Colson Whitehead's latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, was always going to be widely reviewed, if only because his last two books won Pulitzer prizes. Still, after enjoying both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, I was certainly going to read his next book, regardless of what the critics were saying indeed, it was actually quite agreeable to float above the manufactured energy of the book's launch. Saying that, I was encouraged to listen to an interview with the author by Ezra Klein. Now I had heard Whitehead speak once before when he accepted the Orwell Prize in 2020, and once again he came across as a pretty down-to-earth guy. Or if I were to emulate the detached and cynical tone Whitehead embodied in The Nickel Boys, after winning so many literary prizes in the past few years, he has clearly rehearsed how to respond to the cliched questions authors must be asked in every interview. With the obligatory throat-clearing of 'so, how did you get into writing?', for instance, Whitehead replies with his part of the catechism that 'It seemed like being a writer could be a cool job. You could work from home and not talk to people.' The response is the right combination of cute and self-effacing... and with its slight tone-deafness towards enforced isolation, it was no doubt honed before Covid-19. Harlem Shuffle tells three separate stories about Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and 'fence' for stolen goods in New York in the 1960s. Carney doesn't consider himself a genuine criminal though, and there's a certain logic to his relativistic morality. After all, everyone in New York City is on the take in some way, and if some 'lightly used items' in Carney's shop happened to have had 'previous owners', well, that's not quite his problem. 'Nothing solid in the city but the bedrock,' as one character dryly observes. Yet as Ezra pounces on in his NYT interview mentioned abov, the focus on the Harlem underworld means there are very few women in the book, and Whitehead's circular response ah well, it's a book about the criminals at that time! was a little unsatisfying. Not only did it feel uncharacteristically slippery of someone justly lauded for his unflinching power of observation (after all, it was the author who decided what to write about in the first place), it foreclosed on the opportunity to delve into why the heist and caper genres (from The Killing, The Feather Thief, Ocean's 11, etc.) have historically been a 'male' mode of storytelling. Perhaps knowing this to be the case, the conversation quickly steered towards Ray Carney's wife, Elizabeth, the only woman in the book who could be said possesses some plausible interiority. The following off-hand remark from Whitehead caught my attention:

My wife is convinced that [Elizabeth] knows everything about Carney's criminal life, and is sort of giving him a pass. And I'm not sure if that's true. I have to have to figure out exactly what she knows and when she knows it and how she feels about it.

I was quite taken by this, although not simply due to its effect on the story it self. As in, it immediately conjured up a charming picture of Whitehead's domestic arrangements: not only does Whitehead's wife feel free to disagree with what one of Whitehead's 'own' characters knows or believes, but that Colson has no problem whatsoever sharing that disagreement with the public at large. (It feels somehow natural that Whitehead's wife believes her counterpart knows more than she lets on, whilst Whitehead himself imbues the protagonist's wife with a kind of neo-Victorian innocence.) I'm minded to agree with Whitehead's partner myself, if only due to the passages where Elizabeth is studiously ignoring Carney's otherwise unexplained freak-outs. But all of these meta-thoughts simply underline just how emancipatory the Death of the Author can be. This product of academic literary criticism (the term was coined by Roland Barthes' 1967 essay of the same name) holds that the original author's intentions, ideas or biographical background carry no especial weight in determining how others should interpret their work. It is usually understood as meaning that a writer's own views are no more valid or 'correct' than the views held by someone else. (As an aside, I've found that most readers who encounter this concept for the first time have been reading books in this way since they were young. But the opposite is invariably true with cinephiles, who often have a bizarre obsession with researching or deciphering the 'true' interpretation of a film.) And with all that in mind, can you think of a more wry example of how freeing (and fun) nature of the Death of the Author than an author's own partner dissenting with their (Pulitzer Prize-winning) husband on the position of a lynchpin character?

The 1964 Harlem riot began after James Powell, a 15-year-old African American, was shot and killed by Thomas Gilligan, an NYPD police officer in front of 10s of witnesses. Gilligan was subsequently cleared by a grand jury.

As it turns out, the reviews for Harlem Shuffle have been almost universally positive, and after reading it in the two days after its release, I would certainly agree it is an above-average book. But it didn't quite take hold of me in the way that The Underground Railroad or The Nickel Boys did, especially the later chapters of The Nickel Boys that were set in contemporary New York and could thus make some (admittedly fairly explicit) connections from the 1960s to the present day that kind of connection is not there in Harlem Shuffle, or at least I did not pick up on it during my reading. I can see why one might take exception to that, though. For instance, it is certainly true that the week-long Harlem Riot forms a significant part of the plot, and some events in particular are entirely contingent on the ramifications of this momentous event. But it's difficult to argue the riot's impact are truly integral to the story, so not only is this uprising against police brutality almost regarded as a background event, any contemporary allusion to the murder of George Floyd is subsequently watered down. It's nowhere near the historical rubbernecking of Forrest Gump (1994), of course, but that's not a battle you should ever be fighting. Indeed, whilst a certain smoothness of affect is to be priced into the Whitehead reading experience, my initial overall reaction to Harlem Shuffle was fairly flat, despite all the action and intrigue on the page. The book perhaps belies its origins as a work conceived during quarantine after all, the book is essentially comprised of three loosely connected novellas, almost as if the unreality and mental turbulence of lockdown prevented the author from performing the psychological 'deep work' of producing a novel-length text with his usual depth of craft. A few other elements chimed with this being a 'lockdown novel' as well, particularly the book's preoccupation with the sheer physicality of the city compared to the usual complex interplay between its architecture and its inhabitants. This felt like it had been directly absorbed into the book from the author walking around his deserted city, and thus being able to take in details for the first time:

The doorways were entrances into different cities no, different entrances into one vast, secret city. Ever close, adjacent to all you know, just underneath. If you know where to look.

And I can't fail to mention that you can almost touch Whitehead's sublimated hunger to eat out again as well:

Stickups were chops they cook fast and hot, you re in and out. A stakeout was ribs fire down low, slow, taking your time. [ ] Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee.

More seriously, however, the relatively thin personalities of minor characters then reminded me of the simulacrum of Zoom-based relationships, and the essentially unsatisfactory endings to the novellas felt reminiscent of lockdown pseudo-events that simply fizzle out without a bang. One of the stories ties up loose ends with: 'These things were usually enough to terminate a mob war, and they appeared to end the hostilities in this case as well.' They did? Well, okay, I guess.

The corner of 125th Street and Morningside Avenue in 2019, the purported location of Carney's fictional furniture store. Signage plays a prominent role in Harlem Shuffle, possibly due to the author's quarantine walks.

Still, it would be unfair to characterise myself as 'disappointed' with the novel, and none of this piece should be taken as really deep criticism. The book certainly was entertaining enough, and pretty funny in places as well:

Carney didn t have an etiquette book in front of him, but he was sure it was bad manners to sit on a man s safe. [ ] The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains. Launderer, heal thyself.

Yet I can't shake the feeling that every book you write is a book that you don't, and so we might need to hold out a little longer for Whitehead's 'George Floyd novel'. (Although it is for others to say how much of this sentiment is the expectations of a White Reader for The Black Author to ventriloquise the pain of 'their' community.) Some room for personal critique is surely permitted. I dearly missed the junk food energy of the dry and acerbic observations that run through Whitehead's previous work. At one point he had a good line on the model tokenisation that lurks behind 'The First Negro to...' labels, but the callbacks to this idea ceased without any payoff. Similar things happened with the not-so-subtle critiques of the American Dream:

Entrepreneur? Pepper said the last part like manure. That s just a hustler who pays taxes. [ ] One thing I ve learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.

Ultimately, though, I think I just wanted more. I wanted a deeper exploration of how the real power in New York is not wielded by individual street hoodlums or even the cops but in the form of real estate, essentially serving as a synecdoche for Capital as a whole. (A recent take of this can be felt in Jed Rothstein's 2021 documentary, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn and it is perhaps pertinent to remember that the US President at the time this novel was written was affecting to be a real estate tycoon.). Indeed, just like the concluding scenes of J. J. Connolly's Layer Cake, although you can certainly pull off a cool heist against the Man, power ultimately resides in those who control the means of production... and a homespun furniture salesman on the corner of 125 & Morningside just ain't that. There are some nods to kind of analysis in the conclusion of the final story ('Their heist unwound as if it had never happened, and Van Wyck kept throwing up buildings.'), but, again, I would have simply liked more. And when I attempted then file this book away into the broader media landscape, given the current cultural visibility of 1960s pop culture (e.g. One Night in Miami (2020), Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), Summer of Soul (2021), etc.), Harlem Shuffle also seemed like a missed opportunity to critically analyse our (highly-qualified) longing for the civil rights era. I can certainly understand why we might look fondly on the cultural products from a period when politics was less alienated, when society was less atomised, and when it was still possible to imagine meaningful change, but in this dimension at least, Harlem Shuffle seems to merely contribute to this nostalgic escapism.

"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."

The cinema was a rare and expensive treat in my youth, so I first came across Raiders of the Lost Ark by recording it from television onto a poor quality VHS. I only mention this as it meant I watched a slightly different film to the one intended, as my copy somehow missed off the first 10 minutes. For those not as intimately familiar with the film as me, this is just in time to see a Belloq demand Dr. Jones hand over the Peruvian head (see above), just in time to learn that Indy loathes snakes, and just in time to see the inadvertent reproduction of two Europeans squabbling over the spoils of a foreign land. What this truncation did to my interpretation of the film (released thirty years ago today on June 19th 1981) is interesting to explore. Without Jones' physical and moral traits being demonstrated on-screen (as well as missing the weighing the gold head and the rollercoaster boulder scene), it actually made the idea of 'Indiana Jones' even more of a mythical archetype. The film wisely withholds Jones' backstory, but my directors cut deprived him of even more, and counterintuitively imbued him with even more of a legendary hue as the elision made his qualities an assumption beyond question. Indiana Jones, if you can excuse the clich , needed no introduction at all. Good artists copy, great artists steal. And oh boy, does Raiders steal. I've watched this film about twenty times over the past two decades and it's now firmly entered into my personal canon. But watching it on its thirtieth anniversary was different not least because I could situate it in a broader cinematic context. For example, I now see the Gestapo officer in Major Strasser from Casablanca (1942), in fact just as I can with many of Raiders' other orientalist tendencies: not only in its breezy depictions of backwards sand people, but also of North Africa as an entrep t and playground for a certain kind of Western gangster. The opening as well, set in an equally reductionist pseudo-Peru, now feels like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) but without, of course, any self-conscious colonial critique.

The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.

I can now also appreciate some of the finer edges that make this film just so much damn fun to watch. For instance, the comic book conceit that Jones and Belloq are a 'shadowy reflection' of one other and that they need 'only a nudge' to make one like the other. As is the idea that Belloq seems to be actually enjoying being evil. I also spotted Jones rejecting the martini on the plane. This feels less like a comment on corrupting effect of alcohol (he drinks rather heavily elsewhere in the film), but rather a subtle distancing from James Bond. This feels especially important given that the action-packed cold open is, let us be honest for a second, ripped straight from the 007 franchise. John William's soundtracks are always worth mentioning. The corny Raiders March does almost nothing for me, but the highly-underrated 'Ark theme' certainly does. I delight in its allusions to Gregorian chant, the diabolus in musica and the Hungarian minor scale, fusing the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity (the stacked thirds, get it?), the ars antiqua of the Middle Ages with an 'exotic' twist that the Russian Five associated with central European Judaism.

The best use of the ark leitmotif is, of course, when it is opened. Here, Indy and Marion are saved by not opening their eyes whilst the 'High Priest' Belloq and the rest of the Nazis are all melted away. I'm no Biblical scholar, but I'm almost certain they were alluding to Leviticus 16:2 here:

The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.

But would it be too much of a stretch to also see the myth of Orpheus and Eurydices too? Orpheus's wife would only be saved from the underworld if he did not turn around until he came to his own house. But he turned round to look at his wife, and she instantly slipped back into the depths:

For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.

Perhaps not, given that Marion and the ark are not lost in quite the same way. But whilst touching on gender, it was interesting to update my view of archaeologist Ren Belloq. To countermand his slight queer coding (a trope of Disney villains such as Scar, Jafar, Cruella, etc.), there is a rather clumsy subplot involving Belloq repeatedly (and half-heartedly) failing to seduce Marion. This disavows any idea that Belloq isn't firmly heterosexual, essential for the film's mainstream audience, but it is especially important in Raiders because, if we recall the relationship between Belloq and Jones: 'it would take only a nudge to make you like me'. (This would definitely put a new slant on 'Top men'.)

However, my favourite moment is where the Nazis place the ark in a crate in order to transport it to the deserted island. On route, the swastikas on the side of the crate spontaneously burn away, and a disturbing noise is heard in the background. This short scene has always fascinated me, partly because it's the first time in the film that the power of the ark is demonstrated first-hand but also because gives the object an other-worldly nature that, to the best of my knowledge, has no parallel in the rest of cinema. Still, I had always assumed that the Aak disfigured the swastikas because of their association with the Nazis, interpreting the act as God's condemnation of the Third Reich. But now I catch myself wondering whether the ark would have disfigured any iconography as a matter of principle or whether their treatment was specific to the swastika. We later get a partial answer to this question, as the 'US Army' inscriptions in the Citizen Kane warehouse remain untouched. Far from being an insignificant concern, the filmmakers appear to have wandered into a highly-contested theological debate. As in, if the burning of the swastika is God's moral judgement of the Nazi regime, then God is clearly both willing and able to intervene in human affairs. So why did he not, to put it mildly, prevent Auschwitz? From this perspective, Spielberg appears to be limbering up for some of the academic critiques surrounding Holocaust representations that will follow Schindler's List (1993). Given my nostalgic and somewhat ironic attachment to Raiders, it will always be difficult for me to objectively appraise the film. Even so, it feels like it is underpinned by an earnest attempt to entertain the viewer, largely absent in the affected cynicism of contemporary cinema. And when considered in the totality of Hollywood's output, its tonal and technical flaws are not actually that bad or at least Marion's muddled characterisation and its breezy chauvinism (for example) clearly have far worse examples. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film in 2021 is that it hasn't changed that much at all. It spawned one good sequel (The Last Crusade), one bad one (The Temple of Doom), and one hardly worth mentioning at all, yet these adventures haven't affected the original Raiders in any meaningful way. In fact, if anything has affected the original text it is, once again, George Lucas himself, as knowing the impending backlash around the Star Wars prequels adds an inadvertent paratext to all his earlier works. Yet in a 1978 discussion prior to the creation of Raiders, you can get a keen sense of how Lucas' childlike enthusiasm will always result in something either extremely good or something extremely bad somehow no middle ground is quite possible. Yes, it's easy to rubbish his initial ideas 'We'll call him Indiana Smith! but hasn't Lucas actually captured the essence of a heroic 'Americana' here, and that the final result is simply a difference of degree, not kind?

"Again, we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away."

The cinema was a rare and expensive treat in my youth, so I first came across Raiders of the Lost Ark by recording it from television onto a poor quality VHS. I only mention this as it meant I watched a slightly different film to the one intended, as my copy somehow missed off the first 10 minutes. For those not as intimately familiar with the film as me, this is just in time to see a Belloq demand Dr. Jones hand over the Peruvian head (see above), just in time to learn that Indy loathes snakes, and just in time to see the inadvertent reproduction of two Europeans squabbling over the spoils of a foreign land. What this truncation did to my interpretation of the film (released thirty years ago today on June 19th 1981) is interesting to explore. Without Jones' physical and moral traits being demonstrated on-screen (as well as missing the weighing the gold head and the rollercoaster boulder scene), it actually made the idea of 'Indiana Jones' even more of a mythical archetype. The film wisely withholds Jones' backstory, but my directors cut deprived him of even more, and counterintuitively imbued him with even more of a legendary hue as the elision made his qualities an assumption beyond question. Indiana Jones, if you can excuse the clich , needed no introduction at all. Good artists copy, great artists steal. And oh boy, does Raiders steal. I've watched this film about twenty times over the past two decades and it's now firmly entered into my personal canon. But watching it on its thirtieth anniversary was different not least because I could situate it in a broader cinematic context. For example, I now see the Gestapo officer in Major Strasser from Casablanca (1942), in fact just as I can with many of Raiders' other orientalist tendencies: not only in its breezy depictions of backwards sand people, but also of North Africa as an entrep t and playground for a certain kind of Western gangster. The opening as well, set in an equally reductionist pseudo-Peru, now feels like Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) but without, of course, any self-conscious colonial critique.

The imagery of the ark appears to be borrowed from James Tissot's The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, part of the fin de siecle fascination with the occult and (ironically enough given the background of Raiders' director), a French Catholic revival.

I can now also appreciate some of the finer edges that make this film just so much damn fun to watch. For instance, the comic book conceit that Jones and Belloq are a 'shadowy reflection' of one other and that they need 'only a nudge' to make one like the other. As is the idea that Belloq seems to be actually enjoying being evil. I also spotted Jones rejecting the martini on the plane. This feels less like a comment on corrupting effect of alcohol (he drinks rather heavily elsewhere in the film), but rather a subtle distancing from James Bond. This feels especially important given that the action-packed cold open is, let us be honest for a second, ripped straight from the 007 franchise. John William's soundtracks are always worth mentioning. The corny Raiders March does almost nothing for me, but the highly-underrated 'Ark theme' certainly does. I delight in its allusions to Gregorian chant, the diabolus in musica and the Hungarian minor scale, fusing the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity (the stacked thirds, get it?), the ars antiqua of the Middle Ages with an 'exotic' twist that the Russian Five associated with central European Judaism.

The best use of the ark leitmotif is, of course, when it is opened. Here, Indy and Marion are saved by not opening their eyes whilst the 'High Priest' Belloq and the rest of the Nazis are all melted away. I'm no Biblical scholar, but I'm almost certain they were alluding to Leviticus 16:2 here:

The Lord said to Moses: Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die, for I will appear in the cloud above the mercy seat.

But would it be too much of a stretch to also see the myth of Orpheus and Eurydices too? Orpheus's wife would only be saved from the underworld if he did not turn around until he came to his own house. But he turned round to look at his wife, and she instantly slipped back into the depths:

For he who overcome should turn back his gaze
Towards the Tartarean cave,
Whatever excellence he takes with him
He loses when he looks on those below.

Perhaps not, given that Marion and the ark are not lost in quite the same way. But whilst touching on gender, it was interesting to update my view of archaeologist Ren Belloq. To countermand his slight queer coding (a trope of Disney villains such as Scar, Jafar, Cruella, etc.), there is a rather clumsy subplot involving Belloq repeatedly (and half-heartedly) failing to seduce Marion. This disavows any idea that Belloq isn't firmly heterosexual, essential for the film's mainstream audience, but it is especially important in Raiders because, if we recall the relationship between Belloq and Jones: 'it would take only a nudge to make you like me'. (This would definitely put a new slant on 'Top men'.)

However, my favourite moment is where the Nazis place the ark in a crate in order to transport it to the deserted island. On route, the swastikas on the side of the crate spontaneously burn away, and a disturbing noise is heard in the background. This short scene has always fascinated me, partly because it's the first time in the film that the power of the ark is demonstrated first-hand but also because gives the object an other-worldly nature that, to the best of my knowledge, has no parallel in the rest of cinema. Still, I had always assumed that the Aak disfigured the swastikas because of their association with the Nazis, interpreting the act as God's condemnation of the Third Reich. But now I catch myself wondering whether the ark would have disfigured any iconography as a matter of principle or whether their treatment was specific to the swastika. We later get a partial answer to this question, as the 'US Army' inscriptions in the Citizen Kane warehouse remain untouched. Far from being an insignificant concern, the filmmakers appear to have wandered into a highly-contested theological debate. As in, if the burning of the swastika is God's moral judgement of the Nazi regime, then God is clearly both willing and able to intervene in human affairs. So why did he not, to put it mildly, prevent Auschwitz? From this perspective, Spielberg appears to be limbering up for some of the academic critiques surrounding Holocaust representations that will follow Schindler's List (1993). Given my nostalgic and somewhat ironic attachment to Raiders, it will always be difficult for me to objectively appraise the film. Even so, it feels like it is underpinned by an earnest attempt to entertain the viewer, largely absent in the affected cynicism of contemporary cinema. And when considered in the totality of Hollywood's output, its tonal and technical flaws are not actually that bad or at least Marion's muddled characterisation and its breezy chauvinism (for example) clearly have far worse examples. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film in 2021 is that it hasn't changed that much at all. It spawned one good sequel (The Last Crusade), one bad one (The Temple of Doom), and one hardly worth mentioning at all, yet these adventures haven't affected the original Raiders in any meaningful way. In fact, if anything has affected the original text it is, once again, George Lucas himself, as knowing the impending backlash around the Star Wars prequels adds an inadvertent paratext to all his earlier works. Yet in a 1978 discussion prior to the creation of Raiders, you can get a keen sense of how Lucas' childlike enthusiasm will always result in something either extremely good or something extremely bad somehow no middle ground is quite possible. Yes, it's easy to rubbish his initial ideas 'We'll call him Indiana Smith! but hasn't Lucas actually captured the essence of a heroic 'Americana' here, and that the final result is simply a difference of degree, not kind?

Today marks the 90th day of me joining Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time! So since it s been a while already, this blog post is long due. :)

The News

I joined Canonical, this February, to work on Ubuntu full-time! \o/
Those who know, they know that this is really very exciting for me because Canonical has been a dream company for me, for real (more about this below!). And hey, this is my first job, ever, so all the more reason to be psyched about, isn t it? ^_^ P.S. Keep reading and we ll meet my squad really sooon!

The Story Being an undergrad student (batch 2017-2021), I ve been slightly worried during my last two semesters, naturally, thinking about how s it all gonna pan out and what will I be doing, et al, because I ve been seeing all my friends and batchmates getting placed in companies or going for masters or at least having some sort of plans for their future and I, on the other hand, was hopelessly clueless. :D Well, to be fair, I did Google Summer of Code twice, in 2019 and 2020, became a Debian Developer in 2019, been a part of GCI and Outreachy, contributed to over dozens of open-source projects, et al, et al. So I wasn t all completely hopeless but for sure was completely clueless , heh. And for full disclosure, I was only slightly panicking because firstly, I did get placed in several companies and secondly, I didn t really need a job immediately since I was already getting paid to work on Debian stuff by Freexian, which was good enough. :)
(and honestly, Freexian has my whole heart! - more on that later sometime.) But that s not the point. I was still confused and worried and my mom & dad, more so than anyone. Ugh. We were all figuring out and she asked me places that I was interested to work in. And whilst I wasn t clear about things I wanted to do (and still am!) but I was (very) clear about this and so I told her about Canonical and also did tell her that it s a bit too ambitious for me to think about it now so I ll probably apply after some experience or something. and as they say, the world works in mysterious ways and well, it did for me! So back during the Ruby sprints (Feb 20), Kanashiro, the guy ( ), mentioned that his team was hiring and has a vacant position but I won t be eligible since I was still in my junior year. It was since then I ve been actively praying for Cronus, the god of time, to wave his magic wand and align it in such a way that the next opening should be somewhere near my graduation. And guess what? IT HAPPENED! 9 months later, in November 20, Kanashiro told me his team is hiring yet again and that I could apply this time! Without much (since there was some ) delay, I applied and started asking all sorts of questions to Kanashiro. No words are enough for him, he literally helped me throughout the process; from referring me to answering all sorts of doubts I had! And roughly after 2 months of interviewing, et al, my ambitious dream did come true and I finalyyyy signed my contract! \o/
(the interview process and what went on during those 10 weeks is a story for later ;))

The Server Team! \o This position, which I didn t mention earlier, was for the Server Team which is a team of 15 people, working to make Ubuntu server the best! And as I tweeted sometime back, the team is absolutely lovely, super kind, and consists of the best of teammates one could possibly ask for! Here s a quick sneak peek into our weekly team meeting. Thanks to Rafael for taking such a lovely picture. And yes, the cat Luna is a part of our squad! And oh, did I mention that we re completely remote and distributed?
FUN FACT: Our team covers all the TZs, that is, at any point of time (during weekdays), you ll find someone or the other from the team around! \o/ Anyway, our squad, managed by Rick is divided into two halves: Squeaky Wheels and Table Flip. Cool names, right?
Squeaky Wheels does the distro side of stuff and consists of Christian, Andreas, Rafael, Robie, Bryce, Sergio, Kanashiro, Athos, and now myself as well! And OTOH, Table Flip consists of Dan, Chad, Paride, Lucas, James, and Grant. Even though I interact w/ Squeaky Wheels more (basically daily), each of my teammates is absolutely lovely and equally awesome! Whilst I ll talk more about things here in the upcoming months, this is it for now! If there s anything, in particular, you d like to know more about, let me know! And lastly, here s us vibing our way through, making Ubuntu server better, cause that s how we roll!

---

Until next time.
:wq for today.

The Population Issue and its many facets Another couple of weeks passed. A Lot of things happening, lots of anger and depression in folks due to handling in pandemic, but instead of blaming they are willing to blame everybody else including the population. Many of them want forced sterilization like what Sanjay Gandhi did during the Emergency (1975). I had to share So Long, My son . A very moving tale of two families of what happened to them during the one-child policy in China. I was so moved by it and couldn t believe that the Chinese censors allowed it to be produced, shot, edited, and then shared worldwide. It also won a couple of awards at the 69th Berlin Film Festival, silver bear for the best actor and the actress in that category. But more than the award, the theme, and the concept as well as the length of the movie which was astonishing. Over a 3 hr. something it paints a moving picture of love, loss, shame, relief, anger, and asking for forgiveness. All of which can be identified by any rational person with feelings worldwide.

Girl child What was also interesting though was what it couldn t or wasn t able to talk about and that is the Chinese leftover men. In fact, a similar situation exists here in India, only it has been suppressed. This has been more pronounced more in Asia than in other places. One big thing in this is human trafficking and mostly women trafficking. For the Chinese male, that was happening on a large scale from all neighboring countries including India. This has been shared in media and everybody knows about it and yet people are silent. But this is not limited to just the Chinese, even Indians have been doing it. Even yesteryear actress Rupa Ganguly was caught red-handed but then later let off after formal questioning as she is from the ruling party. So much for justice. What is and has been surprising at least for me is Rwanda which is in the top 10 of some of the best places in equal gender. It, along with other African countries have also been in news for putting quite a significant amount of percentage of GDP into public healthcare (between 20-10%), but that is a story for a bit later. People forget or want to forget that it was in Satara, a city in my own state where 220 girls changed their name from nakusha or unwanted to something else and that had become a piece of global news. One would think that after so many years, things would have changed, the only change that has happened is that now we have two ministries, The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) and The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MoHFW). Sadly, in both cases, the ministries have been found wanting, Whether it was the high-profile Hathras case or even the routine cries of help which given by women on the twitter helpline. Sadly, neither of these ministries talks about POSH guidelines which came up after the 2012 gangrape case. For both these ministries, it should have been a pinned tweet. There is also the 1994 PCPNDT Act which although made in 1994, actually functioned in 2006, although what happens underground even today nobody knows . On the global stage, about a decade ago, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt argued in their book Freakonomics how legalized abortion both made the coming population explosion as well as expected crime rates to be reduced. There was a huge pushback on the same from the conservatives and has become a matter of debate, perhaps something that the Conservatives wanted. Interestingly, it hasn t made them go back but go forward as can be seen from the Freakonomics site.

Climate Change Another topic that came up for discussion was repeatedly climate change, but when I share Shell s own 1998 Confidential report titled Greenhouse effect all become strangely silent. The silence here is of two parts, there probably is a large swathe of Indians who haven t read the report and there may be a minority who have read it and know what already has been shared with U.S. Congress. The Conservative s argument has been for it is jobs and a weak we need to research more . There was a partial debunk of it on the TBD podcast by Matt Farell and his brother Sean Farell as to how quickly the energy companies are taking to the coming change.

Health Budget Before going to Covid stories. I first wanted to talk about Health Budgets. From the last 7 years the Center s allocation for health has been between 0.34 to 0.8% per year. That amount barely covers the salaries to the staff, let alone any money for equipment or anything else. And here by allocation I mean, what is actually spent, not the one that is shared by GOI as part of budget proposal. In fact, an article on Wire gives a good breakdown of the numbers. Even those who are on the path of free markets describe India s health business model as a flawed one. See the Bloomberg Quint story on that. Now let me come to Rwanda. Why did I chose Rwanda, I could have chosen South Africa where I went for Debconf 2016, I chose because Rwanda s story is that much more inspiring. In many ways much more inspiring than that South Africa in many ways. Here is a country which for decades had one war or the other, culminating into the Rwanda Civil War which ended in 1994. And coincidentally, they gained independence on a similar timeline as South Africa ending Apartheid in 1994. What does the country do, when it gains its independence, it first puts most of its resources in the healthcare sector. The first few years at 20% of GDP, later than at 10% of GDP till everybody has universal medical coverage. Coming back to the Bloomberg article I shared, the story does not go into the depth of beyond-expiry date medicines, spurious medicines and whatnot. Sadly, most media in India does not cover the deaths happening in rural areas and this I am talking about normal times. Today what is happening in rural areas is just pure madness. For last couple of days have been talking with people who are and have been covering rural areas. In many of those communities, there is vaccine hesitancy and why, because there have been whatsapp forwards sharing that if you go to a hospital you will die and your kidney or some other part of the body will be taken by the doctor. This does two things, it scares people into not going and getting vaccinated, at the same time they are prejudiced against science. This is politics of the lowest kind. And they do it so that they will be forced to go to temples or babas and what not and ask for solutions. And whether they work or not is immaterial, they get fixed and property and money is seized. Sadly, there are not many Indian movies of North which have tried to show it except for oh my god but even here it doesn t go the distance. A much more honest approach was done in Trance . I have never understood how the South Indian movies are able to do a more honest job of story-telling than what is done in Bollywood even though they do in 1/10th the budget that is needed in Bollywood. Although, have to say with OTT, some baggage has been shed but with the whole film certification rearing its ugly head through MEITY orders, it seems two steps backward instead of forward. The idea being simply to infantilize the citizens even more. That is a whole different ball-game which probably will require its own space.

Vaccine issues One good news though is that Vaccination has started. But it has been a long story full of greed by none other than GOI (Government of India) or the ruling party BJP. Where should I start with. I probably should start with this excellent article done by Priyanka Pulla. It is interesting and fascinating to know how vaccines are made, at least one way which she shared. She also shared about the Cutter Incident which happened in the late 50 s. The response was on expected lines, character assassination of her and the newspaper they published but could not critique any of the points made by her. Not a single point that she didn t think about x or y. Interestingly enough, in January 2021 Bharati Biotech was supposed to be share phase 3 trial data but hasn t been put up in public domain till May 2021. In fact, there have been a few threads raised by both well-meaning Indians as well as others globally especially on twitter to which GOI/ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) is silent. Another interesting point to note is that Russia did say in its press release that it is possible that their vaccine may not be standard (read inactivation on their vaccines and another way is possible but would take time, again Brazil has objected, but India hasn t till date.) What also has been interesting is the homegrown B.1.617 lineage or known as double mutant . This was first discovered from my own state, Maharashtra and then transported around the world. There is also B.1.618 which was found in West Bengal and is same or supposed to be similar to the one found in South Africa. This one is known as Triple mutant . About B.1.618 we don t know much other than knowing that it is much more easily transferable, much more infectious. Most countries have banned flights from India and I cannot fault them anyway. Hell, when even our diplomats do not care for procedures to be followed during the pandemic then how a common man is supposed to do. Of course, now for next month, Mr. Modi was supposed to go and now will not attend the G7 meeting. Whether, it is because he would have to face the press (the only Prime Minister and the only Indian Prime Minister who never has faced free press.) or because the Indian delegation has been disinvited, we would never know.

A good article which shares lots of lows with how things have been done in India has been an article by Arundhati Roy. And while the article in itself is excellent and shares a bit of the bitter truth but is still incomplete as so much has been happening. The problem is that the issue manifests in so many ways, it is difficult to hold on. As Arundhati shared, should we just look at figures and numbers and hold on, or should we look at individual ones, for e.g. the one shared in Outlook India. Or the one shared by Dr. Dipshika Ghosh who works in Covid ICU in some hospital

Dr. Dipika Ghosh sharing an incident in Covid Ward

Interestingly as well, while in the vaccine issue, Brazil Anvisa doesn t know what they are doing or the regulator just isn t knowledgeable etc. (statements by various people in GOI, when it comes to testing kits, the same is an approver.)

ICMR/DGCI approving internationally validated kits, Press release.

Twitter In the midst of all this, one thing that many people have forgotten and seem to have forgotten that Twitter and other tools are used by only the elite. The reason why the whole thing has become serious now than in the first phase is because the elite of India have also fallen sick and dying which was not the case so much in the first phase. The population on Twitter is estimated to be around 30-34 million and people who are everyday around 20 odd million or so, which is what 2% of the Indian population which is estimated to be around 1.34 billion. The other 98% don t even know that there is something like twitter on which you can ask help. Twitter itself is exclusionary in many ways, with both the emoticons, the language and all sorts of things. There is a small subset who does use Twitter in regional languages, but they are too small to write anything about. The main language is English which does become a hindrance to lot of people.

Censorship Censorship of Indians critical of Govt. mishandling has been non-stop. Even U.S. which usually doesn t interfere into India s internal politics was forced to make an exception. But of course, this has been on deaf ears. There is and was a good thread on Twitter by Gaurav Sabnis, a friend, fellow Puneite now settled in U.S. as a professor.

Gaurav on Trump-Biden on vaccination of their own citizens

Now just to surmise what has been happened in India and what has been happening in most of the countries around the world. Most of the countries have done centralization purchasing of the vaccine and then is distributed by the States, this is what we understand as co-operative federalism. While last year, GOI took a lot of money under the shady PM Cares fund for vaccine purchase, donations from well-meaning Indians as well as Industries and trade bodies. Then later, GOI said it would leave the states hanging and it is they who would have to buy vaccines from the manufacturers. This is again cheap politics. The idea behind it is simple, GOI knows that almost all the states are strapped for cash. This is not new news, this I have shared a couple of months back. The problem has been that for the last 6-8 months no GST meeting has taken place as shared by Punjab s Finance Minister Amarinder Singh. What will happen is that all the states will fight in-between themselves for the vaccine and most of them are now non-BJP Governments. The idea is let the states fight and somehow be on top. So, the pandemic, instead of being a public health issue has become something of on which politics has to played. The news on whatsapp by RW media is it s ok even if a million or two also die, as it is India is heavily populated. Although that argument vanishes for those who lose their dear and near ones. But that just isn t the issue, the issue goes much more deeper than that Oxygen:12%
Remedisivir:12%
Sanitiser:12%
Ventilator:12%
PPE:18%
Ambulances 28% Now all the products above are essential medical equipment and should be declared as essential medical equipment and should have price controls on which GST is levied. In times of pandemic, should the center be profiting on those. States want to let go and even want the center to let go so that some relief is there to the public, while at the same time make them as essential medical equipment with price controls. But GOI doesn t want to. Leaders of opposition parties wrote open letters but no effect. What is sad to me is how Ambulances are being taxed at 28%. Are they luxury items or sin goods ? This also reminds of the recent discovery shared by Mr. Pappu Yadav in Bihar. You can see the color of ambulances as shared by Mr. Yadav, and the same news being shared by India TV news showing other ambulances. Also, the weak argument being made of not having enough drivers. Ideally, you should have 2-3 people, both 9-1-1 and Chicago Fire show 2 people in ambulance but a few times they have also shown to be flipped over. European seems to have three people in ambulance, also they are also much more disciplined as drivers, at least an opinion shared by an American expat.

Pappu Yadav, President Jan Adhikar Party, Bihar May 11, 2021

What is also interesting to note is GOI plays this game of Health is State subject and health is Central subject depending on its convenience. Last year, when it invoked the Epidemic and DMA Act it was a Central subject, now when bodies are flowing down the Ganges and pyres being lit everywhere, it becomes a State subject. But when and where money is involved, it again becomes a Central subject. The States are also understanding it, but they are fighting on too many fronts.

Snippets from Karnataka High Court hearing today, 13th March 2021

One of the good things is most of the High Courts have woken up. Many of the people on the RW think that the Courts are doing Judicial activism . And while there may be an iota of truth in it, the bitter truth is that many judges or relatives or their helpers have diagnosed and some have even died due to Covid. In face of the inevitable, what can they do. They are hauling up local Governments to make sure they are accountable while at the same time making sure that they get access to medical facilities. And I as a citizen don t see any wrong in that even if they are doing it for selfish reasons. Because, even if justice is being done for selfish reasons, if it does improve medical delivery systems for the masses, it is cool. If it means that the poor and everybody else are able to get vaccinations, oxygen and whatever they need, it is cool. Of course, we are still seeing reports of patients spending in the region of INR 50k and more for each day spent in hospital. But as there are no price controls, judges cannot do anything unless they want to make an enemy of the medical lobby in the country. A good story on medicines and what happens in rural areas, see no further than Laakhon mein ek.

Allahabad High Court hauling Uttar Pradesh Govt. for lack of Oxygen is equal to genocide, May 11, 2021

The censorship is not just related to takedown requests on twitter but nowadays also any articles which are critical of the GOI s handling. I have been seeing many articles which have shared facts and have been critical of GOI being taken down. Previously, we used to see 404 errors happen 7-10 years down the line and that was reasonable. Now we see that happen, days weeks or months. India seems to be turning more into China and North Korea and become more anti-science day-by-day

Fake websites Before going into fake websites, let me start with a fake newspaper which was started by none other than the Gujarat CM Mr. Modi in 2005 .

Gujarat Satya Samachar 2005 launched by Mr. Modi.

And if this wasn t enough than on Feb 8, 2005, he had invoked Official Secrets Act

Mr. Modi invoking Official Secrets Act, Feb 8 2005 Gujarat Samachar

The headlines were In Modi s regime press freedom is in peril-Down with Modi s dictatorship. So this was a tried and tested technique. The above information was shared by Mr. Urvish Kothari, who incidentally also has his own youtube channel. Now cut to 2021, and we have a slew of fake websites being done by the same party. In fact, it seems they started this right from 2011. A good article on BBC itself tells the story. Hell, Disinfo.eu which basically combats disinformation in EU has a whole pdf chronicling how BJP has been doing it. Some of the sites it shared are

Times of New York
Manchester Times
Times of Los Angeles
Manhattan Post
Washington Herald
and many more. The idea being take any site name which sounds similar to a brand name recognized by Indians and make fool of them. Of course, those of who use whois and other such tools can easily know what is happening. Two more were added to the list yesterday, Daily Guardian and Australia Today. There are of course, many features which tell them apart from genuine websites. Most of these are on shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting, most of these are bought either from Godaddy and Bluehost. While Bluehost used to be a class act once upon a time, both the above will do anything as long as they get money. Don t care whether it s a fake website or true. Capitalism at its finest or worst depending upon how you look at it. But most of these details are lost on people who do not know web servers, at all and instead think see it is from an exotic site, a foreign site and it chooses to have same ideas as me. Those who are corrupt or see politics as a tool to win at any cost will not see it as evil. And as a gentleman Raghav shared with me, it is so easy to fool us. An example he shared which I had forgotten. Peter England which used to be an Irish brand was bought by Aditya Birla group way back in 2000. But even today, when you go for Peter England, the way the packaging is done, the way the prices are, more often than not, people believe they are buying the Irish brand. While sharing this, there is so much of Naom Chomsky which comes to my mind again and again

Caste Issues I had written about caste issues a few times on this blog. This again came to the fore as news came that a Hindu sect used forced labor from Dalit community to make a temple. This was also shared by the hill. In both, Mr. Joshi doesn t tell that if they were volunteers then why their passports have been taken forcibly, also I looked at both minimum wage prevailing in New Jersey as a state as well as wage given to those who are in the construction Industry. Even in minimum wage, they were giving $1 when the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled work is $12.00 and as Mr. Joshi shared that they are specialized artisans, then they should be paid between $23 $30 per hour. If this isn t exploitation, then I don t know what is. And this is not the first instance, the first instance was perhaps the case against Cisco which was done by John Doe. While I had been busy with other things, it seems Cisco had put up both a demurrer petition and a petition to strike which the Court stayed. This seemed to all over again a type of apartheid practice, only this time applied to caste. The good thing is that the court stayed the petition. Dr. Ambedkar s statement if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem given at Columbia University in 1916, seems to be proven right in today s time and sadly has aged well. But this is not just something which is there only in U.S. this is there in India even today, just couple of days back, a popular actress Munmun Dutta used a casteist slur and then later apologized giving the excuse that she didn t know Hindi. And this is patently false as she has been in the Bollywood industry for almost now 16-17 years. This again, was not an isolated incident. Seema Singh, a lecturer in IIT-Kharagpur abused students from SC, ST backgrounds and was later suspended. There is an SC/ST Atrocities Act but that has been diluted by this Govt. A bit on the background of Dr. Ambedkar can be found at a blog on Columbia website. As I have shared and asked before, how do we think, for what reason the Age of Englightenment or the Age of Reason happened. If I were a fat monk or a priest who was privileges, would I have let Age of Enlightenment happen. It broke religion or rather Church which was most powerful to not so powerful and that power was more distributed among all sort of thinkers, philosophers, tinkers, inventors and so on and so forth.

Situation going forward I believe things are going to be far more complex and deadly before they get better. I had to share another term called Comorbidities which fortunately or unfortunately has also become part of twitter lexicon. While I have shared what it means, it simply means when you have an existing ailment or condition and then Coronavirus attacks you. The Virus will weaken you. The Vaccine in the best case just stops the damage, but the damage already done can t be reversed. There are people who advise and people who are taking steroids but that again has its own side-effects. And this is now, when we are in summer. I am afraid for those who have recovered, what will happen to them during the Monsoons. We know that the Virus attacks most the lungs and their quality of life will be affected. Even the immune system may have issues. We also know about the inflammation. And the grant that has been given to University of Dundee also has signs of worry, both for people like me (obese) as well as those who have heart issues already. In other news, my city which has been under partial lockdown since a month, has been extended for another couple of weeks. There are rumors that the same may continue till the year-end even if it means economics goes out of the window.There is possibility that in the next few months something like 2 million odd Indians could die

The above is a conversation between Karan Thapar and an Oxford Mathematician Dr. Murad Banaji who has shared that the under-counting of cases in India is huge. Even BBC shared an article on the scope of under-counting. Of course, those on the RW call of the evidence including the deaths and obituaries in newspapers as a narrative . And when asked that when deaths used to be in the 20 s or 30 s which has jumped to 200-300 deaths and this is just the middle class and above. The poor don t have the money to get wood and that is the reason you are seeing the bodies in Ganges whether in Buxar Bihar or Gajipur, Uttar Pradesh. The sights and visuals makes for sorry reading

Pandit Ranjan Mishra son on his father s death due to unavailability of oxygen, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 11th May 2021.

For those who don t know Pandit Ranjan Mishra was a renowned classical singer. More importantly, he was the first person to suggest Mr. Modi s name as a Prime Ministerial Candidate. If they couldn t fulfil his oxygen needs, then what can be expected for the normal public.

Conclusion Sadly, this time I have no humorous piece to share, I can however share a documentary which was shared on Feluda . I have shared about Feluda or Prodosh Chandra Mitter a few times on this blog. He has been the answer of James Bond from India. I have shared previously about The Golden Fortress . An amazing piece of art by Satyajit Ray. I watched that documentary two-three times. I thought, mistakenly that I am the only fool or fan of Feluda in Pune to find out that there are people who are even more than me. There were so many facets both about Feluda and master craftsman Satyajit Ray that I was unaware about. I was just simply amazed. I even shared few of the tidbits with mum as well, although now she has been truly hooked to Korean dramas. The only solace from all the surrounding madness. So, if you have nothing to do, you can look up his books, read them and then see the movies. And my first recommendation would be the Golden Fortress. The only thing I would say, do not have high hopes. The movie is beautiful. It starts slow and then picks up speed, just like a train. So, till later. Update The Mass surveillance part I could not do justice do hence removed it at the last moment. It actually needs its whole space, article. There is so much that the Govt. is doing under the guise of the pandemic that it is difficult to share it all in one article. As it is, the article is big

A new version 0.3.11 of Rblpapi is now arriving at CRAN. It comes two years after the release of version Rblpapit 0.3.10 and brings a few updates and extensions. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is required). This is the eleventh release since the package first appeared on CRAN in 2016. Changes are detailed below. Special thanks to James, Maxime and Michael for sending us pull requests.

Changes in Rblpapi version 0.3.11 (2021-04-20)

• Support blpAutoAuthenticate and B-PIPE access, refactor and generalise authentication (James Bell in #285)
• Deprecate excludeterm (John in #306)
• Correct example in README.md (Maxime Legrand in #314)
• Correct bds man page (and code) (Michael Kerber, and John, in #320)
• Add GitHub Actions continuous integration (Dirk in #323)
• Remove bashisms detected by R CMD check (Dirk #324)
• Switch vignette to minidown (Dirk in #331)
• Switch unit tests framework to tinytest (Dirk in #332)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the Rblpapi page. Questions, comments etc should go to the issue tickets system at 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.

tldr: Rust/coreutils ( https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/ ) is now available in Debian, good enough to boot a Debian with GNOME, install the top 1000 packages, build Firefox, the Linux Kernel and LLVM/Clang. Even if I wrote more than 100 patches to achieve that, it will probably be a bumpy ride for many other use cases.
It is also a terrific project to learn Rust. See the list of good first bugs. Even if I see Rust code every day at Mozilla, I was looking for an actual personal project (i.e. this isn't a Mozilla project) to learn Rust during the various COVID lockdowns. I started contributing to the alternative Coreutils developed in Rust. The project aims at proposing a drop-in replacement of the C-based GNU Coreutils, and I wanted to evaluate if this could be used to run a regular Debian. Similar to what I have done with clang.debian.net a few years ago (rebuilding the Debian archive using clang instead of gcc). I expect that most of the readers know what is the Coreutils. It is a set of programs performing simple operations (copy/move file, change permissions/ownership, etc). Even if some commands are from the 70s, they are at the base of Linux, Unix and macOS. While different implementations can be found, they are trying to remain compatible in terms of arguments, options, etc. This implementation of Coreutils isn t different! If you want to learn more about the history of Unix, I recommend this great Corecursive podcast with Brian Kernighan. While a lot of people contributed to this project, much was left to be done:

• missing programs to be implemented. See https://github.com/uutils/coreutils#utilities
• missing options in the various programs
  
• code not following latest Rust best practices
• lack of consistency in the code base (ex: functions with too many arguments)
• lack of tests/low code coverage
  
• Lots of failures when running the GNU Coreutils testsuite (141 tests pass on 613) - Some trivial to fix, some others harder A good way to start on a Rust project!
  
  

To start easy, I defined 4 goals for this work:

1. Package Coreutils in Debian/Ubuntu
2. Boot a Debian system with a Rust-based coreutils
3. Install the top 1000 packages in Debian - including GNOME
4. Build Firefox, the Linux Kernel and LLV/Clang
   

Packaging of Coreutils in Debian Packaging in Debian isn't a trivial or even simple task. It requires uploading independently all the dependencies in the archive. Rust, with its new ecosystem and small crates, is making this task significantly harder. The package is called rust-coreutils - https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rust-coreutils For Debian/Ubuntu users, to have an idea of the complexity of packaging such applications, just run
debtree --build-dep rust-coreutils dot -Tsvg > coreutils.svg (should be around 1M). Since it isn't production ready, the rust-coreutils is installable in parallel with coreutils. This package does NOT replace the GNU/coreutils files (yet?), the new files are installed in /usr/lib/cargo/bin/. They can be used with: export PATH=/usr/lib/cargo/bin/:$PATH Or, uglier, overriding the files with the new ones.

Booting Debian with rust-coreutils To achieve this, because I knew I would likely break the image a few times, I created a new project to quickly install a full Debian with PXE and preseed. The project is available here: https://github.com/opencollab/qemu-debian-install-pxe-preseed/ A script to create the full qemu image: build_qemu_debian_image.sh A second script to boot on the newly created image: boot.sh Then, building and installing coreutils on the system (yeah, it is ugly - don t do that at home): apt install rust-coreutils
cd /usr/lib/cargo/bin/
for f in *; do
cp -f $f /usr/bin/
done
First surprise, unlike the old init.d init system, as systemd is not relying on a series of scripts (it is mostly written in C), replacing the coreutils did not have an impact. Therefore, I didn't experience any issue during the boot process

Installing the most popular Debian packages Debian packages rely a lot on post-install scripts (stored in /var/lib/dpkg/info/*) to finalize and configure packages. They are (almost?) all using /bin/sh (or /bin/bash) to perform these actions. They intensively call coreutils applications. For example, in /var/lib/dpkg/info/exim4-base.postinst, we can find: install -d -oDebian-exim -gadm -m2750 /var/log/exim4 With an ugly script, we can test the installations of the 1000 most popular packages one by one. Running this, some classes of issues in Rust/coreutils could be easily identified.

Implementing missing options A significant number of problems could be easily identified as a lack of support for some options. Here is a list of most of the fixes I had to implement to make this plan work:

• Implement ln --relative: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1540
  update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-12-amd64
ln: error: Unrecognized option: 'r'
  
  

• Implement cp --archive: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1580
  cp: error: Option 'archive' not yet implemented.
  
  

• Implement cp --no-dereference: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1528
  cp: error: Option 'dereference' not yet implemented.
  
  
• Implement sync -fs: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1639

• Implement install --owner & --group: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1641

• Implement mktemp -t https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1677
• ...

Different behavior Most of the programs behaved as expected. Here is a list of differences:

• install doesn't support using /dev/null as source file
  Setting up libreoffice-common (1:6.1.5-3+deb10u6) ...
install: error: install: cannot install /dev/null to /etc/apparmor.d/local/usr.lib.libreoffice.program.oosplash : the source path is not an existing regular file A limitation of rust itself https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/79390

• mkdir --parent is sometime used (instead of --parents) - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/commit/dbc716546b352c8b81af1952915137049ed12239

• "install foo.txt bar.txt" didn't work - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1644
  install: error: target bar.txt is not a directory

• install -d won't fail if a directory already exists - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1643

• ls non-existing-file wasn't returning an error code. "if ls" was used by some scripts - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1654

• One of the issue was that install -d /tmp/foo could not be executed twice (while the second run with the gnu version wouldn't trigger an error if already existing) - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1641
• ...

Compile Firefox, Clang and the Linux Kernel Build systems can vary significantly one from the other. To verify their usage of coreutils, I built these three major projects

Firefox As Firefox relies mostly on Python as a build system, it went smoothly. I didn t encounter any issue. The only unrelated issue that I noticed working on it was apt-key was broken because the script relied on a buggy option of mktemp.

Linux Kernel I identified only two issues compared to GNU Coreutils:

• The chown command on a non-existing symlink target doesn t fail on the GNU version, the Rust one was triggering an error.
  https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pull/1694
  
• Linux kernel
  ln -fsn ../../x86/boot/bzImage ./arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage
ln: error: Unrecognized option: 'n'

LLVM/Clang The llvm toolchain relies on Cmake. Just like for Firefox, I didn t face any issue.

Comparing with GNU coreutils using its testsuite Recently, James Robson added a new test to run the GNU testsuite on the Rust/coreutils.

# TOTAL: 611
# PASS: 144
# SKIP: 86
# XFAIL: 0
# FAIL: 342
# XPASS: 0
# ERROR: 39
compared to 546 test passing with the GNU version. Even if a bunch of errors are just different outputs, it demonstrates that there is still a long road ahead.

Next steps & contribute First, we will need more motivated contributors to work on this project. Many features remain to be implemented, optimizations to be done (e.g. decreasing the memory usage), etc.
I started to create a list of good first bugs for newcomers: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22Good+first+bug%22
I will update this list of there is some interest for this project.
Helping improve the support of the GNU coreutils testsuite would be a huge step while being a great way to learn Rust! Then, once it is in a better state, we will be able to make it a reliable alternative in Debian/Ubuntu to the GNU/Coreutils. This might be also interesting for other folks who prefer a BSD license over a GPL.

I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in 2020, but it was definitely an improvement on 74 in 2019, 53 in 2018 and 50 in 2017. But not only did I read more in a quantitative sense, the quality seemed higher as well. There were certainly fewer disappointments: given its cultural resonance, I was nonplussed by Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and whilst Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun was a little thin (again, given the obvious influence of the Bond franchise) the booked lacked 'thinness' in a way that made it interesting to critique. The weakest novel I read this year was probably J. M. Berger's Optimal, but even this hybrid of Ready Player One late-period Black Mirror wasn't that cringeworthy, all things considered. Alas, graphic novels continue to not quite be my thing, I'm afraid. I perhaps experienced more disappointments in the non-fiction section. Paul Bloom's Against Empathy was frustrating, particularly in that it expended unnecessary energy battling its misleading title and accepted terminology, and it could so easily have been an 20-minute video essay instead). (Elsewhere in the social sciences, David and Goliath will likely be the last Malcolm Gladwell book I voluntarily read.) After so many positive citations, I was also more than a little underwhelmed by Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and after Ryan Holiday's many engaging reboots of Stoic philosophy, his Conspiracy (on Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan taking on Gawker) was slightly wide of the mark for me. Anyway, here follows a selection of my favourites from 2020, in no particular order:

Fiction Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies & The Mirror and the Light Hilary Mantel During the early weeks of 2020, I re-read the first two parts of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy in time for the March release of The Mirror and the Light. I had actually spent the last few years eagerly following any news of the final instalment, feigning outrage whenever Mantel appeared to be spending time on other projects. Wolf Hall turned out to be an even better book than I remembered, and when The Mirror and the Light finally landed at midnight on 5th March, I began in earnest the next morning. Note that date carefully; this was early 2020, and the book swiftly became something of a heavy-handed allegory about the world at the time. That is to say and without claiming that I am Monsieur Cromuel in any meaningful sense it was an uneasy experience to be reading about a man whose confident grasp on his world, friends and life was slipping beyond his control, and at least in Cromwell's case, was heading inexorably towards its denouement. The final instalment in Mantel's trilogy is not perfect, and despite my love of her writing I would concur with the judges who decided against awarding her a third Booker Prize. For instance, there is something of the longueur that readers dislike in the second novel, although this might not be entirely Mantel's fault after all, the rise of the "ugly" Anne of Cleves and laborious trade negotiations for an uninspiring mineral (this is no Herbertian 'spice') will never match the court intrigues of Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and that man for all seasons, Thomas More. Still, I am already looking forward to returning to the verbal sparring between King Henry and Cromwell when I read the entire trilogy once again, tentatively planned for 2022.

The Fault in Our Stars John Green I came across John Green's The Fault in Our Stars via a fantastic video by Lindsay Ellis discussing Roland Barthes famous 1967 essay on authorial intent. However, I might have eventually come across The Fault in Our Stars regardless, not because of Green's status as an internet celebrity of sorts but because I'm a complete sucker for this kind of emotionally-manipulative bildungsroman, likely due to reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials a few too many times in my teens. Although its title is taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, The Fault in Our Stars is actually more Romeo & Juliet. Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient falls in love with Gus, an equally ill teen from her cancer support group. Hazel and Gus share the same acerbic (and distinctly unteenage) wit and a love of books, centred around Hazel's obsession of An Imperial Affliction, a novel by the meta-fictional author Peter Van Houten. Through a kind of American version of Jim'll Fix It, Gus and Hazel go and visit Van Houten in Amsterdam. I'm afraid it's even cheesier than I'm describing it. Yet just as there is a time and a place for Michelin stars and Haribo Starmix, there's surely a place for this kind of well-constructed but altogether maudlin literature. One test for emotionally manipulative works like this is how well it can mask its internal contradictions while Green's story focuses on the universalities of love, fate and the shortness of life (as do almost all of his works, it seems), The Fault in Our Stars manages to hide, for example, that this is an exceedingly favourable treatment of terminal illness that is only possible for the better off. The 2014 film adaptation does somewhat worse in peddling this fantasy (and has a much weaker treatment of the relationship between the teens' parents too, an underappreciated subtlety of the book). The novel, however, is pretty slick stuff, and it is difficult to fault it for what it is. For some comparison, I later read Green's Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns which, as I mention, tug at many of the same strings, but they don't come together nearly as well as The Fault in Our Stars. James Joyce claimed that "sentimentality is unearned emotion", and in this respect, The Fault in Our Stars really does earn it.

The Plague Albert Camus P. D. James' The Children of Men, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon ... dystopian fiction was already a theme of my reading in 2020, so given world events it was an inevitability that I would end up with Camus's novel about a plague that swept through the Algerian city of Oran. Is The Plague an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two? Where are all the female characters? Where are the Arab ones? Since its original publication in 1947, there's been so much written about The Plague that it's hard to say anything new today. Nevertheless, I was taken aback by how well it captured so much of the nuance of 2020. Whilst we were saying just how 'unprecedented' these times were, it was eerie how a novel written in the 1940s could accurately how many of us were feeling well over seventy years on later: the attitudes of the people; the confident declarations from the institutions; the misaligned conversations that led to accidental misunderstandings. The disconnected lovers. The only thing that perhaps did not work for me in The Plague was the 'character' of the church. Although I could appreciate most of the allusion and metaphor, it was difficult for me to relate to the significance of Father Paneloux, particularly regarding his change of view on the doctrinal implications of the virus, and spoiler alert that he finally died of a "doubtful case" of the disease, beyond the idea that Paneloux's beliefs are in themselves "doubtful". Answers on a postcard, perhaps. The Plague even seemed to predict how we, at least speaking of the UK, would react when the waves of the virus waxed and waned as well:

The disease stiffened and carried off three or four patients who were expected to recover. These were the unfortunates of the plague, those whom it killed when hope was high

It somehow captured the nostalgic yearning for high-definition videos of cities and public transport; one character even visits the completely deserted railway station in Oman simply to read the timetables on the wall.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carr There's absolutely none of the Mad Men glamour of James Bond in John le Carr 's icy world of Cold War spies:

Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, Smiley was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet.

Almost a direct rebuttal to Ian Fleming's 007, Tinker, Tailor has broken-down cars, bad clothes, women with their own internal and external lives (!), pathetically primitive gadgets, and (contra Mad Men) hangovers that significantly longer than ten minutes. In fact, the main aspect that the mostly excellent 2011 film adaption doesn't really capture is the smoggy and run-down nature of 1970s London this is not your proto-Cool Britannia of Austin Powers or GTA:1969, the city is truly 'gritty' in the sense there is a thin film of dirt and grime on every surface imaginable. Another angle that the film cannot capture well is just how purposefully the novel does not mention the United States. Despite the US obviously being the dominant power, the British vacillate between pretending it doesn't exist or implying its irrelevance to the matter at hand. This is no mistake on Le Carr 's part, as careful readers are rewarded by finding this denial of US hegemony in metaphor throughout --pace Ian Fleming, there is no obvious Felix Leiter to loudly throw money at the problem or a Sheriff Pepper to serve as cartoon racist for the Brits to feel superior about. By contrast, I recall that a clever allusion to "dusty teabags" is subtly mirrored a few paragraphs later with a reference to the installation of a coffee machine in the office, likely symbolic of the omnipresent and unavoidable influence of America. (The officer class convince themselves that coffee is a European import.) Indeed, Le Carr communicates a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the peeling wallpaper of Empire. Oftentimes, the writing style matches the graceless and inelegance of the world it depicts. The sentences are dense and you find your brain performing a fair amount of mid-flight sentence reconstruction, reparsing clauses, commas and conjunctions to interpret Le Carr 's intended meaning. In fact, in his eulogy-cum-analysis of Le Carr 's writing style, William Boyd, himself a ventrioquilist of Ian Fleming, named this intentional technique 'staccato'. Like the musical term, I suspect the effect of this literary staccato is as much about the impact it makes on a sentence as the imperceptible space it generates after it. Lastly, the large cast in this sprawling novel is completely believable, all the way from the Russian spymaster Karla to minor schoolboy Roach the latter possibly a stand-in for Le Carr himself. I got through the 500-odd pages in just a few days, somehow managing to hold the almost-absurdly complicated plot in my head. This is one of those classic books of the genre that made me wonder why I had not got around to it before.

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead According to the judges who awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys is "a devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida" that serves as a "powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". But whilst there is plenty of this perseverance and dignity on display, I found little redemption in this deeply cynical novel. It could almost be read as a follow-up book to Whitehead's popular The Underground Railroad, which itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Indeed, each book focuses on a young protagonist who might be euphemistically referred to as 'downtrodden'. But The Nickel Boys is not only far darker in tone, it feels much closer and more connected to us today. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that it is based on the story of the Dozier School in northern Florida which operated for over a century before its long history of institutional abuse and racism was exposed a 2012 investigation. Nevertheless, if you liked the social commentary in The Underground Railroad, then there is much more of that in The Nickel Boys:

Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.

Sardonic aper us of this kind are pretty relentless throughout the book, but it never tips its hand too far into on nihilism, especially when some of the visual metaphors are often first-rate: "An American flag sighed on a pole" is one I can easily recall from memory. In general though, The Nickel Boys is not only more world-weary in tenor than his previous novel, the United States it describes seems almost too beaten down to have the energy conjure up the Swiftian magical realism that prevented The Underground Railroad from being overly lachrymose. Indeed, even we Whitehead transports us a present-day New York City, we can't indulge in another kind of fantasy, the one where America has solved its problems:

The Daily News review described the [Manhattan restaurant] as nouveau Southern, "down-home plates with a twist." What was the twist that it was soul food made by white people?

It might be overly reductionist to connect Whitehead's tonal downshift with the racial justice movements of the past few years, but whatever the reason, we've ended up with a hard-hitting, crushing and frankly excellent book.

True Grit & No Country for Old Men Charles Portis & Cormac McCarthy It's one of the most tedious cliches to claim the book is better than the film, but these two books are of such high quality that even the Coen Brothers at their best cannot transcend them. I'm grouping these books together here though, not because their respective adaptations will exemplify some of the best cinema of the 21st century, but because of their superb treatment of language. Take the use of dialogue. Cormac McCarthy famously does not use any punctuation "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it" but the conversations in No Country for Old Men together feel familiar and commonplace, despite being relayed through this unconventional technique. In lesser hands, McCarthy's written-out Texan drawl would be the novelistic equivalent of white rap or Jar Jar Binks, but not only is the effect entirely gripping, it helps you to believe you are physically present in the many intimate and domestic conversations that hold this book together. Perhaps the cinematic familiarity helps, as you can almost hear Tommy Lee Jones' voice as Sheriff Bell from the opening page to the last. Charles Portis' True Grit excels in its dialogue too, but in this book it is not so much in how it flows (although that is delightful in its own way) but in how forthright and sardonic Maddie Ross is:

"Earlier tonight I gave some thought to stealing a kiss from you, though you are very young, and sick and unattractive to boot, but now I am of a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt." "One would be as unpleasant as the other."

Perhaps this should be unsurprising. Maddie, a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, can barely fire her father's heavy pistol, so she can only has words to wield as her weapon. Anyway, it's not just me who treasures this book. In her encomium that presages most modern editions, Donna Tartt of The Secret History fame traces the novels origins through Huckleberry Finn, praising its elegance and economy: "The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales". I've read any Chaucer, but I am inclined to agree. Tartt also recalls that True Grit vanished almost entirely from the public eye after the release of John Wayne's flimsy cinematic vehicle in 1969 this earlier film was, Tartt believes, "good enough, but doesn't do the book justice". As it happens, reading a book with its big screen adaptation as a chaser has been a minor theme of my 2020, including P. D. James' The Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, John le Carr 's Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy and even a staged production of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol streamed from The Old Vic. For an autodidact with no academic background in literature or cinema, I've been finding this an effective and enjoyable means of getting closer to these fine books and films it is precisely where they deviate (or perhaps where they are deficient) that offers a means by which one can see how they were constructed. I've also found that adaptations can also tell you a lot about the culture in which they were made: take the 'straightwashing' in the film version of Strangers on a Train (1951) compared to the original novel, for example. It is certainly true that adaptions rarely (as Tartt put it) "do the book justice", but she might be also right to alight on a legal metaphor, for as the saying goes, to judge a movie in comparison to the book is to do both a disservice.

The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel In The Glass Hotel, Mandel somehow pulls off the impossible; writing a loose roman- -clef on Bernie Madoff, a Ponzi scheme and the ephemeral nature of finance capital that is tranquil and shimmeringly beautiful. Indeed, don't get the wrong idea about the subject matter; this is no over over-caffeinated The Big Short, as The Glass Hotel is less about a Madoff or coked-up financebros but the fragile unreality of the late 2010s, a time which was, as we indeed discovered in 2020, one event away from almost shattering completely. Mandel's prose has that translucent, phantom quality to it where the chapters slip through your fingers when you try to grasp at them, and the plot is like a ghost ship that that slips silently, like the Mary Celeste, onto the Canadian water next to which the eponymous 'Glass Hotel' resides. Indeed, not unlike The Overlook Hotel, the novel so overflows with symbolism so that even the title needs to evoke the idea of impermanence permanently living in a hotel might serve as a house, but it won't provide a home. It's risky to generalise about such things post-2016, but the whole story sits in that the infinitesimally small distance between perception and reality, a self-constructed culture that is not so much 'post truth' but between them. There's something to consider in almost every character too. Take the stand-in for Bernie Madoff: no caricature of Wall Street out of a 1920s political cartoon or Brechtian satire, Jonathan Alkaitis has none of the oleaginous sleaze of a Dominic Strauss-Kahn, the cold sociopathy of a Marcus Halberstam nor the well-exercised sinuses of, say, Jordan Belford. Alkaitis is dare I say it? eminently likeable, and the book is all the better for it. Even the C-level characters have something to say: Enrico, trivially escaping from the regulators (who are pathetically late to the fraud without Mandel ever telling us explicitly), is daydreaming about the girlfriend he abandoned in New York: "He wished he'd realised he loved her before he left". What was in his previous life that prevented him from doing so? Perhaps he was never in love at all, or is love itself just as transient as the imaginary money in all those bank accounts? Maybe he fell in love just as he crossed safely into Mexico? When, precisely, do we fall in love anyway? I went on to read Mandel's Last Night in Montreal, an early work where you can feel her reaching for that other-worldly quality that she so masterfully achieves in The Glass Hotel. Her f ted Station Eleven is on my must-read list for 2021. "What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate. Not even Mandel cannot give us the answer, but this will certainly do for now.

Running the Light Sam Tallent Although it trades in all of the clich s and stereotypes of the stand-up comedian (the triumvirate of drink, drugs and divorce), Sam Tallent's debut novel depicts an extremely convincing fictional account of a touring road comic. The comedian Doug Stanhope (who himself released a fairly decent No Encore for the Donkey memoir in 2020) hyped Sam's book relentlessly on his podcast during lockdown... and justifiably so. I ripped through Running the Light in a few short hours, the only disappointment being that I can't seem to find videos online of Sam that come anywhere close to match up to his writing style. If you liked the rollercoaster energy of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, the cynicism of George Carlin and the car-crash invertibility of final season Breaking Bad, check this great book out.

Non-fiction Inside Story Martin Amis This was my first introduction to Martin Amis's work after hearing that his "novelised autobiography" contained a fair amount about Christopher Hitchens, an author with whom I had a one of those rather clich d parasocial relationship with in the early days of YouTube. (Hey, it could have been much worse.) Amis calls his book a "novelised autobiography", and just as much has been made of its quasi-fictional nature as the many diversions into didactic writing advice that betwixt each chapter: "Not content with being a novel, this book also wants to tell you how to write novels", complained Tim Adams in The Guardian. I suspect that reviewers who grew up with Martin since his debut book in 1973 rolled their eyes at yet another demonstration of his manifest cleverness, but as my first exposure to Amis's gift of observation, I confess that I was thought it was actually kinda clever. Try, for example, "it remains a maddening truth that both sexual success and sexual failure are steeply self-perpetuating" or "a hospital gym is a contradiction like a young Conservative", etc. Then again, perhaps I was experiencing a form of nostalgia for a pre-Gamergate YouTube, when everything in the world was a lot simpler... or at least things could be solved by articulate gentlemen who honed their art of rhetoric at the Oxford Union. I went on to read Martin's first novel, The Rachel Papers (is it 'arrogance' if you are, indeed, that confident?), as well as his 1997 Night Train. I plan to read more of him in the future.

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 1 & Volume 2 & Volume 3 & Volume 4 George Orwell These deceptively bulky four volumes contain all of George Orwell's essays, reviews and correspondence, from his teenage letters sent to local newspapers to notes to his literary executor on his deathbed in 1950. Reading this was part of a larger, multi-year project of mine to cover the entirety of his output. By including this here, however, I'm not recommending that you read everything that came out of Orwell's typewriter. The letters to friends and publishers will only be interesting to biographers or hardcore fans (although I would recommend Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 first). Furthermore, many of his book reviews will be of little interest today. Still, some insights can be gleaned; if there is any inconsistency in this huge corpus is that his best work is almost 'too' good and too impactful, making his merely-average writing appear like hackwork. There are some gems that don't make the usual essay collections too, and some of Orwell's most astute social commentary came out of series of articles he wrote for the left-leaning newspaper Tribune, related in many ways to the US Jacobin. You can also see some of his most famous ideas start to take shape years if not decades before they appear in his novels in these prototype blog posts. I also read Dennis Glover's novelised account of the writing of Nineteen-Eighty Four called The Last Man in Europe, and I plan to re-read some of Orwell's earlier novels during 2021 too, including A Clergyman's Daughter and his 'antebellum' Coming Up for Air that he wrote just before the Second World War; his most under-rated novel in my estimation. As it happens, and with the exception of the US and Spain, copyright in the works published in his lifetime ends on 1st January 2021. Make of that what you will.

Capitalist Realism & Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class Mark Fisher & Owen Jones These two books are not natural companions to one another and there is likely much that Jones and Fisher would vehemently disagree on, but I am pairing these books together here because they represent the best of the 'political' books I read in 2020. Mark Fisher was a dedicated leftist whose first book, Capitalist Realism, marked an important contribution to political philosophy in the UK. However, since his suicide in early 2017, the currency of his writing has markedly risen, and Fisher is now frequently referenced due to his belief that the prevalence of mental health conditions in modern life is a side-effect of various material conditions, rather than a natural or unalterable fact "like weather". (Of course, our 'weather' is being increasingly determined by a combination of politics, economics and petrochemistry than pure randomness.) Still, Fisher wrote on all manner of topics, from the 2012 London Olympics and "weird and eerie" electronic music that yearns for a lost future that will never arrive, possibly prefiguring or influencing the Fallout video game series. Saying that, I suspect Fisher will resonate better with a UK audience more than one across the Atlantic, not necessarily because he was minded to write about the parochial politics and culture of Britain, but because his writing often carries some exasperation at the suppression of class in favour of identity-oriented politics, a viewpoint not entirely prevalent in the United States outside of, say, Tour F. Reed or the late Michael Brooks. (Indeed, Fisher is likely best known in the US as the author of his controversial 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, but that does not figure greatly in this book). Regardless, Capitalist Realism is an insightful, damning and deeply unoptimistic book, best enjoyed in the warm sunshine I found it an ironic compliment that I had quoted so many paragraphs that my Kindle's copy protection routines prevented me from clipping any further. Owen Jones needs no introduction to anyone who regularly reads a British newspaper, especially since 2015 where he unofficially served as a proxy and punching bag for expressing frustrations with the then-Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. However, as the subtitle of Jones' 2012 book suggests, Chavs attempts to reveal the "demonisation of the working class" in post-financial crisis Britain. Indeed, the timing of the book is central to Jones' analysis, specifically that the stereotype of the "chav" is used by government and the media as a convenient figleaf to avoid meaningful engagement with economic and social problems on an austerity ridden island. (I'm not quite sure what the US equivalent to 'chav' might be. Perhaps Florida Man without the implications of mental health.) Anyway, Jones certainly has a point. From Vicky Pollard to the attacks on Jade Goody, there is an ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the 'chav' backlash, and that would be bad enough even if it was not being co-opted or criminalised for ideological ends. Elsewhere in political science, I also caught Michael Brooks' Against the Web and David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, although they are not quite methodical enough to recommend here. However, Graeber's award-winning Debt: The First 5000 Years will be read in 2021. Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another is worth a brief mention here though, but its sprawling nature felt very much like I was reading a set of Substack articles loosely edited together. And, indeed, I was.

The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing Ewan Clayton A recommendation from a dear friend, Ewan Clayton's The Golden Thread is a journey through the long history of the writing from the Dawn of Man to present day. Whether you are a linguist, a graphic designer, a visual artist, a typographer, an archaeologist or 'just' a reader, there is probably something in here for you. I was already dipping my quill into calligraphy this year so I suspect I would have liked this book in any case, but highlights would definitely include the changing role of writing due to the influence of textual forms in the workplace as well as digression on ergonomic desks employed by monks and scribes in the Middle Ages. A lot of books by otherwise-sensible authors overstretch themselves when they write about computers or other technology from the Information Age, at best resulting in bizarre non-sequiturs and dangerously Panglossian viewpoints at worst. But Clayton surprised me by writing extremely cogently and accurate on the role of text in this new and unpredictable era. After finishing it I realised why for a number of years, Clayton was a consultant for the legendary Xerox PARC where he worked in a group focusing on documents and contemporary communications whilst his colleagues were busy inventing the graphical user interface, laser printing, text editors and the computer mouse.

New Dark Age & Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life James Bridle & Adam Greenfield I struggled to describe these two books to friends, so I doubt I will suddenly do a better job here. Allow me to quote from Will Self's review of James Bridle's New Dark Age in the Guardian:

We're accustomed to worrying about AI systems being built that will either "go rogue" and attack us, or succeed us in a bizarre evolution of, um, evolution what we didn't reckon on is the sheer inscrutability of these manufactured minds. And minds is not a misnomer. How else should we think about the neural network Google has built so its translator can model the interrelation of all words in all languages, in a kind of three-dimensional "semantic space"?

New Dark Age also turns its attention to the weird, algorithmically-derived products offered for sale on Amazon as well as the disturbing and abusive videos that are automatically uploaded by bots to YouTube. It should, by rights, be a mess of disparate ideas and concerns, but Bridle has a flair for introducing topics which reveals he comes to computer science from another discipline altogether; indeed, on a four-part series he made for Radio 4, he's primarily referred to as "an artist". Whilst New Dark Age has rather abstract section topics, Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies is a rather different book altogether. Each chapter dissects one of the so-called 'radical' technologies that condition the choices available to us, asking how do they work, what challenges do they present to us and who ultimately benefits from their adoption. Greenfield takes his scalpel to smartphones, machine learning, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, etc., and I don't think it would be unfair to say that starts and ends with a cynical point of view. He is no reactionary Luddite, though, and this is both informed and extremely well-explained, and it also lacks the lazy, affected and Private Eye-like cynicism of, say, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain. The books aren't a natural pair, for Bridle's writing contains quite a bit of air in places, ironically mimics the very 'clouds' he inveighs against. Greenfield's book, by contrast, as little air and much lower pH value. Still, it was more than refreshing to read two technology books that do not limit themselves to platitudinal booleans, be those dangerously naive (e.g. Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable) or relentlessly nihilistic (Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Sure, they are both anti-technology screeds, but they tend to make arguments about systems of power rather than specific companies and avoid being too anti-'Big Tech' through a narrower, Silicon Valley obsessed lens for that (dipping into some other 2020 reading of mine) I might suggest Wendy Liu's Abolish Silicon Valley or Scott Galloway's The Four. Still, both books are superlatively written. In fact, Adam Greenfield has some of the best non-fiction writing around, both in terms of how he can explain complicated concepts (particularly the smart contract mechanism of the Ethereum cryptocurrency) as well as in the extremely finely-crafted sentences I often felt that the writing style almost had no need to be that poetic, and I particularly enjoyed his fictional scenarios at the end of the book.

The Algebra of Happiness & Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life Scott Galloway & Nir Eyal A cocktail of insight, informality and abrasiveness makes NYU Professor Scott Galloway uncannily appealing to guys around my age. Although Galloway definitely has his own wisdom and experience, similar to Joe Rogan I suspect that a crucial part of Galloway's appeal is that you feel you are learning right alongside him. Thankfully, 'Prof G' is far less err problematic than Rogan (Galloway is more of a well-meaning, spirited centrist), although he, too, has some pretty awful takes at time. This is a shame, because removed from the whirlwind of social media he can be really quite considered, such as in this long-form interview with Stephanie Ruhle. In fact, it is this kind of sentiment that he captured in his 2019 Algebra of Happiness. When I look over my highlighted sections, it's clear that it's rather schmaltzy out of context ("Things you hate become just inconveniences in the presence of people you love..."), but his one-two punch of cynicism and saccharine ("Ask somebody who purchased a home in 2007 if their 'American Dream' came true...") is weirdly effective, especially when he uses his own family experiences as part of his story:

A better proxy for your life isn't your first home, but your last. Where you draw your last breath is more meaningful, as it's a reflection of your success and, more important, the number of people who care about your well-being. Your first house signals the meaningful your future and possibility. Your last home signals the profound the people who love you. Where you die, and who is around you at the end, is a strong signal of your success or failure in life.

Nir Eyal's Indistractable, however, is a totally different kind of 'self-help' book. The important background story is that Eyal was the author of the widely-read Hooked which turned into a secular Bible of so-called 'addictive design'. (If you've ever been cornered by a techbro wielding a Wikipedia-thin knowledge of B. F. Skinner's behaviourist psychology and how it can get you to click 'Like' more often, it ultimately came from Hooked.) However, Eyal's latest effort is actually an extended mea culpa for his previous sin and he offers both high and low-level palliative advice on how to avoid falling for the tricks he so studiously espoused before. I suppose we should be thankful to capitalism for selling both cause and cure. Speaking of markets, there appears to be a growing appetite for books in this 'anti-distraction' category, and whilst I cannot claim to have done an exhausting study of this nascent field, Indistractable argues its points well without relying on accurate-but-dry "studies show..." or, worse, Gladwellian gotchas. My main criticism, however, would be that Eyal doesn't acknowledge the limits of a self-help approach to this problem; it seems that many of the issues he outlines are an inescapable part of the alienation in modern Western society, and the only way one can really avoid distraction is to move up the income ladder or move out to a 500-acre ranch.

Here s my (fifteenth) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian

This was my 24th month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/ Amongs a lot of things, this was month was crazy, hectic, adventerous, and the last of 2020 more on some parts later this month.
I finally finished my 7th semester (FTW!) and moved onto my last one! That said, I had been busy with other things but still did a bunch of Debian stuff Here are the following things I did this month:

Uploads and bug fixes:

• leiningen-clojure (2.9.1-3) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #973094.
• ruby-gh (0.18.0-2) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #976163.
• libgit2 (1.0.1+dfsg.1-3) - libgit2 transition; cf: bug #971571.
• libgit-raw-perl (0.87+ds-1) - Transition upload for bug #971567.
• python-pygit2 (1.3.0+dfsg1-2) - Transition upload for bug #971564.
• golang-gopkg-libgit2-git2go.v30 (30.3.2-1) - Transition upload for bug #976522.
• libgit2 (1.1.0+dfsg.1-1) - New upstream version, v1.1.0.
• golang-gopkg-libgit2-git2go.v31 (31.4.3-1) - Transition upload for bug #976522.
• libgit2 (1.1.0+dfsg.1-2) - libgit2 transition; cf: bug #971571.
• python-pygit2 (1.4.0+dfsg1-1) - New upstream version, v1.4.0.
• ruby-rugged (1.1.0+ds-1) - Transition upload for bug #971565.
• rails (2:6.0.3.4+dfsg-2) - Fixes for bug #976291 and 974065. Thanks, Praveen!
• ruby3.0 (3.0.0~preview2-1) - New upstream version, v3.0.0~preview2.
• golang-github-robertkrimen-otto (0.0~git20200922.ef014fd-1) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #976549.
• bidi-clojure (2.1.3-2) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #975224.
• comidi-clojure (0.3.2-2) - Fixing FTBFS, bug #975218.
• ruby3.0 (3.0.0~rc1-1) - New upstream version, v3.0.0~rc1.
• polybar (3.5.3-1) - New upstream version, v3.5.3.
• ruby3.0 (3.0.0-1) - New upstream version, v3.0.0. Merry Christmas! \o/
• pathetic-clojure (0.5.1-2) - Source-only upload for migration.
• url-clojure (0.1.1-2) - Source-only upload for migration.
• libgit2 (1.1.0+dfsg.1-3) - Fix for bug #972574. Thanks, Cedric!
• ruby-paper-trail (11.1.0-1) - New upstream version, 11.1.0.

Other $things:

• Attended the Debian Ruby team meeting.
• Mentoring for newcomers.
• FTP Trainee reviewing.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.
• Sponsored golang-github-gorilla-css for Fedrico.

---

Debian (E)LTS

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my fifteenth month as a Debian LTS and sixth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 26.00 hours for LTS and 38.25 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued DLA 2474-1, fixing CVE-2020-28928, for musl.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.1.16-3+deb9u1.
• Issued DLA 2481-1, fixing CVE-2020-25709 and CVE-2020-25710, for openldap.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.4.44+dfsg-5+deb9u6.
• Issued DLA 2484-1, fixing #969126, for python-certbot.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.28.0-1~deb9u3.
• Issued DLA 2487-1, fixing CVE-2020-27350, for apt.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.4.11. The update was prepared by the maintainer, Julian.
• Issued DLA 2488-1, fixing CVE-2020-27351, for python-apt.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.4.2. The update was prepared by the maintainer, Julian.
• Issued DLA 2495-1, fixing CVE-2020-17527, for tomcat8.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 8.5.54-0+deb9u5.
• Issued DLA 2488-2, for python-apt.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.4.3. The update was prepared by the maintainer, Julian.
• Issued DLA 2508-1, fixing CVE-2020-35730, for roundcube.
  For Debian 9 Stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.2.3+dfsg.1-4+deb9u8. The update was prepared by the maintainer, Guilhem.

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

• Issued ELA 324-1, fixing CVE-2020-28928, for musl.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.1.5-2+deb8u2.
• Issued ELA 325-1, fixing CVE-2020-28896, for mutt.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.5.23-3+deb8u4.
• Issued ELA 327-1, fixing CVE-2020-25709 and CVE-2020-25710, for openldap.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.4.40+dfsg-1+deb8u8.
• Issued ELA 335-1, fixing CVE-2020-0499, for flac.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.3.0-3+deb8u1.
• Issued ELA 340-1, fixing CVE-2020-35492, for cairo.
  For Debian 8 Jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.14.0-2.1+deb8u3.

Other (E)LTS Work:

• Front-desk duty from 21-12 until 27-12 and from 28-12 until 03-01 for both LTS and ELTS.
• Triaged openldap, python-certbot, lemonldap-ng, qemu, gdm3, open-iscsi, gobby, jackson-databind, wavpack, cairo, nsd, tomcat8, and bountycastle.
• Marked CVE-2020-17527/tomcat8 as not-affected for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-28052/bountycastle as not-affected for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-14394/qemu as postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-35738/wavpack as not-affected for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-3550 3-6 /qemu as postponed for jessie.
• Marked CVE-2020-3550 3-6 /qemu as postponed for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-16093/lemonldap-ng as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-27837/gdm3 as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020- 13987, 13988, 17437 /open-iscsi as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-35450/gobby as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-35728/jackson-databind as no-dsa for stretch.
• Marked CVE-2020-28935/nsd as no-dsa for stretch.
• Auto EOL ed libpam-tacplus, open-iscsi, wireshark, gdm3, golang-go.crypto, jackson-databind, spotweb, python-autobahn, asterisk, nsd, ruby-nokogiri, linux, and motion for jessie.
• General discussion on LTS private and public mailing list.

---

Other $things! \o/

Bugs and Patches Well, I did report some bugs and issues and also sent some patches:

• Issue #44 for github-activity-readme, asking for a feature request to set custom committer s email address.
• Issue #711 for git2go, reporting build failure for the library.
• PR #89 for rubocop-rails_config, bumping RuboCop::Packaging to v0.5.
• Issue #36 for rubocop-packaging, asking to try out mutant :)
• PR #212 for cucumber-ruby-core, bumping RuboCop::Packaging to v0.5.
• PR #213 for cucumber-ruby-core, enabling RuboCop::Packaging.
• Issue #19 for behance, asking to relax constraints on faraday and faraday_middleware.
• PR #37 for rubocop-packaging, enabling tests against ruby3.0! \o/
• PR #489 for cucumber-rails, bumping RuboCop::Packaging to v0.5.
• Issue #362 for nheko, reporting a crash when opening the application.
• PR #1282 for paper_trail, adding RuboCop::Packaging amongst other used extensions.
• Bug #978640 for nheko Debian package, reporting a crash, as a result of libfmt7 regression.

Misc and Fun Besides squashing bugs and submitting patches, I did some other things as well!

• Participated in my first Advent of Code event! :)
  Whilst it was indeed fun, I didn t really complete it. No reason, really. But I ll definitely come back stronger next year, heh! :)
  All the solutions thus far could be found here.
• Did a couple of reviews for some PRs and triaged some bugs here and there, meh.
• Also did some cloud debugging, not so fun if you ask me, but cool enough to make me want to do it again! ^_^
• Worked along with pollo, zigo, ehashman, rlb, et al for puppet and puppetserver in Debian. OMG, they re so lovely! <3
• Ordered some interesting books to read January onward. New year resolution? Meh, not really. Or maybe. But nah.
• Also did some interesting stuff this month but can t really talk about it now. Hopefully sooooon.

---

Until next time.
:wq for today.

TL;DR: CPS-conversion and defunctionalization can help you to come up with a constant-stack algorithm. Update: Turns out I inadvertedly plagiarized the talk The Best Refactoring You ve Never Heard Of by James Koppel. Please consider this a form of sincere flattery.

The starting point Today, I ll take you on a another little walk through the land of program transformations. Let s begin with a simple binary tree, with value of unknown type in the leaves, as well as the canonical map function:

data T a = L a   B (T a) (T a)
map1 :: (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map1 f (L x) = L (f x)
map1 f (B t1 t2) = B (map1 f t1) (map1 f t2)

As you can see, this map function is using the program stack as it traverses the tree. Our goal is now to come up with a map function that does not use the stack! Why? Good question! In Haskell, there wouldn t be a strong need for this, as the Haskell stack is allocated on the heap, just like your normal data, so there is plenty of stack space. But in other languages or environments, the stack space may have a hard limit, and it may be advised to not use unbounded stack space. That aside, it s a fun exercise, and that s sufficient reason for me. (In the following, I assume that tail-calls, i.e. those where a function end with another function call, but without modifying its result, do not actually use stack space. Once all recursive function calls are tail calls, the code is equivalent to an imperative loop, as we will see.)

Think? We could now just stare at the problem (rather the code), and try to come up with a solution directly. We d probably think ok, as I go through the tree, I have to remember all the nodes above me so I need a list of those nodes and for each of these nodes, I also need to remember whether I am currently processing the left child, and yet have to look at the right one, or whether I am done with the left child so what do I have to remember about the current node ? ah, my brain spins already. Maybe eventually I figure it out, but why think when we can derive the solution? So let s start with above map1, and rewrite it, in several, mechanical, steps into a stack-less, tail-recursive solution.

Go! Before we set out, let me rewrite the map function using a local go helper, as follows:

map2 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map2 f t = go t
  where
    go :: T a -> T b
    go (L x) = L (f x)
    go (B t1 t2) = B (go t1) (go t2)

This transformation (effectively the static argument transformation ) has the nice advantage that we do not have to pass f around all the time, and that when we copy the function, I only have to change the top-level name, but not the names of the inner functions. Also, I find it more aesthetically pleasing.

CPS A blunt, effective tool to turn code that is not yet using tail-calls into code that only uses tail-calls is use continuation-passing style. If we have a function of type -> t, we turn it into a function of type -> (t -> r) -> r, where r is the type of the result we want at the very end. This means the function now receives an extra argument, often named k for continuation, and instead of returning some x, the function calls k x. We can apply this to our go function. Here, both t and r happen to be T b; the type of finished trees:

map3 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map3 f t = go t (\r -> r)
  where
    go :: T a -> (T b -> T b) -> T b
    go (L x) k  = k (L (f x))
    go (B t1 t2) k  = go t1 (\r1 -> go t2 (\r2 -> k (B r1 r2)))

Note that when initially call go, we pass the identity function (\r -> r) as the initial continuation. Alas, suddenly all function calls are in tail position, and this codes does not use stack space! Technically, we are done, although it is not quite satisfying; all these lambdas floating around obscure the meaning of the code, are maybe a bit slow to execute, and also, we didn t really learn much yet. This is certainly not the code we would have writing after thinking hard .

Defunctionalization So let s continue rewriting the code to something prettier, simpler. Something that does not use lambdas like this. Again, there is a mechanical technique that can help it. It likely won't make the code prettier, but it will get rid of the lambdas, so let s do that an clean up later. The technique is called defunctionalization (because it replaces functional values by plain data values), and can be seen as a form of refinement. Note that we pass around vales of type (T b -> T b), but we certainly don t mean the full type (T b -> T b). Instead, only very specific values of that type occur in our program, So let us replace (T b -> T b) with a data type that contains representatives of just the values we actually use.

1. We find at all values of type (T b -> T b). These are:
   • (\r -> r)
   • (\r1 -> go t2 (\r2 -> k (B r1 r2)))
   • (\r2 -> k (B r1 r2))
2. We create a datatype with one constructor for each of these:

    data K = I   K1   K2

   (This is not complete yet.)
3. We introduce an interpretation function that turns a K back into a (T b -> T b):

   eval :: K -> (T b -> T b)
   eval = (* TBD *)

4. In the function go, instead of taking a parameter of type (T b -> T b), we take a K. And when we actually use the continuation, we have to turn the K back to the function using eval:

   go :: T a -> K a b -> T b
   go (L x) k  = eval k (L (f x))
   go (B t1 t2) k = go t1 K1

   We also do this to the code fragments identified in the first step; these become:
   • (\r -> r)
   • (\r1 -> go t2 K2)
   • (\r2 -> eval k (B r1 r2))
5. Now we complete the eval function: For each constructor, we simply map it to the corresponding lambda from step 1:

   eval :: K -> (T b -> T b)
   eval I = (\r -> r)
   eval K1 = (\r1 -> go t2 K2)
   eval K2 = (\r2 -> eval k (B r1 r2))

6. This doesn t quite work yet: We have variables on the right hand side that are not bound (t2, r1, k). So let s add them to the constructors K1 and K2 as needed. This also changes the type K itself; it now needs to take type parameters.

This leads us to the following code:

data K a b
  = I
    K1 (T a) (K a b)
    K2 (T b) (K a b)
map4 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map4 f t = go t I
  where
    go :: T a -> K a b -> T b
    go (L x) k  = eval k (L (f x))
    go (B t1 t2) k  = go t1 (K1 t2 k)
    eval :: K a b -> (T b -> T b)
    eval I = (\r -> r)
    eval (K1 t2 k) = (\r1 -> go t2 (K2 r1 k))
    eval (K2 r1 k) = (\r2 -> eval k (B r1 r2))

Not really cleaner or prettier, but everything is still tail-recursive, and we are now working with plain data.

We like lists To clean it up a little bit, we can notice that the K data type really is just a list of values, where the values are either T a or T b. We do not need a custom data type for this! Instead of our K, we can just use the following, built from standard data types:

type K' a b = [Either (T a) (T b)]

Now I replace I with [], K1 t2 k with Left t2 : k and K2 r1 k with Right r1 : k. I also, very suggestively, rename go to down and eval to up:

map5 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map5 f t = down t []
  where
    down :: T a -> K' a b -> T b
    down (L x) k  = up k (L (f x))
    down (B t1 t2) k  = down t1 (Left t2 : k)
    up :: K' a b -> T b -> T b
    up [] r = r
    up (Left  t2 : k) r1 = down t2 (Right r1 : k)
    up (Right r1 : k) r2 = up k (B r1 r2)

At this point, the code suddenly makes more sense again. In fact, I can try to verbalize it:

As we traverse the tree, we have to remember for all parent nodes, whether there is still something Left to do when we come back to it (so we remember a T a), or if we are done with that (so we have a T b). This is the list K' a b. We begin to go down the left of the tree (noting that the right siblings are still left to do), until we hit a leaf. We transform the leaf, and then go up. If we go up and hit the root, we are done. Else, if we go up and there is something Left to do, we remember the subtree that we just processed (as that is already in the Right form), and go down the other subtree. But if we go up and there is nothing Left to do, we put the two subtrees together and continue going up.

Quite neat!

The imperative loop At this point we could stop: the code is pretty, makes sense, and has the properties we want. But let s turn the dial a bit further and try to make it an imperative loop. We know that if we have a single tail-recursive function, then that s equivalent to a loop, with the function s parameter turning into mutable variables. But we have two functions! It turns out that if you have two functions a -> r and b -> r that have the same return type (which they necessarily have here, since we CPS-converted them further up), then those two functions are equivalent to a single function taking a or b , i.e. Either a b -> r. This really nothing else than the high-school level algebra rule of r^a r^b = r^{a + b}. So (after reordering the arguments of down to put T b first) we can rewrite the code as

map6 :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
map6 f t = go (Left t) []
  where
    go :: Either (T a) (T b) -> K' a b -> T b
    go (Left (L x))     k        = go (Right (L (f x))) k
    go (Left (B t1 t2)) k        = go (Left t1) (Left t2 : k)
    go (Right r)  []             = r
    go (Right r1) (Left  t2 : k) = go (Left t2) (Right r1 : k)
    go (Right r2) (Right r1 : k) = go (Right (B r1 r2)) k

Do you see the loop yet? If not, maybe it helps to compare it with the following equivalent imperative looking pseudo-code:

mapLoop :: forall a b. (a -> b) -> T a -> T b
mapLoop f t  
  var node = Left t;
  var parents = [];
  while (true)  
    switch (node)  
      Left (L x) -> node := Right (L (f x))
      Left (B t1 t2) -> node := Left t1; parents.push(Left t2)
      Right r1 ->  
        if (parents.len() == 0)  
          return r1;
          else  
          switch (parents.pop())  
            Left t2  -> node := Left t2; parents.push(Right r1);
            Right r2 -> node := Right (B r1 r2)
           
         
       
     
   
 

Conclusion I find it enlightening to see how apparently very different approaches to a problem (recursive, lazy functions and imperative loops) are connected by a series of rather mechanical transformations. When refactoring code, it is helpful to see if one can conceptualize the refactoring as one of those mechanical steps (refinement, type equivalences, defunctionalization, cps conversion etc.) If you liked this post, you might enjoy my talk The many faces of isOrderedTree, which I have presented at MuniHac 2019 and Haskell Love 2020.

A new maintenance release, now at version 0.0.18, of RcppAnnoy is now 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 famous Spotify music discovery algorithm. This release is follow-up to release 0.0.17 which was made four weeks ago, and which brought the new upstream release 1.17 of Annoy. We now have an updated upstream with a PR by Aaron aiming for improved control of RNG seeding to ensure better reproducibility, along with extended tests and new helpers for RcppAnnoy and Annoy version numbers. The release was once again coordinated with Annoy and James whose BiocNeighbors and uwot packages both consume the Annoy header library shipped here. Detailed changes follow below.

Changes in version 0.0.18 (2020-12-15)

• Small tweaks to threading policy header defines (Dirk closing #65)
• Vignette code is again compiled during testing (Aaron Lum and Dirk in #66 addressing #64)
• Upstream code (with Aaron's PR) was synchronized once more (Dirk in #67)
• A new helper function was added to report the Annoy version (Aaron in #68)

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.

A new release 0.0.17 of RcppAnnoy is now 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 famous Spotify music discovery algorithm. This release brings a new upstream version 1.17, released a few weeks ago, which adds multithreaded index building. This changes the API by adding a new threading policy parameter requiring code using the main Annoy header to update. For this reason we waited a little for the dust to settle on the BioConductor 3.12 release before bringing the changes to BiocNeighbors via this commit and to uwot via this simple PR. Aaron and James updated their packages accordingly so by the time I uploaded RcppAnnoy it made for very smooth sailing as we all had done our homework with proper conditional builds, and the package had no other issue preventing automated processing at CRAN. Yay. I also added a (somewhat overdue one may argue) header file RcppAnnoy.h regrouping defines and includes which should help going forward. Detailed changes follow below.

Changes in version 0.0.17 (2020-11-15)

• Upgrade to Annoy 1.17, but default to serial use.
• Add new header file to regroup includes and defines.
• Upgrade CI script to use R with bspm on focal.

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 now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Benda XU (orv)
• Joseph Nahmias (jello)
• Marcos Fouces (marcos)
• Hayashi Kentaro (kenhys)
• James Valleroy (jvalleroy)
• Helge Deller (deller)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Ricardo Ribalda Delgado
• Pierre Gruet
• Henry-Nicolas Tourneur
• Alo s Micard
• J r me Lebleu
• Nis Martensen
• Stephan Lachnit
• Felix Salfelder
• Aleksey Kravchenko
• tienne Mollier

Congratulations!

Another maintenance RVowpalWabbit package update brought us to version 0.0.15 earlier today. We attempted to fix one compilation error on Solaris, and addressed a few SAN/UBSAN issues with the gcc build. As noted before, there is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out. CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Another maintenance RVowpalWabbit package update brings us to version 0.0.14. This time CRAN asked us to replace the (long obsoleted C-library) function ftime(). Along the way, we also updated links in the DESCRIPTION file to the (spiffy!!) new vowpalwabbit.org website, updated Travis use and fine-tuned some autoconf code in configure.ac. There is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out. It should go to CRAN eventually once we have better mechanisms to support external libraries. CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. More information is on the RVowpalWabbit page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Review: A Grand and Bold Thing, by Ann Finkbeiner

Publisher:	Free Press
Copyright:	August 2010
ISBN:	1-4391-9647-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	200

With the (somewhat excessively long) subtitle of An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In a New Era of Discovery, this is a history of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It's structured as a mostly chronological history of the project with background profiles on key project members, particularly James Gunn. Those who follow my blog will know that I recently started a new job at Vera C. Rubin Observatory (formerly the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope). Our goal is to take a complete survey of the night sky several times a week for ten years. That project is the direct successor of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and its project team includes many people who formerly worked on Sloan. This book (and another one, Giant Telescopes) was recommended to me as a way to come up to speed on the history of this branch of astronomy. Before reading this book, I hadn't understood how deeply the ready availability of the Sloan sky survey data had changed astronomy. Prior to the availability of that survey data, astronomers would develop theories and then try to book telescope time to make observations to test those theories. That telescope time was precious and in high demand, so was not readily available, and was vulnerable to poor weather conditions (like overcast skies) once the allocated time finally arrived. The Sloan project changed all of that. Its output was a comprehensive sky survey available digitally whenever and wherever an astronomer needed it. One could develop a theory and then search the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for relevant data and, for at least some types of theories, test that theory against the data without needing precious telescope time or new observations. It was a transformational change in astronomy, made possible by the radical decision, early in the project, to release all of the data instead of keeping it private to a specific research project. The shape of that change is one takeaway from this book. The other is how many problems the project ran into trying to achieve that goal. About a third of the way into this book, I started wondering if the project was cursed. So many things went wrong, from institutional politics through equipment failures to software bugs and manufacturing problems with the telescope mirror. That makes it all the more impressive how much impact the project eventually had. It's also remarkable just how many bad things can happen to a telescope mirror without making the telescope unusable. Finkbeiner provides the most relevant astronomical background as she tells the story so that the unfamiliar reader can get an idea of what questions the Sloan survey originally set out to answer (particularly about quasars), but this is more of a project history than a popular astronomy book. There's enough astronomy here for context, but not enough to satisfy curiosity. If you're like me, expect to have your curiosity piqued, possibly resulting in buying popular surveys of current astronomy research. (At least one review is coming soon.) Obviously this book is of special interest to me because of my new field of work, my background at a research university, and because it features some of my co-workers. I'm not sure how interesting it will be to someone without that background and personal connection. But if you've ever been adjacent to or curious about how large-scale science projects are done, this is a fascinating story. Both the failures and problems and the way they were eventually solved is different than how the more common stories of successful or failed companies are told. (It helps, at least for me, that the shared goal was to do science, rather than to make money for a corporation whose fortunes are loosely connected to those of the people doing the work.) Recommended if this topic sounds at all interesting. Rating: 7 out of 10

Catching up on accumulated book purchases. I'm going to get another burst of reading time over the holidays (and am really looking forward to it). Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination (sff)
James Blish A Case of Conscience (sff)
Leigh Brackett The Long Tomorrow (sff)
Algis Budrys Who? (sff)
Frances Hardinge Fly By Night (sff)
Robert A. Heinlein Double Star (sff)
N.K. Jemisin The Obelisk Gate (sff)
N.K. Jemisin The Stone Sky (sff)
T. Kingfisher Clockwork Boys (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin City of Illusions (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin The Complete Orsinia (historical)
Ursula K. Le Guin The Dispossessed (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin Five Ways to Forgiveness (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin The Left Hand of Darkness (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin Planet of Exile (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin Rocannon's World (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin The Telling (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin The World for Word Is Forest (sff)
Fritz Leiber The Big Time (sff)
Melina Marchetta Saving Francesca (mainstream)
Richard Matheson The Shrinking Man (sff)
Foz Meadows An Accident of Stars (sff)
Dexter Palmer Version Control (sff)
Frederick Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth The Space Merchants (sff)
Adam Rex True Meaning of Smekday (sff)
John Scalzi The Dispatcher (sff)
Julia Spencer-Fleming In the Bleak Midwinter (mystery)
R.E. Stearns Barbary Station (sff)
Theodore Sturgeon More Than Human (sff)
I'm listing the individual components except for the Orsinia collection, but the Le Guin are from the Library of America Hainish Novels & Stories two-volume set. I had several of these already, but I have a hard time resisting a high-quality Library of America collection for an author I really like. Now I can donate a bunch of old paperbacks. Similarly, a whole bunch of the older SF novels are from the Library of America American Science Fiction two-volume set, which I finally bought since I was ordering Library of America sets anyway. The rest is a pretty random collection of stuff, although several of them are recommendations from Light. I was reading through her old reviews and getting inspired to read (and review) more.

I started web development around late 1994. Some of my earliest paid web work is still online (dated June 1995). Clearly, that was a simpler time for content! I went on to be Webmaster (yes, for those joining us in the last decade, that was a job title once) for UWA, and then for Hartley Poynton/JDV.com at time when security became important as commerce boomed online. At the dawn of the web era, the consideration of backwards compatibility with older web clients (browsers) was deemed to be important; content had to degrade nicely, even without any CSS being applied. As the years stretched out, the legacy became longer and longer. Until now. In mid-2018, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) 3.2 comes into effect, requiring card holder environments to use (at minimum) TLS 1.2 for the encrypted transfer of data. Of course, that s also the maximum version typically available today (TLS 1.3 is in draft 21 at this point in time of writing). This effort by the PCI is forcing people to adopt new browsers that can do the TLS 1.2 protocol (and the encryption ciphers that permits), typically by running modern/recent Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge browsers. And for the majority of people, Chrome is their choice, and the majority of those are all auto-updating on every release. Many are pushing to be compliant with the 2018 PCI DSS 3.2 as early as possible; your logging of negotiated protocols and ciphers will show if your client base is ready as well. I ve already worked with one government agency to demonstrate they were ready, and have already helped disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on their public facing web sites (and previously SSL v3). We ve removed RC4 ciphers, 3DES ciphers, and enabled ephemeral key ciphers to provide forward secrecy. Web developers (writing Javascript and using various frameworks) can rejoice the age of having to support legacy MS IE 6/7/8/9/10 is pretty much over. None of those browsers support TLS 1.2 out of the box (IE 10 can turn this on, but for some reason, it is off by default). This makes Javascript code smaller as it doesn t have to have conditional code to work with the quirks of those older clients. But as we find ourselves with modern clients, we can now ask those clients to be complicit in our attempts to secure the content we serve. They understand modern security constructs such as Content Security Policies and other HTTP security-related headers. There s two tools I am currently using to help in this battle to improve web security. One is SSLLabs.com, the work of Ivan Risti (and now owned/sponsored by Qualys). This tool gives a good view of the encryption in flight (protocols, ciphers), chain of trust (certificate), and a new addition of checking DNS records for CAA records (which I and others piled on a feature request for AWS Route53 to support). The second tool is Scott Helm s SecurityHeaders.io, which looks at the HTTP headers that web content uses to ask browsers to enforce security on the client side. There s a really important reason why these tools are good; they are maintained. As new recommendations on ciphers, protocols, signature algorithms or other actions become recommended, they re updated on these tools. And these tools are produced by very small, but agile teams like one person teams, without the bureaucracy (and lag) associated with large enterprise tools. But these shouldn t be used blindly. These services make suggestions, and you should research them yourselves. For some, not all the recommendations may meet your personal risk profile. Personally, I m uncomfortable with Public-Key-Pins, so that can wait for a while indeed, Chrome has now signalled they will drop this. So while PCI is hitting merchants with their DSS-compliance stick (and making it plainly obvious what they have to do), we re getting a side-effect of having a concrete reason for drawing a line under where our backward compatibility must stretch back to, and the ability to have the web client assist in ensure security of content.

Debian subversion

• Continued work on updating the packaging
  • Thanks to some hints from Daniel Shahaf, realized the entire build was running from the binary target, thus as root. This was the cause for the test failures I had been seeing last month.
• Pushed some long standing patches upstream
  • r1811786

vim

• Uploaded version 2:8.0.1226-1
  • Improved syntax highlighting for debian/control files. Thanks to Mattia Rizzolo for reminding me to look at deb-src-control(5).
  • Updated debsources and debchangelog syntax highlighting for new/unsupported releases in Debian and Ubuntu. Josh Triplett spotted a syntax error which will be fixed in the next upload.
• Reported upstream that a particular test was failing on many of our buildds.
  • Upstream released a fix to sleep longer before moving on in the test.
  • I proposed that it may be better to check for the actual desired state instead.

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libvterm

• Proposed an API for reporting focus events, which was merged. (r713)

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pangoterm

• Proposed a change to use libvterm's new API, which was merged. (r598)

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vim-gnupg

• Fixed an issue that prevented saving the encrypted buffer if the file was opened with a relative path and the user had subsequently changed the working directory. (vim-gnupg#81)

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neovim

• Added tests and merged my PR to ignore leading modifier commands (e.g., :silent, :keeppatterns) when using 'inccommand'. (neovim#6967)
• Potentially root-caused a Neovim hang as being caused by a Debian-specific patch to libuv.

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vim

• During a discussion in a Neovim issue, I was reminded that :lockmarks doesn't affect Vim's '[ and '] marks. I had previously worked around this in vim-gnupg, but seeing someone else run into the issue spurred me to look into it more. Unlike many other marks, Vim doesn't distinctly track these "last change/yank" marks. They're tracked the same way that the range of the current "operation" are -- the b_op_start and b_op_end items in the buf_T struct. This makes the problem a little more touchy, since those are changed in many places. After I had a working prototype, I decided to take a step back and see if there were tests related to what I was going to be changing. Unfortunately, there weren't many and none that dealt with autocmds. These marks are especially relevant for Vim's autocmds because many of those provide the plugin author with information through the '[ and '] marks. That means :lockmarks needs to preserve the state of the marks for the user, but still communicate the relevant information for the autocmds. To that end, I submitted a pull request to test how these marks are affected by autocmds. Once that's merged, I'll feel more comfortable with proposing the existing prototype, which only covers :write, :read, the :diff* commands, and filtering.

Review: Waypoint Kangaroo, by Curtis C. Chen

Series:	Kangaroo #1
Publisher:	Thomas Dunne
Copyright:	June 2016
ISBN:	1-250-08179-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	312

Disclaimer: Curtis was a classmate of mine at Stanford and part of the same social circle. That was a surprisingly long time ago. Kangaroo is a spy (and, for this book, you should think James Bond). Agency training, fake identities, lots of gadgets, grumpy yet ridiculously competent support staff... the typical package. But Kangaroo also has a special power, which is the entire reason he ended up in the position he has. He's apparently the only person in the world who can open the pocket: a hole into another dimension, which can function as infinite storage and quite a bit more. Waypoint Kangaroo opens with the tail end of a mission and Kangaroo in action, as an introduction to Kangaroo's first-person narrative voice, job, and the capabilities of the pocket. But the real story starts when Kangaroo is sent on vacation. The office is being audited, Kangaroo hasn't had time off basically ever, and his boss insists on a trip to Mars on the space equivalent of a cruise ship. No work. An expense account. Just relax and have fun. Kangaroo isn't sure he knows how to not work. Or how to avoid boredom when trying hard to not work. It leads to probably ill-advised decisions like falling in love at first glance with the chief engineer, or going on entirely unauthorized spacewalks in the middle of the night. It's very lucky for him that the captain of this commercial cruise ship appears to also work for his agency. And it's good for his inability to stop working that there's a murder on board. For a first novel, this is refreshingly free of a lot of first novel problems. It's lean, well-structured, easy to follow, moves right along, and doesn't feel over-stuffed with exposition or world-building. There's an interplanetary war in the past background, and of course a lot of loving description of the precise mechanics of the pocket and the tricks with momentum and retrieval Kangaroo can do with it, but the book never falls into too much explanation. And the plot is satisfyingly twisty. It's an action story plot, to be clear: don't expect deep puzzles or complex deduction. But there are enough players and hidden motives to keep things interesting. The downside is that I didn't like Kangaroo very much. He's a bit of an ass. Some of this goes with the spy novel territory, and some of it is good (if occasionally grating) characterization. Kangaroo doesn't know how to turn off the part of his brain that makes everything a mission. But his flippant, know-it-all attitude got on my nerves after a book full of first-person narration, and while (full credit to Curtis here) the romance in this book is clearly consensual and stays well away from the creepy romances so common in spy stories, the love-at-first sight bits and some of Kangaroo's awkward reactions provoked more eye-rolling than enjoyment. A lot of this is just personal taste, but that's the peril of books told with first-person narration. The reader has to really like the protagonist to spend a whole book in their head. If that relationship doesn't click, the supporting characters have a harder time salvaging the experience. Waypoint Kangaroo avoids the problem of too many loving descriptions of guns, partly because it's a spy novel and instead has loving descriptions of spy equipment in a future that supports implanted devices. I think there was a smidgen too much of this, but it was within genre conventions and spy stuff is more interesting than guns. But (and I admit that this is probably idiosyncratic), it also had way too many loving descriptions of alcohol and one drunk scene. I don't care to ever read another book with a drunk protagonist (particularly first-person), and I care considerably less about alcohol than I do about spy equipment or guns. That said, I still liked this well enough that I'll probably buy the sequel. (No cliffhangers; Waypoint Kangaroo is a complete story. But this is a character who could easily support a long episodic series.) The pocket is a neat gimmick, the world background is at least mildly interesting, and some of the supporting characters were excellent. (Particularly the security chief and the engineer.) I might even warm to Kangaroo over time if subsequent stories stay more on his creative fast-talking rather than his drinking and awkward romances. I don't think this is quite good enough for me to recommend it, but if you're in the mood for a light and fast-moving first-person Bond-style story with science fiction trappings, it does deliver. Rating: 6 out of 10