Search Results: "gord"

31 December 2023

Chris Lamb: Favourites of 2023

This post should have marked the beginning of my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies I read and watched in 2023. However, due to coming down with a nasty bout of flu recently and other sundry commitments, I wasn't able to undertake writing the necessary four or five blog posts In lieu of this, however, I will simply present my (unordered and unadorned) highlights for now. Do get in touch if this (or any of my previous posts) have spurred you into picking something up yourself

Books

Films Recent releases

The Blue Caftan (Maryam Touzani, 2022)
The Eight Mountains (Felix van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch, 2022)
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorcese, 2023)
Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2023)
Passages (Ira Sachs, 2023)
Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)
The Tuba Thieves (Alison O Daniel, 2023)
Theater Camp (Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, 2023)
T R (Todd Field, 2022)

Unenjoyable experiences included Alejandro G mez Monteverde's Sound of Freedom (2023), Alex Garland's Men (2022) and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans (2022).
Older releases (Films released before 2022, and not including rewatches from previous years.)

Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)
Daisy Miller (Peter Bogdanovich, 1974)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)
Forbidden Games (Ren Cl ment, 1952)
La Noire de... (Ousmane Semb ne, 1966)
The Queen of Spades (Thorold Dickinson, 1949)
The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)
Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999)
Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960)

Distinctly unenjoyable watches included Ocean's Eleven (1960), El Topo (1970), L olo (1992), Hotel Mumbai (2018), Bulworth (1998) and and The Big Red One (1980).

26 July 2023

Shirish Agarwal: Manipur Violence, Drugs, Binging on Northshore, Alaska Daily, Doogie Kamealoha and EU Digital Resilence Act.

Manipur Videos Warning: The text might be mature and will have references to violence so if there are kids or you are sensitive, please excuse. Few days back, saw the videos and I cannot share the rage, shame and many conflicting emotions that were going through me. I almost didn t want to share but couldn t stop myself. The woman in the video were being palmed, fingered, nude, later reportedly raped and murdered. And there have been more than a few cases. The next day saw another video that showed beheaded heads, and Kukis being killed just next to their houses. I couldn t imagine what those people must be feeling as the CM has been making partisan statements against them. One of the husbands of the Kuki women who had been paraded, fondled is an Army Officer in the Indian Army. The Meiteis even tried to burn his home but the Army intervened and didn t let it get burnt. The CM s own statement as shared before tells his inability to bring the situation out of crisis. In fact, his statement was dumb stating that the Internet shutdown was because there were more than 100 such cases. And it s spreading to the nearby Northeast regions. Now Mizoram, the nearest neighbor is going through similar things where the Meitis are not dominant. The Mizos have told the Meitis to get out. To date, the PM has chosen not to visit Manipur. He just made a small 1 minute statement about it saying how the women have shamed India, an approximation of what he said.While it s actually not the women but the men who have shamed India. The Wire has been talking to both the Meitis, the Kukis, the Nagas. A Kuki women sort of bared all. She is right on many counts. The GOI while wanting to paint the Kukis in a negative light have forgotten what has been happening in its own state, especially its own youth as well as in other states while also ignoring the larger geopolitics and business around it. Taliban has been cracking as even they couldn t see young boys, women becoming drug users. I had read somewhere that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 young person in Afghanistan is now in its grip. So no wonder,the Taliban is trying to eradicate and shutdown drug use among it s own youth. Circling back to Manipur, I was under the wrong impression that the Internet shutdown is now over. After those videos became viral as well as the others I mentioned, again the orders have been given and there is shutdown. It is not fully shut but now only Govt. offices have it. so nobody can share a video that goes against any State or Central Govt. narrative A real sad state of affairs Update: There is conditional reopening whatever that means When I saw the videos, the first thing is I felt was being powerless, powerless to do anything about it. The second was if I do not write about it, amplify it and don t let others know about it then what s the use of being able to blog

Mental Health, Binging on various Webseries Both the videos shocked me and I couldn t sleep that night or the night after. it. Even after doing work and all, they would come in unobtrusively in my nightmares While I felt a bit foolish, I felt it would be nice to binge on some webseries. Little I was to know that both Northshore and Alaska Daily would have stories similar to what is happening here While the story in Alaska Daily is fictional it resembles very closely to a real newspaper called Anchorage Daily news. Even there the Intuit women , one of the marginalized communities in Alaska. The only difference I can see between GOI and the Alaskan Government is that the Alaskan Government was much subtle in doing the same things. There are some differences though. First, the State is and was responsive to the local press and apart from one close call to one of its reporters, most reporters do not have to think about their own life in peril. Here, the press cannot look after either their livelihood or their life. It was a juvenile kid who actually shot the video, uploaded and made it viral. One needs to just remember the case details of Siddique Kappan. Just for sharing the news and the video he was arrested. Bail was denied to him time and time again citing that the Police were investigating . Only after 2 years and 3 months he got bail and that too because none of the charges that the Police had they were able to show any prima facie evidence. One of the better interviews though was of Vrinda Grover. For those who don t know her, her Wikipedia page does tell a bit about her although it is woefully incomplete. For example, most recently she had relentlessly pursued the unconstitutional Internet Shutdown that happened in Kashmir for 5 months. Just like in Manipur, the shutdown was there to bury crimes either committed or being facilitated by the State. For the issues of livelihood, one can take the cases of Bipin Yadav and Rashid Hussain. Both were fired by their employer Dainik Bhaskar because they questioned the BJP MP Smriti Irani what she has done for the state. The problems for Dainik Bhaskar or for any other mainstream media is most of them rely on Government advertisements. Private investment in India has fallen to record lows mostly due to the policies made by the Centre. If any entity or sector grows a bit then either Adani or Ambani will one way or the other take it. So, for most first and second generation entrepreneurs it doesn t make sense to grow and then finally sell it to one of these corporates at a loss GOI on Adani, Ambani side of any deal. The MSME sector that is and used to be the second highest employer hasn t been able to recover from the shocks of demonetization, GST and then the pandemic. Each resulting in more and more closures and shutdowns. Most of the joblessness has gone up tremendously in North India which the Government tries to deny. The most interesting points in all those above examples is within a month or less, whatever the media reports gets scrubbed. Even the firing of the journos that was covered by some of the mainstream media isn t there anymore. I have to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. One can think of the chilling effects on reportage due to the above. The sad fact is even with all the money in the world the PM is unable to come to the Parliament to face questions.
The above poster/question is by Surya Pratap Singh, a retired IAS officer. He asks why the PM is unable to answer in either of the houses. As shared before, the Govt. wants very limited discussion. Even yesterday, the Lok Sabha TV just showed the BJP MP s making statements but silent or mic was off during whatever questions or statements made by the opposition. If this isn t mockery of Indian democracy then I don t know what is Even the media landscape has been altered substantially within the last few years. Both Adani and Ambani have distributed the media pie between themselves. One of the last bastions of the free press, NDTV was bought by Adani in a hostile takeover. Both Ambani and Adani are close to this Goverment. In fact, there is no sector in which one or the other is not present. Media houses like Newsclick, The Wire etc. that are a fraction of mainstream press are where most of the youth have been going to get their news as they are not partisan. Although even there, GOI has time and again interfered. The Wire has had too many 504 Gateway timeouts in the recent months and they had been forced to move most of their journalism from online to video, rather Youtube in order to escape both the censoring and the timeouts as shared above. In such a hostile environment, how both the organizations are somehow able to survive is a miracle. Most local reportage is also going to YouTube as that s the best way for them to not get into Govt. censors. Not an ideal situation, but that s the way it is. The difference between Indian and Israeli media can be seen through this
The above is a Screenshot shared by how the Israeli media has reacted to the Israeli Government s Knesset over the judicial overhaul . Here, the press itself erodes its own by giving into the Government day and night

Binging on Webseries Saw Northshore, Three Pines, Alaska Daily and Doogie Kamealoha M.D. which is based on Doogie Howser M.D. Of the four, enjoyed Doogie Kamealoha M.D. the most but then it might be because it s a copy of Doogie Howser, just updated to the new millenia and there are some good childhood memories associated with that series. The others are also good. I tried to not see European stuff as most of them are twisted and didn t want that space.

EU Digital Operational Resilience Act and impact on FOSS Few days ago, apparently the EU shared the above Act. One can read about it more here. This would have more impact on FOSS as most development of various FOSS distributions happens in EU. Fair bit of Debian s own development happens in Germany and France. While there have been calls to make things more clearer, especially for FOSS given that most developers do foss development either on side or as a hobby while their day job is and would be different. The part about consumer electronics and FOSS is a tricky one as updates can screw up your systems. Microsoft has had a huge history of devices not working after an update or upgrade. And this is not limited to Windows as they would like to believe. Even apple seems to be having its share of issues time and time again. One would have hoped that these companies that make billions of dollars from their hardware and software sales would be doing more testing and Q&A and be more aware about security issues. FOSS, on the other hand while being more responsive doesn t make as much money vis-a-vis the competitors. Let s take the most concrete example. The most successful mobile phone having FOSS is Purism. But it s phone, it has priced itself out of the market. A huge part of that is to do with both economies of scale and trying to get an infrastructure and skills in the States where none or minimally exists. Compared that to say Pinepro that is manufactured in Hong Kong and is priced 1/3rd of the same. For most people it is simply not affordable in these times. Add to that the complexity of these modern cellphones make it harder, not easier for most people to be vigilant and update the phone at all times. Maybe we need more dumphones such as Light and Punkt but then can those be remotely hacked or not, there doesn t seem to be any answers on that one. I haven t even seen anybody even ask those questions. They may have their own chicken and egg issues. For people like me who have lost hearing, while I can navigate smartphones for now but as I become old I don t see anything that would help me. For many an elderly population, both hearing and seeing are the first to fade. There doesn t seem to be any solutions targeted for them even though they are 5-10% of any population at the very least. Probably more so in Europe and the U.S. as well as Japan and China. All of them are clearly under-served markets but dunno a solution for them. At least to me that s an open question.

21 July 2023

Gunnar Wolf: Road trip through mountain ridges to find the surreal

We took a couple of days of for a family vacation / road trip through the hills of Central Mexico. The overall trip does not look like anything out of the ordinary

Other than the fact that Google forecasted we d take approximately 15.5 hours driving for 852Km that is, an average of almost 55 Km/h. And yes, that s what we signed up for. And that s what we got. Of course, the exact routes are not exactly what Google suggested (I can say we optimized a bit the route, i.e., by avoiding the metropolitan area of Quer taro, at the extreme west, and going via San Juan del R o / Tequisquiapan / Bernal). The first stretch of the road is just a regular, huge highway, with no particular insights. The highways leaving and entering Mexico City on the North are not fun nor beautiful, only they are needed to get nice trips going Mexico City sits at a point of changing climates. Of course, it is a huge city And I cannot imagine how it would be without all of the urbanization it now sports. But anyway: On the West, South, and part of the East, it is surrounded by high mountains, with beautiful and dense forests. Mexico City is 2200m high, and most of the valley s surrounding peaks are ~3000m (and at the South Eastern tip, our two big volcanoes, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl, get past the 5700m mark). Towards the North, the landscape is flatter and much more dry. Industrial compounds give way to dry grasslands. Of course, central Mexico does not understand the true meaning of flat, and the landscape is full with eh-not-very-big mountains. Then, as we entered Quer taro State, we started approaching Bernal. And we saw a huge rock that looks like it is not supposed to be there! It just does not fit the surroundings.

Shortly after Bernal, we entered a beautiful, although most crumpled, mountain ridge: Sierra Gorda de Quer taro. Sierra Gorda encompasses most of the North of the (quite small 11500Km total) state of Quer taro, plus portions of the neighboring states; other than the very abrupt and sharp orography, what strikes me most is the habitat diversity it encompasses. We started going up an absolute desert, harsh and beautiful; we didn t take pictures along the way as the road is difficult enough that there are almost no points for stopping for refreshments or for photo opportunities. But it is quite majestic. And if you think deserts are barren, boring places well, please do spend some time enjoying them! Anyway At on point, the road passes by a ~3100m height, and suddenly Pines! More pines! A beautiful forest! We reached our first stop at the originally mining town of Pinal de Amoles.

After spending the night there and getting a much needed rest, we started a quite steep descent towards Jalpan de Serra. While it is only ~20Km away on the map, we descended from 2300 to 760 meters of altitude (and the road was over 40Km long).

Being much lower, the climate drastically changed from cool and humid to quite warm and the body attitude in the kids does not lie!

In the mid-18th century, Fray Jun pero Serra established five missions to evangelize the population of this very harsh territory, and the frontispiece for the church and monastery in Jalpan is quite breathtaking.

But we were just passing by Jalpan. A short visit to the church and to the ice-cream shop, and we were again on our way. We crossed the state border, entering San Luis Potos , and arrived to our main destination: Xilitla, the little town in the beautiful Huasteca where the jungle meets surrealism. Xilitla was chosen by the British poet and patron of various surrealist artists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_James. He was a British noble (an unofficial grandson of King Edward VII), and heir to a huge fortune. I m not going to repeat here his very well known biography suffice to say that he got in love with the Huasteca, and bought a >30ha piece of jungle and mountain close to the Xilitla town, and made it his house. With very ample economic resources, in the late 1940s he started his lifelong project of building a surrealist garden. And Well, that s enough blabbering for me. I m sharing some pictures I took there. The place is plainly magic and wonderful. Edward James died in 1984, and his will decrees that after his death, the jungle should be allowed to reclaim the constructions so many structures are somewhat crumbling, and it is expected they will break down in the following decades. But for whoever comes to Mexico This magic place is definitely worth the heavy ride to the middle of the mountains and to the middle of the jungle.

Xilitla now also hosts a very good museum with sculptures by Leonora Carrington, James long-time friend, but I m not going to abuse this space with even more pictures. And of course, we did more, and enjoyed more, during our three days in Xilitla. And for our way back I wanted to try a different route. We decided to come back to Mexico City crossing Hidalgo state instead of Quer taro. I had feared the roads would be in a worse shape or would be more difficult to travel And I was happy to be proven wrong!

This was the longest driving stretch approximately 6:30 for 250Km. The roads are in quite decent shape, and while there are some stretches where we were quite lonely (probably the loneliest one was the sharp ascent from Tamazunchale to the detour before Orizatl n), the road felt safe and well kept at all times. The sights all across Eastern Hidalgo are breathtaking, and all furiously green (be it with really huge fern leaves or with tall, strong pines), until Zacualtip n.

And just as abruptly or more as when we entered Pinal de Amoles We crossed Orizatl n, and we were in a breathtaking arid, desert-like environment again. We crossed the Barranca de Metztitl n natural reserve, and arrived to spend the night at Huasca de Ocampo. There are many more things we could have done starting at Huasca, a region where old haciendas thrived, full of natural formations, and very very interesting. But we were tired and pining to be finally back home. So we rested until mid-morning and left straight back home in Mexico City. Three hours later, we were relaxing, preparing lunch, the kids watching whatever-TV-like-things are called nowadays. All in all, a very beautiful vacation!

29 May 2023

John Goerzen: Recommendations for Tools for Backing Up and Archiving to Removable Media

I have several TB worth of family photos, videos, and other data. This needs to be backed up and archived. Backups and archives are often thought of as similar. And indeed, they may be done with the same tools at the same time. But the goals differ somewhat: Backups are designed to recover from a disaster that you can fairly rapidly detect. Archives are designed to survive for many years, protecting against disaster not only impacting the original equipment but also the original person that created them. Reflecting on this, it implies that while a nice ZFS snapshot-based scheme that supports twice-hourly backups may be fantastic for that purpose, if you think about things like family members being able to access it if you are incapacitated, or accessibility in a few decades time, it becomes much less appealing for archives. ZFS doesn t have the wide software support that NTFS, FAT, UDF, ISO-9660, etc. do. This post isn t about the pros and cons of the different storage media, nor is it about the pros and cons of cloud storage for archiving; these conversations can readily be found elsewhere. Let s assume, for the point of conversation, that we are considering BD-R optical discs as well as external HDDs, both of which are too small to hold the entire backup set. What would you use for archiving in these circumstances? Establishing goals The goals I have are:

Archives can be restored using Linux or Windows (even though I don t use Windows, this requirement will ensure the broadest compatibility in the future)
The archival system must be able to accommodate periodic updates consisting of new files, deleted files, moved files, and modified files, without requiring a rewrite of the entire archive dataset
Archives can ideally be mounted on any common OS and the component files directly copied off
Redundancy must be possible. In the worst case, one could manually copy one drive/disc to another. Ideally, the archiving system would automatically track making n copies of data.
While a full restore may be a goal, simply finding one file or one directory may also be a goal. Ideally, an archiving system would be able to quickly tell me which discs/drives contain a given file.
Ideally, preserves as much POSIX metadata as possible (hard links, symlinks, modification date, permissions, etc). However, for the archiving case, this is less important than for the backup case, with the possible exception of modification date.
Must be easy enough to do, and sufficiently automatable, to allow frequent updates without error-prone or time-consuming manual hassle

I would welcome your ideas for what to use. Below, I ll highlight different approaches I ve looked into and how they stack up. Basic copies of directories The initial approach might be one of simply copying directories across. This would work well if the data set to be archived is smaller than the archival media. In that case, you could just burn or rsync a new copy with every update and be done. Unfortunately, this is much less convenient with data of the size I m dealing with. rsync is unavailable in that case. With some datasets, you could manually design some rsyncs to store individual directories on individual devices, but that gets unwieldy fast and isn t scalable. You could use something like my datapacker program to split the data across multiple discs/drives efficiently. However, updates will be a problem; you d have to re-burn the entire set to get a consistent copy, or rely on external tools like mtree to reflect deletions. Not very convenient in any case. So I won t be using this. tar or zip While you can split tar and zip files across multiple media, they have a lot of issues. GNU tar s incremental mode is clunky and buggy; zip is even worse. tar files can t be read randomly, making it extremely time-consuming to extract just certain files out of a tar file. The only thing going for these formats (and especially zip) is the wide compatibility for restoration. dar Here we start to get into the more interesting tools. Dar is, in my opinion, one of the best Linux tools that few people know about. Since I first wrote about dar in 2008, it s added some interesting new features; among them, binary deltas and cloud storage support. So, dar has quite a few interesting features that I make use of in other ways, and could also be quite helpful here:

Dar can both read and write files sequentially (streaming, like tar), or with random-access (quick seek to extract a subset without having to read the entire archive)
Dar can apply compression to individual files, rather than to the archive as a whole, faciliting both random access and resilience (corruption in one file doesn t invalidate all subsequent files). Dar also supports numerous compression algorithms including gzip, bzip2, xz, lzo, etc., and can omit compressing already-compressed files.
The end of each dar file contains a central directory (dar calls this a catalog). The catalog contains everything necessary to extract individual files from the archive quickly, as well as everything necessary to make a future incremental archive based on this one. Additionally, dar can make and work with isolated catalogs a file containing the catalog only, without data.
Dar can split the archive into multiple pieces called slices. This can best be done with fixed-size slices ( slice and first-slice options), which let the catalog regord the slice number and preserves random access capabilities. With the execute option, dar can easily wait for a given slice to be burned, etc.
Dar normally stores an entire new copy of a modified file, but can optionally store an rdiff binary delta instead. This has the potential to be far smaller (think of a case of modifying metadata for a photo, for instance).

Additionally, dar comes with a dar_manager program. dar_manager makes a database out of dar catalogs (or archives). This can then be used to identify the precise archive containing a particular version of a particular file. All this combines to make a useful system for archiving. Isolated catalogs are tiny, and it would be easy enough to include the isolated catalogs for the entire set of archives that came before (or even the dar_manager database file) with each new incremental archive. This would make restoration of a particular subset easy. The main thing to address with dar is that you do need dar to extract the archive. Every dar release comes with source code and a win64 build. dar also supports building a statically-linked Linux binary. It would therefore be easy to include win64 binary, Linux binary, and source with every archive run. dar is also a part of multiple Linux and BSD distributions, which are archived around the Internet. I think this provides a reasonable future-proofing to make sure dar archives will still be readable in the future. The other challenge is user ability. While dar is highly portable, it is fundamentally a CLI tool and will require CLI abilities on the part of users. I suspect, though, that I could write up a few pages of instructions to include and make that a reasonably easy process. Not everyone can use a CLI, but I would expect a person that could follow those instructions could be readily-enough found. One other benefit of dar is that it could easily be used with tapes. The LTO series is liked by various hobbyists, though it could pose formidable obstacles to non-hobbyists trying to aceess data in future decades. Additionally, since the archive is a big file, it lends itself to working with par2 to provide redundancy for certain amounts of data corruption. git-annex git-annex is an interesting program that is designed to facilitate managing large sets of data and moving it between repositories. git-annex has particular support for offline archive drives and tracks which drives contain which files. The idea would be to store the data to be archived in a git-annex repository. Then git-annex commands could generate filesystem trees on the external drives (or trees to br burned to read-only media). In a post about using git-annex for blu-ray backups, an earlier thread about DVD-Rs was mentioned. This has a few interesting properties. For one, with due care, the files can be stored on archival media as regular files. There are some different options for how to generate the archives; some of them would place the entire git-annex metadata on each drive/disc. With that arrangement, one could access the individual files without git-annex. With git-annex, one could reconstruct the final (or any intermediate) state of the archive appropriately, handling deltions, renames, etc. You would also easily be able to know where copies of your files are. The practice is somewhat more challenging. Hundreds of thousands of files what I would consider a medium-sized archive can pose some challenges, running into hours-long execution if used in conjunction with the directory special remote (but only minutes-long with a standard git-annex repo). Ruling out the directory special remote, I had thought I could maybe just work with my files in git-annex directly. However, I ran into some challenges with that approach as well. I am uncomfortable with git-annex mucking about with hard links in my source data. While it does try to preserve timestamps in the source data, these are lost on the clones. I wrote up my best effort to work around all this. In a forum post, the author of git-annex comments that I don t think that CDs/DVDs are a particularly good fit for git-annex, but it seems a couple of users have gotten something working. The page he references is Managing a large number of files archived on many pieces of read-only medium. Some of that discussion is a bit dated (for instance, the directory special remote has the importtree feature that implements what was being asked for there), but has some interesting tips. git-annex supplies win64 binaries, and git-annex is included with many distributions as well. So it should be nearly as accessible as dar in the future. Since git-annex would be required to restore a consistent recovery image, similar caveats as with dar apply; CLI experience would be needed, along with some written instructions. Bacula and BareOS Although primarily tape-based archivers, these do also also nominally support drives and optical media. However, they are much more tailored as backup tools, especially with the ability to pull from multiple machines. They require a database and extensive configuration, making them a poor fit for both the creation and future extractability of this project. Conclusions I m going to spend some more time with dar and git-annex, testing them out, and hope to write some future posts about my experiences.

19 December 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Artifact Space

Review: Artifact Space, by Miles Cameron

Series:	Arcana Imperii #1
Publisher:	Gollancz
Copyright:	June 2021
ISBN:	1-4732-3262-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	483

Artifact Space is a military (mostly) science fiction novel, the first of an expected trilogy. Christian Cameron is a prolific author of historical fiction under that name, thrillers under the name Gordon Kent, and historical fantasy under the name Miles Cameron. This is his first science fiction novel. Marca Nbaro is descended from one of the great spacefaring mercantile families, but it's not doing her much good. She is a ward of the Orphanage, the boarding school for orphaned children of the DHC, generous in theory and a hellhole in practice. Her dream to serve on one of the Greatships, the enormous interstellar vessels that form the backbone of the human trading network, has been blocked by the school authorities, a consequence of the low-grade war she's been fighting with them throughout her teenage years. But Marca is not a person to take no for an answer. Pawning her family crest gets her just enough money to hire a hacker to doctor her school records, adding the graduation she was denied and getting her aboard the Greatship Athens as a new Midshipper. I don't read a lot of military science fiction, but there is one type of story that I love that military SF is uniquely well-suited to tell. It's not the combat or the tactics or the often-trite politics. It's the experience of the military as a system, a collective human endeavor. One ideal of the military is that people come to it from all sorts of backgrounds, races, and social classes, and the military incorporates them all into a system built for a purpose. It doesn't matter who you are or what you did before: if you follow the rules, do your job, and become part of a collaboration larger than yourself, you have a place and people to watch your back whether or not they know you or like you. Obviously, like any ideal, many militaries don't live up to this, and there are many stories about those failures. But the story of that ideal, told well, is a genre I like a great deal and is hard to find elsewhere. This sort of military story shares some features with found family, and it's not a coincidence that I also like found family stories. But found family still assumes that these people love you, or at least like you. For some protagonists, that's a tricky barrier both to cross and to believe one has crossed. The (admittedly idealized) military doesn't assume anyone likes you. It doesn't expect that you or anyone around you have the right feelings. It just expects you to do your job and work with other people who are doing their job. The requirements are more concrete, and thus in a way easier to believe in. Artifact Space is one of those military science fiction stories. I was entirely unsurprised to see that the author is a former US Navy career officer. The Greatships here are, technically, more of a merchant marine than a full-blown military. (The author noted in an interview that he based them on the merchant ships of Venice.) The weapons are used primarily for defense; the purpose of the Greatships is trade, and every crew member has a storage allotment in the immense cargo area that they're encouraged to use. The setting is in the far future, after a partial collapse and reconstruction of human society, in which humans have spread through interstellar space, settled habitable planets, and built immense orbital cities. The Athens is trading between multiple human settlements, but its true destination is far into the deep black: Tradepoint, where it can trade with the mysterious alien Starfish for xenoglas, a material that humans have tried and failed to reproduce and on which much of human construction now depends. This is, to warn, one of those stories where the scrappy underdog of noble birth makes friends with everyone and is far more competent than anyone expects. The story shape is not going to surprise you, and you have to have considerable tolerance for it to enjoy this book. Marca is ridiculously, absurdly central to the plot for a new Middie. Sometimes this makes sense given her history; other times, she is in the middle of improbable accidents that felt forced by the author. Cameron doesn't entirely break normal career progression, but Marca is very special in a way that you only get to be as the protagonist of a novel. That said, Cameron does some things with that story shape that I liked. Marca's hard-won survival skills are not weirdly well-suited for her new life aboard ship. To the contrary, she has to unlearn a lot of bad habits and let go of a lot of anxiety. I particularly liked her relationship with her more-privileged cabin mate, which at first seemed to only be a contrast between Thea's privilege and Marca's background, but turned into both of them learning from each other. There's a great mix of supporting characters, with a wide variety of interactions with Marca and a solid sense that all of the characters have their own lives and their own concerns that don't revolve around her. There is, of course, a plot to go with this. I haven't talked about it much because I think the summaries of this book are a bit of a spoiler, but there are several layers of political intrigue, threats to the ship, an interesting AI, and a good hook in the alien xenoglas trade. Cameron does a deft job balancing the plot with Marca's training and her slow-developing sense of place in the ship (and fear about discovery of her background and hacking). The pacing is excellent, showing all the skill I'd expect from someone with a thriller background and over forty prior novels under his belt. Cameron portrays the tedious work of learning a role on a ship without boring the reader, which is a tricky balancing act. I also like the setting: a richly multicultural future that felt like it included people from all of Earth, not just the white western parts. That includes a normalized androgyne third gender, which is the sort of thing you rarely see in military SF. Faster-than-light travel involves typical physics hand-waving, but the shape of the hand-waving is one I've not seen before and is a great excuse for copying the well-known property of oceangoing navies that longer ships can go faster. (One tech grumble, though: while Cameron does eventually say that this is a known tactic and Marca didn't come up with anything novel, deploying spread sensors for greater resolution is sufficiently obvious it should be standard procedure, and shouldn't have warranted the character reactions it got.) I thoroughly enjoyed this. Artifact Space is the best military SF that I've read in quite a while, at least back to John G. Hemry's JAG in space novels and probably better than those. It's going to strike some readers, with justification, as cliched, but the cliches are handled so well that I had only minor grumbling at a few absurd coincidences. Marca is a great character who is easy to care about. The plot was tense and satisfying, and the feeling of military structure, tradition, jargon, and ship pride was handled well. I had a very hard time putting this down and was sad when it ended. If you're in the mood for that class of "learning how to be part of a collaborative structure" style of military SF, recommended. Artifact Space reaches a somewhat satisfying conclusion, but leaves major plot elements unresolved. Followed by Deep Black, which doesn't have a release date at the time of this writing. Rating: 9 out of 10

20 December 2020

Shirish Agarwal: Insane Logic and Farming in other countries

The people who are pro-Government and in this case pro-Corporate do not have any success stories that they can share. Hence, most of the time the arguments are that the other are bad. For e.g. quite a few people argue that we don t need farmers, we can just order from restaurant. They have completely disassociated the idea that even then you need farmers as unless the farmers put the seed in, till the soil and wait for the rains or have irrigation you won t get ripe vegetables which then has to be taken out, and somehow sold to the wholesaler from where it comes to the restaurant and then to your plate. Sadly, even the farm-to-fork infographics are so depressingly sad, you want to look away. If you see the infographic you see it is just not non-veg but also vegetarian food grains which go under lot of questionable practices. Even, with such scenarios that is done by corporations our people want to go ahead. I will share stories from other countries which tell how they are doing more. The Soldier-Farmer Another sad part of these protests have been soldiers who have been returning their medals. The ones who oppose have the gall to say they should return the cash rewards they got. So just like farmers, seems soldiers also do not need money to survive. They are supposed to live only on air and water. This is after the present Govt. has reduced their pensions after retirement and that too without any discussion

Now I nor anybody else would have minded if these conditions were shared going forward rather than doing it retrospectively. People who usually go to the army are not in it for money but for the adventure and glory they bring. But they do also have a family and have a family responsibility. In most other countries, the soldier and his families are well-looked after. If you know that even after you die, the Government would look after your family, you will do your best. Unfortunately, many veterans in India themselves are asked to help by many war widows as the widows don t get family pensions. The proposal naturally has left many miffed. In fact many of the veterans who used to advise people to join the armed forces now advise young people to pursue civilian life and careers. This is when Indian Army has been ironically having shortage of officers from well over a decade and stresses felt by Army personnel also known for a long time. Even under this nationalistic Government, if it cannot take care of its soldiers, then forget about others.

Now it is nobody s argument that India needs to improve its tooth-to-tail ratio but this is the wrong way to go about it. I would probably talk about that some other time as that totally needs its whole place. Even OROP, which was the mandate of this Government hasn t had been done in full as there are quite a few cases in the Supreme Court. Almost all the cases have been heard and only decisions have to be given which the SC for whatever reason doesn t want to give. They just keep changing the date of the hearing. Nowadays, in many suits/cases, the SC asks for fresh hearings even though all the old records are there. This is a newish phenomena which is being observed in SC. Why is it being done? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing for sure has changed, the SC which used to be citizen-focussed or enabler of human rights and used to be held as a beacon for judicial activism has changed but these are other topics which need their own space. Update 16/12/2020 The SC recommends setting up a committee to discuss farmer issues. And this is nothing new. This is called death by committee. When there is already so much literature on the subject, including the works done by Swaminathan Commission. There has been 6 reports which do look at farmer issues in a holistic manner. This is the Supreme Court giving an escape route to GOI. They also have abstained from having a whole session citing Covid. This is when the ruling Govt. is putting a massive 1000 crore on a new building on which the SC has put on hold. And even then the GOI went ahead and did a Bhoomi-Pujan (traditional ceremony when making a new construction from scratch.) Naturally due to the double whammy of both the pension reforms and now the laws to make corporate farming more aggressive has left a deep impact on the soldier-farmer that the state does not think or feel for him. Even the United States farm-aid eloquently describes how corporate farming has made independent farmers suffer. You read that, and it seems it is as the state of our farmers here in India. Even their average land-holding has dropped a bit. I have shared about the state of farmers in India, in two blog posts previously. And it is not just farm owners who have had it bad, even farm workers in U.S. The issue may look to be about the pandemic but goes far deeper. The Israeli Model The Israelis have always used collective farming and do have a large share in farming there. The old model called Kibbutz is what made Israelis self-sufficient in food and water and actually are world-leaders where they export their services to other nations on the same thing. France Just like many other countries, France also seems to have favored farmer co-operatives. Almost 75% of all farmers are in co-operatives. Italy The country world-famous for its wines and cheese are made by its co-operatives. In fact co-ops are the buzzword it seems in Italy, more so in Northern Italy. Asian economies Even Asian economies, especially East Asian economies by and large have been turning to co-operatives. Brazil Now Brazil is almost 40% more than India. In fact, in most of the indices, Brazil beats India handsomely. So one would be forgiven to think that Brazil must have corporate farming. But nothing could be further from the truth. The only downer is that they have high crime in some areas. Otherwise, they are in many ways better than India. In fact, I was surprised a few years ago to learn about Mercsour. I would have to admit though I learned much about Brazil when Debian was holding a debconf about a year back. Otherwise, I had known about the country for number of years but apart from its carnival and samba, hadn t known much about it. I did come to know that most of Latin America also loves spices as much as Indians do. They show that love by using hot sauces. I do one day wanna try one of their sauces to see what makes it tick. I do know they like to barbecue vegetables as much as barbecuing non-veg food. This is going a bit OT but then that s the foodie in me

Conclusion I could have shared more countries which have chosen the co-operative way rather than corporate farming and that is simply because they know what is best for their people and what is best even politically. The new farm laws are neither grounded in farmer s welfare nor anything else. The Govt. has been trying to undermine the farmers for years together. In fact, Madhya Pradesh has openly said that they will not allow farmers from other states to sell in their state. Although, even before these laws there was nothing to restrict the farmer from selling his produce anywhere in the country. Angering the farmers is not good politics as was found sometime back but guessing some lessons need to be re-learned. One comment though, on social media I have seen many people especially youngsters having no real understanding of what inflation is all about. For e.g. if you ask them how come we are having a sort of record inflation in a technical recession (there has been a contraction, actually) and you see them putting themselves into bigger and bigger ditches. This does explain in part why the BJP wins in elections. If you do more rhetoric, which BJP is good as, rather than educating people than you are bound to win. You don t need plans, you don t need a vision, just rhetoric will do. What more evidence is needed when the economy is and was in a worse shape even before the pandemic and BJP won. I would probably write about that as that again needs lot of background and understanding as well as related terms.

3 December 2020

Daniel Lange: No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report

The Linux Foundation has published its annual report today. LWN calls it glossy and yeah, boy, it is shiny. So shiny that people that work in the publishing industry immediately see this has been produced with the Adobe toolchain which - unfortunately - is one of the big suites of software not yet available for Linux. Checking the PDF file metadata reveals the keywords "open source, open standards, open hardware, open data". That is what the Linux Foundation is about. Good stuff. Linux Foundation annual report 2020 cover

Linux Foundation annual report 2020 cover

The PDF producer meta data for the annual report PDF has been set to "Linux kernel 0.12.1 for Workgroups" and the PDF creator meta data element to "Sharp Zaurus XR-5000 (Maemo5) Edition". Somebody thought to better hide the real data and had some tongue-in-cheek ideas. Kudos. But nicer would have been to use Open Source software to produce the report, not? Running strings 2020-Linux-Foundation-Annual-Report_113020.pdf grep Adobe wc -l gives us 1229 lines and confirms the suspicion of the toolchain. A stale /Title (Annual Report 2020) /Producer (macOS Version 10.15.7 $Build 19H15$ Quartz PDFContext) has been forgotten in the document to tell us about the platform. So, ladies and gentlemen, the Linux Foundation 2020 annual report has been produced on a Mac. Running Adobe Creative Cloud on MacOS Catalina 10.15.7. Which is proprietary software. Its kernel (and some userland pieces) are based on BSD. Not Linux.

The image on the front page also struck me as a bit odd ... using a ballpoint pen on the laptop screen? Unbranded laptop. Unbranded cup in the foreground. Kid in the background not paying attention to his tablet. All of that cries stock image so loud it hurts. Google currently finds ~560 uses of the picture and any editorial use nicely tells us that it is Dragana Gordic / Shutterstock. The image is "Smiling mom working at home with her child on the sofa while writing an email. Young woman working from home, while in quarantine isolation during the Covid-19 health crisis". See the Daily Mail for a wonderful example of the working mum in context. I hope, if her laptop had been powered on, it would have run Linux. I mean, what else would still run on an old white MacBook with an Intel "Core 2 Duo" processor from 2008? Daily Mail screenshot of the same stock image used

Daily Mail screenshot of the same stock image used

Continue reading "No dog food today - the Linux Foundation annual report"

14 July 2020

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

The last month saw a new upstream release of Minetest (version 5.3.), a multi-player sandbox game similar to Minecraft. A backport to buster-backports will follow shortly.
Asher Gordon helped release a new version of Berusky 2, a sokoban like logic game but in 3D. The game received several improvements including bug fixes, code polishing and a new way to access the data files. Previously those files were all packed in a special container format but now they can be accessed directly without someone having to rely on some sort of unarchiver. I have uploaded this version as 0.12-1 to Debian unstable.
I tested an upstream patch for empire to address the build failure with GCC 10. This one is a better solution than the currently implemented workaround and I expect it to be included in the next upstream release.
I fixed two FTBFS in simutrans-pak64 and simutrans-pak128.britain, two addon packages for the simulation game simutrans.

Debian Java

New upstream versions this month: hsqldb, libpdfbox2-java, jackson-jr, jackson-dataformat-xml and jackson-databind. The latter upload addressed several security vulnerabilites which have become rather minor because upstream has enabled safe default typing by default now. Nevertheless I have prepared a buster-security update as well which is already available in buster-proposed-updates.

Misc

I packaged new versions of wabt, privacybadger and binaryen and applied another upstream patch for xarchiver to address the incomplete fix for Debian bug #959914, to better handle encrypted multi-volume 7zip archives.
By popular request I uploaded imlib2 version 1.6 to buster-backports because the image library supports the webp format now.

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:

DLA-2278-1. Issued a security update for squid3 fixing 19 CVE.
DLA-2279-1. Issued a security update for tomcat8 fixing 2 CVE.
Prepared and uploaded a stretch-pu update for jackson-databind fixing 20 CVE. (#964727)
Synced the proftpd-dfsg version from Jessie with Stretch to address a memory leak which leads to a denial-of-service and correct the version number to make seemless updates work.
Prepared the security update for imagemagick triaging and/or fixing 76 CVE.
Worked on updating the database about embedded code copies to determine how packages are affected by security vulnerabilities in embedded code copies. This included a) compiling a list of important packages which are regular affected by CVE, b) investigating if embedded code copies are present, c) determining the possible impact of a security vulnerability in those embedded code copies, d) writing a script that automates printing those findings on demand.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

3 March 2020

Elana Hashman: Chili

I really like beans. This is one way for me to power through the copious amounts I receive through the beloved Bean of the Month Club. (It took me many months, but I finally got in!)

Cooked beans two days in a row in order to deliver this masterpiece pic.twitter.com/VzIlPKKosJ e. hashman (@ehashdn) March 3, 2020

Beef Chili Serves 5-7. Active time: 20m. Total time: 90m. Ingredients:

1lb lean ground beef
1 large onion
1 poblano pepper (or use your favourite peppers)
1 stick celery
some fresh garlic (idk, 2-3 cloves?)
2 tablespoons ancho chili powder
3 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons oregano
2 teaspoons garlic powder
14oz can diced tomatoes
14oz can crushed tomatoes
3 cups big cooked beans (I love ayacote morado for this)
3 cups small cooked beans (pinto work great)
salt to taste
wedge of lime (optional)
garnishes (sour cream, grated cheese, green onion, etc.)

Recipe:

Heat a dutch oven on high.
Small or medium dice (depending on your preference) the celery, pepper, and onion. You should have about four cups total.
Brown the beef in the dutch oven, using a little bit of cooking oil to avoid sticking if desired.
While the meat is browning, mince the garlic, measure the spices, and combine these all together.
Once the meat is brown, add the diced vegetables and cook until tender and the onion is translucent.
Add the spices and garlic, thoroughly combine, and cook until fragrant, about one minute.
Add the tomatoes. Once the mixture comes to a boil, cover and simmer for about an hour, stirring every ~20 minutes or so.
Add the beans and use bean broth or water to adjust consistency.
This is a good time to taste and add salt. I usually use 1 to 1 teaspoons.
Bring to a boil again, cover and simmer for 10-15 more minutes.
Turn off the heat, taste, and adjust seasoning if necessary. Add a squeeze of lime if it needs a little acidity.
Serve with sour cream, grated cheese, sliced green onions, or any of your other favourite garnishes.
Enjoy!

before and after pic.twitter.com/CgkeCDPOaO e. hashman (@ehashdn) March 3, 2020

Frequently Asked Questions Q: Why wait until basically the end to add salt?
A: Because canned ingredients will contain salt, and it's hard to predict how much, so you should always salt to taste. Waiting until the end will always ensure you season accurately. Q: Why are so many of these directions so hand-wavey?
A: Cooking is an adventure. Experiment a little! Q: But I have no idea what "to taste" means.
A: Taste it, add the thing, stir, taste it again. Is it salty enough? Sour enough? Sweet enough? You don't know, you say? Keep going. Add a little too much and then you'll find out for next time. Q: Why do you add so many beans and so little meat?
A: I really like beans.

26 June 2017

Jonathan Dowland: Coming in from the cold

I've been using a Mac day-to-day since around 2014, initially as a refreshing break from the disappointment I felt with GNOME3, but since then a few coincidences have kept me on the platform. Something happened earlier in the year that made me start to think about a move back to Linux on the desktop. My next work hardware refresh is due in March next year, which gives me about nine months to "un-plumb" myself from the Mac ecosystem. From the top of my head, here's the things I'm going to have to address:

the command modifier key ( ). It's a small thing but its use on the Mac platform is very consistent, and since it's not used at all within terminals, there's never a clash between window management and terminal applications. Compared to the morass of modifier keys on Linux, I will miss it. It's possible if I settle on a desktop environment and spend some time configuring it I can get to a similarly comfortable place. Similarly, I'd like to stick to one clipboard, and if possible, ignore the select-to-copy, middle-click-to-paste one entirely. This may be an issue for older software.
The Mac hardware trackpad and gestures are honestly fantastic. I still have some residual muscle memory of using the Thinkpad trackpoint, and so I'm weaning myself off the trackpad by using an external thinkpad keyboard with the work Mac, and increasingly using a x61s where possible.
SizeUp. I wrote about this in useful mac programs. It's a window management helper that lets you use keyboard shortcuts to move move and resize windows. I may need something similar, depending on what desktop environment I settle on. (I'm currently evaluating Awesome WM).
1Password. These days I think a password manager is an essential piece of software, and 1Password is a very, very good example of one. There are several other options now, but sadly none that seem remotely as nice as 1Password. Ryan C Gordon wrote 1pass, a Linux-compatible tool to read a 1Password keychain, but it's quite raw and needs some love. By coincidence that's currently his focus, and one can support him in this work via his Patreon.
Font rendering. Both monospace and regular fonts look fantastic out of the box on a Mac, and it can be quite hard to switch back and forth between a Mac and Linux due to the difference in quality. I think this is a mixture of ensuring the font rendering software on Linux is configured properly, but also that I install a reasonable selection of fonts.

I think that's probably it: not a big list! Notably, I'm not locked into iTunes, which I avoid where possible; Apple's Photo app (formerly iPhoto) which is a bit of a disaster; nor Time Machine, which is excellent, but I have a backup system for other things in place that I can use.

8 January 2017

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2016)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

Karen M Sandler (karen)
Sebastien Badia (sbadia)
Christos Trochalakis (ctrochalakis)
Adrian Bunk (bunk)
Michael Lustfield (mtecknology)
James Clarke (jrtc27)
Sean Whitton (spwhitton)
Jerome Georges Benoit (calculus)
Daniel Lange (dlange)
Christoph Biedl (cbiedl)
Gustavo Panizzo (gefa)
Gert Wollny (gewo)
Benjamin Barenblat (bbaren)
Giovani Augusto Ferreira (giovani)
Mechtilde Stehmann (mechtilde)
Christopher Stuart Hoskin (mans0954)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

Dmitry Bogatov
Dominik George
Gordon Ball
Sruthi Chandran
Michael Shuler
Filip Pytloun
Mario Anthony Limonciello
Julien Puydt
Nicholas D Steeves
Raoul Snyman

Congratulations!

7 September 2016

Antonio Terceiro: Debian CI updates for September 2016

debci 1.4 was released just a few days ago. Among general improvements, I would like to highlight:

pretty much every place in the web UI that mentions a PASS or a FAIL also displays the tested package version. This was suggested to me on IRC by Holger
I also tried to workaround an instability when setting up the LXC containers used for the tests, where the test bed process setup would finish without failure even though some steps in the middle of it failed. This caused the very final step for the debci-specific setup to fail, so there was no debci user inside the container, which caused tests to fail because that user was missing. Before that was fixed I was always keeping an eye on this issue, fixing the issue by hand, and re-triggering the affected packages by hand, so as far I can tell there is no package whose status has been permanently affected by this.
Last, but not least, this release brings an interesting contribution by Gordon Ball, which is keeping track of different failure states. debci will now let you know whether a currently failing package has always failed, has passed in a previous version, or if the same version that is currently failing has previously passed.

ci.debian.net has been upgraded to debci 1.4 just after that. At the same time I have also upgraded autodep8 and autopkgtest to their latest versions, available in jessie-backports. This means that it is now safe for Debian packages to assume the changes in autopkgtest 4.0 are available, in special the $AUTOPKGTEST_* environment variables. In other news, for several weeks there were had issues with tests not being scheduled when they should have. I was just assuming that the issue was due to the existing test scheduler, debci-batch, being broken. Today I was working on a new implementation that is going to be a lot faster, I started to hit a similar issue on my local tests, and finally realized what was wrong. The fact is that debci-batch stores the timestamp of the last time a package has been scheduled to run, and it there are no test result after that timestamp, it assumes the package is still in the queue to be tested, and does not schedule it again. It turns out that a few weeks ago, during maintainance work, I had cleared the queue, discarding all jobs that were there, but forgot to reset those timestamps, so when debci-batch came around again, it checked the timestamp of the last request and did not make new requests because there was no test result after that timestamp! I cleared all those timestamps, and the system should now go back to normal. That is it for now. I you want to contribute to the Debian CI project and want to get in touch, you can pop up on the #debci channel on the OFTC IRC network, or mail the autopkgtest-devel mailing list.

30 May 2014

Julien Danjou: OpenStack Design Summit Juno, from a Ceilometer point of view

Last week was the OpenStack Design Summit in Atlanta, GA where we, developers, discussed and designed the new OpenStack release (Juno) coming up. I've been there mainly to discuss Ceilometer upcoming developments.

The summit has been great. It was my third OpenStack design summit, and the first one not being a PTL, meaning it was a largely more relaxed summit for me! On Monday, we started by a 2.5 hours meeting with Ceilometer core developers and contributors about the Gnocchi experimental project that I've started a few weeks ago. It was a great and productive afternoon, and allowed me to introduce and cover this topic extensively, something that would not have been possible in the allocated session we had later in the week. Ceilometer had his design sessions running mainly during Wednesday. We noted a lot of things and commented during the sessions in our Etherpads instances. Here is a short summary of the sessions I've attended. Scaling the central agent I was in charge of the first session, and introduced the work that was done so far in the scaling of the central agent. Six months ago, during the Havana summit, I proposed to scale the central agent by distributing the tasks among several node, using a library to handle the group membership aspect of it. That led to the creation of the tooz library that we worked on at eNovance during the last 6 months. Now that we have this foundation available, Cyril Roelandt started to replace the Ceilometer alarming job repartition code by Taskflow and Tooz. Starting with the central agent is simpler and will be a first proof of concept to be used by the central agent then. We plan to get this merged for Juno. For the central agent, the same work needs to be done, but since it's a bit more complicated, it will be done after the alarming evaluators are converted. Test strategy The next session discussed the test strategy and how we could improve Ceilometer unit and functional testing. There is a lot in this area to be done, and this is going to be one of the main focus of the team in the upcoming weeks. Having Tempest tests run was a goal for Havana, and even if we made a lot of progress, we're still no there yet. Complex queries and per-user/project data collection This session, led by Ildik V ncsa, was about adding finer-grained configuration into the pipeline configuration to allow per-user and per-project data retrieval. This was not really controversial, though how to implement this exactly is still to be discussed, but the idea was well received. The other part of the session was about adding more in the complex queries feature provided by the v2 API. Rethinking Ceilometer as a Time-Series-as-a-Service This was my main session, the reason we met on Monday for a few hours, and one of the most promising session I hope of the week. It appears that the way Ceilometer designed its API and storage backends a long time ago is now a problem to scale the data storage. Also, the events API we introduced in the last release partially overlaps some of the functionality provided by the samples API that causes us scaling troubles. Therefore, I've started to rethink the Ceilometer API by building it as a time series read/write service, letting the audit part of our previous sample API to the event subsystem. After a few researches and experiments, I've designed a new project called Gnocchi, which provides exactly that functionality in a hopefully scalable way. Gnocchi is split in two parts: a time series API and its driver, and a resource indexing API with its own driver. Having two distinct driver sets allows it to use different technologies to store each data type in the best storage engine possible. The canonical driver for time series handling is based on Pandas and Swift. The canonical resource indexer driver is based on SQLAlchemy. The idea and project was well received and looked pretty exciting to most people. Our hope is to design a version 3 of the Ceilometer API around Gnocchi at some point during the Juno cycle, and have it ready as some sort of preview for the final release. Revisiting the Ceilometer data model This session led by Alexei Kornienko, kind of echoed the previous session, as it clearly also tried to address the Ceilometer scalability issue, but in a different way. Anyway, the SQL driver limitations have been discussed and Mehdi Abaakouk implemented some of the suggestions during the week, so we should very soon see more performances in Ceilometer with the current default storage driver. Ceilometer devops session We organized this session to get feedbacks from the devops community about deploying Ceilometer. It was very interesting, and the list of things we could improve is long, and I think will help us to drive our future efforts. SNMP inspectors This session, led by Lianhao Lu, discussed various details of the future of SNMP support in Ceilometer. Alarm and logs improvements This mixed session, led by Nejc Saje and Gordon Chung, was about possible improvements on the alarm evaluation system provided by Ceilometer, and making logging in Ceilometer more effective. Both half-sessions were interesting and led to several ideas on how to improve both systems. Conclusion Considering the current QA problems with Ceilometer, Eoghan Glynn, the new Project Technical Leader for Ceilometer, clearly indicated that this will be the main focus of the release cycle. Personally, I will be focused on working on Gnocchi, and will likely be joined by others in the next weeks. Our idea is to develop a complete solution with a high velocity in the next weeks, and then works on its integration with Ceilometer itself.

7 April 2014

Russ Allbery: Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2011

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 121, No. 3 & 4
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

Another review of a magazine that I finished quite some time ago. Apologies for any inaccuracies or lack of depth in the reviews. There wasn't much in Charles de Lint's reviews in this issue that interested me, but Michelle West covers a great selection of books. Two of them (The Wise Man's Fear and The Quantum Thief) are already on my to-read list; the third, The Postmortal, sounded interesting and would go on my list to purchase if I didn't already have so many good books I've not read. Otherwise, this issue is short on non-fiction. The only other essay entry is a film review from Kathi Maio, which is the typical whining about all things film that F&SF publishes. "Rutger and Baby Do Jotenheim" by Esther M. Friesner: Baby is a former pole dancer with a toy poodle named Mister Snickers, which warns you right away that this story is going to involve a few over-the-top caricatures and more use of the word "piddle" than one might ideally want. Rutger is a mythology professor who tolerates her for the standard reasons in this sort of pairing. They're travelling across country to Baby's sister's wedding when their car breaks down in Minnesota, prompting an encounter with frost giants. As you might expect, this is a sort of fractured fairy tale, except based on Norse mythology instead of the more typical Grimm fare. The fun is in watching these two apparent incompetents (but with enough knowledge of mythology to clue in the reader) reproduce the confrontation between Thor and Utgard-Loki. The fight with old age is particularly entertaining. If you've read any of Friesner's other stories, you know what to expect: not much in the way of deeper meaning, but lots of fun playing with stereotypes and an optimistic, funny outcome. Good stuff. (7) "The Man Inside Black Betty" by Sarah Langan: This story comes with a mouthful of a subtitle: "Is Nicholas Wellington the World's Best Hope?" It's also a story that purports to be written by a fictional character, in this case one Saurub Ramesh (with Langan credited as having done "research"). It's told in the style of first-person journalism, relating the thoughts and impressions of Ramesh as he interviews Nicholas Wellington. The topic is Black Betty: a black hole above Long Island Sound. Wellington is a scientific genius and iconoclast with radical theories of black holes that contradict how the government has been attempting to deal with Black Betty, unsuccessfully. The structure here was well-handled, reminding me a lot of a Michael Lewis article during the financial collapse. Langan has a good feel for how journalism of this type mixes personalities, politics, and facts. But it's all setup and no story. We get some world building, and then it's over, with no resolution except pessimism. Meh. (4) "A Borrowed Heart" by Deborah J. Ross: Ross starts with the trappings of urban fantasy transplanted into a Victorian world: supernatural creatures about, a protagonist who is a high-class prostitute, and sex and a sucubus by the second page. It evolves from there into a family drama and an investigation, always giving the reader the impression that a vampire will jump out at any moment. But the ending caught me entirely by surprise and was far more effective due to its departure from the expected path. Well done. (7) "Bright Moment" by Daniel Marcus: The conflict between terraforming and appreciation for the universe as we find it is an old story pattern in science fiction, and Marcus doesn't add much here. I think the story would have been stronger if he'd found a way to write the same plot with a pure appeal to environmental beauty without the typical stakes-raising. But he does sprinkle the story with a few interesting bits, including a pod marriage and a futuristic version of extreme sports as a way of communing with nature. (6) "The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece" by M. Rickert: This is typical of my reaction to a Rickert story: shading a bit too much towards horror for me, a bit too cryptic, well-written but not really my thing. It's about a corpse painter who does the work of an informal mortician, improving the appearance of bodies for their funerals, and the sheriff who brings him all the dead bodies. It takes an odd macabre twist, and I have no idea what to make of the ending. (4) "Aisle 1047" by Jon Armstrong: Armstrong is best known for a couple of novels, Grey and Yarn, which entangle their stories in the future of marketing and commerce. One may be unsurprised, then, that this short story is on similar themes, with the intensity turned up to the parody point. Tiffan3 is a department-store saleswoman, spouting corporate slogans and advertising copy while trying to push customers towards particular products. The story follows the escalation into an all-out brand war, fought with the bubbly short-cut propaganda of a thirty-second commercial. For me, it fell awkwardly between two stools: it's a little too over-the-top and in love with its own bizarre alternate world to be effective satire, but the world is more depressing than funny and the advertising copy is grating. More of a curiosity than a successful story, I think. (5) "Anise" by Chris DeVito: Stories that undermine body integrity and focus on the fascinated horror of violation of physical boundaries aren't generally my thing, so take that into account in this review. Anise's husband died, but that's not as much of a problem as it used to be. Medical science can resurrect people via a sort of permanent, full-body life support system, making them more cyborg than human. "Anise" is about the social consequences of this technology in a world where a growing number of people have a much different relationship with their body than the typical living person today. It's a disturbing story that is deeply concerned with the physical: sex, blood, physical intimacy in various different forms, and a twisted type of psychological abuse. I think fans of horror will like this more than I did, although it's not precisely horror. It looks at the way one's perception of self and others can change by passing through a profound physical transformation. (5) "Spider Hill" by Donald Mead: I liked this story a lot better. It's about witchcraft and farm magic, about family secrets, and a sort of coming-of-age story (for a girl rather than a boy, for once). The main character is resourceful, determined, but also empathetic and aware of the impact of her actions, which made her more fun to read about. I doubt I'll remember this for too long, but when skimming through it again for a review, I had fond memories of it. (6) "Where Have All the Young Men Gone?" by Albert E. Cowdrey: Cowdrey in his paranormal investigation mode, which I like better than his horror mode. For once, the protagonist isn't even a lower-class or backwoods character. Instead, he's a military historian travelling in Austria who runs across a local ghost story. This is a fairly straightforward ghost investigation that follows a familiar path (albeit to an unusual final destination), but Cowdrey is a good story-teller and I liked the protagonist. (7) "Overtaken" by Karl Bunker: This is the sort of story that delivers its moral with the force of a hammer. It's not subtle. But if you're in the right mood for that, it's one of the better stories of its type. It's about a long-journey starship, crew in hibernation, that's overtaken by a far newer and faster mechanized ship from Earth that's attempting to re-establish contact with the old ships. The story is a conversation between the ship AIs. Save this one until you're in the mood for an old-fashioned defense of humanity. (8) "Time and Tide" by Alan Peter Ryan: Another pseudo-horror story, although I think it's better classified as a haunting. A wardrobe recalls a traumatic drowning in the childhood of the protagonist. As these things tend to do in stories like this, reality and memory start blurring and the wardrobe takes on a malevolent role. Not my sort of thing. (3) "What We Found" by Geoff Ryman: Any new Geoff Ryman story is something to celebrate. This is a haunting story on the boundaries between the scientific method and tribal superstition, deeply entangled with the question of how one recovers from national and familial trauma. How can we avoid passing the evils and madness of one generation down to the next? Much of the story is about family trauma, told with Ryman's exceptional grasp of character, but the science is entangled in an ingenious way that I won't spoil. As with Air, this is in no way science fiction. The science here would have fascinating and rather scary implications for our world, but clearly is not how science actually works. But as an insight into politics, and into healing, I found it a startlingly effective metaphor. I loved every bit of this. By far the best story of the issue. (9) Rating: 7 out of 10

9 November 2013

Russ Allbery: Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2011

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 121, No. 1 & 2
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

Nothing of particular interest in the book reviews in this issue, although I was entertained to see Charles de Lint review a collection of the Prince Valiant strip. I have memories of that strip being one of the most boring works of art created by mankind. De Lint, of course, quite likes it. Our tastes seem to be very disjoint, although I have to admit that I've not read it collected and it may be more coherent and more interesting in that format. The science column in this issue, by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy, deserves special mention. It's on roshambo (rock-paper-scissors), human difficulties with randomness, and strategy in roshambo competitions. It's also the first essay I've read that clearly explains how there can be strategy to roshambo, and why that strategy is worth studying. Even though the primary topic of the column is randomness, it's worth reading from the perspective of strategy in competitive human vs. human games. "Bronsky's Dates with Death" by Peter David: Anyone familiar with PAD's body of work will immediately expect a humorous story with some deeper thoughtful bits, and that's exactly what this is. Bronsky, the title character, is a man almost incapable of saying exactly what's on his mind, and what's on his mind is his eventual death. Not that it bothers him that much; he's just thinking a lot about it. But his incessant discussion of it certainly bothers the people around him. This leads to a few entertaining exchanges with his family, and then to more entertaining exchanges with Death. Or Deaths, as there appear to be several different kinds. I found the exact metaphysics a bit confused, but the ending was still touching and a bit funny. (7) "The Way It Works Out and All" by Peter S. Beagle: This is a reprint of a special fund-raising story about Avram Davidson, so a lot of it was lost on me given that I know almost nothing about Davidson and have yet to get to any of his novels I own. But even without that background, it's a diverting story of hidden and parallel worlds and unexpected explorations. There isn't all that much in the way of a plot, but it's a nice bit of characterization set against a fun SF twist. (6) "Less Stately Mansions" by Rob Chilson: This is a story about conservatism in life, about a farmer staying on his farm and resisting change, and about nostalgia, but I liked it much better than I normally like stories with those themes. It's set against a future world in which climate change is making life increasingly untenable. Humans are migrating into space colonies of various types, but Jacob refuses. This frustrates some parts of the family who want a piece of the substantial cash-out he's being offered for his farm, which of course makes Jacob even more stubborn. It's more of an elegy than a story, but I think it captures a particular stubborn mood, and a conscious decision to go with what one knows even if it doesn't have a long future, quite well. (7) "The Ants of Flanders" by Robert Reed: This is the novella of the issue, and, as you might expect from the author, it's thoughtful, meaty, and satisfying. At the start of the book, the planet is visited by an extraterrestrial ship (or ships it's not entirely clear at first). One of the people near one landing is Bloch, a huge teenager who has an odd lack of natural fear. He stays near the center of the story as Reed slowly develops a cosmology and a galactic political background that makes it clear humans may be incidental to everything that's happening. I liked this. It's a touch depressing in spots, and Bloch is a strange protagonist, but the cosmology is not the normal SF background and sparks some thoughts about how a status quo would be maintained by powers that don't care much about individual lives. The interlude with the leopard is nicely done, even if its significance is inobvious at first. (7) "Hair" by Joan Aiken: This is one of those weird Gothic horror stories about creepy families and half-explained supernatural events that some people love and that do nothing for me. (3) "The Witch of Corinth" by Steven Saylor: This is straight historical fantasy, featuring a Roman and his Greek tutor (heroes, apparently, of a series of historical mysteries) visiting the ruins of Corinth and encountering some bloody and dangerous local conflicts. It's slow and atmospheric, carried along by good characterization and description of ruins. It's not that much of a mystery the characters don't figure things out as much as stick around until the answer becomes obvious but it kept me entertained throughout a sizable story. Numerous elements of the story appear to be fantasy and then get other explanations, but there is a fantasy twist to the ending. (6) "Sir Morgravain Speaks of Night Dragons and Other Things" by Richard Bowes: This odd story is set among the knights of King Arthur on Avalon, where they sleep (mostly), awaiting their call to aid Britain again. Most of the story is told as one-sided dialogue from Morgravain, interspersed with some italic narration. Again, not much of a plot; the story, as such, is figuring out what Morgravain is doing and the point of his interactions with the other knights. I thought it was slight and oddly pointless, but I may have just missed the point. (4) "Someone Like You" by Michael Alexander: A time travel story, but one that's less about time travel per se than about examining and speculating about the alternate paths childhood could take and whether those changes produce different people. It takes some time to figure out what's going on, during which Alexander fills in the protagonist's past and the murder mystery that drives the tale. The time travel mechanism is blatantly hand-waved, making this more of a fantasy than an SF story, which matches the emphasis on emotion and psychology. It's not a bad story, and I think I see where the author was going with the slowly-constructed central conflict, but I still found it hard to take the conflict that seriously. One of the problems with time travel is that undermining of causality also undermines finality of decisions and consequences in ways that can rob stories of their punch. (6) "The Ramshead Algorithm" by KJ Kabza: The first-person protagonist is a well-respected and experienced fixer in a world of chaos and dimensional connection, a world with physics and inhabitants very much unlike ours. But the story doesn't spend much time there; his connection to his home earth is threatened, and he returns to try to stabilize it, which leads to the reader discovering that his family considers him a worthless appendage on a wealthy business family whose sole purpose in life is to stay out of their way. And his portal is rooted in a hedge maze that his father intends to demolish. This is one of those stories that gets more interestingly complex the deeper one gets into it. Ramshead's family is badly screwed up along multiple axes, but not without some hope of redemption. He's desperate and ineffective in his home universe, but more confident and capable when it comes to dealing with dimensional portal problems (although he still seems very young and relies on tools given to him by others). And there's always more going on than it first appears, and not as few obvious villains as it first appears. Good stuff, although I would have liked to understand more about Ramshead's world. (7) Rating: 7 out of 10

2 November 2013

Russ Allbery: Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2011

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 120, No. 5 & 6
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

The editorial in this issue is about the investigation into the troubling death of long-time contributor F. Gwynplain MacIntyre (which was not his real name). It's disturbing, but to me it underscores one of the things that I love about the Internet: people for whom life isn't working very well can still find an outlet, make friendships, and control how they choose to present themselves to the world on-line. That's something quite valuable, and part of why the pushes for "real names" always gives me pause. Somewhat thematically related, this issue also features a non-fiction essay by Maria E. Alonzo about her investigation of Jesse Francis McComas, her great-uncle but better known to the SF community as one of the founding editors of F&SF and co-editor of the famous classic anthology Adventures in Time and Space. This is mostly a curiosity, but it's fun to read about the sense of triumph in tracking down lost family history. This issue also features a Chris Moriarty book review column, always a plus, as well as a few positive reviews of obscure superhero movies by Kathi Maio (plus the required grumbling about a more mainstream film). "The Final Verse" by Chet Williamson: This is more of a horror story than I would normally like, but I got pulled into the investigation of an old bluegrass song and the guesswork and footwork required to track down where it came from. Williamson does a good job with the tone and first-person narration, and the degree to which the protagonist cares about the song to the exclusion of the horrific happenings of the story blunts the horror. Not quite my thing, but I thought it was well-done and played well with the possible meanings of song lyrics. (6) "Stock Photos" by Robert Reed: This is well-written, like nearly all Reed stories, but it lacked enough clues for the reader for me. It's a very short story about a man who's out mowing his lawn when approached by two strangers who apparently want to take photographs of him for stock image collections. Then things get rather weird, but without any explanation, and the ending lost me completely. Frustrating. (It is partially explained by the later "The Road Ahead" story in this same issue.) (4) "The Black Mountain" by Albert E. Cowdrey: From one of F&SF's most reliable story-tellers to another, and this is a more typical story. Cowdrey offers an abandoned and very strange cathedral for an obscure religion, a conflict over a development project, and some rather creepy results, all told in Cowdrey's entertaining fashion. Some places you just don't mess with. (6) "Agent of Change" by Steven Popkes: Told Dos-Passos-style with news excerpts, web sites, and the transcript of an emergency committee, this story shows the discovery of Godzilla, or something akin to Godzilla, in the Pacific, where it's destroying whaling vessels. I do like this style of storytelling, and here it mixes well with humor and a bit of parody as Popkes shows how each different news outlet puts its own recognizable spin on the story. The story isn't particularly memorable, and it doesn't end so much as just stop, but it was fun. (7) "Fine Green Dust" by Don Webb: This story is dedicated to Neal Barrett, which will give SFF short story readers a warning of weirdness to come. In a near future where global warming as continued to make summers even more miserable, the protagonist happens across a naked woman painted green. The green turns out to be a sun block that claims to assist humans in metamorphosis into animals. Most of the story is the protagonist trying to decide what to think of that, interspersed with staring at his neighbor's naked daughter. It's mildly amusing if you don't think about it too much and don't mind the rather prominent male gaze. (5) "Rampion" by Alexandra Duncan: The novella of the story, this is set in Muslim Spain some time during the long fights between Muslims and Christians in the north. It's told as two parallel stories: one telling the protagonist's first meeting with his love, and the second following him as a blind man, some time later, deciding whether, and how, to re-engage with the world. The style feels like fantasy, but there's very little overt fantasy here, and the story could be read as historical adventure. It's good adventure, though; conventional in construction, but with some romance and some drama and a good ending. (7) "Signs of Life" by Carter Scholz: This is to science fiction what "Rampion" is to fantasy: not really SF in the classic sense, but fiction about the process of science. The protagonist works on gene sequencing and is mildly obsessed with a visualization of junk DNA in an attempt to find patterns in it. Like a lot of fiction about science, it's primarily concerned with office politics, grant funding, and an awful boss. There is a faint touch of the supernatural, but that strand of the story doesn't amount to much. There's a happy ending of sorts, but the story left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and I'd completely forgotten it by the time I sat down to write this review. (4) "Starship Dazzle" by Scott Bradfield: I've never seen much in Bradfield's ongoing series of stories about Dazzle, the talking dog. In this one, he's sent via rocket on a one-way trip into outer space and ends up making a bizarre sort of first contact. Like the other Dazzle stories, it's full of attempts at humor that don't really work for me, even though you'd think I'd be sympathetic to the mocking of our commercialization of everything. The ending is just silly, and not in a good way. (3) "The Old Terrologist's Tale" by S.L. Gilbow: I love the setup for this story. It's set in some sort of far future in which terraforming has become routine, and a group of people are telling each other stories over drinks. The first-person protagonist is a terrologist, someone who designs planets (and the technology is available to do this almost from scratch). The conversation is taking a turn towards the humiliating, with a politician belittling the work of terrologists, when an old terrologist who has been listening quietly starts telling a story about designing worlds, both mundane and dangerously beautiful. Gilbow does a great job here capturing blithe self-importance, the habit of belittling other people's technical work, and revenge via storytelling with a nasty barb. This was my favorite story of the issue. (7) "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer" by Ken Liu: This is a rather odd but quite touching story about mothers, daughters, nature, connection, and uploading. It's set after a singularity, in a time when all humans are uploaded into computers and exploring higher dimensions, digital natives in a much deeper sense than is meant today. But Rene 's mother is an Ancient, from before the singularity and still three-dimensional, and she wants to spend some time with her daughter. That leads to a memorable moment of connection, without pulling Rene entirely out of her father's world. Well done. (7) "The Road Ahead" by Robert Reed: Two Reed stories in one issue! And this one is a sequel to "Stock Photos" from earlier, since apparently I wasn't the only one who found it hopelessly confusing. It provides some backstory and makes a bit more sense of the first story, and that also makes it a more interesting story in its own right. The stock photo concept wasn't entirely a lie, as I had thought it was after the first story. There is analysis, anticipation, and trends behind who the pair take pictures of. But this story explores some internal tension, some conflict between them and some knowledge that the woman has that the man doesn't. And in the process it makes everything creepier, but also more interesting, and provides a hint at a really dark way of viewing the news media. I would say that this salvages "Stock Photos," except that I don't think "Stock Photos" is necessary now that one can read this story. (7) "Music Makers" by Kate Wilhelm: This is another story about investigation of the history of music, mingled with the supernatural, but unlike the story that opened this issue, it's not horror. Rather, it's a gentle and sweet fantasy about the power of music and benevolent ghosts and a community coming together. It's a positive and happy note on which to end the issue. (6) Rating: 6 out of 10

10 September 2013

Julien Danjou: OpenStack Ceilometer Havana-3 milestone released

Last week, the third and last milestone of the Havana development branch of Ceilometer has been released and is now available for testing and download. This means the end of the OpenStack Havana development time is coming, and that the features are now frozen. New features

Eleven blueprints have been implemented as you can see on the release page. That's one more than during Havana-2, but it's less than was planned initially, though we had a pretty high score considering the size of our contributors team. I'm going to talk through some of them here, that are the most interesting for users.

Our favorite OPW intern Terri Yu implemented the long awaited GROUP BY API feature, that allows to group samples by fields before returning statistics.
Eoghan Glynn (RedHat) continued his implementation of alarming features, and the audit API has been merged. A few blueprints related to alarming slipped and will be delayed for RC1, as they have been granted feature freeze exceptions: logical combinations of alarms and alarm service partitioner.
With the help of Gordon Chung (IBM), I've worked on creating a middleware to meter API requests. This has been merged into Oslo and is handled by Ceilometer. Gordon added another middleware on top of it to add CADF support for audit.
Ceilometer agent compute gained his second inspector to poll for virtual machine, thanks to Alessandro Pilotti (Cloudbase) who implemented the Hyper-V inspector.
Ceilometer will be able to meter Neutron bandwidth thanks to eNovance folks that worked on bandwidth metering blueprint, both on Ceilometer and Neutron parts. This is also a long awaited feature.
Finally, Ceilometer will be shipped with yet another storage back-end, as Tong Li (IBM) implemented a DB2 driver.

Bug fixes Fifty-six bugs were fixed, though most of them might not interest you so I won't elaborate too much on that. Go read the list if you are curious. Toward our final Havana release With the feature freeze in place, we're now focusing on fixing bugs and improving documentation. I'll try to make sure we'll get there without too much trouble for the 17th October 2013. Stay tuned!

22 July 2013

Daniel Pocock: Winning at any cost

It's not every day that a student messing around with keystroke loggers comes to fame through slashdot. Nonetheless, systematically rigging an election and getting sentenced to 12 months in a dorm with bars has helped raise 22 year old Matthew Weaver's profile well above that of the average script kiddie. Now let's stop and reflect on poor Weaver's future. You may be thinking that with an exchange program like this on his academic record he won't be so popular with employers. Given that he was busted by campus security rather than the FBI he won't even attract the interest of those companies who hire ex-hackers. So where could he go? How is it done in Australia?

Not too long ago, when I was a student myself, one of our prominent universities was subjected to a very similar scam. Four members of the Tin Tin for NUS ticket at La Trobe University were implicated in stuffing the ballot the old fashioned way. The incidents even share the characteristics of chronic stupidity: just as Weaver had been caught voting for himself 259 times from the same IP address in a campus computer lab, team Tin Tin had tried to hand their bag of manipulated postal votes directly to the deputy returning officer rather than discretely posting them through the internal mail. According to an official report by the Deputy Returning Officer, Karsten Haley, all four candidates were charged with Dishonest Conduct and Interfering with Ballot Papers. Unfortunately, the report notes that

La Trobe University SRC Electoral Regulations do not empower the Returning Officer or Deputy to enforce charges or disciplinary procedures and the charges were never faced by the accused.

Given the seriousness of the matter, Haley did not give up his attempts to hold them to account. He escalated it to the Dean of the college and then to the University Secretary. He reports that "their disinterest was extraordinary" and that nobody would involve the police. Young Labor suspended Just over a year later, in 1997, the ALP's youth division for the state of Victoria, Young Labor, was suspended after attempts to rig the ballot to elect the Young Labor leadership team. The guilty parties were never publicly named. Nobody was formally suspended or expelled and this simply left them with more time on their hands to invest their energy in other elections. The suspension of Victorian Young Labor remained in effect for a number of years.

The specific allegations about the Young Labor ballot suggest that those people particularly keen to win had printed fake student cards and given them to stooges who would impersonate other Young Labor members who had not attended to vote in person. Where are they now? It is no co-incidence that these students were (and still are) members of Labor Unity, a powerful faction within Australia's ruling Labor Party, the ALP. Most political organisations would presumably express concern about these allegations. The ALP does things differently. One of the students who withdrew his nomination in La Trobe, Mr Larocca, subsequently became Mayor in the City of Moreland, one of the ALP's strongholds. Even more remarkably from an outsider's viewpoint, another of these figures, Stephen Donnelly, is currently employed as the Assistant State Secretary of the ALP in Victoria. Communications like this newsletter reveal that he is one of the key figures in the party's pre-selection process. He has recently been appointed to direct the ALP's 2013 federal election campaign for the state of Victoria. Another co-incidence On the same weekend that Weaver was in the news for his antics, Donnelly's latest employer, the ALP's Victorian branch, was conducting pre-selection ballots to choose candidates for the upcoming federal election. So it's no surprise that Monday's newspaper headlines report fresh allegations of voting irregularities. Sadly, I've seen some of Labor Unity's bad behavior first hand. About 10 years ago I was living in South Melbourne, which is in the federal electoral district of Melbourne Ports. A young female friend of mine, a member of the local Elwood branch of the ALP, had spent election day handing out brochures for an ALP candidate in a marginal seat rather than assisting the controversial local ALP candidate, Michael Danby. A few days later I was witness to an incident where Danby aggressively confronted this young woman and demanded to know why he hadn't seen her handing out his own leaflets on polling day. He stood within centimeters of her and was literally looking down on her as he demanded some kind of apology to sooth his bruised ego. She looked terrified and barely responded. Within moments one of his handlers approached and physically moved Danby away from this young woman, I dare to think where things would have gone otherwise. Eye for talent Remarkably, at the same time, the infamous Stephen Donnelly had started shadowing Danby in his movements about the district. Fresh out of university, his talents had been recognised by Danby and he was employed in Danby's office, enabling him to continue honing his skills on a full-time basis with a tax-payer funded salary. What a remarkable contrast to the story of Weaver. Can anybody imagine a US congressman collecting Weaver from the prison gates and deploying him to an office on Capitol Hill? The biggest bankruptcy in student history Around the same time, Donnelly's Student Unity, the student arm of Labor Unity were successful in taking over the student union of my own campus, the University of Melbourne. Not long after I graduated I heard that they had been accused of skimming off $1 million from catering providers and a high-risk $46 million property transaction that put the organisation into liquidation. Unlike Mr Weaver, who's scheme at Cal State barely got off the ground, none of those involved in the Melbourne University incident has faced criminal proceedings. One ALP figure, Andrew Landeryou, spent several months in Costa Rica while wanted for questioning in the Supreme Court. His wife has just been endorsed for a seat in the Senate with support from various Labor Unity figures including Danby. The Gillard questions In 1996, around the same time that Donnelly & Co. were romping around student unions learning the tricks of the political trade, a lawyer quietly departed from the firm Slater and Gorden after an internal investigation into a property transaction linked to a union slush fund. Like Donnelly, this lawyer's next move was to take employment in the office of a Labor Party MP. More recently she was backed by Labor Unity to become Prime Minister. The union slush fund remains under investigation, frustrated by the disappearance of documents. The $60 million heist Recently I blogged about Gillard and Abbott, leaders of the two main political parties in Australia, agreeing to take $60 million of taxpayer money to fund their parties' campaigns in the upcoming federal election, giving themselves an obscenely unfair unadvantage over all other contestants. Where would that money end up? In the case of the ALP, does it appear likely that figures like the Victorian ALP's federal campaign director, Mr Donnelly, would be involved in the expenditure? National shame With this background, it becomes easier to understand the quality (or lack of it) in Australia's national leadership. When you consider that the generation responsible for the La Trobe incident, the Young Labor suspension and the MUSU bankruptcy are now growing into positions of greater responsibility in the ALP it leaves me feeling the quality of leadership is only going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better.

For example, the recent incident where coloured people were fed to the sharks has nothing to do with the worldwide refugee crisis and everything to do with maintaining the dumbed-down level of political discourse that Labor Unity thugs and their followers can cope with. Real issues like climate change and energy policy, for example, appear to be beyond the pay grade of Australia's political class

Ranjini - coloured, indefinite detention

It is startling that up to her own recent demise, Gillard herself had repeatedly begged the public to stop asking questions about her own past and remember that Labor politicians are innocent until proven guilty - yet she had a pregnant coloured woman thrown into a concentration camp on unfounded fears about "national security". No evidence has ever been presented that poor Ranjini committed a crime, but the houses bought with money from trade unions, transactions handled through Gillard's own office, seem to be as solid as bricks and mortar. If only poor Matthew Weaver had been an Australian, how much further would his star have risen? Update: please sign the petition at change.org asking La Trobe university to re-examine the report and refer it formally to the police. If you are concerned about the plight of poor Ranjini and other people subject to Australia's domestic rendition program, please take a moment to see Letters for Ranjini

22 January 2013

Russ Allbery: Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2011

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 120, No. 3 & 4
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

Charles de Lint's book review column sticks with the sorts of things he normally reviews: urban and contemporary fantasy and young adult. Predictably, I didn't find that much of interest. But I was happy to see that not all the reviews were positive, and he talked some about how a few books didn't work. I do prefer seeing a mix of positive and negative (or at least critical) reviews. James Sallis's review column focuses entirely on Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (by way of reviewing a collection). I'm always happy to see this sort of review. But between that and de Lint's normal subject matter, this issue of F&SF was left without any current science fiction reviews, which was disappointing. Lucius Shepard's movie review column features stunning amounts of whining, even by Shepard's standards. The topic du jour is how indie films aren't indie enough, mixed with large amounts of cane-shaking and decrying of all popular art. I find it entertaining that the F&SF film review column regularly contains exactly the sort of analysis that one expects from literary gatekeepers who are reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps David Langford should consider adding an "As We See Others" feature to Ansible cataloging the things genre fiction fans say about popular movies. "Scatter My Ashes" by Albert E. Cowdrey: The protagonist of this story is an itinerant author who has been contracted to write a family history (for $100K, which I suspect is a bit of tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment) and has promptly tumbled into bed with his employer. But he is somewhat serious about the writing as well, and is poking around in family archives and asking relatives about past details. There is a murder (maybe) in the family history, not to mention some supernatural connections. Those familiar with Cowdrey's writing will recognize the mix of historical drama, investigation, and the supernatural. Puzzles are, of course, untangled, not without a bit of physical danger. Experienced fantasy readers will probably guess at some of the explanation long before the protagonist does. Like most Cowdrey, it's reliably entertaining, but I found it a bit thin. (6) "A Pocketful of Faces" by Paul Di Filippo: Here's a bit of science fiction, and another mystery, this time following the basic model of a police procedural. The police in this case are enforcing laws around acceptable use of "faces" in a future world where one can clone someone's appearance from their DNA and then mount it on a programmable android. As you might expect from that setup, the possibilities are lurid, occasionally disgusting, and inclined to give the police nightmares. After some scene-setting, the story kicks in with the discovery of the face of a dead woman who, at least on the surface, no one should have any motive to clone. There were a few elements of the story that were a bit too disgusting for me, but the basic mystery plot was satisfying. I thought the ending was a let-down, however. Di Filippo tries to complicate the story and, I thought, went just a little too far, leaving motives and intent more confusing than illuminating. (6) "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu: Back to fantasy, this time using a small bit of magic to illustrate the emotional conflicts and difficulties of allegiance for second-generation immigrants. Jack is the son of an American farther and a Chinese mother who was a mail-order bride. He's young at the start of the story and struggling with the embarassment and humiliation that he feels at his mother's history and the difficulties he has blending in with other kids, leading to the sort of breathtaking cruelty that comes so easily from teenagers who are too self-focused and haven't yet developed adult empathy. I found this very hard to read. The magic is beautiful, personal, and very badly damaged by the cruelty in ways that can never really be fixed. It's a sharp reminder of the importance of being open-hearted, but it's also a devastating reminder that the lesson is normally learned too late. Not the story to read if you're prone to worrying about how you might have hurt other people. (6) "The Evening and the Morning" by Sheila Finch: This long novella is about a third of the issue and is, for once, straight science fiction, a somewhat rare beast in F&SF these days. It's set in the far future, among humans who are members of the Guild of Xenolinguists and among aliens called the Venatixi, and it's about an expedition back to the long-abandoned planet of Earth. I had a lot of suspension of disbelief problems with the setup here. While Earth has mostly dropped out of memory, there's a startling lack of curiosity about its current condition among the humans. Finch plays some with transportation systems and leaves humanity largely dependent on other races to explain the failure to return to Earth, but I never quite bought it. It was necessary to set up the plot, which is an exploration story with touches of first contact set on an Earth that's become alien to the characters, but it seemed remarkably artificial to me. But, putting that aside, I did get pulled into the story. Its emotional focus is one of decline and senescence, a growing sense of futility, that's halted by exploration, mystery, and analysis. The question of what's happened on Earth is inherently interesting and engaging, and the slow movement of the story provides opportunities to build up to some eerie moments. The problem, continuing a theme for this issue, is the ending. Some of the reader's questions are answered, but most of the answers are old, well-worn paths in science fiction. The emotional arc of the story is decidedly unsatisfying, at least to me. I think I see what Finch was trying to do: there's an attempted undermining of the normal conclusion of this sort of investigation to make a broader point about how to stay engaged in the world. But it lacked triumph and catharsis for me, partly because the revelations that we get are too pedestrian for the build-up they received. It's still an interesting story, but I don't think it entirely worked. (6) "Night Gauntlet" by Walter C. DeBill, Jr., et al.: The full list of authors for this story (Walter C. DeBill, Jr., Richard Gavin, Robert M. Price, W.H. Pugmire, Jeffrey Thomas, and Don Webb) provides one with the first clue that it's gone off the rails. Collaborative storytelling, where each author tries to riff off the work of the previous author while spinning the story in a different direction, is something that I think works much better orally, particularly if you can watch facial expressions while the authors try to stump each other. In written form, it's a recipe for a poorly-told story. That's indeed what we get here. The setup is typical Cthulhu mythos stuff: a strange scientist obsessed with conspiracy theories goes insane, leaving behind an office with a map of linkages between apparently unrelated places. The characters in the story also start going insane for similar reasons, leading up to a typical confrontation with things man was not meant to know, or at least pay attention to. If you like that sort of thing, you may like this story better than I did, but I thought it was shallow and predictable. (3) "Happy Ending 2.0" by James Patrick Kelly: More fantasy, this time of the time travel variety. (I call it fantasy since there's no scientific explanation for the time travel and it plays a pure fantasy role in the story.) That's about as much as I can say without giving away the plot entirely (it's rather short). I can see what Kelly was going for, and I think he was largely successful, but I'm not sure how to react to it. The story felt like it reinforced some rather uncomfortable stereotypes about romantic relationships, and the so-called happy ending struck me as the sort of situation that was going to turn very nasty and very uncomfortable about five or ten pages past where Kelly ended the story. (5) "The Second Kalandar's Tale" by Francis Marion Soty: The main question I have about this story is one that I can't answer without doing more research than I feel like doing right now: how much of this is original to Soty and how much if it is straight from Burton's translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Burton is credited for the story, so I suspect quite a lot of this is from the original. Whether one would be better off just reading the original, or if Soty's retelling adds anything substantial, are good questions that I don't have the background to answer. Taken as a stand-alone story, it's not a bad one. It's a twisting magical adventure involving a djinn, a captive woman, some rather predictable fighting over the woman, and then a subsequent adventure involving physical transformation and a magical battle reminiscent of T.H. White. (Although I have quite likely reversed the order of inspiration if as much of this is straight from Burton as I suspect.) Gender roles, however, are kind of appalling, despite the presence of a stunningly powerful princess, due to the amount of self-sacrifice expected from every woman in the story. Personally, I don't think any of the men in the story are worth anywhere near the amount of loyalty and bravery that the women show. Still, it was reasonably entertaining throughout, in exactly the way that I would expect a One Thousand and One Nights tale to be. Whether there's any point in reading it instead of the original is a question I'll leave to others. (7) "Bodyguard" by Karl Bunker: This is probably the best science fiction of the issue. The first person protagonist is an explorer living with an alien race, partly in order to flee the post-singularity world of uploaded minds and apparent stagnation that Earth has become. It's a personal story that uses his analysis of alien mindsets (and his interaction with his assigned alien bodyguard) to flesh out his own desires, emotional background, and reactions to the world. There are some neat linguistic bits here that I quite enjoyed, although I wish they'd been developed at even more length. (The alien language is more realistic than it might sound; there are some human languages that construct sentences in a vaguely similar way.) It's a sad, elegiac story, but it grew on me. (7) "Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls" by Kali Wallace: One has to count this story as science fiction as well, although for me it had a fantasy tone because the scientific world seems to play by fantasy rules from the perspective of the protagonist. Unpacking that perspective is part of the enjoyment of the story. At the start, she seems to be a disabled girl who is being cared for by a strange succession of nurses who vary by the time of day, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that something much stranger is going on. There are moments that capture a sense of wonder, reinforced by the persistantly curious and happy narrative voice, but both are undercut by a pervasive sense of danger and dread. This is a light story written about rather dark actions. My biggest complaint with the story is that it doesn't so much end as wander off into the sunset. It set up conflict within a claustrophobic frame, so I can understand the thematic intent of breaking free of that frame, but in the process I felt like the story walked away from all of the questions and structure that it created and ended in a place that felt less alive with potential than formless and oddly pointless. I think I wanted it to stay involved and engaged with the environment it had created. (6) "Ping" by Dixon Wragg: I probably should just skip this, since despite the table of contents billing and the full title introduction, it's not a story. It's a two-line joke. But it's such a bad two-line joke that I had to complain about it. I have no idea why F&SF bothered to reprint it. (1) "The Ifs of Time" by James Stoddard: This certainly fits with the Arabian Nights story in this issue. The timekeeper of a vast and rambling castle (think Gormenghast taken to the extreme) wanders into a story-telling session in a distant part of the castle. The reader gets to listen to four (fairly good) short stories about time, knowledge, and memory, told in four very different genres. All of this does relate to why the timekeeper is there, and the frame story is resolved by the end, but the embedded stories are the best part; each of them is interesting in a different way, and none of them outlast their welcome. This was probably the strongest story of this issue. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

9 November 2012

Gunnar Wolf: Road trip to ECSL 2012 in Guatemala

Road trip to ECSL 2012 in Guatemala

Encuentro Centroamericano de Software Libre! Guatemala! During a national (for us) holiday, so it's easy to go without missing too much work time! How would I miss the opportunity? Several years ago, I started playing with the idea of having a road trip Probably this was first prompted with the UK crew and the Three Intrepid Motorcycle Riders arriving by land to DebConf 9 I don't know. Fact is, I wanted to go to DebConf10 in New York by land, as well as to DebConf12 in Nicaragua. Mostly due to a lack of time, I didn't Although we did start making some longish trips. Of course, my desire to show Regina what Mexico is like also helped! So, up until a week ago, our (according to my standards) long distance driving experience included:

M xico Guanajuato Puerto Vallarta Guanajuato M xico, in early November 2011, for Festival de Software Libre and with Regina and our Blender friends Octavio and Claudia. Totalling almost 1900Km, mostly consisting of wide, toll highway.
M xico Xilitla San Luis Potos M xico, in April 2012, just for fun and for a nice short vacation, alone with Regina. Totalling almost 1200Km, but through Sierra Gorda de Quer taro, a very tough stretch of about 250Km which we did at about 50Km/h on average. Beautiful route for sure! We didn't originally intend to go through San Luis Potos , and it does not appear to make much sense, as it adds ~350Km to the total, but it was even quicker than going back by the same route and according to those who now, even faster than our planned route, via Tamazunchale and Ixmiquilpan!
M xico San Luis Potos Zacatecas Aguascalientes Guanajuato M xico, in May 2012, for Congreso Internacional de Software Libre, again with Octavio and Claudia. Totalling 1250Km, and following very good roads, although most of them were toll-free.

But there is always a certain halo over crossing a border, maybe more so in countries as large as Mexico. We convinced Pooka and Moni, and granted, with some aprehension, as we knew of some important security risks in the more rural areas we wanted to go through we decided to go to Guatemala. And, although we wanted to go with a bit more time, Real Life took its toll: We could not take more time than the intersection of what our respective jobs offered. So, here goes a short(?) recap of our six day long, 3200Km trip. Of course, we have a map detailing this. Mexico Veracruz I came to my office early on Wednesday (31-oct), and left with Regina around 10AM towards Veracruz. We agreed to meet there with Moni and Pooka, who would take the night bus, and continue together. Crossing Mexico City proved to be the longest obstacle We arrived to Veracruz already past 3PM, and spent a nice evening walking down the center and port of the city. Veracruz port can still be seen as part of central Mexico; I knew the road quite well. Veracruz San Andr s Tuxtla Catemaco San Cristobal de las Casas We met with our friends at the iconic Gran Caf de la Parroquia at 6:30AM. Had a nice breakfast with coffee, and by 7:30 we were heading south-west. The reason to have a road trip was to get to know the route, to enjoy the countryside So, given we "only" had to make 650Km this day, we took the non-toll road A narrow path stretching along the coastal plains of Veracruz, until Acayucan. Doing so, we also saved some money, as the equivalent toll road is around MX$300 (~US$25)! Veracruz is a hot state. We ended up all sweaty and tired by 19:00, when we reached San Cristobal. We had agreed not to drive at night, due to security issues, but fortunately there was quite a bit of traffic both ways between Tuxtla Guti rrez (Chiapas State capital, around 1hr from San Cristobal, where darkness got us) and our destination, so we carried on. Now, San Cristobal is a high city, almost as high as Mexico City (2100m), and being more humid, it was quite chilly. We went for a walk, and were convinced that at a later time, we had to stay for several days there. The city is beautiful, the region is breath-taking, there is a lot of great handicrafts as well, and it's overall very cheap. Really lovely place. San Cristobal de las Casas Cd. Cuauht moc La Mesilla Guatemala Once again, this day started early. We woke up ready to leave at 7AM, and not earlier because the hotel's parking didn't open earlier. After a very quick visit to San Cristobal downtown, to take some photos that were not right the night before, we took the road to Comit n, stopping just for some tamales de bola y chipil n for breakfast. Central Chiapas is almost continuously populated, differing from most of my experience in Mexico. It is all humid, and has some very beautiful landscapes. We passed Comit n, which is a much larger city than what we expected, went downhill after La Trinitaria, crossed a plain, and continued until hills started taking over again. We stopped in a very chaotic, dirty place: Just accross the border, where Ciudad Cuauht moc becomes La Mesilla. This border was basically what we expected: There is no half-official place to exchange money, so we had to buy quetzales from somebody who offered them on the street, at MX$2 per Q1 (where the real exchange should be around 1.50 to 1). While on the road, I was half-looking for exchange posts in Comit n and onwards, and found none (and being a festive day, they would probably be closed anyway). But we were expecting this, after all, and exchanged just the basic minimum: MX$600 (US$50, which by magic became Q300, US$40). The tramit consists of:

Spraying the car against diseases (which has a cost of Q18)
Each of us has to go through migration. Note, in case you cross this border: We didn't expressly cross Mexican migration, so officially there was no record of us going out. Be sure to go through migration to avoid problems at re-entry!
Migration has no cost.
Customs. As we were entering by car, I had to purchase a permit for circulation. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was around Q150, and the permit is valid for 90 days.
That's it! Welcome to Guatemala!

La Mesilla is in Guatemala's Huehuetenango Department, and from all of the Departments we crossed until Guatemala city (Huehuetenango, Quetzaltenango, Totonicap n, Solol , Chimaltenango, Sacatep quez and Guatemala), this is the largest one. Huehuetenango is home to the Cuchumatanes mountain ridge. We found beautiful, really steep, really fertile mountains. It is plainly amazing: Mountains over 60 , and quite often full with agricultural use Even at their steepest points! The CA-1 highway is, in general, in very good shape. There are however many (many, many) speed bumps (or topes, in Mexican terminology. Or t mulos in Guatemalan), at least a couple at every village we crossed, not always painted. The road is narrow and quite winding; it follows river streams for most of the way. We feared it would be in much worse shape, from what we have heard, but during the whole way we found only three points where the road was unusable due to landslides and an alternative road was always in place when we needed it. After Totonicap n, the narrow road becomes a wide (four lane) highway. Don't let that fool you! It still goes through the center of every village along the road, so it's really not meant for speeding. Also, even though the pavement is in very good condition, it is really steep quite often. It is not the easiest road to drive, but it's (again) by far not as bad as we expected. We arrived to Guatemala City as dawn was falling, and got promptly lost. Guatemala has a very strange organization scheme: The city is divided in several zones, laid out in a swirl-like fashion. East-west roads are called Calle and North-south roads are called Avenida (except for zona 4, I think, where they are diagonal, and some are Rutas while the others are V as). I won't go into too much detail). Thing is, many people told us it's a foolproof design, and people from different countries understand the system perfectly. We didn't... At least not when we arrived. We got quite lost, and it took us around one hour to arrive to our hotel, at almost 19:00 Almost 12 hours since we left San Cristobal. Went for a quick dinner, and then waited for our friends to arrive after the first day of work of ECSL, which we missed completely. And, of course, we were quite tired, so we didn't stay up much longer. Antigua Guatemala On Saturday, ECSL's activities started after 14:00 so we almost-kidnapped Wences, the local organization lead, and took him to show us around Antigua Guatemala. Antigua was the capital of Guatemala until an earthquake destroyed it in the 1770s; the capital was moved to present-day Guatemala city, but Antigua was never completely abandoned. Today, it is a world heritage site, a beautiful city, where we could/should have stayed for several days. But we were there for the conference, so we were in Antigua just a couple of hours, and headed back to Guatemala. Word of caution: Going from Guatemala to Antigua, we went down via the steepest road I have ever driven. Again, a real four-lane highway... but quite scary! The main focus for this post is to give some roadtrip advice to potential readers... So, this time around, I won't give much detail regarding ECSL. It was quite interesting, we had some very good discussions... but it would take me too much space to talk about it! The road back: Guatemala Tec n Um n; Cd. Hidalgo Arriaga So, about the road back: Yes, we just spent three days getting to Guatemala City. We were there only for ~36 hours. And... We needed to be here by Tuesday morning no matter what. So, Sunday at noon we said goodbye to our good friends in ECSL and started the long way back. To get to know more of Guatemala, we went back by the CA-2 highway, which goes via the coastal plains Not close to the Pacific ocean, which we didn't get to see at all, but not through the mountains. To get to CA-2, we took CA-9 from Guatemala. If I am not mistaken, this is the only toll road in Guatemala (at least, the only we used, and we used some pretty good highways!) It is not expensive; I don't remember right now, but must have been around Q20 (US$3). Went South past Palin and until CA-2, just outside Escuintla city, and headed West. All of Escuintla and Suchitep quez it is again a four lane highway; somewhere in Retalhueu it becomes a two lane highway. We were strongly advised not to take this road at night because, as the population density is significantly lower than in CA-1, it can get lonely at times And there are several reports of robberies. We did feel the place much less populated, but saw nothing suspicious in any way. Something important: There are almost no speedbumps in CA-2! The terrain stayed quite flat and easy as we crossed Quetzaltenango, and only in San Marcos we found some interesting hills and a very strong rain that would intermitetntly accompany us for the rest of the ride. So, we finally arrived to the border city of Tec n Um n at around 16:30 Approximately four hours after leaving the capital. The Tec n Um n Cd. Hidalgo cities and border pass are completely different from the disorderly and dirty Cd. Cuauht moc La Mesilla ones. The city of Tec n Um n could be just a nice town anywhere in the country, it does not feel aggressive as most border cities I have seen in our continent. We stopped to eat at El pollo campero and headed to the border. In the Mexican side, we also saw a very well consolidated, big and ordered migration area. Migration officers were very kind and helpful As we left Cd. Cuauht moc, Regina didn't get a stamp of leaving Mexico, so technically she was ilegally out of the country (as she is not a national... They didn't care about the rest of us). The tramit to fix this was easy, simple, straightforward. We only paid for the fumigation again (MX$60, US$5), and were allowed to leave. Anyway, we crossed the border. There is a ~30Km narrow road between Cd. Hidalgo and Tapachula, but starting in Tapachula we went on Northwards via a very good, four lane and very straight highway. Even though we had agreed not to drive at night... Well, we were quite hurried and still too far from Mexico City, so we decided to push it for three more hours, following the coastline until the city of Arriaga, almost at the border between Chiapas and Oaxaca. Found a little hotel to sleep some hours and collapsed. Word of warning: This road (from Tapachula to Arriaga) is also known for its robberies. We saw only one suspicious thing: Two guys were pushing up their motorcycle, from which they had apparently fallen. We didn't stop, as they looked healthy and not much in need of help, but later on talked about this Even though this was at night, they were not moving as if they had just crashed; nothing was scratched, not the motorcycle and not their clothes. That might have been an attempt to mug us (or whoever stopped by). This highway is very lonely, and the two directions are separated by a wall of vegetation, so nobody would have probably seen us were we to stop for some minutes. Be aware if you use this road! The trip comes to an end: Arriaga Niltepec Istmo C rdoba M xico The next (last, finally!) day, we left at 6:30AM. After driving somewhat over one hour, we arrived to Niltepec, where a group of taxi drivers had the highway closed as a protest against their local government's tolerance of mototaxis. We evaluated going back to Arriaga and continue via the Tuxtla Guti rrez highway, but that would have been too long. We had a nice breakfast of tlayudas (which resulted in Pooka getting an alergic reaction shortly afterwards) and, talking with people here and there, were told about an alternative route by an agricultural road that surrounds the blockade. So, we took this road the best way we could, and after probably 1hr of driving at 20Km/h, finally came back to the main road. We planned on crossing the isthmus using the Acayucan-Juchit n road We were amazed at the La Ventosa ("the windy") area, where we crossed a huge eolic plant for electricity generation, so of course we got our good share of photos. From then onwards, not much more worth mention. Crossed the isthmus via a quite secondary road in not too good shape (although there is a lot of machinery, and the road will much likely improve in the next few months/years), then took the toll freeway along Veracruz until C rdoba. We stopped for a (delilcious and revigorizing!) cup of coffee in Hotel Zeballos, where Agust n de Iturbide signed with Viceroy Juan O'Donoj the treaties that granted Mexico the independence. Traveller, beware: When crossing between Puebla and Veracruz, there is a steep slope of almost 1000m where , you will almost always (except if it's close to noon) find very thick fog; taking the highway from C rdoba, this is in the region known as Cumbres de Maltrata. We had the usual fog, and just as we left it, a thin but constant rain that went on with us up until we got home. Crossed Puebla state with no further eventualities, and arrived to Pooka and Moni's house by 22:00. Less than one hour later, Regina and me arrived home as well. This was four days ago... and I have finally finished writing it all down ;-) Hope you find this useful, or if not, at least entertaining! If you read this post in my blog, you will find many pictures taken along the trip below (Well, if you are reading the right page, not in the general blog index...). If you are reading from a planet or other syndication service... Well, come to the blog! Dreamhost woes Oh, and... Yes, it sometimes happens: My blog is hosted at Dreamhost. This means that usually it works correctly... But sometimes, specially when many people request many nontrivial pages, it just gives an error. If you get an error, reload once or twice... Or until your patience manages ;-)

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