The Unbroken is the first book of a projected fantasy trilogy. It
is C.L. Clark's first novel.
Lieutenant Touraine is one of the Sands, the derogatory name for the
Balladairan Colonial Brigade. She, like the others of her squad, are
conscript soldiers, kidnapped by the Balladairan Empire from their
colonies as children and beaten into "civilized" behavior by Balladairan
training. They fought in the Balladairan war against the Taargens. Now,
they've been reassigned to El-Wast, capital city of Qaz l, the foremost of
the southern colonies. The place where Touraine was born, from which she
was taken at the age of five.
Balladaire is not France and Qaz l is not Algeria, but the parallels are
obvious and strongly implied by the map and the climates.
Touraine and her squad are part of the forces accompanying Princess Luca,
the crown princess of the Balladairan Empire, who has been sent to take
charge of Qaz l and quell a rebellion. Luca's parents died in the
Withering, the latest round of a recurrent plague that haunts Balladaire.
She is the rightful heir, but her uncle rules as regent and is reluctant
to give her the throne. Qaz l is where she is to prove herself. If she
can bring the colony in line, she can prove that she's ready to rule: her
birthright and her destiny.
The Qaz li are uninterested in being part of Luca's grand plan of personal
accomplishment. She steps off her ship into an assassination attempt,
foiled by Touraine's sharp eyes and quick reactions, which brings the Sand
to the princess's attention. Touraine's reward is to be assigned the
execution of the captured rebels, one of whom recognizes her and names her
mother before he dies. This sets up the core of the plot: Qaz li
rebellion against an oppressive colonial empire, Luca's attempt to use the
colony as a political stepping stone, and Touraine caught in between.
One of the reasons why I am happy to see increased diversity in SFF
authors is that the way we tell stories is shaped by our cultural
upbringing. I was taught to tell stories about colonialism and rebellion
in a specific ideological shape. It's hard to describe briefly, but the
core idea is that being under the rule of someone else is unnatural as
well as being an injustice. It's a deviation from the way the world
should work, something unexpected that is inherently unstable. Once
people unite to overthrow their oppressors, eventual success is
inevitable; it's not only right or moral, it's the natural path of
history. This is what you get when you try to peel the supremacy part
away from white supremacy but leave the unshakable self-confidence and
bedrock assumption that the universe cares what we think.
We were also taught that rebellion is primarily ideological. One may be
motivated by personal injustice, but the correct use of that injustice is
to subsume it into concepts such as freedom and democracy. Those concepts
are more "real" in some foundational sense, more central to the right
functioning of the world, than individual circumstance. When the
now-dominant group tells stories of long-ago revolution, there is no
personal experience of oppression and survival in which to ground the
story; instead, it's linked to anticipatory fear in the reader, to the
idea that one's privileges could be taken away by a foreign oppressor and
that the counter to this threat is ideological unity.
Obviously, not every white fantasy author uses this story shape, but the
tendency runs deep because we're taught it young. You can see it
everywhere in fantasy, from Lord of the Rings to
Tigana. The Unbroken uses a much
different story shape, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the
author is Black.
Touraine is not sympathetic to the Qaz li. These are not her people and
this is not her life. She went through hell in Balladairan schools, but
she won a place, however tenuous. Her personal role model is General
Cantic, the Balladairan Blood General who was also one of her instructors.
Cantic is hard as nails, unforgiving, unbending, and probably a war
criminal, but also the embodiment of a military ethic. She is tough but
fair with the conscript soldiers. She doesn't put a stop to their
harassment by the regular Balladairan troops, but neither does she let it
go too far. Cantic has power, she knows how to keep it, and there is a
place for Touraine in Cantic's world.
And, critically, that place is not just hers: it's one she shares with her
squad. Touraine's primary loyalty is not to Balladaire or to Qaz l. It's
to the Sands. Her soldiers are neither one thing nor the other, and they
disagree vehemently among themselves about what Qaz l and their other
colonial homes should be to them, but they learned together, fought
together, and died together. That theme is woven throughout The
Unbroken: personal bonds, third and fourth loyalties, and practical
ethics of survival that complicate and contradict simple dichotomies of
oppressor and oppressed.
Touraine is repeatedly offered ideological motives that the protagonist in
the typical story shape would adopt. And she repeatedly rejects them for
personal bonds: trying to keep her people safe, in a world that is not
looking out for them.
The consequence is that this book tears Touraine apart. She tries to walk
a precarious path between Luca, the Qaz li, Cantic, and the Sands, and she
falls off that path a lot. Each time I thought I knew where this book was
going, there's another reversal, often brutal. I tend to be a
happily-ever-after reader who wants the protagonist to get everything they
need, so this isn't my normal fare. The amount of hell that Touraine goes
through made for difficult reading, worse because much of it is due to her
own mistakes or betrayals. But Clark makes those decisions believable
given the impossible position Touraine is in and the lack of role models
she has for making other choices. She's set up to fail, and the price of
small victories is to have no one understand the decisions that she makes,
or to believe her motives.
Luca is the other viewpoint character of the book (and yes, this is also a
love affair, which complicates both of their loyalties). She is the
heroine of a more typical genre fantasy novel: the outsider princess with
a physical disability and a razor-sharp mind, ambitious but fair (at least
in her own mind), with a trusted bodyguard advisor who also knew her
father and a sincere desire to be kinder and more even-handed in her
governance of the colony. All of this is real; Luca is a protagonist, and
the reader is not being set up to dislike her. But compared to Touraine's
grappling with identity, loyalty, and ethics, Luca is never in any real
danger, and her concerns start to feel too calculated and superficial.
It's hard to be seriously invested in whether Luca proves herself or gets
her throne when people are being slaughtered and abused.
This, I think, is the best part of this book. Clark tells a traditional
ideological fantasy of learning to be a good ruler, but she puts it
alongside a much deeper and more complex story of multi-faceted
oppression. She has the two protagonists fall in love with each other and
challenges them to understand each other, and Luca does not come off well
in this comparison. Touraine is frustrated, impulsive, physical, and
sometimes has catastrophically poor judgment. Luca is analytical and
calculating, and in most ways understands the political dynamics far
better than Touraine. We know how this story usually goes: Luca sees
Touraine's brilliance and lifts her out of the ranks into a role of
importance and influence, which Touraine should reward with loyalty. But
Touraine's world is more real, more grounded, and more authentic, and both
Touraine and the reader know what Luca could offer is contingent and comes
with a higher price than Luca understands.
(Incidentally, the cover of The Unbroken, designed by Lauren
Panepinto with art by Tommy Arnold, is astonishingly good at capturing
both Touraine's character and the overall feeling of the book. Here's a
larger version.)
The writing is good but uneven. Clark loves reversals, and they did keep
me reading, but I think there were too many of them. By the end of the
book, the escalation of betrayals and setbacks was more exhausting than
exciting, and I'd stopped trusting anything good would last. (Admittedly,
this is an accurate reflection of how Touraine felt.) Touraine's inner
monologue also gets a bit repetitive when she's thrashing in the jaws of
an emotional trap. I think some of this is first-novel problems of
over-explaining emotional states and character reasoning, but these
problems combine to make the book feel a bit over-long.
I'm also not in love with the ending. It's perhaps the one place in the
book where I am more cynical about the politics than Clark is, although
she does lay the groundwork for it.
But this book is also full of places small and large where it goes a
different direction than most fantasy and is better for it. I think my
favorite small moment is Touraine's quiet refusal to defend herself
against certain insinuations. This is such a beautiful bit of
characterization; she knows she won't be believed anyway, and refuses to
demean herself by trying.
I'm not sure I can recommend this book unconditionally, since I think you
have to be in the mood for it, but it's one of the most thoughtful and
nuanced looks at colonialism and rebellion I can remember seeing in
fantasy. I found it frustrating in places, but I'm also still thinking
about it. If you're looking for a political fantasy with teeth, you could
do a lot worse, although expect to come out the other side a bit battered
and bruised.
Followed by The Faithless, and I have no idea where Clark is going
to go with the second book. I suppose I'll have to read and find out.
Content note: In addition to a lot of violence, gore, and death, including
significant character death, there's also a major plague. If you're not
feeling up to reading about panic caused by contageous illness, proceed
with caution.
Rating: 7 out of 10
It s been nearly 8 years since I last made choices about music playing. At the time, I picked Logitech Media Server (LMS, aka Slimserver and Squeezebox server) for whole-house audio and Ampache with the DSub Android app.
It s time to revisit that approach. Here are the things I m looking for:
Whole-house audio: a single control point for all the speakers in the house, which are all connected to some form of Linux (Raspberry Pi or x86). The speakers should be reasonably in sync with each other, and the control point should be able to adjust volume on them centrally. I should be able to play albums, playlists, etc. on them, and skip tracks or seek within a track.
The ability to stream to an Android mobile device, ideally with downloading capabilities for offline use.
If multiple solutions are used, playlist syncing between them.
Ideally, bookmark support to resume playing a long track where it was left off.
Ideally, podcast support.
The current setup
Here are the current components:
Logitech Media Server, which serves the music library for whole-house synchronized audio
Squeezelite is the LMS client running on my Raspberry Pi and x86 systems
Squeezer is a nice Android client for LMS to control playback, adjust volume, etc. It doesn t do any playback on the Android device, of course.
Ampache provides the server for streaming clients, both browser-based and mobile
DSub (F-Droid, Play Store) is a nice Android client for Ampache providing streaming and offline playback
LMS makes an excellent whole-house audio system. I can pull up the webpage (or use an Android app like Squeezer) to browse my music library, queue things up to play, and so forth. I can also create playlists, which it saves as m3u files.
This whole setup is boringly reliable. It just works, year in, year out.
The main problem with this is that LMS has no real streaming/offline mobile support. It is also a rather dated system, with a painful UI for playlist management, and in general doesn t feel very modern. (It s written largely in Perl also!)
So, I paired with it is Ampache. As a streaming player, Ampache is fantastic; I can access it from a web browser, and it will transcode my FLAC files to the quality I ve set in my user prefs. The DSub app for Android is fantastic and remembers my last-play locations and such.
The problem is that Ampache doesn t write its playlists back to m3u format, so I can t use them with LMS. I have to therefore maintain all the playlists in LMS, and it has a smallish limit on the number of tracks per playlist. Ampache also doesn t auto-update from LMS playlists, so I have to delete and recreate the playlists catalog periodically to get updates into Ampache. Not fun.
The new experiment
I m trying out a new system based on these components:
Jellyfin is a media player. It supports not just music, but also video (in fact, the emphasis is more on video). Notably it supports controlling various devices. Its normal frontend is a web browser; Jellyfin s server won t output audio to a device itself.
Mopidy is a media player with a web interface that does output audio to a local device. In normal use, it displays an interface to your music, letting you select, queue up, etc.
Mopidy-Jellyfin (docs) is a plugin for Mopidy that enables two things: 1) Browsing the Jellyfin library within Mopidy, and 2) controlling Mopidy from within Jellyfin. Mode 1 barely works, but mode 2 works perfectly. Within Jellyfin, I can cast to Mopidy and queue up things, seek, skip tracks, etc.
Snapcast is a generic solution to take audio from some sort of source and distribute it throughout the house, syncing each device (and with better syncing than LMS, too!). The source can be just about anything, and the docs include an example of how to set it up with Mopidy.
Mopidy has selectable web interfaces, and the Mopidy-Muse interface has the added benefit of having integrated Snapcast control. (Mopidy-Iris does as well, though it wasn t documented there.) Within it, I can adjust volume on devices, mute devices, etc. I could also use the Snapcast web interface for this purpose.
The default Jellyfin Android app lets me stream media to the mobile device, as well as control the Mopidy player.
Finamp (F-Droid, Play Store) is a very nice Android Jellyfin music playing client, which notably supports downloads for offline playing, a feature the stock app lacks.
The Snapcast Android app (F-Droid, Play Store) isn t strictly necessary, since the Snapcast web app is so simple to use. But it provides near-instant control of speakers and volumes.
This looks a lot more complicated than what I had before, but in reality it only has one additional layer. Since Snapcast is a general audio syncing tool, and Jellyfin doesn t itself output audio, Mopidy and its extensions is the glue .
There s a lot to like about this setup. There is one single canonical source for music and playlists. Jellyfin can do a lot more besides music, and its mobile app gives me video access also. The setup, in general, works pretty well.
There are a few minor glitches, but nothing huge. For instance, Jellyfin fails to clear the play queue on the mopidy side.
But there is one problem, though: when playing a playlist, it is played out of order. Jellyfin itself has the same issue internally, so I m unsure where the bug lies.
Rejected option: Jellyfin with jellycli
This could be a nice option; instead of mopidy with a plugin, just run jellycli in headless mode as a more native client. It also has the playlist ordering bug, and in addition, fails to play a couple of my albums which Mopidy-Jellyfin handles fine. But, if those bugs were addressed, it has a ton of promise as a simpler glue between Jellyfin and Snapcast than Mopidy.
Rejected option: Mopidy-Subidy Plugin with Ampache
Mopidy has a Subsonic plugin, and Ampache implements the Subsonic API. This would theoretically let me use a Mopidy client to play things on the whole-house system, coming from the same Ampache system.
Although I did get this connected with some trial and error (legacy auth on, API version 1.13.0), it was extremely slow. Loading the list of playlists took minutes, the list of albums and artists many seconds. It didn t cache any answers either, so it was unusably slow.
Rejected option: Ampache localplay with mpd
Ampache has a feature called localplay which allows it to control a mpd server. I tested this out with mpd and snapcast. It works, but is highly limited. Basically, it causes Ampache to send a playlist a literal list of URLs to the mpd server. Unfortunately, seeking within a track is impossible from within the Ampache interface.
I will note that once a person is using mpd, snapcast makes a much easier whole-house solution than the streaming option I was trying to get working 8 years ago.
The Debian Videoteam has been
sprinting in
Cape Town, South Africa -- mostly because with Stefano here for a few
months, four of us (Jonathan, Kyle, Stefano, and myself) actually are in
the country on a regular basis. In addition to that, two more members of
the team (Nicolas and Louis-Philippe) are joining the sprint remotely
(from Paris and Montreal).
(Kyle and Stefano working on things, with me behind the camera and
Jonathan busy elsewhere.)
We've made loads of
progress!
Some highlights:
We did a lot of triaging of outstanding bugs and merge requests
against our ansible
repository.
Stale issues were closed, merge requests have been merged (or closed
when they weren't relevant anymore), and new issues that we found
while working on them were fixed. We also improved our test coverage
for some of our ansible roles, and modernized as well as improved the
way our
documentation
is built. (Louis-Philippe, Stefano, Kyle, Wouter, Nicolas)
Some work was done on SReview, our video review and transcode tool:
I fixed up the metadata export code and did some other backend work,
while Stefano worked a bit on the frontend, bringing it up to date to
use bootstrap 4, and adding client-side filtering using vue. Future
work on this will allow editing various things from the webinterface
-- currently that requires issuing SQL commands directly. (Wouter and
Stefano)
Jonathan explored new features in OBS. We've been using OBS for our
"loopy" setup since DebConf20, which is used for the slightly more
interactive sponsor loop that is shown in between talks. The result is
that we'll be able to simplify and improve that setup in future
(mini)DebConf instances. (Jonathan)
Kyle had a look at options for capturing hardware. We currently use
Opsis boards, but they are not an ideal solution, and we are exploring
alternatives. (Kyle)
Some package uploads happened! libmedia-convert-perl will now
(hopefully) migrate to testing; and if all goes well, a new version of
SReview will be available in unstable soon.
The sprint isn't over yet (we're continuing until Sunday), but loads of
things have already happened. Stay tuned!
If you ve done anything in the Kubernetes space in recent years, you ve most likely come across the words Service Mesh . It s backed by a set of mature technologies that provides cross-cutting networking, security, infrastructure capabilities to be used by workloads running in Kubernetes in a manner that is transparent to the actual workload. This abstraction enables application developers to not worry about building in otherwise sophisticated capabilities for networking, routing, circuit-breaking and security, and simply rely on the services offered by the service mesh.In this post, I ll be covering Linkerd, which is an alternative to Istio. It has gone through a significant re-write when it transitioned from the JVM to a Go-based Control Plane and a Rust-based Data Plane a few years back and is now a part of the CNCF and is backed by Buoyant. It has proven itself widely for use in production workloads and has a healthy community and release cadence.It achieves this with a side-car container that communicates with a Linkerd control plane that allows central management of policy, telemetry, mutual TLS, traffic routing, shaping, retries, load balancing, circuit-breaking and other cross-cutting concerns before the traffic hits the container. This has made the task of implementing the application services much simpler as it is managed by container orchestrator and service mesh. I covered Istio in a prior post a few years back, and much of the content is still applicable for this post, if you d like to have a look.Here are the broad architectural components of Linkerd:The components are separated into the control plane and the data plane.The control plane components live in its own namespace and consists of a controller that the Linkerd CLI interacts with via the Kubernetes API. The destination service is used for service discovery, TLS identity, policy on access control for inter-service communication and service profile information on routing, retries, timeouts. The identity service acts as the Certificate Authority which responds to Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs) from proxies for initialization and for service-to-service encrypted traffic. The proxy injector is an admission webhook that injects the Linkerd proxy side car and the init container automatically into a pod when the linkerd.io/inject: enabled is available on the namespace or workload.On the data plane side are two components. First, the init container, which is responsible for automatically forwarding incoming and outgoing traffic through the Linkerd proxy via iptables rules. Second, the Linkerd proxy, which is a lightweight micro-proxy written in Rust, is the data plane itself.I will be walking you through the setup of Linkerd (2.12.2 at the time of writing) on a Kubernetes cluster.Let s see what s running on the cluster currently. This assumes you have a cluster running and kubectl is installed and available on the PATH.
On most systems, this should be sufficient to setup the CLI. You may need to restart your terminal to load the updated paths. If you have a non-standard configuration and linkerd is not found after the installation, add the following to your PATH to be able to find the cli:
export PATH=$PATH:~/.linkerd2/bin/
At this point, checking the version would give you the following:
$ linkerd version Client version: stable-2.12.2 Server version: unavailable
Setting up Linkerd Control PlaneBefore installing Linkerd on the cluster, run the following step to check the cluster for pre-requisites:
kubernetes-api -------------- can initialize the client can query the Kubernetes API
kubernetes-version ------------------ is running the minimum Kubernetes API version is running the minimum kubectl version
pre-kubernetes-setup -------------------- control plane namespace does not already exist can create non-namespaced resources can create ServiceAccounts can create Services can create Deployments can create CronJobs can create ConfigMaps can create Secrets can read Secrets can read extension-apiserver-authentication configmap no clock skew detected
linkerd-version --------------- can determine the latest version cli is up-to-date
Status check results are
All the pre-requisites appear to be good right now, and so installation can proceed.The first step of the installation is to setup the Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) that Linkerd requires. The linkerd cli only prints the resource YAMLs to standard output and does not create them directly in Kubernetes, so you would need to pipe the output to kubectl apply to create the resources in the cluster that you re working with.
$ linkerd install --crds kubectl apply -f - Rendering Linkerd CRDs... Next, run linkerd install kubectl apply -f - to install the control plane.
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/authorizationpolicies.policy.linkerd.io created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/httproutes.policy.linkerd.io created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/meshtlsauthentications.policy.linkerd.io created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/networkauthentications.policy.linkerd.io created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/serverauthorizations.policy.linkerd.io created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/servers.policy.linkerd.io created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/serviceprofiles.linkerd.io created
Next, install the Linkerd control plane components in the same manner, this time without the crds switch:
$ linkerd install kubectl apply -f - namespace/linkerd created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-identity created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-identity created serviceaccount/linkerd-identity created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-destination created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-destination created serviceaccount/linkerd-destination created secret/linkerd-sp-validator-k8s-tls created validatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/linkerd-sp-validator-webhook-config created secret/linkerd-policy-validator-k8s-tls created validatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/linkerd-policy-validator-webhook-config created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-policy created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-destination-policy created role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-heartbeat created rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-heartbeat created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-heartbeat created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-heartbeat created serviceaccount/linkerd-heartbeat created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-proxy-injector created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-proxy-injector created serviceaccount/linkerd-proxy-injector created secret/linkerd-proxy-injector-k8s-tls created mutatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/linkerd-proxy-injector-webhook-config created configmap/linkerd-config created secret/linkerd-identity-issuer created configmap/linkerd-identity-trust-roots created service/linkerd-identity created service/linkerd-identity-headless created deployment.apps/linkerd-identity created service/linkerd-dst created service/linkerd-dst-headless created service/linkerd-sp-validator created service/linkerd-policy created service/linkerd-policy-validator created deployment.apps/linkerd-destination created cronjob.batch/linkerd-heartbeat created deployment.apps/linkerd-proxy-injector created service/linkerd-proxy-injector created secret/linkerd-config-overrides created
Kubernetes will start spinning up the data plane components and you should see the following when you list the pods:
kubernetes-api -------------- can initialize the client can query the Kubernetes API
kubernetes-version ------------------ is running the minimum Kubernetes API version is running the minimum kubectl version
linkerd-existence ----------------- 'linkerd-config' config map exists heartbeat ServiceAccount exist control plane replica sets are ready no unschedulable pods control plane pods are ready cluster networks contains all pods cluster networks contains all services
linkerd-config -------------- control plane Namespace exists control plane ClusterRoles exist control plane ClusterRoleBindings exist control plane ServiceAccounts exist control plane CustomResourceDefinitions exist control plane MutatingWebhookConfigurations exist control plane ValidatingWebhookConfigurations exist proxy-init container runs as root user if docker container runtime is used
linkerd-identity ---------------- certificate config is valid trust anchors are using supported crypto algorithm trust anchors are within their validity period trust anchors are valid for at least 60 days issuer cert is using supported crypto algorithm issuer cert is within its validity period issuer cert is valid for at least 60 days issuer cert is issued by the trust anchor
linkerd-webhooks-and-apisvc-tls ------------------------------- proxy-injector webhook has valid cert proxy-injector cert is valid for at least 60 days sp-validator webhook has valid cert sp-validator cert is valid for at least 60 days policy-validator webhook has valid cert policy-validator cert is valid for at least 60 days
linkerd-version --------------- can determine the latest version cli is up-to-date
control-plane-version --------------------- can retrieve the control plane version control plane is up-to-date control plane and cli versions match
linkerd-control-plane-proxy --------------------------- control plane proxies are healthy control plane proxies are up-to-date control plane proxies and cli versions match
Status check results are
Everything looks good.Setting up the Viz ExtensionAt this point, the required components for the service mesh are setup, but let s also install the viz extension, which provides a good visualization capabilities that will come in handy subsequently. Once again, linkerd uses the same pattern for installing the extension.
$ linkerd viz install kubectl apply -f - namespace/linkerd-viz created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-metrics-api created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-metrics-api created serviceaccount/metrics-api created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-prometheus created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-prometheus created serviceaccount/prometheus created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-admin created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-auth-delegator created serviceaccount/tap created rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-tap-auth-reader created secret/tap-k8s-tls created apiservice.apiregistration.k8s.io/v1alpha1.tap.linkerd.io created role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/web created rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/web created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-check created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-check created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-admin created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-api created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-linkerd-viz-web-api created serviceaccount/web created server.policy.linkerd.io/admin created authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/admin created networkauthentication.policy.linkerd.io/kubelet created server.policy.linkerd.io/proxy-admin created authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/proxy-admin created service/metrics-api created deployment.apps/metrics-api created server.policy.linkerd.io/metrics-api created authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/metrics-api created meshtlsauthentication.policy.linkerd.io/metrics-api-web created configmap/prometheus-config created service/prometheus created deployment.apps/prometheus created service/tap created deployment.apps/tap created server.policy.linkerd.io/tap-api created authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/tap created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-tap-injector created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/linkerd-tap-injector created serviceaccount/tap-injector created secret/tap-injector-k8s-tls created mutatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/linkerd-tap-injector-webhook-config created service/tap-injector created deployment.apps/tap-injector created server.policy.linkerd.io/tap-injector-webhook created authorizationpolicy.policy.linkerd.io/tap-injector created networkauthentication.policy.linkerd.io/kube-api-server created service/web created deployment.apps/web created serviceprofile.linkerd.io/metrics-api.linkerd-viz.svc.cluster.local created serviceprofile.linkerd.io/prometheus.linkerd-viz.svc.cluster.local created
A few seconds later, you should see the following in your pod list:
The viz components live in the linkerd-viz namespace.You can now checkout the viz dashboard:
$ linkerd viz dashboard Linkerd dashboard available at: http://localhost:50750 Grafana dashboard available at: http://localhost:50750/grafana Opening Linkerd dashboard in the default browser Opening in existing browser session.
The Meshed column indicates the workload that is currently integrated with the Linkerd control plane. As you can see, there are no application deployments right now that are running.Injecting the Linkerd Data Plane componentsThere are two ways to integrate Linkerd to the application containers:1 by manually injecting the Linkerd data plane components 2 by instructing Kubernetes to automatically inject the data plane componentsInject Linkerd data plane manuallyLet s try the first option. Below is a simple nginx-app that I will deploy into the cluster:
Back in the viz dashboard, I do see the workload deployed, but it isn t currently communicating with the Linkerd control plane, and so doesn t show any metrics, and the Meshed count is 0:Looking at the Pod s deployment YAML, I can see that it only includes the nginx container:
Let s directly inject the linkerd data plane into this running container. We do this by retrieving the YAML of the deployment, piping it to linkerd cli to inject the necessary components and then piping to kubectl apply the changed resources.
Back in the viz dashboard, the workload now is integrated into Linkerd control plane.Looking at the updated Pod definition, we see a number of changes that the linkerd has injected that allows it to integrate with the control plane. Let s have a look:
At this point, the necessary components are setup for you to explore Linkerd further. You can also try out the jaeger and multicluster extensions, similar to the process of installing and using the viz extension and try out their capabilities.Inject Linkerd data plane automaticallyIn this approach, we shall we how to instruct Kubernetes to automatically inject the Linkerd data plane to workloads at deployment time.We can achieve this by adding the linkerd.io/inject annotation to the deployment descriptor which causes the proxy injector admission hook to execute and inject linkerd data plane components automatically at the time of deployment.
This annotation can also be specified at the namespace level to affect all the workloads within the namespace. Note that any resources created before the annotation was added to the namespace will require a rollout restart to trigger the injection of the Linkerd components.Uninstalling LinkerdNow that we have walked through the installation and setup process of Linkerd, let s also cover how to remove it from the infrastructure and go back to the state prior to its installation.The first step would be to remove extensions, such as viz.
I m trying to replace my old OpenPGP key with a new one. The old key wasn t compromised or lost or anything
bad. Is still valid, but I plan to get rid of it soon. It was created in 2013.
The new key id fingerprint is: AA66280D4EF0BFCC6BFC2104DA5ECB231C8F04C4
I plan to use the new key for things like encrypted emails, uploads to the Debian archive, and more. Also,
the new key includes an identity with a newer personal email address I plan to use soon: arturo.bg@arturo.bg
The new key has been uploaded to some public keyservers.
If you would like to sign the new key, please follow the steps in the Debian wiki.
If you are curious about what that long code block contains, check this https://cirw.in/gpg-decoder/
For the record, the old key fingerprint is: DD9861AB23DC3333892E07A968E713981D1515F8
Cheers!
Shantaram
I know I have been quite behind in review of books but then that s life. First up is actually not as much as a shocker but somewhat of a pleasant surprise. So, a bit of background before I share the news. If you have been living under a rock, then about 10-12 years ago a book called Shantaram was released. While the book is said to have been released in 2003/4 I got it in my hand around 2008/09 or somewhere around that. The book is like a good meal, a buffet. To share the synopsis, Lin a 20 something Australian guy gets involved with a girl, she encourages him to get into heroin, he becomes a heroin user. And drugs, especially hard drugs need constant replenishment, it is a chemical thing. So, to fund those cravings, he starts to steal, rising to rob a bank and while getting away shoots a cop who becomes dead. Now either he surrenders or is caught is unclear, but he is tortured in the jail. So one day, he escapes from prison, lands up at home of somebody who owes him a favor, gets some money, gets a fake passport and lands up in Mumbai/Bombay as it was then known. This is from where the actual story starts. And how a 6 foot something Australian guy relying on his street smartness and know how the transformation happens from Lin to Shantaram. Now what I have shared is perhaps just 5% of the synopsis, as shared the real story starts here.
Now the good news, last week 4 episodes of Shantaram were screened by Apple TV. Interestingly, I have seen quite a number people turning up to buy or get this book and also sharing it on Goodreads. Now there seems to have been some differences from the book to TV. Now I m relying on 10-12 year back memory but IIRC Khaderbhai, one of the main characters who sort of takes Lin/Shantaram under his wing is an Indian. In the series, he is a western or at least looks western/Middle Eastern to me. Also, they have tried to reproduce 1980s in Mumbai/Bombay but dunno how accurate they were My impression of that city from couple of visits at that point in time where they were still more tongas (horse-ridden carriages), an occasional two wheelers and not many three wheelers. Although, it was one of the more turbulent times as lot of agitation for worker rights were happening around that time and a lot of industrial action. Later that led to lot of closure of manufacturing in Bombay and it became more commercial. It would be interesting to know whether they shot it in actual India or just made a set somewhere in Australia, where it possibly might have been shot. The chawl of the book needs a bit of arid land and Australia has lots of it.
It is also interesting as this was a project that had who s who interested in it for a long time but somehow none of them was able to bring the project to fruition, the project seems to largely have an Australian cast as well as second generations of Indians growing in Australia. To take names, Amitabh Bacchan, Johnny Depp, Russel Crowe each of them wanted to make it into a feature film. In retrospect, it is good it was not into a movie, otherwise they would have to cut a lot of material and that perhaps wouldn t have been sufficient. Making it into a web series made sure they could have it in multiple seasons if people like it. There is a lot between now and 12 episodes to even guess till where it would leave you then. So, if you have not read the book and have some holidays coming up, can recommend it. The writing IIRC is easy and just flows. There is a bit of action but much more nuance in the book while in the web series they are naturally more about action. There is also quite a bit of philosophy between him and Kaderbhai and while the series touches upon it, it doesn t do justice but then again it is being commercially made.
Read the book, see the series and share your thoughts on what you think. It is possible that the series might go up or down but am sharing from where I see it, may do another at the end of the season, depending on where they leave it and my impressions.
Update A slight update from the last blog post. Seems Rishi Sunak seems would be made PM of UK. With Hunt as chancellor and Rishi Sunak, Austerity 2.0 seems complete. There have been numerous articles which share how austerity gives rises to fascism and vice-versa. History gives lot of lessons about the same. In Germany, when the economy was not good, it was all blamed on the Jews for number of years. This was the reason for rise of Hitler, and while it did go up by a bit, propaganda by him and his loyalists did the rest. And we know and have read about the Holocaust. Today quite a few Germans deny it or deny parts of it but that s how misinformation spreads. Also Hitler is looked now more as an aberration rather than something to do with the German soul. I am not gonna talk more as there is still lots to share and that actually perhaps requires its own blog post to do justice for the same.
The Pyramid by Henning Mankell
I had actually wanted to review this book but then the bomb called Shantaram appeared and I had to post it above. I had read two-three books before it, but most of them were about multiple beheadings and serial killers. Enough to put anybody into depression. I do not know if modern crime needs to show crime and desperation of and to such a level. Why I and most loved and continue to love Sherlock Holmes as most stories were not about gross violence but rather a homage to the art of deduction, which pretty much seems to be missing in modern crime thrillers rather than grotesque stuff.
In that, like a sort of fresh air I read/am reading the Pyramid by Henning Mankell. The book is about a character made by Monsieur Henning Mankell named Kurt Wallender. I am aware of the series called Wallender but haven t yet seen it. The book starts with Wallender as a beat cop around age 20 and on his first case. He is ambitious, wants to become a detective and has a narrow escape with death. I wouldn t go much into it as it basically gives you an idea of the character and how he thinks and what he does. He is more intuitive by nature and somewhat of a loner. Probably most detectives IRL are, dunno, have no clue. At least in the literary world it makes sense, in real world think there would be much irony for sure. This is speculation on my part, who knows.
Back to the book though. The book has 5 stories a sort of prequel one could say but also not entirely true. The first case starts when he is a beat cop in 1969 and he is just a beat cop. It is a kind of a prequel and a kind of an anthology as he covers from the first case to the 1990s where he is ending his career sort of.
Before I start sharing about the stories in the book, I found the foreword also quite interesting. It asks questions about the interplay of the role of welfare state and the Swedish democracy. Incidentally did watch couple of videos about a sort of mixed sort of political representation that happens in Sweden. It uses what is known as proportional representation. Ironically, Sweden made a turn to the far right this election season. The book was originally in Swedish and were translated to English by Ebba Segerberg and Laurie Thompson.
While all the stories are interesting, would share the last three or at least ask the questions of intrigue. Of course, to answer them you would need to read the book
So the last three stories I found the most intriguing.
The first one is titled Man on the Beach. Apparently, a gentleman goes to one of the beaches, a sort of lonely beach, hails a taxi and while returning suddenly dies. The Taxi driver showing good presence of mind takes it to hospital where the gentleman is declared dead on arrival. Unlike in India, he doesn t run away but goes to the cafeteria and waits there for the cops to arrive and take his statement. Now the man is in his early 40s and looks to be fit. Upon searching his pockets he is found to relatively well-off and later it turns out he owns a couple of shops. So then here are the questions ?
What was the man doing on a beach, in summer that beach is somewhat popular but other times not so much, so what was he doing there?
How did he die, was it a simple heart attack or something more? If he had been drugged or something then when and how?
These and more questions can be answered by reading the story Man on the Beach .
2. The death of a photographer Apparently, Kurt lives in a small town where almost all the residents have been served one way or the other by the town photographer. The man was polite and had worked for something like 40 odd years before he is killed/murdered. Apparently, he is murdered late at night. So here come the questions
a. The shop doesn t even stock any cameras and his cash box has cash. Further investigation reveals it is approximate to his average takeout for the day. So if it s not for cash, then what is the motive ?
b. The body was discovered by his cleaning staff who has worked for almost 20 years, 3 days a week. She has her own set of keys to come and clean the office? Did she give the keys to someone, if yes why?
c. Even after investigation, there is no scandal about the man, no other woman or any vices like gambling etc. that could rack up loans. Also, nobody seems to know him and yet take him for granted till he dies. The whole thing appears to be quite strange. Again, the answers lie in the book.
3. The Pyramid Kurt is sleeping one night when the telephone rings. The scene starts with a Piper Cherokee, a single piston aircraft flying low and dropping something somewhere or getting somebody from/on the coast of Sweden. It turns and after a while crashes. Kurt is called to investigate it. Turns out, the plane was supposed to be destroyed. On crash, both the pilot and the passenger are into pieces so only dental records can prove who they are. Same day or a day or two later, two seemingly ordinary somewhat elderly women, spinsters, by all accounts, live above the shop where they sell buttons and all kinds of sewing needs of the town. They seem middle-class. Later the charred bodies of the two sisters are found :(. So here come the questions
a.Did the plane drop something or pick something somebody up ? The Cherokee is a small plane so any plane field or something it could have landed up or if a place was somehow marked then could be dropped or picked up without actually landing.
b. The firefighter suspects arson started at multiple places with the use of petrol? The question is why would somebody wanna do that? The sisters don t seem to be wealthy and practically everybody has bought stuff from them. They weren t popular but weren t also unpopular.
c. Are the two crimes connected or unconnected? If connected, then how?
d. Most important question, why the title Pyramid is given to the story. Why does the author share the name Pyramid. Does he mean the same or the original thing? He could have named it triangle. Again, answers to all the above can be found in the book.
One thing I also became very aware of during reading the book that it is difficult to understand people s behavior and what they do. And this is without even any criminality involved in. Let s say for e.g. I die in some mysterious circumstances, the possibility of the police finding my actions in last days would be limited and this is when I have hearing loss. And this probably is more to do with how our minds are wired. And most people I know are much more privacy conscious/aware than I am.
Japan s Hikikomori
Japan has been a curious country. It was more or less a colonizer and somewhat of a feared power till it dragged the U.S. unnecessarily in World War 2. The result of the two atom bombs and the restitution meant that Japan had to build again from the ground up. It is also in a seismically unstable place as they have frequent earthquakes although the buildings are hardened/balanced to make sure that vibrations don t tear buildings apart. Had seen years ago on Natgeo a documentary that explains all that. Apart from that, Japan was helped by the Americans and there was good kinship between them till the 1980s till it signed the Plaza Accord which enhanced asset price bubbles that eventually burst. Something from which they are smarting even today. Japan has a constitutional monarchy. A somewhat history lesson or why it exists even today can be found here. Asset price bubbles of the 1980s, more than 50 percent of the population on zero hour contracts and the rest tend to suffer from overwork. There is a term called Karoshi that explains all. An Indian pig-pen would be two, two and a half times larger than a typical Japanese home. Most Japanese live in micro-apartments called konbachiku . All of the above stresses meant that lately many young Japanese people have become Hikikomori. Bloomberg featured about the same a couple of years back. I came to know about it as many Indians are given the idea of Japan being a successful country without knowing the ills and issues it faces. Even in that most women get the wrong end of the short stick i.e. even it they manage to find jobs, it would be most back-breaking menial work. The employment statistics of Japan s internal ministry tells its own story.
If you look at the data above, it seems that the between 2002 and 2019, the share of zero hour contracts has increased while regular work has decreased. This also means that those on the bottom of the ladder can no longer afford a home. There is and was a viral video called Lost in Manboo that went viral few years ago. It is a perfect set of storms. Add to that the Fukushima nuclear incident about which I had shared a few years ago. While the workers are blamed but all design decisions are taken by the management. And as was shown in numerous movies, documentaries etc. Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the line workers knew the correct things to do and correct decisions to take unlike the management. The shut-ins story is almost a decade or two decades old. It is similar story in South Korea but not as depressive as the in Japan. It is somewhat depressive story but needed to be shared. The stories shared in the bloomberg article makes your heart ache
Backpacks
In and around 2015, I had bought a Targus backpack, very much similar to the Targus TSB194US-70 Motor 16-inch Backpack. That bag has given me a lot of comfort over the years but now has become frayed the zip sometimes work and sometimes doesn t. Unlike those days there are a bunch of companies now operating in India. There are eight different companies that I came to know about, Aircase, Harrisons Sirius, HP Oddyssey, Mokobara, Artic Hunter, Dell Pro Hybrid, Dell Roller Backpack and lastly the Decathlon Quechua Hiking backpack 32L NH Escape 500 . Now of all the above, two backpacks seem the best, the first one is Harrisons Sirius, with 45L capacity, I don t think I would need another bag at all. The runner-up is the Decathlon Quecha Hiking Backpack 32L. One of the better things in all the bags is that all have hidden pockets for easy taking in and out of passport while having being ant-theft. I do not have to stress how stressful it is to take out the passport and put it back in. Almost all the vendors have made sure that it is not a stress point anymore. The good thing about the Quecha is that they are giving 10 years warranty, the point to be asked is if that is does the warranty cover the zip. Zips are the first thing that goes out in bags.That actually has what happened to my current bag. Decathlon has a store in Wakad, Pune while I have reached out to the gentleman in charge of Harrisons India to see if they have a reseller in Pune. So hopefully, in next one week I should have a backpack that isn t spilling with things all over the place, whichever I m able to figure out.
This summer, I signed up to participate in the Northcape 4000
<https://www.northcape4000.com/>, an annual 4000km bike ride between Rovereto
(in northern Italy) and the northernmost point of Europe, the North cape.
The Northcape event has been held for several years, and while it always ends
on the North Cape, the route there varies. Last years route went through the
Baltics, but this years was perhaps as direct as possible - taking us through
Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, the Czech republic, Germany again, Sweden,
Finland and finally Norway.
The ride is unsupported, meaning you have to find your own food and
accomodation and can only avail yourself of resupply and sleeping options on
the route that are available to everybody else as well. The event is not meant
to be a race (unlike the Transcontinental, which starts at the same day),
so there is a minimum time to finish it in (10 days) and a maximum (21 days).
Unfortunately, this meant skipping some other events I d wanted attend
(DebConf, MCH).
Fiction
A few days ago somebody asked me and I think it is an often requested to perhaps all fiction readers as to why we like fiction? First of all, reading in itself is told as food for the soul. Because, whenever you write or read anything you don t just read it, you also visualize it. And that visualization is and would be far greater than any attempt in cinema as there are no budget constraints and it takes no more than a minute to visualize a scenario if the writer is any good. You just close your eyes and in a moment you are transported to a different world. This is also what is known as world building . Something fantasy writers are especially gifted in. Also, with the whole parallel Universes being a reality, it is just so much fertile land for imagination that I just cannot believe that it hasn t been worked to death to date. And you do need a lot of patience to make a world, to make characters, to make characters a bit eccentric one way or the other. And you have to know to put into a three, five, or whatever number of acts you want to put in. And then, of course, they have readers like us who dream and add more color to the story than the author did. As we take his, her, or their story and weave countless stories depending on where we are, where we are and who we are.
What people need to understand is that not just readers want escapism but writers too want to escape from the human condition. And they find solace in whatever they write. The well-known example of J.R.R. Tolkien is always there. How he must have felt each day coming after war, to somehow find the strength and just dream away, transport himself to a world of hobbits, elves, and other mysterious beings. It surely must have taken a lot of pain from him that otherwise, he would have felt. There are many others. What also does happen now and then, is authors believe in their own intelligence so much, that they commit crimes, but that s par for the course.
Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse
Currently, I am reading the above title. It is perhaps one of the first horror title books that I have read which has so much fun. The hero has a great sense of wit, humor, and sarcasm that you can cut butter with it. Now if you got that, this is par for the wordplay happening every second paragraph and I m just 100 pages in of the 500-page Novel.
Now, while I haven t read the whole book and I m just speculating, what if at the end we realize that the hero all along was or is the villain. Sadly, we don t have many such twisted stories and that too is perhaps because most people used to have black and white rather than grey characters. From all my reading, and even watching web series and whatnot, it is only the Europeans who seem to have a taste for exploring grey characters and giving twists at the end that people cannot anticipate. Even their heroes or heroines are grey characters. and they can really take you for a ride. It is also perhaps how we humans are, neither black nor white but more greyish. Having grey characters also frees the author quite a bit as she doesn t have to use so-called tropes and just led the characters to lead themselves.
Indian Book publishing Industry
I do know Bengali stories do have a lot of grey characters, but sadly most of the good works are still in Bengali and not widely published compared to say European or American authors. While there is huge potential in the Indian publishing market for English books and there is also hunger, getting good and cheap publishers is the issue. Just recently SAGE publishing division shut down and this does not augur well for the Indian market. In the past few years, I and other readers have seen some very good publishing houses quit India for one reason or the other. GST has also made the sector more expensive. The only thing that works now and has been for some time is the seconds and thirds market. For e.g. I just bought today about 15-20 books @INR 125/- a kind of belated present for the self. That would be what, at the most 2 USD or 2 Euros per book. I bet even a burger costs more than that, but again India being a price-sensitive market, at these prices the seconds book sells. And these are all my favorite authors, Lee Child, Tom Clancy, Dean Koontz, and so on and so forth. I also saw a lot of fantasy books but they would have to wait for another day.
Tourism in India for Debconf 23
I had shared a while back that I would write a bit about tourism as Debconf or Annual Debian Conference will happen in India next year around this time. I was supposed to write it in the FAQ but couldn t find a place or a corner where I could write it. There are actually two things that people need to be aware of. The one thing that people need to be very aware of is food poisoning or Delhi Belly. This is a far too common sight that I have witnessed especially with westerners when they come to visit India. I am somewhat shocked that it hasn t been shared in the FAQ but then perhaps we cannot cover all the bases therein. I did find this interesting article and would recommend the suggestions given in it wholeheartedly. I would suggest people coming to India to buy and have purifying water tablets with them if they decide to stay back and explore India.
Now the problem with tourism is, that one can have as much tourism as one wants. One of the unique ways I found some westerners having the time of their life is buying an Indian Rickshaw or Tuk-Tuk and traveling with it. A few years ago, when I was more adventourous-spirited I was able to meet a few of them. There is also the Race with Rickshaws that happens in Rajasthan and you get to see about 10 odd cities in and around Rajasthan state and get to see the vibrancy in the North. If somebody really wants to explore India, then I would suggest getting down to Goa, specifically, South Goa, meeting with the hippie crowd, and getting one of the hippie guidebooks to India. Most people forget that the Hippies came to India in the 1960s and many of them just never left. Tap water in Pune is ok, have seen and experienced the same in Himachal, Garwhal, and Uttarakhand, although it has been a few years since I have been to those places. North-East is a place I have yet to venture into.
India does have a lot of beauty but most people are not clean-conscious so if you go to common tourist destinations, you will find a lot of garbage. Most cities in India do give you an option of homestays and some even offer food, so if you are on a budget as well as wanna experience life with an Indian family, that could be something you could look into. So you can see and share about India with different eyes.
There is casteism, racism, and all that. Generally speaking, you would see it wielded a lot more in your face in North India than in South India where it is there but far more subtle. About food, what has been shared in the India BOF. Have to say, it doesn t even scratch the surface. If you stay with an Indian family, there is probably a much better chance of exploring the variety of food that India has to offer. From the western perspective, we tend to overcook stuff and make food with Masalas but that s the way most people like it. People who have had hot sauces or whatnot would probably find India much easier to adjust to as tastes might be similar to some extent.
If you want to socialize with young people, while discos are an option, meetup.com also is a good place. You can share your passions and many people have taken to it with gusto. We also have been hosting Comiccons in India, but I haven t had the opportunity to attend them so far. India has a rich oral culture reach going back a few thousand years, but many of those who are practicing those reside more in villages rather than in cities. And while there have been attempts in the past to record them, most of those have come to naught as money runs out as there is no commercial viability to such projects, but that probably is for another day.
In the end, what I have shared is barely a drop in the ocean that is India. Come, have fun, explore, enjoy and invigorate yourself and others
Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel and not a very good place to
start. I recommend at least reading Soul
Music first for a proper introduction to Susan, and you may want to
start with Mort.
When we last saw Susan, she was a student at the Quirm College for Young
Ladies. Now she's a governess for two adorable youngsters, a job that
includes telling them stories and dealing quite capably with monsters in
the cellar. (She uses a poker.) It also includes answering questions
like whether the Hogfather really exists or whether the presents just come
from your parents.
"Look at it this way, then," she said, and took a deep mental breath.
"Wherever people are obtuse and absurd... and wherever they have, by
even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small
chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged
cockroach... and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically
attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as
much grasp of the physical universe as an oyster has of
mountaineering... yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather.
Meanwhile, the Auditors, last seen meddling with Death in
Reaper Man, approach the Assassin's
Guild in Ankh-Morpork to hire the assassination of the Hogfather. This
rather unusual assignment falls to Mister Teatime, an orphan who was taken
in by the guild at an early age and trained to be an assassin. Teatime is
a little unnerving, mostly because he enjoys being an assassin. Rather a
lot.
Hogfather has two major things to recommend it: it's a Death novel,
and it features Susan, who is one of my favorite Discworld characters. It
also has two major strikes against it, at least for me.
The first is relatively minor but, for me, the most irritating. A bit of
the way into the story, Pratchett introduces the Oh God of Hangovers
fair, that's a good pun and then decides that's a good excuse for nausea
and vomiting jokes. A lot of nausea and vomiting jokes.
Look. I know a lot of people don't mind this. But I beg authors (and,
even more so, filmmakers and cartoonists) to consider whether a joke that
some of your audience might like is worth making other parts of your
audience feel physically ill while trying to enjoy your work. It's not at
all a pleasant experience, and while I handle it better in written form,
it still knocks me out of the story and makes me want to skip over scenes
with the obnoxious character who won't shut up about it. Thankfully this
does stop by the end of the book, but there are several segments in the
middle that were rather unpleasant.
The second is that Pratchett tries to convince the reader of the mythical
importance of the Santa Claus myth (for which Hogfather is an obvious
stand-in, if with a Discworld twist), an effort for which I am a highly
unsympathetic audience. I'm with Susan above, with an extra helping of
deep dislike for telling children who trust you something that's literally
untrue. Pratchett does try: he has Death makes a memorable and
frequently-quoted point near the end of the book (transcribed below) that
I don't entirely agree with but still respect. But still, the book is
very invested in convincing Susan that people believing mythology is
critically important to humanity, and I have so many problems with the
literalness of "believing" and the use of trusting children for this
purpose by adults who know better.
There are few topics that bring out my grumpiness more than Santa Claus.
Grumbling aside, though, I did enjoy this book anyway. Susan is always a
delight, and I could read about her adventures as a governess for as long
as Pratchett wanted to write them. Death is filling in for the Hogfather
for most of the book, which is hilarious because he's far too good at it,
in his painfully earnest and literal way, to be entirely safe. I was less
fond of Albert's supporting role (who I am increasingly coming to dislike
as a character), but the entire scene of Death as a mall Santa is
brilliant. And Teatime is an effective, creepy villain, something that
the Discworld series doesn't always deliver. The powers arrayed on
Discworld are so strong that it can be hard to design a villain who
effectively challenges them, but Teatime has a sociopathic Professor
Moriarty energy with added creepiness that fills that role in this book
satisfyingly.
As is typical for Pratchett (at least for me), the plot was serviceable but
not the highlight. Pratchett plays in some interesting ways with a
child's view of the world, the Unseen University bumbles around as a side
plot, and it comes together at the end in a way that makes sense, but the
journey is the fun of the story. The conclusion felt a bit gratuitous,
there mostly to wrap up the story than something that followed naturally
from the previous plot. But it does feature one of the most quoted bits
in Discworld:
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans
need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED
FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS
THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little "
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE
LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST
POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM
OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET Death waved a hand. AND
YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE
IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the
point "
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Here's the thing, though: Susan is right. They're not the same
sort of thing at all, and Pratchett doesn't present an argument that they
are. Death's response is great, but it's also a non sequitur: it is true
and correct but has nothing to do with Susan's argument. Justice is not a
lie in the sense that Santa Claus is a lie: justice is something that
humans can create, just like humans can create gift-giving or a tradition
of imaginative story-telling. But this is not at all the same thing as
encouraging children to believe in the literal existence of a fat man in
red who comes down chimneys to deliver gifts by magic.
And Death isn't even correct in Discworld! If one pays careful
attention to the story, the consequences he's thinks would follow from the
Auditors' attempt on the Hogfather not only don't happen, the exact
opposite happens. This is the point of the Unseen University
subplot, and it's also what happened in Reaper Man. The Auditors
may be trying to kill mythology, but what the books show is that the real
danger comes from the backlash. The force they're meddling with is far
more powerful and persistent than they are.
Death appears to be, by the stated events of the story, completely
incorrect in his analysis of Discworld's metaphysics. Maybe Pratchett
knows this? He did write a story that contradicts Death's analysis if one
reads it carefully. But if so, this is not obvious from the text, or from
Susan's reaction to Death's speech, which makes the metaphysics weirdly
unsatisfying.
So, overall, a mixed bag. Most of the book is very fun, but the
metaphysics heavily rest on a pet peeve of mine, and I really could
have done without the loving descriptions of the effects of hangovers.
This is one of the more famous Discworld novels for the above quote, and
on its own this is deserved (it's a great quote), but I think the logic is
muddled and the story itself contradicts the implications. A rather odd
reading experience.
Followed by Jingo in publication order, and Thief of Time
thematically.
Rating: 7 out of 10
I am traveling to Europe, specifically to Ireland, for a 6 days for a
work meeting.
I thought I could use my phone there. So I looked at my phone provider's
services in Europe, and found the "Fido roaming" services:
https://www.fido.ca/mobility/roaming
The fees, at the time of writing, at fifteen (15!) dollars PER DAY
to get access to my regular phone service (not unlimited!!).
If I do not use that "roaming" service, the fees are:
2$/min
0.75$/text
10$/20MB
That is absolutely outrageous. Any random phone plan in Europe will be
cheaper than this, by at least one order of magnitude. Just to take
any example:
https://www.tescomobile.ie/sim-only-plans.aspx
Those fine folks offer a one-time, prepaid plan for 15 for 28 days
which includes:
unlimited data
1000 minutes
500 text messages
12GB data elsewhere in Europe
I think it's absolutely scandalous that telecommunications providers
in Canada can charge so much money, especially since the most
prohibitive fee (the "non-prepaid" plans) are automatically charged
if I happen to forget to remove my sim card or put my phone in
"airplane mode".
As advised, I have called customer service at Fido for advice on how
to handle this situation. They have confirmed those are the only plans
available for travelers and could not accommodate me otherwise. I have
notified them I was in the process of filing this complaint.
I believe that Canada has become the technological dunce of the world,
and I blame the CRTC for its lack of regulation in that matter. You
should not allow those companies to grow into such a cartel that they
can do such price-fixing as they wish.
I haven't investigated Fido's competitors, but I will bet at least one
of my hats that they do not offer better service.
I attach a screenshot of the Fido page showing those
outrageous fees.
I have no illusions about this having any effect. I thought of
filing such a complain after the Rogers outage as well, but
felt I had less of a standing there because I wasn't affected that
much (e.g. I didn't have a life-threatening situation myself).
This, however, was ridiculous and frustrating enough to trigger this
outrage. We'll see how it goes...
"We will respond to you within 10 working days."
Response from CRTC
They did respond within 10 days. Here is the full response:
Dear Antoine Beaupr :
Thank you for contacting us about your mobile telephone international roaming service plan rates concern with Fido Solutions Inc. (Fido).
In Canada, mobile telephone service is offered on a competitive basis. Therefore, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is not involved in Fido's terms of service (including international roaming service plan rates), billing and marketing practices, quality of service issues and customer relations.
If you haven't already done so, we encourage you to escalate your concern to a manager if you believe the answer you have received from Fido's customer service is not satisfactory.
Based on the information that you have provided, this may also appear to be a Competition Bureau matter. The Competition Bureau is responsible for administering and enforcing the Competition Act, and deals with issues such as false or misleading representations, deceptive marketing practices and collusion. You can reach the Competition Bureau by calling 1-800-348-5358 (toll-free), by TTY (for deaf and hard of hearing people) by calling 1-866-694-8389 (toll-free). For more contact information, please visit http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/00157.html
When consumers are not satisfied with the service they are offered, we encourage them to compare the products and services of other providers in their area and look for a company that can better match their needs. The following tool helps to show choices of providers in your area: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm
Thank you for sharing your concern with us.
In other words, complain with Fido, or change providers. Don't
complain to us, we don't manage the telcos, they self-regulate.
Great job, CRTC. This is going great. This is exactly why we're one of
the most expensive countries on the planet for cell phone service.
Live chat with Fido
Interestingly, the day after I received that response from the CRTC,
I received this email from Fido, while traveling:
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2022 10:10:00 -0400
From: Fido DONOTREPLY@fido.ca
To: REDACTED
Subject: Courriel d avis d itin rance Fido
Roaming Welcome Confirmation
Fido
Date : 13 septembre 2022
Num ro de compte : [redacted]
Bonjour
Antoine Beaupr !
Nous vous crivons pour vous indiquer qu au moins un utilisateur inscrit votre compte s est r cemment connect un r seau en itin rance.
Vous trouverez ci-dessous le message texte de bienvenue en itin rance envoy l utilisateur (ou aux utilisateurs), qui contenait les tarifs d itin rance
applicables.
Message texte de bienvenue en itin rance
Destinataire : REDACTED
Date et heure : 2022-09-13 / 10:10:00
Allo, ici Fido : Bienvenue destination! Vous tes inscrit Fido Nomade alors utilisez vos donn es, parlez et textez comme vous le faites la
maison. Depuis le 1 mars 2022 le tarif cette destination pour 15 $/jour (+ taxes) et valide tous les jours jusqu' 23 h 59 HE, peu importe le fuseau
horaire dans lequel vous vous trouvez. Bon voyage! Des questions? Consultez fido.ca/m/itinerance ou composez +15149333436 (sans frais).
Besoin d aide?
PLANIFIEZ UN VOYAGE AVEC Fido NomadeMC
D couvrez nos options d itin rance et restez en contact l tranger sans vous soucier de votre
facture.
D tails
G rez votre compte
G rez vos produits et services Fido la maison ou sur la route gr ce Mon
Compte.
D tails
Ce courriel est produit automatiquement; veuillez ne pas y r pondre. Ce courriel (et toute pi ce jointe) est confidentiel. Si vous n tes pas le destinataire,
veuillez supprimer le pr sent message et en d truire toute copie.
FIDO SOLUTIONS 800, RUE DE LA GAUCHETI RE OUEST
BUREAU 4000 MONTR AL (QU BEC) H5A 1K3
Fido
I found that message utterly confusing (and yes, I can read
french). Basically, it says that some user (presumably me!) connected
to the network with roaming. I did just disabled airplane mode on my
phone to debug a Syncthing bug but had not enabled roaming.
So this message seemed to say that I would be charged 15$ (per DAY!)
for roaming from now on. Confused, I tried their live chat to try to
clarify things, worried I would get charged even more for calling tech
support on *611. This is a transcript of the chat:
F: Hi! What are we doing today?
Type in your question or choose from the options below:
* Track my Equipment Order
* View Bill Online
* Payment Options
* iPhone 14 Pre-Order
A: i received a message about roaming while abroad but i did not
enable roaming on my phone, will i be charged anyways?
F: I think I know what you re asking for.
Select the topic that best matches your request or try rephrasing your question.
A: no
F: Thank you, this will help us to improve! Would you like to chat with a specialist?
Chat with a specialist
I'll get a specialist to help you with this.
It appears that you're not signed in. Your session may have timed out.
To save time and identify your account details, please sign in to My Account.
Sign in
I'm not able to sign in
Have any questions specific to your Fido account? To service you faster, please identify yourself by completing the form below.
A: Personal info
Form submitted
F: Thank you! I'll connect you with the next available specialist.
Your chat is being transferred to a Live Chat agent. Thanks for your patience.
We are here to assist you and we kindly ask that our team members be treated with respect and dignity. Please note that abuse directed towards any Consumer Care Specialist will not be tolerated and will result in the termination of your conversation with us.
All of our agents are with other customers at the moment. Your chat is in a priority sequence and someone will be with you as soon as possible. Thanks!
Thanks for continuing to hold. An agent will be with you as soon as possible.
Thank you for your continued patience. We re getting more Live Chat requests than usual so it s taking longer to answer. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as an agent becomes available.
Thank you so much for your patience we're sorry for the wait. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as possible.
Hi, I'm [REDACTED] from Fido in [REDACTED]. May I have your name please?
A: hi i am antoine, nice to meet you
sorry to use the live chat, but it's not clear to me i can safely
use my phone to call support, because i am in ireland and i'm
worried i'll get charged for the call
F: Thank You Antoine , I see you waited to speak with me today, thank you for your patience.Apart from having to wait, how are you today?
A: i am good thank you
[... delay ...]
A: should i restate my question?
F: Yes please what is the concern you have?
A: i have received an email from fido saying i someone used my phone for roaming
it's in french (which is fine), but that's the gist of it
i am traveling to ireland for a week
i do not want to use fido's services here... i have set the phon eto airplane mode for most of my time here
F: The SMS just says what will be the charges if you used any services.
A: but today i have mistakenly turned that off and did not turn on roaming
well it's not a SMS, it's an email
F: Yes take out the sim and keep it safe.Turun off or On for roaming you cant do it as it is part of plan.
A: wat
F: if you used any service you will be charged if you not used any service you will not be charged.
A: you are saying i need to physically take the SIM out of the phone?
i guess i will have a fun conversation with your management once i return from this trip
not that i can do that now, given that, you know, i nee dto take the sim out of this phone
fun times
F: Yes that is better as most of the customer end up using some kind of service and get charged for roaming.
A: well that is completely outrageous
roaming is off on the phone
i shouldn't get charged for roaming, since roaming is off on the phone
i also don't get why i cannot be clearly told whether i will be charged or not
the message i have received says i will be charged if i use the service
and you seem to say i could accidentally do that easily
can you tell me if i have indeed used service sthat will incur an extra charge?
are incoming text messages free?
F: I understand but it is on you if you used some data SMS or voice mail you can get charged as you used some services.And we cant check anything for now you have to wait for next bill.
and incoming SMS are free rest all service comes under roaming.
That is the reason I suggested take out the sim from phone and keep it safe or always keep the phone or airplane mode.
A: okay
can you confirm whether or not i can call fido by voice for support?
i mean for free
F: So use your Fido sim and call on +1-514-925-4590 on this number it will be free from out side Canada from Fido sim.
A: that is quite counter-intuitive, but i guess i will trust you on that
thank you, i think that will be all
F: Perfect, Again, my name is [REDACTED] and it s been my pleasure to help you today. Thank you for being a part of the Fido family and have a great day!
A: you too
So, in other words:
they can't tell me if I've actually been roaming
they can't tell me how much it's going to cost me
I should remove the SIM card from my phone (!?) or turn on
airplane mode, but the former is safer
I can call Fido support, but not on the usual *611, and
instead on that long-distance-looking phone number, and yes, that
means turning off airplane mode and putting the SIM card in, which
contradicts step 3
Also notice how the phone number from the live chat
(+1-514-925-4590) is different than the one provided in the email
(15149333436). So who knows what would have happened if I would have
called the latter. The former is mentioned in their contact page.
I guess the next step is to call Fido over the phone and talk to a
manager, which is what the CRTC told me to do in the first place...
I ended up talking with a manager (another 1h phone call) and they
confirmed there is no other package available at Fido for this. At
best they can provide me with a credit if I mistakenly use the roaming
by accident to refund me, but that's it. The manager also confirmed
that I cannot know if I have actually used any data before reading the
bill, which is issued on the 15th of every month, but only
available... three days later, at which point I'll be back home
anyways.
Fantastic.
J.R.R. Tolkein
Now unless you have been living under a rock cave, I am sure you know who Mr. Tolkein is. Apparently, the gentleman passed away on 2nd September 1973 at the sprightly age of 80. And this gives fans like me to talk about fantasy, fantasy authors, and the love-hate relationship we have with them. For a matter of record, I am currently reading Babylon Steel by Gaie Sebold. Now while I won t go into many details (I never like to, if I enjoy a book, I would want the book to be mysterious rather than give praise, simply so that the next person enjoys it as much as I did without having any expectations.) Now this book has plenty of sex so wouldn t recommend it for teenagers but more perhaps to mature audiences, although for the life of me couldn t find any rating on the book. I did come across common sense media but unfortunately, it isn t well known beyond perhaps some people who use it. They sadly don t have a google/Android app And before anybody comments, I know that Android is no longer interested in supporting FOSS, their loss, not ours but that is entirely a blog post/article in itself. so let s leave that aside for now.
Fantasy
So before talking about Mr. Tolkien and his creations let s talk and share a bit about fantasy. We know for a fact that the conscious mind functions at less than 5%, while the other bits are made by the subconscious and the unconscious mind (the three mind model.) So any thought or idea first germinates n either the unconscious or the subconscious part of the mind and then comes into the conscious mind. It is the reason we also dream. That s the subconscious and unconscious mind at work. While we say fantasy mostly to books, it is all around us and not just in prose but in song, dance, and all sorts of creativity are fantasy. Even Sci-fi actually comes from fantasy. Unfortunately, for reasons best known to people, they took out sci-fi and even divided fantasy into high fantasy and low fantasy. I am not going to go much into that but here s a helpful link for those who might want to look more into it. Now the question arises, why do people write? I have asked this question many a time to the authors I have met and the answers are as varied as they come. Two of the most common answers are the need to write (an itch they can t control or won t control) and the other is it s extremely healing. In my own case, even writing mere blog posts I found it unburdening & cathartetic. I believe this last part is what drove Mr. Tolkein and the story and arc that LOTR became.
Tolkien, LOTR, World War I
The casual reader might not know but if you followed or were curious about Mr. Tolkien, you would have found out that Mr. Tolkien served in World War 1 or what is known as the Great War. It was supposed to be the war that ended all wars but sadly didn t. One of the things that set apart Mr. Tolkein from many of his peers was that Mr. Tolkien was very straight about himself and corresponded with people far and wide. There is actually a book called The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien that I hope to get at one of the used book depots. That book spans about 480 pages and gives all the answers as to why Mr. Tolkien made Middle-earth as it was made. I sadly haven t had the opportunity to get it and it is somewhat expensive. But I m sure that if World War 1 wouldn t have happened and Mr. Tolkein hadn t taken part and experienced what he experienced, we wouldn t have LOTR. I can bet losing his friends and comrades, and the pain he felt for those around him propelled him to write about land and a race called Hobbits. I haven t done enough fantasy reading but I do feel that his description of hobbits and the way they were and are is unique. The names and surnames he used were for humor as well as to make a statement about them. Having names such as Harfoots, Padfoot, Took and others just wouldn t be for fun, would it? Also, the responses and the behavior in the four books by Hobbits are almost human-like. It is almost like they are or were our cousins at one point in time but we allowed ourselves to forget. Even the corruption of humans has been shown as well as self-doubt.
There is another part that I found and find fascinating, unlike most books where there is a single hero, in LOTR we have many heroes and heroines. This again, I would attribute to Mr. Tolkien and the heroism he saw on the battlefield and beyond it. All the tender emotions he shares with readers like us are because either he himself or others around him were subjected to grace and wonderment. This is all I derive from the books, those who have The letters of J.R.R. Tolkein , feel free to correct me. I was supposed to write this yesterday but real life has its own way.
I could go on and on, perhaps at a later date or time I may expand on it, but it isn t a coincidence that Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is starting broadcast on the same day when Mr. Tolkein died. In the very end, fantasy is something humans got and does not matter how rich or poor you are. If one were to look, both artists like Michaelangelo and many other artists, who often didn t have enough to have two square meals in the day, but still somehow were inspired to sketch models of airplanes, flying machines which are shockingly similar to the real thing. Many may not know that almost all primates, including apes, monkeys, squirrels, and even dolphins dream. And all of them have elaborate, complex dreams just as we do. Sadly, this info. is not known by most people otherwise, we would be so much empathetic towards our cousins in the animal kingdom.
If you know the Amazon Web Services portfolio, and you are interested in OpenShift or the OKD OpenShift community distribution, this is a table of corresponding technologies.
OpenShift is Red Hat s Kubernetes distribution: it is basically the upstream Kubernetes delivered with monitoring, logging, CI/CD, underlying OS, tested upgrade paths not found with a manual kubernetes.io kubeadm install.
AWS
OpenShift
OpenShift upstream project
Cloud Trail
Kubernetes API Server audit log
Kubernetes
Cloud Watch
OpenShift Monitoring
Prometheus
AWS Artifact
Compliance Operator
OpenSCAP
AWS Trusted Advisor
Insights
AWS Marketplace
OpenShift Operator Hub
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Red Hat SSO
Keycloack
AWS Elastisc Beanstalk
OpenShift Source2Image (S2I)
Source2Image (S2I)
AWS S3
ODF Rados Gateway
Rook RGW
AWS Elastic Bloc Storage
ODF Rados Block Device
Rook RBD
AWS Elastic File System
ODF Ceph FS
Rook CephFS
Amazon Simple Notification Service
OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka
Amazon Guard Duty
API Server audit log review, ACS Runtime detection
Inspired by several others (such as Alex Schroeder s post and Szcze uja s prompt), as well as a desire to get this down for my kids, I figure it s time to write a bit about living through the PC and Internet revolution where I did: outside a tiny town in rural Kansas. And, as I ve been back in that same area for the past 15 years, I reflect some on the challenges that continue to play out.
Although the stories from the others were primarily about getting online, I want to start by setting some background. Those of you that didn t grow up in the same era as I did probably never realized that a typical business PC setup might cost $10,000 in today s dollars, for instance. So let me start with the background.
Nothing was easy
This story begins in the 1980s. Somewhere around my Kindergarten year of school, around 1985, my parents bought a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (aka CoCo II). It had 64K of RAM and used a TV for display and sound.
This got you the computer. It didn t get you any disk drive or anything, no joysticks (required by a number of games). So whenever the system powered down, or it hung and you had to power cycle it a frequent event you d lose whatever you were doing and would have to re-enter the program, literally by typing it in.
The floppy drive for the CoCo II cost more than the computer, and it was quite common for people to buy the computer first and then the floppy drive later when they d saved up the money for that.
I particularly want to mention that computers then didn t come with a modem. What would be like buying a laptop or a tablet without wifi today. A modem, which I ll talk about in a bit, was another expensive accessory. To cobble together a system in the 80s that was capable of talking to others with persistent storage (floppy, or hard drive), screen, keyboard, and modem would be quite expensive. Adjusted for inflation, if you re talking a PC-style device (a clone of the IBM PC that ran DOS), this would easily be more expensive than the Macbook Pros of today.
Few people back in the 80s had a computer at home. And the portion of those that had even the capability to get online in a meaningful way was even smaller.
Eventually my parents bought a PC clone with 640K RAM and dual floppy drives. This was primarily used for my mom s work, but I did my best to take it over whenever possible. It ran DOS and, despite its monochrome screen, was generally a more capable machine than the CoCo II. For instance, it supported lowercase. (I m not even kidding; the CoCo II pretty much didn t.) A while later, they purchased a 32MB hard drive for it what luxury!
Just getting a machine to work wasn t easy. Say you d bought a PC, and then bought a hard drive, and a modem. You didn t just plug in the hard drive and it would work. You would have to fight it every step of the way. The BIOS and DOS partition tables of the day used a cylinder/head/sector method of addressing the drive, and various parts of that those addresses had too few bits to work with the big drives of the day above 20MB. So you would have to lie to the BIOS and fdisk in various ways, and sort of work out how to do it for each drive. For each peripheral serial port, sound card (in later years), etc., you d have to set jumpers for DMA and IRQs, hoping not to conflict with anything already in the system. Perhaps you can now start to see why USB and PCI were so welcomed.
Sharing and finding resources
Despite the two computers in our home, it wasn t as if software written on one machine just ran on another. A lot of software for PC clones assumed a CGA color display. The monochrome HGC in our PC wasn t particularly compatible. You could find a TSR program to emulate the CGA on the HGC, but it wasn t particularly stable, and there s only so much you can do when a program that assumes color displays on a monitor that can only show black, dark amber, or light amber.
So I d periodically get to use other computers most commonly at an office in the evening when it wasn t being used.
There were some local computer clubs that my dad took me to periodically. Software was swapped back then; disks copied, shareware exchanged, and so forth. For me, at least, there was no online to download software from, and selling software over the Internet wasn t a thing at all.
Three Different Worlds
There were sort of three different worlds of computing experience in the 80s:
Home users. Initially using a wide variety of software from Apple, Commodore, Tandy/RadioShack, etc., but eventually coming to be mostly dominated by IBM PC clones
Small and mid-sized business users. Some of them had larger minicomputers or small mainframes, but most that I had contact with by the early 90s were standardized on DOS-based PCs. More advanced ones had a network running Netware, most commonly. Networking hardware and software was generally too expensive for home users to use in the early days.
Universities and large institutions. These are the places that had the mainframes, the earliest implementations of TCP/IP, the earliest users of UUCP, and so forth.
The difference between the home computing experience and the large institution experience were vast. Not only in terms of dollars the large institution hardware could easily cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars but also in terms of sheer resources required (large rooms, enormous power circuits, support staff, etc). Nothing was in common between them; not operating systems, not software, not experience. I was never much aware of the third category until the differences started to collapse in the mid-90s, and even then I only was exposed to it once the collapse was well underway.
You might say to me, Well, Google certainly isn t running what I m running at home! And, yes of course, it s different. But fundamentally, most large datacenters are running on x86_64 hardware, with Linux as the operating system, and a TCP/IP network. It s a different scale, obviously, but at a fundamental level, the hardware and operating system stack are pretty similar to what you can readily run at home. Back in the 80s and 90s, this wasn t the case. TCP/IP wasn t even available for DOS or Windows until much later, and when it was, it was a clunky beast that was difficult.
One of the things Kevin Driscoll highlights in his book called Modem World see my short post about it is that the history of the Internet we usually receive is focused on case 3: the large institutions. In reality, the Internet was and is literally a network of networks. Gateways to and from Internet existed from all three kinds of users for years, and while TCP/IP ultimately won the battle of the internetworking protocol, the other two streams of users also shaped the Internet as we now know it. Like many, I had no access to the large institution networks, but as I ve been reflecting on my experiences, I ve found a new appreciation for the way that those of us that grew up with primarily home PCs shaped the evolution of today s online world also.
An Era of Scarcity
I should take a moment to comment about the cost of software back then. A newspaper article from 1985 comments that WordPerfect, then the most powerful word processing program, sold for $495 (or $219 if you could score a mail order discount). That s $1360/$600 in 2022 money. Other popular software, such as Lotus 1-2-3, was up there as well. If you were to buy a new PC clone in the mid to late 80s, it would often cost $2000 in 1980s dollars. Now add a printer a low-end dot matrix for $300 or a laser for $1500 or even more. A modem: another $300. So the basic system would be $3600, or $9900 in 2022 dollars. If you wanted a nice printer, you re now pushing well over $10,000 in 2022 dollars.
You start to see one barrier here, and also why things like shareware and piracy if it was indeed even recognized as such were common in those days.
So you can see, from a home computer setup (TRS-80, Commodore C64, Apple ][, etc) to a business-class PC setup was an order of magnitude increase in cost. From there to the high-end minis/mainframes was another order of magnitude (at least!) increase. Eventually there was price pressure on the higher end and things all got better, which is probably why the non-DOS PCs lasted until the early 90s.
Increasing Capabilities
My first exposure to computers in school was in the 4th grade, when I would have been about 9. There was a single Apple ][ machine in that room. I primarily remember playing Oregon Trail on it. The next year, the school added a computer lab. Remember, this is a small rural area, so each graduating class might have about 25 people in it; this lab was shared by everyone in the K-8 building. It was full of some flavor of IBM PS/2 machines running DOS and Netware. There was a dedicated computer teacher too, though I think she was a regular teacher that was given somewhat minimal training on computers. We were going to learn typing that year, but I did so well on the very first typing program that we soon worked out that I could do programming instead. I started going to school early these machines were far more powerful than the XT at home and worked on programming projects there.
Eventually my parents bought me a Gateway 486SX/25 with a VGA monitor and hard drive. Wow! This was a whole different world. It may have come with Windows 3.0 or 3.1 on it, but I mainly remember running OS/2 on that machine. More on that below.
Programming
That CoCo II came with a BASIC interpreter in ROM. It came with a large manual, which served as a BASIC tutorial as well. The BASIC interpreter was also the shell, so literally you could not use the computer without at least a bit of BASIC.
Once I had access to a DOS machine, it also had a basic interpreter: GW-BASIC. There was a fair bit of software written in BASIC at the time, but most of the more advanced software wasn t. I wondered how these .EXE and .COM programs were written. I could find vague references to DEBUG.EXE, assemblers, and such. But it wasn t until I got a copy of Turbo Pascal that I was able to do that sort of thing myself. Eventually I got Borland C++ and taught myself C as well. A few years later, I wanted to try writing GUI programs for Windows, and bought Watcom C++ much cheaper than the competition, and it could target Windows, DOS (and I think even OS/2).
Notice that, aside from BASIC, none of this was free, and none of it was bundled. You couldn t just download a C compiler, or Python interpreter, or whatnot back then. You had to pay for the ability to write any kind of serious code on the computer you already owned.
The Microsoft Domination
Microsoft came to dominate the PC landscape, and then even the computing landscape as a whole. IBM very quickly lost control over the hardware side of PCs as Compaq and others made clones, but Microsoft has managed in varying degrees even to this day to keep a stranglehold on the software, and especially the operating system, side. Yes, there was occasional talk of things like DR-DOS, but by and large the dominant platform came to be the PC, and if you had a PC, you ran DOS (and later Windows) from Microsoft.
For awhile, it looked like IBM was going to challenge Microsoft on the operating system front; they had OS/2, and when I switched to it sometime around the version 2.1 era in 1993, it was unquestionably more advanced technically than the consumer-grade Windows from Microsoft at the time. It had Internet support baked in, could run most DOS and Windows programs, and had introduced a replacement for the by-then terrible FAT filesystem: HPFS, in 1988. Microsoft wouldn t introduce a better filesystem for its consumer operating systems until Windows XP in 2001, 13 years later. But more on that story later.
Free Software, Shareware, and Commercial Software
I ve covered the high cost of software already. Obviously $500 software wasn t going to sell in the home market. So what did we have?
Mainly, these things:
Public domain software. It was free to use, and if implemented in BASIC, probably had source code with it too.
Shareware
Commercial software (some of it from small publishers was a lot cheaper than $500)
Let s talk about shareware. The idea with shareware was that a company would release a useful program, sometimes limited. You were encouraged to register , or pay for, it if you liked it and used it. And, regardless of whether you registered it or not, were told please copy! Sometimes shareware was fully functional, and registering it got you nothing more than printed manuals and an easy conscience (guilt trips for not registering weren t necessarily very subtle). Sometimes unregistered shareware would have a nag screen a delay of a few seconds while they told you to register. Sometimes they d be limited in some way; you d get more features if you registered. With games, it was popular to have a trilogy, and release the first episode inevitably ending with a cliffhanger as shareware, and the subsequent episodes would require registration. In any event, a lot of software people used in the 80s and 90s was shareware. Also pirated commercial software, though in the earlier days of computing, I think some people didn t even know the difference.
Notice what s missing: Free Software / FLOSS in the Richard Stallman sense of the word. Stallman lived in the big institution world after all, he worked at MIT and what he was doing with the Free Software Foundation and GNU project beginning in 1983 never really filtered into the DOS/Windows world at the time. I had no awareness of it even existing until into the 90s, when I first started getting some hints of it as a port of gcc became available for OS/2. The Internet was what really brought this home, but I m getting ahead of myself.
I want to say again: FLOSS never really entered the DOS and Windows 3.x ecosystems. You d see it make a few inroads here and there in later versions of Windows, and moreso now that Microsoft has been sort of forced to accept it, but still, reflect on its legacy. What is the software market like in Windows compared to Linux, even today?
Now it is, finally, time to talk about connectivity!
Getting On-Line
What does it even mean to get on line? Certainly not connecting to a wifi access point. The answer is, unsurprisingly, complex. But for everyone except the large institutional users, it begins with a telephone.
The telephone system
By the 80s, there was one communication network that already reached into nearly every home in America: the phone system. Virtually every household (note I don t say every person) was uniquely identified by a 10-digit phone number. You could, at least in theory, call up virtually any other phone in the country and be connected in less than a minute.
But I ve got to talk about cost. The way things worked in the USA, you paid a monthly fee for a phone line. Included in that monthly fee was unlimited local calling. What is a local call? That was an extremely complex question. Generally it meant, roughly, calling within your city. But of course, as you deal with things like suburbs and cities growing into each other (eg, the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex), things got complicated fast. But let s just say for simplicity you could call others in your city.
What about calling people not in your city? That was long distance , and you paid often hugely by the minute for it. Long distance rates were difficult to figure out, but were generally most expensive during business hours and cheapest at night or on weekends. Prices eventually started to come down when competition was introduced for long distance carriers, but even then you often were stuck with a single carrier for long distance calls outside your city but within your state. Anyhow, let s just leave it at this: local calls were virtually free, and long distance calls were extremely expensive.
Getting a modem
I remember getting a modem that ran at either 1200bps or 2400bps. Either way, quite slow; you could often read even plain text faster than the modem could display it. But what was a modem?
A modem hooked up to a computer with a serial cable, and to the phone system. By the time I got one, modems could automatically dial and answer. You would send a command like ATDT5551212 and it would dial 555-1212. Modems had speakers, because often things wouldn t work right, and the telephone system was oriented around speech, so you could hear what was happening. You d hear it wait for dial tone, then dial, then hopefully the remote end would ring, a modem there would answer, you d hear the screeching of a handshake, and eventually your terminal would say CONNECT 2400. Now your computer was bridged to the other; anything going out your serial port was encoded as sound by your modem and decoded at the other end, and vice-versa.
But what, exactly, was the other end?
It might have been another person at their computer. Turn on local echo, and you can see what they did. Maybe you d send files to each other. But in my case, the answer was different: PC Magazine.
PC Magazine and CompuServe
Starting around 1986 (so I would have been about 6 years old), I got to read PC Magazine. My dad would bring copies that were being discarded at his office home for me to read, and I think eventually bought me a subscription directly. This was not just a standard magazine; it ran something like 350-400 pages an issue, and came out every other week. This thing was a monster. It had reviews of hardware and software, descriptions of upcoming technologies, pages and pages of ads (that often had some degree of being informative to them). And they had sections on programming. Many issues would talk about BASIC or Pascal programming, and there d be a utility in most issues. What do I mean by a utility in most issues ? Did they include a floppy disk with software?
No, of course not. There was a literal program listing printed in the magazine. If you wanted the utility, you had to type it in. And a lot of them were written in assembler, so you had to have an assembler. An assembler, of course, was not free and I didn t have one. Or maybe they wrote it in Microsoft C, and I had Borland C, and (of course) they weren t compatible. Sometimes they would list the program sort of in binary: line after line of a BASIC program, with lines like 64, 193, 253, 0, 53, 0, 87 that you would type in for hours, hopefully correctly. Running the BASIC program would, if you got it correct, emit a .COM file that you could then run. They did have a rudimentary checksum system built in, but it wasn t even a CRC, so something like swapping two numbers you d never notice except when the program would mysteriously hang.
Eventually they teamed up with CompuServe to offer a limited slice of CompuServe for the purpose of downloading PC Magazine utilities. This was called PC MagNet. I am foggy on the details, but I believe that for a time you could connect to the limited PC MagNet part of CompuServe for free (after the cost of the long-distance call, that is) rather than paying for CompuServe itself (because, OF COURSE, that also charged you per the minute.) So in the early days, I would get special permission from my parents to place a long distance call, and after some nerve-wracking minutes in which we were aware every minute was racking up charges, I could navigate the menus, download what I wanted, and log off immediately.
I still, incidentally, mourn what PC Magazine became. As with computing generally, it followed the mass market. It lost its deep technical chops, cut its programming columns, stopped talking about things like how SCSI worked, and so forth. By the time it stopped printing in 2009, it was no longer a square-bound 400-page beheamoth, but rather looked more like a copy of Newsweek, but with less depth.
Continuing with CompuServe
CompuServe was a much larger service than just PC MagNet. Eventually, our family got a subscription. It was still an expensive and scarce resource; I d call it only after hours when the long-distance rates were cheapest. Everyone had a numerical username separated by commas; mine was 71510,1421. CompuServe had forums, and files. Eventually I would use TapCIS to queue up things I wanted to do offline, to minimize phone usage online.
CompuServe eventually added a gateway to the Internet. For the sum of somewhere around $1 a message, you could send or receive an email from someone with an Internet email address! I remember the thrill of one time, as a kid of probably 11 years, sending a message to one of the editors of PC Magazine and getting a kind, if brief, reply back!
But inevitably I had
The Godzilla Phone Bill
Yes, one month I became lax in tracking my time online. I ran up my parents phone bill. I don t remember how high, but I remember it was hundreds of dollars, a hefty sum at the time. As I watched Jason Scott s BBS Documentary, I realized how common an experience this was. I think this was the end of CompuServe for me for awhile.
Toll-Free Numbers
I lived near a town with a population of 500. Not even IN town, but near town. The calling area included another town with a population of maybe 1500, so all told, there were maybe 2000 people total I could talk to with a local call though far fewer numbers, because remember, telephones were allocated by the household. There was, as far as I know, zero modems that were a local call (aside from one that belonged to a friend I met in around 1992). So basically everything was long-distance.
But there was a special feature of the telephone network: toll-free numbers. Normally when calling long-distance, you, the caller, paid the bill. But with a toll-free number, beginning with 1-800, the recipient paid the bill. These numbers almost inevitably belonged to corporations that wanted to make it easy for people to call. Sales and ordering lines, for instance. Some of these companies started to set up modems on toll-free numbers. There were few of these, but they existed, so of course I had to try them!
One of them was a company called PennyWise that sold office supplies. They had a toll-free line you could call with a modem to order stuff. Yes, online ordering before the web! I loved office supplies. And, because I lived far from a big city, if the local K-Mart didn t have it, I probably couldn t get it. Of course, the interface was entirely text, but you could search for products and place orders with the modem. I had loads of fun exploring the system, and actually ordered things from them and probably actually saved money doing so. With the first order they shipped a monster full-color catalog. That thing must have been 500 pages, like the Sears catalogs of the day. Every item had a part number, which streamlined ordering through the modem.
Inbound FAXes
By the 90s, a number of modems became able to send and receive FAXes as well. For those that don t know, a FAX machine was essentially a special modem. It would scan a page and digitally transmit it over the phone system, where it would at least in the early days be printed out in real time (because the machines didn t have the memory to store an entire page as an image). Eventually, PC modems integrated FAX capabilities.
There still wasn t anything useful I could do locally, but there were ways I could get other companies to FAX something to me. I remember two of them.
One was for US Robotics. They had an on demand FAX system. You d call up a toll-free number, which was an automated IVR system. You could navigate through it and select various documents of interest to you: spec sheets and the like. You d key in your FAX number, hang up, and US Robotics would call YOU and FAX you the documents you wanted. Yes! I was talking to a computer (of a sorts) at no cost to me!
The New York Times also ran a service for awhile called TimesFax. Every day, they would FAX out a page or two of summaries of the day s top stories. This was pretty cool in an era in which I had no other way to access anything from the New York Times. I managed to sign up for TimesFax I have no idea how, anymore and for awhile I would get a daily FAX of their top stories. When my family got its first laser printer, I could them even print these FAXes complete with the gothic New York Times masthead. Wow! (OK, so technically I could print it on a dot-matrix printer also, but graphics on a 9-pin dot matrix is a kind of pain that is a whole other article.)
My own phone line
Remember how I discussed that phone lines were allocated per household? This was a problem for a lot of reasons:
Anybody that tried to call my family while I was using my modem would get a busy signal (unable to complete the call)
If anybody in the house picked up the phone while I was using it, that would degrade the quality of the ongoing call and either mess up or disconnect the call in progress. In many cases, that could cancel a file transfer (which wasn t necessarily easy or possible to resume), prompting howls of annoyance from me.
Generally we all had to work around each other
So eventually I found various small jobs and used the money I made to pay for my own phone line and my own long distance costs. Eventually I upgraded to a 28.8Kbps US Robotics Courier modem even! Yes, you heard it right: I got a job and a bank account so I could have a phone line and a faster modem. Uh, isn t that why every teenager gets a job?
Now my local friend and I could call each other freely at least on my end (I can t remember if he had his own phone line too). We could exchange files using HS/Link, which had the added benefit of allowing split-screen chat even while a file transfer is in progress. I m sure we spent hours chatting to each other keyboard-to-keyboard while sharing files with each other.
Technology in Schools
By this point in the story, we re in the late 80s and early 90s. I m still using PC-style OSs at home; OS/2 in the later years of this period, DOS or maybe a bit of Windows in the earlier years. I mentioned that they let me work on programming at school starting in 5th grade. It was soon apparent that I knew more about computers than anybody on staff, and I started getting pulled out of class to help teachers or administrators with vexing school problems. This continued until I graduated from high school, incidentally often to my enjoyment, and the annoyance of one particular teacher who, I must say, I was fine with annoying in this way.
That s not to say that there was institutional support for what I was doing. It was, after all, a small school. Larger schools might have introduced BASIC or maybe Logo in high school. But I had already taught myself BASIC, Pascal, and C by the time I was somewhere around 12 years old. So I wouldn t have had any use for that anyhow.
There were programming contests occasionally held in the area. Schools would send teams. My school didn t really send anybody, but I went as an individual. One of them was run by a local college (but for jr. high or high school students. Years later, I met one of the professors that ran it. He remembered me, and that day, better than I did. The programming contest had problems one could solve in BASIC or Logo. I knew nothing about what to expect going into it, but I had lugged my computer and screen along, and asked him, Can I write my solutions in C? He was, apparently, stunned, but said sure, go for it. I took first place that day, leading to some rather confused teams from much larger schools.
The Netware network that the school had was, as these generally were, itself isolated. There was no link to the Internet or anything like it. Several schools across three local counties eventually invested in a fiber-optic network linking them together. This built a larger, but still closed, network. Its primary purpose was to allow students to be exposed to a wider variety of classes at high schools. Participating schools had an ITV room , outfitted with cameras and mics. So students at any school could take classes offered over ITV at other schools. For instance, only my school taught German classes, so people at any of those participating schools could take German. It was an early Zoom room. But alongside the TV signal, there was enough bandwidth to run some Netware frames. By about 1995 or so, this let one of the schools purchase some CD-ROM software that was made available on a file server and could be accessed by any participating school. Nice! But Netware was mainly about file and printer sharing; there wasn t even a facility like email, at least not on our deployment.
BBSs
My last hop before the Internet was the BBS. A BBS was a computer program, usually ran by a hobbyist like me, on a computer with a modem connected. Callers would call it up, and they d interact with the BBS. Most BBSs had discussion groups like forums and file areas. Some also had games. I, of course, continued to have that most vexing of problems: they were all long-distance.
There were some ways to help with that, chiefly QWK and BlueWave. These, somewhat like TapCIS in the CompuServe days, let me download new message posts for reading offline, and queue up my own messages to send later. QWK and BlueWave didn t help with file downloading, though.
BBSs get networked
BBSs were an interesting thing. You d call up one, and inevitably somewhere in the file area would be a BBS list. Download the BBS list and you ve suddenly got a list of phone numbers to try calling. All of them were long distance, of course. You d try calling them at random and have a success rate of maybe 20%. The other 80% would be defunct; you might get the dreaded this number is no longer in service or the even more dreaded angry human answering the phone (and of course a modem can t talk to a human, so they d just get silence for probably the nth time that week). The phone company cared nothing about BBSs and recycled their numbers just as fast as any others.
To talk to various people, or participate in certain discussion groups, you d have to call specific BBSs. That s annoying enough in the general case, but even more so for someone paying long distance for it all, because it takes a few minutes to establish a connection to a BBS: handshaking, logging in, menu navigation, etc.
But BBSs started talking to each other. The earliest successful such effort was FidoNet, and for the duration of the BBS era, it remained by far the largest. FidoNet was analogous to the UUCP that the institutional users had, but ran on the much cheaper PC hardware. Basically, BBSs that participated in FidoNet would relay email, forum posts, and files between themselves overnight. Eventually, as with UUCP, by hopping through this network, messages could reach around the globe, and forums could have worldwide participation asynchronously, long before they could link to each other directly via the Internet. It was almost entirely volunteer-run.
Running my own BBS
At age 13, I eventually chose to set up my own BBS. It ran on my single phone line, so of course when I was dialing up something else, nobody could dial up me. Not that this was a huge problem; in my town of 500, I probably had a good 1 or 2 regular callers in the beginning.
In the PC era, there was a big difference between a server and a client. Server-class software was expensive and rare. Maybe in later years you had an email client, but an email server would be completely unavailable to you as a home user. But with a BBS, I could effectively run a server. I even ran serial lines in our house so that the BBS could be connected from other rooms! Since I was running OS/2, the BBS didn t tie up the computer; I could continue using it for other things.
FidoNet had an Internet email gateway. This one, unlike CompuServe s, was free. Once I had a BBS on FidoNet, you could reach me from the Internet using the FidoNet address. This didn t support attachments, but then email of the day didn t really, either.
Various others outside Kansas ran FidoNet distribution points. I believe one of them was mgmtsys; my memory is quite vague, but I think they offered a direct gateway and I would call them to pick up Internet mail via FidoNet protocols, but I m not at all certain of this.
Pros and Cons of the Non-Microsoft World
As mentioned, Microsoft was and is the dominant operating system vendor for PCs. But I left that world in 1993, and here, nearly 30 years later, have never really returned. I got an operating system with more technical capabilities than the DOS and Windows of the day, but the tradeoff was a much smaller software ecosystem. OS/2 could run DOS programs, but it ran OS/2 programs a lot better. So if I were to run a BBS, I wanted one that had a native OS/2 version limiting me to a small fraction of available BBS server software. On the other hand, as a fully 32-bit operating system, there started to be OS/2 ports of certain software with a Unix heritage; most notably for me at the time, gcc. At some point, I eventually came across the RMS essays and started to be hooked.
Internet: The Hunt Begins
I certainly was aware that the Internet was out there and interesting. But the first problem was: how the heck do I get connected to the Internet?
Learning Link and Gopher
ISPs weren t really a thing; the first one in my area (though still a long-distance call) started in, I think, 1994. One service that one of my teachers got me hooked up with was Learning Link. Learning Link was a nationwide collaboration of PBS stations and schools, designed to build on the educational mission of PBS. The nearest Learning Link station was more than a 3-hour drive away but critically, they had a toll-free access number, and my teacher convinced them to let me use it. I connected via a terminal program and a modem, like with most other things. I don t remember much about it, but I do remember a very important thing it had: Gopher. That was my first experience with Gopher.
Learning Link was hosted by a Unix derivative (Xenix), but it didn t exactly give everyone a shell. I seem to recall it didn t have open FTP access either. The Gopher client had FTP access at some point; I don t recall for sure if it did then. If it did, then when a Gopher server referred to an FTP server, I could get to it. (I am unclear at this point if I could key in an arbitrary FTP location, or knew how, at that time.) I also had email access there, but I don t recall exactly how; probably Pine. If that s correct, that would have dated my Learning Link access as no earlier than 1992.
I think my access time to Learning Link was limited. And, since the only way to get out on the Internet from there was Gopher and Pine, I was somewhat limited in terms of technology as well. I believe that telnet services, for instance, weren t available to me.
Computer labs
There was one place that tended to have Internet access: colleges and universities. In 7th grade, I participated in a program that resulted in me being invited to visit Duke University, and in 8th grade, I participated in National History Day, resulting in a trip to visit the University of Maryland. I probably sought out computer labs at both of those. My most distinct memory was finding my way into a computer lab at one of those universities, and it was full of NeXT workstations. I had never seen or used NeXT before, and had no idea how to operate it. I had brought a box of floppy disks, unaware that the DOS disks probably weren t compatible with NeXT.
Closer to home, a small college had a computer lab that I could also visit. I would go there in summer or when it wasn t used with my stack of floppies. I remember downloading disk images of FLOSS operating systems: FreeBSD, Slackware, or Debian, at the time. The hash marks from the DOS-based FTP client would creep across the screen as the 1.44MB disk images would slowly download. telnet was also available on those machines, so I could telnet to things like public-access Archie servers and libraries though not Gopher. Still, FTP and telnet access opened up a lot, and I learned quite a bit in those years.
Continuing the Journey
At some point, I got a copy of the Whole Internet User s Guide and Catalog, published in 1994. I still have it. If it hadn t already figured it out by then, I certainly became aware from it that Unix was the dominant operating system on the Internet. The examples in Whole Internet covered FTP, telnet, gopher all assuming the user somehow got to a Unix prompt. The web was introduced about 300 pages in; clearly viewed as something that wasn t page 1 material. And it covered the command-line www client before introducing the graphical Mosaic. Even then, though, the book highlighted Mosaic s utility as a front-end for Gopher and FTP, and even the ability to launch telnet sessions by clicking on links. But having a copy of the book didn t equate to having any way to run Mosaic. The machines in the computer lab I mentioned above all ran DOS and were incapable of running a graphical browser. I had no SLIP or PPP (both ways to run Internet traffic over a modem) connectivity at home. In short, the Web was something for the large institutional users at the time.
CD-ROMs
As CD-ROMs came out, with their huge (for the day) 650MB capacity, various companies started collecting software that could be downloaded on the Internet and selling it on CD-ROM. The two most popular ones were Walnut Creek CD-ROM and Infomagic. One could buy extensive Shareware and gaming collections, and then even entire Linux and BSD distributions. Although not exactly an Internet service per se, it was a way of bringing what may ordinarily only be accessible to institutional users into the home computer realm.
Free Software Jumps In
As I mentioned, by the mid 90s, I had come across RMS s writings about free software most probably his 1992 essay Why Software Should Be Free. (Please note, this is not a commentary on the more recently-revealed issues surrounding RMS, but rather his writings and work as I encountered them in the 90s.) The notion of a Free operating system not just in cost but in openness was incredibly appealing. Not only could I tinker with it to a much greater extent due to having source for everything, but it included so much software that I d otherwise have to pay for. Compilers! Interpreters! Editors! Terminal emulators! And, especially, server software of all sorts. There d be no way I could afford or run Netware, but with a Free Unixy operating system, I could do all that. My interest was obviously piqued. Add to that the fact that I could actually participate and contribute I was about to become hooked on something that I ve stayed hooked on for decades.
But then the question was: which Free operating system? Eventually I chose FreeBSD to begin with; that would have been sometime in 1995. I don t recall the exact reasons for that. I remember downloading Slackware install floppies, and probably the fact that Debian wasn t yet at 1.0 scared me off for a time. FreeBSD s fantastic Handbook far better than anything I could find for Linux at the time was no doubt also a factor.
The de Raadt Factor
Why not NetBSD or OpenBSD? The short answer is Theo de Raadt. Somewhere in this time, when I was somewhere between 14 and 16 years old, I asked some questions comparing NetBSD to the other two free BSDs. This was on a NetBSD mailing list, but for some reason Theo saw it and got a flame war going, which CC d me. Now keep in mind that even if NetBSD had a web presence at the time, it would have been minimal, and I would have not all that unusually for the time had no way to access it. I was certainly not aware of the, shall we say, acrimony between Theo and NetBSD. While I had certainly seen an online flamewar before, this took on a different and more disturbing tone; months later, Theo randomly emailed me under the subject SLIME saying that I was, well, SLIME . I seem to recall periodic emails from him thereafter reminding me that he hates me and that he had blocked me. (Disclaimer: I have poor email archives from this period, so the full details are lost to me, but I believe I am accurately conveying these events from over 25 years ago)
This was a surprise, and an unpleasant one. I was trying to learn, and while it is possible I didn t understand some aspect or other of netiquette (or Theo s personal hatred of NetBSD) at the time, still that is not a reason to flame a 16-year-old (though he would have had no way to know my age). This didn t leave any kind of scar, but did leave a lasting impression; to this day, I am particularly concerned with how FLOSS projects handle poisonous people. Debian, for instance, has come a long way in this over the years, and even Linus Torvalds has turned over a new leaf. I don t know if Theo has.
In any case, I didn t use NetBSD then. I did try it periodically in the years since, but never found it compelling enough to justify a large switch from Debian. I never tried OpenBSD for various reasons, but one of them was that I didn t want to join a community that tolerates behavior such as Theo s from its leader.
Moving to FreeBSD
Moving from OS/2 to FreeBSD was final. That is, I didn t have enough hard drive space to keep both. I also didn t have the backup capacity to back up OS/2 completely. My BBS, which ran Virtual BBS (and at some point also AdeptXBBS) was deleted and reincarnated in a different form. My BBS was a member of both FidoNet and VirtualNet; the latter was specific to VBBS, and had to be dropped. I believe I may have also had to drop the FidoNet link for a time. This was the biggest change of computing in my life to that point. The earlier experiences hadn t literally destroyed what came before. OS/2 could still run my DOS programs. Its command shell was quite DOS-like. It ran Windows programs. I was going to throw all that away and leap into the unknown.
I wish I had saved a copy of my BBS; I would love to see the messages I exchanged back then, or see its menu screens again. I have little memory of what it looked like. But other than that, I have no regrets. Pursuing Free, Unixy operating systems brought me a lot of enjoyment and a good career.
That s not to say it was easy. All the problems of not being in the Microsoft ecosystem were magnified under FreeBSD and Linux. In a day before EDID, monitor timings had to be calculated manually and you risked destroying your monitor if you got them wrong. Word processing and spreadsheet software was pretty much not there for FreeBSD or Linux at the time; I was therefore forced to learn LaTeX and actually appreciated that. Software like PageMaker or CorelDraw was certainly nowhere to be found for those free operating systems either. But I got a ton of new capabilities.
I mentioned the BBS didn t shut down, and indeed it didn t. I ran what was surely a supremely unique oddity: a free, dialin Unix shell server in the middle of a small town in Kansas. I m sure I provided things such as pine for email and some help text and maybe even printouts for how to use it. The set of callers slowly grew over the time period, in fact.
And then I got UUCP.
Enter UUCP
Even throughout all this, there was no local Internet provider and things were still long distance. I had Internet Email access via assorted strange routes, but they were all strange. And, I wanted access to Usenet. In 1995, it happened.
The local ISP I mentioned offered UUCP access. Though I couldn t afford the dialup shell (or later, SLIP/PPP) that they offered due to long-distance costs, UUCP s very efficient batched processes looked doable. I believe I established that link when I was 15, so in 1995.
I worked to register my domain, complete.org, as well. At the time, the process was a bit lengthy and involved downloading a text file form, filling it out in a precise way, sending it to InterNIC, and probably mailing them a check. Well I did that, and in September of 1995, complete.org became mine. I set up sendmail on my local system, as well as INN to handle the limited Usenet newsfeed I requested from the ISP. I even ran Majordomo to host some mailing lists, including some that were surprisingly high-traffic for a few-times-a-day long-distance modem UUCP link!
The modem client programs for FreeBSD were somewhat less advanced than for OS/2, but I believe I wound up using Minicom or Seyon to continue to dial out to BBSs and, I believe, continue to use Learning Link. So all the while I was setting up my local BBS, I continued to have access to the text Internet, consisting of chiefly Gopher for me.
Switching to Debian
I switched to Debian sometime in 1995 or 1996, and have been using Debian as my primary OS ever since. I continued to offer shell access, but added the WorldVU Atlantis menuing BBS system. This provided a return of a more BBS-like interface (by default; shell was still an uption) as well as some BBS door games such as LoRD and TradeWars 2002, running under DOS emulation.
I also continued to run INN, and ran ifgate to allow FidoNet echomail to be presented into INN Usenet-like newsgroups, and netmail to be gated to Unix email. This worked pretty well. The BBS continued to grow in these days, peaking at about two dozen total user accounts, and maybe a dozen regular users.
Dial-up access availability
I believe it was in 1996 that dial up PPP access finally became available in my small town. What a thrill! FINALLY! I could now FTP, use Gopher, telnet, and the web all from home. Of course, it was at modem speeds, but still.
(Strangely, I have a memory of accessing the Web using WebExplorer from OS/2. I don t know exactly why; it s possible that by this time, I had upgraded to a 486 DX2/66 and was able to reinstall OS/2 on the old 25MHz 486, or maybe something was wrong with the timeline from my memories from 25 years ago above. Or perhaps I made the occasional long-distance call somewhere before I ditched OS/2.)
Gopher sites still existed at this point, and I could access them using Netscape Navigator which likely became my standard Gopher client at that point. I don t recall using UMN text-mode gopher client locally at that time, though it s certainly possible I did.
The city
Starting when I was 15, I took computer science classes at Wichita State University. The first one was a class in the summer of 1995 on C++. I remember being worried about being good enough for it I was, after all, just after my HS freshman year and had never taken the prerequisite C class. I loved it and got an A! By 1996, I was taking more classes.
In 1996 or 1997 I stayed in Wichita during the day due to having more than one class. So, what would I do then but enjoy the computer lab? The CS dept. had two of them: one that had NCD X terminals connected to a pair of SunOS servers, and another one running Windows. I spent most of the time in the Unix lab with the NCDs; I d use Netscape or pine, write code, enjoy the University s fast Internet connection, and so forth.
In 1997 I had graduated high school and that summer I moved to Wichita to attend college. As was so often the case, I shut down the BBS at that time. It would be 5 years until I again dealt with Internet at home in a rural community.
By the time I moved to my apartment in Wichita, I had stopped using OS/2 entirely. I have no memory of ever having OS/2 there. Along the way, I had bought a Pentium 166, and then the most expensive piece of computing equipment I have ever owned: a DEC Alpha, which, of course, ran Linux.
ISDN
I must have used dialup PPP for a time, but I eventually got a job working for the ISP I had used for UUCP, and then PPP. While there, I got a 128Kbps ISDN line installed in my apartment, and they gave me a discount on the service for it. That was around 3x the speed of a modem, and crucially was always on and gave me a public IP. No longer did I have to use UUCP; now I got to host my own things! By at least 1998, I was running a web server on www.complete.org, and I had an FTP server going as well.
Even Bigger Cities
In 1999 I moved to Dallas, and there got my first broadband connection: an ADSL link at, I think, 1.5Mbps! Now that was something! But it had some reliability problems. I eventually put together a server and had it hosted at an acquantaince s place who had SDSL in his apartment. Within a couple of years, I had switched to various kinds of proper hosting for it, but that is a whole other article.
In Indianapolis, I got a cable modem for the first time, with even tighter speeds but prohibitions on running servers on it. Yuck.
Challenges
Being non-Microsoft continued to have challenges. Until the advent of Firefox, a web browser was one of the biggest. While Netscape supported Linux on i386, it didn t support Linux on Alpha. I hobbled along with various attempts at emulators, old versions of Mosaic, and so forth. And, until StarOffice was open-sourced as Open Office, reading Microsoft file formats was also a challenge, though WordPerfect was briefly available for Linux.
Over the years, I have become used to the Linux ecosystem. Perhaps I use Gimp instead of Photoshop and digikam instead of well, whatever somebody would use on Windows. But I get ZFS, and containers, and so much that isn t available there.
Yes, I know Apple never went away and is a thing, but for most of the time period I discuss in this article, at least after the rise of DOS, it was niche compared to the PC market.
Back to Kansas
In 2002, I moved back to Kansas, to a rural home near a different small town in the county next to where I grew up. Over there, it was back to dialup at home, but I had faster access at work. I didn t much care for this, and thus began a 20+-year effort to get broadband in the country. At first, I got a wireless link, which worked well enough in the winter, but had serious problems in the summer when the trees leafed out. Eventually DSL became available locally highly unreliable, but still, it was something. Then I moved back to the community I grew up in, a few miles from where I grew up. Again I got DSL a bit better. But after some years, being at the end of the run of DSL meant I had poor speeds and reliability problems. I eventually switched to various wireless ISPs, which continues to the present day; while people in cities can get Gbps service, I can get, at best, about 50Mbps. Long-distance fees are gone, but the speed disparity remains.
Concluding Reflections
I am glad I grew up where I did; the strong community has a lot of advantages I don t have room to discuss here. In a number of very real senses, having no local services made things a lot more difficult than they otherwise would have been. However, perhaps I could say that I also learned a lot through the need to come up with inventive solutions to those challenges. To this day, I think a lot about computing in remote environments: partially because I live in one, and partially because I enjoy visiting places that are remote enough that they have no Internet, phone, or cell service whatsoever. I have written articles like Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances based on my own personal experience. I instinctively think about making protocols robust in the face of various kinds of connectivity failures because I experience various kinds of connectivity failures myself.
(Almost) Everything Lives On
In 2002, Gopher turned 10 years old. It had probably been about 9 or 10 years since I had first used Gopher, which was the first way I got on live Internet from my house. It was hard to believe. By that point, I had an always-on Internet link at home and at work. I had my Alpha, and probably also at least PCMCIA Ethernet for a laptop (many laptops had modems by the 90s also). Despite its popularity in the early 90s, less than 10 years after it came on the scene and started to unify the Internet, it was mostly forgotten.
And it was at that moment that I decided to try to resurrect it. The University of Minnesota finally released it under an Open Source license. I wrote the first new gopher server in years, pygopherd, and introduced gopher to Debian. Gopher lives on; there are now quite a few Gopher clients and servers out there, newly started post-2002. The Gemini protocol can be thought of as something akin to Gopher 2.0, and it too has a small but blossoming ecosystem.
Archie, the old FTP search tool, is dead though. Same for WAIS and a number of the other pre-web search tools. But still, even FTP lives on today.
And BBSs? Well, they didn t go away either. Jason Scott s fabulous BBS documentary looks back at the history of the BBS, while Back to the BBS from last year talks about the modern BBS scene. FidoNet somehow is still alive and kicking. UUCP still has its place and has inspired a whole string of successors. Some, like NNCP, are clearly direct descendents of UUCP. Filespooler lives in that ecosystem, and you can even see UUCP concepts in projects as far afield as Syncthing and Meshtastic. Usenet still exists, and you can now run Usenet over NNCP just as I ran Usenet over UUCP back in the day (which you can still do as well). Telnet, of course, has been largely supplanted by ssh, but the concept is more popular now than ever, as Linux has made ssh be available on everything from Raspberry Pi to Android.
And I still run a Gopher server, looking pretty much like it did in 2002.
This post also has a permanent home on my website, where it may be periodically updated.
My youngest has a cute little wooden Rocket puzzle, made by a French company
called Janod.
Sadly, at some point, we lost the nose cone part, so I designed and printed a
replacement.
It's substantially based on one module from an OpenSCAD "Nose Cone Library" by
Garrett
Goss,
which he kindly released to the public domain.
I embellished the cone with a top pointy bit and a rounded brim. I also
hollowed out the bottom to make space for a magnet. Originally I designed an
offset-from-centre slot for the magnet, the idea being, you would insert the
magnet off-centre and it would slot into position and be partly held in by the
offset, and you could then stick a blob of glue or similar to finish the job.
Unfortunately I had a layer shift during the print, so that didn't work. I
reamed out a small alcove instead. The white trim is adapted from the lid from
some kitchen herbs, trimmed back. I secured the magnet and glued the lid over
the bottom.
Here it is: rocket.scad. My contributions are under the terms
of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA
4.0).
Over time the screw hole into the wooden front section of our IKEA HEMNES Shoe
cabinet
had worn out and it was not possible to secure a screw at that position any
more. I designed a little 'wedge' of plastic to sit over the fitting with and
provide some offset screw holes.
At the time, I had a very narrow window of access to our office 3d printer, so I
designed it almost as a "speed coding" session in OpenSCAD: in between 5-10 minutes,
guessing about the exact dimensions for the plastic bit that it sits over.
When I first moved from being a technical consultant to a manager of other consultants, I took a 5-day course Managing Technical Teams a bootstrap for managing people within organisations, but with a particular focus on technical people. We do have some particular quirks, after all
Two elements of that course keep coming to mind when doing Debian work, and they both relate to how teams fit together and get stuff done.
Tuckman s four stages model
In the mid-1960s Bruce W. Tuckman developed a four-stage descriptive model of the stages a project team goes through in its lifetime. They are:
Forming: the team comes together and its members are typically motivated and excited, but they often also feel anxiety or uncertainty about how the team will operate and their place within it.
Storming: initial enthusiasm can give way to frustration or disagreement about goals, roles, expectations and responsibilities. Team members are establishing trust, power and status. This is the most critical stage.
Norming: team members take responsibility and share a common goal. They tolerate the whims and fancies of others, sometimes at the expense of conflict and sharing controversial ideas.
Performing: team members are confident, motivated and knowledgeable. They work towards the team s common goal. The team is high-achieving.
Resolved disagreements and personality clashes result in greater intimacy, and a spirit of co-operation emerges.
Teams need to understand these stages because a team can regress to earlier stages when its composition or goals change. A new member, the departure of an existing member, changes in supervisor or leadership style can all lead a team to regress to the storming stage and fail to perform for a time.
When you see a team member say this, as I observed in an IRC channel recently, you know the team is performing:
nice teamwork these busy days Seen on IRC in the channel of a performing team
Tuckman s model describes a team s performance overall, but how can team members establish what they can contribute and how can they go doing so confidently and effectively?
Belbin s Team Roles
The types of behaviour in which people engage are infinite. But the range of useful behaviours, which make an effective contribution to team performance, is finite. These behaviours are grouped into a set number of related clusters, to which the term Team Role is applied. Belbin, R M. Team Roles at Work. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2010
Dr Meredith Belbin s thesis, based on nearly ten years research during the 1970s and 1980s, is that each team has a number of roles which need to be filled at various times, but they re not innate characteristics of the people filling them. People may have attributes which make them more or less suited to each role, and they can consciously take up a role if they recognise its need in the team at a particular time.
Belbin s nine team roles are:
Resource investigator (people): outgoing; enthusiastic; has lots of contacts knows someone who might know someone who knows how to solve a problem. Associated weaknessses: over-optimism, enthusiasm wanes quickly
Co-ordinator (people): mature; confident; identifies talent; clarifies goals and delegates effectively. Associated weaknesses: may be seen as manipulative; offloads own share of work.
Shaper (action): challenging; dynamic; has drive. Describes what they want and when they want it. Associated weaknesses: prone to provocation; offends others feelings.
Monitor/evaluator (thinking): sees all options, judges accurately. Best given data and options and asked which the team should choose. Associated weaknesses: lacks drive; can be overly critical.
Teamworker (people): takes care of things behind the scenes; spots a problem and deals with it quietly without fuss. Averts friction. Associated weaknesses: indecisive; avoids confrontation.
Implementer (action): turns ideas into actions and organises work. Allowable weaknesses: somewhat inflexible; slow to respond to new possibilities.
Completer finisher (action): searches out errors; polishes and perfects. Despite the name, may never actually consider something finished . Associated weaknesses: inclined to worry; reluctant to delegate.
Specialist (thinking): knows or can acquire a wealth of things on a subject. Associated weaknesses: narrow focus; overwhelmes others with depth of knowledge.
(adapted from https://www.belbin.com/media/3471/belbin-team-role-descriptions-2022.pdf)
A well-balanced team, Belbin asserts, isn t comprised of multiples of nine individuals who fit into one of these roles permanently. Rather, it has a number of people who are comfortable to wear some of these hats as the need arises. It s even useful to use the team roles as language: for example, someone playing a shaper might say the way we ve always done this is holding us back , to which a co-ordinator s could respond Steve, Joanna put on your Plant hats and find some new ideas. Talk to Susan and see if she knows someone who s tackled this before. Present the options to Nigel and he ll help evaluate which ones might work for us.
Teams in Debian
There are all sort of teams in Debian those which are formally brought into operation by the DPL or the constitution; package maintenance teams; public relations teams; non-technical content teams; special interest teams; and a whole heap of others. Teams can be formal and informal, fleeting or long-lived, two people working together or dozens.
But they all have in common the Tuckman stages of their development and the Belbin team roles they need to fill to flourish. At some stage in their existence, they will all experience new or departing team members and a period of re-forming, norming and storming perhaps fleetingly, perhaps not. And at some stage they will all need someone to step into a team role, play the part and get the team one step further towards their goals.
Footnote
Belbin Associates, the company Meredith Belbin established to promote and continue his work, offers a personalised report with guidance about which roles team members show the strongest preferences for, and how to make best use of them in various settings. They re quick to complete and can also take into account observers , i.e. how others see a team member. All my technical staff go through this process blind shortly after they start, so as not to bias their input, and then we discuss the roles and their report in detail as a one-to-one.
There are some teams in Debian for which this process and discussion as a group activity could be invaluable. I have no particular affiliation with Belbin Associates other than having used the reports and the language of team roles for a number of years. If there s sufficient interest for a BoF session at the next DebConf, I could probably be persuaded to lead it.
Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
The meetup was recorded and available on YouTube. Here is the part
relevant to my presentation, with subtitles:1
I got a few questions about how to get information from the higher
layers, like HTTP. As my use case for Akvorado was at the network
edge, my answers were mostly negative. However, as sFlow is
extensible, when collecting flows from Linux servers instead, you
could embed additional data and they could be exported as well.
I also got a question about doing aggregation in a single table.
ClickHouse can aggregate automatically data using TTL. My answer for
not doing that is partial. There is another reason: the retention
periods of the various tables may overlap. For example, the main table
keeps data for 15 days, but even in these 15 days, if I do a query on
a 12-hour window, it is faster to use the flows_1m0s aggregated
table, unless I request something about ports and IP addresses.
To generate the subtitles, I have used Amazon
Transcribe, the speech-to-text solution from Amazon AWS.
Unfortunately, there is no en-FR language available, which would
have been useful for my terrible accent. While the
subtitles were 100% accurate when the host, Robert Hodge from
Altinity, was speaking, the success rate on my talk was quite
lower. I had to rewrite almost all sentences. However, using
speech-to-text is still useful to get the timings, as it is also
something requiring a lot of work to do manually.
I arrived in Prizren late on Wednesday. Here s what I did during debcamp (so over 3 days). I hope this post just motivates others to contribute more to Debian.
At least 2 DDs want to upload packages that need a new version of python3-jsonschema (ie: version > 4.x). Unfortunately, version 4 broke a few packages. I therefore uploaded it to Experimental a few months/week, so I could see the result of autopkgtest reading the pseudo excuse page. And it showed a few packages broke. Here s the one used (or part of) OpenStack:
Nova
Designate
Ironic
python-warlock
Sahara
Vitrage
Thanks to a reactive upstream, I was able to fix the first 4 above, but not Sahara yet. Vitrage poped-up when I uploade Debian release 2 of jsonschema, surprisingly. Also python3-jsonschema autopkgtest itself was broken because missing python3-pip in depends, but that should be fixed also. I then filed bugs for packages not under my control:
bmtk
python-asdf
It looks tlike now there s also spyder which wasn t in the list a few hours ago. Maybe I should also file a bug against it. At this point, I don t think the python-jsonschema transition is finished, but it s on good tracks.
Then I also uploaded a new package of Ceph removing the ceph-mgr-diskprediction-local because it depended on python3-sklearn that the release team wanted to remove. I also prepared a point release update for it, but I m currently waiting for the previous upload to migrate to testing before uploading the point release.
Last, I wrote the missing update command for extrepo, and pushed the merge request to Salsa. Now extrepo should be feature complete (at least from my point of view).
I also merged the patch for numberstation fixing the debian/copyright, and uploaded it to the NEW queue. It s a new package that does 2 factor authentication, and is mobile friendly: it works perfectly on any Mobian powered phone.
Next, I intend to work with Arthur on the Cloud image finder. I hope we can find the time to work on it so it does what I need (ie: support the kind of setup I want to do, with HA, puppet, etc.).
WadC the procedural programming environment for generating Doom
maps version 3.1 has been released. The majority of this was done
a long time ago, but I've dragged my feet in releasing it. I've said
this before, but this is intended to be the last release I do of WadC.
The headline feature for this release is the introduction of a tuning
concept I had for the UI. It occurred to me that a beginner to WadC
might want to load up an example program which is potentially very
complex and hard to unpick to figure out how it works. If the author
could mark certain variables as "tuneable", the UI could provide an
easy way for someone to tweak parameters and then see what happened.
I had in mind the walls of patch panels and knobs you see with analog
synthesizers: tweak this thing over here and see what happens over
there.
I think this kind of feature would be useful in other, similar programming
environments, like OpenSCAD: I don't think they do yet, but I could be wrong.
This release of WadC is dedicated to the memory of Kayvan Walker (1983-2022).
Kayvan was a childhood friend who committed suicide in March this year. Back
in the nineties, Kayvan was responsible for introducing me to Doom in the
first place: I used to visit his house on the way home to mine, as it was
on the walk back from School. His mum works in IT and always encouraged us into it.
Doom was so far ahead, in technical terms, of any other computer game I'd
ever seen, and was the closest thing we had to virtual reality: we could
create our own worlds. It's in no small part thanks to Kayvan and his
Mum that I'm still creating worlds, nearly thirty years later. I owe my
career and most of my hobbies to those pivotal moments. Thank you both.
Kayvan did a lot more for me than just introduce me to Doom, or computing. He
was one of a set of friends that I had every confidence that, no matter what,
we would always be friends, through thick and thin. I miss him terribly.
Please, if you reading this, are suffering, talk to someone. In the UK you can
talk to Samaritans on 116
123.
Welcome to the May 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
Repfix paper
Zhilei Ren, Shiwei Sun, Jifeng Xuan, Xiaochen Li, Zhide Zhou and He Jiang have published an academic paper titled Automated Patching for Unreproducible Builds:
[..] fixing unreproducible build issues poses a set of challenges [..], among which we consider the localization granularity and the historical knowledge utilization as the most significant ones. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel approach [called] RepFix that combines tracing-based fine-grained localization with history-based patch generation mechanisms.
The paper (PDF, 3.5MB) uses the Debian mylvmbackup package as an example to show how RepFix can automatically generate patches to make software build reproducibly. As it happens, Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch for the mylvmbackup package which has remained unapplied by the Debian package maintainer for over seven years, thus this paper inadvertently underscores that achieving reproducible builds will require both technical and social solutions.
Python variables
Johannes Schauer discovered a fascinating bug where simply naming your Python variable _m led to unreproducible .pyc files. In particular, the types module in Python 3.10 requires the following patch to make it reproducible:
Simply renaming the dummy method from _m to _b was enough to workaround the problem. Johannes bug report first led to a number of improvements in diffoscope to aid in dissecting .pyc files, but upstream identified this as caused by an issue surrounding interned strings and is being tracked in CPython bug #78274.
New SPDX team to incorporate build metadata in Software Bill of Materials
SPDX, the open standard for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), is continuously developed by a number of teams and committees. However, SPDX has welcomed a new addition; a team dedicated to enhancing metadata about software builds, complementing reproducible builds in creating a more secure software supply chain. The SPDX Builds Team has been working throughout May to define the universal primitives shared by all build systems, including the who, what, where and how of builds:
Who: the identity of the person or organisation that controls the build infrastructure.
What: the inputs and outputs of a given build, combining metadata about the build s configuration with an SBOM describing source code and dependencies.
Where: the software packages making up the build system, from build orchestration tools such as Woodpecker CI and Tekton to language-specific tools.
How: the invocation of a build, linking metadata of a build to the identity of the person or automation tool that initiated it.
The SPDX Builds Team expects to have a usable data model by September, ready for inclusion in the SPDX 3.0 standard. The team welcomes new contributors, inviting those interested in joining to introduce themselves on the SPDX-Tech mailing list.
Supply-chain security attacks
This was another bumper month for supply-chain attacks in package repositories. Early in the month, Lance R. Vick noticed that the maintainer of the NPM foreach package let their personal email domain expire, so they bought it and now controls foreach on NPM and the 36,826 projects that depend on it . Shortly afterwards, Drew DeVault published a related blog post titled When will we learn? that offers a brief timeline of major incidents in this area and, not uncontroversially, suggests that the correct way to ship packages is with your distribution s package manager .
Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping is a process for building software tools progressively from a primitive compiler tool and source language up to a full Linux development environment with GCC, etc. This is important given the amount of trust we put in existing compiler binaries. This month, a bootstrappable mini-kernel was announced. Called boot2now, it comprises a series of compilers in the form of bootable machine images.
Google s new Assured Open Source Software service
Google Cloud (the division responsible for the Google Compute Engine) announced a new Assured Open Source Software service. Noting the considerable 650% year-over-year increase in cyberattacks aimed at open source suppliers, the new service claims to enable enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows . The announcement goes on to enumerate that packages curated by the new service would be:
Regularly scanned, analyzed, and fuzz-tested for vulnerabilities.
Have corresponding enriched metadata incorporating Container/Artifact Analysis data.
Are built with Cloud Build including evidence of verifiable SLSA-compliance
Are verifiably signed by Google.
Are distributed from an Artifact Registry secured and protected by Google.
A retrospective on the Rust programming language
Andrew bunnie Huang published a long blog post this month promising a critical retrospective on the Rust programming language. Amongst many acute observations about the evolution of the language s syntax (etc.), the post beings to critique the languages approach to supply chain security ( Rust Has A Limited View of Supply Chain Security ) and reproducibility ( You Can t Reproduce Someone Else s Rust Build ):
There s some bugs open with the Rust maintainers to address reproducible builds, but with the number of issues they have to deal with in the language, I am not optimistic that this problem will be resolved anytime soon. Assuming the only driver of the unreproducibility is the inclusion of OS paths in the binary, one fix to this would be to re-configure our build system to run in some sort of a chroot environment or a virtual machine that fixes the paths in a way that almost anyone else could reproduce. I say almost anyone else because this fix would be OS-dependent, so we d be able to get reproducible builds under, for example, Linux, but it would not help Windows users where chroot environments are not a thing.
Reproducible Builds IRC meeting
The minutes and logs from our May 2022 IRC meeting have been published. In case you missed this one, our next IRC meeting will take place on Tuesday 28th June at 15:00 UTC on #reproducible-builds on the OFTC network.
A new tool to improve supply-chain security in Arch Linux
kpcyrd published yet another interesting tool related to reproducibility. Writing about the tool in a recent blog post, kpcyrd mentions that although many PKGBUILDs provide authentication in the context of signed Git tags (i.e. the ability to verify the Git tag was signed by one of the two trusted keys ), they do not support pinning, ie. that upstream could create a new signed Git tag with an identical name, and arbitrarily change the source code without the [maintainer] noticing . Conversely, other PKGBUILDs support pinning but not authentication. The new tool, auth-tarball-from-git, fixes both problems, as nearly outlined in kpcyrd s original blog post.
diffoscopediffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 212, 213 and 214 to Debian unstable.
Chris also made the following changes:
New features:
Add support for extracting vmlinuz Linux kernel images. []
Support both python-argcomplete 1.x and 2.x. []
Strip sticky etc. from x.deb: sticky Debian binary package [ ]. []
Integrate test coverage with GitLab s concept of artifacts. [][][]
Bug fixes:
Don t mask differences in .zip or .jar central directory extra fields. []
Don t show a binary comparison of .zip or .jar files if we have observed at least one nested difference. []
Codebase improvements:
Substantially update comment for our calls to zipinfo and zipinfo -v. []
Use assert_diff in test_zip over calling get_data with a separate assert. []
Don t call re.compile and then call .sub on the result; just call re.sub directly. []
Clarify the comment around the difference between --usage and --help. []
Testsuite improvements:
Test --help and --usage. []
Test that --help includes the file formats. []
Vagrant Cascadian added an external tool reference xb-tool for GNU Guix [] as well as updated the diffoscope package in GNU Guix itself [][][].
Distribution work
In Debian, 41 reviews of Debian packages were added, 85 were updated and 13 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated, including adding a new nondeterministic_ordering_in_deprecated_items_collected_by_doxygen toolchain issue [] as well as ones for mono_mastersummary_xml_files_inherit_filesystem_ordering [], extended_attributes_in_jar_file_created_without_manifest [] and apxs_captures_build_path [].
Vagrant Cascadian performed a rough check of the reproducibility of core package sets in GNU Guix, and in openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his usual monthly reproducible builds status report.
Upstream patches
The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:
Testing framework
The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
Holger Levsen:
Add support for detecting running kernels that require attention. []
Temporarily configure a host to support performing Debian builds for packages that lack .buildinfo files. []
Update generated webpages to clarify wishes for feedback. []
Update copyright years on various scripts. []
Mattia Rizzolo:
Provide a facility so that Debian Live image generation can copy a file remotely. [][][][]
Roland Clobus:
Add initial support for testing generated images with OpenQA. []
And finally, as usual, node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen [][].
Contact
If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:
The Debian Videoteam has been
I m trying to replace my old OpenPGP key with a new one. The old key wasn t compromised or lost or anything
bad. Is still valid, but I plan to get rid of it soon. It was created in 2013.
The new key id fingerprint is: 
My impression of that city from couple of visits at that point in time where they were still more tongas (horse-ridden carriages), an occasional two wheelers and not many three wheelers. Although, it was one of the more turbulent times as lot of agitation for worker rights were happening around that time and a lot of 
So the last three stories I found the most intriguing.
The first one is titled Man on the Beach. Apparently, a gentleman goes to one of the beaches, a sort of lonely beach, hails a taxi and while returning suddenly dies. The Taxi driver showing good presence of mind takes it to hospital where the gentleman is declared dead on arrival. Unlike in India, he doesn t run away but goes to the cafeteria and waits there for the cops to arrive and take his statement. Now the man is in his early 40s and looks to be fit. Upon searching his pockets he is found to relatively well-off and later it turns out he owns a couple of shops. So then here are the questions ?
What was the man doing on a beach, in summer that beach is somewhat popular but other times not so much, so what was he doing there?
How did he die, was it a simple heart attack or something more? If he had been drugged or something then when and how?
These and more questions can be answered by reading the story Man on the Beach .
2. The death of a photographer Apparently, Kurt lives in a small town where almost all the residents have been served one way or the other by the town photographer. The man was polite and had worked for something like 40 odd years before he is killed/murdered. Apparently, he is murdered late at night. So here come the questions
a. The shop doesn t even stock any cameras and his cash box has cash. Further investigation reveals it is approximate to his average takeout for the day. So if it s not for cash, then what is the motive ?
b. The body was discovered by his cleaning staff who has worked for almost 20 years, 3 days a week. She has her own set of keys to come and clean the office? Did she give the keys to someone, if yes why?
c. Even after investigation, there is no scandal about the man, no other woman or any vices like gambling etc. that could rack up loans. Also, nobody seems to know him and yet take him for granted till he dies. The whole thing appears to be quite strange. Again, the answers lie in the book.
3. The Pyramid Kurt is sleeping one night when the telephone rings. The scene starts with a Piper Cherokee, a single piston aircraft flying low and dropping something somewhere or getting somebody from/on the coast of Sweden. It turns and after a while crashes. Kurt is called to investigate it. Turns out, the plane was supposed to be destroyed. On crash, both the pilot and the passenger are into pieces so only dental records can prove who they are. Same day or a day or two later, two seemingly ordinary somewhat elderly women, spinsters, by all accounts, live above the shop where they sell buttons and all kinds of sewing needs of the town. They seem middle-class. Later the charred bodies of the two sisters are found :(. So here come the questions
a.Did the plane drop something or pick something somebody up ? The Cherokee is a small plane so any plane field or something it could have landed up or if a place was somehow marked then could be dropped or picked up without actually landing.
b. The firefighter suspects arson started at multiple places with the use of petrol? The question is why would somebody wanna do that? The sisters don t seem to be wealthy and practically everybody has bought stuff from them. They weren t popular but weren t also unpopular.
c. Are the two crimes connected or unconnected? If connected, then how?
d. Most important question, why the title Pyramid is given to the story. Why does the author share the name Pyramid. Does he mean the same or the original thing? He could have named it triangle. Again, answers to all the above can be found in the book.
One thing I also became very aware of during reading the book that it is difficult to understand people s behavior and what they do. And this is without even any criminality involved in. Let s say for e.g. I die in some mysterious circumstances, the possibility of the police finding my actions in last days would be limited and this is when I have hearing loss. And this probably is more to do with how our minds are wired. And most people I know are much more privacy conscious/aware than I am.
My youngest has a cute little wooden Rocket puzzle, made by a French company
called 
I arrived in Prizren late on Wednesday. Here s what I did during debcamp (so over 3 days). I hope this post just motivates others to contribute more to Debian.
At least 2 DDs want to upload packages that need a new version of python3-jsonschema (ie: version > 4.x). Unfortunately, version 4 broke a few packages. I therefore uploaded it to Experimental a few months/week, so I could see the result of autopkgtest reading the 
