Search Results: "anderson"

12 September 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 14.0.2-1 on CRAN: Updates

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1164 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 36.1 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 595 times according to Google Scholar. Conrad released two small incremental releases to version 14.0.0. We did not immediately bring these to CRAN as we have to be mindful of the desired upload cadence of once every one or two months . But as 14.0.2 has been stable for a few weeks, we now decided to bring it to CRAN. Changes since the last CRAN release are summarised below, and overall fairly minimal. On the package side, we reorder what citation() returns, and now follow CRAN requirements via Authors@R.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.0.2-1 (2024-09-11)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.0.2 (Stochastic Parrot)
    • Optionally use C++20 memory alignment
    • Minor corrections for several corner-cases
  • The order of items displayed by citation() is reversed (Conrad in #449)
  • The DESCRIPTION file now uses an Authors@R field with ORCID IDs

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

8 July 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 14.0.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1158 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 35.1 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 587 times according to Google Scholar. Conrad released a new major upstream version 14.0.0 a couple of days ago. We had been testing this new version extensively over several rounds of reverse-dependency checks across all 1100+ packages. This revealed nine packages requiring truly minor adjustments which eight maintainers made in a matter of days; all this was coordinated in issue #443. Following the upload, CRAN noticed one more issue (see issue #446) but this turned out to be local to the package. There are also renewed deprecation warnings with some Armadillo changes which we will need to address one-by-one. Last but not least with this release we also changed the package versioning scheme to follow upstream Armadillo more closely. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 14.0.0-1 (2024-07-05)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 14.0.0 (Stochastic Parrot)
    • C++14 is now the minimum recommended C++ standard
    • Faster handling of compound expressions by as_scalar(), accu(), dot()
    • Faster interactions between sparse and dense matrices
    • Expanded stddev() to handle sparse matrices
    • Expanded relational operators to handle expressions between sparse matrices and scalars
    • Added .as_dense() to obtain dense vector/matrix representation of any sparse matrix expression
    • Updated physical constants to NIST 2022 CODATA values
  • New package version numbering scheme following upstream versions
  • Re-enabling ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKE for silent CRAN builds

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

29 June 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Bitter Angels

Review: Bitter Angels, by C.L. Anderson
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Copyright: 2009
ISBN: 0-553-59217-3
Format: Mass market
Pages: 438
Bitter Angels is a stand-alone science fiction novel. It won the Philip K. Dick award for best SF original paperback in 2010. C.L. Anderson is a pen name for Sarah Zettel. Terese was a Guardian, one of the agents of the Pax Solaris who find ways to keep the peace in troubled systems and high-stress situations with the help of an implanted Companion, an assistant AI. Forty years ago, on one of those missions, she was captured and her Companion was forcibly removed. She was rescued by her friend and mentor and retired afterwards, starting a new life and a new family, trying to leave the memories behind. Now, the woman who rescued her is dead. She was murdered on duty in the Erasmus system, a corporate hellhole that appears to be on the verge of exploding into a political hot spot. Bianca's last instructions asked for Terese to replace her. Terese's family is furious at her for even considering returning to the Guardians, but she can't say no. Duty, and Bianca's dying request, call too strongly. Amerand is Security on Dazzle, one of the Erasmus stations. He is one of the refugees from Oblivion, the station that the First Bloods who rule the system let die. He keeps his head above water and tries to protect his father and find his mother without doing anything that the ever-present Clerks might find concerning. Keeping an eye on newly-arriving Solaris saints is a typical assignment, since the First Bloods don't trust the meddling do-gooders. But something is not quite right, and a cryptic warning from his Clerk makes him even more suspicious. This is the second book by Sarah Zettel that I've read, and both of them have been tense, claustrophobic thrillers set in a world with harsh social inequality and little space for the characters to maneuver. In this case, the structure of her future universe reminded me a bit of Iain M. Banks's Culture, but with less advanced technology and only humans. The Pax Solaris has eliminated war within its borders and greatly extended lifespans. That peace is maintained by Guardians, who play a role similar to Special Circumstances but a bit more idealist and less lethal. They show up where there are problems and meddle, manipulating and pushing to try to defuse the problems before they reach the Pax Solaris. Like a Culture novel, nearly all of the action takes place outside the Pax Solaris in the Erasmus system. Erasmus is a corporate colony that has turned into a cross between a hereditary dictatorship and the Corporate Rim from Martha Wells's Murderbot series. Debt slavery is ubiquitous, economic inequality is inconceivably vast, and the Clerks are everywhere. Erasmus natives like Amerand have very little leeway and even fewer options. Survival is a matter of not drawing the attention of the wrong people. Terese and her fellow Guardians are appalled, but also keenly aware that destabilizing the local politics may make the situation even worse and get a lot of people killed. Bitter Angels is structured like a mystery: who killed Bianca, and what was her plan when she was killed? Unlike a lot of books of this type, the villains are not idiots and their plan is both satisfyingly complex and still depressingly relevant. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that I have read recent news articles about people with very similar plans, albeit involving less science-fiction technology. Anderson starts with a tense situation and increases the pressure relentlessly, leaving the heroes one step behind the villains for almost the entire novel. It is not happy or optimistic reading at times, the book is quite dark but it certainly was engrossing. The one world-building quibble that I had is that the Erasmus system is portrayed partly as a hydraulic empire, and while this is arguably feasible given that spaceship travel is strictly controlled, it seemed like a weird choice given the prevalence of water on the nearby moons. Water smuggling plays a significant role in the plot, and I wasn't entirely convinced of the politics and logistics behind it. If this sort of thing bugs you, there are some pieces that may require suspension of disbelief. Bitter Angels is the sort of tense thriller where catastrophe is barely avoided and the cost of victory is too high, so you will want to be in the mood for that before you dive in. But if that's what you're looking for, I thought Anderson delivered a complex and satisfying story. Content warning: major character suicide. Rating: 7 out of 10

31 May 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.4.0 on CRAN: Upstream Bugfix

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1151 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 34.6 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 584 times according to Google Scholar. Conrad released a new upstream bugfix yesterday (to improve views of sparse matrices). We uploaded it yesterday too but it once agfain took a day for the hard-working CRAN maintainers to concur that the two NOTEs from reverse-dependency checking over 1100 packages were in a fact false positves. And so it appeared on CRAN earlier today. We also increased the versioned dependency on Rcpp to match the use of optional entry-point headers Rcpp/Light, Rcpp/Lighter and Rcpp/Lightest. No other changes were made. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.4.0 (2024-05-30)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.4 (Cortisol Injector)
    • Faster handling of sparse submatrix views
  • Update versioned Depends on Rcpp to 1.0.8 or later to match use of Light/Lighter/Lightest headers.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

9 May 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.3.0 on CRAN: Upstream Bugfix

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1144 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 34.2 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 583 times according to Google Scholar. Conrad released a new upstream bugfix yesterday (for a corner case with fftw3). We uploaded it yesterday too but it took a day for the hard-working CRAN maintainers to concur that the one (!) NOTE from reverse-dependency checking over 1100 packages was in a fact a false positve. And so it appeared on CRAN (very) early this morning. We also made a change removing a long-redundant setter for C++11 mode via the plugin. No other changes were made. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.3.0 (2024-05-07)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.3 (Cortisol Injector)
    • Fix issue in fft() and fft2() in multi-threaded contexts with FFTW3 enabled
  • No longer set C++11 for the Rcpp plugin as this standard has been the default by R for very long time now.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

5 April 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.2.0 on CRAN: Upstream Fix

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1136 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 33.5 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 578 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings a new upstream bugfix release Armadillo 12.8.2 prepared by Conrad two days ago. It took the usual day to noodle over 1100+ reverse dependencies and ensure two failures were independent of the upgrade (i.e., no change to worse in CRAN parlance). It took CRAN another because we hit a random network outage for (spurious) NOTE on a remote URL, and were then caught in the shrapnel from another large package ecosystem update spuriously pointing some build failures that were due to a missing rebuild to us. All good, as human intervention comes to the rescue. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.2.0 (2024-04-02)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.2 (Cortisol Injector)
    • Workaround for FFTW3 header clash
    • Workaround in testing framework for issue under macOS
    • Minor cleanups to reduce code bloat
    • Improved documentation

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

3 March 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.1.0 on CRAN: Upstream Fix, Interface Polish

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1130 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.8 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 578 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings a new upstream bugfix release Armadillo 12.8.1 prepared by Conrad yesterday. It was delayed for a few hours as CRAN noticed an error in one package which we all concluded was spurious as it could be reproduced outside of the one run there. Following from the previous release, we also use the slighty faster Lighter header in the examples. And once it got to CRAN I also updated the Debian package. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.1.0 (2024-03-02)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.1 (Cortisol Injector)
    • Workaround in norm() for yet another bug in macOS accelerate framework
  • Update README for RcppArmadillo usage counts
  • Update examples to use '#include <RcppArmadillo/Lighter>' for faster compilation excluding unused Rcpp features

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

8 February 2024

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, Interface Polish

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1119 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.5 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 575 times according to Google Scholar. This release brings a new (stable) upstream (minor) release Armadillo 12.8.0 prepared by Conrad two days ago. We, as usual, prepared a release candidate which we tested against the over 1100 CRAN packages using RcppArmadillo. This found no issues, which was confirmed by CRAN once we uploaded and so it arrived as a new release today in a fully automated fashion. We also made a small change that had been prepared by GitHub issue #400: a few internal header files that were cluttering the top-level of the include directory have been moved to internal directories. The standard header is of course unaffected, and the set of full / light / lighter / lightest headers (matching we did a while back in Rcpp) also continue to work as one expects. This change was also tested in a full reverse-dependency check in January but had not been released to CRAN yet. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.8.0.0 (2024-02-06)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 12.8.0 (Cortisol Injector)
    • Faster detection of symmetric expressions by pinv() and rank()
    • Expanded shift() to handle sparse matrices
    • Expanded conv_to for more flexible conversions between sparse and dense matrices
    • Added cbrt()
    • More compact representation of integers when saving matrices in CSV format
  • Five non-user facing top-level include files have been removed (#432 closing #400 and building on #395 and #396)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

5 December 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.6.6.1 on CRAN: No More Deprecation

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 1126 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 31.7 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 569 times according to Google Scholar. This release ends the practice on asking Armadillo to suppress deprecation warnings. RcppArmadillo, as noted, has a large user base. Sometimes Conrad sometimes made changes without too much of a heads-up so at times it was opportune to not bring those warnings to dozens (or maybe hundreds) of packages at CRAN. Yet we need to balance this with the demonstrable need to call out older deprecated code use. So sixteen months ago, with GitHub issue #391, we started to alert author of 30+ affected packages and supplied either pull requests or emailed patches to all. Eleven months ago GitHub issues #402 was added for a second deprecation. And the time of making the switch has come. Release 0.12.6.6.1 no longer defines ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER. So among the over 1100 packages using RcppArmadillo at CRAN, around a good dozen or so were flagged in the upload but CRAN concurred and let the package migrate to CRAN. If you maintain an affected package, consider applying the patch or pull request now. A simple stop-gap measure also exists by adding -DARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER to src/Makevars as either PKG_CPPFLAGS or PKG_CXXFLAGS to reactivate it. But a proper code update, which is generally simple, may be better. If you are unsure, do not hesitate to get in touch. The set of changes since the last CRAN release follows.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.12.6.6.1 (2023-12-03)
  • Following the extendeded transition in #391 and #402, this release no longer sets ARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER. Maintainers of affected packages have received pull requests or patches and can set -DARMA_IGNORE_DEPRECATED_MARKER as PKG_CPPFLAGS.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

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

4 December 2023

Russ Allbery: Cumulative haul

I haven't done one of these in quite a while, long enough that I've already read and reviewed many of these books. John Joseph Adams (ed.) The Far Reaches (sff anthology)
Poul Anderson The Shield of Time (sff)
Catherine Asaro The Phoenix Code (sff)
Catherine Asaro The Veiled Web (sff)
Travis Baldree Bookshops & Bonedust (sff)
Sue Burke Semiosis (sff)
Jacqueline Carey Cassiel's Servant (sff)
Rob Copeland The Fund (nonfiction)
Mar Delaney Wolf Country (sff)
J.S. Dewes The Last Watch (sff)
J.S. Dewes The Exiled Fleet (sff)
Mike Duncan Hero of Two Worlds (nonfiction)
Mike Duncan The Storm Before the Storm (nonfiction)
Kate Elliott King's Dragon (sff)
Zeke Faux Number Go Up (nonfiction)
Nicola Griffith Menewood (sff)
S.L. Huang The Water Outlaws (sff)
Alaya Dawn Johnson The Library of Broken Worlds (sff)
T. Kingfisher Thornhedge (sff)
Naomi Kritzer Liberty's Daughter (sff)
Ann Leckie Translation State (sff)
Michael Lewis Going Infinite (nonfiction)
Jenna Moran Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory (sff collection)
Ari North Love and Gravity (graphic novel)
Ciel Pierlot Bluebird (sff)
Terry Pratchett A Hat Full of Sky (sff)
Terry Pratchett Going Postal (sff)
Terry Pratchett Thud! (sff)
Terry Pratchett Wintersmith (sff)
Terry Pratchett Making Money (sff)
Terry Pratchett Unseen Academicals (sff)
Terry Pratchett I Shall Wear Midnight (sff)
Terry Pratchett Snuff (sff)
Terry Pratchett Raising Steam (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Shepherd's Crown (sff)
Aaron A. Reed 50 Years of Text Games (nonfiction)
Dashka Slater Accountable (nonfiction)
Rory Stewart The Marches (nonfiction)
Emily Tesh Silver in the Wood (sff)
Emily Tesh Drowned Country (sff)
Valerie Vales Chilling Effect (sff)
Martha Wells System Collapse (sff)
Martha Wells Witch King (sff)

22 May 2022

Ulrike Uhlig: How do kids conceive the internet? - part 3

I received some feedback on the first part of interviews about the internet with children that I d like to share publicly here. Thank you! Your thoughts and experiences are important to me! In the first interview round there was this French girl.
Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time on their phones and people should rather spend more time with their children.
To this bit, one person reacted saying that they first laughed when reading her proposal, but then felt extremely touched by it. Another person reacted to the same bit of text:
That s just brilliant. We spend so much time worrying about how the internet will affect children while overlooking how it has already affected us as parents. It actively harms our relationship with our children (keeping us distracted from their amazing life) and sets a bad example for them. Too often, when we worry about children, we should look at our own behavior first. Until about that age (9-10+) at least, they are such a direct reflection of us that it s frightening
Yet another person reacted to the fact that many of the interviewees in the first round seemed to believe that the internet is immaterial, located somewhere in the air, while being at the same time omnipresent:
It reminds me of one time about a dozen years ago, when i was still working closely with one of the city high schools where i d just had a terrible series of days, dealing with hardware failure, crappy service followthrough by the school s ISP, and overheating in the server closet, and had basically stayed overnight at the school and just managed to get things back to mostly-functional before kids and teachers started showing up again. That afternoon, i d been asked by the teacher of a dystopian fiction class to join them for a discussion of Feed, which they d just finished reading. i had read it the week before, and came to class prepared for their questions. (the book is about a near-future where kids have cybernetic implants and their society is basically on a runaway communications overload; not a bad Y[oung]A[dult] novel, really!) The kids all knew me from around the school, but the teacher introduced my appearance in class as one of the most Internet-connected people and they wanted to ask me about whether i really thought the internet would do this kind of thing to our culture, which i think was the frame that the teacher had prepped them with. I asked them whether they thought the book was really about the Internet, or whether it was about mobile phones. Totally threw off the teacher s lesson plans, i think, but we had a good discussion. At one point, one of the kids asked me if there was some kind of crazy disaster and all the humans died out, would the internet just keep running? what would happen on it if we were all gone? all of my labor even that grueling week was invisible to him! The internet was an immaterial thing, or if not immaterial, a force of nature, a thing that you accounted for the way you accounted for the weather, or traffic jams. It didn t occur to him, even having just read a book that asked questions about what hyperconnectivity does to a culture (including grappling with issues of disparate access, effective discrimination based on who has the latest hardware, etc), it didn t occur to him that this shit all works to the extent that it does because people make it go. I felt lost trying to explain it to him, because where i wanted to get to with the class discussion was about how we might decide collectively to make it go somewhere else that our contributions to it, and our labor to perpetuate it (or not) might actually help shape the future that the network helps us slide into. but he didn t even see that human decisions or labor played a role it in at all, let alone a potentially directive role. We were really starting at square zero, which wasn t his fault. Or the fault of his classmates that matter but maybe a little bit of fault on the teacher, who i thought should have been emphasizing this more but even the teacher clearly thought of the internet as a thing being done to us not as something we might actually drive one way or another. And she s not even wrong most people don t have much control, just like most people can t control the weather, even as our weather changes based on aggregate human activity.
I was quite impressed by seeing the internet perceived as a force of nature, so we continued this discussion a bit:
that whole story happened before we started talking about the cloud , but the cloud really reinforces this idea, i think. not that anyone actually thinks that the cloud is a literal cloud, but language shapes minds in subtle ways.
(Bold emphasis in the texts are mine.) Thanks :) I m happy and touched that these interviews prompted your wonderful reactions, and I hope that there ll be more to come on this topic. I m working on it!

12 February 2022

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: apt-offline 1.8.4

apt-offline 1.8.4 apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released. This release includes many bug fixes but the important ones are:
  • Better GPG signature handling
  • Support for verifying InRelease files

Changelog
apt-offline (1.8.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium
  [ Debian Janitor ]
  * Update standards version to 4.5.0, no changes needed.
  [ Paul Wise ]
  * Clarify file type in unknown file message
  * Fix typos
  * Remove trailing whitespace
  * Update LICENSE file to match official GNU version
  * Complain when there are no valid keyrings instead of missing keyrings
  * Make all syncrhronised files world readable
  * Fix usage of indefinite articles
  * Only show the APT Offline GUI once in the menu
  * Update out of date URLs
  * Fix date and whitespace issues in the manual page
  * Replace stereotyping with an appropriate word
  * Switch more Python shebangs to Python 3
  * Correct usage of the /tmp/ directory
  * Fix YAML files
  * Fix usage of the log API
  * Make the copying of changelog lines less brittle
  * Do not split keyring paths on whitespace
  [ Ritesh Raj Sarraf ]
  * Drop the redundant import of the apt module.
    Thanks to github/dandelionred
  * Fix deprecation of get_bugs() in debianbts
  * Drop the unused IgnoredBugTypes
  * Set encoding for files when opening
  * Better error logging when apt fails
  * Don't mandate a default option
  * Demote metadata errors to verbose
  * Also log an error message for every failed .deb url
  * Check hard for the url type
  * Check for ascii armored signature files.
    Thanks to David Klnischkies
  * Add MIME type for InRelease files
  * Drop patch 0001-Drop-the-redundant-import-of-the-apt-module.patch.
    Now part of the 1.8.4 release
  * Prepare release 1.8.3
  * Prepare release 1.8.4
  * debian packaging
    + Bump debhelper compatibility to 13
    + Update install files
  [ Dean Anderson ]
  * [#143] Added support for verifying InRelease files
 -- Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@debian.org>  Sat, 12 Feb 2022 18:52:58 +0530

Resources
  • Tarball and Zip archive for apt-offline are available here
  • Packages should be available in Debian.
  • Development for apt-offline is currently hosted here

6 December 2021

Jonathan Dowland: Sixth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop lightning talk

me looking awkward, thanks [Mark Little](https://twitter.com/nmcl/status/1466148768043126791/photo/1) me looking awkward, thanks Mark Little
Last week I attended the UK Systems Research 2021 conference in County Durham, my first conference in nearly two years (since FOSDEM 2020, right on the cusp of the Pandemic). The Systems conference community is very pleasant and welcoming and so when I heard it was going to take place "physically" again this year I was so keen to attend I decided to hedge my bets and submit two talk proposals. I wasn't expecting them both to be accepted As well as the regular talks (more on those in another post) there is a tradition for people to give short, impromptu lightning talks after dinner on the second night. I've given two of these before, and I'd been considering whether to offer to one this time or not, but with two talks to deliver (and finish writing) I wasn't sure. Usually people talk about something interesting that they have been doing besides their research or day-jobs, but the last two years have been somewhat difficult and I didn't really think I had a topic to talk about. Then I wondered if that was a topic in itself During the first day of the conference (and especially one I'd got past one of my talks) I started to outline a lightning talk idea and it seemed to come out well enough that I thought I'd give it a go. Unusually I therefore had something written down and I was surprised how well it was received, so I thought I'd share it. Here it is:
I was anticipating the lightning talks and being cajoled into talking about something. I've done it twice before. So I've been racking my brains to figure out if I've done anything interesting enough to talk about. in 2018 I talked about some hack I'd made to the classic computer game Doom from 1993. I've done several hacks to Doom that I could probably talk about except I've become a bit uncomfortable about increasingly being thought of as "that doom guy". I'd been reflecting on why it was that I continued to mess about with that game in the first place and I realised it was a form of expression: I was treating Doom like a canvas. I've spent most of my career thinking about what I do in the frame of either science or engineering. I suffer from the creative urge and I've often expressed (and sated) that through my work. And that's possible because there's a craft in what we do. In 2019 I talked about a project I'd embarked on to resurrect my childhood computer, a Commodore Amiga 500, in order to rescue my childhood drawings and digital paintings. (There's the artistic thing again). I'd achieved that and I have ambitions to do some more Amiga stuff but again that's a work in progress and there's nothing much to talk about. In recent years I've been thinking more and more about art and became interested in the works and writings of people like Grayson Perry, Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. I first learned about Eno through his music but he's also a visual artist. and a music producer. As a producer in the 70s he co-invented a system to try and break out of writer's block called "oblique strategies": A deck of cards with oblique suggestions written on them. When you're stuck, you pull a card and it might help you to reframe what you are working on and think about it in a completely different way. I love this idea and I think we should use more things like that in software engineering at least. So back to casting about for something to talk about. What have I been doing in the last couple of years? Frankly, surviving - I've just about managed to keep doing my day job, and keep working on the PhD, at home with two young kids and home schooling and the rest of it. Which is an achievement but makes for a boring lightning talk. But I'd like to say that for anyone here who might have been worrying similarly: I think surviving is more than enough. I'll close on the subject of thinking like an artist and not an engineer. I brought some of the Oblique Strategies deck with me and I thought I'd draw a card to perhaps help you out of a creative dilemma if you're in one. And I kid you not, the first card I drew was this one:
Card reading 'You are an Engineer'

10 September 2021

Enrico Zini: A nightmare of confcalls and microphones

I had this nightmare where I had a very, very important confcall. I joined with Chrome. Chrome said Failed to access your microphone - Cannot use microphone for an unknown reason. Could not start audio source. I joined with Firefox. Firefox chose Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo as a microphone, and did not let me change it. Not in the browser, not in pavucontrol. I joined with the browser on my phone, and the webpage said This meeting needs to use your microphone and camera. Select *Allow* when your browser asks for permissions. But the question never came. I could hear people talking. I had very important things to say. I tried typing them in the chat window, but they weren't seeing it. The meeting ended. I was on the verge of tears.
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?
Since this nightmare happened for real, including the bit about tears in the end, let's see that it doesn't happen again. I should now have three working systems, which hopefully won't all break again all at the same time. Fixing Chrome I can reproduce this reliably, on Bullseye's standard Chromium 90.0.4430.212-1, just launched on an empty profile, no extensions. The webpage has camera and microphone allowed. Chrome doesn't show up in the recording tab of pulseaudio. Nothing on Chrome's stdout/stderr. JavaScript console has:
Logger.js:154 2021-09-10Txx:xx:xx.xxxZ [features/base/tracks] Failed to create local tracks
Array(2)
DOMException: Could not start audio source
I found the answer here:
I had the similar problem once with chromium. i could solve it by switching in preferences->microphone-> from "default" to "intern analog stereo".
Opening the little popup next to the microphone/mute button allows choosing other microphones, which work. Only "Same as system (Default)" does not work. Fixing Firefox I have firefox-esr 78.13.0esr-1~deb11u1. In Jitsi, microphone selection is disabled on the toolbar and in the settings menu. In pavucontrol, changing the recording device for Firefox has no effect. If for some reason the wrong microphone got chosen, those are not ways of fixing it. What I found works is to click on the camera permission icon, remove microphone permission, then reload the page. At that point Firefox will ask for permission again, and that microphone selection seems to work. Relevant bugs: on Jitsi and on Firefox. Since this is well known (once you find the relevant issues), I'd have appreciated Jitsi at least showing a link to an explanation of workarounds on Firefox, instead of just disabling microphone selection. Fixing Jitsi on the phone side I really don't want to preemptively give camera and microphone permissions to my phone browser. I noticed that there's the Jitsi app on F-Droid and much as I hate to use an app when a website would work, at least in this case it's a way to keep the permission sets separate, so I installed that. Fixing pavucontrol? I tried to find out why I can't change input device for FireFox on pavucontrol. I only managed to find an Ask Ubuntu question with no answer and a Unix StackExchange question with no answer.

14 September 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

Review: Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, edited by Maya Schenwar, et al.
Editor: Maya Schenwar
Editor: Joe Macar
Editor: Alana Yu-lan Price
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Copyright: June 2016
ISBN: 1-60846-684-1
Format: Kindle
Pages: 250
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an anthology of essays about policing in the United States. It's divided into two sections: one that enumerates ways that police are failing to serve or protect communities, and one that describes how communities are building resistance and alternatives. Haymarket Books (a progressive press in Chicago) has made it available for free in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and resulting protests in the United States. I'm going to be a bit unfair to this book, so let me start by admitting that the mismatch between it and the book I was looking for is not entirely its fault. My primary goal was to orient myself in the discussion on the left about alternatives to policing. I also wanted to sample something from Haymarket Books; a free book was a good way to do that. I was hoping for a collection of short introductions to current lines of thinking that I could selectively follow in longer writing, and an essay collection seemed ideal for that. What I had not realized (which was my fault for not doing simple research) is that this is a compilation of articles previously published by Truthout, a non-profit progressive journalism site, in 2014 and 2015. The essays are a mix of reporting and opinion but lean towards reporting. The earliest pieces in this book date from shortly after the police killing of Michael Brown, when racist police violence was (again) reaching national white attention. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to providing evidence of police abuse and violence. This is important to do, but it's sadly no longer as revelatory in 2020, when most of us have seen similar things on video, as it was to white America in 2014. If you live in the United States today, while you may not be aware of the specific events described here, you're unlikely to be surprised that Detroit police paid off jailhouse informants to provide false testimony ("Ring of Snitches" by Aaron Miguel Cant ), or that Chicago police routinely use excessive deadly force with no consequences ("Amid Shootings, Chicago Police Department Upholds Culture of Impunity" by Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers), or that there is a long history of police abuse and degradation of pregnant women ("Your Pregnancy May Subject You to Even More Law Enforcement Violence" by Victoria Law). There are about eight essays along those lines. Unfortunately, the people who excuse or disbelieve these stories are rarely willing to seek out new evidence, let alone read a book like this. That raises the question of intended audience for the catalog of horrors part of this book. The answer to that question may also be the publication date; in 2014, the base of evidence and example for discussion had not been fully constructed. This sort of reporting is also obviously relevant in the original publication context of web-based journalism, where people may encounter these accounts individually through social media or other news coverage. In 2020, they offer reinforcement and rhetorical evidence, but I'm dubious that the people who would benefit from this knowledge will ever see it in this form. Those of us who will are already sickened, angry, and depressed. My primary interest was therefore in the second half of the book: the section on how communities are building resistance and alternatives. This is where I'm going to be somewhat unfair because the state of that conversation may have been different in 2015 than it is now in 2020. But these essays were lacking the depth of analysis that I was looking for. There is a human tendency, when one becomes aware of an obvious wrong, to simply publicize the horrible thing that is happening and expect someone to do something about it. It's obviously and egregiously wrong, so if more people knew about it, certainly it would be stopped! That has happened repeatedly with racial violence in the United States. It's also part of the common (and school-taught) understanding of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s: activists succeeded in getting the violence on the cover of newspapers and on television, people were shocked and appalled, and the backlash against the violence created political change. Putting aside the fact that this is too simplistic of a picture of the Civil Rights era, it's abundantly clear at this point in 2020 that publicizing racist and violent policing isn't going to stop it. We're going to have to do something more than draw attention to the problem. Deciding what to do requires political and social analysis, not just of the better world that we want to see but of how our current world can become that world. There is very little in that direction in this book. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? does not answer the question of its title beyond "not us" and "white supremacy." While those answers are not exactly wrong, they're also not pushing the analysis in the direction that I wanted to read. For example (and this is a long-standing pet peeve of mine in US political writing), it would be hard to tell from most of the essays in this book that any country besides the United States exists. One essay ("Killing Africa" by William C. Anderson) talks about colonialism and draws comparisons between police violence in the United States and international treatment of African and other majority-Black countries. One essay talks about US military behavior oversees ("Beyond Homan Square" by Adam Hudson). That's about it for international perspective. Notably, there is no analysis here of what other countries might be doing better. Police violence against out-groups is not unique to the United States. No one has entirely solved this problem, but versions of this problem have been handled with far more success than here. The US has a comparatively appalling record; many countries in the world, particularly among comparable liberal democracies in Europe, are doing far better on metrics of racial oppression by agents of the government and of law enforcement violence. And yet it's common to approach these problems as if we have to develop a solution de novo, rather than ask what other countries are doing differently and if we could do some of those things. The US has some unique challenges, both historical and with the nature of endemic violence in the country, so perhaps such an analysis would turn up too many US-specific factors to copy other people's solutions. But we need to do the analysis, not give up before we start. Novel solutions can lead to novel new problems; other countries have tested, working improvements that could provide a starting framework and some map of potential pitfalls. More fundamentally, only the last two essays of this book propose solutions more complex than "stop." The authors are very clear about what the police are doing, seem less interested in why, and are nearly silent on how to change it. I suspect I am largely in political agreement with most of the authors, but obviously a substantial portion of the country (let alone its power structures) is not, and therefore nothing is changing. Part of the project of ending police violence is understanding why the violence exists, picking apart the motives and potential fracture lines in the political forces supporting the status quo, and building a strategy to change the politics. That isn't even attempted here. For example, the "who do you serve?" question of the book's title is more interesting than the essays give it credit. Police are not a monolith. Why do Black people become police officers? What are their experiences? Are there police forces in the United States that are doing better than others? What makes them different? Why do police act with violence in the moment? What set of cultural expectations, training experiences, anxieties, and fears lead to that outcome? How do we change those factors? Or, to take another tack, why are police not held accountable even when there is substantial public outrage? What political coalition supports that immunity from consequences, what are its fault lines and internal frictions, and what portions of that coalition could be broken off, pealed away, or removed from power? To whom, institutionally, are police forces accountable? What public offices can aspiring candidates run for that would give them oversight capability? This varies wildly throughout the United States; political approaches that work in large cities may not work in small towns, or with county sheriffs, or with the FBI, or with prison guards. To treat these organizations as a monolith and their motives as uniform is bad political tactics. It gives up points of leverage. I thought the best essays of this collection were the last two. "Community Groups Work to Provide Emergency Medical Alternatives, Separate from Police," by Candice Bernd, is a profile of several local emergency response systems that divert emergency calls from the police to paramedics, mental health experts, or social workers. This is an idea that's now relatively mainstream, and it seems to be finding modest success where it has been tried. It's more of a harm mitigation strategy than an attempt to deal with the root problem, but we're going to need both. The last essay, "Building Community Safety" by Ejeris Dixon, is the only essay in this book that is pushing in the direction that I was hoping to read. Dixon describes building an alternative system that can intervene in violent situations without using the police. This is fascinating and I'm glad that I read it. It's also frustrating in context because Dixon's essay should be part of a discussion. Dixon describes spending years learning de-escalation techniques, doing hard work of community discussion and collective decision-making, and making deep investment in the skills required to handle violence without calling in a dangerous outside force. I greatly admire this approach (also common in parts of the anarchist community) and the people who are willing to commit to it. But it's an immense amount of work, and as Dixon points out, that work often falls on the people who are least able to afford it. Marginalized communities, for whom the police are often dangerous, are also likely to lack both time and energy to invest in this type of skill training. And many people simply will not do this work even if they do have the resources to do it. More fundamentally, this approach conflicts somewhat with division of labor. De-escalation and social work are both professional skills that require significant time and practice to hone, and as much as I too would love to live in a world where everyone knows how to do some amount of this work, I find it hard to imagine scaling this approach without trained professionals. The point of paying someone to do this work as their job is that the money frees up their time to focus on learning those skills at a level that is difficult to do in one's free time. But once you have an organized group of professionals who do this work, you have to find a way to keep them from falling prey to the problems that plague the police, which requires understanding the origins of those problems. And that's putting aside the question of how large the residual of dangerous crime that cannot be addressed through any form of de-escalation might be, and what organization we should use to address it. Dixon's essay is great; I wouldn't change anything about it. But I wanted to see the next essay engaging with Dixon's perspective and looking for weaknesses and scaling concerns, and then the next essay that attempts to shore up those weaknesses, and yet another essay that grapples with the challenging philosophical question of a government monopoly on force and how that can and should come into play in violent crime. And then essays on grass-roots organizing in the context of police reform or abolition, and on restorative justice, and on the experience of attempting police reform from the inside, and on how to support public defenders, and on the merits and weaknesses of focusing on electing reform-minded district attorneys. Unfortunately, none of those are here. Overall, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? was a disappointment. It was free, so I suppose I got what I paid for, and I may have had a different reaction if I read it in 2015. But if you're looking for a deep discussion on the trade-offs and challenges of stopping police violence in 2020, I don't think this is the place to start. Rating: 3 out of 10

17 October 2017

Russ Allbery: Bundle haul

Confession time: I started making these posts (eons ago) because a close friend did as well, and I enjoyed reading them. But the main reason why I continue is because the primary way I have to keep track of the books I've bought and avoid duplicates is, well, grep on these posts. I should come up with a non-bullshit way of doing this, but time to do more elegant things is in short supply, and, well, it's my blog. So I'm boring all of you who read this in various places with my internal bookkeeping. I do try to at least add a bit of commentary. This one will be more tedious than most since it includes five separate Humble Bundles, which increases the volume a lot. (I just realized I'd forgotten to record those purchases from the past several months.) First, the individual books I bought directly: Ilona Andrews Sweep in Peace (sff)
Ilona Andrews One Fell Sweep (sff)
Steven Brust Vallista (sff)
Nicky Drayden The Prey of Gods (sff)
Meg Elison The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (sff)
Pat Green Night Moves (nonfiction)
Ann Leckie Provenance (sff)
Seanan McGuire Once Broken Faith (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Brightest Fell (sff)
K. Arsenault Rivera The Tiger's Daughter (sff)
Matthew Walker Why We Sleep (nonfiction)
Some new books by favorite authors, a few new releases I heard good things about, and two (Night Moves and Why We Sleep) from references in on-line articles that impressed me. The books from security bundles (this is mostly work reading, assuming I'll get to any of it), including a blockchain bundle: Wil Allsop Unauthorised Access (nonfiction)
Ross Anderson Security Engineering (nonfiction)
Chris Anley, et al. The Shellcoder's Handbook (nonfiction)
Conrad Barsky & Chris Wilmer Bitcoin for the Befuddled (nonfiction)
Imran Bashir Mastering Blockchain (nonfiction)
Richard Bejtlich The Practice of Network Security (nonfiction)
Kariappa Bheemaiah The Blockchain Alternative (nonfiction)
Violet Blue Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy (nonfiction)
Richard Caetano Learning Bitcoin (nonfiction)
Nick Cano Game Hacking (nonfiction)
Bruce Dang, et al. Practical Reverse Engineering (nonfiction)
Chris Dannen Introducing Ethereum and Solidity (nonfiction)
Daniel Drescher Blockchain Basics (nonfiction)
Chris Eagle The IDA Pro Book, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Nikolay Elenkov Android Security Internals (nonfiction)
Jon Erickson Hacking, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Pedro Franco Understanding Bitcoin (nonfiction)
Christopher Hadnagy Social Engineering (nonfiction)
Peter N.M. Hansteen The Book of PF (nonfiction)
Brian Kelly The Bitcoin Big Bang (nonfiction)
David Kennedy, et al. Metasploit (nonfiction)
Manul Laphroaig (ed.) PoC GTFO (nonfiction)
Michael Hale Ligh, et al. The Art of Memory Forensics (nonfiction)
Michael Hale Ligh, et al. Malware Analyst's Cookbook (nonfiction)
Michael W. Lucas Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition (nonfiction)
Bruce Nikkel Practical Forensic Imaging (nonfiction)
Sean-Philip Oriyano CEHv9 (nonfiction)
Kevin D. Mitnick The Art of Deception (nonfiction)
Narayan Prusty Building Blockchain Projects (nonfiction)
Prypto Bitcoin for Dummies (nonfiction)
Chris Sanders Practical Packet Analysis, 3rd Edition (nonfiction)
Bruce Schneier Applied Cryptography (nonfiction)
Adam Shostack Threat Modeling (nonfiction)
Craig Smith The Car Hacker's Handbook (nonfiction)
Dafydd Stuttard & Marcus Pinto The Web Application Hacker's Handbook (nonfiction)
Albert Szmigielski Bitcoin Essentials (nonfiction)
David Thiel iOS Application Security (nonfiction)
Georgia Weidman Penetration Testing (nonfiction)
Finally, the two SF bundles: Buzz Aldrin & John Barnes Encounter with Tiber (sff)
Poul Anderson Orion Shall Rise (sff)
Greg Bear The Forge of God (sff)
Octavia E. Butler Dawn (sff)
William C. Dietz Steelheart (sff)
J.L. Doty A Choice of Treasons (sff)
Harlan Ellison The City on the Edge of Forever (sff)
Toh Enjoe Self-Reference ENGINE (sff)
David Feintuch Midshipman's Hope (sff)
Alan Dean Foster Icerigger (sff)
Alan Dean Foster Mission to Moulokin (sff)
Alan Dean Foster The Deluge Drivers (sff)
Taiyo Fujii Orbital Cloud (sff)
Hideo Furukawa Belka, Why Don't You Bark? (sff)
Haikasoru (ed.) Saiensu Fikushon 2016 (sff anthology)
Joe Haldeman All My Sins Remembered (sff)
Jyouji Hayashi The Ouroboros Wave (sff)
Sergei Lukyanenko The Genome (sff)
Chohei Kambayashi Good Luck, Yukikaze (sff)
Chohei Kambayashi Yukikaze (sff)
Sakyo Komatsu Virus (sff)
Miyuki Miyabe The Book of Heroes (sff)
Kazuki Sakuraba Red Girls (sff)
Robert Silverberg Across a Billion Years (sff)
Allen Steele Orbital Decay (sff)
Bruce Sterling Schismatrix Plus (sff)
Michael Swanwick Vacuum Flowers (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 1: Dawn (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 2: Ambition (sff)
Yoshiki Tanaka Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 3: Endurance (sff)
Tow Ubukata Mardock Scramble (sff)
Sayuri Ueda The Cage of Zeus (sff)
Sean Williams & Shane Dix Echoes of Earth (sff)
Hiroshi Yamamoto MM9 (sff)
Timothy Zahn Blackcollar (sff)
Phew. Okay, all caught up, and hopefully won't have to dump something like this again in the near future. Also, more books than I have any actual time to read, but what else is new.

11 August 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #8: Customizing Spell Checks for R CMD check

Welcome to the eight post in the ramblingly random R rants series, or R4 for short. We took a short break over the last few weeks due to some conferencing followed by some vacationing and general chill. But we're back now, and this post gets us back to initial spirit of (hopefully) quick and useful posts. Perusing yesterday's batch of CRANberries posts, I noticed a peculiar new directory shown the in the diffstat output we use to compare two subsequent source tarballs. It was entitled .aspell/, in the top-level directory, and in two new packages by R Core member Kurt Hornik himself. The context is, of course, the not infrequently-expressed desire to customize the spell checking done on CRAN incoming packages, see e.g. this r-package-devel thread. And now we can as I verified with (the upcoming next release of) RcppArmadillo, along with a recent-enough (i.e. last few days) version of r-devel. Just copying what Kurt did, i.e. adding a file .aspell/defaults.R, and in it pointing to rds file (named as the package) containing a character vector with words added to the spell checker's universe is all it takes. For my package, see here for the peculiars. Or see here:
edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$ cat defaults.R 
Rd_files <- vignettes <- R_files <- description <-
    list(encoding = "UTF-8",
         language = "en",
         dictionaries = c("en_stats", "RcppArmadillo"))
edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$ r -p -e 'readRDS("RcppArmadillo.rds")'
[1] "MPL"            "Sanderson"      "Templated"
[4] "decompositions" "onwards"        "templated"
edd@bud:~/git/rcpparmadillo/.aspell(master)$     
And now R(-devel) CMD check --as-cran ... is silent about spelling. Yay! But take this with a grain of salt as this does not yet seem to be "announced" as e.g. yesterday's change in the CRAN Policy did not mention it. So things may well change -- but hey, it worked for me. And this all is about aspell, here is something topical about a spell to close the post:

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

17 May 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Upcoming Rcpp Talks

Very excited about the next few weeks which will cover a number of R conferences, workshops or classes with talks, mostly around Rcpp and one notable exception: If you are near one those events, interested and able to register (for the events requiring registration), I would love to chat before or after.

22 March 2017

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Suggests != Depends

A number of packages on CRAN use Suggests: casually. They list other packages as "not required" in Suggests: -- as opposed to absolutely required via Imports: or the older Depends: -- yet do not test for their use in either examples or, more commonly, unit tests. So e.g. the unit tests are bound to fail because, well, Suggests != Depends. This has been accomodated for many years by all parties involved by treating Suggests as a Depends and installing unconditionally. As I understand it, CRAN appears to flip a switch to automatically install all Suggests from major repositories glossing over what I consider to be a packaging shortcoming. (As an aside, treatment of Additonal_repositories: is indeed optional; Brooke Anderson and I have a fine paper under review on this) I spend a fair amount of time with reverse dependency ("revdep") checks of packages I maintain, and I will no longer accomodate these packages. These revdep checks take long enough as it is, so I will now blacklist these packages that are guaranteed to fail when their "optional" dependencies are not present. Writing R Extensions says in Section 1.1.3
All packages that are needed10 to successfully run R CMD check on the package must be listed in one of Depends or Suggests or Imports . Packages used to run examples or tests conditionally (e.g. via if(require(pkgname))) should be listed in Suggests or Enhances . (This allows checkers to ensure that all the packages needed for a complete check are installed.) In particular, packages providing only data for examples or vignettes should be listed in Suggests rather than Depends in order to make lean installations possible. [...] It used to be common practice to use require calls for packages listed in Suggests in functions which used their functionality, but nowadays it is better to access such functionality via :: calls.
and continues in Section 1.1.3.1
Note that someone wanting to run the examples/tests/vignettes may not have a suggested package available (and it may not even be possible to install it for that platform). The recommendation used to be to make their use conditional via if(require("pkgname"))): this is fine if that conditioning is done in examples/tests/vignettes.
I will now exercise my option to use 'lean installations' as discussed here. If you want your package included in tests I run, please make sure it tests successfully when only its required packages are present.

18 December 2016

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.7.600.1.0

armadillo image Earlier this week, Conrad released Armadillo 7.600.1. The corresponding RcppArmadillo release 0.7.600.1.0 is now on CRAN and in Debian. This follows several of rounds testing at our end with a full reverse-dependency of a pre-release version followed by another full reverse-depency check. Which was of course followed by CRAN testing for two more days. Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language--and is widely used by (currently) 298 other packages on CRAN -- an increase of 24 just since the last CRAN release of 0.7.500.0.0 in October! Changes in this release relative to the previous CRAN release 0.7.500.0.0 are as follows:

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.600.1.0 (2016-12-16)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.600.1 (Coup d'Etat Deluxe)
    • more accurate eigs_sym() and eigs_gen()
    • expanded floor(), ceil(), round(), trunc(), sign() to handle sparse matrices
    • added arg(), atan2(), hypot()

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.7.500.1.0 (2016-11-11)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 7.500.1
  • Small improvement to return value treatment
  • The sample.h extension was updated to the newer Armadillo interface. (Closes #111)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

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

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