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19 October 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: The Cassini Division

Review: The Cassini Division, by Ken MacLeod
Series: Fall Revolution #3
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 1998
Printing: August 2000
ISBN: 0-8125-6858-3
Format: Mass market
Pages: 305
The Cassini Division is the third book in the Fall Revolution series and a fairly direct sequel (albeit with different protagonists) to The Stone Canal. This is not a good place to start the series. It's impossible to talk about the plot of this book without discussing the future history of this series, which arguably includes some spoilers for The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal. I don't think the direction of history matters that much in enjoying the previous books, but read the first two books of the series before this review if you want to avoid all spoilers. When the Outwarders uploaded themselves and went fast, they did a lot of strange things: an interstellar probe contrary to all known laws of physics, the disassembly of Ganymede, and the Malley Mile, which plays a significant role in The Stone Canal. They also crashed the Earth. This was not entirely their fault. There were a lot of politics, religious fundamentalism, and plagues in play as well. But the storm of viruses broadcast from their transformed Jupiter shut down essentially all computing equipment on Earth, which set off much of the chaos. The results were catastrophic, and also politically transformative. Now, the Solar Union is a nearly unified anarchosocialist society, with only scattered enclaves of non-cooperators left outside that structure. Ellen May Ngewthu is a leader of the Cassini Division, the bulwark that stands between humans and the Outwarders. The Division ruthlessly destroys any remnant or probe that dares rise out of Jupiter's atmosphere, ensuring that the Outwarders, whatever they have become after untold generations of fast evolution, stay isolated to the one planet they have absorbed. The Division is very good at what they do. But there is a potential gap in that line of defense: there are fast folk in storage at the other end of the Malley Mile, on New Mars, and who knows what the deranged capitalists there will do or what forces they might unleash. The one person who knows a path through the Malley Mile isn't talking, so Ellen goes in search of the next best thing: the non-cooperator scientist Isambard Kingdom Malley. I am now thoroughly annoyed at how politics are handled in this series, and much less confused by the frequency with which MacLeod won Prometheus Awards from the Libertarian Futurist Society. Some of this is my own fault for having too high of hopes for political SF, but nothing in this series so far has convinced me that MacLeod is seriously engaging with political systems. Instead, the world-building to date makes the classic libertarian mistake of thinking societies will happily abandon stability and predictability in favor of their strange definition of freedom. The Solar Union is based on what Ellen calls the true knowledge, which is worth quoting in full so that you know what kind of politics we're talking about:
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything. All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil. This is the true knowledge. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things. Things we could use.
This is certainly something that some people will believe, particularly cynical college students who love political theory, feeling smarter than other people, and calling their pet theories things like "the true knowledge." It is not even remotely believable as the governing philosophy of a solar confederation. The point of government for the average person in human society is to create and enforce predictable mutual rules that one can use as a basis for planning and habits, allowing you to not think about politics all the time. People who adore thinking about politics have great difficulty understanding how important it is to everyone else to have ignorable government. Constantly testing your power against other coalitions is a sport, not a governing philosophy. Given the implication that this testing is through violence or the threat of violence, it beggars belief that any large number of people would tolerate that type of instability for an extended period of time. Ellen is fully committed to the true knowledge. MacLeod likely is not; I don't think this represents the philosophy of the author. But the primary political conflict in this novel famous for being political science fiction is between the above variation of anarchy and an anarchocapitalist society, neither of which are believable as stable political systems for large numbers of people. This is a bit like seeking out a series because you were told it was about a great clash of European monarchies and discovering it was about a fight between Liberland and Sealand. It becomes hard to take the rest of the book seriously. I do realize that one point of political science fiction is to play with strange political ideas, similar to how science fiction plays with often-implausible science ideas. But those ideas need some contact with human nature. If you're going to tell me that the key to clawing society back from a world-wide catastrophic descent into chaos is to discard literally every social system used to create predictability and order, you had better be describing aliens, because that's not how humans work. The rest of the book is better. I am untangling a lot of backstory for the above synopsis, which in the book comes in dribs and drabs, but piecing that together is good fun. The plot is far more straightforward than the previous two books in the series: there is a clear enemy, a clear goal, and Ellen goes from point A to point B in a comprehensible way with enough twists to keep it interesting. The core moral conflict of the book is that Ellen is an anti-AI fanatic to the point that she considers anyone other than non-uploaded humans to be an existential threat. MacLeod gives the reader both reasons to believe Ellen is right and reasons to believe she's wrong, which maintains an interesting moral tension. One thing that MacLeod is very good at is what Bob Shaw called "wee thinky bits." I think my favorite in this book is the computer technology used by the Cassini Division, who have spent a century in close combat with inimical AI capable of infecting any digital computer system with tailored viruses. As a result, their computers are mechanical non-Von-Neumann machines, but mechanical with all the technology of a highly-advanced 24th century civilization with nanometer-scale manufacturing technology. It's a great mental image and a lot of fun to think about. This is the only science fiction novel that I can think of that has a hard-takeoff singularity that nonetheless is successfully resisted and fought to a stand-still by unmodified humanity. Most writers who were interested in the singularity idea treated it as either a near-total transformation leaving only remnants or as something that had to be stopped before it started. MacLeod realizes that there's no reason to believe a post-singularity form of life would be either uniform in intent or free from its own baffling sudden collapses and reversals, which can be exploited by humans. It makes for a much better story. The sociology of this book is difficult to swallow, but the characterization is significantly better than the previous books of the series and the plot is much tighter. I was too annoyed by the political science to fully enjoy it, but that may be partly the fault of my expectations coming in. If you like chewy, idea-filled science fiction with a lot of unexplained world-building that you have to puzzle out as you go, you may enjoy this, although unfortunately I think you need to read at least The Stone Canal first. The ending was a bit unsatisfying, but even that includes some neat science fiction ideas. Followed by The Sky Road, although I understand it is not a straightforward sequel. Rating: 6 out of 10

1 May 2023

Gunnar Wolf: Scanning heaps of 8mm movies

After my father passed away, I brought home most of the personal items he had, both at home and at his office. Among many, many (many, many, many) other things, I brought two of his personal treasures: His photo collection and a box with the 8mm movies he shot approximately between 1956 and 1989, when he was forced into modernity and got a portable videocassette recorder. I have talked with several friends, as I really want to get it all in a digital format, and while I ve been making slow but steady advances scanning the photo reels, I was particularly dismayed (even though it was most expected most personal electronic devices aren t meant to last over 50 years) to find out the 8mm projector was no longer in working conditions; the lamp and the fans work, but the spindles won t spin. Of course, it is quite likely it is easy to fix, but it is beyond my tinkering abilities and finding photographic equipment repair shops is no longer easy. Anyway, even if I got it fixed, filming a movie from a screen, even with a decent camera, is a lousy way to get it digitized. But almost by mere chance, I got in contact with my cousin Daniel, ho came to Mexico to visit his parents, and had precisely brought with him a 8mm/Super8 movie scanner! It is a much simpler piece of equipment than I had expected, and while it does present some minor glitches (i.e. the vertical framing slightly loses alignment over the course of a medium-length film scanning session, and no adjustment is possible while the scan is ongoing), this is something that can be decently fixed in post-processing, and a scanning session can be split with no ill effects. Anyway, it is quite uncommon a mid-length (5min) film can be done without interrupting i.e. to join a splice, mostly given my father didn t just film, but also edited a lot (this is, it s not just family pictures, but all different kinds of fiction and documentary work he did). So, Daniel lent me a great, brand new, entry-level film scanner; I rushed to scan as many movies as possible before his return to the USA this week, but he insisted he bought it to help preserve our family s memory, and given we are still several cousins living in Mexico, I could keep hold of it so any other of the cousins will find it more easily. Of course, I am thankful and delighted! So, this equipment is a Magnasonic FS81. It is entry-level, as it lacks some adjustment abilities a professional one would surely have, and I m sure a better scanner will make the job faster but it s infinitely superior to not having it! The scanner processes roughly two frames per second (while the nominal 8mm/Super8 speed is 24 frames per second), so a 3 minute film reel takes a bit over 35 minutes And a long, ~20 minute film reel takes Close to 4hr, if nothing gets in your way :- And yes, with longer reels, the probability of a splice breaking are way higher than with a short one not only because there is simply a longer film to process, but also because, both at the unwinding and at the receiving reels, mechanics play their roles. The films don t advance smoothly, but jump to position each frame in the scanner s screen, so every bit of film gets its fair share of gentle tugs. My professional consultant on how and what to do is my good friend Chema Serralde, who has stopped me from doing several things I would regret later otherwise (such as joining spliced tapes with acidic chemical adhesives such as Kola Loka, a.k.a. Krazy Glue even if it s a bit trickier to do it, he insisted me on best using simple transparent tape if I m not buying fancy things such as film-adhesive). Chema also explained me the importance of the loopers (las Lupes in his technical Spanish translation), which I feared increased the likelihood of breaking a bit of old glue due to the angle in which the film gets pulled but if skipped, result in films with too much jumping. Not all of the movies I have are for public sharing Some of them are just family movies, with high personal value, but probably of very little interest to others. But some are! I have been uploading some of the movies, after minor post-processing, to the Internet Archive. Among them: Anyway, I have a long way forward for scanning. I have 20 3min reels, 19 5min reels, and 8 20min reels. I want to check the scanning quality, but I think my 20min reels are mostly processed (we paid for scanning them some years ago). I mostly finished the 3min reels, but might have to go over some of them again due to the learning process. And Well, I m having quite a bit of fun in the process!

25 March 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Thief of Time

Review: Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #26
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: May 2001
Printing: August 2014
ISBN: 0-06-230739-8
Format: Mass market
Pages: 420
Thief of Time is the 26th Discworld novel and the last Death novel, although he still appears in subsequent books. It's the third book starring Susan Sto Helit, so I don't recommend starting here. Mort is the best starting point for the Death subseries, and Reaper Man provides a useful introduction to the villains. Jeremy Clockson was an orphan raised by the Guild of Clockmakers. He is very good at making clocks. He's not very good at anything else, particularly people, but his clocks are the most accurate in Ankh-Morpork. He is therefore the logical choice to receive a commission by a mysterious noblewoman who wants him to make the most accurate possible clock: a clock that can measure the tick of the universe, one that a fairy tale says had been nearly made before. The commission is followed by a surprise delivery of an Igor, to help with the clock-making. People who live in places with lots of fields become farmers. People who live where there is lots of iron and coal become blacksmiths. And people who live in the mountains near the Hub, near the gods and full of magic, become monks. In the highest valley are the History Monks, founded by Wen the Eternally Surprised. Like most monks, they take apprentices with certain talents and train them in their discipline. But Lobsang Ludd, an orphan discovered in the Thieves Guild in Ankh-Morpork, is proving a challenge. The monks decide to apprentice him to Lu-Tze the sweeper; perhaps that will solve multiple problems at once. Since Hogfather, Susan has moved from being a governess to a schoolteacher. She brings to that job the same firm patience, total disregard for rules that apply to other people, and impressive talent for managing children. She is by far the most popular teacher among the kids, and not only because she transports her class all over the Disc so that they can see things in person. It is a job that she likes and understands, and one that she's quite irate to have interrupted by a summons from her grandfather. But the Auditors are up to something, and Susan may be able to act in ways that Death cannot. This was great. Susan has quickly become one of my favorite Discworld characters, and this time around there is no (or, well, not much) unbelievable romance or permanently queasy god to distract. The clock-making portions of the book quickly start to focus on Igor, who is a delightful perspective through whom to watch events unfold. And the History Monks! The metaphysics of what they are actually doing (which I won't spoil, since discovering it slowly is a delight) is perhaps my favorite bit of Discworld world building to date. I am a sucker for stories that focus on some process that everyone thinks happens automatically and investigate the hidden work behind it. I do want to add a caveat here that the monks are in part a parody of Himalayan Buddhist monasteries, Lu-Tze is rather obviously a parody of Laozi and Daoism in general, and Pratchett's parodies of non-western cultures are rather ham-handed. This is not quite the insulting mess that the Chinese parody in Interesting Times was, but it's heavy on the stereotypes. It does not, thankfully, rely on the stereotypes; the characters are great fun on their own terms, with the perfect (for me) balance of irreverence and thoughtfulness. Lu-Tze refusing to be anything other than a sweeper and being irritatingly casual about all the rules of the order is a classic bit that Pratchett does very well. But I also have the luxury of ignoring stereotypes of a culture that isn't mine, and I think Pratchett is on somewhat thin ice. As one specific example, having Lu-Tze's treasured sayings be a collection of banal aphorisms from a random Ankh-Morpork woman is both hilarious and also arguably rather condescending, and I'm not sure where I landed. It's a spot-on bit of parody of how a lot of people who get very into "eastern religions" sound, but it's also equating the Dao De Jing with advice from the Discworld equivalent of a English housewife. I think the generous reading is that Lu-Tze made the homilies profound by looking at them in an entirely different way than the woman saying them, and that's not completely unlike Daoism and works surprisingly well. But that's reading somewhat against the grain; Pratchett is clearly making fun of philosophical koans, and while anything is fair game for some friendly poking, it still feels a bit weird. That isn't the part of the History Monks that I loved, though. Their actual role in the story doesn't come out of the parody. It's something entirely native to Discworld, and it's an absolute delight. The scene with Lobsang and the procrastinators is perhaps my favorite Discworld set piece to date. Everything about the technology of the History Monks, even the Bond parody, is so good. I grew up reading the Marvel Comics universe, and Thief of Time reminds me of a classic John Byrne or Jim Starlin story, where the heroes are dumped into the middle of vast interdimensional conflicts involving barely-anthropomorphized cosmic powers and the universe is revealed to work in ever more intricate ways at vastly expanding scales. The Auditors are villains in exactly that tradition, and just like the best of those stories, the fulcrum of the plot is questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, and the surprising alliances these non-human powers make with humans or semi-humans. I devoured this kind of story as a kid, and it turns out I still love it. The one complaint I have about the plot is that the best part of this book is the middle, and the end didn't entirely work for me. Ronnie Soak is at his best as a supporting character about three quarters of the way through the book, and I found the ending of his subplot much less interesting. The cosmic confrontation was oddly disappointing, and there's a whole extended sequence involving chocolate that I think was funnier in Pratchett's head than it was in mine. The ending isn't bad, but the middle of this book is my favorite bit of Discworld writing yet, and I wish the story had carried that momentum through to the end. I had so much fun with this book. The Discworld novels are clearly getting better. None of them have yet vaulted into the ranks of my all-time favorite books there's always some lingering quibble or sagging bit but it feels like they've gone from reliably good books to more reliably great books. The acid test is coming, though: the next book is a Rincewind book, which are usually the weak spots. Followed by The Last Hero in publication order. There is no direct thematic sequel. Rating: 8 out of 10

16 January 2023

Gunnar Wolf: Back to Understanding Computers and Cognition

As many of you know, I work at UNAM, Mexico s largest university. My work is split in two parts: My full-time job is to be the systems and network administrator at the Economics Research Institute, and I do some hours of teaching at the Engineering Faculty. At the Institute, my role is academic but although I have tried to frame my works in a way amenable to analysis grounded on the Social Sciences (Construcci n Colaborativa del Conocimiento, Hecho con Creative Commons, Mecanismos de privacidad y anonimato), so far, I have not taken part of academic collaboration with my coworkers Economics is a field very far from my interests, to somehow illustrate it. I was very happy when I was invited to be a part of a Seminar on The Digital Economy in the age of Artificial Intelligence . I talked with the coordinator, and we agreed we have many Economic Science experts but understanding what does Artificial Intelligence mean eludes then, so I will be writing one of the introductory chapters to this analysis. But Hey, I m no expert in Artificial Intelligence. If anything, I could be categorized as an AI-skeptical! Well, at least I might be the closest thing at hand in the Institute So I have been thinking about what I will be writing, and finding and reading material to substantiate what I ll be writing. One of the readings I determined early on I would be going back to is Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores 1986 book, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (oh, were you expecting a link to buy it instead of reading it online?) I first came across this book by mere chance. Back in the last day of year 2000, my friend Ariel invited me and my then-girlfriend to tag along and travel by land to the USA to catch some just-after-Christmas deals in San Antonio. I was not into shopping, but have always enjoyed road trips, so we went together. We went, yes, to the never-ending clothing shops, but we also went to some big libraries And the money I didn t spend at other shops, I spent there. And then some more. There was a little, somewhat oldish book that caught my eye. And I ll be honest: I looked at this book only because it was obviously produced by the LaTeX typesetting system (the basics of which I learnt in 1983, and with which I have written well, basically everything substantial I ve ever done). I remember I read this book with most interest back in that year, and finished it with a Wow, that was a strange trip! And Although I have never done much that could be considered AI-related, this has always been my main reference. But not for explaining what is a perceptron, how is an expert system to ponder the weight of given information, or whether a neural network is convolutional or recurrent, or how to turn from a network trained to recognize feature x into a generational network. No, our book is not technical. Well Not in that sense. This book tackles cognition. But in order to discuss cognition, it must first come to a proper definition of it. And to do so, it has to base itself on philosophy, starting by noting the author s disagreement with what they term as the rationalistic tradition: what we have come to term valid reasoning in Western countries. Their main claim is that the rationalistic tradition cannot properly explain a process as complex as cognition (how much bolder can you be than proposing something like this?). So, this book presents many constructs of Heidggerian origin, aiming to explain what it is understanding and being. In doing so, it follows Humberto Maturana s work. Maturana is also a philosopher, but comes from a background in biology he published works on animal neurophysiology that are also presented here. Writing this, I must ensure you I am not a philosopher, and lack field-specific knowledge to know whether this book is so unique. I know from the onset it does not directly help me to write the chapter I will be writing (but it will surely help me write some important caveats that will make the chapter much more interesting and different to what anybody with a Web browser could write about artificial intelligence). One last note: Although very well written, and notable for bringing hard to grasp concepts to mere technical staff as myself, this is not light, easy reading. I started re-reading this book a couple of weeks ago, and have just finished chapter 5 (page 69). As some reviewers state, this is one of those books you have to go back a paragraph or two over and over. But it is a most enjoyable and interesting reading.

28 December 2022

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2022: Classics

As a follow-up to yesterday's post detailing my favourite works of fiction from 2022, today I'll be listing my favourite fictional works that are typically filed under classics. Books that just missed the cut here include: E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his later A Passage to India (1913), both gently nudged out by Forster's superb Howard's End (see below). Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1958) also just missed out on a write-up here, but I can definitely recommend it to anyone interested in reading a modern Italian classic.

War and Peace (1867) Leo Tolstoy It's strange to think that there is almost no point in reviewing this novel: who hasn't heard of War and Peace? What more could possibly be said about it now? Still, when I was growing up, War and Peace was always the stereotypical example of the 'impossible book', and even start it was, at best, a pointless task, and an act of hubris at worst. And so there surely exists a parallel universe in which I never have and will never will read the book... Nevertheless, let us try to set the scene. Book nine of the novel opens as follows:
On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began; that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? [ ] The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible they become to us.
Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, War and Peace follows the lives and fates of three aristocratic families: The Rostovs, The Bolkonskys and the Bezukhov's. These characters find themselves situated athwart (or against) history, and all this time, Napoleon is marching ever closer to Moscow. Still, Napoleon himself is essentially just a kind of wallpaper for a diverse set of personal stories touching on love, jealousy, hatred, retribution, naivety, nationalism, stupidity and much much more. As Elif Batuman wrote earlier this year, "the whole premise of the book was that you couldn t explain war without recourse to domesticity and interpersonal relations." The result is that Tolstoy has woven an incredibly intricate web that connects the war, noble families and the everyday Russian people to a degree that is surprising for a book started in 1865. Tolstoy's characters are probably timeless (especially the picaresque adventures and constantly changing thoughts Pierre Bezukhov), and the reader who has any social experience will immediately recognise characters' thoughts and actions. Some of this is at a 'micro' interpersonal level: for instance, take this example from the elegant party that opens the novel:
Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own and the health of Her Majesty, who, thank God, was better today. And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.
But then, some of the focus of the observations are at the 'macro' level of the entire continent. This section about cities that feel themselves in danger might suffice as an example:
At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.
And finally, in his lengthy epilogues, Tolstoy offers us a dissertation on the behaviour of large organisations, much of it through engagingly witty analogies. These epilogues actually turn out to be an oblique and sarcastic commentary on the idiocy of governments and the madness of war in general. Indeed, the thorough dismantling of the 'great man' theory of history is a common theme throughout the book:
During the whole of that period [of 1812], Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements as the figurehead of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it. [ ] Why do [we] all speak of a military genius ? Is a man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.
Unlike some other readers, I especially enjoyed these diversions into the accounting and workings of history, as well as our narrow-minded way of trying to 'explain' things in a singular way:
When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.
Given all of these serious asides, I was also not expecting this book to be quite so funny. At the risk of boring the reader with citations, take this sarcastic remark about the ineptness of medicine men:
After his liberation, [Pierre] fell ill and was laid up for three months. He had what the doctors termed 'bilious fever.' But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him and gave him medicines to drink he recovered.
There is actually a multitude of remarks that are not entirely complimentary towards Russian medical practice, but they are usually deployed with an eye to the human element involved rather than simply to the detriment of a doctor's reputation "How would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter s illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand rubles?" Other elements of note include some stunning set literary pieces, such as when Prince Andrei encounters a gnarly oak tree under two different circumstances in his life, and when Nat sha's 'Russian' soul is awakened by the strains of a folk song on the balalaika. Still, despite all of these micro- and macro-level happenings, for a long time I felt that something else was going on in War and Peace. It was difficult to put into words precisely what it was until I came across this passage by E. M. Forster:
After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story [and] they do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens and fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for place, [but] very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.
'Space' indeed. Yes, potential readers should note the novel's great length, but the 365 chapters are actually remarkably short, so the sensation of reading it is not in the least overwhelming. And more importantly, once you become familiar with its large cast of characters, it is really not a difficult book to follow, especially when compared to the other Russian classics. My only regret is that it has taken me so long to read this magnificent novel and that I might find it hard to find time to re-read it within the next few years.

Coming Up for Air (1939) George Orwell It wouldn't be a roundup of mine without at least one entry from George Orwell, and, this year, that place is occupied by a book I hadn't haven't read in almost two decades Still, the George Bowling of Coming Up for Air is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in a distinctly average English suburban row house with his nuclear family. One day, after winning some money on a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up in order to fish in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. Less important than the plot, however, is both the well-observed remarks and scathing criticisms that Bowling has of the town he has returned to, combined with an ominous sense of foreboding before the Second World War breaks out. At several times throughout the book, George's placid thoughts about his beloved carp pool are replaced by racing, anxious thoughts that overwhelm his inner peace:
War is coming. In 1941, they say. And there'll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant's clerk plastered over the piano that he's buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of thing matter, anyway? I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT'S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It's all going to happen. I know it - at any rate, I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen.
Already we can hear psychological madness that underpinned the Second World War. Indeed, there is no great story in Coming Up For Air, no wonderfully empathetic characters and no revelations or catharsis, so it is impressive that I was held by the descriptions, observations and nostalgic remembrances about life in modern Lower Binfield, its residents, and how it has changed over the years. It turns out, of course, that George's beloved pool has been filled in with rubbish, and the village has been perverted by modernity beyond recognition. And to cap it off, the principal event of George's holiday in Lower Binfield is an accidental bombing by the British Royal Air Force. Orwell is always good at descriptions of awful food, and this book is no exception:
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren't much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn't believe it. Then I rolled my tongue around it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.
Many other tell-tale elements of Orwell's fictional writing are in attendance in this book as well, albeit worked out somewhat less successfully than elsewhere in his oeuvre. For example, the idea of a physical ailment also serving as a metaphor is present in George's false teeth, embodying his constant preoccupation with his ageing. (Readers may recall Winston Smith's varicose ulcer representing his repressed humanity in Nineteen Eighty-Four). And, of course, we have a prematurely middle-aged protagonist who almost but not quite resembles Orwell himself. Given this and a few other niggles (such as almost all the women being of the typical Orwell 'nagging wife' type), it is not exactly Orwell's magnum opus. But it remains a fascinating historical snapshot of the feeling felt by a vast number of people just prior to the Second World War breaking out, as well as a captivating insight into how the process of nostalgia functions and operates.

Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster Howards End begins with the following sentence:
One may as well begin with Helen s letters to her sister.
In fact, "one may as well begin with" my own assumptions about this book instead. I was actually primed to consider Howards End a much more 'Victorian' book: I had just finished Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and had found her 1925 book at once rather 'modern' but also very much constrained by its time. I must have then unconsciously surmised that a book written 15 years before would be even more inscrutable, and, with its Victorian social mores added on as well, Howards End would probably not undress itself so readily in front of the reader. No doubt there were also the usual expectations about 'the classics' as well. So imagine my surprise when I realised just how inordinately affable and witty Howards End turned out to be. It doesn't have that Wildean shine of humour, of course, but it's a couple of fields over in the English countryside, perhaps abutting the more mordant social satires of the earlier George Orwell novels (see Coming Up for Air above). But now let us return to the story itself. Howards End explores class warfare, conflict and the English character through a tale of three quite different families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes; the gentle & idealistic Schlegels; and the lower-middle class Basts. As the Bloomsbury Group Schlegel sisters desperately try to help the Basts and educate the rich but close-minded Wilcoxes, the three families are drawn ever closer and closer together. Although the whole story does, I suppose, revolve around the house in the title (which is based on the Forster's own childhood home), Howards End is perhaps best described as a comedy of manners or a novel that shows up the hypocrisy of people and society. In fact, it is surprising how little of the story actually takes place in the eponymous house, with the overwhelming majority of the first half of the book taking place in London. But it is perhaps more illuminating to remark that the Howards End of the book is a house that the Wilcoxes who own it at the start of the novel do not really need or want. What I particularly liked about Howards End is how the main character's ideals alter as they age, and subsequently how they find their lives changing in different ways. Some of them find themselves better off at the end, others worse. And whilst it is also surprisingly funny, it still manages to trade in heavier social topics as well. This is apparent in the fact that, although the characters themselves are primarily in charge of their own destinies, their choices are still constrained by the changing world and shifting sense of morality around them. This shouldn't be too surprising: after all, Forster's novel was published just four years before the Great War, a distinctly uncertain time. Not for nothing did Virginia Woolf herself later observe that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" and that "all human relations have shifted: those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children." This process can undoubtedly be seen rehearsed throughout Forster's Howards End, and it's a credit to the author to be able to capture it so early on, if not even before it was widespread throughout Western Europe. I was also particularly taken by Forster's fertile use of simile. An extremely apposite example can be found in the description Tibby Schlegel gives of his fellow Cambridge undergraduates. Here, Timmy doesn't want to besmirch his lofty idealisation of them with any banal specificities, and wishes that the idea of them remain as ideal Platonic forms instead. Or, as Forster puts it, to Timmy it is if they are "pictures that must not walk out of their frames." Wilde, at his most weakest, is 'just' style, but Forster often deploys his flair for a deeper effect. Indeed, when you get to the end of this section mentioning picture frames, you realise Forster has actually just smuggled into the story a failed attempt on Tibby's part to engineer an anonymous homosexual encounter with another undergraduate. It is a credit to Forster's sleight-of-hand that you don't quite notice what has just happened underneath you and that the books' reticence to honestly describe what has happened is thus structually analogus Tibby's reluctance to admit his desires to himself. Another layer to the character of Tibby (and the novel as a whole) is thereby introduced without the imposition of clumsy literary scaffolding. In a similar vein, I felt very clever noticing the arch reference to Debussy's Pr lude l'apr s-midi d'un faune until I realised I just fell into the trap Forster set for the reader in that I had become even more like Tibby in his pseudo-scholarly views on classical music. Finally, I enjoyed that each chapter commences with an ironic and self-conscious bon mot about society which is only slightly overblown for effect. Particularly amusing are the ironic asides on "women" that run through the book, ventriloquising the narrow-minded views of people like the Wilcoxes. The omniscient and amiable narrator of the book also recalls those ironically distant voiceovers from various French New Wave films at times, yet Forster's narrator seems to have bigger concerns in his mordant asides: Forster seems to encourage some sympathy for all of the characters even the more contemptible ones at their worst moments. Highly recommended, as are Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his slightly later A Passage to India (1913).

The Good Soldier (1915) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier starts off fairly simply as the narrator's account of his and his wife's relationship with some old friends, including the eponymous 'Good Soldier' of the book's title. It's an experience to read the beginning of this novel, as, like any account of endless praise of someone you've never met or care about, the pages of approving remarks about them appear to be intended to wash over you. Yet as the chapters of The Good Soldier go by, the account of the other characters in the book gets darker and darker. Although the author himself is uncritical of others' actions, your own critical faculties are slowgrly brought into play, and you gradully begin to question the narrator's retelling of events. Our narrator is an unreliable narrator in the strict sense of the term, but with the caveat that he is at least is telling us everything we need to know to come to our own conclusions. As the book unfolds further, the narrator's compromised credibility seems to infuse every element of the novel even the 'Good' of the book's title starts to seem like a minor dishonesty, perhaps serving as the inspiration for the irony embedded in the title of The 'Great' Gatsby. Much more effectively, however, the narrator's fixations, distractions and manner of speaking feel very much part of his dissimulation. It sometimes feels like he is unconsciously skirting over the crucial elements in his tale, exactly like one does in real life when recounting a story containing incriminating ingredients. Indeed, just how much the narrator is conscious of his own concealment is just one part of what makes this such an interesting book: Ford Madox Ford has gifted us with enough ambiguity that it is also possible that even the narrator cannot find it within himself to understand the events of the story he is narrating. It was initially hard to believe that such a carefully crafted analysis of a small group of characters could have been written so long ago, and despite being fairly easy to read, The Good Soldier is an almost infinitely subtle book even the jokes are of the subtle kind and will likely get a re-read within the next few years.

Anna Karenina (1878) Leo Tolstoy There are many similar themes running through War and Peace (reviewed above) and Anna Karenina. Unrequited love; a young man struggling to find a purpose in life; a loving family; an overwhelming love of nature and countless fascinating observations about the minuti of Russian society. Indeed, rather than primarily being about the eponymous Anna, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. Nevertheless, our Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of government official Alexei Karenin, a colourless man who has little personality of his own, and she turns to a certain Count Vronsky in order to fulfil her passionate nature. Needless to say, this results in tragic consequences as their (admittedly somewhat qualified) desire to live together crashes against the rocks of reality and Russian society. Parallel to Anna's narrative, though, Konstantin Levin serves as the novel's alter-protagonist. In contrast to Anna, Levin is a socially awkward individual who straddles many schools of thought within Russia at the time: he is neither a free-thinker (nor heavy-drinker) like his brother Nikolai, and neither is he a bookish intellectual like his half-brother Serge. In short, Levin is his own man, and it is generally agreed by commentators that he is Tolstoy's surrogate within the novel. Levin tends to come to his own version of an idea, and he would rather find his own way than adopt any prefabricated view, even if confusion and muddle is the eventual result. In a roughly isomorphic fashion then, he resembles Anna in this particular sense, whose story is a counterpart to Levin's in their respective searches for happiness and self-actualisation. Whilst many of the passionate and exciting passages are told on Anna's side of the story (I'm thinking horse race in particular, as thrilling as anything in cinema ), many of the broader political thoughts about the nature of the working classes are expressed on Levin's side instead. These are stirring and engaging in their own way, though, such as when he joins his peasants to mow the field and seems to enter the nineteenth-century version of 'flow':
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.
Overall, Tolstoy poses no didactic moral message towards any of the characters in Anna Karenina, and merely invites us to watch rather than judge. (Still, there is a hilarious section that is scathing of contemporary classical music, presaging many of the ideas found in Tolstoy's 1897 What is Art?). In addition, just like the earlier War and Peace, the novel is run through with a number of uncannily accurate observations about daily life:
Anna smiled, as one smiles at the weaknesses of people one loves, and, putting her arm under his, accompanied him to the door of the study.
... as well as the usual sprinkling of Tolstoy's sardonic humour ("No one is pleased with his fortune, but everyone is pleased with his wit."). Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the other titan of Russian literature, once described Anna Karenina as a "flawless work of art," and if you re only going to read one Tolstoy novel in your life, it should probably be this one.

1 November 2022

Jonathan Dowland: Halloween playlist 2022

I hope you had a nice Halloween! I've collected together some songs that I've enjoyed over the last couple of years that loosely fit a theme: ambient, instrumental, experimental, industrial, dark, disconcerting, etc. I've prepared a Spotify playlist of most of them, but not all. The list is inline below as well, with many (but not all) tracks linking to Bandcamp, if I could find them there. This is a bit late, sorry. If anyone listens to something here and has any feedback I'd love to hear it. (If you are reading this on an aggregation site, it's possible the embeds won't work. If so, click through to my main site) Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3bEvEguRnf9U1RFrNbv5fk?si=9084cbf78c364ac8; The list, with Bandcamp embeds where possible: Some sources
  1. Via Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone
  2. Via Mary Anne Hobbs
  3. Via Lose yourself with
  4. Soma FM - Doomed (Halloween Special)

22 September 2021

Gunnar Wolf: New book out! Mecanismos de privacidad y anonimato en redes, una visi n transdisciplinaria

Three years ago, I organized a fun and most interesting colloquium at Facultad de Ingenier a, UNAM about privacy and anonymity online. I would have loved to share this earlier with the world, but The university s processes are quite slow (and, to be fair, I also took quite a bit of time to push things through). But today, I m finally happy to share the result of that work with all of you. We managed to get 11 of the talks in the colloquium as articles. The back-cover text reads (in Spanish):
We live in an era where human to human interactions are more and more often mediated by technology. This, of course, means everything leaves a digital trail, a trail that can follow and us relentlessly. Privacy is recognized, however, as a human right although one that is under growing threats. Anonymity is the best tool to secure it. Throughout history, clear steps have been taken legally, technically and technologically to defend it. Various studies point out this is not only a known issue for the network's users, but that a large majority has searched for alternatives to protect their communications' privacy. This book stems from a colloquium held by *Laboratorio de Investigaci n y Desarrollo de Software Libre* (LIDSOL) of Facultad de Ingenier a, UNAM, towards the end of 2018, where we invited experts from disciplines so far apart as law and systems development, psychology and economics, to contribute with their experiences to a transdisciplinary vision.
If this interests you, you can get the book at our institutional repository. Oh, and What about the birds? In Spanish (Mexican only?), we have a saying, hay p jaros en el alambre , meaning watch your words, as uninvited people might be listening, as birds resting over the wires over which phone calls used to be made (back in the day where wiretapping was that easy). I found the design proposed by our editor ingenious and very fitting for our topic!

7 February 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2020

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

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

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

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

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carr There's absolutely none of the Mad Men glamour of James Bond in John le Carr 's icy world of Cold War spies:
Small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, Smiley was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting, and extremely wet.
Almost a direct rebuttal to Ian Fleming's 007, Tinker, Tailor has broken-down cars, bad clothes, women with their own internal and external lives (!), pathetically primitive gadgets, and (contra Mad Men) hangovers that significantly longer than ten minutes. In fact, the main aspect that the mostly excellent 2011 film adaption doesn't really capture is the smoggy and run-down nature of 1970s London this is not your proto-Cool Britannia of Austin Powers or GTA:1969, the city is truly 'gritty' in the sense there is a thin film of dirt and grime on every surface imaginable. Another angle that the film cannot capture well is just how purposefully the novel does not mention the United States. Despite the US obviously being the dominant power, the British vacillate between pretending it doesn't exist or implying its irrelevance to the matter at hand. This is no mistake on Le Carr 's part, as careful readers are rewarded by finding this denial of US hegemony in metaphor throughout --pace Ian Fleming, there is no obvious Felix Leiter to loudly throw money at the problem or a Sheriff Pepper to serve as cartoon racist for the Brits to feel superior about. By contrast, I recall that a clever allusion to "dusty teabags" is subtly mirrored a few paragraphs later with a reference to the installation of a coffee machine in the office, likely symbolic of the omnipresent and unavoidable influence of America. (The officer class convince themselves that coffee is a European import.) Indeed, Le Carr communicates a feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the peeling wallpaper of Empire. Oftentimes, the writing style matches the graceless and inelegance of the world it depicts. The sentences are dense and you find your brain performing a fair amount of mid-flight sentence reconstruction, reparsing clauses, commas and conjunctions to interpret Le Carr 's intended meaning. In fact, in his eulogy-cum-analysis of Le Carr 's writing style, William Boyd, himself a ventrioquilist of Ian Fleming, named this intentional technique 'staccato'. Like the musical term, I suspect the effect of this literary staccato is as much about the impact it makes on a sentence as the imperceptible space it generates after it. Lastly, the large cast in this sprawling novel is completely believable, all the way from the Russian spymaster Karla to minor schoolboy Roach the latter possibly a stand-in for Le Carr himself. I got through the 500-odd pages in just a few days, somehow managing to hold the almost-absurdly complicated plot in my head. This is one of those classic books of the genre that made me wonder why I had not got around to it before.

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead According to the judges who awarded it the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys is "a devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida" that serves as a "powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption". But whilst there is plenty of this perseverance and dignity on display, I found little redemption in this deeply cynical novel. It could almost be read as a follow-up book to Whitehead's popular The Underground Railroad, which itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Indeed, each book focuses on a young protagonist who might be euphemistically referred to as 'downtrodden'. But The Nickel Boys is not only far darker in tone, it feels much closer and more connected to us today. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that it is based on the story of the Dozier School in northern Florida which operated for over a century before its long history of institutional abuse and racism was exposed a 2012 investigation. Nevertheless, if you liked the social commentary in The Underground Railroad, then there is much more of that in The Nickel Boys:
Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.
Sardonic aper us of this kind are pretty relentless throughout the book, but it never tips its hand too far into on nihilism, especially when some of the visual metaphors are often first-rate: "An American flag sighed on a pole" is one I can easily recall from memory. In general though, The Nickel Boys is not only more world-weary in tenor than his previous novel, the United States it describes seems almost too beaten down to have the energy conjure up the Swiftian magical realism that prevented The Underground Railroad from being overly lachrymose. Indeed, even we Whitehead transports us a present-day New York City, we can't indulge in another kind of fantasy, the one where America has solved its problems:
The Daily News review described the [Manhattan restaurant] as nouveau Southern, "down-home plates with a twist." What was the twist that it was soul food made by white people?
It might be overly reductionist to connect Whitehead's tonal downshift with the racial justice movements of the past few years, but whatever the reason, we've ended up with a hard-hitting, crushing and frankly excellent book.

True Grit & No Country for Old Men Charles Portis & Cormac McCarthy It's one of the most tedious cliches to claim the book is better than the film, but these two books are of such high quality that even the Coen Brothers at their best cannot transcend them. I'm grouping these books together here though, not because their respective adaptations will exemplify some of the best cinema of the 21st century, but because of their superb treatment of language. Take the use of dialogue. Cormac McCarthy famously does not use any punctuation "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it" but the conversations in No Country for Old Men together feel familiar and commonplace, despite being relayed through this unconventional technique. In lesser hands, McCarthy's written-out Texan drawl would be the novelistic equivalent of white rap or Jar Jar Binks, but not only is the effect entirely gripping, it helps you to believe you are physically present in the many intimate and domestic conversations that hold this book together. Perhaps the cinematic familiarity helps, as you can almost hear Tommy Lee Jones' voice as Sheriff Bell from the opening page to the last. Charles Portis' True Grit excels in its dialogue too, but in this book it is not so much in how it flows (although that is delightful in its own way) but in how forthright and sardonic Maddie Ross is:
"Earlier tonight I gave some thought to stealing a kiss from you, though you are very young, and sick and unattractive to boot, but now I am of a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt." "One would be as unpleasant as the other."
Perhaps this should be unsurprising. Maddie, a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, can barely fire her father's heavy pistol, so she can only has words to wield as her weapon. Anyway, it's not just me who treasures this book. In her encomium that presages most modern editions, Donna Tartt of The Secret History fame traces the novels origins through Huckleberry Finn, praising its elegance and economy: "The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales". I've read any Chaucer, but I am inclined to agree. Tartt also recalls that True Grit vanished almost entirely from the public eye after the release of John Wayne's flimsy cinematic vehicle in 1969 this earlier film was, Tartt believes, "good enough, but doesn't do the book justice". As it happens, reading a book with its big screen adaptation as a chaser has been a minor theme of my 2020, including P. D. James' The Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, John le Carr 's Tinker, Tailor Soldier, Spy and even a staged production of Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol streamed from The Old Vic. For an autodidact with no academic background in literature or cinema, I've been finding this an effective and enjoyable means of getting closer to these fine books and films it is precisely where they deviate (or perhaps where they are deficient) that offers a means by which one can see how they were constructed. I've also found that adaptations can also tell you a lot about the culture in which they were made: take the 'straightwashing' in the film version of Strangers on a Train (1951) compared to the original novel, for example. It is certainly true that adaptions rarely (as Tartt put it) "do the book justice", but she might be also right to alight on a legal metaphor, for as the saying goes, to judge a movie in comparison to the book is to do both a disservice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Algebra of Happiness & Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life Scott Galloway & Nir Eyal A cocktail of insight, informality and abrasiveness makes NYU Professor Scott Galloway uncannily appealing to guys around my age. Although Galloway definitely has his own wisdom and experience, similar to Joe Rogan I suspect that a crucial part of Galloway's appeal is that you feel you are learning right alongside him. Thankfully, 'Prof G' is far less err problematic than Rogan (Galloway is more of a well-meaning, spirited centrist), although he, too, has some pretty awful takes at time. This is a shame, because removed from the whirlwind of social media he can be really quite considered, such as in this long-form interview with Stephanie Ruhle. In fact, it is this kind of sentiment that he captured in his 2019 Algebra of Happiness. When I look over my highlighted sections, it's clear that it's rather schmaltzy out of context ("Things you hate become just inconveniences in the presence of people you love..."), but his one-two punch of cynicism and saccharine ("Ask somebody who purchased a home in 2007 if their 'American Dream' came true...") is weirdly effective, especially when he uses his own family experiences as part of his story:
A better proxy for your life isn't your first home, but your last. Where you draw your last breath is more meaningful, as it's a reflection of your success and, more important, the number of people who care about your well-being. Your first house signals the meaningful your future and possibility. Your last home signals the profound the people who love you. Where you die, and who is around you at the end, is a strong signal of your success or failure in life.
Nir Eyal's Indistractable, however, is a totally different kind of 'self-help' book. The important background story is that Eyal was the author of the widely-read Hooked which turned into a secular Bible of so-called 'addictive design'. (If you've ever been cornered by a techbro wielding a Wikipedia-thin knowledge of B. F. Skinner's behaviourist psychology and how it can get you to click 'Like' more often, it ultimately came from Hooked.) However, Eyal's latest effort is actually an extended mea culpa for his previous sin and he offers both high and low-level palliative advice on how to avoid falling for the tricks he so studiously espoused before. I suppose we should be thankful to capitalism for selling both cause and cure. Speaking of markets, there appears to be a growing appetite for books in this 'anti-distraction' category, and whilst I cannot claim to have done an exhausting study of this nascent field, Indistractable argues its points well without relying on accurate-but-dry "studies show..." or, worse, Gladwellian gotchas. My main criticism, however, would be that Eyal doesn't acknowledge the limits of a self-help approach to this problem; it seems that many of the issues he outlines are an inescapable part of the alienation in modern Western society, and the only way one can really avoid distraction is to move up the income ladder or move out to a 500-acre ranch.

17 December 2020

Elana Hashman: Easy risotto

I have a secret: risotto doesn't have to involve standing over a pot, stirring for 30 minutes. There is a better way. I've made risotto using the "stir 5ever" method and frankly this one is half the work and just as good. I took inspiration from Kenji Lopez-Alt, who describes how you can make risotto with only a few minutes of stirring at the end! Yes, this is a secret too good to keep to myself. The linked recipe is too rich for a weeknight dinner, at least for my tastes, so I've included my typical modifications below, which omits the heavy cream. I usually make mushroom risotto, because all the ingredients are long-lived pantry ingredients, which means I can make this on a whim without having to grocery shop! Mushroom risotto Serves 3 as a main course. Active time: 25m. Total time: 45m. Ingredients: Recipe:
  1. Leave mushrooms to rehydrate in 1 cup of hot water for at least 10 minutes.
  2. Set a wide saucepan (about 3.5qts) or skillet on medium heat.
  3. Mix stock and wine for a total of 4 cups. You can used homemade stock (the best), boxed, or reconstitute from bouillon (my usual). If you use bouillon, I find you get the best flavour if you use a mix, so I tend to use half "no-chicken" and half "organic chicken" of the Better than Bouillon brand. Let this cool if you used boiling water; you don't want it to be too hot.
  4. Mix the rice and stock in a large bowl, agitating it to release the starch. Reserve stock and set the rice in a strainer to drain.
  5. Small dice an onion. Add olive oil and butter to the pan, and then add the onion. Cook the onion until it's translucent, but don't brown it.
  6. Increase the heat to high and add the rice to the pan to toast until it becomes a little bit brown, stirring occasionally, about 3-4 minutes. Set a timer so it doesn't burn
  7. Meanwhile, drain the mushrooms, making sure you reserve the broth. Chop mushrooms and mince the garlic. Once the rice is toasted, add mushrooms and garlic and stir.
  8. Stir the reserved stock. Add all of the mushroom liquid and all but 1 cup of the starchy stock to the pan. Bring to a boil.
  9. Once it has reached a boil, cover, reduce to the lowest heat, and allow the rice to simmer undisturbed for 10 minutes. In the meantime, you can grate the cheese.
  10. After 10 minutes, stir the rice once, shake the pan to ensure it is level, and return to the heat for 10 more minutes. Sit back, relax, and bask in the very little stirring you are doing.
  11. At this point, the rice should be nearly cooked. Give it a stir, and add the remaining cup of broth. Stir until fully incorporated, turn the heat up to high, and cook until the risotto reaches your preferred consistency. I like mine rather thick.
  12. Once the rice is fully cooked, turn off the heat and stir in the grated cheese a bit at a time, reserving some for garnish. Taste, and season with salt and pepper.
  13. Garnish with the grated cheese, and perhaps some herbs. Serve and enjoy!
Variations No mushrooms: Okay, okay, you hate mushrooms! Sorry! You can leave them out. Don't bother with the mushrooms, and add broth to make up for the lost liquid. Mushroom lover: Alternatively, if you love mushrooms and you have fresh ones available, use &frac13 to a pound (150-225g) chopped fresh mushrooms instead of dried. Add them at the same time you add the onions to ensure all the liquid cooks off. Milanese, with stuff: One of my favourite variations on this dish is a version with shrimp, asparagus, and saffron. Leave the mushrooms out, increase the wine to or even 1 cup (seafood likes a little extra acidity), ensure you have a total of 5 cups of broth, and add a few strands of saffron. Chop asparagus and shrimp, season with salt and pepper, saut them with some butter or olive oil in a separate pan so they don't overcook, and fold them in at the very end, after you've added the cheese. I MUST SUFFER: This was too easy? Want to stir more??? Fine, have it your $*!#ing way. I'm sure you can be creative and come up with something on your own...

3 March 2020

Elana Hashman: Chili

I really like beans. This is one way for me to power through the copious amounts I receive through the beloved Bean of the Month Club. (It took me many months, but I finally got in!) Beef Chili Serves 5-7. Active time: 20m. Total time: 90m. Ingredients: Recipe:
  1. Heat a dutch oven on high.
  2. Small or medium dice (depending on your preference) the celery, pepper, and onion. You should have about four cups total.
  3. Brown the beef in the dutch oven, using a little bit of cooking oil to avoid sticking if desired.
  4. While the meat is browning, mince the garlic, measure the spices, and combine these all together.
  5. Once the meat is brown, add the diced vegetables and cook until tender and the onion is translucent.
  6. Add the spices and garlic, thoroughly combine, and cook until fragrant, about one minute.
  7. Add the tomatoes. Once the mixture comes to a boil, cover and simmer for about an hour, stirring every ~20 minutes or so.
  8. Add the beans and use bean broth or water to adjust consistency.
  9. This is a good time to taste and add salt. I usually use 1 to 1 teaspoons.
  10. Bring to a boil again, cover and simmer for 10-15 more minutes.
  11. Turn off the heat, taste, and adjust seasoning if necessary. Add a squeeze of lime if it needs a little acidity.
  12. Serve with sour cream, grated cheese, sliced green onions, or any of your other favourite garnishes.
  13. Enjoy!
Frequently Asked Questions Q: Why wait until basically the end to add salt?
A: Because canned ingredients will contain salt, and it's hard to predict how much, so you should always salt to taste. Waiting until the end will always ensure you season accurately. Q: Why are so many of these directions so hand-wavey?
A: Cooking is an adventure. Experiment a little! Q: But I have no idea what "to taste" means.
A: Taste it, add the thing, stir, taste it again. Is it salty enough? Sour enough? Sweet enough? You don't know, you say? Keep going. Add a little too much and then you'll find out for next time. Q: Why do you add so many beans and so little meat?
A: I really like beans.

12 November 2016

John Goerzen: Morning in the Skies

IMG_8515 This is morning. Time to fly. Two boys, happy to open the hangar door and get the plane ready. It s been a year since I passed the FAA exam and became a pilot. Memories like these are my favorite reminders why I did. It is such fun to see people s faces light up with the joy of flying a few thousand feet above ground, of the beauty and freedom and peace of the skies. I ve flown 14 different passengers in that time; almost every flight I ve taken has been with people, which I enjoy. I ve heard wow or beautiful so many times, and said it myself even more times. IMG_6083 I ve landed in two state parks, visited any number of wonderful small towns, seen historic sites and placid lakes, ascended magically over forests and plains. I ve landed at 31 airports in 10 states, flying over 13,000 miles. airports Not once have I encountered anyone other than friendly, kind, and outgoing. And why not? After all, we re working around magic flying carpet machines, right? IMG_7867_bw (That s my brother before a flight with me, by the way) Some weeks it is easy to be glum. This week has been that way for many, myself included. But then, whether you are in the air or on the ground, if you pay attention, you realize we still live in a beautiful world with many wonderful people. And, in fact, I got a reminder of that this week. Not long after the election, I got in a plane, pushed in the throttle, and started the takeoff roll down a runway in the midst of an Indiana forest. The skies were the best kind of clear blue, and pretty soon I lifted off and could see for miles. Off in the distance, I could see the last cottony remnants of the morning s fog, lying still in the valleys, surrounding the little farms and houses as if to give them a loving hug. Wow. Sometimes the flight is bumpy. Sometimes the weather doesn t cooperate, and it doesn t happen at all. Sometimes you can fly across four large states and it feels as smooth as glass the whole way. Whatever happens, at the end of the day, the magic flying carpet machine gets locked up again. We go home, rest our heads on our soft pillows, and if we so choose, remember the beauty we experienced that day. Really, this post is not about being a pilot. This post is a reminder to pay attention to all that is beautiful in this world. It surrounds us; the smell of pine trees in the forest, the delight in the faces of children, the gentle breeze in our hair, the kind word from a stranger, the very sunrise. I hope that more of us will pay attention to the moments of clear skies and wind at our back. Even at those moments when we pull the hangar door shut. IMG_20160716_093627

28 March 2016

Lucy Wayland: Stuffed Butternut Squash

This is a fusion recipe from a rather bland just stuff it with ricotta recipe I saw, David Scott s The Peniless Vegetarian , and my own mutations on those themes. I can t give you exact quantities, just make a little more than you will make the hollowed mound (grin), and the rest will make an excellent pasta sauce. Ingredients For an average sized butternut squash, you will need:
1 onion (I prefer red)
3 cloves of garlic
1 capsicum pepper (I prefer green, my ex- preferred red)
Some red lentils
Optional green or brown lentils for texture and flavour. I used some puy
The lentil quantity is hard to estimate, but I ratio 4 red to 1 optional.
Roughly one handful of chopped mushrooms i.e. when chopped, it is one handful
1 tin tinned tomatoes
Some tomato puree
A generous amout of garam masala garam masala is what brings out the flavout in lentils
Some paprike
Optional chilli if using chilli, I recommend fresh of course.
Optional Balsamic vinegar
Optional Marmite Preperation of the Squash
1. Cut the butternut squash in half, length ways. This is very hard, you will need a good large knife, and may require you jumping up and down into the air. This is the second most hard of the procedure. 2. For each half, scoop out the seeds, and pare back the bowl till it is no longer overly fibrous. Discard this, or find a use for the seeds. 3. For each half, scoop a channel of the softer flesh up from the baisin up near the top. This has to be done by feel, is hard and thankless work. Also experimentation required. Reserve this flesh. Preperation of the Filling This is just basically a nice lentil sauce that can be used with pasta, rice, toast etc. Important: this is not a stir fry, but a largish, heavy bottom pan is recommended. 1. Finely peel then chopp the onions and the garlic. Chopp the chillis if used (I am a chilli gal). Please observe Chilli Protocol[0] 2. Wash and chop the pepper and mushrooms. Not finely diced, but not crudite-sized slices. Remember that peppers shrivel down a little, mushrooms a lot. 3. Start frying the onions for a while in some oil (I prefer olive, but others are acceptible), until they just about to go translucent. Then add the garlic and optional chillis until the garlic is just cooking nicely. 4. Add the spices, turn over until all the containts of the pan are covered, and cook for another 30 seconds or so. Then add the tinned tomato, and then add half a can of cold water water which rinsed the tin out with. Stir this around, and make sure it is now at just at a simmer or pre-simmer. 5. Add the lentils. You want 0.5-1 cm of water above the lentils when you have added and stirred. Let these cook and expand for about 5 mins, stirring all the while, all the lentils will stick to the bottom. 6. Add the pepper, mushroom, reserved squash flesh, and optional dash of balsamic vinegar, and half a tea spoon of marmite. Cook and stir until the pepper goes soft. This is the hard part. Add boiling water if really too thick, or some tomato puree if too thin. There is no hard science to this, you want at the end of 10 minutes or so something resembling the thickness in texture of a stiff bolognaise sauce. Assembly
1. Have a baking tray. Whether you prefer to grease, line with foil, or line with baking parchment is up to you. I prefer baking parchment. 2. Stuff those two halves of butternut squash with that sauce you made. It should make a mound of about 1cm about the level. If you feel extravagent, and are not vegan, sprinkle a little grated cheese on top. 3. Place in a pre-heated oven of 200oC. Cooking time should be about 20 mins, but larger ones take longer. The acid test is to briefly take them out, and prod the lower side with a fork. It should go through the skin with little resistance. When ready, serve. It s really a dish in itself, but some people might like a bit of salad, or maybe a light green risotto.

1 February 2016

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 40 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between January 24th and January 30th:

Media coverage Holger Levsen was interviewed by the FOSDEM team to introduce his talk on Sunday 31st.

Toolchain fixes Jonas Smedegaard uploaded d-shlibs/0.63 which makes the order of dependencies generated by d-devlibdeps stable accross locales. Original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Packages fixed The following 53 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: appstream-glib, aptitude, arbtt, btrfs-tools, cinnamon-settings-daemon, cppcheck, debian-security-support, easytag, gitit, gnash, gnome-control-center, gnome-keyring, gnome-shell, gnome-software, graphite2, gtk+2.0, gupnp, gvfs, gyp, hgview, htmlcxx, i3status, imms, irker, jmapviewer, katarakt, kmod, lastpass-cli, libaccounts-glib, libam7xxx, libldm, libopenobex, libsecret, linthesia, mate-session-manager, mpris-remote, network-manager, paprefs, php-opencloud, pisa, pyacidobasic, python-pymzml, python-pyscss, qtquick1-opensource-src, rdkit, ruby-rails-html-sanitizer, shellex, slony1-2, spacezero, spamprobe, sugar-toolkit-gtk3, tachyon, tgt. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:
  • gnubg/1.05.000-4 by Russ Allbery.
  • grcompiler/4.2-6 by Hideki Yamane.
  • sdlgfx/2.0.25-5 fix by Felix Geyer, uploaded by Gianfranco Costamagna.
Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:
  • #812876 on glib2.0 by Lunar: ensure that functions are sorted using the C locale when giotypefuncs.c is generated.

diffoscope development diffoscope 48 was released on January 26th. It fixes several issues introduced by the retrieval of extra symbols from Debian debug packages. It also restores compatibility with older versions of binutils which does not support readelf --decompress.

strip-nondeterminism development strip-nondeterminism 0.015-1 was uploaded on January 27th. It fixes handling of signed JAR files which are now going to be ignored to keep the signatures intact.

Package reviews 54 reviews have been removed, 36 added and 17 updated in the previous week. 30 new FTBFS bugs have been submitted by Chris Lamb, Michael Tautschnig, Mattia Rizzolo, Tobias Frost.

Misc. Alexander Couzens and Bryan Newbold have been busy fixing more issues in OpenWrt. Version 1.6.3 of FreeBSD's package manager pkg(8) now supports SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH. Ross Karchner did a lightning talk about reproducible builds at his work place and shared the slides.

13 October 2015

Norbert Preining: (Kim Doo Soo) ( , Free Spirit)

On the recently reviewed album International Sad Hits Vol 1 I wrote that Kim Doo Soo was the great surprise of the CD for me. So I went ahead and bought (not that easy, import from US!) one of his most recommended album, the Free Spirit. Kim_Doo_Soo-Free_Spirit Sad songs, full of melancholy, speaking of desperation, isolation, destroyed love. The music and singing is simple, mainly based on guitar and voice only, at times harmonica, strings and others are added. In contrast to the Crying Philosopher Tomokawa Kazuki, the songs are all very melodic and easy to listen, but still carrying a strong impact. After listening to these songs, the melodies wander around my brain resonating again and again, like (mis)guiding lights in a dark forest. kim-doo-soo-japanese-textAll the songs are in Korean, but fortunately the accompanying booklet carries a Japanese translation for the Korean incapables like me. In the future I will provide some translations into English, since I believe that this artist should be more known outside this small area. While a friend of mine said I don t like (bimbokusai) music, I have to say I enjoy reading through the sad stories while listening to this special music.
This is the 2002 fourth album by Korea s true cult folk/singer-songwriter hero, Kim Doo Soo. Kim Doo Soo is perhaps the deepest and most introspective of Korea s acid folk singers. Legends surround his songs political oppression, alcoholism, suicide, a 10-year period of mountain seclusion. [ ] On Free Spirit he mines productive veins of profound melancholy, animistic nature, and unfathomable, hermetic affection. These songs are couched in a veil of gorgeous, still melodicism, Kim s quavering vocals and guitar shaded with subtle accordion, cello, organ and harmonica. A reflective and unearthly masterpiece.
Forced Exposure
To this I cannot add anything more eloquent! The songs on this CD are as follows, the English translation is taken from Kim Doo Soo s official web page.
  1. (Wild flower)
  2. (Boat for the shore)
  3. (Butterfly)
  4. (Sweetbrier)
  5. (Bohemian)
  6. (Dawn rain)
  7. 19 Blues (Blues of 19th street)
  8. (Mountain)
  9. (As time goes by)
  10. Romantic Horizon
  11. ( ) (Reminiscence)
  12. (Evening river)
  13. ( ) (Bohemian poetry)
  14. , (Dandelion, dandelion)
My favorites under these songs are Boat for the shore ( You aren t coming any more onto a wild sea I am leaving ), Bohemian ( I m going to the shores of emptiness, my free spirit flows down the river probably his most famous song, assumed to be responsible for his retreat to the mountains), Dawn rain (A lovely song, and the only one without Japanese translation! Very strange.), Mountain ( Mountains Mountains my dream, mountains ). But I can recommend each and every song on this CD. To close this short review, if you are interested in something else but the usual happy-pappy KPop or JPop or USPop, and are searching for inspiring and songs with Tiefgang (deep meaning, as we say it in German), give this special artist a try! Some links concerning Kim Doo Soo that might be useful:

24 September 2015

Joachim Breitner: The Incredible Proof Machine

In a few weeks, I will have the opportunity to offer a weekend workshop to selected and motivated high school students1 to a topic of my choice. My idea is to tell them something about logic, proofs, and the joy of searching and finding proofs, and the gratification of irrevocable truths. While proving things on paper is already quite nice, it is much more fun to use an interactive theorem prover, such as Isabelle, Coq or Agda: You get immediate feedback, you can experiment and play around if you are stuck, and you get lots of small successes. Someone2 once called interactive theorem proving the worlds most geekiest videogame . Unfortunately, I don t think one can get high school students without any prior knowledge in logic, or programming, or fancy mathematical symbols, to do something meaningful with a system like Isabelle, so I need something that is (much) easier to use. I always had this idea in the back of my head that proving is not so much about writing text (as in normally written proofs) or programs (as in Agda) or labeled statements (as in Hilbert-style proofs), but rather something involving facts that I have proven so far floating around freely, and way to combine these facts to new facts, without the need to name them, or put them in a particular order or sequence. In a way, I m looking for labVIEW wrestled through the Curry-Horward-isomorphism. Something like this:
A proof of implication currying

A proof of implication currying

So I set out, rounded up a few contributors (Thanks!), implemented this, and now I proudly present: The Incredible Proof Machine3 This interactive theorem prover allows you to do perform proofs purely by dragging blocks (representing proof steps) onto the paper and connecting them properly. There is no need to learn syntax, and hence no frustration about getting that wrong. Furthermore, it comes with a number of example tasks to experiment with, so you can simply see it as a challenging computer came and work through them one by one, learning something about the logical connectives and how they work as you go. For the actual workshop, my plan is to let the students first try to solve the tasks of one session on their own, let them draw their own conclusions and come up with an idea of what they just did, and then deliver an explanation of the logical meaning of what they did. The implementation is heavily influenced by Isabelle: The software does not know anything about, say, conjunction ( ) and implication ( ). To the core, everything is but an untyped lambda expression, and when two blocks are connected, it does unification4 of the proposition present on either side. This general framework is then instantiated by specifying the basic rules (or axioms) in a descriptive manner. It is quite feasible to implement other logics or formal systems on top of this as well. Another influence of Isabelle is the non-linear editing: You neither have to create the proof in a particular order nor have to manually manage a proof focus . Instead, you can edit any bit of the proof at any time, and the system checks all of it continuously. As always, I am keen on feedback. Also, if you want to use this for your own teaching or experimenting needs, let me know. We have a mailing list for the project, the code is on GitHub, where you can also file bug reports and feature requests. Contributions are welcome! All aspects of the logic are implemented in Haskell and compiled to JavaScript using GHCJS, the UI is plain hand-written and messy JavaScript code, using JointJS to handle the graph interaction. Obviously, there is still plenty that can be done to improve the machine. In particular, the ability to create your own proof blocks, such as proof by contradiction, prove them to be valid and then use them in further proofs, is currently being worked on. And while the page will store your current progress, including all proofs you create, in your browser, it needs better ways to save, load and share tasks, blocks and proofs. Also, we d like to add some gamification, i.e. achievements ( First proof by contradiction , 50 theorems proven ), statistics, maybe a share theorem on twitter button. As the UI becomes more complicated, I d like to investigating moving more of it into Haskell world and use Functional Reactive Programming, i.e. Ryan Trickle s reflex, to stay sane. Customers who liked The Incredible Proof Machine might also like these artifacts, that I found while looking whether something like this exists:

  1. Students with migration background supported by the START scholarship
  2. Does anyone know the reference?
  3. We almost named it Proofcraft , which would be a name our current Minecraft-wild youth would appreciate, but it is alreay taken by Gerwin Kleins blog. Also, the irony of a theorem prover being in-credible is worth something.
  4. Luckily, two decades ago, Tobias Nipkow published a nice implementation of higher order pattern unification as ML code, which I transliterated to Haskell for this project.

23 July 2015

Antoine Beaupr : Is it safe to use open wireless access points?

I sometimes get questions when people use my wireless access point, which, for as long as I can remember, has been open to everyone; that is without any form of password protection or encryption. I arguably don't use the access point much myself, as I prefer the wired connection for the higher bandwidth, security and reliability it provides. Apart from convenience for myself and visitors, the main reason why I leave my wireless access open is that I believe in a free (both as in beer and freedom) internet, built with principles of solidarity rather than exploitation and profitability. In these days of ubiquitous surveillance, freedom often goes hand in hand with anonymity, which implies providing free internet access to everyone. I also believe that, as more and more services get perniciously transferred to the global internet, access to the network is becoming a basic human right. This is therefore my small contribution to the struggle, now also part of the R seau Libre project. So here were my friends question, in essence:
My credit card info was stolen when I used a wifi hotspot in an airport... Should I use open wifi networks? Is it safe to use my credit card for shopping online?
Here is a modified version of an answer I sent to a friend recently which I thought could be useful to the larger internet community. The short answer is "sorry about that", "it depends, you generally can, but be careful" and "your credit card company is supposed to protect you".

Sorry! First off, sorry to hear that our credit card was stolen in an airport! That has to be annoying... Did the credit card company reimburse you? Normally, the whole point of credit cards is that they protect you in case of theft like this and they are supposed to reimburse you if you credit card gets stolen or abused...

The complexity and unreliability of passwords Now of course, securing every bit of your internet infrastructure helps in protecting against such attacks. However: there is a trade-off! First off, it does makes it more complicated for people to join the network. You need to make up some silly password (which has its own security problems: passwords can be surprisingly easy to guess!) that you will post on the fridge or worst, forget all the time! And if it's on the fridge, anyone with a view to that darn fridge, be it one-time visitor or sneaky neighbor, can find the password and steal your internet access (although, granted, that won't allow them to directly spy on your internet connection). In any case, if you choose to use a password, you should use the tricks I wrote in the koumbit wiki to generate the password and avoid writing it on the fridge.

The false sense of security of wireless encryption Second, it can also give a false sense of security: just because a wifi access point appears "secure" (ie. that the communication between your computer and the wifi access point is encrypted) doesn't mean the whole connection is secure. In fact, one attack that can be done against access points is exactly to masquerade as an existing access point, with no security security at all. That way, instead of connecting to the real secure and trusted access point, you connect to an evil one which spies on our connection. Most computers will happily connect to such a hotspot even with degraded security without warning. It may be what happened at the airport, in fact. Of course this particular attack would be less likely to happen if you live in the middle of the woods than an airport, but it's some important distinction to keep in mind, because the same attack can be performed after the wireless access point, for example by your countryside internet access provider or someone attacking it. Your best protection for your banking details is to rely on good passwords (for your back account) but also, and more importantly, what we call end-to-end encryption. That is usually implemented using the "HTTPS" with a pad lock icon in your address bar. This ensures that the communication between your computer and the bank or credit card company is secure, that is: that no wifi access point or attacker between your computer and them can intercept your credit card number.

The flaws of internet security Now unfortunately, even the HTTPS protocol doesn't bring complete security. For example, one attack that can be done is similar to the previous one and that is to masquerade as a legitimate bank site, but either strip out the encryption or even fake the encryption. So you also need to look at the address of the website you are visiting. Attackers are often pretty clever and will use many tricks to hide the real address of the website in the address bar. To work around this, I always explicitly type my bank website address (https://accesd.desjardins.com/ in my case) directly myself instead of clicking on links, bookmarks or using a search engine to find my bank site. In the case of credit cards, it is much trickier because when you buy stuff online, you end up putting that credit card number on different sites which you do not necessarily trust. There's no good solution but complaining to your credit card company if you believe a website you used has stolen your credit card details. You can also use services like Paypal, Dwolla or Bitcoin that hide your credit card details from the seller, if they support the service. I usually try to avoid putting my credit card details on sites I do not trust, and limit myself to known parties (e.g. Via Rail, Air Canada, etc). Also, in general, I try to assume the network connection between me and the website I visit is compromised. This forced me to get familiar with online security and use of encryption. It is more accessible to me than trying to secure the infrastructure i am using, because i often do not control it at all (e.g. internet cafes...). Internet security is unfortunately a hard problem, and things are not getting easier as more things move online. The burden is on us programmers and system administrators to create systems that are more secure and intuitive for our users so, as I said earlier, sorry the internet sucks so much, we didn't think so many people would join the acid trip of the 70s. ;)

12 July 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: week 11 in Stretch cycle

Debian is undertaking a huge effort to develop a reproducible builds system. I'd like to thank you for that. This could be Debian's most important project, with how badly computer security has been going.

PerniciousPunk in Reddit's Ask me anything! to Neil McGovern, DPL. What happened in the reproducible builds effort this week: Toolchain fixes More tools are getting patched to use the value of the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable as the current time:

In the reproducible experimental toolchain which have been uploaded: Johannes Schauer followed up on making sbuild build path deterministic with several ideas. Packages fixed The following 311 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies : 4ti2, alot, angband, appstream-glib, argvalidate, armada-backlight, ascii, ask, astroquery, atheist, aubio, autorevision, awesome-extra, bibtool, boot-info-script, bpython, brian, btrfs-tools, bugs-everywhere, capnproto, cbm, ccfits, cddlib, cflow, cfourcc, cgit, chaussette, checkbox-ng, cinnamon-settings-daemon, clfswm, clipper, compton, cppcheck, crmsh, cupt, cutechess, d-itg, dahdi-tools, dapl, darnwdl, dbusada, debian-security-support, debomatic, dime, dipy, dnsruby, doctrine, drmips, dsc-statistics, dune-common, dune-istl, dune-localfunctions, easytag, ent, epr-api, esajpip, eyed3, fastjet, fatresize, fflas-ffpack, flann, flex, flint, fltk1.3, fonts-dustin, fonts-play, fonts-uralic, freecontact, freedoom, gap-guava, gap-scscp, genometools, geogebra, git-reintegrate, git-remote-bzr, git-remote-hg, gitmagic, givaro, gnash, gocr, gorm.app, gprbuild, grapefruit, greed, gtkspellmm, gummiboot, gyp, heat-cfntools, herold, htp, httpfs2, i3status, imagetooth, imapcopy, imaprowl, irker, jansson, jmapviewer, jsdoc-toolkit, jwm, katarakt, khronos-opencl-man, khronos-opengl-man4, lastpass-cli, lava-coordinator, lava-tool, lavapdu, letterize, lhapdf, libam7xxx, libburn, libccrtp, libclaw, libcommoncpp2, libdaemon, libdbusmenu-qt, libdc0, libevhtp, libexosip2, libfreenect, libgwenhywfar, libhmsbeagle, libitpp, libldm, libmodbus, libmtp, libmwaw, libnfo, libpam-abl, libphysfs, libplayer, libqb, libsecret, libserial, libsidplayfp, libtime-y2038-perl, libxr, lift, linbox, linthesia, livestreamer, lizardfs, lmdb, log4c, logbook, lrslib, lvtk, m-tx, mailman-api, matroxset, miniupnpd, mknbi, monkeysign, mpi4py, mpmath, mpqc, mpris-remote, musicbrainzngs, network-manager, nifticlib, obfsproxy, ogre-1.9, opal, openchange, opensc, packaging-tutorial, padevchooser, pajeng, paprefs, pavumeter, pcl, pdmenu, pepper, perroquet, pgrouting, pixz, pngcheck, po4a, powerline, probabel, profitbricks-client, prosody, pstreams, pyacidobasic, pyepr, pymilter, pytest, python-amqp, python-apt, python-carrot, python-django, python-ethtool, python-mock, python-odf, python-pathtools, python-pskc, python-psutil, python-pypump, python-repoze.tm2, python-repoze.what, qdjango, qpid-proton, qsapecng, radare2, reclass, repsnapper, resource-agents, rgain, rttool, ruby-aggregate, ruby-albino, ruby-archive-tar-minitar, ruby-bcat, ruby-blankslate, ruby-coffee-script, ruby-colored, ruby-dbd-mysql, ruby-dbd-odbc, ruby-dbd-pg, ruby-dbd-sqlite3, ruby-dbi, ruby-dirty-memoize, ruby-encryptor, ruby-erubis, ruby-fast-xs, ruby-fusefs, ruby-gd, ruby-git, ruby-globalhotkeys, ruby-god, ruby-hike, ruby-hmac, ruby-integration, ruby-jnunemaker-matchy, ruby-memoize, ruby-merb-core, ruby-merb-haml, ruby-merb-helpers, ruby-metaid, ruby-mina, ruby-net-irc, ruby-net-netrc, ruby-odbc, ruby-ole, ruby-packet, ruby-parseconfig, ruby-platform, ruby-plist, ruby-popen4, ruby-rchardet, ruby-romkan, ruby-ronn, ruby-rubyforge, ruby-rubytorrent, ruby-samuel, ruby-shoulda-matchers, ruby-sourcify, ruby-test-spec, ruby-validatable, ruby-wirble, ruby-xml-simple, ruby-zoom, rumor, rurple-ng, ryu, sam2p, scikit-learn, serd, shellex, shorewall-doc, shunit2, simbody, simplejson, smcroute, soqt, sord, spacezero, spamassassin-heatu, spamprobe, sphinxcontrib-youtube, splitpatch, sratom, stompserver, syncevolution, tgt, ticgit, tinyproxy, tor, tox, transmissionrpc, tweeper, udpcast, units-filter, viennacl, visp, vite, vmfs-tools, waffle, waitress, wavtool-pl, webkit2pdf, wfmath, wit, wreport, x11proto-input, xbae, xdg-utils, xdotool, xsystem35, yapsy, yaz. Please note that some packages in the above list are falsely reproducible. In the experimental toolchain, debhelper exported TZ=UTC and this made packages capturing the current date (without the time) reproducible in the current test environment. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Ben Hutchings upstreamed several patches to fix Linux reproducibility issues which were quickly merged. Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Uploads that should fix packages not in main: Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet: reproducible.debian.net A new package set has been added for lua maintainers. (h01ger) tracker.debian.org now only shows reproducibility issues for unstable. Holger and Mattia worked on several bugfixes and enhancements: finished initial test setup for NetBSD, rewriting more shell scripts in Python, saving UDD requests, and more debbindiff development Reiner Herrmann fixed text comparison of files with different encoding. Documentation update Juan Picca added to the commands needed for a local test chroot installation of the locales-all package. Package reviews 286 obsolete reviews have been removed, 278 added and 243 updated this week. 43 new bugs for packages failing to build from sources have been filled by Chris West (Faux), Mattia Rizzolo, and h01ger. The following new issues have been added: timestamps_in_manpages_generated_by_ronn, timestamps_in_documentation_generated_by_org_mode, and timestamps_in_pdf_generated_by_matplotlib. Misc. Reiner Herrmann has submitted patches for OpenWrt. Chris Lamb cleaned up some code and removed cruft in the misc.git repository. Mattia Rizzolo updated the prebuilder script to match what is currently done on reproducible.debian.net.

5 July 2015

Robert Edmonds: Git packaging workflow for py-lmdb

Recently, I packaged the py-lmdb Python binding for the LMDB database library. This package is going to be team maintained by the pkg-db group, which is responsible for maintaining BerkeleyDB and LMDB packages. Below are my notes on (re-)Debianizing this package and how the Git repository for the source package is laid out. The upstream py-lmdb developer has a Git-centric workflow. Development is done on the master branch, with regular releases done as fast-forward merges to the release branch. Release tags of the form py-lmdb_X.YZ are provided. The only tarballs provided are the ones that GitHub automatically generates from tags. Since these tarballs are synthetic and the content of these tarballs matches the content on the corresponding tag, we will ignore them in favor of using the release tags directly. (The --git-pristine-tar-commit option to gbp-buildpackage will be used so that .orig.tar.gz files can be replicated so that the Debian archive will accept subsequent uploads, but tarballs are otherwise irrelevant to our workflow.) To make it clear that the release tags come from upstream's repository, they should be prefixed with upstream/, which would preferably result in a DEP-14 compliant scheme. (Unfortunately, since upstream's release tags begin with py-lmdb_, this doesn't quite match the pattern that DEP-14 recommends.) Here is how the local packaging repository is initialized. Note that git clone isn't used, so that we can customize how the tags are fetched. Instead, we create an empty Git repository and add the upstream repository as the upstream remote. The --no-tags option is used, so that git fetch does not import the remote's tags. However, we also add a custom fetch refspec refs/tags/*:refs/tags/upstream/* so that the remote's tags are explicitly fetched, but with the upstream/ prefix.
$ mkdir py-lmdb
$ cd py-lmdb
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/edmonds/debian/py-lmdb/.git/
$ git remote add --no-tags upstream https://github.com/dw/py-lmdb
$ git config --add remote.upstream.fetch 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/upstream/*'
$ git fetch upstream
remote: Counting objects: 3336, done.
remote: Total 3336 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 3336
Receiving objects: 100% (3336/3336), 2.15 MiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1958/1958), done.
From https://github.com/dw/py-lmdb
 * [new branch]      master     -> upstream/master
 * [new branch]      release    -> upstream/release
 * [new branch]      win32-sparse-patch -> upstream/win32-sparse-patch
 * [new tag]         last-cython-version -> upstream/last-cython-version
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.1 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.1
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.2 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.2
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.3 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.3
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.4 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.4
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.5 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.5
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.51 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.51
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.52 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.52
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.53 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.53
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.54 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.54
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.56 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.56
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.57 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.57
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.58 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.58
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.59 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.59
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.60 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.60
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.61 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.61
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.62 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.62
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.63 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.63
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.64 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.64
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.65 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.65
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.66 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.66
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.67 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.67
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.68 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.68
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.69 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.69
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.70 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.70
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.71 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.71
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.72 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.72
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.73 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.73
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.74 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.74
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.75 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.75
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.76 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.76
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.77 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.77
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.78 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.78
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.79 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.79
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.80 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.80
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.81 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.81
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.82 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.82
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.83 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.83
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.84 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.84
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.85 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.85
 * [new tag]         py-lmdb_0.86 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.86
$
Note that at this point we have content from the upstream remote in our local repository, but we don't have any local branches:
$ git status
On branch master
Initial commit
nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)
$ git branch -a
  remotes/upstream/master
  remotes/upstream/release
  remotes/upstream/win32-sparse-patch
$
We will use the DEP-14 naming scheme for the packaging branches, so the branch for packages targeted at unstable will be called debian/sid. Since I already made an initial 0.84-1 upload, we need to start the debian/sid branch from the upstream 0.84 tag and import the original packaging content from that upload. The --no-track flag is passed to git checkout initially so that Git doesn't consider the upstream release tag upstream/py-lmdb_0.84 to be the upstream branch for our packaging branch.
$ git checkout --no-track -b debian/sid upstream/py-lmdb_0.84
Switched to a new branch 'debian/sid'
$
At this point I imported the original packaging content for 0.84-1 with git am. Then, I signed the debian/0.84-1 tag:
$ git tag -s -m 'Debian release 0.84-1' debian/0.84-1
$ git verify-tag debian/0.84-1
gpg: Signature made Sat 04 Jul 2015 02:49:42 PM EDT using RSA key ID AAF6CDAE
gpg: Good signature from "Robert Edmonds <edmonds@mycre.ws>" [ultimate]
gpg:                 aka "Robert Edmonds <edmonds@fsi.io>" [ultimate]
gpg:                 aka "Robert Edmonds <edmonds@debian.org>" [ultimate]
$
New upstream releases are integrated by fetching new upstream tags and non-fast-forward merging into the packaging branch. The latest release is 0.86, so we merge from the upstream/py-lmdb_0.86 tag.
$ git fetch upstream --dry-run
[...]
$ git fetch upstream
[...]
$ git checkout debian/sid
Already on 'debian/sid'
$ git merge --no-ff --no-edit upstream/py-lmdb_0.86
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 ChangeLog                        46 ++++++++++++++
 docs/index.rst                   46 +++++++++++++-
 docs/themes/acid/layout.html      4 +-
 examples/dirtybench-gdbm.py       6 ++
 examples/dirtybench.py           19 ++++++
 examples/nastybench.py           18 ++++--
 examples/parabench.py             6 ++
 lib/lmdb.h                       37 ++++++-----
 lib/mdb.c                       281 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------------
 lib/midl.c                        2 +-
 lib/midl.h                        2 +-
 lib/py-lmdb/preload.h            48 ++++++++++++++
 lmdb/__init__.py                  2 +-
 lmdb/cffi.py                    120 ++++++++++++++++++++++++-----------
 lmdb/cpython.c                   86 +++++++++++++++++++------
 lmdb/tool.py                      5 +-
 misc/gdb.commands                21 ++++++
 misc/runtests-travisci.sh         3 +-
 misc/runtests-ubuntu-12-04.sh    28 ++++----
 setup.py                          2 +
 tests/crash_test.py              22 +++++++
 tests/cursor_test.py             37 +++++++++++
 tests/env_test.py                73 +++++++++++++++++++++
 tests/testlib.py                 14 +++-
 tests/txn_test.py                20 ++++++
 25 files changed, 773 insertions(+), 175 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 lib/py-lmdb/preload.h
 create mode 100644 misc/gdb.commands
$
Here I did some additional development work like editing the debian/gbp.conf file and applying a fix for #790738 to make the package build reproducibly. The package is now ready for an 0.86-1 upload, so I ran the following gbp dch command:
$ gbp dch --release --auto --new-version=0.86-1 --commit
gbp:info: Found tag for topmost changelog version '6bdbb56c04571fe2d5d22aa0287ab0dc83959de5'
gbp:info: Continuing from commit '6bdbb56c04571fe2d5d22aa0287ab0dc83959de5'
gbp:info: Changelog has been committed for version 0.86-1
$
This automatically generates a changelog entry for 0.86-1, but it includes commit summaries for all of the upstream commits since the last release, which I had to edit out. Then, I used gbp buildpackage with BUILDER=pbuilder to build the package in a clean, up-to-date sid chroot. After checking the result, I signed the debian/0.86-1 tag:
$ git tag -s -m 'Debian release 0.86-1' debian/0.86-1
$
The package is now ready to be pushed to git.debian.org. First, a bare repository is initialized:
$ ssh git.debian.org
edmonds@moszumanska:~$ cd /srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db$ umask 002
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db$ mkdir py-lmdb.git
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db$ cd py-lmdb.git/
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git$ git --bare init --shared
Initialized empty shared Git repository in /srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git/
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git$ echo 'py-lmdb Debian packaging' > description
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git$ mv hooks/post-update.sample hooks/post-update
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git$ chmod a+x hooks/post-update
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git$ logout
Shared connection to git.debian.org closed.
Then, we add a new debian remote to our local packaging repository. Per our repository conventions, we need to ensure that only branch names matching debian/* and pristine-tar and tag names matching debian/* and upstream/* are pushed to the debian remote when we run git push debian, so we add a a set of remote.debian.push refspecs that correspond to these conventions. We also add an explicit remote.debian.fetch refspec to fetch tags.
$ git remote add debian ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git
$ git config --add remote.debian.push 'refs/tags/debian/*'
$ git config --add remote.debian.push 'refs/tags/upstream/*'
$ git config --add remote.debian.push 'refs/heads/debian/*'
$ git config --add remote.debian.push 'refs/heads/pristine-tar'
$ git config --add remote.debian.fetch 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'
We now run the initial push to the remote Git repository. The --set-upstream option is used so that our local branches will be configured to track the corresponding remote branches. Also note that the debian/* and upstream/* tags are pushed as well.
$ git push debian --set-upstream
Counting objects: 3333, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (1083/1083), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3333/3333), 1.37 MiB   0 bytes/s, done.
Total 3333 (delta 2231), reused 3314 (delta 2218)
To ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git
 * [new branch]      pristine-tar -> pristine-tar
 * [new branch]      debian/sid -> debian/sid
 * [new tag]         debian/0.84-1 -> debian/0.84-1
 * [new tag]         debian/0.86-1 -> debian/0.86-1
 * [new tag]         upstream/last-cython-version -> upstream/last-cython-version
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.1 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.1
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.2 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.2
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.3 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.3
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.4 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.4
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.5 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.5
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.51 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.51
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.52 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.52
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.53 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.53
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.54 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.54
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.56 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.56
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.57 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.57
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.58 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.58
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.59 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.59
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.60 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.60
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.61 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.61
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.62 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.62
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.63 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.63
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.64 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.64
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.65 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.65
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.66 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.66
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.67 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.67
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.68 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.68
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.69 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.69
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.70 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.70
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.71 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.71
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.72 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.72
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.73 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.73
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.74 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.74
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.75 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.75
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.76 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.76
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.77 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.77
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.78 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.78
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.79 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.79
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.80 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.80
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.81 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.81
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.82 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.82
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.83 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.83
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.84 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.84
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.85 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.85
 * [new tag]         upstream/py-lmdb_0.86 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.86
Branch pristine-tar set up to track remote branch pristine-tar from debian.
Branch debian/sid set up to track remote branch debian/sid from debian.
$
After the initial push, we need to configure the remote repository so that clones will checkout the debian/sid branch by default:
$ ssh git.debian.org
edmonds@moszumanska:~$ cd /srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git/
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git$ git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/debian/sid
edmonds@moszumanska:/srv/git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git$ logout
Shared connection to git.debian.org closed.
We can check if there are any updates in upstream's Git repository with the following command:
$ git fetch upstream --dry-run -v
From https://github.com/dw/py-lmdb
 = [up to date]      master     -> upstream/master
 = [up to date]      release    -> upstream/release
 = [up to date]      win32-sparse-patch -> upstream/win32-sparse-patch
 = [up to date]      last-cython-version -> upstream/last-cython-version
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.1 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.1
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.2 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.2
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.3 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.3
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.4 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.4
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.5 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.5
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.51 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.51
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.52 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.52
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.53 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.53
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.54 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.54
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.56 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.56
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.57 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.57
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.58 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.58
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.59 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.59
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.60 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.60
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.61 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.61
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.62 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.62
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.63 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.63
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.64 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.64
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.65 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.65
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.66 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.66
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.67 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.67
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.68 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.68
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.69 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.69
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.70 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.70
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.71 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.71
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.72 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.72
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.73 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.73
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.74 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.74
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.75 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.75
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.76 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.76
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.77 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.77
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.78 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.78
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.79 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.79
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.80 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.80
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.81 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.81
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.82 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.82
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.83 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.83
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.84 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.84
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.85 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.85
 = [up to date]      py-lmdb_0.86 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.86
We can check if any co-maintainers have pushed updates to the git.debian.org repository with the following command:
$ git fetch debian --dry-run -v
From ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb
 = [up to date]      debian/sid -> debian/debian/sid
 = [up to date]      pristine-tar -> debian/pristine-tar
 = [up to date]      debian/0.84-1 -> debian/0.84-1
 = [up to date]      debian/0.86-1 -> debian/0.86-1
 = [up to date]      upstream/last-cython-version -> upstream/last-cython-version
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.1 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.1
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.2 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.2
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.3 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.3
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.4 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.4
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.5 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.5
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.51 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.51
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.52 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.52
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.53 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.53
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.54 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.54
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.56 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.56
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.57 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.57
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.58 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.58
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.59 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.59
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.60 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.60
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.61 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.61
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.62 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.62
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.63 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.63
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.64 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.64
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.65 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.65
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.66 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.66
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.67 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.67
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.68 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.68
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.69 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.69
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.70 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.70
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.71 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.71
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.72 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.72
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.73 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.73
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.74 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.74
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.75 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.75
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.76 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.76
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.77 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.77
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.78 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.78
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.79 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.79
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.80 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.80
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.81 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.81
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.82 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.82
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.83 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.83
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.84 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.84
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.85 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.85
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.86 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.86
$
We can check if anything needs to be pushed from our local repository to the git.debian.org repository with the following command:
$ git push debian --dry-run -v
Pushing to ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git
To ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git
 = [up to date]      debian/sid -> debian/sid
 = [up to date]      pristine-tar -> pristine-tar
 = [up to date]      debian/0.84-1 -> debian/0.84-1
 = [up to date]      debian/0.86-1 -> debian/0.86-1
 = [up to date]      upstream/last-cython-version -> upstream/last-cython-version
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.1 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.1
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.2 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.2
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.3 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.3
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.4 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.4
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.5 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.5
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.51 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.51
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.52 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.52
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.53 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.53
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.54 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.54
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.56 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.56
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.57 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.57
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.58 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.58
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.59 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.59
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.60 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.60
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.61 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.61
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.62 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.62
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.63 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.63
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.64 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.64
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.65 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.65
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.66 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.66
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.67 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.67
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.68 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.68
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.69 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.69
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.70 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.70
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.71 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.71
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.72 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.72
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.73 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.73
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.74 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.74
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.75 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.75
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.76 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.76
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.77 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.77
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.78 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.78
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.79 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.79
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.80 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.80
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.81 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.81
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.82 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.82
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.83 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.83
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.84 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.84
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.85 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.85
 = [up to date]      upstream/py-lmdb_0.86 -> upstream/py-lmdb_0.86
Everything up-to-date
Finally, in order to set up a fresh local clone of the git.debian.org repository that's configured like the local repository created above, we have to do the following:
$ git clone --origin debian ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-db/py-lmdb.git
Cloning into 'py-lmdb'...
remote: Counting objects: 3333, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1070/1070), done.
remote: Total 3333 (delta 2231), reused 3333 (delta 2231)
Receiving objects: 100% (3333/3333), 1.37 MiB   1.11 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2231/2231), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
$ cd py-lmdb
$ git remote add --no-tags upstream https://github.com/dw/py-lmdb
$ git config --add remote.upstream.fetch 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/upstream/*'
$ git fetch upstream
remote: Counting objects: 56, done.
remote: Total 56 (delta 25), reused 25 (delta 25), pack-reused 31
Unpacking objects: 100% (56/56), done.
From https://github.com/dw/py-lmdb
 * [new branch]      master     -> upstream/master
 * [new branch]      release    -> upstream/release
 * [new branch]      win32-sparse-patch -> upstream/win32-sparse-patch
$ git branch --track pristine-tar debian/pristine-tar 
Branch pristine-tar set up to track remote branch pristine-tar from debian.
$ git config --add remote.debian.push 'refs/tags/debian/*'
$ git config --add remote.debian.push 'refs/tags/upstream/*'
$ git config --add remote.debian.push 'refs/heads/debian/*'
$ git config --add remote.debian.push 'refs/heads/pristine-tar'
$ git config --add remote.debian.fetch 'refs/tags/*:refs/tags/*'
$
This is a fair amount of effort beyond a simple git clone, though, so I wonder if anything can be done to optimize this.

17 June 2015

Norbert Preining: Gaming: Portal

Ok, I have to admit, I sometimes do game and recently I finished Portal. Quite old (released in 2007), but still lots of fun. I started playing it about one year ago, off and on, until I recently finished the last level. Took me about 1 year of playing to finish the actual playing time of about 10h I guess you can see how much an addict I am  portalhazards I have never been a gamer, and I think there are only three set of games I played for extended periods of time:
plus one more game, which got me hooked somehow: Hard-core board gamer who I am (I prefer playing with people real games without computer), I loved the Myst series for its crazy riddles, where solving them often needs a combination of logical thinking, recognizing patterns in images and sounds, and piecing together long list of hints. This is something a normal board game cannot provide. From the Descent series I loved the complete freedom of movement. Normal first-person shooters are just like humans running around, a bit of jumping and crouching, but Descent gives you 6D freedom which led to some people getting sick while watching me playing. From the Civilization series I don t know what I liked particularly, but it got you involved and allowed you to play long rounds. After these sins of youngsters, I haven t played for long long time, until a happy coincidence (of being Debian Developer) brought Steam onto my (Linux) machine together with a bunch of games I received for free. One of the games was Portal. Portal is in the style of Myst games one can place dual portals in various places, and by entering one of the portals, one leaves through the other. Using this one has to manage to solve loads of puzzle, evade being shot, dissolved in acid, crashed to death, etc etc, with the only aim to leave the underground station. portal-ex Besides shooting these portals there are some cubes that one can carry around and use for a variety of purposes, like putting them onto buttons, using them as stairs, protecting yourself from being shot, etc. But that s already all the tools one has. Despite of this, the levels pose increasingly difficult problems, and one is surprised how strange things one can achieve with these limited abilities and no, one cannot buy new power-ups, its not WoW. Logical thinking, tactic, and a certain level of reaction suffices. While not as philosophical as Myst, it was still a lot of fun. The only thing I am a bit unclear is, where to go from here. There are two possible successors: The logical one would be Portal 2. But I recently found a game that reminded me even more of the Myst series, combined with Portal: The Talos Principle, with stunning graphics: talos1 talos2 And filled with riddles again, maybe not as involved as in the Myst series (I don t know by now), but still a bit more challenging than Portal s one:
talos3 talos4 Difficult decision. If you have any other suggestions, please let me know!

4 May 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: first week in Stretch cycle

Debian Jessie has been released on April 25th, 2015. This has opened the Stretch development cycle. Reactions to the idea of making Debian build reproducibly have been pretty enthusiastic. As the pace is now likely to be even faster, let's see if we can keep everyone up-to-date on the developments. Before the release of Jessie The story goes back a long way but a formal announcement to the project has only been sent in February 2015. Since then, too much work has happened to make a complete report, but to give some highlights: Lunar did a pretty improvised lightning talk during the Mini-DebConf in Lyon. This past week It seems changes were pilling behind the curtains given the amount of activity that happened in just one week. Toolchain fixes We also rebased the experimental version of debhelper twice to merge the latest set of changes. Lunar submitted a patch to add a -creation-date to genisoimage. Reiner Herrmann opened #783938 to request making -notimestamp the default behavior for javadoc. Juan Picca submitted a patch to add a --use-date flag to texi2html. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes of their build dependencies: apport, batctl, cil, commons-math3, devscripts, disruptor, ehcache, ftphs, gtk2hs-buildtools, haskell-abstract-deque, haskell-abstract-par, haskell-acid-state, haskell-adjunctions, haskell-aeson, haskell-aeson-pretty, haskell-alut, haskell-ansi-terminal, haskell-async, haskell-attoparsec, haskell-augeas, haskell-auto-update, haskell-binary-conduit, haskell-hscurses, jsch, ledgersmb, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libarchive-tar-wrapper-perl, libbusiness-onlinepayment-payflowpro-perl, libcapture-tiny-perl, libchi-perl, libcommons-codec-java, libconfig-model-itself-perl, libconfig-model-tester-perl, libcpan-perl-releases-perl, libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libdbd-firebird-perl, libdbix-class-resultset-recursiveupdate-perl, libdbix-profile-perl, libdevel-cover-perl, libdevel-ptkdb-perl, libfile-tail-perl, libfinance-quote-perl, libformat-human-bytes-perl, libgtk2-perl, libhibernate-validator-java, libimage-exiftool-perl, libjson-perl, liblinux-prctl-perl, liblog-any-perl, libmail-imapclient-perl, libmocked-perl, libmodule-build-xsutil-perl, libmodule-extractuse-perl, libmodule-signature-perl, libmoosex-simpleconfig-perl, libmoox-handlesvia-perl, libnet-frame-layer-ipv6-perl, libnet-openssh-perl, libnumber-format-perl, libobject-id-perl, libpackage-pkg-perl, libpdf-fdf-simple-perl, libpod-webserver-perl, libpoe-component-pubsub-perl, libregexp-grammars-perl, libreply-perl, libscalar-defer-perl, libsereal-encoder-perl, libspreadsheet-read-perl, libspring-java, libsql-abstract-more-perl, libsvn-class-perl, libtemplate-plugin-gravatar-perl, libterm-progressbar-perl, libterm-shellui-perl, libtest-dir-perl, libtest-log4perl-perl, libtext-context-eitherside-perl, libtime-warp-perl, libtree-simple-perl, libwww-shorten-simple-perl, libwx-perl-processstream-perl, libxml-filter-xslt-perl, libxml-writer-string-perl, libyaml-tiny-perl, mupen64plus-core, nmap, openssl, pkg-perl-tools, quodlibet, r-cran-rjags, r-cran-rjson, r-cran-sn, r-cran-statmod, ruby-nokogiri, sezpoz, skksearch, slurm-llnl, stellarium. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: Improvements to reproducible.debian.net Mattia Rizzolo has been working on compressing logs using gzip to save disk space. The web server would uncompress them on-the-fly for clients which does not accept gzip content. Mattia Rizzolo worked on a new page listing various breakage: missing or bad debbindiff output, missing build logs, unavailable build dependencies. Holger Levsen added a new execution environment to run debbindiff using dependencies from testing. This is required for packages built with GHC as the compiler only understands interfaces built by the same version. debbindiff development Version 17 has been uploaded to unstable. It now supports comparing ISO9660 images, dictzip files and should compare identical files much faster. Documentation update Various small updates and fixes to the pages about PDF produced by LaTeX, DVI produced by LaTeX, static libraries, Javadoc, PE binaries, and Epydoc. Package reviews Known issues have been tagged when known to be deterministic as some might unfortunately not show up on every single build. For example, two new issues have been identified by building with one timezone in April and one in May. RD and help2man add current month and year to the documentation they are producing. 1162 packages have been removed and 774 have been added in the past week. Most of them are the work of proper automated investigation done by Chris West. Summer of code Finally, we learned that both akira and Dhole were accepted for this Google Summer of Code. Let's welcome them! They have until May 25th before coding officialy begins. Now is the good time to help them feel more comfortable by sharing all these little bits of knowledge on how Debian works.

Next.