Search Results: "gris"

28 April 2023

Shirish Agarwal: John Grisham s books, Evolution removed from textbooks

Gray Mountain John Grisham I have been perusing John Grisham s books, some read and some re-read again. Almost all of the books that Mr. Grisham wrote are relevant even today. The Gray Mountain talks about how mountain top removal was done in Applachia, the U.S. (South). In fact NASA made a summary which either was borrowed from this book or the author borrowed from NASA, either could be true although seems it might be the former. And this is when GOI just made a new Forest Conservation Bill 2023 which does the opposite. There are many examples of the same, the latest from my own city as an e.g. Vetal Tekdi is and was a haven for people animals, birds all kinds of ecosystem and is a vital lung of the city, one of the few remaining green spaces in the city but BJP wants to commercialize it as it has been doing for everything, I haven t been to the Himalayas since 4-5 years back as I hear the rape of the land daily. Even after Joshimath tragedy, if people are not opening the eyes what can I do  The more I say, the more depressed I will become so will leave it for now. In many ways the destruction seems similar to the destruction that happened in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro. So as can be seen from what I have shared this book was mostly about environment and punitive damages and also how punitive damages have been ceiling in America (South). This was done via lobbying by the coal groups and apparently destroyed people s lives, communities, even whole villages. It also shared how most people called black lung and how those claims had been denied by Coal Companies all the time. And there are hardly any unions. While the book itself is a fiction piece, there is a large amount of truth in it. And that is one of the reasons people write a fiction book. You could write about reality using fictional names and nobody can sue you while you set the reality as it is. In many ways, it is a tell-all.

The Testament John Grisham One of the things I have loved about John Grisham is he understands human condition. In this book it starts with an eccentric billionaire who makes a will which leaves all his property to an illegitimate child who coincidentally also lives in Brazil, she is a missionary. The whole book is about human failings as well as about finding the heir. I am not going to give much detail as the book itself is fun.

The Appeal John Grisham In this, we are introduced to a company that does a chemical spill for decades and how that leads to lobbying and funding Judicial elections. It does go into quite a bit of length how private money coming from Big business does all kind of shady things to get their person elected to the Supreme Court. Sadly, this seems to happen all the time, for e.g. two weeks ago. This piece from the Atlantic also says the same. Again, won t tell as there is a bit of irony at the end of the book.

The Rainmaker John Grisham This in short is about how Insurance Companies stiff people. It s a wonderful story that has all people in grey including our hero. An engaging book that sorta tells how the Insurance Industry plays the game. In India, the companies are safe as they ask for continuance for years together and their object is to delay the hearings till the grandchildren are not alive unlike in the U.S. or UK. It also does tell how more lawyers are there then required. Both of which are the same in my country.

The Litigators John Grisham This one is about Product Liability, both medicines as well as toys for young kids. What I do find funny a bit is how the law in States allows people to file cases but doesn t protect people while in EU they try their best that if there is any controversy behind any medicine or product, they will simply ban it. Huge difference between the two cultures.

Evolution no longer part of Indian Education A few days ago, NCERT (one of the major bodies) that looks into Indian Education due to BJP influence has removed Darwin s Theory of Evolution. You can t even debate because the people do not understand adaptability. So the only conclusion is that Man suddenly appeared out of nowhere. If that is so, then we are the true aliens. They discard the notion that we and Chimpanzees are similar. Then they also have to discard this finding that genetically we are 96% similar.

18 April 2023

Shirish Agarwal: Philips LCD Monitor 22 , 1984, Reaper Man, The Firm.

PHILIPS PHL 221S8L Those who have been reading this blog for a long time would perhaps know that I had bought a Viewsonic 19 almost 12 years ago. The Monitor was functioning well till last week. I had thought to change it to a 24 monitor almost 3-4 years ago when 24 LCD Monitors were going for around 4k/- or thereabouts. But the monitor kept on functioning and I didn t have space (nor do) to have a dual-monitor setup. It just didn t make sense. Apart from higher electricity charges it would have also have made more demands on my old system which somehow is still functioning even after all those years. Then last week, it started to dim and after couple of days completely conked out. I had wanted to buy a new monitor in front of mum so she could watch movies or whatever but this was not to be. Sp I had to buy an LCD Monitor as Government raised taxes enormously after pandemic. Same/similar monitor that used to cost INR 4k/- today costed me almost INR 7k/- almost double the price. Hooking it to Debian I got the following

$ sudo hwinfo --monitor grep Model Model: "PHILIPS PHL 221S8L" FWIW hwinfo is the latest version

~$ sudo hwinfo --version21.82
I did see couple of movies before starting to write this blog post. Not an exceptional monitor but better than before. I had option from three brands, Dell (most expensive), Philips (middle) and & LG (lowest in prices). Interestingly, Viewsonic disappeared from the market about 5 years back and made a comeback just couple of years ago. Even Philips which had exited the PC Monitor almost a decade back re-entered the market. Apart from the branding, it doesn t make much of a difference as almost all the products including the above monitors are produced in China. I did remember her a lot while buying the monitor as I m sure she would have enjoyed it far more than me but that was not to be

1984 During last week when I didn t have the monitor I re-read 1984. To be completely honest, I had read the above book when I was in the 20 s and I had no context. The protagonist seemed like a whiner and for the life of me I couldn t understand why he didn t try to escape. Re-reading after almost 2 decades and a bit more I shat a number of times because now the context is pretty near and pretty real. I can see why the Republicans in the U.S. banned it. I also realized why the protagnist didn t attempt to run away because wherever he would run away it would be the same thing. It probably is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. To willfully accept what is false after all that torture. What was also interesting to me is to find that George Orwell was also a soldier just like Tolkien was. Both took part and wrote such different stories. While Mr. Tolkien writes and shares the pendulum between hope and despair, Mr. Orwell is decidedly dark. Not grey but dark. I am not sure if I would like to read Animal Farm anytime soon.

The Reaper Man Terry Pratchett It is by sheer coincidence or perhaps I needed something to fill me up when I got The Reaper Man from Terry Pratchett. It was practically like a breath of fresh air. And I love Mr. Pratchett for the inclusivity he brings in. We think about skin color, and what not and here Mr. Pratchett writes about an undead gentleman who s extremely polite as he was a wizard. I won t talk more as I don t really want to spoil the surprise but rest assured everybody is gonna love it. I also read Long Utopia but this is for those who believe and think of multiverses long before it became a buzzword that it is today.

The Firm John Grisham Now I don t know what I should write about this book as there aren t many John Grisham books where a rookie wins against more than one party opposite him. I wouldn t go much into depth but simply say it was worth a read. I am currently reading Gray Mountain. It very much shows how the coal Industry is corrupt and what all it does. It also brings to mind the amount of mining that is done in which Iron is the mostly sought after and done. Now if we are mining 94% Iron then wouldn t it make sense to ask to have a circular economy around Iron but we don t even hear a word about it. Even with all the imagined projections of lithium mining, it would hardly be 10% . I could go on but will finish for now, till later.

19 March 2023

Russ Allbery: Review: Allow Me to Retort

Review: Allow Me to Retort, by Elie Mystal
Publisher: The New Press
Copyright: 2022
ISBN: 1-62097-690-0
Format: Kindle
Pages: 257
If you're familiar with Elie Mystal's previous work (writer for The Nation, previously editor for Above the Law, Twitter gadfly, and occasional talking head on news commentary programs), you'll have a good idea what to expect from this book: pointed liberal commentary, frequently developing into rants once he works up a head of steam. The subtitle of A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution tells you that the topic is US constitutional law, which is very on brand. You're going to get succinct and uncompromising opinions at the intersection of law and politics. If you agree with them, you'll probably find them funny; if you disagree with them, you'll probably find them infuriating. In other words, Elie Mystal is the sort of writer one reads less for "huh, I disagreed with you but that's a good argument" and more for "yeah, you tell 'em, Elie!" I will be very surprised if this book changes anyone's mind about a significant political debate. I'm not sure if people who disagree are even in the intended audience. I'm leery of this sort of book. Usually its function is to feed confirmation bias with some witty rejoinders and put-downs that only sound persuasive to people who already agree with them. If I want that, I can just read Twitter (and you will be unsurprised to know that Mystal has nearly 500,000 Twitter followers). This style can also be boring at book length if the author is repeating variations on a theme. There is indeed a lot of that here, particularly in the first part of this book. If you don't generally agree with Mystal already, save yourself the annoyance and avoid this like the plague. It's just going to make you mad, and I don't think you're going to get anything useful out of it. But as I got deeper into this book, I think Mystal has another, more interesting purpose that's aimed at people who do largely agree. He's trying to undermine a very common US attitude (even on the left) about the US constitution. I don't know if most people from the US (particularly if they're white and male) realize quite how insufferably smug we tend to be about the US constitution. When you grow up here, the paeans to the constitution and the Founding Fathers (always capitalized like deities) are so ubiquitous and unremarked that it's difficult not to absorb them at a subconscious level. There is a national mythology about the greatness of our charter of government that crosses most political divides. In its modern form, this comes with some acknowledgment that some of its original provisions (the notorious three-fifths of a person clause, for instance) were bad, but we subsequently fixed them and everything is good now. Nearly everyone gets taught this in school, and it's almost never challenged. Even the edifices of the US left, such as the ACLU and the NAACP, tend to wrap themselves in the constitution. It's an enlightening experience to watch someone from the US corner a European with a discussion of the US constitution and watch the European plan escape routes while their soul attempts to leave their body. And I think it's telling that having that experience, as rare as it might be given how oblivious we can be, is still more common than a white person having a frank conversation with a black person in the US about the merits of the constitution as written. For various reasons, mostly because this is not very safe for the black person, this rarely happens. This book is primarily Mystal giving his opinion on various current controversies in constitutional law, but the underlying refrain is that the constitution is a trash document written by awful people that sets up a bad political system. That system has been aggressively defended by reactionary Supreme Courts, which along with the designed difficulty of the amendment process has prevented fixing many obviously broken parts. This in turn has led to numerous informal workarounds and elaborate "interpretations" to attempt to make the system vaguely functional. In other words, Mystal is trying to tell the US reader to stop being so precious about this specific document, and is using its truly egregious treatment of black people as the main fulcrum for his argument. Along the way, he gives an abbreviated tour of the highlights of constitutional law, but if you're at all interested in politics you've probably heard most of that before. The main point, I think, is to dig up any reverence left over from a US education, haul it out into the light of day, and compare it to the obvious failures of the constitution as a body of law and the moral failings of its authors. Mystal then asks exactly why we should care about original intent or be so reluctant to change the resulting system of government. (Did I mention you should not bother with this book if you don't agree with Mystal politically? Seriously, don't do that to yourself.) Readers of my reviews will know that I'm fairly far to the left politically, particularly by US standards, and yet I found it fascinating how much lingering reverence Mystal managed to dig out of me while reading this book. I found myself getting defensive in places, which is absurd because I didn't write this document. But I grew up surrounded by nigh-universal social signaling that the US constitution was the greatest political document ever, and in a religious tradition that often argued that it was divinely inspired. If one is exposed to enough of this, it becomes part of your background understanding of the world. Sometimes it takes someone being deliberately provocative to haul it back up to the surface where it can be examined. This book is not solely a psychological intervention in national mythology. Mystal gets into detailed legal arguments as well. I thought the most interesting was the argument that the bizarre and unconvincing "penumbras" and "emanations" reasoning in Griswold v. Connecticut (which later served as the basis of Roe v. Wade) was in part because the Lochner era Supreme Court had, in the course of trying to strike down all worker protection laws, abused the concept of substantive due process so badly that Douglas was unwilling to use it in the majority opinion and instead made up entirely new law. Mystal argues that the Supreme Court should have instead tackled the true meaning of substantive due process head-on and decided Griswold on 14th Amendment equal protection and substantive due process grounds. This is probably a well-known argument in legal circles, but I'd not run into it before (and Mystal makes it far more interesting and entertaining than my summary). Mystal also joins the tradition of thinking of the Reconstruction Amendments (the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments passed after the Civil War) as a second revolution and an attempt to write a substantially new constitution on different legal principles, an attempt that subsequently failed in the face of concerted and deadly reactionary backlash. I first encountered this perspective via Jamelle Bouie, and it added a lot to my understanding of Reconstruction to see it as a political fight about the foundational principles of US government in addition to a fight over continuing racism in the US south. Maybe I was unusually ignorant of it (I know I need to read W.E.B. DuBois), but I think this line of reasoning doesn't get enough attention in popular media. Mystal provides a good introduction. But, that being said, Allow Me to Retort is more of a vibes book than an argument. As in his other writing, Mystal focuses on what he sees as the core of a controversy and doesn't sweat the details too much. I felt like he was less trying to convince me and more trying to model a different way of thinking and talking about constitutional law that isn't deferential to ideas that are not worthy of deference. He presents his own legal analysis and possible solutions to current US political challenges, but I don't think the specific policy proposals are the strong part of this book. The point, instead, is to embrace a vigorous politics based on a modern understanding of equality, democracy, and human rights, without a lingering reverence for people who mostly didn't believe in any of those things. The role of the constitution in that politics is a flawed tool rather than a sacred text. I think this book is best thought of as an internal argument in the US left. That argument is entirely within the frame of the US legal tradition, so if you're not in the US, it will be of academic interest at best (and probably not even that). If you're on the US right, Mystal offers lots of provocative pull quotes to enjoy getting outraged over, but he provides that service on Twitter for free. But if you are on the US left, I think Allow Me to Retort is worth more consideration than I'd originally given it. There's something here about how we engage with our legal history, and while Mystal's approach is messy, maybe that's the only way you can get at something that's more emotion than logic. In some places it degenerates into a Twitter rant, but Mystal is usually entertaining even when he's ranting. I'm not sorry I read it. Rating: 7 out of 10

31 October 2022

Jonathan Dowland: Cosey Fanni Tutti - Guitar/Amplitude

I haven't posted a crate digging picture for a while: Amongst other distractions, I needed to replace my turntable needle. The dead needle lasted me about 20 years, although a fair chunk of that was not spent not doing anything.
yellow 7inch record playing
I love Cosey Fanni Tutti's solo work, as well as her stuff with Chris Carter and some other collaborations: although I was familiar with Throbbing Gristle, it was the live experiment Carter Tutti Void and the recording of it pressed as Transverse that got me interested. "Tutti" was one of my top albums of 2019. Her autobiography Art, Sex, Music was fascinating. I haven't read the follow-up, Re-Sisters yet, but it's on my list. The Arena documentary she was involved with DELIA DERBYSHIRE: THE MYTHS AND THE LEGENDARY TAPES was fabulous. I've yet to hear Tutti's soundtrack album taken from it. This morning's record is a 7" from Electronic Sound magazine with two dark ambient instrumental pieces.

19 February 2022

Shirish Agarwal: The King of Torts John Grisham

John Grisham The King of Torts Lots of things have been happening and I have been unable to be on top of things. There are so many things that happen and keep on happening and a lot of it is just not in control. For those who are watching Brexit, India is going through the same/similar phenomena just without Brexit. I would not like to delve much into Indian happenings as there is no sweet story to tell. Mum is in hospital (diabetic foot) so a lot of time to read books. So I have been making use of the time and at the same time learning or making connections from what I know of the history of the world which goes on enriching what I read all the time. For e.g. in this book, opens up with people who are on Crack. Now while the book is set in 2003, it is still relevant today for a lot of things. There have been rumors and whatnot that the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan supplied a lot of cocaine to black folks in the early 1980s. While that has never been proved, it has been proved somewhat that the CIA and even people in the state department were part of providing crack cocaine to African Americans (as they refer to blacks) in those days. Whether this was because of black power rising or non-profits like ACLU or other organizations is beyond me. I had also read that the GOP (Republicans/Grand Old Party) in the 1970s itself when computers became fast and could do a lot of processing, came to know if education would be as it is, then soon they would no voters. hence they decided to defund education in America, the end result being massive education loans to prospective students and perhaps partly the reason why China produces more than enough STEM graduates than the total number of Americans who become graduates. It is a shame nonetheless, that education in the U.S. is never top  . This is somewhat from a Republican perspective. That is also the reason they are much anti-science.

Tort Cases India doesn t have either class-action suits or tort cases. But before we go headlong, this is what tort means. The book however is not about general tort cases but medical tort cases. The idea is that medical companies often produce medicines claiming they solve x or y issues but more often than not they take short-cuts to get approval from FDA and other regulators. And sooner or later those medicines can and do have harmful effects on the body, sometimes resulting in death. One of the more interesting articles that I read and probably also shared is the work done by Mr. Rob Bilott. While it is a typical David and Goliath story once you read the book, you realize that there are and were many difficulties in Mr. Rob s path that are never fully appreciated or even worked out. The biggest issue is the 8 years that he paid out of his own pocket to get the hundreds and thousands of people tested. How many of us would do that? And this is before proving causation of any disease, illness or anything to a particular environment, pollution etc. is hard even then and even now. Whatever money the victims receive afterward and whatever went to Mr. Rob Bilott would never compensate for the stress faced by him. And lawyers have to be careful, if they ask too little, they are not hurting the company and there is no change in its behavior. If they ask too much, the company can declare Chapter 11, bankruptcy so they have to keep the balance. There is also a lot of greed shown by the tort lawyer and while at the end he does tell about a company s nefarious activities that he suspects he could share his opinion only after giving up his law career. There is and was talk of tort-reform in the book but as can be seen if you reform tort there is just no way to punish such companies but that is in the U.S. There is also some observations that I have shared over the years, for e.g. Europe bans far more drugs than the U.S. does. A major part of it is perhaps due to the fact that Europe has 26/27 independent medical regulators and one country bans medicine for one or the other reason, the rest of Europe also bans the same. In the U.S. it is only the FDA. I have read they have had both funding and staffing issues for years and this is from before the pandemic. The Indian regulators are much worse. One could follow Priyanka Pulla s articles in Mint and others where she has shared how the regulator is corrupt and lazy and a combo of both. And all of this is besides how doctors are corrupted in India by marketing executives of pharma companies. That would be a whole article in itself. In short, when you read this book, there are so many thoughts that come alive when you are reading the book. The sad part is the book doesn t offer any solutions at all. John Grisham s books are usually legal thrillers and courtroom exchanges, this one though is and was very different. This one sadly doesn t take one to any conclusion apart from the fact that we live in an imperfect world and there don t seem to be any solutions. This was even shared by Rep. Katie Porter in her pinned tweet. The Abbvie s of the world will continue to take common people like you and me for a ride.

1 June 2020

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities May 2020

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

Changes

Issues

Review

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

Communication

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

17 October 2017

Jonathan Dowland: Electric Dreams

No spoilers, for those who have yet to watch it... Channel 4 have been broadcasting a new 10-part series called Electric Dreams, based on some of the short fiction of Philip K Dick. The series was commissioned after Channel 4 lost Black Mirror to Netflix, perhaps to try and find something tonally similar. Electric Dreams is executive-produced by Brian Cranston, who also stars in one of the episodes yet to broadcast. I've read all of PKD's short fiction1 but it was a long time ago so I have mostly forgotten the stories upon which the series is based. I've quite enjoyed going back and re-reading them after watching the corresponding episodes to see what changes they've made. In some cases the changes are subtle or complementary, in other cases they've whittled the original story right out and installed a new one inside the shell. A companion compilation has been published with just the relevant short stories in it, and from what I've seen browsing it in a book shop it also contains short introductions which might be worth a read. Things started strong with The Hood Maker, which my wife also enjoyed, although she was disappointed to realise we wouldn't be revisiting those characters in the future. The world-building was strong enough that it seemed like a waste for a single episode. My favourite episode of those broadcast so far was The Commuter, starring Timothy Spall. The changes made were complementary and immensely expanded the emotional range of the story. In some ways, a key aspect of the original story was completely inverted, which I found quite funny: my original take on Dick's story was Dick implying a particular outcome was horrific, whereas it becomes desirable in the TV episode.
Episode 4, *Crazy Diamond* Episode 4, Crazy Diamond
One of the stories most hollowed-out was Sales Pitch which was the basis for Tony Grisoni s episode Crazy Diamond, starring Steve Buscemi and Sidse Babett Knudsen. Buscemi was good but Knudsen totally stole every frame she was in. Fans of the cancelled Channel 4 show Utopia should enjoy this one: both were directed by Marc Munden and the directing, photography and colour balance really recall it. The last episode broadcast was Real Life directed by Ronald D Moore of Battlestar Galactica reboot fame and starring Anna Paquin. Like Sales Pitch it bears very little resemblance to the original story. It played around with similar ideas explored in a lot of Sci-Fi movies and TV shows but left me a little flat; I didn't think it contributed much that I hadn't seen before. I was disappointed that there was a relatively conclusive ending. There was a subversive humour in the Dick short that was completely lost in the retelling. The world design seemed pretty generic. I'm looking forward to Autofac, which is one of the shorts I can remember particularly enjoying.

  1. as collected in the 5 volumes of The Collected Stories of Philip K Dick, although I don't doubt there are some stragglers that were missed out when that series was compiled.

1 April 2017

Russ Allbery: Review: Two Serpents Rise

Review: Two Serpents Rise, by Max Gladstone
Series: Craft #2
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: October 2013
ISBN: 1-4668-0204-9
Format: Mobi
Pages: 350
This is the second book in the Craft Sequence, coming after Three Parts Dead, but it's not a sequel. The only thing shared between the books is the same universe and magical system. Events in Two Serpents Rise were sufficiently distant from the events of the first book that it wasn't obvious (nor did it matter) where it fit chronologically. Caleb is a gambler and an investigator for Red King Consolidated, the vast firm that controls the water supply, and everything else, in the desert city of Dresediel Lex. He has a fairly steady and comfortable job in a city that's not comfortable for many, one of sharp divisions between rich and poor and which is constantly one water disturbance away from riot. His corporate work life frustrates his notorious father, a legendary priest of the old gods who were defeated by the Red King and who continues to fight an ongoing terrorist resistance to the new corporate order. But Caleb has as little as possible to do with that. Two Serpents Rise opens with an infiltration of the Bright Mirror Reservoir, one of the key components of Dresediel Lex's water supply. It's been infested with Tzimet: demon-like creatures that, were they to get into the city's water supply, would flow from faucets and feed on humans. Red King Incorporated discovered this one and sealed the reservoir before the worst could happen, but it's an unsettling attack. And while Caleb is attempting to determine what happened, he has an unexpected encounter with a cliff runner: a daredevil parkour enthusiast with an unexpected amulet of old Craft that would keep her invisible from most without the magical legacy Caleb is blessed (or cursed) with. He doesn't think her presence is related to the attack, but he can't be sure, particularly with the muddling fact that he finds her personally fascinating. Like Three Parts Dead, you could call Two Serpents Rise an urban fantasy in that it's a fantasy that largely takes place in cities and is concerned with such things as infrastructure, politics, and the machinery of civilization. However, unlike Three Parts Dead, it takes itself much more seriously and has less of the banter and delightful absurdity of the previous book. The identification of magic with contracts and legalities is less amusingly creative here and more darkly sinister. Partly this is because the past of Dresediel Lex is full of bloodthirsty gods and human sacrifice, and while Red King Consolidated has put an end to that practice, it lurks beneath the surface and is constantly brought to mind by some grisly artifacts. I seem to always struggle with fantasy novels based loosely on central American mythology. An emphasis on sacrifice and terror always seems to emerge from that background, and it verges too close to horror for me. It also seems prone to clashes of divine power and whim instead of thoughtful human analysis. That's certainly the case here: instead of Tara's creative sleuthing and analysis, Caleb's story is more about uncertainty, obsession, gambling, and shattering revelations. Magical rituals are described more in terms of their emotional impact than their world-building magical theory. I think this is mostly a matter of taste, and it's possible others would like Two Serpents Rise better than the previous book, but it wasn't as much my thing. The characters are a mixed bag. Caleb was a bit too passive to me, blown about by his father and his employer and slow to make concrete decisions. Mal was the highlight of the book for me, but I felt at odds with the author over that, which made the end of the book somewhat frustrating. Caleb has some interesting friends, but this is one of those books where I would have preferred one of the supporting cast to be the protagonist. That said, it's not a bad book. There are some very impressive set pieces, the supporting cast is quite good, and I am wholeheartedly in favor of fantasy novels that are built around the difficulties of water supply to a large, arid city. This sort of thing has far more to do with human life than the never-ending magical wars over world domination that most fantasy novels focus on, and it's not at all boring when told properly. Gladstone is a good writer, and despite the focus of this book not being as much my cup of tea, I'll keep reading this series. Followed by Full Fathom Five. Rating: 7 out of 10

31 March 2017

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in March 2017

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previous month):
Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously or accidentally during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. I have generously been awarded a grant from the Core Infrastructure Initiative to fund my work in this area. This month I:
I also made the following changes to our tooling:
diffoscope

diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues.

  • New features/optimisations:
    • Extract squashfs archive in one go rather than per-file, speeding up ISO comparison by ~10x.
    • Add support for .docx and .odt files via docx2txt & odt2txt. (#859056).
    • Add support for PGP files via pgpdump. (#859034).
    • Add support for comparing Pcap files. (#858867).
    • Compare GIF images using gifbuild. (#857610).
  • Bug fixes:
    • Ensure that we really are using ImageMagick and not the GraphicsMagick compatibility layer. (#857940).
    • Fix and add test for meaningless 1234-content metadata when introspecting archives. (#858223).
    • Fix detection of ISO9660 images processed with isohybrid.
    • Skip icc tests if the Debian-specific patch is not present. (#856447).
    • Support newer versions of cbfstool to avoid test failures. (#856446).
    • Update the progress bar prior to working to ensure filename is in sync.
  • Cleanups:
    • Use /usr/share/dpkg/pkg-info.mk over manual calls to dpkg-parsechangelog in debian/rules.
    • Ensure tests and the runtime environment can locate binaries in /usr/sbin (eg. tcpdump).

strip-nondeterminism

strip-nondeterminism is our tool to remove specific non-deterministic results from a completed build.

  • Fix a possible endless loop while stripping .ar files due to trusting the file's own file size data. (#857975).
  • Add support for testing files we should reject and include the filename when evaluating fixtures.

buildinfo.debian.net

buildinfo.debian.net is my experiment into how to process, store and distribute .buildinfo files after the Debian archive software has processed them.

  • Add support for Format: 1.0. (#20).
  • Don't parse Format: header as the source package version. (#21).
  • Show the reproducible status of packages.


Debian


I submitted my platform for the 2017 Debian Project Leader Elections. This was subsequently covered on LWN and I have been participating in the discussions on the debian-vote mailing list since then.


Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 14.75 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • "Frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Issued DLA 848-1 for the freetype font library fixing a denial of service vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 851-1 for wget preventing a header injection attack.
  • Issued DLA 863-1 for the deluge BitTorrent client correcting a cross-site request forgery vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 864-1 for jhead (an EXIF metadata tool) patching an arbitrary code execution vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 865-1 for the suricata intrusion detection system, fixing an IP protocol matching error.
  • Issued DLA 871-1 for python3.2 fixing a TLS stripping vulnerability in the smptlib library.
  • Issued DLA 873-1 for apt-cacher preventing a HTTP response splitting vulnerability.
  • Issued DLA 876-1 for eject to prevent an issue regarding the checking of setuid(2) and setgid(2) return values.

Uploads
  • python-django:
    • 1:1.10.6-1 New upstream bugfix release.
    • 1:1.11~rc1-1 New upstream release candidate.
  • redis:
    • 3:3.2.8-2 Avoid conflict between RuntimeDirectory and tmpfiles.d(5) both attempting to create /run/redis with differing permissions. (#856116)
    • 3:3.2.8-3 Revert the creation of a /usr/bin/redis-check-rdb to /usr/bin/redis-server symlink to avoid a dangling symlink if only the redis-tools package is installed. (#858519)
  • gunicorn 19.7.0-1 & 19.7.1-1 New upstream releases.
  • adminer 4.3.0-1 New upstream release.

Finally, I also made the following non-maintainer uploads (NMUs):


FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 121 packages: 4pane, adql, android-platform-system-core, android-sdk-helper, braillegraph, deepnano, dh-runit, django-auth-ldap, django-dirtyfields, drf-extensions, gammaray, gcc-7, gnome-keysign, golang-code.gitea-sdk, golang-github-bluebreezecf-opentsdb-goclient, golang-github-bsm-redeo, golang-github-cupcake-rdb, golang-github-denisenkom-go-mssqldb, golang-github-exponent-io-jsonpath, golang-github-facebookgo-ensure, golang-github-facebookgo-freeport, golang-github-facebookgo-grace, golang-github-facebookgo-httpdown, golang-github-facebookgo-stack, golang-github-facebookgo-subset, golang-github-go-openapi-loads, golang-github-go-openapi-runtime, golang-github-go-openapi-strfmt, golang-github-go-openapi-validate, golang-github-golang-geo, golang-github-gorilla-pat, golang-github-gorilla-securecookie, golang-github-issue9-assert, golang-github-issue9-identicon, golang-github-jaytaylor-html2text, golang-github-joho-godotenv, golang-github-juju-errors, golang-github-kisielk-gotool, golang-github-kubernetes-gengo, golang-github-lpabon-godbc, golang-github-lunny-log, golang-github-makenowjust-heredoc, golang-github-mrjones-oauth, golang-github-nbutton23-zxcvbn-go, golang-github-neelance-sourcemap, golang-github-ngaut-deadline, golang-github-ngaut-go-zookeeper, golang-github-ngaut-log, golang-github-ngaut-pools, golang-github-ngaut-sync2, golang-github-optiopay-kafka, golang-github-quobyte-api, golang-github-renstrom-dedent, golang-github-sergi-go-diff, golang-github-siddontang-go, golang-github-smartystreets-go-aws-auth, golang-github-xanzy-go-cloudstack, golang-github-xtaci-kcp, golang-github-yohcop-openid-go, graywolf, haskell-raaz, hfst-ospell, hikaricp, iptraf-ng, kanboard-cli, kcptun, kreport, libbluray, libcatmandu-store-elasticsearch-perl, libcsfml, libnet-prometheus-perl, libosmocore, libpandoc-wrapper-perl, libseqlib, matrix-synapse, mockldap, nfs-ganesha, node-buffer, node-pako, nose-el, nvptx-tools, nx-libs, open-ath9k-htc-firmware, pagein, paleomix, pgsql-ogr-fdw, profanity, pyosmium, python-biotools, python-django-extra-views, python-django-otp, python-django-push-notifications, python-dnslib, python-gmpy, python-gmpy2, python-holidays, python-kanboard, python-line-profiler, python-pgpy, python-pweave, python-raven, python-xapian-haystack, python-xopen, r-cran-v8, repetier-host, ruby-jar-dependencies, ruby-maven-libs, ruby-psych, ruby-retriable, seafile-client, spyder-unittest, stressant, systray-mdstat, telegram-desktop, thawab, tigris, tnseq-transit, typesafe-config, vibe.d, x2goserver & xmlrpc-c. I additionally filed 14 RC bugs against packages that had incomplete debian/copyright files against: golang-github-cupcake-rdb, golang-github-sergi-go-diff, graywolf, hfst-ospell, libbluray, pgsql-ogr-fdw, python-gmpy, python-gmpy2, python-pgpy, python-xapian-haystack, repetier-host, telegram-desktop, tigris & xmlrpc-c.

30 December 2016

Chris Lamb: My favourite books of 2016

Whilst I managed to read almost sixty books in 2016 here are ten of my favourites in no particular order. Disappointments this year include Stewart Lee's Content Provider (nothing like his stand-up), Christopher Hitchens' And Yet (his best essays are already published) and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (great exposition, bizarre conclusion). The worst book I finished, by far, was Mark Edward's Follow You Home.





https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B010EAQLV2.01._PC__.jpg Animal QC Gary Bell, QC Subtitled My Preposterous Life, this rags-to-riches story about a working-class boy turned eminent lawyer would be highly readable as a dry and factual account but I am compelled to include it here for its extremely entertaining style of writing. Full of unsurprising quotes that take one unaware: would you really expect a now-Queen's Counsel to "heartily suggest that if you find yourself suffering from dysentery in foreign climes you do not medicate it with lobster thermidor and a bottle of Ecuadorian red?" A real good yarn.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B0196HJ6OS.01._PC__.jpg So You've Been Publically Shamed Jon Ronson The author was initially recommended to me by Brad but I believe I started out with the wrong book. In fact, I even had my doubts about this one, prematurely judging from the title that it was merely cashing-in on a fairly recent internet phenomenon like his more recent shallow take on Trump and the alt-Right but in the end I read Publically Shamed thrice in quick succession. I would particularly endorse the audiobook version: Ronson's deadpan drawl suits his writing perfectly.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B00IX49OS4.01._PC__.jpg The Obstacle is the Way Ryan Holiday Whilst everyone else appears to be obligated to include Ryan's recent Ego is the Enemy in their Best of 2016 lists I was actually taken by his earlier "introduction by stealth" to stoic philosophy. Certainly not your typical self-help book, this is "a manual to turn to in troubling times". Returning to this work at least three times over the year even splashing out on the audiobook at some point I feel like I learned a great deal, although it is now difficult to pinpoint exactly what. Perhaps another read in 2017 is thus in order
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/071563335X.01._PC__.jpg Layer Cake J.J. Connolly To judge a book in comparison to the film is to do both a disservice, but reading the book of Layer Cake really underscored just how well the film played to the strengths of that medium. All of the aspects that would not have worked had been carefully excised from the screenplay, ironically leaving more rewarding "layers" for readers attempting the book. A parallel adaption here might be No Country for Old Men - I would love to read (or write) a comparative essay between these two adaptions although McCarthy's novel is certainly the superior source material.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B00G1SRB6Q.01._PC__.jpg Lying Sam Harris I've absorbed a lot of Sam Harris's uvre this year in the form of his books but moreover via his compelling podcast. I'm especially fond of Waking Up on spirituality without religion and would rank that as my favourite work of his. Lying is a comparatively short read, more of a long essay in fact, where he argues that we can radically simplify our lives by merely telling the truth in situations where others invariably lie. Whilst it would take a brave soul to adopt his approach his case is superlatively well-argued and a delight to read.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/0140442103.01._PC__.jpg Letters from a Stoic Seneca

Great pleasure is to be found not only in keeping up an old and established friendship but also in beginning and building up a new one. Reading this in a beautifully svelte hardback, I tackled a randomly-chosen letter per day rather than attempting to read it cover-to-cover. Breaking with a life-long tradition, I even decided to highlight sections in pen so I could return to them at ease. I hope it's not too hackneyed to claim I gained a lot from "building up" a relationship with this book. Alas, it is one of those books that is too easy to recommend given that it might make one appear wise and learned, but if you find yourself in a slump, either in life or in your reading habits, it certainly has my approval.


https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B00BHD3TIE.01._PC__.jpg Solo: A James Bond Novel William Boyd I must have read all of the canonical Fleming novels as a teenager and Solo really rewards anyone who has done so. It would certainly punish anyone expecting a Goldeneye or at least be a little too foreign to be enjoyed. Indeed, its really a pastiche of these originals, both in terms of the time period, general tone (Bond is more somber; more vulnerable) and in various obsessions of Fleming's writing, such as the overly-detailed description of the gambling and dining tables. In this universe, 007's restaurant expenses probably contributed signifcantly to the downfall of the British Empire, let alone his waistline. Bond flicking through a ornithological book at one point was a cute touch
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B019MMUA8S.01._PC__.jpg The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck Mark Manson Certainly a wildcard to include here and not without its problems, The Subtle Art is a curious manifesto on how to approach life. Whilst Manson expouses an age-old philosophy of grounding yourself and ignoring the accumulation of flatscreen TVs, etc. he manages to do so in a fresh and provocative "21st-centry gonzo" style. Highly entertaining, at one point the author posits an alternative superhero ("Disappointment Panda") that dishes out unsolicited and uncomfortable truths to strangers before simply walking away: "You know, if you make more money, that s not going to make your kids love you," or: "What you consider friendship is really just your constant attempts to impress people." Ouch.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B004ZLS5RK.01._PC__.jpg The Fourth Protocol Frederick Forsyth I have a crystal-clear memory from my childhood of watching a single scene from a film in the dead of night: Pierce Brosnan sets a nuclear device to detonate after he can get away but a double-crossing accomplice surreptitiously brings the timetable forward in order that the bomb also disposes of him Anyway, at some point whilst reading The Fourth Protocol it dawned on me that this was that book. I might thus be giving the book more credit due to this highly satisfying connection but I think it stands alone as a superlative political page-turner and is still approachable outside the machinations of the Cold War.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B003IDMUSG.01._PC__.jpg The Partner John Grisham After indulging in a bit too much non-fiction and an aborted attempt at The Ministry of Fear, I turned to a few so-called lower-brow writers such as Jeffrey Archer, etc. However, it was The Partner that turned out to be a real page-turner for somewhat undefinable reasons. Alas, it appears the rest of the author's output is unfortunately in the same vein (laywers, etc.) so I am hesitant to immediately begin others but judging from various lists online I am glad I approached this one first.
https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/B00D3J2QKC.01._PC__.jpg Shogun: The First Novel of the Asian saga James Clavell Despite its length, I simply couldn't resist returning to Shogun this year although it did fatigue me to the point that I have still yet to commence on its sequel, Tai-Pan. Like any good musical composition, one is always rewarded by returning to a book and I took great delight in uncovering more symbolism throughout (such as noticing that one of the first words Blackthorne learns in Japanese is "truth") but also really savouring the tragic arcs that run throughout the novel, some beautiful phrases ("The day seemed to lose its warmth ") and its wistful themes of inevitability and karma.

9 August 2016

Shirish Agarwal: Doha and the Supreme Court of DFSG Free

Hi, I am in two minds of what to write about Doha. My job has been vastly simplified by a friend when he shared with me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdrAd-44LW0 . That video is more relevant and more closer to the truth than whatever I can share. As can be seen it is funny but more sad the way Qatarians are trying to figure out how things will be and as can be seen it seems to heading towards a real estate bubble . They would have to let go of the Sharia if they are thinking of wealthy westerners coming to stay put. I am just sad to know that many of my country-men are stuck there and although I hope the best for them, I dread it may turn out the way it has turned out for many people of Indians, and especially from Kerala in Saudi Arabia. I would touch about the Kerala situation probably in another blog post as this time is exclusively for legal aspects which were discussed in Debconf. A bit of backgrounder here, one part of my family is lawyers which means I have somewhat notion of law as practiced in our land. As probably everybody knows, India was ruled by the British for around 150 odd years. One of the things that they gave while leaving was/is the IPC (Indian Penal Code) and is practiced with the common law concept. The concept means precedence of any judgement goes quite some way in framing rulings and law of the land as time goes on besides the lobbying and the politics which happens in any democracy. Free software would not have been there without the GPL The General Public License. And the license is as much a legal document as it s something that the developers can work without becoming deranged, as it is one of the more simpler licenses to work with. My own understanding of the legal, ethical and moral issues around me were framed by two-three different TV shows, books (fiction and non-fiction alike) apart from what little news I heard in family. One was M*A*S*H* (with Alan Alda and his frailness, anarchism, humanism, civil rights), the Practise and Boston Legal which does lay bare the many grey areas that lawyers have to deal with ( The Practice also influenced a lot of civil rights understanding and First amendment, but as it is a TV show, how much of it is actually practiced for lawyers and how much moral dilemma they are can only be guessed at.) . In books it is artists like John Grisham, Michael Connelly as well as Perry Mason Agatha Christie. In non-fiction look at the treasures under bombayhighcourt e-books corner and series of Hamlyn Lectures. I would have to warn that all of the above are major time-sinks but rewarding in their own way. Also haven t read all of them as time and interests are constrained but do know they are good for understanding bit of our history. I do crave for a meetup kind of scenario when non-lawyers can read and discuss about facets of law . All that understanding was vastly amplified by Groklaw.net which made non-lawyers at the very least be able to decipher and understand what is going on in the free software world. After PJ (Pamela Jones) closed it in 2013 due to total surveillance by the Free World (i.e. the United States of America, NSA) we have been thirsty. We do get occasionally somewhat mildly interesting articles in lwn.net or arstechnica.net but nowhere the sheer brilliance of groklaw. So, it was a sheer stroke of luck that I met Mr. Bradley M. Kuhn who works with Karen Sandler on Software Conservancy. While I wanted to be there for his presentation, it was just one of those days which doesn t go as planned. However, as we met socially and over e-mail there were two basic questions which I asked him which also imbibes why we need to fight for software freedom in the court of law. Below is a re-wording of what he shared . Q1. why do people think that GPL still needs to be challenged in the court of law while there are gpl-violations which has been more or less successfully defended in the court of law ? Bradley Kuhn the GPL violations is basically a violation of one or more clauses of the GPL license and not the GPL license as a whole and my effort during my lifetime would be to make/have such precedents that the GPL is held as a valid license in the court of law. Q2. Let s say IF GPL is held to be valid in the court of law, would FSF benefit monetarily, at least to my mind it might be so, as more people and comapnies could be convinced to use strong copyleft licenses such as GPLv3 or AGPLv3 . Bradley Kuhn It may or may not. It is possible that even after winning, that people and especially companies may go for weak copyleft licenses if it suits them. The only benefit would probably would be to those people who are already using GPLv3 as the law could be used to protect them as well. Although we would want and welcome companies who would use strong copyleft license such as the GPL, the future is in future and hence uncertain. Both possibilities co-exist. While Bradley didn t say it, I would add further here it probably would mean also moving from being a more offensive mode (which GPL-violations is based upon where a violation occurs and somebody either from the victim s side or a by-stander notices the violation, brings it to the notice of the victim and the GPL-volations team.) to perhaps it being defended by the DMCA people themselves, once GPL is held as a valid license in the eyes of law. Although should you use the DMCA or not is a matter of choice, personal belief system as well as your legal recourses. I have to share that the FSF and the GPL-violations team are probably very discerning when they take up the fight as most of the work done by them is pro-bono (i.e. they don t make a single penny/paisa from the work done therein.) and hence in view of scarce resources, it makes sense to go only for the biggest violators in the hopes that you can either make them agree to compensate and agree to the terms of license of any software/hardware combination or sue them and take a bigger share of the reward/compensation awarded by the Court to help the defendant and maybe some of the proceeds donated by the defendant and people like you and me to make sure that Conservancy and the GPL-violations team is still around to help the next time something similar happens.
Bradley Kuhn presenting at #Debconf 16

Bradley Kuhn presenting at #Debconf 16

Now, as far as his presentation is concerned, whose video can be seen at http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/The_Supreme_Court_of_DFSGFree.webm , I thought it was tame. While he talked about gaming the system in some sense, he was sharing that the system debian-legal works (most-of-the-time). The list actually works because many far more brilliant people than me take time to understand the intricacies of various licenses and how they should be interpreted through the excellently written Debian Free Software Guidelines and whether the license under discussion contravenes the DFSG or is part of it. I do agree with his point though that the ftp-master/s and the team may not be the right person to judge the license in adherence to the DFSG, or her/is not giving a reason for rejecting a package to not entering into the package archive. I actually asked the same question on debian-legal and while I had guessed, it seems there is enough review of the licenses per-se as answer from Paul Wise shows. Charles Pessley also shared an idea he has documented which probably didn t get much traction as involves more work on DD s without any benefit to show for it. All in all I hope it sheds some light on why there is need to be more aware of law in software freedom. Two Organizations which work on software freedom from legal standpoint are SFLC (Delhi) headed by the charming Mr. Eben Moglen and ALF (Bangalore). I do hope more people, especially developers take a bit more interest in some of the resources mentioned above.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Alternative Law Forum, #bombayhighcourt e-library, #Common Law, #Debconf16, #Fiction, #Hewlyn lectures, #India, #Jurispudence, #legal fiction, #real estate bubble, #SFLC.in, #Software Freedom, #timesink, Doha, Law

10 May 2016

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible builds: week 54 in Stretch cycle

What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between May 1st and May 7th 2016: Media coverage There has been a surprising tweet last week: "Props to @FiloSottile for his nifty gvt golang tool. We're using it to get reproducible builds for a Zika & West Nile monitoring project." and to our surprise Kenn confirmed privately that he indeed meant "reproducible builds" as in "bit by bit identical builds". Wow. We're looking forward to learn more details about this; for now we just know that they are doing this for software quality reasons basically. Two of the four GSoC and Outreachy participants for Reproducible builds posted their introductions to Planet Debian: Toolchain fixes and other upstream developments dpkg 1.18.5 was uploaded fixing two bugs relevant to us: This upload made it necessary to rebase our dpkg on the version on sid again, which Niko Tyni and Lunar promptly did. Then a few days later 1.18.6 was released to fix a regression in the previous upload, and Niko promptly updated our patched version again. Following this Niko Tyni found #823428: "dpkg: many packages affected by dpkg-source: error: source package uses only weak checksums". Alexis Bienven e worked on tex related packages and SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH: Emmanuel Bourg uploaded jflex/1.4.3+dfsg-2, which removes timestamps from generated files. Packages fixed The following 285 packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies (mostly from GCC honouring SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, see the previous week report): 0ad abiword abcm2ps acedb acpica-unix actiona alliance amarok amideco amsynth anjuta aolserver4-nsmysql aolserver4-nsopenssl aolserver4-nssqlite3 apbs aqsis aria2 ascd ascii2binary atheme-services audacity autodocksuite avis awardeco bacula ballerburg bb berusky berusky2 bindechexascii binkd boinc boost1.58 boost1.60 bwctl cairo-dock cd-hit cenon.app chipw ckermit clp clustalo cmatrix coinor-cbc commons-pool cppformat crashmail crrcsim csvimp cyphesis-cpp dact dar darcs darkradiant dcap dia distcc dolphin-emu drumkv1 dtach dune-localfunctions dvbsnoop dvbstreamer eclib ed2k-hash edfbrowser efax-gtk efax exonerate f-irc fakepop fbb filezilla fityk flasm flightgear fluxbox fmit fossil freedink-dfarc freehdl freemedforms-project freeplayer freeradius fxload gdb-arm-none-eabi geany-plugins geany geda-gaf gfm gif2png giflib gifticlib glaurung glusterfs gnokii gnubiff gnugk goaccess gocr goldencheetah gom gopchop gosmore gpsim gputils grcompiler grisbi gtkpod gvpe hardlink haskell-github hashrat hatari herculesstudio hpcc hypre i2util incron infiniband-diags infon ips iptotal ipv6calc iqtree jabber-muc jama jamnntpd janino jcharts joy2key jpilot jumpnbump jvim kanatest kbuild kchmviewer konclude krename kscope kvpnc latexdiff lcrack leocad libace-perl libcaca libcgicc libdap libdbi-drivers libewf libjlayer-java libkcompactdisc liblscp libmp3spi-java libpwiz librecad libspin-java libuninum libzypp lightdm-gtk-greeter lighttpd linpac lookup lz4 lzop maitreya meshlab mgetty mhwaveedit minbif minc-tools moc mrtrix mscompress msort mudlet multiwatch mysecureshell nifticlib nkf noblenote nqc numactl numad octave-optim omega-rpg open-cobol openmama openmprtl openrpt opensm openvpn openvswitch owx pads parsinsert pcb pd-hcs pd-hexloader pd-hid pd-libdir pear-channels pgn-extract phnxdeco php-amqp php-apcu-bc php-apcu php-solr pidgin-librvp plan plymouth pnscan pocketsphinx polygraph portaudio19 postbooks-updater postbooks powertop previsat progressivemauve puredata-import pycurl qjackctl qmidinet qsampler qsopt-ex qsynth qtractor quassel quelcom quickplot qxgedit ratpoison rlpr robojournal samplv1 sanlock saods9 schism scorched3d scummvm-tools sdlbasic sgrep simh sinfo sip-tester sludge sniffit sox spd speex stimfit swarm-cluster synfig synthv1 syslog-ng tart tessa theseus thunar-vcs-plugin ticcutils tickr tilp2 timbl timblserver tkgate transtermhp tstools tvoe ucarp ultracopier undbx uni2ascii uniutils universalindentgui util-vserver uudeview vfu virtualjaguar vmpk voms voxbo vpcs wipe x264 xcfa xfrisk xmorph xmount xyscan yacas yasm z88dk zeal zsync zynaddsubfx Last week the 1000th bug usertagged "reproducible" was fixed! This means roughly 2 bugs per day since 2015-01-01. Kudos and huge thanks to everyone involved! Please also note: FTBFS packages have not been counted here and there are still 600 open bugs with reproducible patches provided. Please help bringing that number down to 0! The following packages have become reproducible after being fixed: Some uploads have fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them: Uploads which fix reproducibility issues, but currently FTBFS: Patches submitted that have not made their way to the archive yet: Package reviews 54 reviews have been added, 6 have been updated and 44 have been removed in this week. 18 FTBFS bugs have been reported by Chris Lamb, James Cowgill and Niko Tyni. diffoscope development Thanks to Mattia, diffoscope 52~bpo8+1 is available in jessie-backports now. tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Reiner Herrmann, Holger Levsen and Mattia Rizzolo and reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible builds folks on IRC. Mattia also wrote a small ikiwiki macro for this blog to ease linking reproducible issues, packages in the package tracker and bugs in the Debian BTS.

8 December 2015

Daniel Pocock: Comparison of free, open source accounting software

There are a diverse range of free software solutions for accounting. Personally, I have been tracking my personal and business accounts using a double-entry accounting system since I started doing freelance work about the same time I started university. Once you become familiar with double-entry accounting (which doesn't require much more than basic arithmetic skills and remembering the distinction between a debit and a credit) it is unlikely you would ever want to go back to a spreadsheet. Accounting software promoted for personal/home users often provides a very basic ledger where you can distinguish how much cash goes to rent, how much to food and how much to the tax man. Software promoted for business goes beyond the core ledger functionality and provides helpful ways to keep track of which bills you already paid, which are due imminently and which customers haven't paid you. Even for a one-man-band, freelancer or contractor, using a solution like this is hugely more productive than trying to track bills in a spreadsheet. Factors to consider when choosing a solution Changing accounting software can be a time consuming process and require all the users to learn a lot of new things. Therefore, it is generally recommended to start with something a little more powerful than what you need in the hope that you will be able to stick with it for a long time. With proprietary software this can be difficult because the more advanced solutions cost more money than you might be willing to pay right now. With free software, there is no such limitation and you can start with an enterprise-grade solution from day one and just turn off or ignore the features you don't need yet. If you are working as an IT consultant or freelancer and advising other businesses then it is also worthwhile to choose a solution for yourself that you can potentially recommend to your clients and customize for them. The comparison Here is a quick comparison of some of the free software accounting solutions that are packaged on popular Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora:
Product Postbooks Tryton GnuCash LedgerSMB HomeBank Skrooge KMyMoney BG Financas Grisbi
GUI Y Y Y N Y Y Y Y Y
Web UI Y Y N Y N N N N N
Multi-user Y Y N Y N N N N Y
File storage N Y Y N Y Y Y N N
SQL storage Y Y Y Y N N Y Y Y
Multi-currency Y Y Y Y N Y Y Y
A/R Y Y Y Y N Y Y Y
A/P Y Y Y Y N Y Y Y
VAT/GST Y Y Y Y N N Y Y
Inventory Y Y N Y N N N
Linux Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
Windows Y Y
Mac OS Y Y
Technology C++, JavaScript, Node Python C Perl C Java
License CPAL GPL3 GPL2 GPL2
The table doesn't consider Odoo (formerly OpenERP) because the packages were considered buggy and are not maintained any more, it is replaced by Tryton. Compiere and Adempiere are other well known solutions but they haven't been packaged at all. Features in detail While the above list gives a basic summary of features, it is necessary to look more closely at how they are implemented. For example, if you need to report on VAT or GST, there are two methods of reporting: cash or accrual. Some products only support accruals because that is easier to implement. Even in commercial products that support cash-based VAT reporting, the reports are not always accurate (I've seen that problem with the proprietary Quickbooks software) and a tax auditor will be quick to spot such errors. The only real way to get to know one of these products is to test it for a couple of hours. Postbooks, for example, provides the Demo database so you can test it with dummy data without making any real commitment. User interface choices If you need to support users on multiple platforms or remote users such as an accountant or book-keeper, it is tempting to choose a solution with a web interface. The solutions with desktop interfaces can be provisioned to remote users using a terminal-server setup. The full GUI solutions tend to offer a richer user interface and reporting experience. It can frequently be useful to have multiple windows or reports open at the same time, doing this with browser tabs can be painful. File or database storage There are many good reasons to use database storage and my personal preference is for PostgreSQL. Using a database allows you to run a variety of third-party reporting tools and write your own scripts for data import and migration. Community and commercial support When dealing with business software, it is important to look at both the community and the commercial support offerings that are available. Some communities have events, such as xTupleCon for Postbooks or a presence at other major events like FOSDEM. Summary My personal choice at the moment is Postbooks from xTuple. This is because of a range of factors, including the availability of both web and desktop clients, true multi-user support, the multi-currency support and the PostgreSQL back-end.

8 June 2014

Russ Allbery: INN 2.5.4

Julien LIE completed this release a few weeks ago, but between work and other things I'm only finally now posting the announcement. This is primarily a bug-fix release. The most user-visible changes are that the radius.conf file for the nnrpd RADIUS authenticator has been renamed to inn-radius.conf (to avoid a conflict with the configuration of the actual RADIUS server), and the sample innd and nnrpd MOTD files are now installed as samples and not as live configuration on a new server install. controlchan and pgpverify now check the signer of control messages in a way that works properly with UIDs containing spaces and keys that define multiple UIDs, which should fix long-standing problems with verifying the control messages for fido.ger.* and grisbi.*. The nnrpd posting filter now has access to the attributes hash, similar to the authentication and access Perl hooks. In addition, there are fixes for a variety of crash bugs, build issues, log rotation issues, and the normal variety of bug fixes that accumulate over time. You can get the latest version from the official ISC download page or from my personal INN pages. The latter also has links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation. As always, thanks to Julien LIE for doing the lion's share of work on the new release, including investigating and fixing bugs, merging patches, and doing all the hard parts of the release process.

27 May 2014

Jon Dowland: 2012 In Review

2013 is nearly all finished up and so I thought I'd spend a little time writing up what was noteable in the last twelve months. When I did so I found an unfinished draft from the year before. It would be a shame for it to go to waste, so here it is. 2012 was an interesting year in many respects with personal highs and lows. Every year I see a lots of "round-up"-style blog posts on the web, titled things like "2012 in music", which attempt to summarize the highlights of the year in that particular context. Here's JWZ's effort, for example. Often they are prefixed with statements like "2012 was a strong year for music" or whatever. For me, 2012 was not a particularly great year. I discovered quite a lot of stuff that I love that was new to me, but not new in any other sense. In Music, there were a bunch of come-back albums that made the headlines. I picked up both of Orbital's Wonky and Brian Eno's Lux (debatably a comeback: his first ambient record since 1983, his first solo effort since 2005, but his fourth collaborative effort on Warp in the naughties). I've enjoyed them both, but I've already forgotten Wonky and I still haven't fully embraced Lux (and On Land has not been knocked from the top spot when I want to listen to ambience.) There was also Throbbing Gristle's (or X-TG) final effort, a semi/post-TG, partly posthumous double-album swan song effort which, even more than Lux, I still haven't fully digested. In all honesty I think it was eclipsed by the surprise one-off release of a live recording of a TG side project featuring Nik Void of Factory Floor: Carter Tutti Void's Transverse, which is excellent. Ostensibly a four-track release, there's a studio excerpt V4 studio (Slap 1) which is available from (at least) Amazon. There's also a much more obscure fifth "unreleased" track cruX which I managed to "buy" from one of the web shops for zero cost. The other big musical surprise for me last year was Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. I knew nothing of BJH, although it turns out I've heard some of her singles repeatedly on Radio 6, but her band's guitarist Ed Blazey and his partner lived in the flat below me briefly. In that time I managed to get to the pub with him just once, but he kindly gave me a copy of their album on 12" afterwards. It reminds me a bit of Goldfrapp circa "Seventh Tree": I really like it and I'm looking forward to whatever they do next. Reznor's How To Destroy Angels squeezed out An Omen EP which failed to set my world on fire as a coherent collection, despite a few strong songs individually. In movies, sadly once again I'd say most of the things I recall seeing would be "also rans". Prometheus was a disappointment, although I will probably rewatch it in 2D at least once. The final Batman was fun although not groundbreaking to me and it didn't surpass Ledger's efforts in The Dark Knight. Inception remains my favourite Nolan by a long shot. Looper is perhaps the stand-out, not least because it came from nowhere and I managed to avoid any hype. In games, I moaned about having moaning about too many games, most of which are much older than 2012. I started Borderlands 2 after enjoying Borderlands (disqualified on age grounds) but to this day haven't persued it much further. I mostly played the two similar meta-games: The Playstation Plus download free games in a fixed time period and the more sporadic but bountiful humble bundle whack-a-mole. More on these another time. In reading, as is typical I mostly read stuff that was not written in 2012. Of that which was, Charles Stross's The Apocalypse Codex was an improvement over The Fuller Memorandum which I did not enjoy much, but in general I'm finding I much prefer Stross's older work to his newer; David Byrne's How Music Works was my first (and currently last) Google Books ebook purchase, and I read it entirely on a Nexus 7. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but the experience has not made a convert of me away from paper. He leans heavily on his own experiences which is inevitable but fortunately they are wide and numerous. Iain Banks' Stonemouth was an enjoyable romp around a fictional Scottish town (one which, I am reliably informed, is incredibly realistical rendered). One of his "mainstream" novels, It avoided a particular plot pattern that I've grown to dread with Banks, much to my suprise (and pleasure). Finally, the stand-out pleasant surprise novel of the year was Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth. With a plot device not unlike Banks' Transition or Stross's Family Trade series, the pair managed to write a journey-book capturing the sense-of-wonder that these multiverse plots are good for. (Or perhaps I have a weakness for them). It's hard to find the lines between Baxter and Pratchett's writing, but the debatably-reincarnated Tibetan Monk-cum-Artificial Intelligence 'Lobsang' must surely be Pratchett's. Pratchett managed to squeeze out another non-Discworld novel (Dodger) as well as a long-overdue short story collection, although I haven't read either of them yet. On to 2013's write-up...

17 May 2014

Thorsten Glaser: Quotes of the day SWB Engrish

Stadtwerke Bonn conduct track works on the third
weekend of May 23-25th on several sections of the
line 61. The orbits of lines 61, 62 and 65 drive from
Friday 23 May to Sunday 25 May not on their usual
line paths. Due the track works a train replacement
service by busses will be established. Please note: The travel time of the shuttle busses
takes longer. It is recommend to adjust the traveling
plan. We apologise for any inconvenience! (Emphasis mine. Inconvenience, such as almost C N>K )

15 January 2014

Sylvestre Ledru: Debian France shop

During the month of December, we have been working with folks from En Vente Libre to create a shop with Debian products: http://www.enventelibre.org/debian We have now a shop with plenty of Debian products. The design has been done by Ahmet DEMIR. Most of them are already known by the community (they were sold during FOSDEM or various Debconf) like the Buff, Swiss Army knife or the classical polos. But, t-shirts based on Wheezy theme are brand new:
They are available in three colors:
* Red
* Blue
* Grey For now, the website is only French, an English version might come in the future.

23 March 2012

Raphaël Hertzog: People behind Debian: J rg Jaspert, FTPmaster, Debian Account Manager, and more

Photo by Wouter Verhelst

J rg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones) Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers. :-) Check out his interview to learn more about some of the numerous ways one can get involved in Debian, managing its infrastructure and without having to be a packager. Raphael: Who are you? J rg: My name is J rg Jaspert and I m 35 years old working for a small company doing system administration and consulting work for our customers. I m married for a little while now and sometime soon a little Ganneff will be crawling out of my wife. (Whoever didn t think of the movie Alien now is just boring). Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? J rg: I started using Debian somewhere around 2000, 2001. Before that I had the misfortune to try SuSE and RedHat, both with a user experience that let me fully understand why people think Linux is unusable. (Due to my work I m in the unfortunate situation to have to use RedHat on two machines. Funny how they are still utter crap and worse than bad toys). And all of this lets get a Linux running here came up because I was trying to find a replacement for my beloved OS/2 installation, which I had for some years. So after I got Debian installed, good old Potato, I got myself active on our mailing lists, starting with the German user one. A bit later I replied to a question if someone can help as staff for a Debian booth somewhere. It was the most boring event I ever visited (very nice orga, unfortunately no visitors), but I got a few important things there: The software I packaged, found me a sponsor and voila, maintainer I was. Some more packages got added and at some point my sponsor turned out to be my advocate. The NM process run around 2 months, and mid April 2002 I got THE MAIL. Raphael: Some Debian developers believe that you have too many responsibilities within Debian (DAM, FTPMaster, Debconf, Partners, Planet Debian, Mirrors, ). Do you agree that it can be problematic, and if yes, are you trying to scale down? J rg: It s DebConf, tssk. And yes, I do have some extra groups and roles. And you even only list some, leaving out all I do outside Debian. But simply counting number of roles is a plain stupid way to go. Way more interesting is how much work is behind a role and how many other people are involved. And looking at those you listed I don t see any I am a SPOF. Let s look at those you listed: DAM: Here I did start out assisting James to get the huge backload down which had accumulated over time. Nowadays I am merely the one with the longest term as DAM. Christoph Berg joined in April 2008 and Enrico Zini followed during October 2010, both very active. Especially Enrico, lately with the redesign of the NM webpages. FTPMaster: The basic outline of the FTPMaster history is similar to the DAM one. I joined as an assistant, after the oh-so-famous Vancouver meeting in 2004. Together with Jeroen, we both then got the backload down which had accumulated there. He did most of the removals while I had a fun time cleaning up NEW. And we both prepared patches for the codebase. And in 2007, as the last action as DPL, Sam made me FTPMaster. Since then I haven t been alone either. In fact we have much more rotation in the team than ever before, which is a good thing. Today we are 3 FTPMasters, 4 FTP Assistants and 1 Trainee. Though we always like new blood and would welcome more volunteers. DebConf: I am very far outside the central DebConf team. I am not even a delegate here. Currently I am merely an admin, though there are 4 others with the same rights on the DebConf machines. I ve not taken any extra jobs this year, nor will I. Probably for next year again, but not 2012. Planet: I am one of three again, but then Planet is mostly running itself. Debian developers can just edit the config, cron is doing the work, not much needed here. Occasional cleanups, every now and then a mail to answer, done. In short: No real workload attached. Mirrors: My main part here is the ftpsync scriptset. Which is a small part of the actual work. The majority of it, like checking mirrors, getting them to fix errors, etc. is done by Simon Paillard (and since some time, Raphael Geissert is active there too, you might have heard about his http.debian.net). Having said that, there is stuff I could have handled better or probably faster. There always is. Right now I have 2 outstanding things I want to do a (last) cleanup on and then give away. Raphael: You got married last year. I know by experience that entertaining a relationship and/or a family takes time. How do you manage to combine this with your Debian involvement? J rg: Oh well, I first met my wife at the International Conference on OpenSource 2009 in Taiwan. So OpenSource, Debian and me being some tiny wheel in the system wasn t entirely news to her. And in the time since then she learned that there is much more behind when you are in a community like Debian, instead of just doing it for work. Even better that she met Debian people multiple times already, and knows with who I am quarreling Also, she is currently attending a language school having lots of homework in the evening. Gives me time for Debian stuff. :) How that turns out with the baby I have no idea yet. I do want to train it to like pressing the M key, so little-Ganneff can deal with NEW all on its own (M being Manual reject), but it might take a day or twenty before it gets so far. :) Raphael: Thanks to the continuous work of many new volunteers, the NEW queue is no longer a bottleneck. What are the next challenges for the FTPmaster team? J rg: Bad link, try this one. :) Also, no longer sounds like its recent. It s not, it s just that people usually recognize the negative only and not the positive parts. Well, there are a few challenges actually. The first one, even if it sounds simple, is an ongoing one: We need Debian Developers willing to do the work that is hidden behind those simple graphs. Yes, we are currently having a great FTP Team doing a splendid work in keeping that queue reasonably small this is a/THE sisyphean task per excellence. There will always be something waiting for NEW, even if you just cleaned the queue, you turn around and there is something else back in already. Spreading this workload to more people helps not burning one out. So if one or more of the readers is interested, we always like new volunteers. You simply need to be an uploading DD and have a bit of free time. For the rest we do have training procedures in place. Another one is getting the multi-archive stuff done. The goal is to end up with ONE host for all our archives. One dak installation. But separate overrides, trees, mirrors, policies and people (think RMs, backports team, security team). While this is halfway easy to think of in terms of merging backports into main it gets an interesting side note when you think of merging security into main . The security archive does have information that is limited to few people before public release of a security announce, and so we must make sure our database isn t leaking information. Or our filesystem layer handling. Or logs. Etc. Especially as the database is synced in (near) realtime to a DD accessible machine. And the filesystem data too, just a little less often. There is also a discussion about a good way to setup a PPA for Debian service. We do have a very far developed proposal here how it should work, and I really should do the finishing touches and get it to the public. Might even get a GSoC project on it. So far for some short to middle term goals. If you want to go really long term, I do think that we should get to the point where we get rid of the classical view of a source package being one (or more) tarballs plus the Debian changes. Where a new version requires the full upload of one or more of those parts of the source package. I don t know exactly where it should end up. Sure, stuff like one central DVCS, maintainers push there, the archive generates the source tarballs and prepares the mirrors do sound good for a quick glance. But there are lots of trouble and pitfalls and probably some dragons hidden here. Raphael: The Debian repositories are managed by DAK (Debian Archive Kit) which is not packaged. Thus Debian users pick tools like reprepro to manage their package repositories. Is that how things should be? J rg: Oh, Mark Hymers wants to do a package again. More power to him if he does, though yes, DAK is not exactly a quick-and-easy thing to install. But nowadays it is a trillion times easier than the past thanks to Mark s work people can now follow the instructions, scripts and whatever they find inside the setup directory. Still, it really depends on the archive size you are managing. A complex tool like dak does not make sense for someone who wants to publish one or a dozen of his own packages somewhere. Thats just like doing a finger amputation with a chainsaw it certainly works and is fun for the one with the chainsaw but you probably end up a little overdoing it. I myself am using dpkg-scan[packages sources] from a shell script but also mini-dinstall in places (never got friend with reprepro when I looked at it). Works, and for the few dozen packages those places manage it is more than enough. Also, using dak forces you into some ways of behaviour that are just what Debian wants but might not be what a user wants. Like inability to overwrite an existing file. One of the reasons why mentors.debian.net won t work with dak. Or the use of a postgres database. Or that of gpg. Sure, if you end up having more than just a dozen packages, if you have many suites and also movement between them, then dak is sure a thing to look at. And how should things be : however the user and admins of that certain install of reprepro, mini-dinstall, dak, whatever want it. This is not one-tool-for-all land :) Raphael: What is the role of Debian Account Managers (DAM)? Do you believe that DAMs have a responsibility to shape Debian by defining limits in terms of who can join and what can be done within Debian? J rg: Quote from https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2010/10/msg00010.html:
The Debian Account Managers (DAM) are responsible for maintaining the list of members of the Debian Project, also known as Debian Developers. DAMs are authoritative in deciding who is a member of the Debian Project and can take subsequent actions such as approving and expelling Project members.
Now, aside from this quote, my OWN PERSONAL OPINION, without wearing anything even vaguely resembling a DAM hat: DAM is the one post that is entitled to decide who is a member or not. Usually that is in the way of joining (or not), which is simple enough. But every now and then this also means acting on a request to do something about whatever behaviour of a Debian Project member. I hate that (and i think one can easily replace I with WE there). But it s our job. We usually aren t quick about it. And we don t act on our own initiative when we do, we always have (numerous) other DDs complain/appeal/talk/whatever to us first. The expulsion procedure , luckily not invoked that often, does guarantee a slow process and lots of input from others. Are we the best for it? Probably not, we are just some people out of a thousand who happen to have a very similar hobby Debian. We aren t trained in dealing with the situations that can come up. But we are THE role inside Debian that is empowered to make such decisions, so naturally it ends up with us. Raphael: You did a lot of things for Debian over the years. What did bring you the most joy? Are there things that you re still bitter about? J rg: The most joy? Hrm, without being involved in Debian and SPI I would never have met my wife.
Or my current job. Or a GR against me. Not many running around with that badge, though I m still missing my own personal Serious problems with Mr. Jaspert thread. Bad you all.
Or visited so many places. Think of all the DebConfs, QA meetings, BSPs and whatever events.
Or met so many people.
Or learned so many things I would never even have come near without being DD. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? J rg: Yes.
Thank you to J rg for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

One comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

9 October 2011

Andrew Pollock: [life] There's something to be said for a destination wedding

Our friends Andrew and Janice finally tied the knot last Sunday, in Langkawi, Malaysia. They're Aussies currently living in New York, and Janice is of Malaysian descent, so I think part of the reason was to accommodate some Malaysian relatives that wouldn't be able to travel, and the other reason was that it was going to mean a bunch of people had to travel anyway, so why not travel somewhere a bit exotic? As my sister is getting married later this month in Brisbane, we decided to spare Zoe two massive international flights in close succession, and Sarah and Zoe flew out a few days ahead of me, and went to Brisbane, and then Zoe, Sarah and her mum flew to Langkawi from there, and I flew there from San Francisco, with the plan being for Sarah and Zoe to hang out in Brisbane for the 4 weeks in between weddings. It was the longest amount of travel I think I've ever done. I hadn't sat down and calculated what the travel time was beforehand, and when I got on the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and they said it was going to be nearly 14 hours just to Hong Kong, I nearly wept. The only good thing about it was I didn't have to wrangle a toddler as well. From there, I had to get to Singapore, with a several hour layover, and then another flight from Singapore to Langkawi. I left SFO at 1:20am on Monday morning, and finally arrived at about 7am (San Francisco time) the following day. I didn't even bother getting off the plane in Hong Kong, it was only an hour and a half layover. I think the layover in Singapore was 5 hours, and it was a separate flight. Singapore airport at least was pretty good to kill time in. It was funny, I was reading Wired while I was killing time in Singapore, and they had an article, which included a side bar on 10 Best Airports to Get Stuck In, and I observed that getting to Langkawi and back involved using 4 of them. The flight into Langkawi was more eventful than usual. I was dozing a bit as we were coming in to land, and I woke up to the sensation of taking off again. I wondered if we'd had an aborted landing? Sure enough, soon after, the captain got on the public address and said that they'd had to abort the landing due to bad weather in Langkawi. He had pretty bad Engrish, thanking us for our frustration and saying something about fuel, so I didn't get a lot of the details. We proceeded to circle for a while before finally landing. I think the flight ended up landing something like an hour or more later than scheduled. So that was mildly exciting. Langkawi airport was one of those little "walk across the tarmac" places. I think I stood the closest to an operating jet engine that I ever have, as another aeroplane taxied in to a stop between my plane and the terminal while I was walking to it. Loud. Anyway, that was all just me getting there. Sarah had a bit of fun getting to Brisbane on her own with Zoe. She's now too long to sleep in an in-flight bassinet, and doesn't seem to like sleeping vertically in the Ergo Baby Carrier (possibly she was too hot in it). I think she got a bit of sleep lying across Sarah's lap, but Sarah didn't get much sleep. I think there was similar fun for the Brisbane to Kuala Lumpur flight, but at least she had two laps to lie across for that one. Sarah, Zoe and Sarah's mum arrived in Langkawi earlier in the day on Tuesday, and I made it to the resort at about 10pm (local time) and pretty much immediately crashed for the night. The Westin Langkawi was just fabulous. I don't think we've stayed at a resort since our honeymoon, and this resort was a whole other level compared to Heron Island. The rooms were very comfortable, and the resort was very accommodating of a toddler. Their Kids Club menu was excellent. The breakfast buffet (included in our room rate) was the most comprehensive breakfast buffet I have ever seen in a hotel. The only thing missing was bacon, being a Muslim country, but I can live without that. It was pretty easy to just fill up on breakfast, skip lunch and just have a light dinner. The on-resort dining prices were also very reasonable. The off-resort prices were even cheaper. The resort facilities in general were very comprehensive. Three pools. A children's play room. A well equipped gym and recreational area including squash courts. An extremely nice day spa. The thing I liked best about the whole destination wedding thing was all of the activities leading up to the actual wedding. The wedding was on the Sunday, and we had the Hen's and Buck's parties on Friday. Apparently Australia is the only place that calls it a Buck's party. The rest of the world calls it a Stag party, how about that? There was some last-minute changes to the Buck's party, and we ended up chartering this huge $2 million yacht for 4 hours and going for a cruise and doing some jetskiing and water sports. The captain was Aussie, so we all had a good chat with him. Apparently it's a corporate vessel, with an exclusive chartering arrangement with the Westin. On Friday night, we all went out to a seafood buffet dinner at the Yellow Cafe over at Cenang Beach. Most of the guys and girls already knew each other courtesy of the day's activities, so dinner involved a lot of meeting the other halves. What I really liked about all of the pre-wedding stuff was that by the time the wedding rolled around, you really felt like you knew a bunch of Andrew and Janice's family and friends, which I think made the whole thing feel a lot more intimate. Saturday was a recovery day. Sarah's aunties Glenda (who was in Singapore on business) and Vicki (who lives in Thailand) had joined us at the resort by this stage, so we were all knocking around together checking out the island. We took the cable car to the top, but unfortunately the sky bridge was closed due to the inclement weather. There was a lot of touristy stuff at the bottom of where the cable car was, and Zoe got to have an encounter with a very large python. She even tried to give it a kiss. One of the things that was surprising was how popular Zoe was with all of the locals and other Asian tourists. We could probably have charged for photographs. There was a little girl, who I thought was possibly a similar age to Zoe (turned out she was two and a half) and I asked her parents if I could take a photo of the two girls together, and no sooner had they sat down together and a virtual paparazzi materialised out of nowhere taking photographs. Similarly, all of the staff at the Westin were totally taken by Zoe, and wanted to touch her. To her credit, Zoe handled all of the extra attention pretty well. The wedding wasn't until 6pm on Sunday, so we did a 4 hour island hopping boat tour in the morning. That was a bit of an experience. It was nothing short of sheer bedlam trying to board the right boat at the wharf (I use the term lightly) and then the boat's captain had to arrange the passengers appropriately so as to keep the boat on an even keel. It was a narrow motor boat with a canopy cover over the back two thirds of it. First stop was Dayang Bunting Island, home of Pregnant Maiden Lake, where we stopped for 45 minutes. More bedlam ensued getting off the boat at the wharf there (there was veritable flotilla of tour boats all trying to load and unload at the same time). Monkeys abounded. They seemed incredibly tame. We were practically tripping over them. Zoe didn't seem to be as taken by the monkeys as I thought she would. It was a short walk up a reasonable flight of stairs to get to the lake, though some incredibly humid jungle, and once we got there, there wasn't a huge amount to do in the time we had available. So we dunked Zoe's feet in the lake a few times and then made our way back to the chaos at the wharf and got back on our boat. We stopped for a similar amount of time at another island with a pretty nice beach, and Zoe had enough time to a quick swim in the ocean with Sarah, and then we made our way back to the boat again to another spot where we watched sea eagle feeding. Heaps of eagles circling overhead would take turns to swoop down and grab fish and fly off again. It was impressive. I think I managed to snap some good action shots with the long lens. Then we had the wedding itself. It was on the beach out the front of the Heavenly Spa on the resort. Let me say, the Westin knows how to put a wedding together. The ceremony was as lovely as the location. For the reception, the one 5 bedroom villa on the resort was booked for the night. Dinner was a buffet on the lawn out the front (briefly delayed thanks to a rain shower) and then speeches and general partying happened around the terrace out the back of the villa. There were some beautiful speeches. Janice's brought a tear to my eye. Part of the whole package included something like a 10 person video crew that were running around capturing everything. It felt a bit surreal. It was definitely the most high-end wedding I've ever been to (sorry Scott and Julie, your "Wedding of the Century" has been eclipsed by the "Wedding of the Millennium"). Monday was a wind down day. Zoe mercifully gave us a sleep in until 8am. Our flights didn't leave until the evening on Tuesday, so after we checked out we went for a drive around the island to try and get Zoe to take a nap in the car. We ended up at the fruit farm, which to the best of my understanding is run by the government. Zoe had fallen asleep by this stage, and Sarah said she'd stay behind in the car and have a nap too. So her mum and I went on the tour. It was a fun little tour. There were only four of us on it. They drive you around the farm on the back of a truck and show you the various crops they have. They stop at a few places and give you a bunch of fruit samples, attempt to answer your questions, and take funny pictures of you. The favourite seemed to be to dangle a fruit on a knife up close in front of the camera while having the subject(s) in the background look like they're carrying an enormous fruit. We got back to the car to an upset Sarah and small group of locals milling around. Sarah had managed to lock Zoe in the car for about 30 minutes when she got out to make her a sandwich after Zoe had woken up from her nap. Fortunately the engine was running and the air conditioning was on, so there was no risk of Zoe overheating (on the contrary, she was a bit on the cool side). Some kind locals had somehow figured out which car rental company to call (it's possible there's only one) and someone came out with a spare key, so the crisis was averted just before we got back to the car. It's the first time Zoe's been locked in the car (it's pretty much impossible in the Prius) and it was just our luck that it'd happen in a foreign country! One of the saddest things about Langkawi was the amount of garbage floating around in the ocean, and washing up on the beaches. I was swimming in the ocean off the yacht while we were out on the Buck's party, and it was disgusting. The jetski was temporarily disabled due to sucking in something. We visited Black Sand Beach, which was supposed to be something of a tourist attraction. Covered in trash. Ian Kiernan would be sad. The captain of the yacht we were on for the Buck's party said it was all from Thailand and got flushed out of all the rivers and streams by the recent rain. Just goes to show how connected everything is. The house is very quiet without Sarah and Zoe, but my friend Liam is visiting from Zurich for a couple of weeks, so that's helping break the silence. I'm using the time to get a heap of things done that I don't otherwise get time to get done. Unfortunately the photos from the trip are only available on Facebook at the moment, but they'll eventually get uploaded here.

31 August 2011

Axel Beckert: Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: How wdiff and colordiff help to choose the right Swiss Army Knife

In light of the fact that it seems possible to fit the plastic caps of a Debian branded Swiss Army Knife (Last orders today!) on an existing Swiss Army Knife (German written howto as PDF), I started to think about which Victorinox Cybertool would be the best fitting for me. And because the Victorinox comparison page doesn t really show diffs, just columns with floating text which are not very helpful for generating diffs in your head, I used command line tools for that purpose: wdiff Because the floating texts are not line- but just whitespace-based, the tool of choice is not diff but wdiff, a word-based diff. It encloses additions and removals in + + and [- -] blocks. (No, those aren t Japanese smileys although they look a lot like some. ^^). The easiest and clearest way is to copy and paste the texts from Victorinox comparison page into some text files and compare them with wdiff:
$ wdiff cybertool34.txt cybertool41.txt
+Schraubendreher 2.5mm,+ Pinzette, N hahle mit Nadel hr, +Holzs ge,+ Bit-Schl ssel( 5 mm Innensechskant f r die D-SUB Steckverbinder, 4 mm Innensechskant f r Bits, Bit Phillips 0, Bit Phillips 1, Bit-Schlitzschrauben 4 mm, Bit Phillips 2, Bit Hex 4 mm, Bit Torx 8, Bit Torx 10, Bit Torx 15 ), Kombizange( H lsenpresser, Drahtschneider ), Stech-Bohrahle, Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen ), Mehrzweckhaken (Pakettr ger), +Metalls ge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ),+ Dosen ffner( kleiner Schraubendreher ), Kleine Klinge, Grosse Klinge, Ring, inox, Mini-Schraubendreher, Kapselheber( Schraubendreher, Drahtabisolierer ), +Holzmeissel / Schaber,+ Bit-Halter, Stecknadel, inox, Schere, Korkenzieher, Zahnstocher
So this already extracted the information which are the seven tools which are in the Cybertool 41, but not in the Cybertool 34. Nevertheless the diff is still not easily recognizable on the first glance. There are several ways to help here. First wdiff has an option --no-common (the according short option is -3) which just shows added and removed words:
$ wdiff -3 cybertool34.txt cybertool41.txt
======================================================================
 +Schraubendreher 2.5mm,+ 
======================================================================
  +Holzs ge,+ 
======================================================================
  +Metalls ge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ),+ 
======================================================================
  +Holzmeissel / Schaber,+ 
======================================================================
This is already way better to quickly recognize the actual differences. But if you still also want to see the common tools of the two knifes you need some visual help: One option is to use wdiff s --terminal (or short -t) option. Added words are then displayed inverse and removed words are shown underlined (background and foreground colors hardcoded as there is no invert colors style in CSS or HTML):

$ wdiff -t cybertool34.txt cybertool41.txt
Schraubendreher 2.5mm, Pinzette, N hahle mit Nadel hr, Holzs ge, Bit-Schl ssel( 5 mm Innensechskant f r die D-SUB Steckverbinder, 4 mm Innensechskant f r Bits, Bit Phillips 0, Bit Phillips 1, Bit-Schlitzschrauben 4 mm, Bit Phillips 2, Bit Hex 4 mm, Bit Torx 8, Bit Torx 10, Bit Torx 15 ), Kombizange( H lsenpresser, Drahtschneider ), Stech-Bohrahle, Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen ), Mehrzweckhaken (Pakettr ger), Metalls ge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ), Dosen ffner( kleiner Schraubendreher ), Kleine Klinge, Druckkugelschreiber, Grosse Klinge, Ring, inox, Mini-Schraubendreher, Kapselheber( Schraubendreher, Drahtabisolierer ), Holzmeissel / Schaber, Bit-Halter, Stecknadel, inox, Schere, Korkenzieher, Zahnstocher

But some still like to to use color instead of the contrast-rich inverse and the easily to oversee underlining. This is where colordiff comes into play: colordiff colordiff is like syntax highlighting for diffs on the command line. I works with classic and unified diffs as well as with wdiffs and debdiffs (the debdiff command is part of the devscripts package).
$ wdiff cybertool34.txt cybertool41.txt colordiff
+Schraubendreher 2.5mm,+ Pinzette, N hahle mit Nadel hr, +Holzs ge,+ Bit-Schl ssel( 5 mm Innensechskant f r die D-SUB Steckverbinder, 4 mm Innensechskant f r Bits, Bit Phillips 0, Bit Phillips 1, Bit-Schlitzschrauben 4 mm, Bit Phillips 2, Bit Hex 4 mm, Bit Torx 8, Bit Torx 10, Bit Torx 15 ), Kombizange( H lsenpresser, Drahtschneider ), Stech-Bohrahle, Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen ), Mehrzweckhaken (Pakettr ger), +Metalls ge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ),+ Dosen ffner( kleiner Schraubendreher ), Kleine Klinge, Grosse Klinge, Ring, inox, Mini-Schraubendreher, Kapselheber( Schraubendreher, Drahtabisolierer ), +Holzmeissel / Schaber,+ Bit-Halter, Stecknadel, inox, Schere, Korkenzieher, Zahnstocher
$ wdiff cybertool29.txt cybertool41.txt colordiff
+Schraubendreher 2.5mm,+ Pinzette, N hahle mit Nadel hr, +Holzs ge,+ Bit-Schl ssel( 5 mm Innensechskant f r die D-SUB Steckverbinder, 4 mm Innensechskant f r Bits, Bit Phillips 0, Bit Phillips 1, Bit-Schlitzschrauben 4 mm, Bit Phillips 2, Bit Hex 4 mm, Bit Torx 8, Bit Torx 10, Bit Torx 15 ), +Kombizange( H lsenpresser, Drahtschneider ),+ Stech-Bohrahle, +Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen ), Mehrzweckhaken (Pakettr ger), Metalls ge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ),+ Dosen ffner( kleiner Schraubendreher ), Kleine Klinge, [-Druckkugelschreiber,-] Grosse Klinge, Ring, inox, Mini-Schraubendreher, Kapselheber( Schraubendreher, Drahtabisolierer ), +Holzmeissel / Schaber,+ Bit-Halter, Stecknadel, inox, +Schere,+ Korkenzieher, Zahnstocher
(Coloured Screenshots done with ANSI HTML Adapter from the package aha.) Some, especially those who are used to git, are probably confused by the default choice of diff colors. This is easily fixable by writing the following into you ~/.colordiffrc:
newtext=green
oldtext=red
diffstuff=darkblue
cvsstuff=darkyellow
(See also /etc/colordiff for the defaults and hints.) colordiff has by the way two operating modes: So now let us compare the Cybertool 29 with Cybertool 34 in a normal diff (by using the texts from above and replacing all commata with newline characters) with git-like colors:
$ colordiff cybertool29-lines.txt cybertool34-lines.txt
12a13,14
> Kombizange( H lsenpresser
> Drahtschneider )
13a16,17
> Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen )
> Mehrzweckhaken (Pakettr ger)
16d19
< Druckkugelschreiber
25a29
> Schere
Or as unifed diff with some context:
$ colordiff -u cybertool29-lines.txt cybertool34-lines.txt
--- cybertool29-lines.txt     2011-08-31 20:55:37.195546238 +0200
+++ cybertool34-lines.txt   2011-08-31 20:55:11.667710504 +0200
@@ -10,10 +10,13 @@
 Bit Torx 8
 Bit Torx 10
 Bit Torx 15 )
+Kombizange( H lsenpresser
+Drahtschneider )
 Stech-Bohrahle
+Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen )
+Mehrzweckhaken (Pakettr ger)
 Dosen ffner( kleiner Schraubendreher )
 Kleine Klinge
-Druckkugelschreiber
 Grosse Klinge
 Ring
 inox
@@ -23,5 +26,6 @@
 Bit-Halter
 Stecknadel
 inox
+Schere
 Korkenzieher
 Zahnstocher
So if you want nicely colored diffs with Subversion like you re used to with git, you can use svn diff colordiff.

Next.