Search Results: "zed"

15 January 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Library of Broken Worlds

Review: The Library of Broken Worlds, by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Copyright: June 2023
ISBN: 1-338-29064-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 446
The Library of Broken Worlds is a young-adult far-future science fantasy. So far as I can tell, it's stand-alone, although more on that later in the review. Freida is the adopted daughter of Nadi, the Head Librarian, and her greatest wish is to become a librarian herself. When the book opens, she's a teenager in highly competitive training. Freida is low-wetware, without the advanced and expensive enhancements of many of the other students competing for rare and prized librarian positions, which she makes up for by being the most audacious. She doesn't need wetware to commune with the library material gods. If one ventures deep into their tunnels and consumes their crystals, direct physical communion is possible. The library tunnels are Freida's second home, in part because that's where she was born. She was created by the Library, and specifically by Iemaja, the youngest of the material gods. Precisely why is a mystery. To Nadi, Freida is her daughter. To Quinn, Nadi's main political rival within the library, Freida is a thing, a piece of the library, a secondary and possibly rogue AI. A disruptive annoyance. The Library of Broken Worlds is the sort of science fiction where figuring out what is going on is an integral part of the reading experience. It opens with a frame story of an unnamed girl (clearly Freida) waking the god Nameren and identifying herself as designed for deicide. She provokes Nameren's curiosity and offers an Arabian Nights bargain: if he wants to hear her story, he has to refrain from killing her for long enough for her to tell it. As one might expect, the main narrative doesn't catch up to the frame story until the very end of the book. The Library is indeed some type of library that librarians can search for knowledge that isn't available from more mundane sources, but Freida's personal experience of it is almost wholly religious and oracular. The library's material gods are identified as AIs, but good luck making sense of the story through a science fiction frame, even with a healthy allowance for sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. The symbolism and tone is entirely fantasy, and late in the book it becomes clear that whatever the material gods are, they're not simple technological AIs in the vein of, say, Banks's Ship Minds. Also, the Library is not solely a repository of knowledge. It is the keeper of an interstellar peace. The Library was founded after the Great War, to prevent a recurrence. It functions as a sort of legal system and grand tribunal in ways that are never fully explained. As you might expect, that peace is based more on stability than fairness. Five of the players in this far future of humanity are the Awilu, the most advanced society and the first to leave Earth (or Tierra as it's called here); the Mah m, who possess the material war god Nameren of the frame story; the Lunars and Martians, who dominate the Sol system; and the surviving Tierrans, residents of a polluted and struggling planet that is ruthlessly exploited by the Lunars. The problem facing Freida and her friends at the start of the book is a petition brought by a young Tierran against Lunar exploitation of his homeland. His name is Joshua, and Freida is more than half in love with him. Joshua's legal argument involves interpretation of the freedom node of the treaty that ended the Great War, a node that precedent says gives the Lunars the freedom to exploit Tierra, but which Joshua claims has a still-valid originalist meaning granting Tierrans freedom from exploitation. There is, in short, a lot going on in this book, and "never fully explained" is something of a theme. Freida is telling a story to Nameren and only explains things Nameren may not already know. The reader has to puzzle out the rest from the occasional hint. This is made more difficult by the tendency of the material gods to communicate only in visions or guided hallucinations, full of symbolism that the characters only partly explain to the reader. Nonetheless, this did mostly work, at least for me. I started this book very confused, but by about the midpoint it felt like the background was coming together. I'm still not sure I understand the aurochs, baobab, and cicada symbolism that's so central to the framing story, but it's the pleasant sort of stretchy confusion that gives my brain a good workout. I wish Johnson had explained a few more things plainly, particularly near the end of the book, but my remaining level of confusion was within my tolerances. Unfortunately, the ending did not work for me. The first time I read it, I had no idea what it meant. Lots of baffling, symbolic things happened and then the book just stopped. After re-reading the last 10%, I think all the pieces of an ending and a bit of an explanation are there, but it's absurdly abbreviated. This is another book where the author appears to have been finished with the story before I was. This keeps happening to me, so this probably says something more about me than it says about books, but I want books to have an ending. If the characters have fought and suffered through the plot, I want them to have some space to be happy and to see how their sacrifices play out, with more detail than just a few vague promises. If much of the book has been puzzling out the nature of the world, I would like some concrete confirmation of at least some of my guesswork. And if you're going to end the book on radical transformation, I want to see the results of that transformation. Johnson does an excellent job showing how brutal the peace of the powerful can be, and is willing to light more things on fire over the course of this book than most authors would, but then doesn't offer the reader much in the way of payoff. For once, I wish this stand-alone turned out to be a series. I think an additional book could be written in the aftermath of this ending, and I would definitely read that novel. Johnson has me caring deeply about these characters and fascinated by the world background, and I'd happily spend another 450 pages finding out what happens next. But, frustratingly, I think this ending was indeed intended to wrap up the story. I think this book may fall between a few stools. Science fiction readers who want mysterious future worlds to be explained by the end of the book are going to be frustrated by the amount of symbolism, allusion, and poetic description. Literary fantasy readers, who have a higher tolerance for that style, are going to wish for more focused and polished writing. A lot of the story is firmly YA: trying and failing to fit in, developing one's identity, coming into power, relationship drama, great betrayals and regrets, overcoming trauma and abuse, and unraveling lies that adults tell you. But this is definitely not a straight-forward YA plot or world background. It demands a lot from the reader, and while I am confident many teenage readers would rise to that challenge, it seems like an awkward fit for the YA marketing category. About 75% of the way in, I would have told you this book was great and you should read it. The ending was a let-down and I'm still grumpy about it. I still think it's worth your attention if you're in the mood for a sink-or-swim type of reading experience. Just be warned that when the ride ends, I felt unceremoniously dumped on the pavement. Content warnings: Rape, torture, genocide. Rating: 7 out of 10

11 January 2024

Matthias Klumpp: Wayland really breaks things Just for now?

This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate s post Does Wayland really break everything? , but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months1.

Some facts Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland2 this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects. From reading Wayland protocols and working with it at a much lower level than I ever wanted to, it is also very clear to me that Wayland is an exceptionally well-designed core protocol, and so are the additional extension protocols (xdg-shell & Co.). The modularity of Wayland is great, it gives it incredible flexibility and will for sure turn out to be good for the long-term viability of this project (and also provides a path to correct protocol issues in future, if one is found). In other words: Wayland is an amazing foundation to build on, and a lot of its design decisions make a lot of sense! The shift towards people seeing Linux more as an application developer platform, and taking PipeWire and XDG Portals into account when designing for Wayland is also an amazing development and I love to see this this holistic approach is something I always wanted! Furthermore, I think Wayland removes a lot of functionality that shouldn t exist in a modern compositor and that s a good thing too! Some of X11 s features and design decisions had clear drawbacks that we shouldn t replicate. I highly recommend to read Nate s blog post, it s very good and goes into more detail. And due to all of this, I firmly believe that any advancement in the Wayland space must come from within the project.

But! But! Of course there was a but coming I think while developing Wayland-as-an-ecosystem we are now entrenched into narrow concepts of how a desktop should work. While discussing Wayland protocol additions, a lot of concepts clash, people from different desktops with different design philosophies debate the merits of those over and over again never reaching any conclusion (just as you will never get an answer out of humans whether sushi or pizza is the clearly superior food, or whether CSD or SSD is better). Some people want to use Wayland as a vehicle to force applications to submit to their desktop s design philosophies, others prefer the smallest and leanest protocol possible, other developers want the most elegant behavior possible. To be clear, I think those are all very valid approaches. But this also creates problems: By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way. For Nate s Photoshop analogy: Of course Linux does not break Photoshop, it is Adobe s responsibility to port it. But what if Linux was missing a crucial syscall that Photoshop needed for proper functionality and Adobe couldn t port it without that? In that case it becomes much less clear on who is to blame for Photoshop not being available. A lot of Wayland protocol work is focused on the environment and design, while applications and work to port them often is considered less. I think this happens because the overlap between application developers and developers of the desktop environments is not necessarily large, and the overlap with people willing to engage with Wayland upstream is even smaller. The combination of Windows developers porting apps to Linux and having involvement with toolkits or Wayland is pretty much nonexistent. So they have less of a voice.

A quick detour through the neuroscience research lab I have been involved with Freedesktop, GNOME and KDE for an incredibly long time now (more than a decade), but my actual job (besides consulting for Purism) is that of a PhD candidate in a neuroscience research lab (working on the morphology of biological neurons and its relation to behavior). I am mostly involved with three research groups in our institute, which is about 35 people. Most of us do all our data analysis on powerful servers which we connect to using RDP (with KDE Plasma as desktop). Since I joined, I have been pushing the envelope a bit to extend Linux usage to data acquisition and regular clients, and to have our data acquisition hardware interface well with it. Linux brings some unique advantages for use in research, besides the obvious one of having every step of your data management platform introspectable with no black boxes left, a goal I value very highly in research (but this would be its own blogpost). In terms of operating system usage though, most systems are still Windows-based. Windows is what companies develop for, and what people use by default and are familiar with. The choice of operating system is very strongly driven by application availability, and WSL being really good makes this somewhat worse, as it removes the need for people to switch to a real Linux system entirely if there is the occasional software requiring it. Yet, we have a lot more Linux users than before, and use it in many places where it makes sense. I also developed a novel data acquisition software that even runs on Linux-only and uses the abilities of the platform to its fullest extent. All of this resulted in me asking existing software and hardware vendors for Linux support a lot more often. Vendor-customer relationship in science is usually pretty good, and vendors do usually want to help out. Same for open source projects, especially if you offer to do Linux porting work for them But overall, the ease of use and availability of required applications and their usability rules supreme. Most people are not technically knowledgeable and just want to get their research done in the best way possible, getting the best results with the least amount of friction.
KDE/Linux usage at a control station for a particle accelerator at Adlershof Technology Park, Germany, for reference (by 25years of KDE)3

Back to the point The point of that story is this: GNOME, KDE, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu: They all do not matter if the necessary applications are not available for them. And as soon as they are, the easiest-to-use solution wins. There are many facets of easiest : In many cases this is RHEL due to Red Hat support contracts being available, in many other cases it is Ubuntu due to its mindshare and ease of use. KDE Plasma is also frequently seen, as it is perceived a bit easier to onboard Windows users with it (among other benefits). Ultimately, it comes down to applications and 3rd-party support though. Here s a dirty secret: In many cases, porting an application to Linux is not that difficult. The thing that companies (and FLOSS projects too!) struggle with and will calculate the merits of carefully in advance is whether it is worth the support cost as well as continuous QA/testing. Their staff will have to do all of that work, and they could spend that time on other tasks after all. So if they learn that porting to Linux not only means added testing and support, but also means to choose between the legacy X11 display server that allows for 1:1 porting from Windows or the new Wayland compositors that do not support the same features they need, they will quickly consider it not worth the effort at all. I have seen this happen. Of course many apps use a cross-platform toolkit like Qt, which greatly simplifies porting. But this just moves the issue one layer down, as now the toolkit needs to abstract Windows, macOS and Wayland. And Wayland does not contain features to do certain things or does them very differently from e.g. Windows, so toolkits have no way to actually implement the existing functionality in a way that works on all platforms. So in Qt s documentation you will often find texts like works everywhere except for on Wayland compositors or mobile 4. Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.

What s missing?

Window positioning SDI applications with multiple windows are very popular in the scientific world. For data acquisition (for example with microscopes) we often have one monitor with control elements and one larger one with the recorded image. There is also other configurations where multiple signal modalities are acquired, and the experimenter aligns windows exactly in the way they want and expects the layout to be stored and to be loaded upon reopening the application. Even in the image from Adlershof Technology Park above you can see this style of UI design, at mega-scale. Being able to pop-out elements as windows from a single-window application to move them around freely is another frequently used paradigm, and immensely useful with these complex apps. It is important to note that this is not a legacy design, but in many cases an intentional choice these kinds of apps work incredibly well on larger screens or many screens and are very flexible (you can have any window configuration you want, and switch between them using the (usually) great window management abilities of your desktop). Of course, these apps will work terribly on tablets and small form factors, but that is not the purpose they were designed for and nobody would use them that way. I assumed for sure these features would be implemented at some point, but when it became clear that that would not happen, I created the ext-placement protocol which had some good discussion but was ultimately rejected from the xdg namespace. I then tried another solution based on feedback, which turned out not to work for most apps, and now proposed xdg-placement (v2) in an attempt to maybe still get some protocol done that we can agree on, exploring more options before pushing the existing protocol for inclusion into the ext Wayland protocol namespace. Meanwhile though, we can not port any application that needs this feature, while at the same time we are switching desktops and distributions to Wayland by default.

Window position restoration Similarly, a protocol to save & restore window positions was already proposed in 2018, 6 years ago now, but it has still not been agreed upon, and may not even help multiwindow apps in its current form. The absence of this protocol means that applications can not restore their former window positions, and the user has to move them to their previous place again and again. Meanwhile, toolkits can not adopt these protocols and applications can not use them and can not be ported to Wayland without introducing papercuts.

Window icons Similarly, individual windows can not set their own icons, and not-installed applications can not have an icon at all because there is no desktop-entry file to load the icon from and no icon in the theme for them. You would think this is a niche issue, but for applications that create many windows, providing icons for them so the user can find them is fairly important. Of course it s not the end of the world if every window has the same icon, but it s one of those papercuts that make the software slightly less user-friendly. Even applications with fewer windows like LibrePCB are affected, so much so that they rather run their app through Xwayland for now. I decided to address this after I was working on data analysis of image data in a Python virtualenv, where my code and the Python libraries used created lots of windows all with the default yellow W icon, making it impossible to distinguish them at a glance. This is xdg-toplevel-icon now, but of course it is an uphill battle where the very premise of needing this is questioned. So applications can not use it yet.

Limited window abilities requiring specialized protocols Firefox has a picture-in-picture feature, allowing it to pop out media from a mediaplayer as separate floating window so the user can watch the media while doing other things. On X11 this is easily realized, but on Wayland the restrictions posed on windows necessitate a different solution. The xdg-pip protocol was proposed for this specialized usecase, but it is also not merged yet. So this feature does not work as well on Wayland.

Automated GUI testing / accessibility / automation Automation of GUI tasks is a powerful feature, so is the ability to auto-test GUIs. This is being worked on, with libei and wlheadless-run (and stuff like ydotool exists too), but we re not fully there yet.

Wayland is frustrating for (some) application authors As you see, there is valid applications and valid usecases that can not be ported yet to Wayland with the same feature range they enjoyed on X11, Windows or macOS. So, from an application author s perspective, Wayland does break things quite significantly, because things that worked before can no longer work and Wayland (the whole stack) does not provide any avenue to achieve the same result. Wayland does break screen sharing, global hotkeys, gaming latency (via no tearing ) etc, however for all of these there are solutions available that application authors can port to. And most developers will gladly do that work, especially since the newer APIs are usually a lot better and more robust. But if you give application authors no path forward except use Xwayland and be on emulation as second-class citizen forever , it just results in very frustrated application developers. For some application developers, switching to a Wayland compositor is like buying a canvas from the Linux shop that forces your brush to only draw triangles. But maybe for your avant-garde art, you need to draw a circle. You can approximate one with triangles, but it will never be as good as the artwork of your friends who got their canvases from the Windows or macOS art supply shop and have more freedom to create their art.

Triangles are proven to be the best shape! If you are drawing circles you are creating bad art! Wayland, via its protocol limitations, forces a certain way to build application UX often for the better, but also sometimes to the detriment of users and applications. The protocols are often fairly opinionated, a result of the lessons learned from X11. In any case though, it is the odd one out Windows and macOS do not pose the same limitations (for better or worse!), and the effort to port to Wayland is orders of magnitude bigger, or sometimes in case of the multiwindow UI paradigm impossible to achieve to the same level of polish. Desktop environments of course have a design philosophy that they want to push, and want applications to integrate as much as possible (same as macOS and Windows!). However, there are many applications out there, and pushing a design via protocol limitations will likely just result in fewer apps.

The porting dilemma I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues. Many scientists do not even understand why their Python script that creates some GUIs suddenly behaves weirdly because Qt is now using the Wayland backend on Ubuntu instead of X11. They do not know the difference and also do not want to deal with these details even though they may be programmers as well, the real goal is not to fiddle with the display server, but to get to a scientific result somehow. Another issue is portability layers like Wine which need to run Windows applications as-is on Wayland. Apparently Wine s Wayland driver has some heuristics to make window positioning work (and I am amazed by the work done on this!), but that can only go so far.

A way out? So, how would we actually solve this? Fundamentally, this excessively long blog post boils down to just one essential question: Do we want to force applications to submit to a UX paradigm unconditionally, potentially loosing out on application ports or keeping apps on X11 eternally, or do we want to throw them some rope to get as many applications ported over to Wayland, even through we might sacrifice some protocol purity? I think we really have to answer that to make the discussions on wayland-protocols a lot less grueling. This question can be answered at the wayland-protocols level, but even more so it must be answered by the individual desktops and compositors. If the answer for your environment turns out to be Yes, we want the Wayland protocol to be more opinionated and will not make any compromises for application portability , then your desktop/compositor should just immediately NACK protocols that add something like this and you simply shouldn t engage in the discussion, as you reject the very premise of the new protocol: That it has any merit to exist and is needed in the first place. In this case contributors to Wayland and application authors also know where you stand, and a lot of debate is skipped. Of course, if application authors want to support your environment, you are basically asking them now to rewrite their UI, which they may or may not do. But at least they know what to expect and how to target your environment. If the answer turns out to be We do want some portability , the next question obviously becomes where the line should be drawn and which changes are acceptable and which aren t. We can t blindly copy all X11 behavior, some porting work to Wayland is simply inevitable. Some written rules for that might be nice, but probably more importantly, if you agree fundamentally that there is an issue to be fixed, please engage in the discussions for the respective MRs! We for sure do not want to repeat X11 mistakes, and I am certain that we can implement protocols which provide the required functionality in a way that is a nice compromise in allowing applications a path forward into the Wayland future, while also being as good as possible and improving upon X11. For example, the toplevel-icon proposal is already a lot better than anything X11 ever had. Relaxing ACK requirements for the ext namespace is also a good proposed administrative change, as it allows some compositors to add features they want to support to the shared repository easier, while also not mandating them for others. In my opinion, it would allow for a lot less friction between the two different ideas of how Wayland protocol development should work. Some compositors could move forward and support more protocol extensions, while more restrictive compositors could support less things. Applications can detect supported protocols at launch and change their behavior accordingly (ideally even abstracted by toolkits). You may now say that a lot of apps are ported, so surely this issue can not be that bad. And yes, what Wayland provides today may be enough for 80-90% of all apps. But what I hope the detour into the research lab has done is convince you that this smaller percentage of apps matters. A lot. And that it may be worthwhile to support them. To end on a positive note: When it came to porting concrete apps over to Wayland, the only real showstoppers so far5 were the missing window-positioning and window-position-restore features. I encountered them when porting my own software, and I got the issue as feedback from colleagues and fellow engineers. In second place was UI testing and automation support, the window-icon issue was mentioned twice, but being a cosmetic issue it likely simply hurts people less and they can ignore it easier. What this means is that the majority of apps are already fine, and many others are very, very close! A Wayland future for everyone is within our grasp! I will also bring my two protocol MRs to their conclusion for sure, because as application developers we need clarity on what the platform (either all desktops or even just a few) supports and will or will not support in future. And the only way to get something good done is by contribution and friendly discussion.

Footnotes
  1. Apologies for the clickbait-y title it comes with the subject
  2. When I talk about Wayland I mean the combined set of display server protocols and accepted protocol extensions, unless otherwise clarified.
  3. I would have picked a picture from our lab, but that would have needed permission first
  4. Qt has awesome platform issues pages, like for macOS and Linux/X11 which help with porting efforts, but Qt doesn t even list Linux/Wayland as supported platform. There is some information though, like window geometry peculiarities, which aren t particularly helpful when porting (but still essential to know).
  5. Besides issues with Nvidia hardware CUDA for simulations and machine-learning is pretty much everywhere, so Nvidia cards are common, which causes trouble on Wayland still. It is improving though.

10 January 2024

Colin Watson: Going freelance

I ve mentioned this in a couple of other places, but I realized I never got round to posting about it on my own blog rather than on other people s services. How remiss of me. Anyway: after much soul-searching, I decided a few months ago that it was time for me to move on from Canonical and the Launchpad team there. Nearly 20 years is a long time to spend at any company, and although there are a bunch of people I ll miss, Launchpad is in a reasonable state where I can let other people have a turn. I m now in business for myself as a freelance developer! My new company is Columbiform, and I m focusing on Debian packaging and custom Python development. My services page has some self-promotion on the sorts of things I can do. My first gig, and the one that made it viable to make this jump, is at Freexian where I m helping with an exciting infrastructure project that we hope will start making Debian developers lives easier in the near future. This is likely to take up most of my time at least through to the end of 2024, but I may have some spare cycles. Drop me a line if you have something where you think I could be a good fit, and we can have a talk about it.

7 January 2024

Valhalla's Things: A Corset or Two

Posted on January 7, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, period:victorian, FreeSoftWear
a black coutil midbust corset, from a 3/4 front view, showing the busk closure, a waist tape and external boning channels made of the same twill tape and placed about 1-2 cm from each other at waist level. CW for body size change mentions I needed a corset, badly. Years ago I had a chance to have my measurements taken by a former professional corset maker and then a lesson in how to draft an underbust corset, and that lead to me learning how nice wearing a well-fitted corset feels. Later I tried to extend that pattern up for a midbust corset, with success. And then my body changed suddenly, and I was no longer able to wear either of those, and after a while I started missing them. Since my body was still changing (if no longer drastically so), and I didn t want to use expensive materials for something that had a risk of not fitting after too little time, I decided to start by making myself a summer lightweight corset in aida cloth and plastic boning (for which I had already bought materials). It fitted, but not as well as the first two ones, and I ve worn it quite a bit. I still wanted back the feeling of wearing a comfy, heavy contraption of coutil and steel, however. After a lot of procrastination I redrafted a new pattern, scrapped everything, tried again, had my measurements taken by a dressmaker [#dressmaker], put them in the draft, cut a first mock-up in cheap cotton, fixed the position of a seam, did a second mock-up in denim [#jeans] from an old pair of jeans, and then cut into the cheap herringbone coutil I was planning to use. And that s when I went to see which one of the busks in my stash would work, and realized that I had used a wrong vertical measurement and the front of the corset was way too long for a midbust corset. a corset busk basted to a mock-up with scraps of fabric between each stud / loop. Luckily I also had a few longer busks, I basted one to the denim mock up and tried to wear it for a few hours, to see if it was too long to be comfortable. It was just a bit, on the bottom, which could be easily fixed with the Power Tools1. Except, the more I looked at it the more doing this felt wrong: what I needed most was a midbust corset, not an overbust one, which is what this was starting to be. I could have trimmed it down, but I knew that I also wanted this corset to be a wearable mockup for the pattern, to refine it and have it available for more corsets. And I still had more than half of the cheap coutil I was using, so I decided to redo the pattern and cut new panels. And this is where the or two comes in: I m not going to waste the overbust panels: I had been wanting to learn some techniques to make corsets with a fashion fabric layer, rather than just a single layer of coutil, and this looks like an excellent opportunity for that, together with a piece of purple silk that I know I have in the stash. This will happen later, however, first I m giving priority to the underbust. Anyway, a second set of panels was cut, all the seam lines marked with tailor tacks, and I started sewing by inserting the busk. And then realized that the pre-made boning channel tape I had was too narrow for the 10 mm spiral steel I had plenty of. And that the 25 mm twill tape was also too narrow for a double boning channel. On the other hand, the 18 mm twill tape I had used for the waist tape was good for a single channel, so I decided to put a single bone on each seam, and then add another piece of boning in the middle of each panel. Since I m making external channels, making them in self fabric would have probably looked better, but I no longer had enough fabric, because of the cutting mishap, and anyway this is going to be a strictly underwear only corset, so it s not a big deal. Once the boning channel situation was taken care of, everything else proceeded quite smoothly and I was able to finish the corset during the Christmas break, enlisting again my SO to take care of the flat steel boning while I cut the spiral steels myself with wire cutters. The same corset straight from the front: the left side is a few mm longer than the right side I could have been a bit more precise with the binding, as it doesn t align precisely at the front edge, but then again, it s underwear, nobody other than me and everybody who reads this post is going to see it and I was in a hurry to see it finished. I will be more careful with the next one. The same corset from the back, showing cross lacing with bunny ears at the waist and a lacing gap of about 8 cm. I also think that I haven t been careful enough when pressing the seams and applying the tape, and I ve lost about a cm of width per part, so I m using a lacing gap that is a bit wider than I planned for, but that may change as the corset gets worn, and is still within tolerance. Also, on the morning after I had finished the corset I woke up and realized that I had forgotten to add garter tabs at the bottom edge. I don t know whether I will ever use them, but I wanted the option, so maybe I ll try to add them later on, especially if I can do it without undoing the binding. The next step would have been flossing, which I proceeded to postpone until I ve worn the corset for a while: not because there is any reason for it, but because I still don t know how I want to do it :) What was left was finishing and uploading the pattern and instructions, that are now on my sewing pattern website as #FreeSoftWear, and finally I could post this on the blog.
  1. i.e. by asking my SO to cut and sand it, because I m lazy and I hate doing that part :D

27 December 2023

Bits from Debian: Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act

Debian Public Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act and the Product Liability Directive The European Union is currently preparing a regulation "on horizontal cybersecurity requirements for products with digital elements" known as the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). It is currently in the final "trilogue" phase of the legislative process. The act includes a set of essential cybersecurity and vulnerability handling requirements for manufacturers. It will require products to be accompanied by information and instructions to the user. Manufacturers will need to perform risk assessments and produce technical documentation and, for critical components, have third-party audits conducted. Discovered security issues will have to be reported to European authorities within 25 hours (1). The CRA will be followed up by the Product Liability Directive (PLD) which will introduce compulsory liability for software. While a lot of these regulations seem reasonable, the Debian project believes that there are grave problems for Free Software projects attached to them. Therefore, the Debian project issues the following statement:
  1. Free Software has always been a gift, freely given to society, to take and to use as seen fit, for whatever purpose. Free Software has proven to be an asset in our digital age and the proposed EU Cyber Resilience Act is going to be detrimental to it. a. As the Debian Social Contract states, our goal is "make the best system we can, so that free works will be widely distributed and used." Imposing requirements such as those proposed in the act makes it legally perilous for others to redistribute our work and endangers our commitment to "provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system". (2) b. Knowing whether software is commercial or not isn't feasible, neither in Debian nor in most free software projects - we don't track people's employment status or history, nor do we check who finances upstream projects (the original projects that we integrate in our operating system). c. If upstream projects stop making available their code for fear of being in the scope of CRA and its financial consequences, system security will actually get worse rather than better. d. Having to get legal advice before giving a gift to society will discourage many developers, especially those without a company or other organisation supporting them.
  2. Debian is well known for its security track record through practices of responsible disclosure and coordination with upstream developers and other Free Software projects. We aim to live up to the commitment made in the Debian Social Contract: "We will not hide problems." (3) a.The Free Software community has developed a fine-tuned, tried-and-tested system of responsible disclosure in case of security issues which will be overturned by the mandatory reporting to European authorities within 24 hours (Art. 11 CRA). b. Debian spends a lot of volunteering time on security issues, provides quick security updates and works closely together with upstream projects and in coordination with other vendors. To protect its users, Debian regularly participates in limited embargos to coordinate fixes to security issues so that all other major Linux distributions can also have a complete fix when the vulnerability is disclosed. c. Security issue tracking and remediation is intentionally decentralized and distributed. The reporting of security issues to ENISA and the intended propagation to other authorities and national administrations would collect all software vulnerabilities in one place. This greatly increases the risk of leaking information about vulnerabilities to threat actors, representing a threat for all the users around the world, including European citizens. d. Activists use Debian (e.g. through derivatives such as Tails), among other reasons, to protect themselves from authoritarian governments; handing threat actors exploits they can use for oppression is against what Debian stands for. e. Developers and companies will downplay security issues because a "security" issue now comes with legal implications. Less clarity on what is truly a security issue will hurt users by leaving them vulnerable.
  3. While proprietary software is developed behind closed doors, Free Software development is done in the open, transparent for everyone. To retain parity with proprietary software the open development process needs to be entirely exempt from CRA requirements, just as the development of software in private is. A "making available on the market" can only be considered after development is finished and the software is released.
  4. Even if only "commercial activities" are in the scope of CRA, the Free Software community - and as a consequence, everybody - will lose a lot of small projects. CRA will force many small enterprises and most probably all self employed developers out of business because they simply cannot fulfill the requirements imposed by CRA. Debian and other Linux distributions depend on their work. If accepted as it is, CRA will undermine not only an established community but also a thriving market. CRA needs an exemption for small businesses and, at the very least, solo-entrepreneurs.
Information about the voting process: Debian uses the Condorcet method for voting. Simplistically, plain Condorcets method can be stated like so : "Consider all possible two-way races between candidates. The Condorcet winner, if there is one, is the one candidate who can beat each other candidate in a two-way race with that candidate." The problem is that in complex elections, there may well be a circular relationship in which A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Most of the variations on Condorcet use various means of resolving the tie. Debian's variation is spelled out in the constitution, specifically, A.5(3) Sources: (1) CRA proposals and links & PLD proposals and links (2) Debian Social Contract No. 2, 3, and 4 (3) Debian Constitution

Russ Allbery: Review: A Study in Scarlet

Review: A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Series: Sherlock Holmes #1
Publisher: AmazonClassics
Copyright: 1887
Printing: February 2018
ISBN: 1-5039-5525-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 159
A Study in Scarlet is the short mystery novel (probably a novella, although I didn't count words) that introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes. I'm going to invoke the 100-year-rule and discuss the plot of this book rather freely on the grounds that even someone who (like me prior to a few days ago) has not yet read it is probably not that invested in avoiding all spoilers. If you do want to remain entirely unspoiled, exercise caution before reading on. I had somehow managed to avoid ever reading anything by Arthur Conan Doyle, not even a short story. I therefore couldn't be sure that some of the assertions I was making in my review of A Study in Honor were correct. Since A Study in Scarlet would be quick to read, I decided on a whim to do a bit of research and grab a free copy of the first Holmes novel. Holmes is such a part of English-speaking culture that I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. This was largely true, but cultural osmosis had somehow not prepared me for the surprise Mormons. A Study in Scarlet establishes the basic parameters of a Holmes story: Dr. James Watson as narrator, the apartment he shares with Holmes at 221B Baker Street, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes's competition with police detectives, and his penchant for making leaps of logical deduction from subtle clues. The story opens with Watson meeting Holmes, agreeing to split the rent of a flat, and being baffled by the apparent randomness of Holmes's fields of study before Holmes reveals he's a consulting detective. The first case is a murder: a man is found dead in an abandoned house, without a mark on him although there are blood splatters on the walls and the word "RACHE" written in blood. Since my only prior exposure to Holmes was from cultural references and a few TV adaptations, there were a few things that surprised me. One is that Holmes is voluble and animated rather than aloof. Doyle is clearly going for passionate eccentric rather than calculating mastermind. Another is that he is intentionally and unabashedly ignorant on any topic not related to solving mysteries.
My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you chose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
This is directly contrary to my expectation that the best way to make leaps of deduction is to know something about a huge range of topics so that one can draw unexpected connections, particularly given the puzzle-box construction and odd details so beloved in classic mysteries. I'm now curious if Doyle stuck with this conception, and if there were any later mysteries that involved astronomy. Speaking of classic mysteries, A Study in Scarlet isn't quite one, although one can see the shape of the genre to come. Doyle does not "play fair" by the rules that have not yet been invented. Holmes at most points knows considerably more than the reader, including bits of evidence that are not described until Holmes describes them and research that Holmes does off-camera and only reveals when he wants to be dramatic. This is not the sort of story where the reader is encouraged to try to figure out the mystery before the detective. Rather, what Doyle seems to be aiming for, and what Watson attempts (unsuccessfully) as the reader surrogate, is slightly different: once Holmes makes one of his grand assertions, the reader is encouraged to guess what Holmes might have done to arrive at that conclusion. Doyle seems to want the reader to guess technique rather than outcome, while providing only vague clues in general descriptions of Holmes's behavior at a crime scene. The structure of this story is quite odd. The first part is roughly what you would expect: first-person narration from Watson, supposedly taken from his journals but not at all in the style of a journal and explicitly written for an audience. Part one concludes with Holmes capturing and dramatically announcing the name of the killer, who the reader has never heard of before. Part two then opens with... a western?
In the central portion of the great North American Continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence. Nor is Nature always in one mood throughout the grim district. It comprises snow-capped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy valleys. There are swift-flowing rivers which dash through jagged ca ons; and there are enormous plains, which in winter are white with snow, and in summer are grey with the saline alkali dust. They all preserve, however, the common characteristics of barrenness, inhospitality, and misery.
First, I have issues with the geography. That region contains some of the most beautiful areas on earth, and while a lot of that region is arid, describing it primarily as a repulsive desert is a bit much. Doyle's boundaries and distances are also confusing: the Yellowstone is a northeast-flowing river with its source in Wyoming, so the area between it and the Colorado does not extend to the Sierra Nevadas (or even to Utah), and it's not entirely clear to me that he realizes Nevada exists. This is probably what it's like for people who live anywhere else in the world when US authors write about their country. But second, there's no Holmes, no Watson, and not even the pretense of a transition from the detective novel that we were just reading. Doyle just launches into a random western with an omniscient narrator. It features a lean, grizzled man and an adorable child that he adopts and raises into a beautiful free spirit, who then falls in love with a wild gold-rush adventurer. This was written about 15 years before the first critically recognized western novel, so I can't blame Doyle for all the cliches here, but to a modern reader all of these characters are straight from central casting. Well, except for the villains, who are the Mormons. By that, I don't mean that the villains are Mormon. I mean Brigham Young is the on-page villain, plotting against the hero to force his adopted daughter into a Mormon harem (to use the word that Doyle uses repeatedly) and ruling Salt Lake City with an iron hand, border guards with passwords (?!), and secret police. This part of the book was wild. I was laughing out-loud at the sheer malevolent absurdity of the thirty-day countdown to marriage, which I doubt was the intended effect. We do eventually learn that this is the backstory of the murder, but we don't return to Watson and Holmes for multiple chapters. Which leads me to the other thing that surprised me: Doyle lays out this backstory, but then never has his characters comment directly on the morality of it, only the spectacle. Holmes cares only for the intellectual challenge (and for who gets credit), and Doyle sets things up so that the reader need not concern themselves with aftermath, punishment, or anything of that sort. I probably shouldn't have been surprised this does fit with the Holmes stereotype but I'm used to modern fiction where there is usually at least some effort to pass judgment on the events of the story. Doyle draws very clear villains, but is utterly silent on whether the murder is justified. Given its status in the history of literature, I'm not sorry to have read this book, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. It is very much of its time: everyone's moral character is linked directly to their physical appearance, and Doyle uses the occasional racial stereotype without a second thought. Prevailing writing styles have changed, so the prose feels long-winded and breathless. The rivalry between Holmes and the police detectives is tedious and annoying. I also find it hard to read novels from before the general absorption of techniques of emotional realism and interiority into all genres. The characters in A Study in Scarlet felt more like cartoon characters than fully-realized human beings. I have no strong opinion about the objective merits of this book in the context of its time other than to note that the sudden inserted western felt very weird. My understanding is that this is not considered one of the better Holmes stories, and Holmes gets some deeper characterization later on. Maybe I'll try another of Doyle's works someday, but for now my curiosity has been sated. Followed by The Sign of the Four. Rating: 4 out of 10

22 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Wintersmith

Review: Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #35
Publisher: Clarion Books
Copyright: 2006
Printing: 2007
ISBN: 0-06-089033-9
Format: Mass market
Pages: 450
Wintersmith is the 35th Discworld novel and the 3rd Tiffany Aching novel. You could probably start here, since understanding the backstory isn't vital for following the plot, but I'm not sure why you would. Tiffany is now training with Miss Treason, a 113-year-old witch who is quite different in her approach from Miss Level, Tiffany's mentor in A Hat Full of Sky. Miss Level was the unassuming and constantly helpful glue that held the neighborhood together. Miss Treason is the judge; her neighbors are scared of her and proud of being scared of her, since that means they have a proper witch who can see into their heads and sort out their problems. On the surface, they're quite different; part of the story of this book is Tiffany learning to see the similarities. First, though, Miss Treason rushes Tiffany to a strange midnight Morris Dance, without any explanation. The Morris Dance usually celebrates the coming of spring and is at the center of a village party, so Tiffany is quite confused by seeing it danced on a dark and windy night in late autumn. But there is a hole in the dance where the Fool normally is, and Tiffany can't keep herself from joining it. This proves to be a mistake. That space was left for someone very different from Tiffany, and now she's entangled herself in deep magic that she doesn't understand. This is another Pratchett novel where the main storyline didn't do much for me. All the trouble stems from Miss Treason being maddeningly opaque, and while she did warn Tiffany, she did so in that way that guarantees a protagonist of a middle-grade novel will ignore. The Wintersmith is a boring, one-note quasi-villain, and the plot mainly revolves around elemental powers being dumber than a sack of hammers. The one thing I will say about the main plot is that the magic Tiffany danced into is entangled with courtship and romance, Tiffany turns thirteen over the course of this book, and yet this is not weird and uncomfortable reading the way it would be in the hands of many other authors. Pratchett has a keen eye for the age range that he's targeting. The first awareness that there is such a thing as romance that might be relevant to oneself pairs nicely with the Wintersmith's utter confusion at how Tiffany's intrusion unbalanced his dance. This is a very specific age and experience that I think a lot of authors would shy away from, particularly with a female protagonist, and I thought Pratchett handled it adroitly. I personally found the Wintersmith's awkward courting tedious and annoying, but that's more about me than about the book. As with A Hat Full of Sky, though, everything other than the main plot was great. It is becoming obvious how much Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax have in common, and that Granny Weatherwax recognizes this and is training Tiffany herself. This is high-quality coming-of-age material, not in the traditional fantasy sense of chosen ones and map explorations, but in the sense of slowly-developing empathy and understanding of people who think differently than you do. Tiffany, like Granny Weatherwax, has very little patience with nonsense, and her irritation with stupidity is one of her best characteristics. But she's learning how to blunt it long enough to pay attention, and to understand how people she doesn't like can still be the right people for specific situations. I particularly loved how Granny carries on with a feud at the same time that Tiffany is learning to let go of one. It's not a contradiction or hypocrisy; it's a sign that Tiffany is entitled to her judgments and feelings, but has to learn how to keep them in their place and not let them take over. One of the great things about the Tiffany Aching books is that the villages are also characters. We don't see that much of the individual people, but one of the things Tiffany is learning is how to see the interpersonal dynamics and patterns of village life. Somehow the feelings of irritation and exasperation fade once you understand people's motives and see more sides to their character. There is a lot more Nanny Ogg in this book than there has been in the last few, and that reminded me of how much I love her character. She has a completely different approach than Granny Weatherwax, but it's just as effective in different ways. She's also the perfect witch to have around when you've stumbled into a stylized love story that you don't want to be a part of, and yet find oddly fascinating. It says something about the skill of Pratchett's characterization that I could enjoy a book this much while having no interest in the main plot. The Witches have always been great characters, but somehow they're even better when seen through Tiffany's perspective. Good stuff; if you liked any of the other Tiffany Aching books, you will like this as well. Followed by Making Money in publication order. The next Tiffany Aching novel is I Shall Wear Midnight. Rating: 8 out of 10

21 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Box

Review: The Box, by Marc Levinson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Copyright: 2006, 2008
Printing: 2008
ISBN: 0-691-13640-8
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 278
The shipping container as we know it is only about 65 years old. Shipping things in containers is obviously much older; we've been doing that for longer than we've had ships. But the standardized metal box, set on a rail car or loaded with hundreds of its indistinguishable siblings into an enormous, specially-designed cargo ship, became economically significant only recently. Today it is one of the oft-overlooked foundations of global supply chains. The startlingly low cost of container shipping is part of why so much of what US consumers buy comes from Asia, and why most complex machinery is assembled in multiple countries from parts gathered from a dizzying variety of sources. Marc Levinson's The Box is a history of container shipping, from its (arguable) beginnings in the trailer bodies loaded on Pan-Atlantic Steamship Corporation's Ideal-X in 1956 to just-in-time international supply chains in the 2000s. It's a popular history that falls on the academic side, with a full index and 60 pages of citations and other notes. (Per my normal convention, those pages aren't included in the sidebar page count.) The Box is organized mostly chronologically, but Levinson takes extended detours into labor relations and container standardization at the appropriate points in the timeline. The book is very US-centric. Asian, European, and Australian shipping is discussed mostly in relation to trade with the US, and Africa is barely mentioned. I don't have the background to know whether this is historically correct for container shipping or is an artifact of Levinson's focus. Many single-item popular histories focus on something that involves obvious technological innovation (paint pigments) or deep cultural resonance (salt) or at least entertaining quirkiness (punctuation marks, resignation letters). Shipping containers are important but simple and boring. The least interesting chapter in The Box covers container standardization, in which a whole bunch of people had boring meetings, wrote some things done, discovered many of the things they wrote down were dumb, wrote more things down, met with different people to have more meetings, published a standard that partly reflected the fixations of that one guy who is always involved in standards discussions, and then saw that standard be promptly ignored by the major market players. You may be wondering if that describes the whole book. It doesn't, but not because of the shipping containers. The Box is interesting because the process of economic change is interesting, and container shipping is almost entirely about business processes rather than technology. Levinson starts the substance of the book with a description of shipping before standardized containers. This was the most effective, and probably the most informative, chapter. Beyond some vague ideas picked up via cultural osmosis, I had no idea how cargo shipping worked. Levinson gives the reader a memorable feel for the sheer amount of physical labor involved in loading and unloading a ship with mixed cargo (what's called "breakbulk" cargo to distinguish it from bulk cargo like coal or wheat that fills an entire hold). It's not just the effort of hauling barrels, bales, or boxes with cranes or raw muscle power, although that is significant. It's also the need to touch every piece of cargo to move it, inventory it, warehouse it, and then load it on a truck or train. The idea of container shipping is widely attributed, including by Levinson, to Malcom McLean, a trucking magnate who became obsessed with the idea of what we now call intermodal transport: using the same container for goods on ships, railroads, and trucks so that the contents don't have to be unpacked and repacked at each transfer point. Levinson uses his career as an anchor for the story, from his acquisition of Pan-American Steamship Corporation to pursue his original idea (backed by private equity and debt, in a very modern twist), through his years running Sea-Land as the first successful major container shipper, and culminating in his disastrous attempted return to shipping by acquiring United States Lines. I am dubious of Great Man narratives in history books, and I think Levinson may be overselling McLean's role. Container shipping was an obvious idea that the industry had been talking about for decades. Even Levinson admits that, despite a few gestures at giving McLean central credit. Everyone involved in shipping understood that cargo handling was the most expensive and time-consuming part, and that if one could minimize cargo handling at the docks by loading and unloading full containers that didn't have to be opened, shipping costs would be much lower (and profits higher). The idea wasn't the hard part. McLean was the first person to pull it off at scale, thanks to some audacious economic risks and a willingness to throw sharp elbows and play politics, but it seems likely that someone else would have played that role if McLean hadn't existed. Container shipping didn't happen earlier because achieving that cost savings required a huge expenditure of capital and a major disruption of a transportation industry that wasn't interested in being disrupted. The ships had to be remodeled and eventually replaced; manufacturing had to change; railroad and trucking in theory had to change (in practice, intermodal transport; McLean's obsession, didn't happen at scale until much later); pricing had to be entirely reworked; logistical tracking of goods had to be done much differently; and significant amounts of extremely expensive equipment to load and unload heavy containers had to be designed, built, and installed. McLean's efforts proved the cost savings was real and compelling, but it still took two decades before the shipping industry reconstructed itself around containers. That interim period is where this history becomes a labor story, and that's where Levinson's biases become somewhat distracting. In the United States, loading and unloading of cargo ships was done by unionized longshoremen through a bizarre but complex and long-standing system of contract hiring. The cost savings of container shipping comes almost completely from the loss of work for longshoremen. It's a classic replacement of labor with capital; the work done by gangs of twenty or more longshoreman is instead done by a single crane operator at much higher speed and efficiency. The longshoreman unions therefore opposed containerization and launched numerous strikes and other labor actions to delay use of containers, force continued hiring that containers made unnecessary, or win buyouts and payoffs for current longshoremen. Levinson is trying to write a neutral history and occasionally shows some sympathy for longshoremen, but they still get the Luddite treatment in this book: the doomed reactionaries holding back progress. Longshoremen had a vigorous and powerful union that won better working conditions structured in ways that look absurd to outsiders, such as requiring that ships hire twice as many men as necessary so that half of them could get paid while not working. The unions also had a reputation for corruption that Levinson stresses constantly, and theft of breakbulk cargo during loading and warehousing was common. One of the interesting selling points for containers was that lossage from theft during shipping apparently decreased dramatically. It's obvious that the surface demand of the longshoremen unions, that either containers not be used or that just as many manual laborers be hired for container shipping as for earlier breakbulk shipping, was impossible, and that the profession as it existed in the 1950s was doomed. But beneath those facts, and the smoke screen of Levinson's obvious distaste for their unions, is a real question about what society owes workers whose jobs are eliminated by major shifts in business practices. That question of fairness becomes more pointed when one realizes that this shift was massively subsidized by US federal and local governments. McLean's Sea-Land benefited from direct government funding and subsidized navy surplus ships, massive port construction in New Jersey with public funds, and a sweetheart logistics contract from the US military to supply troops fighting the Vietnam War that was so generous that the return voyage was free and every container Sea-Land picked up from Japanese ports was pure profit. The US shipping industry was heavily government-supported, particularly in the early days when the labor conflicts were starting. Levinson notes all of this, but never draws the contrast between the massive support for shipping corporations and the complete lack of formal support for longshoremen. There are hard ethical questions about what society owes displaced workers even in a pure capitalist industry transformation, and this was very far from pure capitalism. The US government bankrolled large parts of the growth of container shipping, but the only way that longshoremen could get part of that money was through strikes to force payouts from private shipping companies. There are interesting questions of social and ethical history here that would require careful disentangling of the tendency of any group to oppose disruptive change and fairness questions of who gets government support and who doesn't. They will have to wait for another book; Levinson never mentions them. There were some things about this book that annoyed me, but overall it's a solid work of popular history and deserves its fame. Levinson's account is easy to follow, specific without being tedious, and backed by voluminous notes. It's not the most compelling story on its own merits; you have to have some interest in logistics and economics to justify reading the entire saga. But it's the sort of history that gives one a sense of the fractal complexity of any area of human endeavor, and I usually find those worth reading. Recommended if you like this sort of thing. Rating: 7 out of 10

20 December 2023

Ulrike Uhlig: How volunteer work in F/LOSS exacerbates pre-existing lines of oppression, and what that has to do with low diversity

This is a post I wrote in June 2022, but did not publish back then. After first publishing it in December 2023, a perfectionist insecure part of me unpublished it again. After receiving positive feedback, i slightly amended and republish it now. In this post, I talk about unpaid work in F/LOSS, taking on the example of hackathons, and why, in my opinion, the expectation of volunteer work is hurting diversity. Disclaimer: I don t have all the answers, only some ideas and questions.

Previous findings In 2006, the Flosspols survey searched to explain the role of gender in free/libre/open source software (F/LOSS) communities because an earlier [study] revealed a significant discrepancy in the proportion of men to women. It showed that just about 1.5% of F/LOSS community members were female at that time, compared with 28% in proprietary software (which is also a low number). Their key findings were, to name just a few:
  • that F/LOSS rewards the producing code rather than the producing software. It thereby puts most emphasis on a particular skill set. Other activities such as interface design or documentation are understood as less technical and therefore less prestigious.
  • The reliance on long hours of intensive computing in writing successful code means that men, who in general assume that time outside of waged labour is theirs , are freer to participate than women, who normally still assume a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities. Female F/LOSS participants, however, seem to be able to allocate a disproportionate larger share of their leisure time for their F/LOSS activities. This gives an indication that women who are not able to spend as much time on voluntary activities have difficulties to integrate into the community.
We also know from the 2016 Debian survey, published in 2021, that a majority of Debian contributors are employed, rather than being contractors, and rather than being students. Also, 95.5% of respondents to that study were men between the ages of 30 and 49, highly educated, with the largest groups coming from Germany, France, USA, and the UK. The study found that only 20% of the respondents were being paid to work on Debian. Half of these 20% estimate that the amount of work on Debian they are being paid for corresponds to less than 20% of the work they do there. On the other side, there are 14% of those who are being paid for Debian work who declared that 80-100% of the work they do in Debian is remunerated.

So, if a majority of people is not paid, why do they work on F/LOSS? Or: What are the incentives of free software? In 2021, Louis-Philippe V ronneau aka Pollo, who is not only a Debian Developer but also an economist, published his thesis What are the incentive structures of free software (The actual thesis was written in French). One very interesting finding Pollo pointed out is this one:
Indeed, while we have proven that there is a strong and significative correlation between the income and the participation in a free/libre software project, it is not possible for us to pronounce ourselves about the causality of this link.
In the French original text:
En effet, si nous avons prouv qu il existe une corr lation forte et significative entre le salaire et la participation un projet libre, il ne nous est pas possible de nous prononcer sur la causalit de ce lien.
Said differently, it is certain that there is a relationship between income and F/LOSS contribution, but it s unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software. I would like to scratch this question a bit further, mostly relying on my own observations, experiences, and discussions with F/LOSS contributors.

Volunteer work is unpaid work We often hear of hackathons, hack weeks, or hackfests. I ve been at some such events myself, Tails organized one, the IETF regularly organizes hackathons, and last week (June 2022!) I saw an invitation for a hack week with the Torproject. This type of event generally last several days. While the people who organize these events are being paid by the organizations they work for, participants on the other hand are generally joining on a volunteer basis. Who can we expect to show up at this type of event under these circumstances as participants? To answer this question, I collected some ideas:
  • people who have an employer sponsoring their work
  • people who have a funder/grant sponsoring their work
  • people who have a high income and can take time off easily (in that regard, remember the Gender Pay Gap, women often earn less for the same work than men)
  • people who rely on family wealth (living off an inheritance, living on rights payments from a famous grandparent - I m not making these situations up, there are actual people in such financially favorable situations )
  • people who don t need much money because they don t have to pay rent or pay low rent (besides house owners that category includes people who live in squats or have social welfare paying for their rent, people who live with parents or caretakers)
  • people who don t need to do care work (for children, elderly family members, pets. Remember that most care work is still done by women.)
  • students who have financial support or are in a situation in which they do not yet need to generate a lot of income
  • people who otherwise have free time at their disposal
So, who, in your opinion, fits these unwritten requirements? Looking at this list, it s pretty clear to me why we d mostly find white men from the Global North, generally with higher education in hackathons and F/LOSS development. ( Great, they re a culture fit! ) Yes, there will also always be some people of marginalized groups who will attend such events because they expect to network, to find an internship, to find a better job in the future, or to add their participation to their curriculum. To me, this rings a bunch of alarm bells.

Low diversity in F/LOSS projects a mirror of the distribution of wealth I believe that the lack of diversity in F/LOSS is first of all a mirror of the distribution of wealth on a larger level. And by wealth I m referring to financial wealth as much as to social wealth in the sense of Bourdieu: Families of highly educated parents socially reproducing privilege by allowing their kids to attend better schools, supporting and guiding them in their choices of study and work, providing them with relations to internships acting as springboards into well paid jobs and so on. That said, we should ask ourselves as well:

Do F/LOSS projects exacerbate existing lines of oppression by relying on unpaid work? Let s look again at the causality question of Pollo s research (in my words):
It is unclear whether working on free/libre software ultimately helps finding a well paid job, or if having a well paid job is the cause enabling work on free/libre software.
Maybe we need to imagine this cause-effect relationship over time: as a student, without children and lots of free time, hopefully some money from the state or the family, people can spend time on F/LOSS, collect experience, earn recognition - and later find a well-paid job and make unpaid F/LOSS contributions into a hobby, cementing their status in the community, while at the same time generating a sense of well-being from working on the common good. This is a quite common scenario. As the Flosspols study revealed however, boys often get their own computer at the age of 14, while girls get one only at the age of 20. (These numbers might be slightly different now, and possibly many people don t own an actual laptop or desktop computer anymore, instead they own mobile devices which are not exactly inciting them to look behind the surface, take apart, learn, appropriate technology.) In any case, the above scenario does not allow for people who join F/LOSS later in life, eg. changing careers, to find their place. I believe that F/LOSS projects cannot expect to have more women, people of color, people from working class backgrounds, people from outside of Germany, France, USA, UK, Australia, and Canada on board as long as volunteer work is the status quo and waged labour an earned privilege.

Wait, are you criticizing all these wonderful people who sacrifice their free time to work towards common good? No, that s definitely not my intention, I m glad that F/LOSS exists, and the F/LOSS ecosystem has always represented a small utopia to me that is worth cherishing and nurturing. However, I think we still need to talk more about the lack of diversity, and investigate it further.

Some types of work are never being paid Besides free work at hacking events, let me also underline that a lot of work in F/LOSS is not considered payable work (yes, that s an oxymoron!). Which F/LOSS project for example, has ever paid translators a decent fee? Which project has ever considered that doing the social glue work, often done by women in the projects, is work that should be paid for? Which F/LOSS projects pay the people who do their Debian packaging rather than relying on yet another already well-paid white man who can afford doing this work for free all the while holding up how great the F/LOSS ecosystem is? And how many people on opensourcedesign jobs are looking to get their logo or website done for free? (Isn t that heart icon appealing to your altruistic empathy?) In my experience even F/LOSS projects which are trying to do the right thing by paying everyone the same amount of money per hour run into issues when it turns out that not all hours are equal and that some types of work do not qualify for remuneration at all or that the rules for the clocking of work are not universally applied in the same way by everyone.

Not every interaction should have a monetary value, but Some of you want to keep working without being paid, because that feels a bit like communism within capitalism, it makes you feel good to contribute to the greater good while not having the system determine your value over money. I hear you. I ve been there (and sometimes still am). But as long as we live in this system, even though we didn t choose to and maybe even despise it - communism is not about working for free, it s about getting paid equally and adequately. We may not think about it while under the age of 40 or 45, but working without adequate financial compensation, even half of the time, will ultimately result in not being able to care for oneself when sick, when old. And while this may not be an issue for people who inherit wealth, or have an otherwise safe economical background, eg. an academic salary, it is a huge problem and barrier for many people coming out of the working or service classes. (Oh and please, don t repeat the neoliberal lie that everyone can achieve whatever they aim for, if they just tried hard enough. French research shows that (in France) one has only 30% chance to become a class defector , and change social class upwards. But I managed to get out and move up, so everyone can! - well, if you believe that I m afraid you might be experiencing survivor bias.)

Not all bodies are equally able We should also be aware that not all of us can work with the same amount of energy either. There is yet another category of people who are excluded by the expectation of volunteer work, either because the waged labour they do already eats all of their energy, or because their bodies are not disposed to do that much work, for example because of mental health issues - such as depression-, or because of physical disabilities.

When organizing events relying on volunteer work please think about these things. Yes, you can tell people that they should ask their employer to pay them for attending a hackathon - but, as I ve hopefully shown, that would not do it for many people, especially newcomers. Instead, you could propose a fund to make it possible that people who would not normally attend can attend. DebConf is a good example for having done this for many years.

Conclusively I would like to urge free software projects that have a budget and directly pay some people from it to map where they rely on volunteer work and how this hurts diversity in their project. How do you or your project exacerbate pre-existing lines of oppression by granting or not granting monetary value to certain types of work? What is it that you take for granted? As always, I m curious about your feedback!

Worth a read These ideas are far from being new. Ashe Dryden s well-researched post The ethics of unpaid labor and the OSS community dates back to 2013 and is as important as it was ten years ago.

Melissa Wen: The Rainbow Treasure Map Talk: Advanced color management on Linux with AMD/Steam Deck.

Last week marked a major milestone for me: the AMD driver-specific color management properties reached the upstream linux-next! And to celebrate, I m happy to share the slides notes from my 2023 XDC talk, The Rainbow Treasure Map along with the individual recording that just dropped last week on youtube talk about happy coincidences!

Steam Deck Rainbow: Treasure Map & Magic Frogs While I may be bubbly and chatty in everyday life, the stage isn t exactly my comfort zone (hallway talks are more my speed). But the journey of developing the AMD color management properties was so full of discoveries that I simply had to share the experience. Witnessing the fantastic work of Jeremy and Joshua bring it all to life on the Steam Deck OLED was like uncovering magical ingredients and whipping up something truly enchanting. For XDC 2023, we split our Rainbow journey into two talks. My focus, The Rainbow Treasure Map, explored the new color features we added to the Linux kernel driver, diving deep into the hardware capabilities of AMD/Steam Deck. Joshua then followed with The Rainbow Frogs and showed the breathtaking color magic released on Gamescope thanks to the power unlocked by the kernel driver s Steam Deck color properties.

Packing a Rainbow into 15 Minutes I had so much to tell, but a half-slot talk meant crafting a concise presentation. To squeeze everything into 15 minutes (and calm my pre-talk jitters a bit!), I drafted and practiced those slides and notes countless times. So grab your map, and let s embark on the Rainbow journey together! Slide 1: The Rainbow Treasure Map - Advanced Color Management on Linux with AMD/SteamDeck Intro: Hi, I m Melissa from Igalia and welcome to the Rainbow Treasure Map, a talk about advanced color management on Linux with AMD/SteamDeck. Slide 2: List useful links for this technical talk Useful links: First of all, if you are not used to the topic, you may find these links useful.
  1. XDC 2022 - I m not an AMD expert, but - Melissa Wen
  2. XDC 2022 - Is HDR Harder? - Harry Wentland
  3. XDC 2022 Lightning - HDR Workshop Summary - Harry Wentland
  4. Color management and HDR documentation for FOSS graphics - Pekka Paalanen et al.
  5. Cinematic Color - 2012 SIGGRAPH course notes - Jeremy Selan
  6. AMD Driver-specific Properties for Color Management on Linux (Part 1) - Melissa Wen
Slide 3: Why do we need advanced color management on Linux? Context: When we talk about colors in the graphics chain, we should keep in mind that we have a wide variety of source content colorimetry, a variety of output display devices and also the internal processing. Users expect consistent color reproduction across all these devices. The userspace can use GPU-accelerated color management to get it. But this also requires an interface with display kernel drivers that is currently missing from the DRM/KMS framework. Slide 4: Describe our work on AMD driver-specific color properties Since April, I ve been bothering the DRM community by sending patchsets from the work of me and Joshua to add driver-specific color properties to the AMD display driver. In parallel, discussions on defining a generic color management interface are still ongoing in the community. Moreover, we are still not clear about the diversity of color capabilities among hardware vendors. To bridge this gap, we defined a color pipeline for Gamescope that fits the latest versions of AMD hardware. It delivers advanced color management features for gamut mapping, HDR rendering, SDR on HDR, and HDR on SDR. Slide 5: Describe the AMD/SteamDeck - our hardware AMD/Steam Deck hardware: AMD frequently releases new GPU and APU generations. Each generation comes with a DCN version with display hardware improvements. Therefore, keep in mind that this work uses the AMD Steam Deck hardware and its kernel driver. The Steam Deck is an APU with a DCN3.01 display driver, a DCN3 family. It s important to have this information since newer AMD DCN drivers inherit implementations from previous families but aldo each generation of AMD hardware may introduce new color capabilities. Therefore I recommend you to familiarize yourself with the hardware you are working on. Slide 6: Diagram with the three layers of the AMD display driver on Linux The AMD display driver in the kernel space: It consists of three layers, (1) the DRM/KMS framework, (2) the AMD Display Manager, and (3) the AMD Display Core. We extended the color interface exposed to userspace by leveraging existing DRM resources and connecting them using driver-specific functions for color property management. Slide 7: Three-layers diagram highlighting AMD Display Manager, DM - the layer that connects DC and DRM Bridging DC color capabilities and the DRM API required significant changes in the color management of AMD Display Manager - the Linux-dependent part that connects the AMD DC interface to the DRM/KMS framework. Slide 8: Three-layers diagram highlighting AMD Display Core, DC - the shared code The AMD DC is the OS-agnostic layer. Its code is shared between platforms and DCN versions. Examining this part helps us understand the AMD color pipeline and hardware capabilities, since the machinery for hardware settings and resource management are already there. Slide 9: Diagram of the AMD Display Core Next architecture with main elements and data flow The newest architecture for AMD display hardware is the AMD Display Core Next. Slide 10: Diagram of the AMD Display Core Next where only DPP and MPC blocks are highlighted In this architecture, two blocks have the capability to manage colors:
  • Display Pipe and Plane (DPP) - for pre-blending adjustments;
  • Multiple Pipe/Plane Combined (MPC) - for post-blending color transformations.
Let s see what we have in the DRM API for pre-blending color management. Slide 11: Blank slide with no content only a title 'Pre-blending: DRM plane' DRM plane color properties: This is the DRM color management API before blending. Nothing! Except two basic DRM plane properties: color_encoding and color_range for the input colorspace conversion, that is not covered by this work. Slide 12: Diagram with color capabilities and structures in AMD DC layer without any DRM plane color interface (before blending), only the DRM CRTC color interface for post blending In case you re not familiar with AMD shared code, what we need to do is basically draw a map and navigate there! We have some DRM color properties after blending, but nothing before blending yet. But much of the hardware programming was already implemented in the AMD DC layer, thanks to the shared code. Slide 13: Previous Diagram with a rectangle to highlight the empty space in the DRM plane interface that will be filled by AMD plane properties Still both the DRM interface and its connection to the shared code were missing. That s when the search begins! Slide 14: Color Pipeline Diagram with the plane color interface filled by AMD plane properties but without connections to AMD DC resources AMD driver-specific color pipeline: Looking at the color capabilities of the hardware, we arrive at this initial set of properties. The path wasn t exactly like that. We had many iterations and discoveries until reached to this pipeline. Slide 15: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane degamma properties, LUT and TF, to AMD DC resources The Plane Degamma is our first driver-specific property before blending. It s used to linearize the color space from encoded values to light linear values. Slide 16: Describe plane degamma properties and hardware capabilities We can use a pre-defined transfer function or a user lookup table (in short, LUT) to linearize the color space. Pre-defined transfer functions for plane degamma are hardcoded curves that go to a specific hardware block called DPP Degamma ROM. It supports the following transfer functions: sRGB EOTF, BT.709 inverse OETF, PQ EOTF, and pure power curves Gamma 2.2, Gamma 2.4 and Gamma 2.6. We also have a one-dimensional LUT. This 1D LUT has four thousand ninety six (4096) entries, the usual 1D LUT size in the DRM/KMS. It s an array of drm_color_lut that goes to the DPP Gamma Correction block. Slide 17: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane CTM property to AMD DC resources We also have now a color transformation matrix (CTM) for color space conversion. Slide 18: Describe plane CTM property and hardware capabilities It s a 3x4 matrix of fixed points that goes to the DPP Gamut Remap Block. Both pre- and post-blending matrices were previously gone to the same color block. We worked on detaching them to clear both paths. Now each CTM goes on its own way. Slide 19: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane HDR multiplier property to AMD DC resources Next, the HDR Multiplier. HDR Multiplier is a factor applied to the color values of an image to increase their overall brightness. Slide 20: Describe plane HDR mult property and hardware capabilities This is useful for converting images from a standard dynamic range (SDR) to a high dynamic range (HDR). As it can range beyond [0.0, 1.0] subsequent transforms need to use the PQ(HDR) transfer functions. Slide 21: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane shaper properties, LUT and TF, to AMD DC resources And we need a 3D LUT. But 3D LUT has a limited number of entries in each dimension, so we want to use it in a colorspace that is optimized for human vision. It means in a non-linear space. To deliver it, userspace may need one 1D LUT before 3D LUT to delinearize content and another one after to linearize content again for blending. Slide 22: Describe plane shaper properties and hardware capabilities The pre-3D-LUT curve is called Shaper curve. Unlike Degamma TF, there are no hardcoded curves for shaper TF, but we can use the AMD color module in the driver to build the following shaper curves from pre-defined coefficients. The color module combines the TF and the user LUT values into the LUT that goes to the DPP Shaper RAM block. Slide 23: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane 3D LUT property to AMD DC resources Finally, our rockstar, the 3D LUT. 3D LUT is perfect for complex color transformations and adjustments between color channels. Slide 24: Describe plane 3D LUT property and hardware capabilities 3D LUT is also more complex to manage and requires more computational resources, as a consequence, its number of entries is usually limited. To overcome this restriction, the array contains samples from the approximated function and values between samples are estimated by tetrahedral interpolation. AMD supports 17 and 9 as the size of a single-dimension. Blue is the outermost dimension, red the innermost. Slide 25: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD plane blend properties, LUT and TF, to AMD DC resources As mentioned, we need a post-3D-LUT curve to linearize the color space before blending. This is done by Blend TF and LUT. Slide 26: Describe plane blend properties and hardware capabilities Similar to shaper TF, there are no hardcoded curves for Blend TF. The pre-defined curves are the same as the Degamma block, but calculated by the color module. The resulting LUT goes to the DPP Blend RAM block. Slide 27: Color Pipeline Diagram with all AMD plane color properties connect to AMD DC resources and links showing the conflict between plane and CRTC degamma Now we have everything connected before blending. As a conflict between plane and CRTC Degamma was inevitable, our approach doesn t accept that both are set at the same time. Slide 28: Color Pipeline Diagram connecting AMD CRTC gamma TF property to AMD DC resources We also optimized the conversion of the framebuffer to wire encoding by adding support to pre-defined CRTC Gamma TF. Slide 29: Describe CRTC gamma TF property and hardware capabilities Again, there are no hardcoded curves and TF and LUT are combined by the AMD color module. The same types of shaper curves are supported. The resulting LUT goes to the MPC Gamma RAM block. Slide 30: Color Pipeline Diagram with all AMD driver-specific color properties connect to AMD DC resources Finally, we arrived in the final version of DRM/AMD driver-specific color management pipeline. With this knowledge, you re ready to better enjoy the rainbow treasure of AMD display hardware and the world of graphics computing. Slide 31: SteamDeck/Gamescope Color Pipeline Diagram with rectangles labeling each block of the pipeline with the related AMD color property With this work, Gamescope/Steam Deck embraces the color capabilities of the AMD GPU. We highlight here how we map the Gamescope color pipeline to each AMD color block. Slide 32: Final slide. Thank you! Future works: The search for the rainbow treasure is not over! The Linux DRM subsystem contains many hidden treasures from different vendors. We want more complex color transformations and adjustments available on Linux. We also want to expose all GPU color capabilities from all hardware vendors to the Linux userspace. Thanks Joshua and Harry for this joint work and the Linux DRI community for all feedback and reviews. The amazing part of this work comes in the next talk with Joshua and The Rainbow Frogs! Any questions?
References:
  1. Slides of the talk The Rainbow Treasure Map.
  2. Youtube video of the talk The Rainbow Treasure Map.
  3. Patch series for AMD driver-specific color management properties (upstream Linux 6.8v).
  4. SteamDeck/Gamescope color management pipeline
  5. XDC 2023 website.
  6. Igalia website.

19 December 2023

Antoine Beaupr : (Re)introducing screentest

I have accidentally rewritten screentest, an old X11/GTK2 program that I was previously using to, well, test screens.

Screentest is dead It was removed from Debian in May 2023 but had already missed two releases (Debian 11 "bullseye" and 12 "bookworm") due to release critical bugs. The stated reason for removal was:
The package is orphaned and its upstream is no longer developed. It depends on gtk2, has a low popcon and no reverse dependencies.
So I had little hope to see this program back in Debian. The git repository shows little activity, the last being two years ago. Interestingly, I do not quite remember what it was testing, but I do remember it to find dead pixels, confirm native resolution, and various pixel-peeping. Here's a screenshot of one of the screentest screens: screentest screenshot showing a white-on-black checkered background, with some circles in the corners, shades of gray and colors in the middle Now, I think it's safe to assume this program is dead and buried, and anyways I'm running wayland now, surely there's something better? Well, no. Of course not. Someone would know about it and tell me before I go on a random coding spree in a fit of procrastination... riiight? At least, the Debconf video team didn't seem to know of any replacement. They actually suggested I just "invoke gstreamer directly" and "embrace the joy of shell scripting".

Screentest reborn So, I naively did exactly that and wrote a horrible shell script. Then I realized the next step was to write an command line parser and monitor geometry guessing, and thought "NOPE, THIS IS WHERE THE SHELL STOPS", and rewrote the whole thing in Python. Now, screentest lives as a ~400-line Python script, half of which is unit test data and command-line parsing.

Why screentest Some smarty pants is going to complain and ask why the heck one would need something like that (and, well, someone already did), so maybe I can lay down a list of use case:
  • testing color output, in broad terms (answering the question of "is it just me or this project really yellow?")
  • testing focus and keystone ("this looks blurry, can you find a nice sharp frame in that movie to adjust focus?")
  • test for native resolution and sharpness ("does this projector really support 4k for 30$? that sounds like bullcrap")
  • looking for dead pixels ("i have a new monitor, i hope it's intact")

What does screentest do? Screentest displays a series of "patterns" on screen. The list of patterns is actually hardcoded in the script, copy-pasted from this list from the videotestsrc gstreamer plugin, but you can pass any pattern supported by your gstreamer installation with --patterns. A list of patterns relevant to your installation is available with the gst-inspect-1.0 videotestsrc command. By default, screentest goes through all patterns. Each pattern runs indefinitely until the you close the window, then the next pattern starts. You can restrict to a subset of patterns, for example this would be a good test for dead pixels: 
screentest --patterns black,white,red,green,blue
This would be a good sharpness test: 
screentest --patterns pinwheel,spokes,checkers-1,checkers-2,checkers-4,checkers-8
A good generic test is the classic SMPTE color bars and is the first in the list, but you can run only that test with: 
screentest --patterns smpte
(I will mention, by the way, that as a system administrator with decades of experience, it is nearly impossible to type SMPTE without first typing SMTP and re-typing it again a few times before I get it right. I fully expect this post to have numerous typos.)
Here's an example of the SMPTE pattern from Wikipedia: SMPTE color bars For multi-monitor setups, screentest also supports specifying which output to use as a native resolution, with --output. Failing that, it will try to look at the outputs and use the first it will find. If it fails to find anything, you can specify a resolution with --resolution WIDTHxHEIGHT. I have tried to make it go full screen by default, but stumbled a bug in Sway that crashes gst-launch. If your Wayland compositor supports it, you can possibly enable full screen with --sink waylandsink fullscreen=true. Otherwise it will create a new window that you will have to make fullscreen yourself. For completeness, there's also an --audio flag that will emit the classic "drone", a sine wave at 440Hz at 40% volume (the audiotestsrc gstreamer plugin. And there's a --overlay-name option to show the pattern name, in case you get lost and want to start with one of them again.

How this works Most of the work is done by gstreamer. The script merely generates a pipeline and calls gst-launch to show the output. That both limits what it can do but also makes it much easier to use than figuring out gst-launch. There might be some additional patterns that could be useful, but I think those are better left to gstreamer. I, for example, am somewhat nostalgic of the Philips circle pattern that used to play for TV stations that were off-air in my area. But that, in my opinion, would be better added to the gstreamer plugin than into a separate thing. The script shows which command is being ran, so it's a good introduction to gstreamer pipelines. Advanced users (and the video team) will possibly not need screentest and will design their own pipelines with their own tools. I've previously worked with ffmpeg pipelines (in another such procrastinated coding spree, video-proxy-magic), and I found gstreamer more intuitive, even though it might be slightly less powerful. In retrospect, I should probably have picked a new name, to avoid crashing the namespace already used by the project, which is now on GitHub. Who knows, it might come back to life after this blog post; it would not be the first time. For now, the project lives along side the rest of my scripts collection but if there's sufficient interest, I might move it to its own git repositories. Comments, feedback, contributions are as usual welcome. And naturally, if you know something better for this kind of stuff, I'm happy to learn more about your favorite tool! So now I have finally found something to test my projector, which will likely confirm what I've already known all along: that it's kind of a piece of crap and I need to get a proper one.

16 December 2023

Thomas Lange: Adding a writeable data partition to an ISO image

Some years ago a customer needed a live ISO containing a customized FAI environment (not for installing but for extended hardware stress tests), but on an USB stick with the possibility to store the logs of the tests on the USB stick. But an ISO file system (iso9660) remains read-only, even when put onto an USB stick. I had the idea to add another partition onto the USB stick after the ISO was written to it (using cp or dd). You can use fdisk with an ISO file, add a new partition, loop mount the ISO and format this partition. That's all. This worked perfect for my customer. I forgot this idea for a while but a few weeks ago I remembered it. What could be possible when my FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) image would also provide such a partition? Which things could be provided on this partition? Could I provide a FAI ISO and my users would be able to easily put their own .deb package onto it without remastering the ISO or building an ISO on their own? Now here's the shell script, that extends an ISO or an USB stick with an ext4 or exFAT partition and set the file system label to MY-DATA. https://github.com/faiproject/fai/blob/master/bin/mk-data-partition Examples how to use mk-data-partition 
Add a data partition of size 1G to the Debian installer ISO using an ext4 partition
# mk-data-partition -s 1G debian-12.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso
Create the data partition using an exFAT file system on USB named /dev/sdb.
First copy (or dd) the ISO onto the USB stick. Then add the data partition
to the USB stick.
# cp faicd64-large_6.0.3.iso /dev/sdb
# mk-data-partition -F /dev/sdb
Create the data partition and copy directories A and B to it
# mk-data-partition -c debian-12.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso A B
The next FAI version will use this in different parts of an installation. A blog post about this will follow. A new idea for our Debian installer ISO Here are my ideas how the Debian installer could use such a partition if it automatically detects and mounts it (by it's file system label): The advantage of this approach is that there's no need for the user to remaster the official Debian installer ISO, which is not easy for end users. We only have to extend the installer to use files from this data partition in some portions of the installation. Additional udebs, packages or firmware could automatically be used by the installer. Companies could easily create an OEM installer of Debian. What do you think about this idea? Please send feedback to lange@debian.org

15 December 2023

Scarlett Gately Moore: KDE: Snaps, KDEneon, Debian and my future.

First I want to thank KDE for this wonderful write up on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kde_akademy-2023-over-a-million-reasons-why-activity-7139965489153208320-PNem?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop It made my heart explode with happiness as I prepped for my interview on Monday. I didn t get the job ( Just the usual we were very impressed with your experience, but we went with another candidate ). I think the cosmos is determined for me to hold out for the project even though it is only part time work, it is work and if I have learned nothing else this year, I have learned how to live on a very tight budget! It turns out many of the things we think we need, we don t. So with hard work of Kevin Ottens ( Thank you!!!! ), this should be finalized after the first of the year. This plan also allows me time for KDEneon and Debian work. I am happy with it and look forward to the coming year and the exciting things to come. My holiday plans are to help the Debian KDE team with the KF6 packaging, On-going KDEneon efforts, and continue to make sure the snaps Qt6 transition is a painless as possible. I will also be working on the qt6 kde-neon extension. In closing, despite my terrible luck with job-hunting, I am in an amazing community and I am truly grateful to each and every one of you. It has been a great year and I have added many new things to my skillset and I look forward to many more next year. As usual, it is that time of month where I have not raised enough to pay my internet bill ( phone company taking an extra 200.00 didn t help ) If you can spare any change ( any amount helps! ) please consider a donation https://gofund.me/b74e4c6f Thank you! I hope everyone has a wonderful <insert your holiday here> !!!!! ~ Scarlett

14 December 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.21 on CRAN: Updated Upstream Support!

An exciting new release 0.4.21 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ( ProtoBuf ) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. ProtoBuf development, following what seemed like a multi-year lull, all of a sudden picked up again with a vengeance a little while ago. And the library releases we rely on for convenience and provided by the Linux distributions are lagging. So last summer we received an excellent, and focussed, pull request #93 offering to update the package to the newer ProtoBuf 22.0 and beyond. (Aside: When a library ditches its numbering scheme you know changes are for real . My Ubuntu 23.10 box is still at 3.21 in a different counting scheme .) But it wasn t until last weekend the issue ticket #95 by Sebastian ran into the same issue, but recognized it and contained a container recipe! So now all of a sudden we were able to build under a newer ProtoBuf which made accepting the PR #93 much easier! We added this as an additional continuous unit test, and made a few other smaller updates to documentation and style. The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has full details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.21 (2022-12-13)
  • Package now builds with ProtoBuf >= 22.x thanks to Matteo Gianella (#93 addressing #92).
  • An Alpine 3.19-based workflow was added to test this in continuous integration thanks to a suggestion by Sebastian Meyer.
  • A large number of old-style .Call were updated (#96).
  • Several packaging, dcoumentation and testing items were updated.

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the quick overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

13 December 2023

Melissa Wen: 15 Tips for Debugging Issues in the AMD Display Kernel Driver

A self-help guide for examining and debugging the AMD display driver within the Linux kernel/DRM subsystem. It s based on my experience as an external developer working on the driver, and are shared with the goal of helping others navigate the driver code. Acknowledgments: These tips were gathered thanks to the countless help received from AMD developers during the driver development process. The list below was obtained by examining open source code, reviewing public documentation, playing with tools, asking in public forums and also with the help of my former GSoC mentor, Rodrigo Siqueira.

Pre-Debugging Steps: Before diving into an issue, it s crucial to perform two essential steps: 1) Check the latest changes: Ensure you re working with the latest AMD driver modifications located in the amd-staging-drm-next branch maintained by Alex Deucher. You may also find bug fixes for newer kernel versions on branches that have the name pattern drm-fixes-<date>. 2) Examine the issue tracker: Confirm that your issue isn t already documented and addressed in the AMD display driver issue tracker. If you find a similar issue, you can team up with others and speed up the debugging process.

Understanding the issue: Do you really need to change this? Where should you start looking for changes? 3) Is the issue in the AMD kernel driver or in the userspace?: Identifying the source of the issue is essential regardless of the GPU vendor. Sometimes this can be challenging so here are some helpful tips:
  • Record the screen: Capture the screen using a recording app while experiencing the issue. If the bug appears in the capture, it s likely a userspace issue, not the kernel display driver.
  • Analyze the dmesg log: Look for error messages related to the display driver in the dmesg log. If the error message appears before the message [drm] Display Core v... , it s not likely a display driver issue. If this message doesn t appear in your log, the display driver wasn t fully loaded and you will see a notification that something went wrong here.
4) AMD Display Manager vs. AMD Display Core: The AMD display driver consists of two components:
  • Display Manager (DM): This component interacts directly with the Linux DRM infrastructure. Occasionally, issues can arise from misinterpretations of DRM properties or features. If the issue doesn t occur on other platforms with the same AMD hardware - for example, only happens on Linux but not on Windows - it s more likely related to the AMD DM code.
  • Display Core (DC): This is the platform-agnostic part responsible for setting and programming hardware features. Modifications to the DC usually require validation on other platforms, like Windows, to avoid regressions.
5) Identify the DC HW family: Each AMD GPU has variations in its hardware architecture. Features and helpers differ between families, so determining the relevant code for your specific hardware is crucial.
  • Find GPU product information in Linux/AMD GPU documentation
  • Check the dmesg log for the Display Core version (since this commit in Linux kernel 6.3v). For example:
    • [drm] Display Core v3.2.241 initialized on DCN 2.1
    • [drm] Display Core v3.2.237 initialized on DCN 3.0.1

Investigating the relevant driver code: Keep from letting unrelated driver code to affect your investigation. 6) Narrow the code inspection down to one DC HW family: the relevant code resides in a directory named after the DC number. For example, the DCN 3.0.1 driver code is located at drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dcn301. We all know that the AMD s shared code is huge and you can use these boundaries to rule out codes unrelated to your issue. 7) Newer families may inherit code from older ones: you can find dcn301 using code from dcn30, dcn20, dcn10 files. It s crucial to verify which hooks and helpers your driver utilizes to investigate the right portion. You can leverage ftrace for supplemental validation. To give an example, it was useful when I was updating DCN3 color mapping to correctly use their new post-blending color capabilities, such as: Additionally, you can use two different HW families to compare behaviours. If you see the issue in one but not in the other, you can compare the code and understand what has changed and if the implementation from a previous family doesn t fit well the new HW resources or design. You can also count on the help of the community on the Linux AMD issue tracker to validate your code on other hardware and/or systems. This approach helped me debug a 2-year-old issue where the cursor gamma adjustment was incorrect in DCN3 hardware, but working correctly for DCN2 family. I solved the issue in two steps, thanks for community feedback and validation: 8) Check the hardware capability screening in the driver: You can currently find a list of display hardware capabilities in the drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dcn*/dcn*_resource.c file. More precisely in the dcn*_resource_construct() function. Using DCN301 for illustration, here is the list of its hardware caps: 
	/*************************************************
	 *  Resource + asic cap harcoding                *
	 *************************************************/
	pool->base.underlay_pipe_index = NO_UNDERLAY_PIPE;
	pool->base.pipe_count = pool->base.res_cap->num_timing_generator;
	pool->base.mpcc_count = pool->base.res_cap->num_timing_generator;
	dc->caps.max_downscale_ratio = 600;
	dc->caps.i2c_speed_in_khz = 100;
	dc->caps.i2c_speed_in_khz_hdcp = 5; /*1.4 w/a enabled by default*/
	dc->caps.max_cursor_size = 256;
	dc->caps.min_horizontal_blanking_period = 80;
	dc->caps.dmdata_alloc_size = 2048;
	dc->caps.max_slave_planes = 2;
	dc->caps.max_slave_yuv_planes = 2;
	dc->caps.max_slave_rgb_planes = 2;
	dc->caps.is_apu = true;
	dc->caps.post_blend_color_processing = true;
	dc->caps.force_dp_tps4_for_cp2520 = true;
	dc->caps.extended_aux_timeout_support = true;
	dc->caps.dmcub_support = true;
	/* Color pipeline capabilities */
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dcn_arch = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.input_lut_shared = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.icsc = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_ram = 0; // must use gamma_corr
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.srgb = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.pq = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_caps.hlg = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.post_csc = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.gamma_corr = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.dgam_rom_for_yuv = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.hw_3d_lut = 1;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_ram = 1;
	// no OGAM ROM on DCN301
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.srgb = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.pq = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ogam_rom_caps.hlg = 0;
	dc->caps.color.dpp.ocsc = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.gamut_remap = 1;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.num_3dluts = pool->base.res_cap->num_mpc_3dlut; //2
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_ram = 1;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.srgb = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.bt2020 = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.gamma2_2 = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.pq = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ogam_rom_caps.hlg = 0;
	dc->caps.color.mpc.ocsc = 1;
	dc->caps.dp_hdmi21_pcon_support = true;
	/* read VBIOS LTTPR caps */
	if (ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_caps)  
		enum bp_result bp_query_result;
		uint8_t is_vbios_lttpr_enable = 0;
		bp_query_result = ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_caps(ctx->dc_bios, &is_vbios_lttpr_enable);
		dc->caps.vbios_lttpr_enable = (bp_query_result == BP_RESULT_OK) && !!is_vbios_lttpr_enable;
	 
	if (ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_interop)  
		enum bp_result bp_query_result;
		uint8_t is_vbios_interop_enabled = 0;
		bp_query_result = ctx->dc_bios->funcs->get_lttpr_interop(ctx->dc_bios, &is_vbios_interop_enabled);
		dc->caps.vbios_lttpr_aware = (bp_query_result == BP_RESULT_OK) && !!is_vbios_interop_enabled;
Keep in mind that the documentation of color capabilities are available at the Linux kernel Documentation.

Understanding the development history: What has brought us to the current state? 9) Pinpoint relevant commits: Use git log and git blame to identify commits targeting the code section you re interested in. 10) Track regressions: If you re examining the amd-staging-drm-next branch, check for regressions between DC release versions. These are defined by DC_VER in the drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/dc.h file. Alternatively, find a commit with this format drm/amd/display: 3.2.221 that determines a display release. It s useful for bisecting. This information helps you understand how outdated your branch is and identify potential regressions. You can consider each DC_VER takes around one week to be bumped. Finally, check testing log of each release in the report provided on the amd-gfx mailing list, such as this one Tested-by: Daniel Wheeler:

Reducing the inspection area: Focus on what really matters. 11) Identify involved HW blocks: This helps isolate the issue. You can find more information about DCN HW blocks in the DCN Overview documentation. In summary:
  • Plane issues are closer to HUBP and DPP.
  • Blending/Stream issues are closer to MPC, OPP and OPTC. They are related to DRM CRTC subjects.
This information was useful when debugging a hardware rotation issue where the cursor plane got clipped off in the middle of the screen. Finally, the issue was addressed by two patches: 12) Issues around bandwidth (glitches) and clocks: May be affected by calculations done in these HW blocks and HW specific values. The recalculation equations are found in the DML folder. DML stands for Display Mode Library. It s in charge of all required configuration parameters supported by the hardware for multiple scenarios. See more in the AMD DC Overview kernel docs. It s a math library that optimally configures hardware to find the best balance between power efficiency and performance in a given scenario. Finding some clk variables that affect device behavior may be a sign of it. It s hard for a external developer to debug this part, since it involves information from HW specs and firmware programming that we don t have access. The best option is to provide all relevant debugging information you have and ask AMD developers to check the values from your suspicions.
  • Do a trick: If you suspect the power setup is degrading performance, try setting the amount of power supplied to the GPU to the maximum and see if it affects the system behavior with this command: sudo bash -c "echo high > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level"
I learned it when debugging glitches with hardware cursor rotation on Steam Deck. My first attempt was changing the clock calculation. In the end, Rodrigo Siqueira proposed the right solution targeting bandwidth in two steps:

Checking implicit programming and hardware limitations: Bring implicit programming to the level of consciousness and recognize hardware limitations. 13) Implicit update types: Check if the selected type for atomic update may affect your issue. The update type depends on the mode settings, since programming some modes demands more time for hardware processing. More details in the source code: 
/* Surface update type is used by dc_update_surfaces_and_stream
 * The update type is determined at the very beginning of the function based
 * on parameters passed in and decides how much programming (or updating) is
 * going to be done during the call.
 *
 * UPDATE_TYPE_FAST is used for really fast updates that do not require much
 * logical calculations or hardware register programming. This update MUST be
 * ISR safe on windows. Currently fast update will only be used to flip surface
 * address.
 *
 * UPDATE_TYPE_MED is used for slower updates which require significant hw
 * re-programming however do not affect bandwidth consumption or clock
 * requirements. At present, this is the level at which front end updates
 * that do not require us to run bw_calcs happen. These are in/out transfer func
 * updates, viewport offset changes, recout size changes and pixel
depth changes.
 * This update can be done at ISR, but we want to minimize how often
this happens.
 *
 * UPDATE_TYPE_FULL is slow. Really slow. This requires us to recalculate our
 * bandwidth and clocks, possibly rearrange some pipes and reprogram
anything front
 * end related. Any time viewport dimensions, recout dimensions,
scaling ratios or
 * gamma need to be adjusted or pipe needs to be turned on (or
disconnected) we do
 * a full update. This cannot be done at ISR level and should be a rare event.
 * Unless someone is stress testing mpo enter/exit, playing with
colour or adjusting
 * underscan we don't expect to see this call at all.
 */
enum surface_update_type  
UPDATE_TYPE_FAST, /* super fast, safe to execute in isr */
UPDATE_TYPE_MED,  /* ISR safe, most of programming needed, no bw/clk change*/
UPDATE_TYPE_FULL, /* may need to shuffle resources */
 ;

Using tools: Observe the current state, validate your findings, continue improvements. 14) Use AMD tools to check hardware state and driver programming: help on understanding your driver settings and checking the behavior when changing those settings.
  • DC Visual confirmation: Check multiple planes and pipe split policy.
  • DTN logs: Check display hardware state, including rotation, size, format, underflow, blocks in use, color block values, etc.
  • UMR: Check ASIC info, register values, KMS state - links and elements (framebuffers, planes, CRTCs, connectors). Source: UMR project documentation
15) Use generic DRM/KMS tools:
  • IGT test tools: Use generic KMS tests or develop your own to isolate the issue in the kernel space. Compare results across different GPU vendors to understand their implementations and find potential solutions. Here AMD also has specific IGT tests for its GPUs that is expect to work without failures on any AMD GPU. You can check results of HW-specific tests using different display hardware families or you can compare expected differences between the generic workflow and AMD workflow.
  • drm_info: This tool summarizes the current state of a display driver (capabilities, properties and formats) per element of the DRM/KMS workflow. Output can be helpful when reporting bugs.

Don t give up! Debugging issues in the AMD display driver can be challenging, but by following these tips and leveraging available resources, you can significantly improve your chances of success. Worth mentioning: This blog post builds upon my talk, I m not an AMD expert, but presented at the 2022 XDC. It shares guidelines that helped me debug AMD display issues as an external developer of the driver. Open Source Display Driver: The Linux kernel/AMD display driver is open source, allowing you to actively contribute by addressing issues listed in the official tracker. Tackling existing issues or resolving your own can be a rewarding learning experience and a valuable contribution to the community. Additionally, the tracker serves as a valuable resource for finding similar bugs, troubleshooting tips, and suggestions from AMD developers. Finally, it s a platform for seeking help when needed. Remember, contributing to the open source community through issue resolution and collaboration is mutually beneficial for everyone involved.

12 December 2023

Raju Devidas: Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy

Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxyNextcloud is a popular self-hosted solution for file sync and share as well as cloud apps such as document editing, chat and talk, calendar, photo gallery etc. This guide will walk you through setting up Nextcloud AIO using Docker Compose. This blog post would not be possible without immense help from Sahil Dhiman a.k.a. sahilisterThere are various ways in which the installation could be done, in our setup here are the pre-requisites.

Step 1 : The docker-compose file for nextcloud AIOThe original compose.yml file is present in nextcloud AIO&aposs git repo here . By taking a reference of that file, we have own compose.yml here. 
services:
  nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer:
    image: nextcloud/all-in-one:latest
    init: true
    restart: always
    container_name: nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer # This line is not allowed to be changed as otherwise AIO will not work correctly
    volumes:
      - nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config # This line is not allowed to be changed as otherwise the built-in backup solution will not work
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro # May be changed on macOS, Windows or docker rootless. See the applicable documentation. If adjusting, don&apost forget to also set &aposWATCHTOWER_DOCKER_SOCKET_PATH&apos!
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    environment: # Is needed when using any of the options below
      # - AIO_DISABLE_BACKUP_SECTION=false # Setting this to true allows to hide the backup section in the AIO interface. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-disable-the-backup-section
      - APACHE_PORT=32323 # Is needed when running behind a web server or reverse proxy (like Apache, Nginx, Cloudflare Tunnel and else). See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/blob/main/reverse-proxy.md
      - APACHE_IP_BINDING=127.0.0.1 # Should be set when running behind a web server or reverse proxy (like Apache, Nginx, Cloudflare Tunnel and else) that is running on the same host. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/blob/main/reverse-proxy.md
      # - BORG_RETENTION_POLICY=--keep-within=7d --keep-weekly=4 --keep-monthly=6 # Allows to adjust borgs retention policy. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-borgs-retention-policy
      # - COLLABORA_SECCOMP_DISABLED=false # Setting this to true allows to disable Collabora&aposs Seccomp feature. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-disable-collaboras-seccomp-feature
      - NEXTCLOUD_DATADIR=/opt/docker/cloud.raju.dev/nextcloud # Allows to set the host directory for Nextcloud&aposs datadir.   Warning: do not set or adjust this value after the initial Nextcloud installation is done! See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-change-the-default-location-of-nextclouds-datadir
      # - NEXTCLOUD_MOUNT=/mnt/ # Allows the Nextcloud container to access the chosen directory on the host. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-allow-the-nextcloud-container-to-access-directories-on-the-host
      # - NEXTCLOUD_UPLOAD_LIMIT=10G # Can be adjusted if you need more. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-the-upload-limit-for-nextcloud
      # - NEXTCLOUD_MAX_TIME=3600 # Can be adjusted if you need more. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-the-max-execution-time-for-nextcloud
      # - NEXTCLOUD_MEMORY_LIMIT=512M # Can be adjusted if you need more. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-the-php-memory-limit-for-nextcloud
      # - NEXTCLOUD_TRUSTED_CACERTS_DIR=/path/to/my/cacerts # CA certificates in this directory will be trusted by the OS of the nexcloud container (Useful e.g. for LDAPS) See See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-trust-user-defined-certification-authorities-ca
      # - NEXTCLOUD_STARTUP_APPS=deck twofactor_totp tasks calendar contacts notes # Allows to modify the Nextcloud apps that are installed on starting AIO the first time. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-change-the-nextcloud-apps-that-are-installed-on-the-first-startup
      # - NEXTCLOUD_ADDITIONAL_APKS=imagemagick # This allows to add additional packages to the Nextcloud container permanently. Default is imagemagick but can be overwritten by modifying this value. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-add-os-packages-permanently-to-the-nextcloud-container
      # - NEXTCLOUD_ADDITIONAL_PHP_EXTENSIONS=imagick # This allows to add additional php extensions to the Nextcloud container permanently. Default is imagick but can be overwritten by modifying this value. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-add-php-extensions-permanently-to-the-nextcloud-container
      # - NEXTCLOUD_ENABLE_DRI_DEVICE=true # This allows to enable the /dev/dri device in the Nextcloud container.   Warning: this only works if the &apos/dev/dri&apos device is present on the host! If it should not exist on your host, don&apost set this to true as otherwise the Nextcloud container will fail to start! See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-enable-hardware-transcoding-for-nextcloud
      # - NEXTCLOUD_KEEP_DISABLED_APPS=false # Setting this to true will keep Nextcloud apps that are disabled in the AIO interface and not uninstall them if they should be installed. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-keep-disabled-apps
      # - TALK_PORT=3478 # This allows to adjust the port that the talk container is using. See https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-adjust-the-talk-port
      # - WATCHTOWER_DOCKER_SOCKET_PATH=/var/run/docker.sock # Needs to be specified if the docker socket on the host is not located in the default &apos/var/run/docker.sock&apos. Otherwise mastercontainer updates will fail. For macos it needs to be &apos/var/run/docker.sock&apos
    # networks: # Is needed when you want to create the nextcloud-aio network with ipv6-support using this file, see the network config at the bottom of the file
      # - nextcloud-aio # Is needed when you want to create the nextcloud-aio network with ipv6-support using this file, see the network config at the bottom of the file
      # - SKIP_DOMAIN_VALIDATION=true
    # # Uncomment the following line when using SELinux
    # security_opt: ["label:disable"]
volumes: # If you want to store the data on a different drive, see https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one#how-to-store-the-filesinstallation-on-a-separate-drive
  nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:
    name: nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer # This line is not allowed to be changed as otherwise the built-in backup solution will not work
I have not removed many of the commented options in the compose file, for a possibility of me using them in the future.If you want a smaller cleaner compose with the extra options, you can refer to 
services:
  nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer:
    image: nextcloud/all-in-one:latest
    init: true
    restart: always
    container_name: nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer
    volumes:
      - nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    environment:
      - APACHE_PORT=32323
      - APACHE_IP_BINDING=127.0.0.1
      - NEXTCLOUD_DATADIR=/opt/docker/nextcloud
volumes:
  nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:
    name: nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer
I am using a separate directory to store nextcloud data. As per nextcloud documentation you should be using a separate partition if you want to use this feature, however I did not have that option on my server, so I used a separate directory instead. Also we use a custom port on which nextcloud listens for operations, we have set it up as 32323 above, but you can use any in the permissible port range. The 8080 port is used the setup the AIO management interface. Both 8080 and the APACHE_PORT do not need to be open on the host machine, as we will be using reverse proxy setup with nginx to direct requests. once you have your preferred compose.yml file, you can start the containers using 
$ docker-compose -f compose.yml up -d 
Creating network "clouddev_default" with the default driver
Creating volume "nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer" with default driver
Creating nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer ... done
once your container&aposs are running, we can do the nginx setup.

Step 2: Configuring nginx reverse proxy for our domain on host. A reference nginx configuration for nextcloud AIO is given in the nextcloud git repository here . You can modify the configuration file according to your needs and setup. Here is configuration that we are using

map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade  
    default upgrade;
    &apos&apos close;
 
server  
    listen 80;
    #listen [::]:80;            # comment to disable IPv6
    if ($scheme = "http")  
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
     
    listen 443 ssl http2;      # for nginx versions below v1.25.1
    #listen [::]:443 ssl http2; # for nginx versions below v1.25.1 - comment to disable IPv6
    # listen 443 ssl;      # for nginx v1.25.1+
    # listen [::]:443 ssl; # for nginx v1.25.1+ - keep comment to disable IPv6
    # http2 on;                                 # uncomment to enable HTTP/2        - supported on nginx v1.25.1+
    # http3 on;                                 # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+
    # quic_retry on;                            # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+
    # add_header Alt-Svc &aposh3=":443"; ma=86400&apos; # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+
    # listen 443 quic reuseport;       # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+ - please remove "reuseport" if there is already another quic listener on port 443 with enabled reuseport
    # listen [::]:443 quic reuseport;  # uncomment to enable HTTP/3 / QUIC - supported on nginx v1.25.0+ - please remove "reuseport" if there is already another quic listener on port 443 with enabled reuseport - keep comment to disable IPv6
    server_name cloud.example.com;
    location /  
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:32323$request_uri;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $server_port;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Scheme $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
    
        client_body_buffer_size 512k;
        proxy_read_timeout 86400s;
        client_max_body_size 0;
        # Websocket
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
     
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/cloud.example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/cloud.example.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_session_timeout 1d;
    ssl_session_cache shared:MozSSL:10m; # about 40000 sessions
    ssl_session_tickets off;
    ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
    ssl_ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
    # Optional settings:
    # OCSP stapling
    # ssl_stapling on;
    # ssl_stapling_verify on;
    # ssl_trusted_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/<your-nc-domain>/chain.pem;
    # replace with the IP address of your resolver
    # resolver 127.0.0.1; # needed for oscp stapling: e.g. use 94.140.15.15 for adguard / 1.1.1.1 for cloudflared or 8.8.8.8 for google - you can use the same nameserver as listed in your /etc/resolv.conf file
Please note that you need to have valid SSL certificates for your domain for this configuration to work. Steps on getting valid SSL certificates for your domain are beyond the scope of this article. You can give a web search on getting SSL certificates with letsencrypt and you will get several resources on that, or may write a blog post on it separately in the future.once your configuration for nginx is done, you can test the nginx configuration using 
$ sudo nginx -t 
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
and then reload nginx with 
$ sudo nginx -s reload

Step 3: Setup of Nextcloud AIO from the browser.To setup nextcloud AIO, we need to access it using the web browser on URL of our domain.tld:8080, however we do not want to open the 8080 port publicly to do this, so to complete the setup, here is a neat hack from sahilister 
ssh -L 8080:127.0.0.1:8080 username:<server-ip>
you can bind the 8080 port of your server to the 8080 of your localhost using Unix socket forwarding over SSH.The port forwarding only last for the duration of your SSH session, if the SSH session breaks, your port forwarding will to. So, once you have the port forwarded, you can open the nextcloud AIO instance in your web browser at 127.0.0.1:8080
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
you will get this error because you are trying to access a page on localhost over HTTPS. You can click on advanced and then continue to proceed to the next page. Your data is encrypted over SSH for this session as we are binding the port over SSH. Depending on your choice of browser, the above page might look different.once you have proceeded, the nextcloud AIO interface will open and will look something like this.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxynextcloud AIO initial screen with capsicums as password
It will show an auto generated passphrase, you need to save this passphrase and make sure to not loose it. For the purposes of security, I have masked the passwords with capsicums. once you have noted down your password, you can proceed to the Nextcloud AIO login, enter your password and then login. After login you will be greeted with a screen like this.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
now you can put the domain that you want to use in the Submit domain field. Once the domain check is done, you will proceed to the next step and see another screen like this
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
here you can select any optional containers for the features that you might want. IMPORTANT: Please make sure to also change the time zone at the bottom of the page according to the time zone you wish to operate in.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
The timezone setup is also important because the data base will get initialized according to the set time zone. This could result in wrong initialization of database and you ending up in a startup loop for nextcloud. I faced this issue and could only resolve it after getting help from sahilister . Once you are done changing the timezone, and selecting any additional features you want, you can click on Download and start the containersIt will take some time for this process to finish, take a break and look at the farthest object in your room and take a sip of water. Once you are done, and the process has finished you will see a page similar to the following one.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
wait patiently for everything to turn green.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
once all the containers have started properly, you can open the nextcloud login interface on your configured domain, the initial login details are auto generated as you can see from the above screenshot. Again you will see a password that you need to note down or save to enter the nextcloud interface. Capsicums will not work as passwords. I have masked the auto generated passwords using capsicums.Now you can click on Open your Nextcloud button or go to your configured domain to access the login screen.
Nextcloud AIO install with docker-compose and nginx reverse proxy
You can use the login details from the previous step to login to the administrator account of your Nextcloud instance. There you have it, your very own cloud!

Additional Notes:

How to properly reset Nextcloud setup?While following the above steps, or while following steps from some other tutorial, you may have made a mistake, and want to start everything again from scratch. The instructions for it are present in the Nextcloud documentation here . Here is the TLDR for a docker-compose setup. These steps will delete all data, do not use these steps on an existing nextcloud setup unless you know what you are doing.
  • Stop your master container. 
docker-compose -f compose.yml down -v
The above command will also remove the volume associated with the master container
  • Stop all the child containers that has been started by the master container. 
docker stop nextcloud-aio-apache nextcloud-aio-notify-push nextcloud-aio-nextcloud nextcloud-aio-imaginary nextcloud-aio-fulltextsearch nextcloud-aio-redis nextcloud-aio-database nextcloud-aio-talk nextcloud-aio-collabora
  • Remove all the child containers that has been started by the master container
docker rm nextcloud-aio-apache nextcloud-aio-notify-push nextcloud-aio-nextcloud nextcloud-aio-imaginary nextcloud-aio-fulltextsearch nextcloud-aio-redis nextcloud-aio-database nextcloud-aio-talk nextcloud-aio-collabora
  • If you also wish to remove all images associated with nextcloud you can do it with
docker rmi $(docker images --filter "reference=nextcloud/*" -q)
  • remove all volumes associated with child containers
docker volume rm <volume-name>
  • remove the network associated with nextcloud
docker network rm nextcloud-aio

Additional references.
  1. Nextcloud Github
  2. Nextcloud reverse proxy documentation
  3. Nextcloud Administration Guide
  4. Nextcloud User Manual
  5. Nextcloud Developer&aposs manual

10 December 2023

Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Python 3.12 preparations, debian-printing, merged-/usr tranisition updates, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)

Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services.

Preparing for Python 3.12 by Stefano Rivera Stefano uploaded a few packages in preparation for Python 3.12, including pycxx and cython. Cython has a major new version (Cython 3), adding support for 3.12, but also bringing changes that many packages in Debian aren t ready to build with, yet. Stefano uploaded it to Debian experimental and did an archive rebuild of affected packages, and some analysis of the result. Matthias Klose has since filed bugs for all of these issues.

debian-printing, by Thorsten Alteholz This month Thorsten invested some of the previously obtained money to build his own printlab. At the moment it only consists of a dedicated computer with an USB printer attached. Due to its 64GB RAM and an SSD, building of debian-printing packages is much faster now. Over time other printers will be added and understanding bugs should be a lot easier now. Also Thorsten again adopted two packages, namely mink and ink, and moved them to the debian-printing team.

Merged-/usr transition by Helmut Grohne, et al The dumat analysis tool has been improved in quite some aspects. Beyond fixing false negative diagnostics, it now recognizes protective diversions used for mitigating Multi-Arch: same file loss. It was found that the proposed mitigation for ineffective diversions does not work as expected. Trying to fix it up resulted in more problems, some of which remain unsolved as of this writing. Initial work on moving shared libraries in the essential set has been done. Meanwhile, the wider Debian community worked on fixing all known Multi-Arch: same file loss scenarios. This work is now being driven by Christian Hofstaedler and during the Mini DebConf in Cambridge, Chris Boot, tienne Mollier, Miguel Landaeta, Samuel Henrique, and Utkarsh Gupta sent the other half of the necessary patches.

Miscellaneous contributions
  • Stefano merged patches to support loong64 and hurd-amd64 in re2.
  • For the Cambridge mini-conf, Stefano added a web player to the DebConf video streaming frontend, as the Cambridge miniconf didn t have its own website to host the player.
  • Rapha l helped the upstream developers of hamster-time-tracker to prepare a new upstream release (the first in multiple years) and packaged that new release in Debian unstable.
  • Enrico joined Hemut in brainstorming some /usr-merge solutions.
  • Thorsten took care of RM-bugs to remove no longer needed packages from the Debian archive and closed about 50 of them.
  • Helmut ported the feature of mounting a fuse connection via /dev/fd/N from fuse3 to fuse2.
  • Helmut sent a number of patches simplifying unprivileged use of piuparts.
  • Roberto worked with Helmut to prepare the Shorewall package for the ongoing /usr-move transition.
  • Utkarsh also helped with the ongoing /usr-merge work by preparing patches for gitlab, libnfc, and net-tools.
  • Utkarsh, along with Helmut, brainstormed on fixing #961138, as this affects the whole archive and all the suites and not just R packages. Utkarsh intends to follow up on the bug in December.
  • Santiago organized a MiniDebConf in Uruguay. In total, nine people attended, including most of DDs in the surrounding area. Here s a nicely written blog by Gunnar Wolf.
  • Santiago also worked on some issues on Salsa CI, fixed with some merge requests: #462, #463, and #466.

9 December 2023

Simon Josefsson: Classic McEliece goes to IETF and OpenSSH

My earlier work on Streamlined NTRU Prime has been progressing along. The IETF document on sntrup761 in SSH has passed several process points. GnuPG s libgcrypt has added support for sntrup761. The libssh support for sntrup761 is working, but the merge request is stuck mostly due to lack of time to debug why the regression test suite sporadically errors out in non-sntrup761 related parts with the patch. The foundation for lattice-based post-quantum algorithms has some uncertainty around it, and I have felt that there is more to the post-quantum story than adding sntrup761 to implementations. Classic McEliece has been mentioned to me a couple of times, and I took some time to learn it and did a cut n paste job of the proposed ISO standard and published draft-josefsson-mceliece in the IETF to make the algorithm easily available to the IETF community. A high-quality implementation of Classic McEliece has been published as libmceliece and I ve been supporting the work of Jan Moj to package libmceliece for Debian, alas it has been stuck in the ftp-master NEW queue for manual review for over two months. The pre-dependencies librandombytes and libcpucycles are available in Debian already. All that text writing and packaging work set the scene to write some code. When I added support for sntrup761 in libssh, I became familiar with the OpenSSH code base, so it was natural to return to OpenSSH to experiment with a new SSH KEX for Classic McEliece. DJB suggested to pick mceliece6688128 and combine it with the existing X25519+sntrup761 or with plain X25519. While a three-algorithm hybrid between X25519, sntrup761 and mceliece6688128 would be a simple drop-in for those that don t want to lose the benefits offered by sntrup761, I decided to start the journey on a pure combination of X25519 with mceliece6688128. The key combiner in sntrup761x25519 is a simple SHA512 call and the only good I can say about that is that it is simple to describe and implement, and doesn t raise too many questions since it is already deployed. After procrastinating coding for months, once I sat down to work it only took a couple of hours until I had a successful Classic McEliece SSH connection. I suppose my brain had sorted everything in background before I started. To reproduce it, please try the following in a Debian testing environment (I use podman to get a clean environment). 
# podman run -it --rm debian:testing-slim
apt update
apt dist-upgrade -y
apt install -y wget python3 librandombytes-dev libcpucycles-dev gcc make git autoconf libz-dev libssl-dev
cd ~
wget -q -O- https://lib.mceliece.org/libmceliece-20230612.tar.gz   tar xfz -
cd libmceliece-20230612/
./configure
make install
ldconfig
cd ..
git clone https://gitlab.com/jas/openssh-portable
cd openssh-portable
git checkout jas/mceliece
autoreconf
./configure # verify 'libmceliece support: yes'
make # CC="cc -DDEBUG_KEX=1 -DDEBUG_KEXDH=1 -DDEBUG_KEXECDH=1"
You should now have a working SSH client and server that supports Classic McEliece! Verify support by running ./ssh -Q kex and it should mention mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com. To have it print plenty of debug outputs, you may remove the # character on the final line, but don t use such a build in production. You can test it as follows: 
./ssh-keygen -A # writes to /usr/local/etc/ssh_host_...
# setup public-key based login by running the following:
./ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -P ""
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub > ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
adduser --system sshd
mkdir /var/empty
while true; do $PWD/sshd -p 2222 -f /dev/null; done &
./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com date
On the client you should see output like this: 
OpenSSH_9.5p1, OpenSSL 3.0.11 19 Sep 2023
...
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received
debug1: kex: algorithm: mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com
debug1: kex: host key algorithm: ssh-ed25519
debug1: kex: server->client cipher: chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com MAC: <implicit> compression: none
debug1: kex: client->server cipher: chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com MAC: <implicit> compression: none
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_ECDH_REPLY
debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_ECDH_REPLY received
debug1: Server host key: ssh-ed25519 SHA256:YognhWY7+399J+/V8eAQWmM3UFDLT0dkmoj3pIJ0zXs
...
debug1: Host '[localhost]:2222' is known and matches the ED25519 host key.
debug1: Found key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:1
debug1: rekey out after 134217728 blocks
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received
debug1: rekey in after 134217728 blocks
...
debug1: Sending command: date
debug1: pledge: fork
debug1: permanently_set_uid: 0/0
Environment:
  USER=root
  LOGNAME=root
  HOME=/root
  PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin
  MAIL=/var/mail/root
  SHELL=/bin/bash
  SSH_CLIENT=::1 46894 2222
  SSH_CONNECTION=::1 46894 ::1 2222
debug1: client_input_channel_req: channel 0 rtype exit-status reply 0
debug1: client_input_channel_req: channel 0 rtype eow@openssh.com reply 0
Sat Dec  9 22:22:40 UTC 2023
debug1: channel 0: free: client-session, nchannels 1
Transferred: sent 1048044, received 3500 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
Bytes per second: sent 23388935.4, received 78108.6
debug1: Exit status 0
Notice the kex: algorithm: mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com output. How about network bandwidth usage? Below is a comparison of a complete SSH client connection such as the one above that log in and print date and logs out. Plain X25519 is around 7kb, X25519 with sntrup761 is around 9kb, and mceliece6688128 with X25519 is around 1MB. Yes, Classic McEliece has large keys, but for many environments, 1MB of data for the session establishment will barely be noticeable. 
./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=curve25519-sha256 date 2>&1   grep ^Transferred
Transferred: sent 3028, received 3612 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com date 2>&1   grep ^Transferred
Transferred: sent 4212, received 4596 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com date 2>&1   grep ^Transferred
Transferred: sent 1048044, received 3764 bytes, in 0.0 seconds
So how about session establishment time? 
date; i=0; while test $i -le 100; do ./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=curve25519-sha256 date > /dev/null 2>&1; i= expr $i + 1 ; done; date
Sat Dec  9 22:39:19 UTC 2023
Sat Dec  9 22:39:25 UTC 2023
# 6 seconds
date; i=0; while test $i -le 100; do ./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=sntrup761x25519-sha512@openssh.com date > /dev/null 2>&1; i= expr $i + 1 ; done; date
Sat Dec  9 22:39:29 UTC 2023
Sat Dec  9 22:39:38 UTC 2023
# 9 seconds
date; i=0; while test $i -le 100; do ./ssh -v -p 2222 localhost -oKexAlgorithms=mceliece6688128x25519-sha512@openssh.com date > /dev/null 2>&1; i= expr $i + 1 ; done; date
Sat Dec  9 22:39:55 UTC 2023
Sat Dec  9 22:40:07 UTC 2023
# 12 seconds
I never noticed adding sntrup761, so I m pretty sure I wouldn t notice this increase either. This is all running on my laptop that runs Trisquel so take it with a grain of salt but at least the magnitude is clear. Future work items include: Happy post-quantum SSH ing! Update: Changing the mceliece6688128_keypair call to mceliece6688128f_keypair (i.e., using the fully compatible f-variant) results in McEliece being just as fast as sntrup761 on my machine. Update 2023-12-26: An initial IETF document draft-josefsson-ssh-mceliece-00 published.

8 December 2023

Jonathan Dowland: The scourge of Electron, the nostalgia of Pidgin

For reasons I won't go into right now, I've spent some of this year working on a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 260. Despite it being relatively underpowered, I love almost everything about it. Unfortunately the model I bought has 8G RAM which turned out to be more limiting than I thought it would be. You can do incredible things with 8G of RAM: incredible, wondrous things. And most of my work, whether that's wrangling containers, hacking on OpenJDK, or complex Haskell projects, are manageable. Where it falls down is driving the modern scourge: Electron, and by proxy, lots of modern IM tools: Slack (urgh), Discord (where one of my main IRC social communities moved to), WhatsApp Web1 and even Signal Desktop. For that reason, I've (temporarily) looked at alternatives, and I was pleasantly surprised to find serviceable plugins for Pidgin, the stalwart Instant Messenger multiplexer. I originally used Pidgin (then called Gaim) back in the last century, at the time to talk to ICQ, MSN Messenger and AIM (all but ICQ2 long dead). It truly is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
Discord from within Pidgin Discord from within Pidgin
The plugins are3: Pidgin with all of these plugins loaded runs perfectly well and consumes fractions of the RAM that each of those Electron apps did prior. A side-effect of moving these into Pidgin (in particular Discord) is a refocussing of the content. Fewer distractions around the text. The lack of auto-link embedding, and other such things, make it a cleaner, purer experience. This made me think of the Discord community I am in (I'm really only active in one). It used to be an IRC channel of people that I met through a mutual friend. Said friend recently departed Discord, due to the signal to noise ratio being too poor, and the incessant nudge to click on links, engage, engage, engage. I wonder if the experience mediated by Pidgin would be more tolerable to them?
What my hexchat looks like What my hexchat looks like
I'm still active in one IRC channel (and inactive in many more). I could consider moving IRC into Pidgin as well. At the moment, my IRC client of choice is hexchat, which (like Pidgin) is still using GTK2 for the UI. There's something perversely pleasant about that.
  1. if you go to the trouble of trying to run it as an application distinct from your web browser.
  2. I'm still somewhat surprised ICQ is still going. I might try and recover my old ID.
  3. There may or may not be similar plugins for Slack, but as I (am forced to) use that for corporate stuff, I'm steering clear of them.

6 December 2023

Tim Retout: Nostalgia for my attention span

This post was possibly inspired by my daughter s homework assignment to interview an old person about technology change. Guess who s old now? Sometimes I look back at how life used to be, and remember what it was like. There are two key nostalgia points for me: before internet, and before smartphones.

Before the internet Before the internet, there were computers. There were always computers in my life, they were just less fancy, with mainly text and fewer graphics at first. These days we adapt our user interfaces to look more like DOS and call it retro , although claiming it s more efficient that way. Sometimes it is. The written word is a fundamental mode of human communication it resonates. Some of my earliest programming memories were typing lines of BASIC code into some sort of BBC Micro, usually not successfully. Most of my computer learning was largely theoretical, through Usborne books (now available online! Thanks internet for reducing the marginal cost of publishing to approximately zero) but without the benefit of a computer of my own. I went for a walk this morning, with a slight bite to the air, and bought a newspaper, like the old person I am (I m leaning in). Imagine that - a physical paper full of news. When I was an inquisitive sixth-former, TheGuardian cost 50 pence today it was 2.80. This increase far outstrips the rate of inflation, which would bring it to around 90 pence. No, this must surely reflect the drop in circulation of the physical edition, and the rise in advertisement-filled web content.

Before smartphones As the internet became mainstream, I remember dial-up, and Freeserve, and even the tail end of USENET, and IRC. This was still a time when email was a thing you had to be at your desk to check. Feature phones were very useful, but it was still possible to get lost. My university halls had a shared land-line phone on each floor. And I wrote on the internet. I remember commenting on blogs, and I think my writing was better back then; more free, less inhibited. I do find myself giving less attention to news squeezed into the small form-factor of a mobile phone. Chat messages and notification pings. I m not convinced this is great progress for humanity.

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