Another minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.20, of RcppAnnoy has arrived on CRAN. RcppAnnoy is the Rcpp-based R integration of the nifty Annoy library by Erik Bernhardsson. Annoy is a small and lightweight C++ template header library for very fast approximate nearest neighbours originally developed to drive the Spotify music discovery algorithm. This release mainly updates the included copy of Annoy to version 1.7.3 which now provides a C++ namespace in the header API. So I sent a pair of PRs to uwot to update its (compiled) use, which James promptly merged. With that the CRAN update was once again seamless. Otherwise the package follows current custom by moving away from C++11 as a set compilation standard to be open for more modern C++ idioms. Here, this allows in particular for possible multithreaded indexing for which everything needed is in C++17. However, we did not turn multithreaded indexing on as the RNG use is such that the streams would differ leading to slightly different (if of course equivalent) results. Users can enable this by recompiling with the switch flipped, see src/Makevars.

Changes in version 0.0.21 (2023-07-02)

• The build setup switched from C++11 to C++17 which offers threading support (which remains off by default to ensure consistent results)
• Upstream code was update to Annoy 1.17.3, the switch to an explicit C++ namespace has been accomodated (Dirk in #75)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Last weekend was the bi-annual time to roll the main machine and server to the current Ubuntu release, now at 23.04. It must now have been fifteen or so years that I have used Ubuntu for my desktop / server (for reasons I may write about another time). And of course it all passed swimmingly as usual. [ And a small aside, if I may. Among all these upgrades, one of my favourite piece of tech trivia that may well be too little known remains the dedication of the PostgreSQL maintainers installing the new version, now PostgreSQL 15, seamlessly in parallel with the existing one, in my case PostgreSQL 14, keeping both running (!!) on two neighbouring ports (!!) so that there is no service disruption. So at some point, maybe this weekend, I will run the provided script to dump-and-restore to trigger the database migration at my convenience. Happy PostgreSQL on Debian/Ubuntu user since the late 1990s. It. Just. Works. ] [ Similarly, it is plainly amazeballs how apt orders and runs package updates to service to keep running for a maximum amount of time. This machine acts as e.g. a web server and it was up and running (as were other services) while thousands of package got updated/replaced. It is pretty amazing. Whereas on other platforms people still maintain the do not ever update anything we demonstrably offer the opposite here. Really not too shabby. ] This time, I had one small hickup. Emacs, now at version 28 bringing loads of niceties along, would not load. And the error soon lead to a post on the magit list where its indefatigable author Jonas Bernoulli suggested a rebuild (and hence re-compilation of the elisp files). Which I did, and which allowed a start of VM inside Emacs. So I was happy. But it allowed it only once for each VM package reinstall. Not good, and I remained curious. Some more digging lead to a breakthrough. A post and commit at the Fedora Project indicated that for just VM within Emacs, byte-compilation throws a spanner. Which one can work around by telling Emacs not to compile the files in the VM folder. So I applied that patch to the VM package in a local build et voil we have working VM. The world is clearly better when your email client of 25+ years just works. And feels snappier because everything under Emacs28 feels snappier! So I set this up properly and filed Debian Bug Report #1039105. To which Ian Jackson, the maintainer, replied a few days later nodding that he could reproduce. And that he concurred with the bug report, and was planning to update throughout. And lo and behold this morning s update reveals that this made into an update for the just-released Debian Bookworm. So yay. In all these years of Debian maintainership (somewhere between twentyfive and thirty) this may be my first bug report with patch going straight into a stable release. But of course, true and full credit goes of course to G ran Uddeborg for putting it up first for Fedora. Lovely how Open Source can work together. We really should do more, not less, of that. But I digress Anyway, in sum: If you try to use VM under the lovely Emacs 28, there is a fix, and if you use it with Debian Bookworm the fix should hit your mirrors soons. Ditto, methinks, for the next Ubuntu release. If you use it under Ubuntu now, the package is (elisp) text-only and can be safely installed on a derivative (which we do not enjoy in general but which is fine here). So enjoy! If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Thanks to Nicholas Guriev, dotenv-cli now uses exec instead of popen to create the new process on POSIX systems. As a refresher, dotenv-cli is a package that provides the dotenv command. dotenv reads the .env file from the current directory, puts the contents in the environment variables, and executes the given command with the extra environment variables set. dotenv comes in handy if you follow the 12 factor app methodology or just need to run a program locally with specific environment variables set. With this new change, when you call instead of forking a new process for my_awesome_tool, effectively creating a child process of dotenv, dotenv now uses exec to become the new process. This is a bit cleaner, as there is no longer a dotenv-process running that you don t actually care about, and less-error prone when trying to send signals such as SIGTERM to the processes that runs my_awesome_tool. Unfortunately, exec does not work properly under Windows, so here we still fall back to using popen. This new feature is available in version 3.2.0 which is available on PyPI and debian/unstable.

From May 25th to 27th, Bras lia hosted the MiniDebConf 2023. This gathering, composed of various activities such as talks, workshops, sprints, BSP (Bug Squashing Party), key signing, social events, and hacking, aimed to bring the community together and celebrate the world's largest Free Software project: Debian. The MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 was a success thanks to the participation of everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge about Debian. We valued the presence of both beginners who are getting familiar with the system and official project developers. The spirit of inclusion and collaboration was present throughout the event. MiniDebConfs are local meetings organized by members of the Debian Project, aiming to achieve similar goals as DebConf but on a regional scale. Throughout the year, events like this occur in different parts of the world, strengthening the Debian community. Activities The MiniDebConf program was intense and diverse. On May 25th and 26th (Thursday and Friday), we had talks, discussions, workshops, and many hands-on activities. On the 27th (Saturday), the Hacking Day took place, which was a special moment for Debian contributors to come together and work collaboratively on various aspects of the project. This was the Brazilian version of Debcamp, a tradition preceding DebConf. On this day, we prioritized practical activities such as software packaging, translations, key signing, install fest, and the Bug Squashing Party.

Edition numbers The event numbers are impressive and demonstrate the community's involvement with Debian. We had 236 registered participants, 20 submitted talks, 14 volunteers, and 125 check-ins. Furthermore, in the hands-on activities, we achieved significant results, including 7 new installations of Debian GNU/Linux, the update of 18 packages in the official Debian project repository by participants, and the inclusion of 7 new contributors to the translation team. We also highlight the remote participation of the community through live streams. The analytics data reveals that our website received a total of 7,058 views, with 2,079 views on the homepage (which featured our sponsors' logos), 3,042 views on the program page, and 104 views on the sponsors' page. We recorded 922 unique users during the event. On YouTube, the live stream reached 311 views, with 56 likes and a peak of 20 concurrent views. There were an incredible 85.1 hours of watch time, and our channel gained 30 new subscribers. All this engagement and interest from the community further strengthen MiniDebConf. Photos and videos To relive the best moments of the event, we have photos and recordings available. Photos can be accessed at: https://deb.li/pbsb2023. Video recordings of the talks are available at the following link: https://deb.li/vbsb2023. To stay updated and connect with the Debian Bras lia community, follow us on our social media channels:

• Telegram: https://t.me/debianbrasilia
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/debianbrasiliaoficial
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DebianBrasilia

Thanks We would like to express our deep gratitude to all the participants, organizers, sponsors, and supporters who contributed to the success of MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023. In particular, we extend our thanks to our Gold sponsors: 2024. Pencillabs, Globo, Policorp, and Toradex Brasil, and our Silver sponsor, 4-Linux. We also thank Finatec and the Instituto para Conserva o de Tecnologias Livres (ICTL) for their support. MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 was a milestone for the Debian community, demonstrating the power of collaboration and Free Software. We hope that everyone enjoyed this enriching gathering and will continue to actively participate in future Debian Project initiatives. Together, we can make a difference!

No per odo de 25 a 27 de maio, Bras lia foi palco da MiniDebConf 2023. Esse encontro, composto por diversas atividades como palestras, oficinas, sprints, BSP (Bug Squashing Party), assinatura de chaves, eventos sociais e hacking, teve como principal objetivo reunir a comunidade e celebrar o maior projeto de Software Livre do mundo: o Debian. A MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 foi um sucesso gra as participa o de todas e todos, independentemente do n vel de conhecimento sobre o Debian. Valorizamos a presen a tanto dos(as) usu rios(as) iniciantes que est o se familiarizando com o sistema quanto dos(as) desenvolvedores(as) oficiais do projeto. O esp rito de acolhimento e colabora o esteve presente em todos os momentos. As MiniDebConfs s o encontros locais organizados por membros do Projeto Debian, visando objetivos semelhantes aos da DebConf, por m em mbito regional. Ao longo do ano, eventos como esse ocorrem em diferentes partes do mundo, fortalecendo a comunidade Debian. Atividades A programa o da MiniDebConf foi intensa e diversificada. Nos dias 25 e 26 (quinta e sexta-feira), tivemos palestras, debates, oficinas e muitas atividades pr ticas. J no dia 27 (s bado), ocorreu o Hacking Day, um momento especial em que os(as) colaboradores(as) do Debian se reuniram para trabalhar em conjunto em v rios aspectos do projeto. Essa foi a vers o brasileira da Debcamp, tradi o pr via DebConf. Nesse dia, priorizamos as atividades pr ticas de contribui o ao projeto, como empacotamento de softwares, tradu es, assinaturas de chaves, install fest e a Bug Squashing Party.

N meros da edi o Os n meros do evento impressionam e demonstram o envolvimento da comunidade com o Debian. Tivemos 236 inscritos(as), 20 palestras submetidas, 14 volunt rios(as) e 125 check-ins realizados. Al m disso, nas atividades pr ticas, tivemos resultados significativos, como 7 novas instala es do Debian GNU/Linux, a atualiza o de 18 pacotes no reposit rio oficial do projeto Debian pelos participantes e a inclus o de 7 novos contribuidores na equipe de tradu o. Destacamos tamb m a participa o da comunidade de forma remota, por meio de transmiss es ao vivo. Os dados anal ticos revelam que nosso site obteve 7.058 visualiza es no total, com 2.079 visualiza es na p gina principal (que contava com o apoio de nossos patrocinadores), 3.042 visualiza es na p gina de programa o e 104 visualiza es na p gina de patrocinadores. Registramos 922 usu rios(as) nicos durante o evento. No YouTube, a transmiss o ao vivo alcan ou 311 visualiza es, com 56 curtidas e um pico de 20 visualiza es simult neas. Foram incr veis 85,1 horas de exibi o, e nosso canal conquistou 30 novos inscritos(as). Todo esse engajamento e interesse da comunidade fortalecem ainda mais a MiniDebConf. Fotos e v deos Para revivermos os melhores momentos do evento, temos dispon veis fotos e v deos. As fotos podem ser acessadas em: https://deb.li/pbsb2023. J os v deos com as grava es das palestras est o dispon veis no seguinte link: https://deb.li/vbsb2023. Para manter-se atualizado e conectar-se com a comunidade Debian Bras lia, siga-nos em nossas redes sociais:

• Telegram: https://t.me/debianbrasilia
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/debianbrasiliaoficial
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DebianBrasilia

Agradecimentos Gostar amos de agradecer profundamente a todos(as) os(as) participantes, organizadores(as), patrocinadores e apoiadores(as) que contribu ram para o sucesso da MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023. Em especial, expressamos nossa gratid o aos patrocinadores Ouro: Pencillabs, Globo, Policorp e Toradex Brasil, e ao patrocinador Prata, 4-Linux. Tamb m agradecemos Finatec e ao Instituto para Conserva o de Tecnologias Livres (ICTL) pelo apoio. A MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 foi um marco para a comunidade Debian, demonstrando o poder da colabora o e do Software Livre. Esperamos que todas e todos tenham desfrutado desse encontro enriquecedor e que continuem participando ativamente das pr ximas iniciativas do Projeto Debian. Juntos, podemos fazer a diferen a!

Tablet Magazine has an interesting article about Jewish men who fought in the military for Nazi Germany [1]. I m surprised that they didn t frag their colleagues. Dropbox has an insightful interview with a lawyer about the future of machine learning in the legal profession [2]. This seems like it could give real benefits to society in giving legal assistance to more people and giving less uncertainty about the result of court cases. It could also find unclear laws for legislators who want to improve things. Some people have started a software to produce a free software version of Victoria 2 [3]. Hopefully OpenVic will become as successful as FreeCiv and FreeCraft! Hackster has an interesting article about work to create a machine that does a realistic impersonation of someone s handwriting [4]. The aim is to be good enough to fool people who want manually written assignments. Ars technica has an interesting article about a side channel attack using the power LEDs of smart-card readers to extract cryptographic secret key data [5]. As usual for articles about side channels it turns out to be really hard to do and their proof of concept involved recording a card being repeatedly scanned for an hour. This doesn t mean it s a non-issue, they should harden readers against this. Vice has an interesting article on the search for chemical remnants of ancient organisms in 1.6 billion year old fossils [6]. Bleeping Computer has an interesting article about pirate Windows 10 ISOs infecting systems with EFI malware [7]. That s a particularly nasty attack and shows yet another down-side to commercial software. For Linux the ISOs are always clean and the systems aren t contaminated. The Register has an interesting article about a robot being used for chilled RAM attacks to get access to boot time secrets [8]. They monitor EMF output to stop it at the same time in each boot which I consider the most noteworthy part of this attack. The BBC has an interesting article about personalised medicine [9]. There are 400 million people in the world with rare diseases and an estimated 60 million of them will die before the age of 5. Personalised medicine can save many lives. Let s hope it is used outside the first world. Knuth s thoughts about ChatGPT are interesting [10]. Interesting article about Brown M&Ms and assessing the likely quality of work from a devops team [11]. The ABC has an interesting article about the use of AI and robot traps to catch feral cats [12].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/yxo8czll
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2jt9vg28
• [3] https://www.openvic.com
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/25hzskc6
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/26ahcbg2
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/2z7xu2sl
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2ysgc548
• [8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/cold_boot_ram_theft/ > https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/cold_boot_ram_theft/
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2j5dk7lt
• [10] https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt
• [11] https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2023/05/27/brown-mms/
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2xqrltle

Motherboard Battery You know you have become too old when you get stumped and the solution is simple and fixed by the vendor. About a week back, I was getting CPU Fan Error. It s a 6 year old desktop so I figured that the fan or the ball bearings on the fan must have worn out. I opened up the cabinet and I could see both the on cpu fan was working coolly as well as the side fan was working without an issue. So I couldn t figure out what was the issue. I had updated the BIOS/UEFI number of years ago so that couldn t be an issue. I fiddled with the boot menu and was able to boot into Linux but it was a pain that I had to do every damn time. As it is, it takes almost 2-3 minutes for the whole desktop to be ready and this extra step was annoying. I had bought a Mid-tower cabinet while the motherboard so there were alternate connectors I could try but still the issue persisted. And this workaround was heart-breaking as you boot the BIOS/UEFI and fix the boot menu each time even though it had Debian Boot Launcher and couple of virtual ones provided by the vendor (Asus) and they were hardwired. So failing all, went to my vendor/support and asked if he could find out what the issue is. It costed me $10, he did all the same things I did but one thing more, he changed the battery (cost less than 1USD) and presto all was right with the world again. I felt like a fool but a deal is a deal so paid the gentleman for his services. Now can again use the desktop and at least know about what s happening in the outside world.

Framework Laptops I have been seeing quite a few teardowns of Framework Laptops on Youtube and love it. More so, now that they have AMD in their arsenal. I do hope they work on their pricing and logistics and soon we have it here competing with others. If the pricing isn t substantial then definitely would be one of the first ones to order. India is and remains a very cost-conscious market and more so with the runaway prices that we have been seeing. In fact, the last 3 years have been pretty bad for the overall PC market declining 30% YoY for the last 3 years while prices have gone through the roof. Apart from the pricing from the vendors, taxation has been another hit as the current Govt. has been taxing anywhere from 30-100% taxes on various PC, desktop and laptop components. Think have shared Graphic cards for instance have 100% Duty apart from other taxes. I don t see the market picking up at least in the 24 to 36 months. Most of this year and next year, both AMD and Intel are doing refreshes so while there would be some improvements (probably 10-15%) not earth-shattering for the wider market to sit up and take notice. Intel has proposed a 64-bit architecture (only) about couple of months back, more on that later. As far as the Indian market is concerned, if you want the masses, then have lappies at around 40-50k ($600 USD) and there would be a mass takeup, if you want to be a Lenovo or something like that, then around a lakh or INR 100k ($1200 USD) or be an Apple which is around 150k INR or around 2000 USD. There are some clues as to what their plans but for that you have to trawl their forums and the knowledgebase. Seems some people are using freight forwarders to get around the hurdles but Framework doesn t want to do any shortcuts for the same. Everybody seems to be working on Vertical stacking of chips, whether it is the Chinese, or Belgian s or even AMD and Intel who have their own spins to it, but most of these technologies are at least 3-4 years out in the future (or more). India is a big laggard in this space with having knowledge of 45nm which in Aviation speak one could say India knows how to build 707 (one of the first Boeing commercial passenger carrying aircraft) while today it is Boeing 777x or Airbus 350. I have shared in the past how the Tata s have been trying to collaborate with the Japanese and get at least their 25nm chip technology but nothing has come of it to date. The only somewhat o.k. news has been the chip testing and packaging plant by Micron to be made in Gujarat. It doesn t do anything for us although we would be footing almost 70% of the plant s capital expenditure and the maximum India will get 4k jobs. Most of these plants are highly automated as dust is their mortal enemy so even the 4k jobs announced seem far-fetched. It would probably be less than half once production starts if it happens but that is probably a story for another time. Just as a parting shot, even memory vendors are going highly automated factory lines.

VR Headsets I was stuck by how similar or where VR is when I was watching Made in Finland. I don t want to delve much into the series but it is a fascinating one. I was very much taken by the character of Kari Kairamo or the actor who played the character of him and was very much disappointed with the sad ending the gentleman got. It is implicated in the series that the banks implicitly forced him to commit suicide. There is also a lot of chaos as is normal in a big company having many divisions. It s only when Jorma Olila takes over, the company sheds a lot of dead weight was cut off with mobiles having the most funding which they didn t have before. I was also fascinated when I experienced pride when Nokia shows off its 1011 mobile phone when at that time phones were actually like bricks. My first Nokia was number of years later, Nokia 1800 and have to say those phones outlasted a long time than today s Samsung s. If only Nokia had read the tea leaves right Back to the topic though, I have been wearing glasses since the age of 5 year old. They weigh less than 10 grams and you still get a nose dent. And I know enough people, times etc. when people have got headaches and whatnot from glasses. Unless the VR headsets become that size and don t cost an arm and leg (or a kidney or a liver) it would have niche use. While 5G and 6G would certainly push more ppl to get it it probably would take a few more years before we have something that is simple and doesn t need too much to get it rolling. The series I mentioned above is already over it s first season but would highly recommend it. I do hope the second season happens quickly and we do come to know why and how Nokia missed the Android train and their curious turn to get to Microsoft which sorta sealed their fate

Steam I have been following Steam, Luthris and plenty of other launchers on Debian. There also seems to some sort of an idea that once MESA 23.1.x or later comes into Debian at some point we may get Steam 64-bit and some people are hopeful that we may get it by year-end. There are a plethora of statistics that can be used to find status of Gaming on Linux. This is perhaps the best one I got so far. Valve also has its own share of stats that it shows here. I am not going to go into much detail except the fact that lutris has been there on Debian sometime now. And as and when Steam does go fully 64-bit, whole lot of multilib issues could be finally put to rest. Interestingly, Intel has quietly also shared details of only a 64-bit architecture PC. From what I could tell, it simply boots into 16-bit and then goes into 64-bit bypassing the 32-bit. In theory, it should remove whole lot code, make it safer as well as faster. If rival AMD was to play along things could move much faster. Now don t get me wrong, 32-bit was good, but for it s time. I m sure at some point in time even 64-bit would have its demise, and we would jump to 128-bit. Of course, in reality we aren t anywhere close to even 48-bit, leave alone 64-bit. Superuser gives a good answer on that. We may be a decade or more before we exhaust that but for sure there will be need for better, faster hardware especially as we use more and more of AI for good and bad things. I am curious to see how it pans out and how it will affect (or not) FOSS gaming. FWIW, I used to peruse freegamer.blogspot.com which kinda ended in 2021 and now use Lee Reilly blog posts to know what is happening in github as far as FOSS games are concerned. There is also a whole thing about handhelds and gaming but that probably would require its own blog post or two. There are just too many while at the same time too few (legally purchasable in India) to have its own blog post, maybe sometime in Future. Best way to escape the world. Till later.

Review: Semiosis, by Sue Burke

Series:	Semiosis #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	February 2018
ISBN:	0-7653-9137-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	333

Semiosis is a first-contact science fiction novel and the first half of a duology. It was Sue Burke's first novel. In the 2060s, with the Earth plagued by environmental issues, a group of utopians decided to found a colony on another planet. Their goal is to live in harmony with an unspoiled nature. They wrote a suitably high-minded founding document, the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pax, and set out in cold sleep on an interstellar voyage. 158 years later, they awoke in orbit around a planet with a highly-developed ecology, which they named Pax. Two pods and several colonists were lost on landing, but the rest remained determined to follow through with their plan. Not that they had many alternatives. Pax does not have cities or technological mammalian life, just as they hoped. It does, however, have intelligent life. This novel struggled to win me over for reasons that aren't the fault of Burke's writing. The first is that it is divided into seven parts, each telling the story of a different generation. Intellectually, I like this technique for telling an anthropological story that follows a human society over time. But emotionally, I am a character reader first and foremost, and I struggle with books where I can't follow the same character throughout. It makes the novel feel more like a fix-up of short stories, and I'm not much of a short story reader. Second, this is one of those stories where a human colony loses access to its technology and falls back to a primitive lifestyle. This is a concept I find viscerally unpleasant and very difficult to read about. I don't mind reading stories that start at the lower technological level and rediscover lost technology, but the process of going backwards, losing knowledge, surrounded by breaking technology that can never be repaired, is disturbing at a level that throws me out of the story. It doesn't help that the original colonists chose to embrace that reversion. Some of this wasn't intentional some vital equipment was destroyed when they landed but a lot of it was the plan from the start. They are the type of fanatics who embrace a one-way trip and cannibalizing the equipment used to make it in order to show their devotion to the cause. I spent the first part of the book thinking the founding colonists were unbelievably foolish, but then they started enforcing an even more restrictive way of life on their children and that tipped me over into considering them immoral. This was the sort of political movement that purged all religion and political philosophy other than their one true way so that they could raise "uncorrupted" children. Burke does recognize how deeply abusive this is. The second part of the book, which focuses on the children of the initial colonists, was both my favorite section and had my favorite protagonist, precisely because someone put words to the criticisms that I'd been thinking since the start of the book. The book started off on a bad foot with me, but if it had kept up the momentum of political revolution and rethinking provided by the second part, it might have won me over. That leads to the third problem, though, which is the first contact part of the story. (If you've heard anything about this series, you probably know what the alien intelligence is, and even if not you can probably guess, but I'll avoid spoilers anyway.) This is another case where the idea is great, but I often don't get along with it as a reader. I'm a starships and AIs and space habitats sort of SF reader by preference and tend to struggle with biological SF, even though I think it's great more of it is being written. In this case, mind-altering chemicals enter the picture early in the story, and while this makes perfect sense given the world-building, this is another one of my visceral dislikes. A closely related problem is that the primary alien character is, by human standards, a narcissistic asshole. This is for very good story and world-building reasons. I bought the explanation that Burke offers, I like the way this shows how there's no reason to believe humans have a superior form of intelligence, and I think Burke's speculations on the nature of that alien intelligence are fascinating. There are a lot of good reasons to think that alien morality would be wildly different from human morality. But, well, I'm still a human reading this book and I detested the alien, which is kind of a problem given how significant of a character it is. That's a lot baggage for a story to overcome. It says something about how well-thought-out the world-building is that it kept my attention anyway. Burke uses the generational structure very effectively. Events, preferences, or even whims early in the novel turn into rituals or traditions. Early characters take on outsized roles in history. The humans stick with the rather absurd constitution of Pax, but do so in a way that feels true to how humans reinterpret and stretch and layer meaning on top of wholly inadequate documents written in complete ignorance of the challenges that later generations will encounter. I would have been happier without the misery and sickness and messy physicality of this abusive colonization project, but watching generations of humans patch together a mostly functioning society was intellectually satisfying. The alien interactions were also solid, with the caveat that it's probably impossible to avoid a lot of anthropomorphizing. If I were going to sum up the theme of the novel in a sentence, it's that even humans who think they want to live in harmony with nature are carrying more arrogance about what that harmony would look like than they realize. In most respects the human colonists stumbled across the best-case scenario for them on this world, and it was still harder than anything they had imagined. Unfortunately, I thought the tail end of the book had the weakest plot. It fell back on a story that could have happened in a lot of first-contact novels, rather than the highly original negotiation over ecological niches that happened in the first half of the book. Out of eight viewpoint characters in this book, I only liked one of them (Sylvia). Tatiana and Lucille were okay, and I might have warmed to them if they'd had more time in the spotlight, but I felt like they kept making bad decisions. That's the main reason why I can't really recommend it; I read for characters, I didn't really like the characters, and it's hard for a book to recover from that. It made the story feel chilly and distant, more of an intellectual exercise than the sort of engrossing emotional experience I prefer. But, that said, this is solid SF speculation. If your preferred balance of ideas and characters is tilted more towards ideas than mine, and particularly if you like interesting aliens and don't mind the loss of technology setting, this may well be to your liking. Even with all of my complaints, I'm curious enough about the world that I am tempted to read the sequel, since its plot appears to involve more of the kind of SF elements I like. Followed by Interference. Content warning: Rape, and a whole lot of illness and death. Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Translation State, by Ann Leckie

Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	June 2023
ISBN:	0-316-29024-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	354

Translation State is a science fiction novel set in the same universe as the Imperial Radch series and Provenance. It is not truly a sequel of any of those books, but as with Provenance, it has significant spoilers for the conclusion of Ancillary Mercy. Provenance takes place earlier, but it's plot is unrelated as far as I can recall. Enea has spent much of hir adult life living with hir difficult and somewhat abusive grandmanan and, in recent years, running her household. Now, Grandmanan is dead, and the relatives who have been waiting to inherit Grandmanan's wealth are descending like a flock of vultures and treating hir like a servant. Enea can barely stand to be around them. It is therefore somewhat satisfying to watch their reactions when they discover that there is no estate. Grandmanan had been in debt and sold her family title to support herself for the rest of her life. Enea will receive an allowance and an arranged job that expects a minimum of effort. Everyone else gets nothing. It's still a wrenching dislocation from everything Enea has known, but at least sie can relax, travel, and not worry about money. Enea's new job for the Office of Diplomacy is to track down a fugitive who disappeared two hundred years earlier. The request came from the Radchaai Translators Office, the agency responsible for the treaty with the alien Presger, and was resurrected due to the upcoming conclave to renegotiate the treaty. No one truly expects Enea to find this person or any trace of them. It's a perfect quiet job to reward hir with travel and a stipend for putting up with Grandmanan all these years. This plan lasts until Enea's boredom and sense of duty get the better of hir. Enea is one of three viewpoint characters. Reet lives a quiet life in which he only rarely thinks about murdering people. He has a menial job in Rurusk Station, at least until he falls in with an ethnic club that may be a cover for more political intentions. Qven... well, Qven is something else entirely. Provenance started with some references to the Imperial Radch trilogy but then diverged into its own story. Translation State does the opposite. It starts as a cozy pseudo-detective story following Enea and a slice-of-life story following Reet, interspersed with baffling chapters from Qven, but by the end of the book the characters are hip-deep in the trilogy aftermath. It's not the direct continuation of the political question of the trilogy that I'm still partly hoping for, but it's adjacent. As you might suspect from the title, this story is about Presger Translators. Exactly how is not entirely obvious at the start, but it doesn't take long for the reader to figure it out. Leckie fills in a few gaps in the world-building and complicates (but mostly retains) the delightfully askew perspective Presger Translators have on the world. For me, though, the best part of the book was the political maneuvering once the setup is complete and all the characters are in the same place. The ending, unfortunately, dragged a little bit; the destination of the story was obvious but delayed by characters not talking to each other. I tend to find this irritating, but I know tastes differ. I was happily enjoying Translation State but thinking that it didn't suck me in as much as the original trilogy, and even started wondering if I'd elevated the Imperial Radch trilogy too high in my memory. Then an AI ship showed up and my brain immediately got fully invested in the story. I'm very happy to get whatever other stories in this universe Leckie is willing to write, but I would have been even happier if a ship appeared as more than a supporting character. To the surprise of no one who reads my reviews, I clearly have strong preferences in protagonists. This wasn't one of my favorites, but it was a solidly good book, and I will continue to read everything Ann Leckie writes. If you liked Provenance, I think you'll like this one as well. We once again get a bit more information about the aliens in this universe, and this time around we get more Radchaai politics, but the overall tone is closer to Provenance. Great powers are in play, but the focus is mostly on the smaller scale. Recommended, but of course read the Imperial Radch trilogy first. Note that Translation State uses a couple of sets of neopronouns to represent different gender systems. My brain still struggles with parsing them grammatically, but this book was good practice. It was worth the effort to watch people get annoyed at the Radchaai unwillingness to acknowledge more than one gender. Content warning: Cannibalism (Presger Translators are very strange), sexual assault. Rating: 8 out of 10

Release 0.6.32 of the digest package arrived at CRAN this morning, and will be uploaded to Debian as well. digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, blake3, and crc32c algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a mature and widely-used (with 58.3 million downloads just on the partial cloud mirrors of CRAN which keep logs) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation to quickly identify the various objects. This release brings two changes. First, we added crc32c as a new hashing algorithm. And we did so in a portable minimal fashion while also adding a new CRAN crc32c package with the full hardware-optimised support form x86_64 and Arm64 (M1/M2) chips. Fully integrating the optional added package is still work in progress we may refine. (Now, as it turns out, a first bug report that this is not as portable as we hoped. But it also looks like we already have a fix. So a quick follow-up release is likely.) Second, Dean Attali had looked into AES digests and cyphers using the CBC mode and noticed what we needed padding which he kindly contributed in PR #186. My CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

co2mon.nz currently uses monitors based on Oliver Seiler s open source design which I am personally building. This post describes my exploration of how to achieve production of a CO2 monitor that could enable the growth of co2mon.nz.

Goals Primarily I want to design a CO2 monitor which allows the majority of the production process to be outsourced. In particular, the PCB should be able to be assembled in an automated fashion (PCBA). As a secondary goal, I d like to improve the aesthetics of the monitor while retaining the unique feature of displaying clear visual indication of the current ventilation level through coloured lights. Overall, I ll consider the project successfull if I can achieve a visually attractive CO2 monitor which takes me less than 10 minutes per monitor to assemble/box/ship and whose production cost has the potential to be lower than the current model.

PCB

Schematic The existing CO2 monitor design provides a solid foundation but relies upon the ESP32 Devkit board, which is intended for evaluation purposes and is not well suited to automated assembly. Replacing this devkit board with the underlying ESP32 module is the major change needed to enable PCBA production, which then also requires moving the supporting electronics from the devkit board directly onto the primary PCB. The basic ESP32 chipset used in the devkit boards is no longer available as a discrete module suitable for placement directly onto a PCB which means the board will also have to be updated to use a more modern variant of the ESP32 chipset which is in active production such as the ESP32-S3. The ESP32-S3-WROOM1-N4 module is a very close match to the original devkit and will be suitable for this project. In addition to the change of ESP module, I made the following other changes to the components in use:

• Added an additional temperature/humidity sensor (SHT30). The current monitors take temperature/humidity measurements from the SCD40 chipset. These are primarily intended to help in the calculation of CO2 levels and rely on an offset being subtracted to account for the heat generated by the electronic components themselves. I ve found their accuracy to OK, but not perfect. SHT30 is a cheap part, so its addition to hopefully provide improved temperature/humidity measurement is an easy choice.
• Swapped to USB-C instead of USB-B for the power connector. USB-C is much more common than USB-B and is also smaller and not as tall off the board which provides more flexibility in the case design.

With major components selected the key task is to draw the schematic diagram describing how they electrically connect to each other, which includes all the supporting electronics (e.g. resistors, capacitors, etc) needed. I started out trying to use the EasyEDA/OSHWLab ecosystem thinking the tight integration with JLCPCB s assembly services would be a benefit, but the web interface was too clunky and limiting and I quickly got frustrated. KiCad proved to be a much more pleasant and capable tool for the job. The reference design in the ESP32 datasheet (p28) and USB-C power supply examples from blnlabs were particularly helpful alongside the KiCad documentation and the example of the existing monitor in completing this step (click the image to enlarge).

Layout The next step is to physically lay out where each component from the schematic will sit on the PCB itself. Obviously this requires first determining the overall size, shape and outline of the board and needs to occur in iteration with the intended design of the overall monitor, including the case, to ensure components like switches and USB sockets line up correctly. In addition to the requirements around the look and function of the case, the components themselves also have considerations that must be taken into account, including:

• For best WiFi reception, the ESP32 antenna should be at the top of the monitor and should not have PCB underneath it, or for a specified distance either side of it.
• The SHT30 temperature sensor should be as far from any heat generating components (e.g. the ESP32, BME680 and SCD40 modules) as possible and also considering that any generated heat will rise, as low on the monitor as possible.
• The sensors measuring the air (SCD40, BME680 and SHT30) must have good exposure to the air outside the case.

Taking all of these factors into account I ended up with a square PCB containing a cutout in the top right so that the ESP32 antenna can sit within the overall square outline while still meeting its design requirements. The SCD40 and BME680 sit in the top left corner, near the edges for good airflow and far away from the SHT30 temperature sensor in the bottom left corner. The LEDs I placed in a horizontal row across the center of the board, the LCD in the bottom right, a push button on the right-hand side and the USB-C socket in the center at the bottom. Once the components are placed, the next big task is to route the traces (aka wires) between the components on the board such that all the required electrical connections are made without any unintended connections (aka shorts) being created. This is a fun constraint solving/optimisation challenge and takes on an almost artistic aspect with other PCB designers often having strong opinions on which layout is best. The majority of the traces and routing for this board were able to be placed on the top layer of the PCB, but I also made use of the back layer for a few traces to help avoid conflicts and deal with places where different traces needed to cross each other. It s easy to see how this step would be much more challenging and time consuming on a larger and more complex PCB design. The final touches were to add some debugging breakouts for the serial and JTAG ports on the ESP32-S3 and a logo and various other helpful text on the silkscreen layer that will be printed on the PCB so it looks nice.

Production For assembly of the PCB, I went with JLCPCB based out of China. The trickiest part of the process was component selection and ensuring that the parts I had planned in the schematic were available. JLCPCB in conjunction with lcsc.com provides a basic and extended part library. If you use only basic parts you get quicker and cheaper assembly, while using extended parts bumps your order into a longer process with a small fee charged for each component on the board. Initially I spent a lot of time selecting components (particularly LEDs and switches) that were in the basic library before realising that the ESP32 modules are only available in the extended library! I think the lesson is that unless you re building the most trivial PCB with only passive components you will almost certainly end up in the advanced assembly process anyway, so trying to stay within the basic parts library is not worth the time. Unfortunately the SCD40 sensor, the most crucial part of the monitor, is not stocked at all by JLCPCB/LCSC! To work around this JLCPCB will maintain a personal component library for you when you ship components to them to for use in future orders. Given the extra logistical time and hassle of having to do this, combined with having a number of SCD40 components already on hand I decided to have the boards assembled without this component populated for the initial prototype run. This also had the benefit of lowering the risk if something went wrong as the cost of the SCD40 is greater than the cost of the PCB and all the other components combined! I found the kicad-jlcpcb-tools plugin for KiCad invaluable for keeping track of what part from lcsc.com I was planning to use for each component and generating the necessary output files for JLCPCB. The plugin allows you to store these mappings in your actual schematic which is very handy. The search interface it provides is fairly clunky and I found it was often easier to search for the part I needed on lcsc.com and then just copy the part number across into the plugin s search box rather than trying to search by name or component type. The LCD screen is the remaining component which is not easily assembled onto the PCB directly, but as you ll see next, this actually turned out to be OK as integrating the screen directly into the case makes the final assembly process smoother. The final surprise in the assembly process was the concept of edge rails, additional PCB material that is needed on either side of the board to help with feeding it through the assembly machine in the correct position. These can be added automatically by JLCPCB and have to be snapped off after the completed boards are received. I hadn t heard about these before and I was a little worried that they d interfere or get in the way of either the antenna cut-out at the top of the board, or the switch on the right hand side as it overhangs the edge so it can sit flush with the case. In the end there was no issue with the edge rails. The switch was placed hanging over them without issue and snapping them off once the boards arrived was a trivial 30s job using a vice to hold the edge rail and then gently tipping the board over until it snapped off - the interface between the board and the rails while solid looking has obviously been scored or perforated in some way during the production process so the edge breaks cleanly and smoothly. Magic! The process was amazingly quick with the completed PCBs (picture above) arriving within 7 days of the order being placed and looking amazing.

Case

Design I mocked up a very simple prototype of the case in FreeCAD during the PCB design process to help position and align the placement of the screen, switch and USB socket on the PCB as all three of these components interface directly with the edges of the case. Initially this design was similar to the current monitor design where the PCB (with lights and screen attached) sits in the bottom of the case, which has walls containing grilles for airflow and then a separate transparent perspex is screwed onto the top to complete the enclosure. As part of the aesthetic improvements for the new monitor I wanted to move away from a transparent front panel to something opaque but still translucent enough to allow the colour of the lights to show through. Without a transparent front panel the LCD also needs to be mounted directly into the case itself. The first few prototype iterations followed the design of the original CO2 monitor with a flat front panel that attaches to the rest of the case containing the PCB, but the new requirement to also attach the LCD to the front panel proved to make this unworkable. To stay in place the LCD has to be pushed onto mounting poles containing a catch mechanism which requires a moderate amount of force and applying that force to the LCD board when it is already connected to the PCB is essentially impossible. As a result I ended up completely flipping the design such that the front panel is a single piece of plastic that also encompasses the walls of the case and contains appropriate mounting stakes for both the screen and the main PCB. Getting to this design hugely simplified the assembly process. Starting with an empty case lying face down on a bench, the LCD screen is pushed onto the mounting poles and sits flush with the cover of the case - easily achieved without the main PCB yet in place. Next, the main PCB is gently lowered into the case facing downwards and sits on the mounting pole in each corner with the pins for the LCD just protruding through the appropriate holes in the PCB ready to be quickly soldered into place (this took significant iteration and tuning of dimensions/positioning to achieve!). Finally, a back panel can be attached which holds the PCB in place and uses cantilever snap joints to click on to the rest of the case. Overall the design is a huge improvement over the previous case which required screws and spacers to position the PCB and cover relative to the rest of the case, with the spacers and screws being particularly fiddly to work with. The major concern I had with the new design was that the mount to attach the monitor to the wall has moved from being attached to the main case and components directly to needing to be on the removable back panel - if the clips holding this panel to the case fail the core part of the monitor will fall off the wall which would not be good. To guard against this I ve doubled the size and number of clips at the top of the case (which bears the weight) and the result seems very robust in my testing. To completely assemble a monitor, including the soldering step takes me about 2-3 minutes individually, and would be even quicker if working in batches.

Production Given the number of design/testing iterations required to fine tune the case I chose not to outsource case production for now and used my 3D printer to produce them. I ve successfully used JLCPCB s 3D printing service for the previous case design, so I m confident that getting sufficient cases printed from JLCPCB or another supplier will not be an issue now that the design is finalised. I tried a variety of filament colours, but settled on a transparent filament which once combined in the necessary layers to form the case is not actually transparent like perspex is, but provides a nice translucent medium which achieves the goal of having the light colour visible without exposing all of the circuit board detail. There s room for future improvement in the positioning of the LEDs on the circuit board to provide a more even distribution of light across the case but overall I really like the way the completed monitor ends up looking.

Evaluation Building this monitor has been a really fun project, both in seeing something progress from an idea, to plans on a screen to a nice physical thing on my wall, but also in learning and developing a bunch of new skills in PCB design, assembly and 3D design. The goal of having a CO2 monitor which I can outsource the vast majority of production of is as close to being met as I think is possible without undertaking the final proof of placing a large order. I ve satisfied myself that each step is feasible and that the final assembly process is quick, easy and well below the level of effort and time it was taking me to produce the original monitors. Cost wise it s also a huge win, primarily in terms of the time taken, but also in the raw components - currently the five prototypes I ordered and built are on par with the component cost of the original CO2 monitor, but this will drop further with larger orders due to price breaks and amortisation of the setup and shipping expenses across more monitors. This project has also given me a much better appreciation for how much I m only just scratching the surface of the potential complexities and challenges in producing a hardware product of this type. I m reasonably confident I could successfully produce a few hundred and maybe even a few thousand monitors using this approach, but it s also clear that getting beyond that point is and would be a whole further level of effort and learning. Hardware is hard work. That s not news to anyone, including me, but there is something to be said for experiencing the process first hand to make the reality of what s required real. The PCB and case designs are both shared and can be found at https://github.com/co2monnz/co2monitor-pcb and https://github.com/co2monnz/cad, feedback and suggestions welcome!

Review: The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #30
Publisher:	HarperTempest
Copyright:	2003
Printing:	2006
ISBN:	0-06-001238-2
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	375

The Wee Free Men is the 30th Discworld novel but the first Tiffany Aching book and doesn't rely on prior knowledge of Discworld, although the witches from previous books do appear. You could start here, although I think the tail end of the book has more impact if you already know who Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents was the first Discworld novel written to be young adult, and although I could see that if I squinted, it didn't feel that obviously YA to me. The Wee Free Men is clearly young adult (or perhaps middle grade), right down to the quintessential protagonist: a nine-year-old girl who is practical and determined and a bit of a misfit and does a lot of growing up over the course of the story. Tiffany Aching is the youngest daughter in a large Aching family that comes from a long history of Aching families living in the Chalk. She has a pile of older relatives and one younger brother named Wentworth who is an annoying toddler obsessed with sweets. Her family work a farm that is theoretically the property of the local baron but has been in their family for years. There is always lots to do and Tiffany is an excellent dairymaid, so people mostly leave her alone with her thoughts and her tiny collection of books from her grandmother. Her now-deceased Grandma Aching was a witch. Tiffany, as it turns out, is also a witch, not that she knows that. As the book opens, certain... things are trying to get into her world from elsewhere. The first is a green monster that pops up out of the river and attempts to snatch Wentworth, much to Tiffany's annoyance. She identifies it as Jenny Green-Teeth via a book of fairy tales and dispatches it with a frying pan, somewhat to her surprise, but worse are coming. Even more surprised by her frying pan offensive are the Nac Mac Feegle, last seen in Carpe Jugulum, who know something about where this intrusion is coming from. In short order, the Aching farm has a Nac Mac Feegle infestation. This is, unfortunately, another book about Discworld's version of fairy (or elves, as they were called in Lords and Ladies). I find stories about the fae somewhat hit and miss, and Pratchett's version is one of my least favorites. The Discworld Queen of Fairy is mostly a one-dimensional evil monster and not a very interesting one. A big chunk of the plot is an extended sequence of dreams that annoyed me and went on for about twice as long as it needed to. That's the downside of this book. The upside is that Tiffany Aching is exactly the type of protagonist I loved reading about as a kid, and still love reading about as an adult. She's thoughtful, curious, observant, determined, and uninterested in taking any nonsense from anyone. She has a lot to learn, both about the world and about herself, but she doesn't have to be taught lessons twice and she has a powerful innate sense of justice. She also has a delightfully sarcastic sense of humor.

"Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it." "No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short."

One of the best things that Pratchett does with this book is let Tiffany dislike her little brother. Wentworth eventually ends up in trouble and Tiffany has to go rescue him, which of course she does because he's her baby brother. But she doesn't like him; he's annoying and sticky and constantly going on about sweets and never says anything interesting. Tiffany is aware that she's supposed to love him because he's her little brother, but of course this is not how love actually works, and she doesn't. But she goes and rescues him anyway, because that's the right thing to do, and because he's hers. There are a lot of adult novels that show the nuanced and sometimes uncomfortable emotions we have about family members, but this sort of thing is a bit rarer in novels pitched at pre-teens, and I loved it. One valid way to read it is that Tiffany is neurodivergent, but I think she simply has a reasonable reaction to a brother who is endlessly annoying and too young to have many redeeming qualities in her eyes, and no one forces her to have a more socially expected one. It doesn't matter what you feel about things; it matters what you do, and as long as you do the right thing, you can have whatever feelings about it you want. This is a great lesson for this type of book. The other part of this book that I adored was the stories of Grandma Aching. Tiffany is fairly matter-of-fact about her dead grandmother at the start of the book, but it becomes clear over the course of the story that she's grieving in her own way. Grandma Aching was a taciturn shepherd who rarely put more than two words together and was much better with sheep than people, but she was the local witch in the way that Granny Weatherwax was a witch, and Tiffany was paying close attention. They never managed to communicate as much as either of them wanted, but the love shines through Tiffany's memories. Grandma Aching was teaching her how to be a witch: not the magical parts, but the far more important parts about justice and fairness and respect for other people. This was a great introduction of a new character and a solid middle-grade or young YA novel. I was not a fan of the villain and I can take or leave the Nac Mac Feegle (who are basically Scottish Smurfs crossed with ants and are a little too obviously the comic relief, for all that they're also effective warriors). But Tiffany is great and the stories of Grandma Aching are even better. This was not as good as Night Watch (very few things are), but it was well worth reading. Followed in publication order by Monstrous Regiment. The next Tiffany Aching novel is A Hat Full of Sky. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Furious Heaven, by Kate Elliott

Series:	Sun Chronicles #2
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2023
ISBN:	1-250-86701-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	725

Furious Heaven is the middle book of a trilogy and a direct sequel to Unconquerable Sun. Don't start here. I also had some trouble remembering what happened in the previous book (grumble recaps mutter), and there are a lot of threads, so I would try to minimize the time between books unless you have a good memory for plot details. This is installment two of gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space. When we last left Sun and her Companions, Elliott had established the major players in this interstellar balance of power and set off some opening skirmishes, but the real battles were yet to come. Sun was trying to build her reputation and power base while carefully staying on the good side of Queen-Marshal Eirene, her mother and the person credited with saving the Republic of Chaonia from foreign dominance. The best parts of the first book weren't Sun herself but wily Persephone, one of her Companions, whose viewpoint chapters told a more human-level story of finding her place inside a close-knit pre-existing friendship group. Furious Heaven turns that all on its head. The details are spoilers (insofar as a plot closely tracking the life of Alexander the Great can contain spoilers), but the best parts of the second book are the chapters about or around Sun. What I find most impressive about this series so far is Elliott's ability to write Sun as charismatic in a way that I can believe as a reader. That was hit and miss at the start of the series, got better towards the end of Unconquerable Sun, and was wholly effective here. From me, that's high but perhaps unreliable praise; I typically find people others describe as charismatic to be some combination of disturbing, uncomfortable, dangerous, or obviously fake. This is a rare case of intentionally-written fictional charisma that worked for me. Elliott does not do this by toning down Sun's ambition. Sun, even more than her mother, is explicitly trying to gather power and bend the universe (and the people in it) to her will. She treats people as resources, even those she's the closest to, and she's ruthless in pursuit of her goals. But she's also honorable, straightforward, and generous to the people around her. She doesn't lie about her intentions; she follows a strict moral code of her own, keeps her friends' secrets, listens sincerely to their advice, and has the sort of battlefield charisma where she refuses to ask anyone else to take risks she personally wouldn't take. And her use of symbolism and spectacle isn't just superficial; she finds the points of connection between the symbols and her values so that she can sincerely believe in what she's doing. I am fascinated by how Elliott shapes the story around her charisma. Writing an Alexander analogue is difficult; one has to write a tactical genius with the kind of magnetic attraction that enabled him to lead an army across the known world, and make this believable to the reader. Elliott gives Sun good propaganda outlets and makes her astonishingly decisive (and, of course, uses the power of the author to ensure those decisions are good ones), but she also shows how Sun is constantly absorbing information and updating her assumptions to lay the groundwork for those split-second decisions. Sun uses her Companions like a foundation and a recovery platform, leaning on them and relying on them to gather her breath and flesh out her understanding, and then leaping from them towards her next goal. Elliott writes her as thinking just a tiny bit faster than the reader, taking actions I was starting to expect but slightly before I had put together my expectation. It's a subtle but difficult tightrope to walk as the writer, and it was incredibly effective for me. The downside of Furious Heaven is that, despite kicking the action into a much higher gear, this book sprawls. There are five viewpoint characters (Persephone and the Phene Empire character Apama from the first book, plus two new ones), as well as a few interlude chapters from yet more viewpoints. Apama's thread, which felt like a minor subplot of the first book, starts paying off in this book by showing the internal political details of Sun's enemy. That already means the reader has to track two largely separate and important stories. Add on a Persephone side plot about her family and a new plot thread about other political factions and it's a bit too much. Elliott does a good job avoiding reader confusion, but she still loses narrative momentum and reader interest due to the sheer scope. Persephone's thread in particular was a bit disappointing after being the highlight of the previous book. She spends a lot of her emotional energy on tedious and annoying sniping at Jade, which accomplishes little other than making them both seem immature and out of step with the significance of what's going on elsewhere. This is also a middle book of a trilogy, and it shows. It provides a satisfying increase in intensity and gets the true plot of the trilogy well underway, but nothing is resolved and a lot of new questions and plot threads are raised. I had similar problems with Cold Fire, the middle book of the other Kate Elliott trilogy I've read, and this book is 200 pages longer. Elliott loves world-building and huge, complex plots; I have a soft spot for them too, but they mean the story is full of stuff, and it's hard to maintain the same level of reader interest across all the complications and viewpoints. That said, I truly love the world-building. Elliott gives her world historical layers, with multiple levels of lost technology, lost history, and fallen empires, and backs it up with enough set pieces and fragments of invented history that I was enthralled. There are at least five major factions with different histories, cultures, and approaches to technology, and although they all share a history, they interpret that history in fascinatingly different ways. This world feels both lived in and full of important mysteries. Elliott also has a knack for backing the ambitions of her characters with symbolism that defines the shape of that ambition. The title comes from a (translated) verse of an in-universe song called the Hymn of Leaving, which is sung at funerals and is about the flight on generation ships from the now-lost Celestial Empire, the founding myth of this region of space:

Crossing the ocean of stars we leave our home behind us.
We are the spears cast at the furious heaven
And we will burn one by one into ashes
As with the last sparks we vanish.
This memory we carry to our own death which awaits us
And from which none of us will return.
Do not forget. Goodbye forever.

This is not great poetry, but it explains so much about the psychology of the characters. Sun repeatedly describes herself and her allies as spears cast at the furious heaven. Her mother's life mission was to make Chaonia a respected independent power. Hers is much more than that, reaching back into myth for stories of impossible leaps into space, burning brightly against the hostile power of the universe itself. A question about a series like this is why one should want to read about a gender-swapped Alexander the Great in space, rather than just reading about Alexander himself. One good (and sufficient) answer is that both the gender swap and the space parts are inherently interesting. But the other place that Elliott uses the science fiction background is to give Sun motives beyond sheer personal ambition. At a critical moment in the story, just like Alexander, Sun takes a detour to consult an Oracle. Because this is a science fiction novel, it's a great SF set piece involving a mysterious AI. But also because this is a science fiction story, Sun doesn't only ask about her personal ambitions. I won't spoil the exact questions; I think the moment is better not knowing what she'll ask. But they're science fiction questions, reader questions, the kinds of things Elliott has been building curiosity about for a book and a half by the time we reach that scene. Half the fun of reading a good epic space opera is learning the mysteries hidden in the layers of world-building. Aligning the goals of the protagonist with the goals of the reader is a simple storytelling trick, but oh, so effective. Structurally, this is not that great of a book. There's a lot of build-up and only some payoff, and there were several bits I found grating. But I am thoroughly invested in this universe now. The third book can't come soon enough. Followed by Lady Chaos, which is still being written at the time of this review. Rating: 7 out of 10

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1079 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 29.6 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper) (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 543 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.4.1 made by Conrad at the end of last week. As usual, I prepared the usual release candidate, tested on the over 1000 reverse depends (which sadly takes a long time on old hardware), found no issues and sent it to CRAN. Where it got tested again and was by a stroke of bad luck upheld for two unrelated issue (one package fell over one of its other dependencies changing a data representation, another fell afoul of a tightened test on total test time) so this awaited the usual email handshake with the CRAN maintainers and the weekend got in the way. The release also contains a PR kindly provided by Mikael Jagan for an upcoming change in package Matrix. As a bugfix release, the set of changes is fairly small.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.4.1.0 (2023-06-17)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.4.1 (Cortisol Profusion Redux)
  • fix bug in SpMat::shed_cols()
  • functions such as .is_finite() and find_nonfinite() will now emit a runtime warning when compiled in fast math mode; such compilation mode disables detection of non-finite values
• Accommodate upcoming change in package Matrix (Mikael Jagan in #417 addressing #415)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Another quick update to the still somewhat new package spdl is now om CRAN, and will go to Debian soon too. The key focus of spdl is to offer the exact same interface to logging from both R and C++ by relying on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog package. Usage examples are shown on the RcppSpdlog docs page. This release add support for the wrappers init() and log() wrapping the existing setup() function but requiring only the level argument. This requires version 0.0.13 of RcppSpdlog which was released to CRAN yesterday. The short NEWS entry follows.

Changes in spdl version 0.0.5 (2023-06-18)

• Add simple aliases init() and log() wrapping setup() but requiring only the logging level argument

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the spdl page If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

Version 0.0.13 of RcppSpdlog is now on CRAN and will be soon be uploaded to Debian too. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the package documention site. This release adds a small (but handy) accessor generalisation: Instead of calling setup() with two arguments for a label and the logging level we now only require the desired level. We also cleaned up one implementation detail for the stopwatch feature added in January, and simplified the default C++ compilation standard setting. The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.13 (2023-06-17)

• Minor tweak to stopwatch setup avoids pulling in fmt
• No longer set a C++ compilation standard as the default choices by R are sufficient for the package
• Add convenience wrapper log_init omitting first argument to log_setup while preserving the interface from the latter
• Add convenience setup wrappers init and log to API header file spdl.h

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

The BOINC distributed computing client in Debian (Bookworm and previous releases) can check the idle time via the X11 protocol and run GPU jobs when the interactive user is idle, so the user gets GPU power for graphics when they need it and when it s idle BOINC uses it. This doesn t work for Wayland and unfortunately no-one has written a Wayland equivalent of xprintidle (which shows the number of milliseconds that the X11 session has been idle in milliseconds. In the Debian bug system there is bug #813728 about a message every second due to failed attempts to find X11 idle time [1]. On my main workstation with Wayland it logs Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified . There is also bug #775125 about BOINC not detecting mouse movements [2], I added to it about the issues with Wayland. There s the package swayidle in Debian that is designed to manage the screen-save process on Wayland, below is an example of how to use it to display output on 5 seconds and 10 seconds of idle.

swayidle -w timeout 5 'echo 5' timeout 10 'echo 10' resume 'echo resume' before-sleep 'echo before-sleep'

The code for swayidle has only 7 comments and isn t easy to read. I looked in to writing a Wayland equivalent of xprintidle but it would take more work than I m prepared to invest in it. So it seems to me that the best option might be to have BOINC receive SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for the start and stop of idle time and then have scripts call xprintidle, swayidle, a wrapper for w (for systems without graphics) or other methods. To run swayidle as root you can set WAYLAND_DISPLAY=../$USER_ID/wayland-0.

• [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=813728
• [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=775125

Ayisha After a long time I saw a movie that I enjoyed wholeheartedly. And it unexpectedly touched my heart. The name of the movie is Ayisha. The first frame of the movie itself sets the pace where we see Ayisha (Manju Warrier) who decides to help out a gang as lot of women were being hassled. So she agrees to hoodwink cops and help launder some money. Then she is shown to work as a maid for an elite Arab family. To portray a Muslim character in these polarized times really shows guts especially when the othering of the Muslim has been happening 24 7. In fact, just few days back I was shocked to learn that Muslim homes were being marked as Jews homes had been marked in the 1930 s. Not just homes but also businesses too. And after few days in a total hypocritical fashion one of the judges says that you cannot push people to buy or not buy from a shop. This is after systemically doing the whole hate campaign for almost 2 weeks. What value the judge s statements are after 2 weeks ??? The poison has already seeped in But I m drifting from the topic/movie.

The real fun of the movie is the beautiful relationship that happens between Ayisha and Mama, she is the biggest maternal figure in the house and in fact, her command is what goes in the house. The house or palace which is the perfect description is shown as being opulent but not as rich as both Mama and Ayisha are, spiritually and emotionally both giving and sharing of each other. Almost a mother daughter relationship, although with others she is shown as having a bit of an iron hand. Halfway through the movie we come to know that Ayisha was also a dramatist and an actress having worked in early Malayalam movies. I do not want to go through all the ups and downs as that is the beauty of the movie and it needs to be seen for that aspect. I am always sort of in two worlds where should I promote a book or series or movie or not because most of the time it is the unexpected that works. When we have expectation it doesn t. Avatar, the Way of the Water is an exception, not many movies I can recall like that where I had expectations and still the movie surpassed it. So maybe go with no expectations at all

Manju Warrier Manju Warrier should actually be called Manju Warrior as she chose to be with the survivor rather than the sexism that is prevalent in the Malayalam film industry which actually is more or less a mirror of Bollywood and society as whole. These three links should give enough background knowledge as to what has been happening although I m sure my Malayalam friends would more than add to that knowledge whatever may be missing. In quite a few movies, the women are making inroads without significant male strength. Especially Manju s movies have no male lead for the last few movies. Whether that is deliberate part on Manju or an obstacle being put in front of her. Anyone knows that having a male lead and a female lead enriches the value of a movie quite a bit. This doesn t mean one is better than the other but having both enriches the end product, as simple as that. This is sadly not happening. Having POSH training and having an ICC is something that each organization should look forward for. It s kind of mandatory need of hour, especially when we have young people all around us. I am hopeful that people who are from Kerala would shed some more background light on what has been happening.

Books I haven t yet submitted an application for Debconf. But my idea is irrespective of whether or not I m there, I do hope we can have a library where people can donate books and people can take away books as well. A kind of circular marketplace/library where just somebody notes what books are available. Even if 100 odd people are coming to Debconf that easily means 100 books of various languages. That in itself would be interesting and to see what people are reading, wanting to discuss etc. We could even have readings. IIRC, in 2016 we had a children s area, maybe we could do some readings from some books to children which fuels their imagination. Even people like me who are deaf would be willing to look at excerpts and be charmed by them. For instance, in all my forays of fantasy literature except for Babylon Steel I haven t read one book that has a female lead character and I have read probably around 100 odd fantasy books till date. Not a lot but still to my mind, is a big gap as far as literature is concerned. How would more women write fantasy if they don t have heroes to look forward to :(. Or maybe I may be missing some authors and characters that others know and I do not. Do others feel the same or this question hasn t even been asked ??? Dunno. Please let me know.

Debutsav So apparently Debutsav is happening 2 days from now. While I did come to know about it few days back I had to think whether I want to apply for this or apply for Debconf as I physically, emotionally can t do justice to both even though they are a few months apart. I wish all the best for the attendees as well as presenters sharing all the projects and hopefully somebody shares at least some of the projects that are presented there so we may know what new projects or softwares to follow or whatever. Till later.

Last night I attended the first local Linux User Group talk since before the pandemic (possibly even long before the pandemic!) Topic: How and why Atomic Access runs Debian on a 100Gbps router Speaker: Joe Botha This is the first time CLUG used Woodstock Brewery as a venue. It s great, because now we can have snacks and beer during the talks :) Joe has worked in the internet space for quite some time, and co-founded companies like Teraco, Frogfoot, Amobia, Octotel and Atomic Access. Through all of these he s done interesting and noteworthy work, which I ve only seen some glimpses of before in the few moments we ve interacted at CLUG events. It was nice seeing a lot more detail of a project that I wouldn t even know about if he didn t give this talk. It doesn t seem that anyone else is running Debian on big switches for commercial ISPs. He goes through these great lengths to run Debian so that he can have a decent set of tools and familiar commands on the switch, as apposed to the (my word here) crappy tooling that you would get on the brand name switches. By total coincidence, David Plonka happened to be at the brewery too, he s a network expert who works at Akamai. He didn t know this talk was taking place, so this was a fun happenstance, he had some good inputs during the talk too. He also bought everyone a round of beer, thanks David! I asked Joe for his slides and I ll share them here when I get them. Unfortunately we don t have video for this talk, but I asked Joe to consider coming to DebConf23, I think this topic would be really interesting to the wider Debian crowd. By the way, both registration and the call for proposals are now officially open for DebConf23, it s taking place in September in Kochi, India this year. Updates (2023-06-07): Joe provided slides for his talk, you can get them here. He also provided some links:

• Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfgjbHivdQ8 Building a Better NOS with Linux and switchdev
• Switchdev wiki: https://github.com/Mellanox/mlxsw/wiki
• Switchdev repository: https://github.com/Marvell-switching/switchdev-prestera

Over the last month I ve performed some market research to better understand the potential for co2mon.nz and to help me decide whether the product I ve built has a fit with the market or not. The key conclusions I ve drawn from this work are:

• Air quality is acknowledged as important, but monitoring it is not an urgent or pressing problem for most people.
• Most of the value is seen in the hardware rather than the software service.

Keep reading to hear more about the results that lead to those conclusions.

Survey The first piece of research I undertook was a survey covering three topics: views on indoor air quality, how respondents currently monitor indoor air quality and the desired features, including price, for a CO2 monitor. The survey was distributed to my extended personal network via social media, email and word of mouth. I offered respondents the opportunity to win a year of free monitoring as an incentive and received just under 70 responses overall - the lucky winner of that prize was Sam H of Auckland whose shiny new CO2 monitor will be in the mail shortly.

Views on indoor air quality

• Nearly all respondents strongly agreed that clean, fresh indoor air is important for avoiding sickness and enabling our best work, learning and general cognitive performance, with not a single negative response.
• 25% of respondents indicated they did not have a good understanding of the quality of the indoor air they were breathing versus 43% who indicated they had a good understanding of their indoor air quality.
• Nearly 70% of respondents agreed (and greater than 40% strongly agreed) that real-time monitoring is beneficial and worth investing time and money in providing, with a similar distribution of responses agreeing it should be required in all shared indoor spaces.

Current ventilation monitoring approaches

• For the home setting, using our senses was the most common method of understanding air quality, and only 6% of respondents were unhappy with their ability to monitor ventilation at home.
• At work, trusting the owner of the building to monitor ventilation was the most common method, although using our senses and some personally collected data also featured for 20% of respondents. While the majority of respondents saw some room for improvement here, less than 20% of respondents were unsatisfied with the ability to monitor ventilation at work.
• In shared public spaces using our senses and trusting the owner were equally popular with very little use of any data reported. The majority of respondents (40%) were unsatisfied with this situation with 34% seeing some room for improvement and very few being satisfied overall.

CO2 monitoring product features

• A screen and WiFi were both strongly supported features with less than 10% of respondents seeing them as irrelevant and a large majority of answers skewing towards essential.
• Coloured lights providing a quick indication were not viewed as important by 13% of respondents and while the majority of answers were towards essential there was also a large (22%) set of respondents who were indifferent to this feature.
• The ability to access measurements and reports via a web interface was very mixed. Around 20% of respondents reported the feature as irrelevant, 20% essential with the majority seeing it as useful but mot essential.
• Almost all respondents strongly indicated that additional air quality metrics beyond CO2 were important to collect.
• Respondents mostly indicated the proposed prices are too high (64%), with essentially no responses suggesting they were too low and the balance (43%) in the middle. Only 5% of respondents indicated a preference for a rental option over a straight purchase.

Advertising In parallel with the survey, I worked with my cousin who runs a marketing agency, The Asset, to place some Facebook ads aiming to systematically evaluate what combination of images and text would draw the best response. It s been an interesting process - despite working for Google for 15 years, I know relatively little about the day to day practice of online advertising! I think we re about 50% of the way through that process of systematically building a funnel of traffic, it s been a steep learning curve and its clear there s significantly more thought and time that would need to be invested into this were it to be the primary driver of sales for a business. It s interested to see how what resonates or doesn t resonate with the audience is often completely different to what I expect, confirming the importance of having a process to evaluate and tweak how the advertising runs. After just under 2 weeks of advertising with a daily budget in the $20 - $30 range, my ads have had just under 17k impressions by 10k distinct people resulting in 76 visits to the co2mon.nz website, and zero sales. The ads themselves received 233 clicks, so there s clearly a lot of room for further improvement and revision of the ad text itself to present a more compelling message. Unfortunately the most common response and feedback to the ads themselves has been comments arguing that CO2 is wonderful, climate change is invented and all our problems would be solved if we had more CO2 everywhere. Tedious to deal with, but also useful reminder about awareness and interest in the problem to contrast with the results from the survey of my extended personal network!

Feedback from other conversations In addition to the survey and advertising I ve had conversations with some local air conditioning and ventilation businesses as well as a commercial building management firm - all providing similar feedback to the results from the survey - acknowledgement that air quality is important and relatively immaturely measured currently, but low urgency or pain to change or remedy that situation. Another interesting point that s come up in conversations with various small business owners is what to do if or when the monitoring shows a ventilation problem? The obvious answer of opening the windows more does not seem to be particularly well received. Without a compelling solution to offer to the potential problem that the monitoring might reveal I often sense a reluctance from people to invest too much time and money in something which may create a problem in a space they don t currently see as urgent.

Conclusions The responses are interesting and surprising to me a in a few ways (no interest in rental, favouring web interface over app), but at the end of the day lead to the two conclusions described above: Air quality is acknowledged as important, but monitoring it is not an urgent or pressing problem for most people. At home and work the majority of people are OK with relying on their senses or trusting someone else to maintain ventilation. They wouldn t object to improvements, but the feedback is that ventilation monitoring is not a problem people are actively looking to solve. The number of people who do see this as an urgent enough problem to invest money into solving is low - even within the biased sample of my extended network. There is a stronger set of evidence for the problem being seen as more urgent by the users of shared public spaces - but I ve not been able to find any evidence that the owners and managers of those spaces feel the same urgency or duty of care towards their users to invest in this space. Most of the opportunity is in the hardware rather than the software service. This signal comes through in the feedback on the pricing (preferring outright purchase vs rental), but it s also been directly expressed in the free-form comments and other conversations I ve had and the the relative importance given to the physical product features over the web/app interfaces in the survey results.

Wrap Up I m glad I finally spent the time doing this research, particularly the survey, these are good lessons to learn, even if I should have taken the time to learn them a year ago - so I can write that reminder (do your research before building a product) down as a key outcome of this process too! Stay tuned for more details on the other work I ve been doing recently on the hardware side of co2mon.nz and what these results mean for my overall plans. As always, I d love to hear from you if these results give you ideas or questions you d like to discuss.