Search Results: "Martin"

5 January 2021

Russ Allbery: New year haul

For once, I've already read and reviewed quite a few of these books. Elizabeth Bear Machine (sff)
Timothy Caulfield Your Day, Your Way (non-fiction)
S.A. Chakraborty The City of Brass (sff)
John Dickerson The Hardest Job in the World (non-fiction)
Tracy Deonn Legendborn (sff)
Lindsay Ellis Axiom's End (sff)
Alix E. Harrow The Once and Future Witches (sff)
TJ Klune The House in the Cerulean Sea (sff)
Maria Konnikova The Biggest Bluff (non-fiction)
Talia Levin Culture Warlords (non-fiction)
Yoon Ha Lee Phoenix Extravagent (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee, et al. The Vela (sff)
Michael Lewis Flash Boys (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis Losers (non-fiction)
Michael Lewis The Undoing Project (non-fiction)
Megan Lindholm Wizard of the Pigeons (sff)
Nathan Lowell Quarter Share (sff)
Adrienne Martini Somebody's Gotta Do It (non-fiction)
Tamsyn Muir Princess Florinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (sff)
Naomi Novik A Deadly Education (sff)
Margaret Owen The Merciful Crow (sff)
Anne Helen Peterson Can't Even (non-fiction)
Devon Price Laziness Does Not Exist (non-fiction)
The Secret Barrister The Secret Barrister (non-fiction)
Studs Terkel Working (non-fiction)
Kathi Weeks The Problem with Work (non-fiction)
Reeves Wiedeman Billion Dollar Loser (non-fiction) Rather a lot of non-fiction in this batch, much more than usual. I've been in a non-fiction mood lately. So many good things to read!

4 January 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: The Once and Future Witches

Review: The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow
Publisher: Redhook Books
Copyright: October 2020
ISBN: 0-316-42202-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 515
Once upon a time there were three sisters. They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white as knuckle-bones on the banks. The sisters had no mother and a no-good father, but they had each other; it might have been enough. But the sisters were banished from their kingdom, broken and scattered.
The Once and Future Witches opens with Juniper, the youngest, arriving in the city of New Salem. The year is 1893, but not in our world, not quite; Juniper has witch-ways in her pocket and a few words of power. That's lucky for her because the wanted posters arrived before she did. Unbeknownst to her or to each other, her sisters, Agnes and Bella, are already in New Salem. Agnes works in a cotton mill after having her heart broken one too many times; the mill is safer because you can't love a cotton mill. Bella is a junior librarian, meek and nervous and uncertain but still fascinated by witch-tales and magic. It's Bella who casts the spell, partly by accident, partly out of wild hope, but it was Juniper arriving in the city who provided the final component that made it almost work. Not quite, not completely, but briefly the lost tower of Avalon appears in St. George's Square. And, more importantly, the three sisters are reunited. The world of the Eastwood sisters has magic, but the people in charge of that world aren't happy about it. Magic is a female thing, contrary to science and, more importantly, God. History has followed a similar course to our world in part because magic has been ruthlessly suppressed. Inquisitors are a recent memory and the cemetery has a witch-yard, where witches are buried unnamed and their ashes sown with salt. The city of New Salem is called New Salem because Old Salem, that stronghold of witchcraft, was burned to the ground and left abandoned, fit only for tourists to gawk at the supposedly haunted ruins. The women's suffrage movement is very careful to separate itself from any hint of witchcraft or scandal, making its appeals solely within the acceptable bounds of the church. Juniper is the one who starts to up-end all of that in New Salem. Juniper was never good at doing what she was told. This is an angry book that feels like something out of another era, closer in tone to a Sheri S. Tepper or Joanna Russ novel than the way feminism is handled in recent work. Some of that is the era of the setting, before women even had the right to vote. But primarily it's because Harrow, like those earlier works, is entirely uninterested in making excuses or apologies for male behavior. She takes an already-heated societal conflict and gives the underdogs magic, which turns it into a war. There is likely a better direct analogy from the suffrage movement, but the comparison that came to my mind was if Martin Luther King, Jr. proved ineffective or had not existed, and instead Malcolm X or the Black Panthers became the face of the Civil Rights movement. It's also an emotionally exhausting book. The protagonists are hurt and lost and shattered. Their moments of victory are viciously destroyed. There is torture and a lot of despair. It works thematically; all the external solutions and mythical saviors fail, but in the process the sisters build their own strength and their own community and rescue themselves. But it's hard reading at times if you're emotionally invested in the characters (and I was very invested). Harrow does try to balance the losses with triumphs and that becomes more effective and easier to read in the back half of the book, but I struggled with the grimness at the start. One particular problem for me was that the sisters start the book suspicious and distrustful of each other because of lies and misunderstandings. This is obvious to the reader, but they don't work through it until halfway through the book. I can't argue with this as a piece of characterization it made sense to me that they would have reacted to their past the way that they did. But it was still immensely frustrating to read, since in the meantime awful things were happening and I wanted them to band together to fight. They also worry over the moral implications of the fate of their father, whereas I thought the only problem was that the man couldn't die more than once. There too, it makes sense given the moral framework the sisters were coerced into, but it is not my moral framework and it was infuriating to see them stay trapped in it for so long. The other thing that I found troubling thematically is that Harrow personalizes evil. I thought the more interesting moral challenge posed in this book is a society that systematically abuses women and suppresses their power, but Harrow gradually supplants that systemic conflict with a villain who has an identity and a backstory. It provides a more straightforward and satisfying climax, and she does avoid the trap of letting triumph over one character solve all the broader social problems, but it still felt too easy. Worse, the motives of the villain turn out to be at right angles to the structure of the social oppression. It's just a tool he's using, and while that's also believable, it means the transfer of the narrative conflict from the societal to the personal feels like a shying away from a sharper political point. Harrow lets the inhabitants of New Salem off too easily by giving them the excuse of being manipulated by an evil mastermind. What I thought Harrow did handle well was race, and it feels rare to be able to say this about a book written by and about white women. There are black women in New Salem as well, and they have their own ways and their own fight. They are suspicious of the Eastwood sisters because they're worried white women will stir up trouble and then run away and leave the consequences to fall on black women... and they're right. An alliance only forms once the white women show willingness to stay for the hard parts. Black women are essential to the eventual success of the protagonists, but the opposite is not necessarily true; they have their own networks, power, and protections, and would have survived no matter what the Eastwoods did. The book is the Eastwoods' story, so it's mostly concerned with white society, but I thought Harrow avoided both making black women too magical or making white women too central. They instead operate in parallel worlds that can form the occasional alliance of mutual understanding. It helps that Cleopatra Quinn is one of the best characters of the book. This was hard, emotional reading. It's the sort of book where everything has a price, even the ending. But I'm very glad I read it. Each of the three sisters gets their own, very different character arc, and all three of those arcs are wonderful. Even Agnes, who was the hardest character for me to like at the start of the book and who I think has the trickiest story to tell, becomes so much stronger and more vivid by the end of the book. Sometimes the descriptions are trying a bit too hard and sometimes the writing is not quite up to the intended goal, but some of the descriptions are beautiful and memorable, and Harrow's way of weaving the mythic and the personal together worked for me. This is a more ambitious book than The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and while I think the ambition exceeded Harrow's grasp in a few places and she took a few thematic short-cuts, most of it works. The characters felt like living and changing people, which is not easy given how heavily the story structure leans on maiden, mother, and crone archetypes. It's an uncompromising and furious book that turns the anger of 1970s feminist SF onto themes that are very relevant in 2021. You will have to brace yourself for heartbreak and loss, but I think it's fantasy worth reading. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

11 December 2020

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in November 2020

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in December) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games
Debian Java Misc Debian LTS This was my 57. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 12 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following: ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 8 Jessie . This was my 30. month and I have been paid to work 15 hours on ELTS. Thanks for reading and see you next time.

20 November 2020

Shirish Agarwal: Rights, Press freedom and India

In some ways it is sad and interesting to see how personal liberty is viewed in India. And how it differs from those having the highest fame and power can get a different kind of justice then the rest cannot.

Arnab Goswami This particular gentleman is a class apart. He is the editor as well as Republic TV, a right-leaning channel which demonizes the minority, women whatever is antithesis to the Central Govt. of India. As a result there have been a spate of cases against him in the past few months. But surprisingly, in each of them he got hearing the day after the suit was filed. This is unique in Indian legal history so much so that a popular legal site which publishes on-going cases put up a post sharing how he was getting prompt hearings. That post itself needs to be updated as there have been 3 more hearings which have been done back to back for him. This is unusual as there have been so many cases pending for the SC attention, some arguably more important than this gentleman . So many precedents have been set which will send a wrong message. The biggest one, that even though a trial is taking place in the sessions court (below High Court) the SC can interject on matters. What this will do to the morale of both lawyers as well as judges of the various Sessions Court is a matter of speculation and yet as shared unprecedented. The saddest part was when Justice Chandrachud said
Justice Chandrachud If you don t like a channel then don t watch it. 11th November 2020 .
This is basically giving a free rope to hate speech. How can a SC say like that ? And this is the Same Supreme Court which could not take two tweets from Shri Prashant Bhushan when he made remarks against the judiciary .

J&K pleas in Supreme Court pending since August 2019 (Abrogation 370) After abrogation of 370, citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, the population of which is 13.6 million people including 4 million Hindus have been stuck with reduced rights and their land being taken away due to new laws. Many of the Hindus which regionally are a minority now rue the fact that they supported the abrogation of 370A . Imagine, a whole state whose answers and prayers have not been heard by the Supreme Court and the people need to move a prayer stating the same.

100 Journalists, activists languishing in Jail without even a hearing 55 Journalists alone have been threatened, booked and in jail for reporting of pandemic . Their fault, they were bring the irregularities, corruption made during the pandemic early months. Activists such as Sudha Bharadwaj, who giving up her American citizenship and settling to fight for tribals is in jail for 2 years without any charges. There are many like her, There are several more petitions lying in the Supreme Court, for e.g. Varavara Rao, not a single hearing from last couple of years, even though he has taken part in so many national movements including the emergency as well as part-responsible for creation of Telengana state out of Andhra Pradesh .

Then there is Devangana kalita who works for gender rights. Similar to Sudha Bharadwaj, she had an opportunity to go to UK and settle here. She did her master s and came back. And now she is in jail for the things that she studied. While she took part in Anti-CAA sittings, none of her speeches were incendiary but she still is locked up under UAPA (Unlawful Practises Act) . I could go on and on but at the moment these should suffice.

Petitions for Hate Speech which resulted in riots in Delhi are pending, Citizen s Amendment Act (controversial) no hearings till date. All of the best has been explained in a newspaper article which articulates perhaps all that I wanted to articulate and more. It is and was amazing to see how in certain cases Article 32 is valid and in many it is not. Also a fair reading of Justice Bobde s article tells you a lot how the SC is functioning. I would like to point out that barandbench along with livelawindia makes it easier for never non-lawyers and public to know how arguments are done in court, what evidences are taken as well as give some clue about judicial orders and judgements. Both of these resources are providing an invaluable service and more often than not, free of charge.

Student Suicide and High Cost of Education
For quite sometime now, the cost of education has been shooting up. While I have visited this topic earlier as well, recently a young girl committed suicide because she was unable to pay the fees as well as additional costs due to pandemic. Further investigations show that this is the case with many of the students who are unable to buy laptops. Now while one could think it is limited to one college then it would be wrong. It is almost across all India and this will continue for months and years. People do know that the pandemic is going to last a significant time and it would be a long time before R value becomes zero . Even the promising vaccine from Pfizer need constant refrigeration which is sort of next to impossible in India. It is going to make things very costly.

Last Nail on Indian Media Just today the last nail on India has been put. Thankfully Freedom Gazette India did a much better job so just pasting that
Information and Broadcasting Ministry bringing OTT services as well as news within its ambit.
With this, projects like Scam 1992, The Harshad Mehta Story or Bad Boy Billionaires:India, Test Case, Delhi Crime, Laakhon Mein Ek etc. etc. such kind of series, investigative journalism would be still-births. Many of these web-series also shared tales of woman empowerment while at the same time showed some of the hard choices that women had to contend to live with. Even western media may be censored where it finds the political discourse not to its liking. There had been so many accounts of Mr. Ravish Kumar, the winner of Ramon Magsaysay, how in his shows the electricity was cut in many places. I too have been the victim when the BJP governed in Maharashtra as almost all Puneities experienced it. Light would go for just half or 45 minutes at the exact time. There is another aspect to it. The U.S. elections showed how independent media was able to counter Mr. Trump s various falsehoods and give rise to alternative ideas which lead the team of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Biden now being the President-elect while Kamala Harris being the vice-president elect. Although the journey to the white house seems as tough as before. Let s see what happens. Hopefully 2021 will bring in some good news. Update On 27th November 2020 Martin who runs the planet got an e-mail/notice by a Mr. Nikhil Sethi who runs the wikibio.com property. Mr. Sethi asked to remove the link pointing Devangana Kalita from my blog post to his site as he has used the no follow link. On inquiring further, the gentleman stated that it is an Updated mandate (his exact quote) from Google algorithm. To further understand the issue, I went to SERP as they are one of the more known ones on the subject. I also looked it up on Google as well. Found that the gentleman was BSing the whole time. The page basically talks about weightage of a page/site and authoritativeness which is known and yet highly contested ideas. In any case, the point for me was for whatever reason (could be fear, could be something else entirely), Mr. Sethi did not want me to link the content. Hence, I have complied above. I could have dragged it out but I do not wish Mr. Sethi any ill-being or/and further harm unduly and unintentionally caused by me. Hence, have taken down the link.

13 November 2020

Martin Michlmayr: beancount2ledger 1.3 released

I released version 1.3 of beancount2ledger, the beancount to ledger converter that was moved from bean-report ledger into a standalone tool. You can get beancount2ledger from GitHub or via pip install. Here are the changes in 1.3:

4 November 2020

Martin-Éric Racine: Migrating to Predictable Network Interface Names

A couple of years ago, I moved into a new flat that comes with RJ45 sockets wired for 10 Gigabit (but currently offering 1 Gigabit) Ethernet.This also meant changing the settings on my router box for my new ISP.I took this opportunity to review my router's other settings too. I'll be blogging about these over the next few posts. Migrating to Predictable Network Interface Names Ever since Linus decided to flip the network interface enumeration order in the Linux kernel, I had been relying on udev's persistent network interface rules to maintain some semblance of consistency in the NIC naming scheme of my hosts. It has never been a totally satisfactory method, since it required manually editing the file to list the MAC addresses of all Ethernet cards and WiFi dongles likely to appear on that host to consistently use an easy-to-remember name that I could adopt for ifupdown configuration files. Enter predictable interface names. What started as a Linux kernel module project at Dell was eventually re-implemented in systemd. However, clear documentation on the naming scheme had been difficult to find and udev's persistent network interface rules gave me what I needed, so I postponed the transition for years. Relocating to a new flat and rethinking my home network to match gave me an opportunity to revisit the topic. The naming scheme is surprisingly simple and logical, once proper explanations have been found. The short version: The rest of the name specifies on which PCI bus and which slot the interface is found. On my old Dell laptop, it looks like this: An added bonus of the naming scheme is that it makes replacing hardware a breeze, since the naming scheme is bus and slot specific, not MAC address specific. No need to edit any configuration file. I saw this first-hand when I got around upgrading my router's network cards to Gigabit-capable ones to take advantage of my new home's broadband LAN. All it took was to power off the host, swap the Ethernet cards and power on the host. That's it. systemd took care of everything else. Still, migrating looked like a daunting task. Debian's wiki page gave me some answers, but didn't provide a systematic approach. I came up with the following shell script: 
#!/bin/sh
lspci   grep -i -e ethernet -e network
sudo dmesg   grep -i renamed
for n in $(ls -X /sys/class/net/   grep -v lo);
do
  echo $n: && udevadm test-builtin net_id /sys/class/net/$n 2>/dev/null   grep NAME;
  sudo rgrep $n /etc
  sudo find /etc -name '*$n*'
done
This combined ideas found on the Debian wiki with a few of my own. Running the script before and after the migration ensured that I hadn't missed any configuration file. Once I was satisfied with that, I commented out the old udev persistent network interface rules, ran dpkg-reconfigure on all my Linux kernel images to purge the rules from the initrd images, and called it a day. ... well, not quite. It turns out that with bridge-utils, bridge_ports all no longer works. One must manually list all interfaces to be bridged. Debian bug report filed. PS: Luca Capello pointed out that Debian 10/Buster's Release Notes include migration instructions.

3 November 2020

Martin-Éric Racine: Adding IPv6 support to my home LAN

A couple of year ago, I moved into a new flat that comes with RJ45 sockets wired for 10 Gigabit (but currently offering 1 Gigabit) Ethernet.This also meant changing the settings on my router box for my new ISP.I took this opportunity to review my router's other settings too. I'll be blogging about these over the next few posts. Adding IPv6 support to my home LAN I have been following the evolution of IPv6 ever since the KAME project produced the first IPv6 implementation. I have also been keeping track of the IPv4 address depletion. Around the time the IPv6 Day was organized in 2011, I started investigating the situation of IPv6 support at local ISPs. Well, never mind all those rumors about Finland being some high-tech mecca. Back then, no ISP went beyond testing their routers for IPv6 compatibility and producing white papers on what their limited test deployments accomplished. Not that it matters much, in practice. Most IPv6 documentation out there, including Debian's own, still focuses on configuring transitional mechanisms, especially how to connect to a public IPv6 tunnel broker. Relocating to a new flat and rethinking my home network to match gave me an opportunity to revisit the topic. Much to my delight, my current ISP offers native IPv6. This prompted me to go back and read up on IPv6 one more time. One important detail: IPv6 hosts are globally reachable. The implications of this don't immediately spring to mind for someone used to IPv4 network address translation (NAT): Any network service running on an IPv6 host can be reached by anyone anywhere. Contrary to IPv4, there is no division between private and public IP addresses. Whereas a device behind an IPv4 NAT essentially is shielded from the outside world, IPv6 breaks this assumption in more than one way. Not only is the host reachable from anywhere, its default IPv6 address is a mathematical conversion (EUI-64) of the network interface's MAC address, which makes every connection forensically traceable to a unique device. Basically, if you hadn't given much thought to firewalls until now, IPv6 should give you enough goose bumps to get around it. Tightening the configuration of every network service is also an absolute must. For instance, I configured sshd to only listen to private IPv4 addresses. What /etc/network/interfaces might look like on an dual-stack (IPv4 + IPv6) host: 
allow-hotplug enp9s0
iface enp9s0 inet dhcp
iface enp9s0 inet6 auto
	privext 2
	dhcp 1
The auto method means that IPv6 will be auto-configured using SLAAC; privext 2 enables IPv6 privacy options and specifies that we prefer connecting via the randomly-generated IPv6 address, rather than the EUI-64 calculated MAC specific address; dhcp 1 enables passive DHCPv6 to fetch additional routing information. The above works for most desktop and laptop configurations. Where things got more complicated is on the router. I decided early on to keep NAT to provide an IPv4 route to the outside world. Now how exactly is IPv6 routing done? Every node along the line must have its own IPv6 address... including the router's LAN interface. This is accomplished using the sample script found in Debian's IPv6 prefix delegation wiki page. I modified mine as follows (the rest of the script is omitted for clarity): 
#Both LAN interfaces on my private network are bridged via br0
IA_PD_IFACE="br0"
IA_PD_SERVICES="dnsmasq"
IA_PD_IPV6CALC="/usr/bin/ipv6calc"
Just put the script at the suggested location. We'll need to request a prefix on the router's outside interface to utilize it. This gives us the following interfaces file: 
allow-hotplug enp2s4 enp2s8 enp2s9
auto br0
iface enp2s4 inet dhcp
iface enp2s4 inet6 auto
	request_prefix 1
	privext 2
	dhcp 1
iface enp2s8 inet manual
iface enp2s8 inet6 manual
iface enp2s9 inet manual
iface enp2s9 inet6 manual
iface br0 inet static
	bridge_ports enp2s8 enp2s9
	address 10.10.10.254
iface br0 inet6 manual
	bridge_ports enp2s8 enp2s9
	# IPv6 from /etc/dhcp/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/prefix_delegation
The IPv4 NAT and IPv6 Bridge script on my router looks as follows: 
#!/bin/sh
PATH="/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin"
wan=enp2s4
lan=br0
########################################################################
# IPv4 NAT
iptables -F; iptables -t nat -F; iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -X; iptables -t nat -X; iptables -t mangle -X
iptables -Z; iptables -t nat -Z; iptables -t mangle -Z
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $wan -j MASQUERADE
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
########################################################################
# IPv6 bridge
ip6tables -F; ip6tables -X; ip6tables -Z
# Default policy DROP
ip6tables -P FORWARD DROP
# Allow ICMPv6 forwarding
ip6tables -A FORWARD -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT
# Allow established connections
ip6tables -I FORWARD -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
# Accept packets FROM LAN to everywhere
ip6tables -I FORWARD -i $lan -j ACCEPT
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/forwarding
# IPv6 propagation via /etc/dhcp/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/prefix_delegation
The above already provided enough IPv6 connectivity to pass the IPv6 test on my desktop inside the LAN. To make things more fun, I enabled DHCPv6 support for my LAN on the router's dnsmasq by adding the last 3 lines to the configuration: 
dhcp-hostsfile=/etc/dnsmasq-ethersfile
bind-interfaces
interface=br0
except-interface=enp2s4
no-dhcp-interface=enp2s4
dhcp-range=tag:br0,10.10.10.0,static,infinite
dhcp-range=tag:br0,::1,constructor:br0,ra-names,ra-stateless,infinite
enable-ra
dhcp-option=option6:dns-server,[::],[2606:4700:4700::1111],[2001:4860:4860::8888]
The 5 first lines (included here for emphasis) are extremely important: they ensure that dnsmasq won't provide any IPv4 or IPv6 service to the outside interface (enp2s4) and that DHCP will only be provided for LAN hosts whose MAC address is known. Line 6 shows how dnsmasq's DHCP service syntax differs between IPv4 and IPv6. The rest of my configuration was omitted on purpose. Enabling native IPv6 on my LAN has been an interesting experiment. I'm sure that someone could come up with even better ip6tables rules for the router or for my desktop hosts. Feel free to mention them in the blog's comment.

Martin-Éric Racine: GRUB fine-tuning

A couple of years ago, I moved into a new flat that comes with RJ45 sockets wired for 10 Gigabit (but currently offering 1 Gigabit) Ethernet.This also meant changing the settings on my router box for my new ISP.I took this opportunity to review my router's other settings too. I'll be blogging about these over the next few posts. GRUB fine-tuning One thing that had been annoying me ever since Debian migrated to systemd as /sbin/init is that boot message verbosity hasn't been the same. Previously, the cmdline option quiet merely suppressed the kernel's output to the bootscreen, but left the daemon startup messages alone. Not anymore. Nowadays, quiet produces a blank screen. After some googling, I found the solution to that: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="noquiet loglevel=5" The former restores daemon startup messages, while the later makes the kernel output only significant notices or more serious messages. On most of my hosts, it mostly reports inconsistencies in the ACPI configuration of the BIOS. Another setting I find useful is a reboot delay in case a kernel panic happens: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="panic=15" This gives me enough time to snap a picture of the screen output to attach to the bug report that will follow.

Martin Michlmayr: ledger2beancount 2.5 released

I released version 2.5 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. Here are the changes in 2.5: Thanks to input from Remco R nders, Yuri Khan, and Thierry. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli and Kirill Goncharov for testing my changes. You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub

27 July 2020

Martin Michlmayr: ledger2beancount 2.4 released

I released version 2.4 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. There are two notable changes in this release:
  1. I fixed two regressions introduced in the last release. Sorry about the breakage!
  2. I improved support for hledger. I believe all syntax differences in hledger are supported now.
Here are the changes in 2.4: Thanks to Kirill Goncharov for pointing out one regressions, to Taylor R Campbell for for a patch, to Stefano Zacchiroli for some input, and finally to Simon Michael for input on hledger! You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub

24 July 2020

Martin Michlmayr: beancount2ledger 1.1 released

Martin Blais recently announced that he'd like to re-organize the beancount code and split out some functionality into separate projects, including the beancount to ledger/hledger conversion code previously provided by bean-report. I agreed to take on the maintenance of this code and I've now released beancount2ledger, a beancount to ledger/hledger converter. You can install beancount2ledger with pip: 
pip3 install beancount2ledger
Please report issues to the GitHub tracker. There are a number of outstanding issues I'll fix soon, but please report any other issues you encounter. Note that I'm not very familiar with hledger. I intend to sync up with hledger author Simon Michael soon, but please file an issue if you notice any problems with the hledger conversion. Version 1.1 contains a number of fixes compared to the latest code in bean-report: 1.1 (2020-07-24) 1.0 (2020-07-22)

26 June 2020

Martin Michlmayr: ledger2beancount 2.3 released

I released version 2.3 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. There are three notable changes with this release:
  1. Performance has significantly improved. One large, real-world test case has gone from around 160 seconds to 33 seconds. A smaller test case has gone from 11 seconds to ~3.5 seconds.
  2. The documentation is available online now (via Read the Docs).
  3. The repository has moved to the beancount GitHub organization.
Here are the changes in 2.3: Thanks to Colin Dean for some feedback. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for prompting me into investigating performance issues (and thanks to the developers of the Devel::NYTProf profiler). You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub

11 June 2020

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in May 2020

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in June) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games
Debian Java Misc Debian LTS This was my 51. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 25 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following: ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 7 Wheezy . This was my 24. month and I have been paid to work 9,25 hours on ELTS. Thanks for reading and see you next time.

1 June 2020

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2020

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • nsntrace: talk to upstream about collaborative maintenance
  • Debian: deploy changes, debug issue with GPS markers file generation, migrate bls/DUCK from alioth-archive to salsa
  • Debian website: ran map cron job, synced mirrors
  • Debian wiki: approve accounts, ping folks with bouncing email

Communication

Sponsors The apt-offline work and the libfile-libmagic-perl backports were sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

30 May 2020

Martin Michlmayr: ledger2beancount 2.2 released

I released version 2.2 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. Here are the changes in 2.2: You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub. Thanks to GitHub user MarinBernard for reporting a bug with virtual postings!

6 April 2020

Martin Michlmayr: ledger2beancount 2.1 released

I released version 2.1 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter. Here are the changes in 2.1: You can get ledger2beancount from GitHub. Thanks to Thierry (thdox) for reporting a bug and for fixing some typos in the documentation. Thanks to Stefano Zacchiroli for some good feedback.

17 October 2017

Norbert Preining: Japanese TeX User Meeting 2017

Last saturday the Japanese TeX User Meeting took place in Fujisawa, Kanagawa. For those who have been at the TUG 2013 in Tokyo you will remember that the Japanese TeX community is quite big and vibrant. On Saturday about 50 users and developers gathered for a set of talks on a variety of topics. The first talk was by Keiichiro Shikano ( ) on using Markup text to generate (La)TeX and HTML. He presented a variety of markup formats, including his own tool xml2tex. The second talk was my Masamichi Hosoda ( ) on reducing the size of PDF files using PDFmark extraction. As a contributor to many projects including Texinfo and LilyPond, Masamichi Hosoda tells us horror stories about multiple font embedding in the manual of LilyPond, the permanent need for adaption to newer Ghostscript versions, and the very recent development in Ghostscript prohibiting the merge of font definitions in PDF files. Next up was Yusuke Terada ( ) on grading exams using TeX. Working through hundreds and hundreds of exams and do the grading is something many of us are used to and I think nobody really enjoys it. Yusuke Terada has combined various tools, including scans, pdf merging using pdfpages, to generate gradable PDF which were then checked on an iPad. On the way he did hit some limits in dvipdfmx on the number of images, but this was obviously only a small bump on the road. Now if that could be automatized as a nice application, it would be a big hit I guess! The forth talk was by Satoshi Yamashita ( ) on the preparation of slides using KETpic. KETpic is a long running project by Setsuo Takato ( ) for the generation of graphics, in particular using Cinderella. KETpic and KETcindy integrates with lots of algebraic and statistical programs (R, Maxima, SciLab, ) and has a long history of development. Currently there are activities to incorporate it into TeX Live. The fifth talk was by Takuto Asakura ( ) on programming TeX using expl3, the main building block of the LaTeX3 project and already adopted by many TeX developers. Takuto Asakura came to fame on this years TUG/BachoTeX 2017 when he won the W. J. Martin Prize for his presentation Implementing bioinformatics algorithms in TeX. I think we can expect great new developments from Takuto! The last talk was by myself on fmtutil and updmap, two of the main management programs in any TeX installation, presenting the changes introduced over the last year, including the most recent release of TeX Live. Details have been posted on my blog, and a lengthy article in TUGboat 38:2, 2017 is available on this topic, too. After the conference about half of the participants joined a social dinner in a nearby Izakaya, followed by a after-dinner beer tasting at a local craft beer place. Thanks to Tatsuyoshi Hamada for the organization. As usual, the Japanese TeX User Meetings are a great opportunity to discuss new features and make new friends. I am always grateful to be part of this very nice community! I am looking forward to the next year s meeting.

1 October 2017

Iain R. Learmonth: Free Software Efforts (2017W39)

Here s my weekly report for week 39 of 2017. In this week I have travelled to Berlin and caught up on some podcasts in doing so. I ve also had some trouble with the RSS feeds on my blog but hopefully this is all fixed now. Thanks to Martin Milbret I now have a replacement for my dead workstation, an HP Z600, and there will be a blog post about this new set up to come next week. Thanks also to S lvan and a number of others that made donations towards getting me up and running again. A breakdown of the donations and expenses can be found at the end of this post.

Debian Two of my packages measurement-kit from OONI and python-azure-devtools used to build the Azure Python SDK (packaged as python-azure) have been accepted by ftp-master into Debian s unstable suite. I have also sponsored uploads for comptext, comptty, fllog, flnet and gnustep-make. I had previously encouraged Eric Heintzmann to become a DM and I have given him DM upload privileges for the gnustep-make package as he has shown to care for the GNUstep packages well. Bugs closed (fixed/wontfix): #8751251, #8751261, #861753, #873083

Tor Project My Tor Project contributions this week were primarily attending the Tor Metrics meeting which I have reported on in a separate blog post.

Sustainability I believe it is important to be clear not only about the work I have already completed but also about the sustainability of this work into the future. I plan to include a short report on the current sustainability of my work in each weekly report. The replacement workstation arrived on Friday and is now up and running. In total I received 308.73 in donations and spent 36.89 on video adapters and 141.94 on replacement hard drives for my NAS (which includes my local Debian mirror and backups). For the Tor Metrics meeting in Berlin, Tor Project paid my flights and accommodation and I paid only for ground transport and food myself. The total cost for ground transport during the trip was 45.92 (taxi to airport, 1 Tageskarte) and total cost for food was 23.46. The current funds I have available for equipment, travel and other free software expenses is now 60.52. I do not believe that any hardware I rely on is looking at imminent failure.
  1. Fixed by a sponsored upload, not by my changes [return]

6 September 2017

Mike Gabriel: MATE 1.18 landed in Debian testing

This is to announce that finally all MATE Desktop 1.18 components have landed in Debian testing (aka buster). Credits Again a big thanks to the packaging team (esp. Vangelis Mouhtsis and Martin Wimpress, but also to Jeremy Bicha for constant advice and Aron Xu for joining the Debian+Ubuntu MATE Packaging Team and merging all the Ubuntu zesty and artful branches back to master). Fully Available on all Debian-supported Architectures The very special thing about this MATE 1.18 release for Debian is that MATE is now available on all Debian hardware architectures. See "Buildd" column on our DDPO overview page [1]. Thanks to all the people from the Debian porters realm for providing feedback to my porting questions. References

31 August 2017

Martin-Éric Racine: Firefox slow as HEL even after boosting RAM from 4GB to 16GB

The title says it all: Firefox is the only piece of software that shows zero sign of improvement in its performance after quadrupling the amount of RAM installed on my 64-bit desktop computer. All other applications show a significant boost in performance. Yet, among all the applications I use, Firefox is the one that most needed this speed boost. To say that this is a major disapointment is an understatement. FFS, Mozilla devs!

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