Search Results: "apo"

14 July 2020

Ian Jackson: MessagePack vs CBOR (RFC7049)

tl;dr: Use MessagePack, rather than CBOR. Introduction I recently wanted to choose a binary encoding. This was for a project using Rust serde, so I looked at the list of formats there. I ended up reading about CBOR and MessagePack. Both of these are binary formats for a JSON-like data model. Both of them are "schemaless", meaning you can decode them without knowing the structure. (This also provides some forwards compatibility.) They are, in fact, quite similar (although they are totally incompatible). This is no accident: CBOR is, effectively, a fork of MessagePack. Both formats continue to exist and both are being used in new programs. I needed to make a choice but lacked enough information. I thought I would try to examine the reasons and nature of the split, and to make some kind of judgement about the situation. So I did a lot of reading [11]. Here are my conclusions. History and politics Between about 2010 and 2013 there was only MessagePack. Unfortunately, MessagePack had some problems. The biggest of these was that it lacked a separate string type. Strings were to be encoded simply as byte blocks. This caused serious problems for many MessagePack library implementors: for example, when decoding a MessagePack file the Python library wouldn't know whether to produce a Python bytes object, or a string. Straightforward data structures wouldn't round trip through MessagePack. [1] [2] It seems that in late 2012 this came to the attention to someone with an IETF background. According to them, after unsatisfactory conversations with MessagePack upstream, they decided they would have to fork. They submitted an Internet Draft for a partially-incompatible protocol [3] [4]. Little seemed to happen in the IETF until soon before the Orlando in-person IETF meeting in February 2013.[5] These conversations sparked some discussion in the MessagePack issue tracker. There were long threads including about process [1,2,4 ibid]. But there was also a useful technical discussion, about proposed backward compatible improves to the MessagePack spec.[5] The prominent IETF contributor provided some helpful input in these discussions in the MessagePack community - but also pushed quite hard for a "tagging" system, which suggestion was not accepted (see my technical analysis, below). An improved MessagePack spec resulted, with string support, developed largely by the MessagePack community. It seems to have been available in useable form since mid-2013 and was officially published as canonical in August 2013. Meanwhile a parallel process was pursued in the IETF, based on the IETF contributor's fork, with 11 Internet-Drafts from February[7] to September[8]. This seems to have continued even though the original technical reason for the fork - lack of string vs binary distinction - no longer applied. The IETF proponent expressed unhappiness about MessagePack's stewardship and process as much as they did about the technical details [4, ibid]. The IETF process culminated in the CBOR RFC[9]. The discussion on process questions between the IETF proponent and MessagePack upstream, in the MessagePack issue tracker [4, ibid] should make uncomfortable reading for IETF members. The IETF acceptance of CBOR despite clear and fundamental objections from MessagePack upstream[13] and indeed other respected IETF members[14], does not reflect well on the IETF. The much vaunted openness of the IETF process seems to have been rather one-sided. The IETF proponent here was an IETF Chair. Certainly the CBOR author was very well-spoken and constantly talks about politeness and cooperation and process; but what they actually did was very hostile. They accused the MessagePack community of an "us and them" attitude while simultaneously pursuing a forked specification! The CBOR RFC does mention MessagePack in Appendix E.2. But not to acknowledge that CBOR was inspired by MessagePack. Rather, it does so to make a set of tendentious criticisms of MessagePack. Perhaps these criticisms were true when they were first written in an I-D but they were certainly false by the time the RFC was actually published, which occurred after the MessagePack improvement process was completely concluded, with a formal spec issued. Since then both formats have existed in parallel. Occasionally people discuss which one is better, and sometimes it is alleged that "yes CBOR is the successor to MessagePack", which is not really fair.[9][10] Technical differences The two formats have a similar arrangement: initial byte which can encode small integers, or type and length, or type and specify a longer length encoding. But there are important differences. Overall, MessagePack is very significantly simpler. Floating point CBOR supports five floating point formats! Not only three sizes of IEEE754, but also decimal floating point, and bigfloats. This seems astonishing for a supposedly-simple format. (Some of these are supported via the semi-optional tag mechanism - see below.) Indefinite strings and arrays Like MessagePack, CBOR mostly precedes items with their length. But CBOR also supports "indefinite" strings, arrays, and so on, where the length is not specified at the beginning. The object (array, string, whatever) is terminated by a special "break" item. This seems to me to be a mistake. If you wanted the kind of application where MessagePack or CBOR would be useful, streaming sub-objects of unknown length is not that important. This possibility considerably complicates decoders. CBOR tagging system CBOR has a second layer of sort-of-type which can be attached to each data item. The set of possible tags is open-ended and extensible, but the CBOR spec itself gives tag values for: two kinds of date format; positive and negative bignums; decimal floats (see above); binary but expected to be encoded if converted to JSON (in base64url, base64, or base16); nestedly encoded CBOR; URIs; base64 data (two formats); regexps; MIME messages; and a special tag to make file(1) work. In practice it is not clear how many of these are used, but a decoder must be prepared to at least discard them. The amount of additional spec complexity here is quite astonishing. IMO binary formats like this will (just like JSON) be used by a next layer which always has an idea of what the data means, including (where the data is a binary blob) what encoding it is in etc. So these tags are not useful. These tags might look like a middle way between (i) extending the binary protocol with a whole new type such as an extension type (incompatible with old readers) and encoding your new kind data in a existing type (leaving all readers who don't know the schema to print it as just integers or bytes or string). But I think they are more trouble than they are worth. The tags are uncomfortably similar to the ASN.1 tag system, which is widely regarded as one of ASN.1's unfortunate complexities. MessagePack extension mechanism MessagePack explicitly reserves some encoding space for users and for future extensions: there is an "extension type". The payload is an extension type byte plus some more data bytes; the data bytes are in a format to be defined by the extension type byte. Half of the possible extension byte values are reserved for future specification, and half are designated for application use. This is pleasingly straightforward. (There is also one unused primary initial byte value, but that would be rejected by existing decoders and doesn't seem like a likely direction for future expansion.) Minor other differences in integer encoding The encodings of integers differ. In MessagePack, signed and unsigned integers have different typecodes. In CBOR, signed and unsigned positive integers have the same typecodes; negative integers have a different set of typecodes. This means that a CBOR reader which knows it is expecting a signed value will have to do a top-bit-set check on the actual data value! And a CBOR writer must check the value to choose a typecode. MessagePack reserves fewer shortcodes for small negative integers, than for small positive integers. Conclusions and lessons MessagePack seems to have been prompted into fixing the missing string type problem, but only by the threat of a fork. However, this fork went ahead even after MessagePack clearly accepted the need for a string type. MessagePack had a fixed protocol spec before the IETF did. The continued pursuit of the IETF fork was ostensibly been motivated by a disapproval of the development process and in particular a sense that the IETF process was superior. However, it seems to me that the IETF process was abused by CBOR's proponent, who just wanted things their own way. I have seen claims by IETF proponents that the open decisionmaking system inherently produces superior results. However, in this case the IETF process produced a bad specification. To the extent that other IETF contributors had influence over the ultimate CBOR RFC, I don't think they significantly improved it. CBOR has been described as MessagePack bikeshedded by the IETF. That would have been bad enough, but I think it's worse than that. To a large extent CBOR is one person's NIH-induced bad design rubber stamped by the IETF. CBOR's problems are not simply matters of taste: it's significantly overcomplicated. One lesson for the rest of us is that although being the upstream and nominally in charge of a project seems to give us a lot of power, it's wise to listen carefully to one's users and downstreams. Once people are annoyed enough to fork, the fork will have a life of its own. Another lesson is that many of us should be much warier of the supposed moral authority of the IETF. Many IETF standards are awful (Oauth 2 [12]; IKE; DNSSEC; the list goes on). Sometimes (especially when network adoption effects are weak, as with MessagePack vs CBOR) better results can be obtained from a smaller group, or even an individual, who simply need the thing for their own uses. Finally, governance systems of public institutions like the IETF need to be robust in defending the interests of outsiders (and hence of society at large) against eloquent insiders who know how to work the process machinery. Any institution which nominally serves the public good faces a constant risk of devolving into self-servingness. This risk gets worse the more powerful and respected the institution becomes. References
  1. #13: First-class string type in serialization specification (MessagePack issue tracker, June 2010 - August 2013)
  2. #121: Msgpack can't differentiate between raw binary data and text strings (MessagePack issue tracker, November 2012 - February 2013)
  3. draft-bormann-apparea-bpack-00: The binarypack JSON-like representation format (IETF Internet-Draft, October 2012)
  4. #129: MessagePack should be developed in an open process (MessagePack issue tracker, February 2013 - March 2013)
  5. Re: JSON mailing list and BoF (IETF apps-discuss mailing list message from Carsten Bormann, 18 February 2013)
  6. #128: Discussions on the upcoming MessagePack spec that adds the string type to the protocol (MessagePack issue tracker, February 2013 - August 2013)
  7. draft-bormann-apparea-bpack-01: The binarypack JSON-like representation format (IETF Internet-Draft, February 2013)
  8. draft-bormann-cbor: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) (IETF Internet-Drafts, May 2013 - September 2013)
  9. RFC 7049: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) (October 2013)
  10. "MessagePack should be replaced with [CBOR] everywhere ..." (floatboth on Hacker News, 8th April 2017)
  11. Discussion with very useful set of history links (camgunz on Hacker News, 9th April 2017)
  12. OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell (Eran Hammer, blog posting from 2012, via Wayback Machine)
  13. Re: [apps-discuss] [Json] msgpack/binarypack (Re: JSON mailing list and BoF) (IETF list message from Sadyuki Furuhashi, 4th March 2013)
  14. "no apologies for complaining about this farce" (IETF list message from Phillip Hallam-Baker, 15th August 2013)
    Edited 2020-07-14 18:55 to fix a minor formatting issue, and 2020-07-14 22:54 to fix two typos


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Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in June 2020

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in July) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games Short news
Debian Java Misc Debian LTS This was my 52. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 60 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following: Thanks for reading and see you next time.

12 July 2020

Antoine Beaupr : On contact tracing apps

I have strong doubts about the efficiency of any tracing app of the sort, and even less in the context where it is unlikely that a majority of the population will use it. There's also the problem that this app would need to work on Apple phones, or be incompatible with them, and cause significant "fracture" between those who have access to technology, and those who haven't. See this text for more details. Such an app would be a security and privacy liability at no benefit to public health. There are better options, see for this research on hardware tokens. But I doubt any contact tracing app or hardware will actually work anyways. I am a computer engineer with more than 20 years of experience in the domain, and I have been following this question closely. Please don't do this.
I wrote the above in a response to the Qu bec government's survey about a possible tracing app. Update: a previous version of this article was titled plainly "on contact tracing". In case that was not obvious, I definitely do not object to contact tracing per se. I believe it's a fundamental, critical, and important part of fighting the epidemic and I think we should do it. I do not believe any engineer has found a proper way of doing it with "apps" so far, but I do not deny the utility and importance of "contact tracing" itself. Apologies for the confusion.
Pour une raison que je m'explique mal, le sondage m' t envoy en anglais, et j'ai donc crit ma r ponse dans la langue de Shakespeare au lieu de celle de moli re... Je serai heureux de fournir une traduction fran aise ceux ou celles qui en ont besoin...

30 June 2020

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in June 2020

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during June 2020 (previous month): For Lintian, the static analysis tool for Debian packages:

Reproducible Builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. The project is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter. This month, I:

Elsewhere in our tooling, I made the following changes to diffoscope including preparing and uploading versions 147, 148 and 149 to Debian: trydiffoscope is the web-based version of diffoscope. This month, I specified a location for the celerybeat scheduler to ensure that the clean/tidy tasks are actually called which had caused an accidental resource exhaustion. (#12)

Debian I filed three bugs against: Debian LTS This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 5 hours on its sister Extended LTS project. You can find out more about the project via the following video:
Uploads

Russ Allbery: Review: The Fifth Risk

Review: The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Copyright: 2018
Printing: 2019
ISBN: 0-393-35745-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 254
The Fifth Risk starts with the presidential transition. Max Stier, the first person profiled by Lewis in this book, is the founder of the Partnership for Public Service. That foundation helped push through laws to provide more resources and structure for the transition of the United States executive branch from one president to the next. The goal was to fight wasted effort, unnecessary churn, and pointless disruption in the face of each administration's skepticism about everyone who worked for the previous administration.
"It's Groundhog Day," said Max. "The new people come in and think that the previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave, they say, 'This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I've ever worked with.' This happens over and over and over."
By 2016, Stier saw vast improvements, despite his frustration with other actions of the Obama administration. He believed their transition briefings were one of the best courses ever produced on how the federal government works. Then that transition process ran into Donald Trump. Or, to be more accurate, that transition did not run into Donald Trump, because neither he nor anyone who worked for him were there. We'll never know how good the transition information was because no one ever listened to or read it. Meetings were never scheduled. No one showed up. This book is not truly about the presidential transition, though, despite its presence as a continuing theme. The Fifth Risk is, at its heart, an examination of government work, the people who do it, why it matters, and why you should care about it. It's a study of the surprising and misunderstood responsibilities of the departments of the United States federal government. And it's a series of profiles of the people who choose this work as a career, not in the upper offices of political appointees, but deep in the civil service, attempting to keep that system running. I will warn now that I am far too happy that this book exists to be entirely objective about it. The United States desperately needs basic education about the government at all levels, but particularly the federal civil service. The public impression of government employees is skewed heavily towards the small number of public-facing positions and towards paperwork frustrations, over which the agency usually has no control because they have been sabotaged by Congress (mostly by Republicans, although the Democrats get involved occasionally). Mental images of who works for the government are weirdly selective. The Coast Guard could say "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" every day, to the immense gratitude of the people they rescue, but Reagan was still able to use that as a cheap applause line in his attack on government programs. Other countries have more functional and realistic social attitudes towards their government workers. The United States is trapped in a politically-fueled cycle of contempt and ignorance. It has to stop. And one way to help stop it is someone with Michael Lewis's story-telling skills writing a different narrative. The Fifth Risk is divided into a prologue about presidential transitions, three main parts, and an afterword (added in current editions) about a remarkable government worker whom you likely otherwise would never hear about. Each of the main parts talks about a different federal department: the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Commerce. In keeping with the theme of the book, the people Lewis profiles do not do what you might expect from the names of those departments. Lewis's title comes from his discussion with John MacWilliams, a former Goldman Sachs banker who quit the industry in search of more personally meaningful work and became the chief risk officer for the Department of Energy. Lewis asks him for the top five risks he sees, and if you know that the DOE is responsible for safeguarding nuclear weapons, you will be able to guess several of them: nuclear weapons accidents, North Korea, and Iran. If you work in computer security, you may share his worry about the safety of the electrical grid. But his fifth risk was project management. Can the government follow through on long-term hazardous waste safety and cleanup projects, despite constant political turnover? Can it attract new scientists to the work of nuclear non-proliferation before everyone with the needed skills retires? Can it continue to lay the groundwork with basic science for innovation that we'll need in twenty or fifty years? This is what the Department of Energy is trying to do. Lewis's profiles of other departments are similarly illuminating. The Department of Agriculture is responsible for food stamps, the most effective anti-poverty program in the United States with the possible exception of Social Security. The section on the Department of Commerce is about weather forecasting, specifically about NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). If you didn't know that all of the raw data and many of the forecasts you get from weather apps and web sites are the work of government employees, and that AccuWeather has lobbied Congress persistently for years to prohibit the NOAA from making their weather forecasts public so that AccuWeather can charge you more for data your taxes already paid for, you should read this book. The story of American contempt for government work is partly about ignorance, but it's also partly about corporations who claim all of the credit while selling taxpayer-funded resources back to you at absurd markups. The afterword I'll leave for you to read for yourself, but it's the story of Art Allen, a government employee you likely have never heard of but whose work for the Coast Guard has saved more lives than we are able to measure. I found it deeply moving. If you, like I, are a regular reader of long-form journalism and watch for new Michael Lewis essays in particular, you've probably already read long sections of this book. By the time I sat down with it, I think I'd read about a third in other forms on-line. But the profiles that I had already read were so good that I was happy to read them again, and the additional stories and elaboration around previously published material was more than worth the cost and time investment in the full book.
It was never obvious to me that anyone would want to read what had interested me about the United States government. Doug Stumpf, my magazine editor for the past decade, persuaded me that, at this strange moment in American history, others might share my enthusiasm.
I'll join Michael Lewis in thanking Doug Stumpf. The Fifth Risk is not a proposal for how to fix government, or politics, or polarization. It's not even truly a book about the Trump presidency or about the transition. Lewis's goal is more basic: The United States government is full of hard-working people who are doing good and important work. They have effectively no public relations department. Achievements that would result in internal and external press releases in corporations, not to mention bonuses and promotions, go unnoticed and uncelebrated. If you are a United States citizen, this is your government and it does important work that you should care about. It deserves the respect of understanding and thoughtful engagement, both from the citizenry and from the politicians we elect. Rating: 10 out of 10

26 June 2020

Chris Lamb: On the pleasure of hating

People love to tell you that they "don't watch sports" but the story of Lance Armstrong provides a fascinating lens through which to observe our culture at large. For example, even granting all that he did and all the context in which he did it, why do sports cheats act like a lightning rod for such an instinctive hatred? After all, the sheer level of distaste directed at people such as Lance eludes countless other criminals in our society, many of whom have taken a lot more with far fewer scruples. The question is not one of logic or rationality, but of proportionality. In some ways it should be unsurprising. In all areas of life, we instinctively prefer binary judgements to moral ambiguities and the sports cheat is a clich of moral bankruptcy cheating at something so seemingly trivial as a sport actually makes it more, not less, offensive to us. But we then find ourselves strangely enthralled by them, drawn together in admiration of their outlaw-like tenacity, placing them strangely close to criminal folk heroes. Clearly, sport is not as unimportant as we like to claim it is. In Lance's case in particular though, there is undeniably a Shakespearean quality to the story and we are forced to let go of our strict ideas of right and wrong and appreciate all the nuance.

There is a lot of this nuance in Marina Zenovich's new documentary. In fact, there's a lot of everything. At just under four hours, ESPN's Lance combines the duration of a Tour de France stage with the depth of the peloton an endurance event compared to the bite-sized hagiography of Michael Jordan's The Last Dance. Even for those who follow Armstrong's story like a mini-sport in itself, Lance reveals new sides to this man for all seasons. For me, not only was this captured in his clumsy approximations at being a father figure but also in him being asked something I had not read in countless tell-all books: did his earlier experiments in drug-taking contribute to his cancer? But even in 2020 there are questions that remain unanswered. By needlessly returning to the sport in 2009, did Lance subconsciously want to get caught? Why does he not admit he confessed to Betsy Andreu back in 1999 but will happily apologise to her today for slurring her publicly on this very point? And why does he remain so vindictive towards former-teammate Floyd Landis? In all of Armstrong's evasions and masterful control of the narrative, there is the gnawing feeling that we don't even know what questions we should be even asking. As ever, the questions are more interesting than the answers.

Lance also reminded me of how professional cycling's obsession with national identity. Although I was intuitively aware of it to some degree, I had not fully grasped how much this kind of stereotyping runs through the veins of the sport itself, just like the drugs themselves. Journalist Daniel Friebe first offers us the portrait of:
Spaniards tend to be modest, very humble. Very unpretentious. And the Italians are loud, vain and outrageous showmen.
Former directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel then asserts that "Belgians are hard workers... they are ambitious to a certain point, but not overly ambitious", and cyclist J rg Jaksche concludes with:
The Germans are very organised and very structured. And then the French, now I have to be very careful because I am German, but the French are slightly superior.
This kind of lazy caricature is nothing new, especially for those brought up on a solid diet of Tintin and Asterix, but although all these examples are seemingly harmless, why does the underlying idea of ascribing moral, social or political significance to genetic lineage remain so durable in today's age of anti-racism? To be sure, culture is not quite the same thing as race, but being judged by the character of one's ancestors rather than the actions of an individual is, at its core, one of the many conflations at the heart of racism. There is certainly a large amount of cognitive dissonance at work, especially when Friebe elaborates:
East German athletes were like incredible robotic figures, fallen off a production line somewhere behind the Iron Curtain...
... but then bermensch Jan Ullrich is immediately described as "emotional" and "struggled to live the life of a professional cyclist 365 days a year". We see the habit to stereotype is so ingrained that even in the face of this obvious contradiction, Friebe unironically excuses Ullrich's failure to live up his German roots due to him actually being "Mediterranean".

I mention all this as I am known within my circles for remarking on these national characters, even collecting stereotypical examples of Italians 'being Italian' and the French 'being French' at times. Contrary to evidence, I don't believe in this kind of innate quality but what I do suspect is that people generally behave how they think they ought to behave, perhaps out of sheer imitation or the simple pleasure of conformity. As the novelist Will Self put it:
It's quite a complicated collective imposture, people pretending to be British and people pretending to be French, and then they get really angry with each other over what they're pretending to be.
The really remarkable thing about this tendency is that even if we consciously notice it there is no seemingly no escape even I could not smirk when I considered that a brash Texan winning the Tour de France actually combines two of America's cherished obsessions: winning... and annoying the French.

17 June 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Network Effect

Review: Network Effect, by Martha Wells
Series: Murderbot Diaries #5
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: May 2020
ISBN: 1-250-22984-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 351
Network Effect is the first Murderbot novel, although the fifth story of the series. The previous stories, beginning with All Systems Red, were novellas. Under no circumstances should you start reading the series here. Network Effect builds significantly on the story arc that ended with Exit Strategy and resolves some important loose ends from Artificial Condition. It's meant to be read in series order. I believe this is the first time in my life that I've started reading a book on the night of its release. I was looking forward to this novel that much, and it does not disappoint. I'll try not to spoil the previous books too much in this review, but at this point it's a challenge. Just go read them. They're great. The big question I had about the first Murderbot novel was how would it change the plot dynamic of the series. All of the novellas followed roughly the same plot structure: Murderbot would encounter some humans who need help, somewhat grudgingly help them while pursuing its own agenda, snark heavily about human behavior in the process, once again prove its competence, and do a little bit of processing of its feelings and a lot of avoiding them. This formula works great at short length. Would Wells change it at novel length, or if not, would it get tedious or strained? The answer is that Wells added in quite a bit more emotional processing and relationship management to flesh out the core of the book and created a plot with more layers and complexity than the novella plots, and the whole construction works wonderfully. This is exactly the book I was hoping for when I heard there would be a Murderbot novel. If you like the series, you'll like this, and should feel free to read it now without reading the rest of the review.
Overse added, "Just remember you're not alone here." I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that's where 90 plus percent of my problems are.
Many of the loose ends in the novellas were tied up in the final one, Exit Strategy. The biggest one that wasn't, at least in my opinion, was ART, the research transport who helped Murderbot considerably in Artificial Condition and clearly was more than it appeared to be. That is exactly the loose end that Wells resolves here, to great effect. I liked the dynamic between ART and Murderbot before, but it's so much better with an audience to riff off of (and yet better still when there are two audiences, one who already knew Murderbot and one who already knew ART). I like ART almost as much as Murderbot, and that's saying a lot. The emotional loose end of the whole series has been how Murderbot will decide to interact with other humans. I think that's not quite resolved by the end of the novel, but we and Murderbot have both learned considerably more. The novellas, except for the first, are mostly solo missions even when Murderbot is protecting clients. This is something more complicated; the interpersonal dynamics hearken back to the first novella and then go much deeper, particularly in the story-justified flashbacks. Wells uses Murderbot's irritated avoidance to keep some emotional dynamics underplayed and indirect, letting the reader discover them at opportune moments, and this worked beautifully for me. And Murderbot's dynamic with Amena is just wonderful, mostly because of how smart, matter-of-fact, trusting, and perceptive Amena is. That's one place where the novel length helps: Wells has more room to expand the characterization of characters other than Murderbot, something that's usually limited in the novellas to a character or two. And these characters are great. Murderbot is clearly the center of the story, but the other characters aren't just furniture for it to react to. They have their own story arcs, they're thoughtful, they learn, and it's a delight to watch them slot Murderbot into various roles, change their minds, adjust, and occasionally surprise it in quite touching ways, all through Murderbot's eyes.
Thiago had said he felt like he should apologize and talk to me more about it. Ratthi had said, "I think you should let it go for a while, at least until we get ourselves out of this situation. SecUnit is a very private person, it doesn't like to discuss its feelings." This is why Ratthi is my friend.
I have some minor quibbles. The targetSomething naming convention Murderbot comes up with and then is stuck with because it develops too much momentum is entertaining but confusing. A few of the action sequences were just a little on the long side; I find the emotional processing much more interesting. There's also a subplot with a character with memory holes and confusion that I thought dragged on too long, mostly because I found the character intensely irritating for some reason. But these are just quibbles. Network Effect is on par with the best of the novellas that precede it, and that's a high bar indeed. In this series, Wells has merged the long-running science fiction thread of artificial intelligences and the humanity of robots with the sarcastic and introspective first-person narration of urban fantasy, gotten the internal sensation of emotional avoidance note-perfect without making it irritating (that's some deep magic right there), and added in some top-tier negotiation of friendship and relationships without losing the action and excitement of a great action movie. It's a truly impressive feat and the novel is the best installment so far. I will be stunned if Network Effect doesn't make most of the award lists next year. Followed by Fugitive Telemetry, due out in April of 2021. You can believe that I have already preordered it. Rating: 9 out of 10

11 June 2020

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in May 2020

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

30 May 2020

Sean Whitton: GNU Emacs' Transient Mark mode

Something I ve found myself doing as the pandemic rolls on is picking out and (re-)reading through sections of the GNU Emacs manual and the GNU Emacs Lisp reference manual. This has got me (too) interested in some of the recent history of Emacs development, and I did some digging into archives of emacs-devel from 2008 (15M mbox) regarding the change to turn Transient Mark mode on by default and set mark-even-if-inactive to true by default in Emacs 23.1. It s not always clear which objections to turning on Transient Mark mode by default take into account the mark-even-if-inactive change. I think that turning on Transient Mark mode along with mark-even-if-inactive is a good default. The question that remains is whether the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode are significant enough that experienced Emacs users should consider altering Emacs default behaviour to mitigate them. Here s one popular blog arguing for some mitigations. How might Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous? The suggestion is that it makes using the mark for navigation rather than for acting on regions less convenient:
  1. setting a mark just so you can jump back to it (i) is a distinct operation you have to think of separately; and (ii) requires two keypresses, C-SPC C-SPC, rather than just one keypress
  2. using exchange-point-and-mark activates the region, so to use it for navigation you need to use either C-u C-x C-x or C-x C-x C-g, neither of which are convenient to type, or else it will be difficult to set regions at the place you ve just jumped to because you ll already have one active.
There are two other disadvantages that people bring up which I am disregarding. The first is that it makes it harder for new users to learn useful ways in which to use the mark when it s deactivated. This happened to me, but it can be mitigated without making any behavioural changes to Emacs. The second is that the visual highlighting of the region can be distracting. So far as I can tell, this is only a problem with exchange-point-and-mark, and it s subsumed by the problem of that command actually activating the region. The rest of the time Emacs automatic deactivation of the region seems sufficient. How might disabling Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous? When Transient Mark mode is on, many commands will do something usefully different when the mark is active. The number of commands in Emacs which work this way is only going to increase now that Transient Mark mode is the default. If you disable Transient Mark mode, then to use those features you need to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode. This can be fiddly and/or require a lot of keypresses, depending on exactly where you want to put the region. Without being able to see the region, it might be harder to know where it is. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons for wanting Transient Mark mode to be the default, to avoid confusing new users. I don t think this is likely to affect experienced Emacs users often, however, and on occasions when more precision is really needed, C-u C-x C-x will make the region visible. So I m not counting this as a disadvantage. How might we mitigate these two sets of disadvantages? Here are the two middle grounds I m considering. Mitigation #1: Transient Mark mode, but hack C-x C-x behaviour 
(defun spw/exchange-point-and-mark (arg)
  "Exchange point and mark, but reactivate mark a bit less often.

Specifically, invert the meaning of ARG in the case where
Transient Mark mode is on but the region is inactive."
  (interactive "P")
  (exchange-point-and-mark
   (if (and transient-mark-mode (not mark-active))
       (not arg)
     arg)))
(global-set-key [remap exchange-point-and-mark] &aposspw/exchange-point-and-mark)
We avoid turning Transient Mark mode off, but mitigate the second of the two disadvantages given above. I can t figure out why it was thought to be a good idea to make C-x C-x reactivate the mark and require C-u C-x C-x to use the action of exchanging point and mark as a means of navigation. There needs to a binding to reactivate the mark, but in roughly ten years of having Transient Mark mode turned on, I ve found that the need to reactivate the mark doesn t come up often, so the shorter and longer bindings seem the wrong way around. Not sure what I m missing here. Mitigation #2: disable Transient Mark mode, but enable it temporarily more often 
(setq transient-mark-mode nil)
(defun spw/remap-mark-command (command &optional map)
  "Remap a mark-* command to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode."
  (let* ((cmd (symbol-name command))
         (fun (intern (concat "spw/" cmd)))
         (doc (concat "Call  "
                      cmd
                      "&apos and temporarily activate Transient Mark mode.")))
    (fset fun  (lambda ()
                 ,doc
                 (interactive)
                 (call-interactively #&apos,command)
                 (activate-mark)))
    (if map
        (define-key map (vector &aposremap command) fun)
      (global-set-key (vector &aposremap command) fun))))
(dolist (command &apos(mark-word
                   mark-sexp
                   mark-paragraph
                   mark-defun
                   mark-page
                   mark-whole-buffer))
  (spw/remap-mark-command command))
(with-eval-after-load &aposorg
  (spw/remap-mark-command &aposorg-mark-element org-mode-map)
  (spw/remap-mark-command &aposorg-mark-subtree org-mode-map))
;; optional
(global-set-key "\M-=" (lambda () (interactive) (activate-mark)))
;; resettle the previous occupant
(global-set-key "\C-cw" &aposcount-words-region)
Here we remove both of the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above, and mitigate the main disadvantage of not activating Transient Mark mode by making it more convenient to activate it temporarily. For example, this enables using C-M-SPC C-M-SPC M-( to wrap the following two function arguments in parentheses. And you can hit M-h a few times to mark some blocks of text or code, then operate on them with commands like M-% and C-/ which behave differently when the region is active.1 Comparing these mitigations Both of these mitigations handle the second of the two disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above. What remains, then, is
  1. under the effects of mitigation #1, how much of a barrier to using marks for navigational purposes is it to have to press C-SPC C-SPC instead of having a single binding, C-SPC, for all manual mark setting2
  2. under the effects of mitigation #2, how much of a barrier to taking advantage of commands which act differently when the region is active is it to have to temporarily enable Transient Mark mode with C-SPC C-SPC, M-= or one of the mark-* commands?
These are unknowns.3 So I m going to have to experiment, I think, to determine which mitigation to use, if either. In particular, I don t know whether it s really significant that setting a mark for navigational purposes and for region marking purposes are distinct operations under mitigation #1. My plan is to start with mitigation #2 because that has the additional advantage of allowing me to confirm or disconfirm my belief that not being able to see where the region is will only rarely get in my way.
  1. The idea of making the mark-* commands activate the mark comes from an emacs-devel post by Stefan Monnier in the archives linked above.
  2. One remaining possibility I m not considering is mitigation #1 plus binding something else to do the same as C-SPC C-SPC. I don t believe there are any easily rebindable keys which are easier to type than typing C-SPC twice. And this does not deal with the two distinct mark-setting operations problem.
  3. Another way to look at this is the question of which of setting a mark for navigational purposes and activating a mark should get C-SPC and which should get C-SPC C-SPC.

17 May 2020

Erich Schubert: Contact Tracing Apps are Useless

Some people believe that automatic contact tracing apps will help contain the Coronavirus epidemic. They won t. Sorry to bring the bad news, but IT and mobile phones and artificial intelligence will not solve every problem. In my opinion, those that promise to solve these things with artificial intelligence / mobile phones / apps / your-favorite-buzzword are at least overly optimistic and blinder Aktionismus (*), if not naive, detachted from reality, or fraudsters that just want to get some funding. (*) there does not seem to be an English word for this doing something just for the sake of doing something, without thinking about whether it makes sense to do so Here are the reasons why it will not work:
  1. Signal quality. Forget detecting proximity with Bluetooth Low Energy. Yes, there are attempts to use BLE beacons for indoor positioning. But these use that you can learn fingerprints of which beacons are visible at which points, combined with additional information such as movement sensors and history (you do not teleport around in a building). BLE signals and antennas apparently tend to be very prone to orientation differences, signal reflections, and of course you will not have the idealized controlled environment used in such prototypes. The contacts have a single device, and they move this is not comparable to indoor positioning. I strongly doubt you can tell whether you are close to someone, or not.
  2. Close vs. protection. The app cannot detect protection in place. Being close to someone behind a plexiglass window or even a solid wall is very different from being close otherwise. You will get a lot of false contacts this way. That neighbor that you have never seen living in the appartment above will likely be considered a close contact of yours, as you sleep next to each other every day
  3. Low adoption rates. Apparently even in technology affine Singapore, fewer than 20% of people installed the app. That does not even mean they use it regularly. In Austria, the number is apparently below 5%, and people complain that it does not detect contact But in order for this approach to work, you will need Chinese-style mass surveillance that literally puts you in prison if you do not install the app.
  4. False alerts. Because of these issues, you will get false alerts, until you just do not care anymore.
  5. False sense of security. Honestly: the app does not pretect you at all. All it tries to do is to make the tracing of contacts easier. It will not tell you reliably if you have been infected (as mentioned above, too many false positives, too few users) nor that you are relatively safe (too few contacts included, too slow testing and reporting). It will all be on the quality of about 10 days ago you may or may not have contact with someone that tested positive, please contact someone to expose more data to tell you that it is actually another false alert .
  6. Trust. In Germany, the app will be operated by T-Systems and SAP. Not exactly two companies that have a lot of fans SAP seems to be one of the most hated software around. Neither company is known for caring about privacy much, but they are prototypical for business first . Its trust the cat to keep the cream. Yes, I know they want to make it open-source. But likely only the client, and you will still have to trust that the binary in the app stores is actually built from this source code, and not from a modified copy. As long as the name T-Systems and SAP are associated to the app, people will not trust it. Plus, we all know that the app will be bad, given the reputation of these companies at making horrible software systems
  7. Too late. SAP and T-Systems want to have the app ready in mid June. Seriously, this must be a joke? It will be very buggy in the beginning (because it is SAP!) and it will not be working reliably before end of July. There will not be a substantial user before fall. But given the low infection rates in Germany, nobody will bother to install it anymore, because the perceived benefit is 0 one the infection rates are low.
  8. Infighting. You may remember that there was the discussion before that there should be a pan-european effort. Except that in the end, everybody fought everybody else, countries went into different directions and they all broke up. France wanted a centralized systems, while in Germany people pointed out that the users will not accept this and only a distributed system will have a chance. That failed effort was known as Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) vs. Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) , and it turned out to have become a big clusterfuck . And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Iceleand, probably the country that handled the Corona crisis best (they issued a travel advisory against Austria, when they were still happily spreading the virus at apres-ski; they massively tested, and got the infections down to almost zero within 6 weeks), has been experimenting with such an app. Iceland as a fairly close community managed to have almost 40% of people install their app. So did it help? No: The technology is more or less I wouldn t say useless [ ] it wasn t a game changer for us. The contact tracing app is just a huge waste of effort and public money. And pretty much the same applies to any other attempts to solve this with IT. There is a lot of buzz about solving the Corona crisis with artificial intelligence: bullshit! That is just naive. Do not speculate about magic power of AI. Get the data, understand the data, and you will see it does not help. Because its real data. Its dirty. Its late. Its contradicting. Its incomplete. It is all what AI currently can not handle well. This is not image recognition. You have no labels. Many of the attempts in this direction already fail at the trivial 7-day seasonality you observe in the data For example, the widely known John Hopkins Has the curve flattened trend has a stupid, useless indicator based on 5 day averages. And hence you get the weekly up and downs due to weekends. They show pretty up and down indicators. But these are affected mostly by the day of the week. And nobody cares. Notice that they currently even have big negative infections in their plots? There is no data on when someone was infected. Because such data simply does not exist. What you have is data when someone tested positive (mostly), when someone reported symptons (sometimes, but some never have symptoms!), and when someone dies (but then you do not know if it was because of Corona, because of other issues that became just worse because of Corona, or hit by a car without any relation to Corona). The data that we work with is incredibly delayed, yet we pretend it is live . Stop reading tea leaves. Stop pretending AI can save the world from Corona.

11 May 2020

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in April 2020

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in May) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games
Playonlinux
Debian Java Misc Debian LTS This was my 50. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 11,5 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following: ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 7 Wheezy . This was my 23. month and I have been paid to work 2 hours on ELTS. Thanks for reading and see you next time.

10 May 2020

Russell Coker: IT Asset Management

In my last full-time position I managed the asset tracking database for my employer. It was one of those things that someone needed to do, and it seemed that only way that someone wouldn t equate to no-one was for me to do it which was ok. We used Snipe IT [1] to track the assets. I don t have enough experience with asset tracking to say that Snipe is better or worse than average, but it basically did the job. Asset serial numbers are stored, you can have asset types that allow you to just add one more of the particular item, purchase dates are stored which makes warranty tracking easier, and every asset is associated with a person or listed as available. While I can t say that Snipe IT is better than other products I can say that it will do the job reasonably well. One problem that I didn t discover until way too late was the fact that the finance people weren t tracking serial numbers and that some assets in the database had the same asset IDs as the finance department and some had different ones. The best advice I can give to anyone who gets involved with asset tracking is to immediately chat to finance about how they track things, you need to know if the same asset IDs are used and if serial numbers are tracked by finance. I was pleased to discover that my colleagues were all honourable people as there was no apparent evaporation of valuable assets even though there was little ability to discover who might have been the last person to use some of the assets. One problem that I ve seen at many places is treating small items like keyboards and mice as assets . I think that anything that is worth less than 1 hour s pay at the minimum wage (the price of a typical PC keyboard or mouse) isn t worth tracking, treat it as a disposable item. If you hire a programmer who requests an unusually expensive keyboard or mouse (as some do) it still won t be a lot of money when compared to their salary. Some of the older keyboards and mice that companies have are nasty, months of people eating lunch over them leaves them greasy and sticky. I think that the best thing to do with the keyboards and mice is to give them away when people leave and when new people join the company buy new hardware for them. If a company can t spend $25 on a new keyboard and mouse for each new employee then they either have a massive problem of staff turnover or a lack of priority on morale.
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26 April 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Goodbye

Review: The Last Goodbye, by Matt Potter
Publisher: Silvertail
Copyright: 2014-2016
Printing: 2016
ISBN: 1-909269-42-5
Format: Kindle
Pages: 308
In the contested space between the interested amateur and the trained expert lies the enthusiast. A topic has, for often inexplicable reasons, caught fire in their thoughts and become a mild obsession. They may not have formal training or systematic conceptual grounding beneath their interest, but they partly make up for that lack with sustained fascination. They research widely and obscurely about their particular focus, develop novel theories, see distinctions and classifications that few others would bother to investigate, and present their discoveries to anyone who will stand still long enough. And occasionally, when that interest happens to coincide with writing skill, they produce some surprisingly excellent essays or books. Matt Potter's enthusiasm is resignation letters.
Every damaging resignation letter, every cornered truth attack, every out-of-control speech by a former friend, is more than just an inconvenience, to be countered with positive spin and internal memos: it's an open challenge to the official version of the story, the perfectly controlled brand. They are breaks in an otherwise perfectly planned, smoothly executed narrative of the powerful. Holes in the program code. A rare, irresistible chance to hack into history's shiny, unstoppable operation.
The Last Goodbye: A History of the World in Resignation Letters is not, in truth, a history of the world. It is, first and foremost, a taxonomy, because there are types of resignation letters. The opening chapter, the truth bomb, is the type that one would expect upon discovering that someone wrote a book on the topic (that wasn't advice on how to write a good one). But there are other types, less heavy on the fireworks but just as fascinating. The unquotable expert construction. The knife in the back. The incoherent scream of rage. But also the surprisingly gentle and graceful conclusion.
It is the question that the letters themselves try in vain to answer, over and over again even as they explain, analyse, protest and bear witness to a million other details. The question is: Why? All the forces in the universe stack up against unburdening ourselves in a resignation letter. Professionally, it can be suicide. In practical terms, it is often self-defeating. Self-help books coach against unleashing its force; colleagues and confidantes urge caution, self-restraint. And yet we do it, and damn the consequences. We have no choice but to speak in sorrow, love, grief, cold anger, thirst for revenge, wounded pride, the pain of injustice, loyalty, pangs of regret, throes of vengeful madness, deluded righteousness, panic, black distress, isolation, ecstasies of martyrdom, and a million other shades of human extremity we need to say our piece even as we leave the stage.
The risk of the enthusiast's book is that the lack of structural grounding can leave the conclusions unsupported. A fair critique of this book is that it contains a lot of amateur sociology. Potter has a journalist's eye for motive and narrative, but some of his conclusions may not be warranted. But he compensates for the lack of rigor with, well, enthusiasm. Potter is fascinated by resignation letters and the insight they offer, and that fascination is irresistibly contagious. It's probably obvious that the chapters on truth bombs, fuck yous, and knives in the back have visceral appeal. The resignation letter as a force of truth-telling, as the revenge of a disregarded peon, as a crack in the alliance between the powerful that may let some truth shine through, is what got me to buy this book. And Potter doesn't disappoint; he quotes from both famous and nearly unknown examples, dissects the writing and the intent, and gives us a ringside seat to a few effective acts of revenge. That's not the best part of this book, though. The chapter that I will remember the longest is Potter's dissection of the constructed resignation letter. The carefully drafted public relations statement, the bland formality, the attempt to make a news story disappear. The conversation-ender. It's a truism that any area of human endeavor involves more expertise than those who have only observed it from the outside will realize, but I had never thought to apply that principle to the ghost-written resignation letter. The careful non-apology, the declaration that one has "become a distraction," the tell-tale phrasing of "spending more time with my family" is offensive in its bland dishonesty. But Potter shows that the blandness is expertly constructed to destroy quotability. Those statements are nearly impossible to remember or report on because they have been built that way: nouns carefully separated from verbs, all force dissipated by circuities and modifiers, and subtle grammatical errors introduced to discourage written news from including direct quotes. Potter's journalism background shines here because he can describe the effect on news reporting. He walks the reader through the construction to reveal that the writing is not incompetent but instead is skillfully bad in a way that causes one's attention to skitter off of it. The letter vanishes into its own vagueness. The goal is to smother the story in such mediocrity that it becomes forgettable. And it works. I've written several resignation letters of my own. Somewhat unusually, I've even sent several of them, although (as Potter says is typical) fewer than I've written. I've even written (and sent) the sort of resignation letter that every career advisor will say to never send. Potter's discussion of the motives and thought process behind those letters rang true for me. It's a raw and very human moment, one is never in as much control of it as one wishes, the cracks and emotions break through in the writing, and often those letters are trying to do far too many things at the same time. But it's also a moment in which one can say something important and have others listen, which can be weirdly challenging to do in the normal course of a job. Potter ends this book beautifully by looking at resignation letters that break or transcend the mold of most of the others he's examined: letters where the author seems to have found some peace and internal understanding and expresses that simply and straightforwardly. I found this surprisingly touching after the emotional roller-coaster of the rest of the book, and a lovely note on which to end. This is a great book. Potter has a good eye for language and the emotion encoded in it, a bracing preference for the common worker or employee over the manager or politician, and the skill to produce some memorable turns of phrase. Most importantly, he has the enthusiast's love of the topic. Even if you don't care about resignation letters going in, it will be hard to avoid some fascination with them by the end of this book. Recommended. This book was originally published as F*ck You and Goodbye in the UK. Rating: 8 out of 10

22 April 2020

Jonathan Dowland: SUPERHOT

Continuing a series of blog posts about casual Nintendo Switch games, next in the series is SUPERHOT. Normally 19.99, I picked it up for 13.99 in a sale. That's a little bit more than I would usually pay for a casual game. SUPERHOT first came on my radar because someone I know from a baby group worked on their VR port in some capacity.
Slow-motion buckshot Slow-motion buckshot
A first-person shooter, SUPERHOT's USP is that time only progresses when you move well, nearly. Time is slowed to a complete crawl when you are not moving. The game's visual style is very distinctive: Almost everything is a washed out grey or white colour and porcelean-like texture, except weapons and objects you can interact with, which are a matt black, and enemies, which are a bright red. It reminds me a lot of the 1992 Amiga game Robocop 3.
Robocop 3 Robocop 3
The play-style is very reminiscent of the "Bullet Time" sequences in The Matrix seemingly impossibly overwhelming odds deftly manoeuvred through thanks to superhuman reaction times. The game has a relatively short campaign of little vignettes, linked together by a cyberpunk narrative. The game is sometimes criticised for the short campaign, but for me that's ideal. And the vignettes being short and quite standalone suits my play requirements very well.
Amiga easter-egg Amiga easter-egg
The narrative interspersed between the play scenarios is a little bit over-long, and you can spend an unreasonable amount of time bashing buttons to get through it. Despite that it's a moderately interesting story. Once you've beaten the campaign, you can go back and play any of the scenarios again, or try the newly unlocked endless mode. I haven't tried that yet. The original prototype for the game is a free-to-play in-browser demo, available here. On Windows PC, there's a sequel-of-sorts in the works called MIND CONTROL DELETE with a lot of new features to add replay value.

21 April 2020

Wouter Verhelst: Extrepo GitLab update

Earlier this month, GitLab B.V.'s package signing key expired, requiring them to rotate their key. This means that anyone who uses one of their packages needs to jump through a number of manual hoops to update their apt key configuration, which is an annoying manual process that also requires people to download random files from the Internet -- something extrepo was written to prevent. At least they're served over https, but still. I didn't notice until today, but I just updated the extrepo metadata to carry the new key. That means that if you enable one of the GitLab repositories through extrepo enable, you will get the new key rather than the old one. On top of that, if you had already enabled the repository through extrepo, all that is needed for you right now to pull in the new key is to run extrepo update. While I do apologise for the late update, hopefully this should make some people's lives a bit easier. And if GitLab B.V. reads this: please send me a MR to the repository next time, so that we can make process be done in time ;-)

19 April 2020

Enrico Zini: Little wonders

Gibbsdavidl/CatterPlots
devel
2020-04-20
Did you ever wish you could make scatter plots with cat shaped points? Now you can! - Gibbsdavidl/CatterPlots
Various things in MetaPost
wonder archive.org
2020-04-20
What is the best tool to use for drawing vector pictures? For me and probably for many others, the answer is pretty obvious: Illustrator, or, maybe, Inkscape.
SELinux Coloring Book
devel security archive.org
2020-04-20
A coloring book to help folks understand how SELinux works. - mairin/selinux-coloring-book
EURion constellation - Wikipedia
security archive.org
2020-04-20
The EURion constellation (also known as Omron rings[1] or doughnuts[2]) is a pattern of symbols incorporated into a number of banknote designs worldwide since about 1996. It is added to help imaging software detect the presence of a banknote in a digital image. Such software can then block the user from reproducing banknotes to prevent counterfeiting using colour photocopiers. According to research from 2004, the EURion constellation is used for colour photocopiers but probably not used in computer software.[3] It has been reported that Adobe Photoshop will not allow editing of an image of a banknote, but in some versions this is believed to be due to a different, unknown digital watermark rather than the EURion constellation.[4][3]
136 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena
wonder archive.org
2020-04-20
This huge collection of non-scary optical illusions and fascinating visual phenomena emphasizes interactive exploration, beauty, and scientific explanation.
Generated Photos Unique, worry-free model photos
ai archive.org
2020-04-20
Generated photos are created from scratch by AI systems. All images can be used for any purpose without worrying about copyrights, distribution rights, infringement claims, or royalties.
Rangierer im Bahnhof Dresden - Friedrichstadt 1984
history
2020-04-20
Dokumentarfilm ber die Rangierer im Bahnhof Dresden-Friedrichstadt in der DDR aus dem Jahr 1984.
Femmina accabadora - Wikipedia
culture history archive.org
2020-04-20
Il termine sardo femina accabadora, femina agabbad ra o, pi comunemente, agabbadora o accabadora (s'agabbad ra, lett. "colei che finisce", deriva dal sardo s'acabbu, "la fine" o dallo spagnolo acabar, "terminare") denota la figura storicamente incerta di una donna che si incaricava di portare la morte a persone di qualunque et , nel caso in cui queste fossero in condizioni di malattia tali da portare i familiari o la stessa vittima a richiederla. In realt non ci sono prove di tale pratica, che avrebbe riguardato alcune regioni sarde come Marghine, Planargia e Gallura[1]. La pratica non doveva essere retribuita dai parenti del malato poich il pagare per dare la morte era contrario ai dettami religiosi e della superstizione.
Cat Coat Genetics 101: A Tweetorial
nature archive.org
2020-04-20
Alright the people have spoken and they want more cat genetics. So, I present to you all "Cat Coat Genetics 101: A Tweetorial", feat. pics of many real life cats (for science, of course...this baby is Caterpillar).

14 April 2020

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in March 2020

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in April) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. I am sure I am not the only one who will remember March 2020 in the future as a month nobody was really fond of. I was mostly occupied with non-Debian work and managed to get ill in the same week I wanted to celebrate my birthday but it didn t matter anyway because of ehm quarantine and social distancing. Maybe next year March will be great again.
Debian Games Debian Java Misc Debian LTS This was my 49. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 10 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following: ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 7 Wheezy . This was my 22. month and I have been paid to work 9 hours on ELTS. Thanks for reading and see you next time.

8 April 2020

David Bremner: Tangling multiple files

I have lately been using org-mode literate programming to generate example code and beamer slides from the same source. I hit a wall trying to re-use functions in multiple files, so I came up with the following hack. Thanks 'ngz' on #emacs and Charles Berry on the org-mode list for suggestions and discussion. 
(defun db-extract-tangle-includes ()
  (goto-char (point-min))
  (let ((case-fold-search t)
        (retval nil))
    (while (re-search-forward "^#[+]TANGLE_INCLUDE:" nil t)
      (let ((element (org-element-at-point)))
        (when (eq (org-element-type element) &aposkeyword)
          (push (org-element-property :value element) retval))))
    retval))
(defun db-ob-tangle-hook ()
  (let ((includes (db-extract-tangle-includes)))
    (mapc #&aposorg-babel-lob-ingest includes)))
(add-hook &aposorg-babel-pre-tangle-hook #&aposdb-ob-tangle-hook t)
Use involves something like the following in your org-file. 
#+SETUPFILE: presentation-settings.org
#+SETUPFILE: tangle-settings.org
#+TANGLE_INCLUDE: lecture21.org
#+TITLE: GC V: Mark & Sweep with free list
For batch export with make, I do something like 
%.tangle-stamp: %.org
    emacs --batch --quick  -l org  -l $ HOME /.emacs.d/org-settings.el --eval "(org-babel-tangle-file \"$<\")"
    touch $@

7 April 2020

Shirish Agarwal: GMRT 2020 and lots of stories

First of all, congratulations to all those who got us 2022 Debconf, so we will finally have a debconf in India. There is of course, lot of work to be done between now and then. For those who would be looking forward to visit India and especially Kochi I would suggest you to hear this enriching tale
I am sorry I used youtube link but it is too good a podcast not to be shared. Those who don t want youtube can use the invidio.us link for the same as shared below. https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=BvjgKuKmnQ4 I am sure there are lot more details, questions, answers etc. but would direct them gently to Praveen, Shruti, Balasankar and the rest who are from Kochi to answer if you have any questions about that history.

National Science Day, GMRT 2020 First, as always, we are and were grateful to both NCRA as well as GMRT for taking such good care of us. Even though Akshat was not around, probably getting engaged, a few of us were there. About 6-7 from the Mozilla Nasik while the rest representing the foss community. Here is a small picture which commentrates the event
National Science Day, GMRT 2020
While there is and was a lot to share about the event. For e.g. Akshay had bought RPI- Zero as well as RPI-2 (Raspberry Pi s ) and showed some things. He had also bought up a Debian stable live drive with persistence although the glare from the sun was too much that we couldn t show it to clearly to students. This was also the case with RPI but still we shared what and how much we could. Maybe next year, we either ask them to have double screens or give us dark room so we can showcase things much better. We did try playing with contrast and all but it didn t have much of an effect . Of course in another stall few students had used RPI s as part of their projects so at times we did tell some of the newbies to go to those stalls and see and ask about those projects so they would have a much wider experience of things. The Mozilla people were pushing VR as well as Mozilla lite the browser for the mobile. We also gossiped quite a bit. I shared about indicatelts , a third-party certificate extension although I dunno if I should file a wnpp about it or not. We didn t have a good experience of when I had put an RFP (Request for Package) which was accepted for an extension which had similar functionality which we later come to know was sharing the sites people were using the extension to call home and share both the URL and the IP Address they were using it from. Sadly, didn t leave a good taste in mouth

Delhi Riots One thing I have been disappointed with is the lack of general awareness about things especially in the youth. We have people who didn t know that for e.g. in the Delhi riots which happened recently the law and order (Police) lies with Home Minister of India, Amit Shah. This is perhaps the only capital in the world which has its own Chief Minister but doesn t have any say on its law and order. And this has been the case for last 70 years i.e. since independance. The closest I know so far is the UK but they too changed their tune in 2012. India and especially Delhi seems to be in a time-capsule which while being dysfunctional somehow is made to work. In many ways, it s three body or a body split into three personalities which often makes governance a messy issue but that probably is a topic for another day. In fact, scroll had written a beautiful editorial that full statehood for Delhi was not only Arvind Kejriwal s call (AAP) but also something that both BJP as well as Congress had asked in the past. In fact, nothing about the policing is in AAP s power. All salaries, postings, transfers of police personnel everything is done by the Home Ministry, so if any blame has to be given it has to be given to the Home Ministry for the same.

American Capitalism and Ventilators America had been having a history of high cost healthcare as can be seen in this edition of USA today from 2017 . The Affordable Care Act was signed as a law by President Obama in 2010 which Mr. Trump curtailed when he came into power couple of years back. An estimated 80,000 people died due to seasonal flu in 2018-19 . Similarly, anywhere between 24-63,000 have supposed to have died from Last October to February-March this year. Now if the richest country can t take care of their population which is 1/3rd of the population of this country while at the same time United States has thrice the area that India has. This I am sharing as seasonal flu also strikes the elderly as well as young children more than adults. So in one senses, the vulnerable groups overlap although from some of the recent stats, for Covid-19 even those who are 20+ are also vulnerable but that s another story altogether. If you see the CDC graph of the seasonal flu it is clear that American health experts knew about it. One another common factor which joins both the seasonal flu and covid is both need ventilators for the most serious cases. So, in 2007 it was decided that the number of ventilators needed to be ramped up, they had approximately 62k ventilators at that point in time all over U.S. The U.S. in 2010, asked for bids and got bid from a small californian company called Newport Medic Instruments. The price of the ventilators was approximately INR 700000 at 2010 prices, while Newport said they would be able to mass-produce at INR 200000 at 2010 prices. The company got the order and they started designing the model which needed to be certified by FDA. By 2011, they got the product ready when a big company called Covidgen bought Newport Medic and shutdown the project. This was shared in a press release in 2012. The whole story was broken by New York Times again, just a few days ago which highlighted how America s capitalism rough shod over public health and put people s life unnecessarily in jeopardy. If those new-age ventilators would have been a reality then not just U.S. but India and many other countries would have bought the ventilators as every county has same/similar needs but are unable to pay the high cost which in many cases would be passed on to their citizens either as price of service, or by raising taxes or a mixture of both with public being none the wiser. Due to dearth of ventilators and specialized people to operate it and space, there is possibility that many countries including India may have to make tough choices like Italian doctors had to make as to who to give ventilator to and have the mental and emotional guilt which would be associated with the choices made.

Some science coverage about diseases in wire and other publications Since Covid coverage broke out, the wire has been bringing various reports of India s handling of various epidemics, mysteries, some solved, some still remaining unsolved due to lack of interest or funding or both. The Nipah virus has been amply discussed in the movie Virus (2019) which I shared in the last blog post and how easily it could have been similar to Italy in Kerala. Thankfully, only 24 people including a nurse succumbed to that outbreak as shared in the movie. I had shared about Kerala nurses professionalism when I was in hospital couple of years back. It s no wonder that their understanding of hygeine and nursing procedures are a cut above the rest hence they are sought after not just in India but world-over including US and UK and the middle-east. Another study on respitory illness was bought to my attention by my friend Pavithran.

Possibility of extended lockdown in India There was talk in the media of extended lockdown or better put an environment is being created so that an extended lockdown can be done. This is probably in part due to a mathematical model and its derivatives shared by two Indian-origin Cambridge scholars who predict that a minimum 49 days lockdown may be necessary to flatten the covid curve about a week back.
Predictions of the outcome of the current 21-day lockdown (Source: Rajesh Singh, R. Adhikari, Cambridge University)
Alternative lockdown strategies suggested by the Cambridge model (Source: Rajesh Singh, R. Adhikari, Cambridge University)
India caving to US pressure on Hydroxychloroquine While there has been lot of speculation in U.S. about Hydroxychloroquine as the wonder cure, last night Mr. Trump threatened India in a response to a reporter that Mr. Modi has to say no for Hydroxychloroquine and there may be retaliations.
As shared before if youtube is not your cup you can see the same on invidio.us https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=YP-ewgoJPLw Now while there have been several instances in the past of U.S. trying to bully India, going all the way back to 1954. In fact, in recent memory, there were sanctions on India by US under Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government (BJP) 1998 but he didn t buckle under the pressure and now we see our current PM taking down our own notification from a day ago and not just sharing Hydroxychloroquine but also Paracetemol to other countries so it would look as if India is sharing with other countries. Keep in mind, that India, Brazil haven t seen eye to eye on trade agreements of late and Paracetemol prices have risen in India. The price rise has been because the API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) for the same come from China where the supply chain will take time to be fixed and we would also have to open up, although should we, should we not is another question altogether. I talk about supply chains as lean supply chains were the talk since late 90 s when the Japanese introduced Just-in-time manufacturing which lead to lean supply chains as well as lot of outsourcing as consequence. Of course, the companies saved money but at the cost of flexibility and how this model was perhaps flawed was shared by a series of articles in Economist as early as 2004 when there were lot of shocks to that model and would be exaberated since then. There have been frequent shocks to these fragile ecosystem more since 2008 after the financial meltdown and this would put more companies out of business than ever before. The MSME sector in India had already been severely impacted first by demonetization and then by the horrendous implementation of GST whose cries can be heard from all sectors. Also the frequent changing of GST taxes has made markets jumpy and investors unsure. With judgements such as retrospective taxes, AGR (Adjusted Gross Revenue) etc. it made not only the international investors scared, but also domestic investors. The flight of the capital has been noticeable. This I had shared before when Indian Government shared about LRS report which it hasn t since then. In fact Outlook Business had an interesting article about it where incidentally it talked about localcircles, a community networking platform where you get to know of lot of things and whom I am also a member of. At the very end I apologize for not sharing the blog post before but then I was feeling down but then I m not the only one.

30 March 2020

Shirish Agarwal: Covid 19 and the Indian response.

There have been lot of stories about Coronavirus and with it a lot of political blame-game has been happening. The first step that India took of a lockdown is and was a good step but without having a plan as to how especially the poor and the needy and especially the huge migrant population that India has (internal migration) be affected by it. A 2019 World Economic Forum shares the stats. as 139 million people. That is a huge amount of people and there are a variety of both push and pull factors which has displaced these huge number of people. While there have been attempts in the past and probably will continue in future they will be hampered unless we have trust-worthy data which is where there is lots that need to be done. In the recent few years, both the primary and secondary data has generated lot of controversies within India as well as abroad so no point in rehashing all of that. Even the definition of who is a migrant needs to be well-established just as who is a farmer . The simplest lucanae in the later is those who have land are known as farmers but the tenant farmers and their wives are not added as farmers hence the true numbers are never known. Is this an India-specific problem or similar definition issues are there in the rest of the world I don t know.

How our Policies fail to reach the poor and the vulnerable The sad part is most policies in India are made in castles in the air . An interview by the wire shares the conundrum of those who are affected and the policies which are enacted for them (it s a youtube video, sorry)
If one with an open and fresh mind sees the interview it is clear that why there was a huge reverse migration from Indian cities to villages. The poor and marginalized has always seen the Indian state as an extortive force so it doesn t make sense for them to be in the cities. The Prime Minister s annoucement of food for 3 months was a clear indication for the migrant population that for 3 months they will have no work. Faced with such a scenario, the best option for them was to return to their native places. While videos of huge number of migrants were shown of Delhi, this was the scenario of most states and cities, including Pune, my own city . Another interesting point which was made is most of the policies will need the migrants to be back in the villages. Most of these are tied to the accounts which are opened in villages, so even if they want to have the benefits they will have to migrate to villages in order to use them. Of course, everybody in India knows how leaky the administration is. The late Shri Rajiv Gandhi had famously and infamously remarked once how leaky the Public Distribution system and such systems are. It s only 10 paise out of rupee which reaches the poor. And he said this about 30 years ago. There have been numerous reports of both IPS (Indian Police Services) reforms and IAS (Indian Administrative Services) reforms over the years, many of the committee reports have been in public domain and in fact was part of the election manifesto of the ruling party in 2014 but no movement has happened on that part. The only thing which has happened is people from the ruling party have been appointed on various posts which is same as earlier governments. I was discussing with a friend who is a contractor and builder about the construction labour issues which were pointed in the report and if it is true that many a times the migrant labour is not counted. While he shared a number of cases where he knew, a more recent case in public memory was when some labourers died while building Amanora mall which is perhaps one of largest malls in India. There were few accidents while constructing the mall. Apparently, the insurance money which should have gone to the migrant laborer was taken by somebody close to the developers who were building the mall. I have a friend in who lives in Jharkhand who is a labour officer. She has shared with me so many stories of how the labourers are exploited. Keep in mind she has been a labor officer appointed by the state and her salary is paid by the state. So she always has to maintain a balance of ensuring worker s rights and the interests of the state, private entities etc. which are usually in cahoots with the state and it is possible that lot of times the State wins over the worker s rights. Again, as a labour officer, she doesn t have that much power and when she was new to the work, she was often frustrated but as she remarked few months back, she has started taking it easy (routinized) as anyways it wasn t helping her in any good way. Also there have been plenty of cases of labor officers being murdered so its easier to understand why one tries to retain some sanity while doing their job.

The Indian response and the World Response The Indian response has been the lockdown and very limited testing. We seem to be following the pattern of UK and U.S. which had been slow to respond and slow to testing. In the past Kerala showed the way but this time even that is not enough. At the end of the day we need to test, test and test just as shared by the WHO chairman. India is trying to create its own cheap test kits with ICMR approval, for e.g. a firm from my own city Pune MyLab has been given approval. We will know how good or bad they are only after they have been field-tested. For ventilators we have asked Mahindra and Mahindra even though there are companies like Allied Medical and others who have exported to EU and others which the Govt. is still taking time to think through. This is similar to how in UK some companies who are with the Govt. but who have no experience in making ventilators are been given orders while those who have experience and were exporting to Germany and other countries are not been given orders. The playbook is errily similar. In India, we don t have the infrastructure for any new patients, period. Heck only a couple of states have done something proper for the anganwadi workers. In fact, last year there were massive strikes by anganwadi workers all over India but only NDTV showed a bit of it along with some of the news channels from South India. Most mainstream channels chose to ignore it. On the world stage, some of the other countries and how they have responded perhaps need sharing. For e.g. I didn t know that Cuba had so many doctors and the politics between it and Brazil. Or the interesting stats. shared by Andreas Backhaus which seems to show how distributed the issue (age-wise) is rather than just a few groups as has been told in Indian media. What was surprising for me is the 20-29 age group which has not been shared so much in the Indian media which is the bulk of our population. The HBR article also makes a few key points which I hope both the general public and policymakers both in India as well as elsewhere take note of. What is worrying though that people can be infected twice or more as seems to be from Singapore or China and elsewhere. I have read enough of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton books to be aware that viruses can do whatever. They will over time mutate, how things will happen then is anybody s guess. What I found interesting is the world economic forum article which hypothesis that it may be two viruses which got together as well as research paper from journal from poteome research which has recently been published. The biggest myth flying around is that summer will halt or kill the spread which even some of my friends have been victim of . While a part of me wants to believe them, a simple scientific fact has been viruses have probably been around us and evolved over time, just like we have. In fact, there have been cases of people dying due to common cold and other things. Viruses are so prevalent it s unbelivable. What is and was interesting to note is that bat-borne viruses as well as pangolin viruses had been theorized and shared by Chinese researchers going all the way back to 90 s . The problem is even if we killed all the bats in the world, some other virus will take its place for sure. One of the ideas I had, dunno if it s feasible or not that at least in places like Airports, we should have some sort of screenings and a labs working on virology. Of course, this will mean more expenses for flying passengers but for public health and safety maybe it would worth doing so. In any case, virologists should have a field day cataloging various viruses and would make it harder for viruses to spread as fast as this one has. The virus spread also showed a lack of leadership in most of our leaders who didn t react fast enough. While one hopes people do learn from this, I am afraid the whole thing is far from over. These are unprecedented times and hope that all are maintaining social distancing and going out only when needed.

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