, s3ql, wine. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• bochs/2.6-4 by Santiago Vila.
• codec2/0.4-3 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• coquelicot/0.9.4-1 by Lunar.
• criticalmass/1:1.0.0-3 by Santiago Vila.
• ekg/1:1.9~pre+r2855-3 by Santiago Vila.
• eterm/0.9.6-3 by Santiago Vila.
• fbi/2.10-2 by Moritz Muehlenhoff.
• fsvs/1.2.6-2 by Santiago Vila.
• glhack/1.2-3 by Santiago Vila.
• httraqt/1.4.6-2 by Anton Gladky.
• libapache-authznetldap-perl/0.07-6 by gregor herrmann, original patch by Dhole.
• libkinosearch1-perl/1.01-3 uploaded by Florian Schlichting, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• liblucy-perl/0.3.3-6 uploaded by Florian Schlichting, original patch by Niko Tyni.
• slony1-2/2.2.4-1 by Christoph Berg.
• slrn/1.0.2-3 uploaded by Moritz Muehlenhoff, original patch by Dmitry Bogatov.
• svtplay-dl/0.10.2015.08.24-1 uploaded by Olof Johansson, fixed upstream.
• swh-plugins/0.4.15+1-8 uploaded by Jarom r Mike , original patch by Chris Lamb.
• sysstat/11.1.6-2 uploaded by Robert Luberda, original patch by Chris Lamb.
• uhd/3.9.0-3 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• volk/1.1-3 by A. Maitland Bottoms.
• yadifa/2.1.3-2 uploaded by Markus Schade, original patch by Santiago Vila.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them:

• dict-jargon/4.4.7-3 uploaded by Ruben Molina, original patch by Dhole.
• ferret-vis/6.9.3-3 uploaded by Alastair McKinstry, original patch by Chris Lamb.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #798366 on lilo by Dmitry Bogatov: remove usage of __TIME__ and __DATE__ macros.
• #798557 on libapache-dbi-perl by Dhole: set date of the manpage to the latest debian/changelog entry.
• #798776 on testdisk by upstream!

reproducible.debian.net The configuration of all remote armhf and amd64 nodes in now finished. The remaining reproducibility tests running on the Jenkins host has been removed. armhf results and graphs are now visible in dashboard. We can now test the whole archive in 2-3 weeks using the current 12 amd64 jobs and 3 months using the current 6 armhf builders. We will be looking at improving the armhf sitation, maybe using more native systems or via arm64. (h01ger) The Jenkins UI is now more responsive since all jobs building packages have been moved to remote hosts. (h01ger) A new job has been added to collect information about build nodes to be included in the variation table. (h01ger) The currently scheduled page has been split for amd64 and armhf. They now give an overview (refreshed every minute, thanks to Chris Lamb) of the packages currently being tested. (h01ger) Several cleanup and bugfixes have been made, especially in the remote building and maintenance scripts. They should now be more robust against network problems. The automatic scheduler is now also run closer to when schroots and pbuilders are updated. (h01ger, mapreri) Package reviews 16 reviews have been removed, 54 added and 55 updated this week. Santiago Vila renamed lc_messages_randomness with the more descriptive different_pot_creation_date_in_gettext_mo_files. New issues added this week: timestamps_in_reports_generated_by_abi_compliance_checker, umask_and_timestamp_variation_in_tgz_generated_by_abi_compliance_checker, and timestamps_added_by_blast2. 23 new FTBFS bugs have been filled by Chris Lamb, and Niko Tyni. Misc. Red Hat developper Mike McLean had a talk at Flock 2015 about reproducible builds in Koji. Slides and video recording are available. Koji is the build infrastructure used by Fedora, Red Hat and other distributions. It already keeps track of the environment used for a given build, so the required changes for handling the environment are smaller than the ones in Debian. Fedora is still missing a team effort to fix non-determinism in the package builds, but it is great to see Fedora moving forward.

Sharing a scanner over the network using SANE is fairly straightforward. Here's how I shared a scanner on a server (running Debian jessie) with a client (running Ubuntu trusty).

Install SANE The packages you need on both the client and the server are:

• libsane
• sane-utils

You should check whether or your scanner is supported by the latest stable release or by the latest development version. In my case, I needed to get a Canon LiDE 220 working so I had to grab the libsane 1.0.25+git20150528-1 package from Debian experimental.

Test the scanner locally Once you have SANE installed, you can test it out locally to confirm that it detects your scanner:

scanimage -L

This should give you output similar to this:

device  genesys:libusb:001:006' is a Canon LiDE 220 flatbed scanner

If that doesn't work, make sure that the scanner is actually detected by the USB stack:

$ lsusb   grep Canon
Bus 001 Device 006: ID 04a9:190f Canon, Inc.

and that its USB ID shows up in the SANE backend it needs:

$ grep 190f /etc/sane.d/genesys.conf 
usb 0x04a9 0x190f

To do a test scan, simply run:

scanimage > test.ppm

and then take a look at the (greyscale) image it produced (test.ppm).

Configure the server With the scanner working locally, it's time to expose it to network clients by adding the client IP addresses to /etc/sane.d/saned.conf:

## Access list
192.168.1.3

and then opening the appropriate port on your firewall (typically /etc/network/iptables in Debian):

-A INPUT -s 192.168.1.3 -p tcp --dport 6566 -j ACCEPT

Then you need to ensure that the SANE server is running by setting the following in /etc/default/saned:

RUN=yes

if you're using the sysv init system, or by running this command:

systemctl enable saned.socket

if using systemd. I actually had to reboot to make saned visible to systemd, so if you still run into these errors:

$ service saned start
Failed to start saned.service: Unit saned.service is masked.

you're probably just one reboot away from getting it to work.

Configure the client On the client, all you need to do is add the following to /etc/sane.d/net.conf:

connect_timeout = 60
myserver

where myserver is the hostname or IP address of the server running saned.

Test the scanner remotely With everything in place, you should be able to see the scanner from the client computer:

$ scanimage -L
device  net:myserver:genesys:libusb:001:006' is a Canon LiDE 220 flatbed scanner

and successfully perform a test scan using this command:

scanimage > test.ppm

Over the last weekends I finally managed to finish The Talos Principle, all of its endings. Compared to the actual play time I needed for Portal 2, namely about 12 hours, The Talos Principle challenged me much longer, about 36 hours. An enjoyable ride through many different and stunningly created worlds filled with many many puzzles that need to be solved.
Combined with three different endings the games offers great fun for those who love riddle games. Comparing it to my favorite riddle game (series), Myst, the graphics have of course developed and provide stunning views. I haven t played games in a landscape since the Myst series (Portal is indoors), so I was taken by surprise about all the details and love that has been put into the graphics. Maybe its only me because it was the first game of this quality I have played. And above all, I could actually play it on my normal Intel GPU laptop (but surprisingly only on Linux, the Windows version refused to play on my under-powered laptop).
There are only two slightly negative points I have to mention: Due to the nature of very restricted tool set, the riddles feel a bit repetitive. Some of them stand out, but after having played through the A and B worlds, you feel like you have seen that before when entering a new riddle. Still challenging, and that is what I was looking for, but a bit more variation would be nice. Here is a riddle that stood out due to its funny nature.
The game also has a long list of Easter Eggs, some of which I could find, some of which I surely missed. Most funny of those I found was the Developer World where funny characters lounge. Another I found was this money throwing guy called Fork Parker, who happens to be the financial officer of the developers team. Did they really make sooo much money from the game?
Something a bit uncommon or new to me was the fact that there are three (3!) endings, depending on what you choose to do. The first and easiest one is the ending of the good student you collect enough sigils, and follow Elohims words and ascent to eternity rather boring. Reminds me of an old Viennese song how boring it is to be an angel in heaven.
Bit more challenging is the bad student ending: You ignore Elohim s warnings and ascent the tower, solve several more riddles, and via a few more twists manage to escape to the real world. Nice graphics, great ending.
The most challenging ending is the enlighted student ending. To manage to reach this ending, one needs to collect each and everything that is to be found in the game, including all hidden stars and grey sigils. Here I have to mention the second slightly negative point: Finding the stars is rather luck then problem solving ability. Often one needs to guess a location of a reflector, or stumble over a hidden staircase, or press some arbitrary buttons. For my feeling the riddles for the stars were to arbitrary. So I managed to collect several of the stars by myself, but for many I needed hints on how to solve the riddles. Anyway, in case you managed to listen to all recordings, collect all texts, get all stars and collect all sigils from the extra worlds, you might ascend to the last floor of the tower and become a messenger yourself. Not sure if I want to become a messenger there, though.
Just in time with me finishing the game, the developers shipped out an extension called Road to Gehenna . Stunning graphics, even better, waiting ahead now I only need the time!
All in all a great piece of game, lovingly crafted graphics, interesting game play, lots of small levels, which helps people like me who cannot play for hours overnight, but need to do riddles one by one in short gaming sessions. So if you are in for riddle games, watch out for the next offer on Steam. Enjoy.

I haven't posted one of these in a while, but now that I'm finally caught up with writing reviews (although not posting them yet), I've been feeling about reading again. And of course the backlog always grows. Let's see if I can figure out what I've picked up since the last post. Catherine Asaro The Phoenix Code (sff)
Annie Bellet Justice Calling (sff)
Annie Bellet Murder of Crows (sff)
Annie Bellet Pack of Lies (sff)
Zen Cho Sorcerer to the Crown (sff)
J.J. Gribble Steel Victory (sff)
Judith L. Herman Trauma and Recovery (non-fiction)
Janis Ian & Mike Resnick Stars: The Anthology (sff anthology)
Megg Jensen Hidden (sff)
T. Kingfisher Bryony and Roses (sff)
T. Kingfisher The Seventh Bride (sff)
Nancy Kress Crossfire (sff)
Edmond Lau The Effective Engineer (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee The Fox's Tower and Other Tales (sff collection)
Lozzi Roma Rome and the Vatican (non-fiction)
Elizabeth Lynn The Dancers of Arun (sff)
Elizabeth Lynn The Northern Girl (sff)
Rhonda Mason Empress Game (sff)
Vonda N. McIntyre Starfarers (sff)
Linda Nagata Memory (sff)
Jody Lynn Nye Strong Arm Tactics (sff)
Cat Rambo Near + Far (sff)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch The Diving Bundle (sff collection)
Kristine Kathryn Rusch Recovering Apollo 8 (sff)
L. Shelby Serendipity's Tide (sff)
L. Shelby Treachery's Harbor (sff)
L. Shelby Fealty's Shore (sff)
K.B. Spangler Digital Divide (sff)
Judith Tarr Forgotten Suns (sff)
Greg van Eekhout California Bones (sff) Hm, that's quite a lot. Most of it is various ebooks I picked up from various places, including a Humble Bundle. I've been impulse-buying a lot of stuff based on James Nicoll's reviews. The travel guide was a gift from a friend from a vacation in Italy.

Review: My Real Children, by Jo Walton

Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	May 2014
ISBN:	0-7653-3265-5
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	317

Patricia, the one form of her name that she's never used, is what the staff in the nursing home call her. "VC" is the frequent annotation on her daily chart: very confused. She's old, and forgetful, and trying very hard not to be her mother, and she remembers two lives. Not only remembers but lives: the nursing home isn't the same from day to day. They keep misplacing the lift, and the staff keep changing. But the memories are the strongest. She has two lives, two sets of children, all of whom she recognizes. When someone from one life visits, the other feels like a dream, but both of them persist. Two lives that divided at the most significant decision of her life. My Real Children is one of those books that fits in the broader speculative fiction genre as alternate history, but also has many of the virtues of mimetic fiction. It's the story of one woman's life, told, except for the opening frame, chronologically from start to finish. At the start, it's simple biography, telling Patty's story from childhood, through World War II, until the moment of her fateful decision in 1949. From there the narrative splits, and she lives two lives. And the world splits as well: in one, Kennedy was assassinated by a bomb; in another, the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into something much worse. Much is still unchanged, including the general lives of people Patty knew well in one life and not in another, but the worlds keep diverging from each other and from ours. The exact nature of the divergence is not, however, a significant part of the book. This is not the type of alternate history that is obsessed with the point of change, or even the implications for the world. Rather, this novel is about one woman, one decision, and two very different paths through life. Different friends, different challenges, different careers... different hopes and dreams, and different children. But always the same person, the same sense of practicality, the same ethics. It's beautifully told, striking just the right balance of showing important moments in detail and passing quickly, but smoothly, over some years. And, as with Among Others, Walton strikes the perfect emotional balance, leaving some reactions understated, letting the reader bring their own reactions to the book, and filling it with small bits of telling, factual detail rather than internal monologues. This is also one of the most heart-wrenching books I've ever read. My Real Children is a whole life, and not an easy one, complete with the heartaches and betrayals, the good and bad decisions, care for elderly relatives, dementia, tragedy, and even abuse. And moments of shining joy or profound satisfaction, but made all the more poignant because they're fleeting. The reader knows, in a sense, how the story ends, which casts a shadow over the rest of the book. But, even without that shadow, life can be hard, or cruel, alongside the wonder and joy. And it ends, and the ending is not neat and clean and uplifting, although one can choose how one meets it. This is the story of a life, all of it, and how choices can divide that life, and how they can cast a long shadow over how one later defines oneself. This book hurts. A lot. Enough that I want to warn you in advance I was in tears through the last third of the book. But it hurts because it's so very real and deep, not via a blow-by-blow description of daily actions, but by striding unafraid into the deep complications of choice and consequence. It's also a profoundly feminist book, in a quiet and descriptive way. It shared the Tiptree award for 2015 and fully deserved it. Both of the protagonist's lives are struggles against expectations, around gender, sexuality, and the role of women in society. Those struggles take very different forms, but they share some deep similarities. Walton shows the impact from the bottom up: the effects on specific lives, specific people, specific situations. It's brilliantly done. One can't help but think of The Female Man given the telling of parallel lives, but this is a case study, whereas Russ's novel was a battle cry. It gets under your skin instead of in your face. (Use of subtlety on this topic is easier now, forty years of occasional progress past when Russ wrote her classic.) This is a much harder book to read than Among Others. It's less forgiving, less reassuring, less willing to provide a happy ending. Lives rarely have clean, happy endings; one has to construct them, by choosing the material to build the ending on. But it's a brilliant, profound book, in that way that stories about people in all their complexity can be. Be cautious about your mood when you read this, particularly if you've had the experience of caring for a dying relative, but it's a book I will remember for a very long time. Rating: 9 out of 10

during the last weeks, I spent time mostly with RC bug prevention but I at least managed to also fix a couple of actual RC bugs:

• #777854 src:freecraft: "freecraft: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  add patch from Nicholas Luedtke/HP, QA upload.
• #778025 src:netrek-client-cow: "netrek-client-cow: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  add patch from Thavatchai Makphaibulchoke/HP, upload to DELAYED/2
• #778058 src:percona-xtradb-cluster-galera-2.x: "percona-xtradb-cluster-galera-2.x: ftbfs with GCC-5"
  add patch from alexander balderson/HP, upload to DELAYED/2
• #780206 src:squashfs-tools: "fix ftbfs with GCC 5 on armhf"
  apply patch from Ubuntu/Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #789093 libapache2-authcookie-perl: "libapache2-authcookie-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  update patch (pkg-perl)
• #790285 src:stdsyslog: "stdsyslog: FTBFS with glibc 2.21 and gcc-5"
  sponsor maintainer upload
• #795202 src:libcatalyst-perl: "FTBFS: t/aggregate/live_engine_request_parameters.t fails"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #796315 src:libflickr-upload-perl: "libflickr-upload-perl: FTBFS: t/failupload.t (Wstat: 65280 Tests: 2 Failed: 0)"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #796537 src:libcgi-simple-perl: "libcgi-simple-perl: Missing Build-Depends on libio-stringy-perl"
  add missing build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #797581 libmojolicious-plugin-i18n-perl: "libmojolicious-plugin-i18n-perl: FTBFS: t/i18n_url_for.t fails"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #797584 libmojolicious-plugin-cgi-perl: "libmojolicious-plugin-cgi-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  upload new upstream release (pkg-perl)
• #797966 syncevolution-common: "syncevolution-common: uninstallable due to libsynthesis0 dependency"
  sponsor maintainer upload
• #798790 libmoosex-clone-perl: "libmoosex-clone-perl: missing dependency on libnamespace-autoclean-perl"
  update runtime dependencies (pkg-perl)

Although I've been writing a bit recently about file-storage, this post is about something much more simple: Just making a random file or two available on an ad-hoc basis. In the past I used to have my email and website(s) hosted on the same machine, and that machine was well connected. Making a file visible just involved running ~/bin/publish, which used scp to write a file beneath an apache document-root. These days I use "my computer", "my work computer", and "my work laptop", amongst other hosts. The SSH-keys required to access my personal boxes are not necessarily available on all of these hosts. Add in firewall constraints and suddenly there isn't an obvious way for me to say "Publish this file online, and show me the root". I asked on twitter but nothing useful jumped out. So I ended up writing a simple server, via sinatra which would allow:

• Login via the site, and a browser. The login-form looks sexy via bootstrap.
• Upload via a web-form, once logged in. The upload-form looks sexy via bootstrap.
• Or, entirely seperately, with HTTP-basic-auth and a HTTP POST (i.e. curl)

This worked, and was even secure-enough, given that I run SSL if you import my CA file. But using basic auth felt like cheating, and I've been learning more Go recently, and I figured I should start taking it more seriously, so I created a small repository of learning-programs. The learning programs started out simply, but I did wire up a simple TOTP authenticator. Having TOTP available made me rethink things - suddenly even if you're not using SSL having an eavesdropper doesn't compromise future uploads. I'd also spent a few hours working out how to make extensible commands in go, the kind of thing that lets you run:

cmd sub-command1 arg1 arg2
cmd sub-command2 arg1 .. argN

The solution I came up with wasn't perfect, but did work, and allow the seperation of different sub-command logic. So suddenly I have the ability to run "subcommands", and the ability to authenticate against a time-based secret. What is next? Well the hard part with golang is that there are so many things to choose from - I went with gorilla/mux as my HTTP-router, then I spend several hours filling in the blanks. The upshot is now that I have a TOTP-protected file upload site:

publishr init    - Generates the secret
publishr secret  - Shows you the secret for import to your authenticator
publishr serve   - Starts the HTTP daemon

Other than a lack of comments, and test-cases, it is complete. And stand-alone. Uploads get dropped into ./public, and short-links are generated for free. If you want to take a peak the code is here:

• https://github.com/skx/go-experiments/tree/master/publishr

The only annoyance is the handling of dependencies - which need to be "go got ..". I guess I need to look at godep or similar, for my next learning project. I guess there's a minor gain in making this service available via golang. I've gained protection against replay attacks, assuming non-SSL environment, and I've simplified deployment. The downside is I can no longer login over the web, and I must use curl, or similar, to upload. Acceptible tradeoff.

Review: The Sea Thy Mistress, by Elizabeth Bear

Series:	Edda of Burdens #3
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	February 2011
ISBN:	0-7653-1884-9
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	334

The Sea Thy Mistress is the third book in the Edda of Burdens series, but the second book (By the Mountain Bound) was a prequel to the first, telling the story of an earlier world and the betrayal that ended it. This one is a direct sequel to All the Windwracked Stars, a complex and idea-rich book that I read more than six years ago. A challenging property of Bear's fiction is that it's short on explanation and doesn't hold your hand. This makes it lean, sharp, and effective if you're fully invested in it and can keep the context in your head. It becomes very hard to understand if you've mostly forgotten the plot of an earlier book. (Once again, I bemoan the death of the previous book synopsis in series fiction.) The Sea Thy Mistress is all about aftermath, loss, despair, unhealed wounds, old grudges, and complicated personal histories, and it relies very heavily on the reader being invested enough in the characters to care about all of those things. I wish I'd read this entire series closer together so that I could retain more of the state. The start of this story was therefore somewhat frustrating, as I scrambled to rebuild my memory of the first book and piece together the large cast. Thankfully, most of the characters are easy to care about. Aethelred reliably brought a smile to my face, and the opening scene of him finding a baby on the sea shore is a great piece of writing. Selene is back; she was one of my favorite characters in the first book. And Bear pulls off something I didn't think she could: the Grey Wolf is also back, for the third book, and he actually won me over. I think he grew up a bit; there's at least less whining and angst, and more effective action. It probably also helped that less of the story was told from his perspective. The Sea Thy Mistress is primarily the story of Cathoair and his son, Cathmar, and their encounter with a truly nasty threat: a goddess who has way more knowledge of how their world works than they do, and is out to destroy it. This review will necessarily be sketchy on details; most of them would partly spoil All the Windwracked Stars. (I suppose I'm spoiling it a bit anyway just by listing characters who are still around.) Cathmar is... not too irritating. He's young and stupid, and the first half of the book is a bit painful as he plays into the hands of the plot with much less information than the reader has available. But I was okay with him by the end of the book. Cathoair is a more complicated matter. I suspect whether you like this book will depend mostly on whether you can find some sympathy for his personal angst and self-destructive behavior, or at least tolerate him long enough to get to the ending. Quite a lot of this book consists of people behaving stupidly and horribly while those who love them stand by helplessly, unable to figure out how to break the cycle. If that sounds frustrating, you have the right impression. I really struggled with the first two-thirds of the book and started regretting reading it. But there is a payoff: one that's uncomfortable, raw, perilous, and sad, but also beautiful and honest and effective. Muire's role in this book may be minor, but it's very memorable. Despite the difficulties of the early book, I was very glad to have read it for the payoff. I'm not sure whether to recommend this or not, but I think it's worth reading if you enjoyed All the Windwracked Stars. If you do read it, though, try to read the whole series in close proximity. You'll want to remember the details between books. I'm now somewhat tempted to go back and re-read the whole series to experience it in context. Rating: 6 out of 10

Categories:

• Debian-Blog
• Rant

Keywords:

• Google
• Encryption
• Privacy
• Cloud

Like: