Shantaram I know I have been quite behind in review of books but then that s life. First up is actually not as much as a shocker but somewhat of a pleasant surprise. So, a bit of background before I share the news. If you have been living under a rock, then about 10-12 years ago a book called Shantaram was released. While the book is said to have been released in 2003/4 I got it in my hand around 2008/09 or somewhere around that. The book is like a good meal, a buffet. To share the synopsis, Lin a 20 something Australian guy gets involved with a girl, she encourages him to get into heroin, he becomes a heroin user. And drugs, especially hard drugs need constant replenishment, it is a chemical thing. So, to fund those cravings, he starts to steal, rising to rob a bank and while getting away shoots a cop who becomes dead. Now either he surrenders or is caught is unclear, but he is tortured in the jail. So one day, he escapes from prison, lands up at home of somebody who owes him a favor, gets some money, gets a fake passport and lands up in Mumbai/Bombay as it was then known. This is from where the actual story starts. And how a 6 foot something Australian guy relying on his street smartness and know how the transformation happens from Lin to Shantaram. Now what I have shared is perhaps just 5% of the synopsis, as shared the real story starts here. Now the good news, last week 4 episodes of Shantaram were screened by Apple TV. Interestingly, I have seen quite a number people turning up to buy or get this book and also sharing it on Goodreads. Now there seems to have been some differences from the book to TV. Now I m relying on 10-12 year back memory but IIRC Khaderbhai, one of the main characters who sort of takes Lin/Shantaram under his wing is an Indian. In the series, he is a western or at least looks western/Middle Eastern to me. Also, they have tried to reproduce 1980s in Mumbai/Bombay but dunno how accurate they were My impression of that city from couple of visits at that point in time where they were still more tongas (horse-ridden carriages), an occasional two wheelers and not many three wheelers. Although, it was one of the more turbulent times as lot of agitation for worker rights were happening around that time and a lot of industrial action. Later that led to lot of closure of manufacturing in Bombay and it became more commercial. It would be interesting to know whether they shot it in actual India or just made a set somewhere in Australia, where it possibly might have been shot. The chawl of the book needs a bit of arid land and Australia has lots of it. It is also interesting as this was a project that had who s who interested in it for a long time but somehow none of them was able to bring the project to fruition, the project seems to largely have an Australian cast as well as second generations of Indians growing in Australia. To take names, Amitabh Bacchan, Johnny Depp, Russel Crowe each of them wanted to make it into a feature film. In retrospect, it is good it was not into a movie, otherwise they would have to cut a lot of material and that perhaps wouldn t have been sufficient. Making it into a web series made sure they could have it in multiple seasons if people like it. There is a lot between now and 12 episodes to even guess till where it would leave you then. So, if you have not read the book and have some holidays coming up, can recommend it. The writing IIRC is easy and just flows. There is a bit of action but much more nuance in the book while in the web series they are naturally more about action. There is also quite a bit of philosophy between him and Kaderbhai and while the series touches upon it, it doesn t do justice but then again it is being commercially made. Read the book, see the series and share your thoughts on what you think. It is possible that the series might go up or down but am sharing from where I see it, may do another at the end of the season, depending on where they leave it and my impressions. Update A slight update from the last blog post. Seems Rishi Sunak seems would be made PM of UK. With Hunt as chancellor and Rishi Sunak, Austerity 2.0 seems complete. There have been numerous articles which share how austerity gives rises to fascism and vice-versa. History gives lot of lessons about the same. In Germany, when the economy was not good, it was all blamed on the Jews for number of years. This was the reason for rise of Hitler, and while it did go up by a bit, propaganda by him and his loyalists did the rest. And we know and have read about the Holocaust. Today quite a few Germans deny it or deny parts of it but that s how misinformation spreads. Also Hitler is looked now more as an aberration rather than something to do with the German soul. I am not gonna talk more as there is still lots to share and that actually perhaps requires its own blog post to do justice for the same.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell I had actually wanted to review this book but then the bomb called Shantaram appeared and I had to post it above. I had read two-three books before it, but most of them were about multiple beheadings and serial killers. Enough to put anybody into depression. I do not know if modern crime needs to show crime and desperation of and to such a level. Why I and most loved and continue to love Sherlock Holmes as most stories were not about gross violence but rather a homage to the art of deduction, which pretty much seems to be missing in modern crime thrillers rather than grotesque stuff. In that, like a sort of fresh air I read/am reading the Pyramid by Henning Mankell. The book is about a character made by Monsieur Henning Mankell named Kurt Wallender. I am aware of the series called Wallender but haven t yet seen it. The book starts with Wallender as a beat cop around age 20 and on his first case. He is ambitious, wants to become a detective and has a narrow escape with death. I wouldn t go much into it as it basically gives you an idea of the character and how he thinks and what he does. He is more intuitive by nature and somewhat of a loner. Probably most detectives IRL are, dunno, have no clue. At least in the literary world it makes sense, in real world think there would be much irony for sure. This is speculation on my part, who knows. Back to the book though. The book has 5 stories a sort of prequel one could say but also not entirely true. The first case starts when he is a beat cop in 1969 and he is just a beat cop. It is a kind of a prequel and a kind of an anthology as he covers from the first case to the 1990s where he is ending his career sort of. Before I start sharing about the stories in the book, I found the foreword also quite interesting. It asks questions about the interplay of the role of welfare state and the Swedish democracy. Incidentally did watch couple of videos about a sort of mixed sort of political representation that happens in Sweden. It uses what is known as proportional representation. Ironically, Sweden made a turn to the far right this election season. The book was originally in Swedish and were translated to English by Ebba Segerberg and Laurie Thompson. While all the stories are interesting, would share the last three or at least ask the questions of intrigue. Of course, to answer them you would need to read the book So the last three stories I found the most intriguing. The first one is titled Man on the Beach. Apparently, a gentleman goes to one of the beaches, a sort of lonely beach, hails a taxi and while returning suddenly dies. The Taxi driver showing good presence of mind takes it to hospital where the gentleman is declared dead on arrival. Unlike in India, he doesn t run away but goes to the cafeteria and waits there for the cops to arrive and take his statement. Now the man is in his early 40s and looks to be fit. Upon searching his pockets he is found to relatively well-off and later it turns out he owns a couple of shops. So then here are the questions ? What was the man doing on a beach, in summer that beach is somewhat popular but other times not so much, so what was he doing there? How did he die, was it a simple heart attack or something more? If he had been drugged or something then when and how? These and more questions can be answered by reading the story Man on the Beach . 2. The death of a photographer Apparently, Kurt lives in a small town where almost all the residents have been served one way or the other by the town photographer. The man was polite and had worked for something like 40 odd years before he is killed/murdered. Apparently, he is murdered late at night. So here come the questions a. The shop doesn t even stock any cameras and his cash box has cash. Further investigation reveals it is approximate to his average takeout for the day. So if it s not for cash, then what is the motive ? b. The body was discovered by his cleaning staff who has worked for almost 20 years, 3 days a week. She has her own set of keys to come and clean the office? Did she give the keys to someone, if yes why? c. Even after investigation, there is no scandal about the man, no other woman or any vices like gambling etc. that could rack up loans. Also, nobody seems to know him and yet take him for granted till he dies. The whole thing appears to be quite strange. Again, the answers lie in the book. 3. The Pyramid Kurt is sleeping one night when the telephone rings. The scene starts with a Piper Cherokee, a single piston aircraft flying low and dropping something somewhere or getting somebody from/on the coast of Sweden. It turns and after a while crashes. Kurt is called to investigate it. Turns out, the plane was supposed to be destroyed. On crash, both the pilot and the passenger are into pieces so only dental records can prove who they are. Same day or a day or two later, two seemingly ordinary somewhat elderly women, spinsters, by all accounts, live above the shop where they sell buttons and all kinds of sewing needs of the town. They seem middle-class. Later the charred bodies of the two sisters are found :(. So here come the questions a.Did the plane drop something or pick something somebody up ? The Cherokee is a small plane so any plane field or something it could have landed up or if a place was somehow marked then could be dropped or picked up without actually landing. b. The firefighter suspects arson started at multiple places with the use of petrol? The question is why would somebody wanna do that? The sisters don t seem to be wealthy and practically everybody has bought stuff from them. They weren t popular but weren t also unpopular. c. Are the two crimes connected or unconnected? If connected, then how? d. Most important question, why the title Pyramid is given to the story. Why does the author share the name Pyramid. Does he mean the same or the original thing? He could have named it triangle. Again, answers to all the above can be found in the book. One thing I also became very aware of during reading the book that it is difficult to understand people s behavior and what they do. And this is without even any criminality involved in. Let s say for e.g. I die in some mysterious circumstances, the possibility of the police finding my actions in last days would be limited and this is when I have hearing loss. And this probably is more to do with how our minds are wired. And most people I know are much more privacy conscious/aware than I am.

Japan s Hikikomori Japan has been a curious country. It was more or less a colonizer and somewhat of a feared power till it dragged the U.S. unnecessarily in World War 2. The result of the two atom bombs and the restitution meant that Japan had to build again from the ground up. It is also in a seismically unstable place as they have frequent earthquakes although the buildings are hardened/balanced to make sure that vibrations don t tear buildings apart. Had seen years ago on Natgeo a documentary that explains all that. Apart from that, Japan was helped by the Americans and there was good kinship between them till the 1980s till it signed the Plaza Accord which enhanced asset price bubbles that eventually burst. Something from which they are smarting even today. Japan has a constitutional monarchy. A somewhat history lesson or why it exists even today can be found here. Asset price bubbles of the 1980s, more than 50 percent of the population on zero hour contracts and the rest tend to suffer from overwork. There is a term called Karoshi that explains all. An Indian pig-pen would be two, two and a half times larger than a typical Japanese home. Most Japanese live in micro-apartments called konbachiku . All of the above stresses meant that lately many young Japanese people have become Hikikomori. Bloomberg featured about the same a couple of years back. I came to know about it as many Indians are given the idea of Japan being a successful country without knowing the ills and issues it faces. Even in that most women get the wrong end of the short stick i.e. even it they manage to find jobs, it would be most back-breaking menial work. The employment statistics of Japan s internal ministry tells its own story.

If you look at the data above, it seems that the between 2002 and 2019, the share of zero hour contracts has increased while regular work has decreased. This also means that those on the bottom of the ladder can no longer afford a home. There is and was a viral video called Lost in Manboo that went viral few years ago. It is a perfect set of storms. Add to that the Fukushima nuclear incident about which I had shared a few years ago. While the workers are blamed but all design decisions are taken by the management. And as was shown in numerous movies, documentaries etc. Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the line workers knew the correct things to do and correct decisions to take unlike the management. The shut-ins story is almost a decade or two decades old. It is similar story in South Korea but not as depressive as the in Japan. It is somewhat depressive story but needed to be shared. The stories shared in the bloomberg article makes your heart ache

Backpacks In and around 2015, I had bought a Targus backpack, very much similar to the Targus TSB194US-70 Motor 16-inch Backpack. That bag has given me a lot of comfort over the years but now has become frayed the zip sometimes work and sometimes doesn t. Unlike those days there are a bunch of companies now operating in India. There are eight different companies that I came to know about, Aircase, Harrisons Sirius, HP Oddyssey, Mokobara, Artic Hunter, Dell Pro Hybrid, Dell Roller Backpack and lastly the Decathlon Quechua Hiking backpack 32L NH Escape 500 . Now of all the above, two backpacks seem the best, the first one is Harrisons Sirius, with 45L capacity, I don t think I would need another bag at all. The runner-up is the Decathlon Quecha Hiking Backpack 32L. One of the better things in all the bags is that all have hidden pockets for easy taking in and out of passport while having being ant-theft. I do not have to stress how stressful it is to take out the passport and put it back in. Almost all the vendors have made sure that it is not a stress point anymore. The good thing about the Quecha is that they are giving 10 years warranty, the point to be asked is if that is does the warranty cover the zip. Zips are the first thing that goes out in bags.That actually has what happened to my current bag. Decathlon has a store in Wakad, Pune while I have reached out to the gentleman in charge of Harrisons India to see if they have a reseller in Pune. So hopefully, in next one week I should have a backpack that isn t spilling with things all over the place, whichever I m able to figure out.

So, I did not accomplish my reading goal for 2016 (reading and reviewing more books in 2016 than I did in 2015). Many things contributed to that, but the root cause was that I didn't make enough time for reading. Much of the time that could have gone to reading went to playing Hearthstone (a good thing) and obsessing over the 2016 US election (mostly a waste of time and particularly energy, although I'm not sure I could have stopped). That said, I did get quite a lot of reading done at the end of the year, and I'm hoping to keep up that momentum for next year. In 2016, I did a lot of re-reading and comfort reading. I'm probably going to continue with some of the re-reading in 2017, since I'm enjoying it, but my reading goal for the year is to get back to reading award nominees and previous award winners. There's so much great new stuff being published that I want to discover. I'm not going to set an explicit goal around number of books, but I am going to make an effort to carve out more time in my schedule for reading books (and less for reading on-line news). This was another year with two 10 out of 10 books. One of them was a re-read: Lord of Emperors, the second book of Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic. (I also re-read the first book this year, Sailing to Sarantium, and gave it a 9.) I like nearly all of Kay's historical fantasies, but this duology is one of my personal favorites. The second 10 out of 10 book was a complete surprise: A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (translated by Henning Koch). My mother found this book and suggested it to me, and I loved every moment of it. I will definitely be reading more of Backman's work. There were two more fiction standouts this year: Digger by Ursula Vernon, and The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton. The first is a graphic novel about a wombat who is trying to make her way home from an unexpected detour into a mess of magic and gods. The second is the middle book in a trilogy about an attempt to construct Plato's Just City and all of the philosophical and social problems that ensue (with some bonus science fiction and fantasy elements). Both of them are excellent. Walton is consistently one of my favorite authors, and Ursula Vernon was my great discovery of a new author to read this year. (Not that I've followed through on that much, the year in reading being what it was, but I will be doing so.) My favorite non-fiction book of the year continues my interest in time management in general and Mark Forster's approaches in particular. Secrets of Productive People was the last book I reviewed this year (just a coincidence, not any intentional attempt to set things up for next year) and the best version of his overall approach to date. If you've not read any of Forster based on my previous recommendations, this is a good place to start. Also worth mentions were Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life, on the O.J. Simpson case, and Andrew Groen's The Empires of EVE, on the history of player empires in the EVE Online MMORPG. I Kickstarted the latter and didn't regret it. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

Review: A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman

Translator:	Henning Koch
Publisher:	Washington Square
Copyright:	2012, 2014
Printing:	May 2015
ISBN:	1-4767-3802-5
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	337

Ove is 59 years old and drives a Saab. He's grumpy, often taciturn, very particular in how things should be done, and extremely judgmental about how other people do them. He is the sort of person who regularly rants about how poorly things are done these days and how much better they used to be. Ove does not like change. A Man Called Ove opens with him terrorizing the employees of an Apple Store, trying to buy a computer, but this incident is actually foreshadowing, and will only make sense at the very end of the book. The story actually begins in the second chapter, with Ove making his morning rounds of the neighborhood in which he lives, discovering an out-of-place bicycle and a mangy cat, and then starting to put a hook in his ceiling. But just as he's getting started, he's interrupted by new neighbors, who are incapable of backing up a trailer properly without scraping it against his house. Not that motor vehicles are allowed in the area anyway. That inauspicious beginning changes Ove's life, mostly through the sheer persistence of other people's disasters. It's not obvious at first that it will, and at the start A Man Called Ove could be a funny collection of stories about a curmudgeon. But as Backman shows more of Ove's life and tells more of his background and situation, it becomes something so much more, something satisfying and heart-breaking and deeply human. I've been struggling to review this book because I find it hard to capture what makes it so wonderful. Making that even harder, several key plot elements are introduced gradually in the story in ways that add a lot to the rhythm of the plot, and I don't want to spoil them. I think the closest I can get in a spoiler-free review is that A Man Called Ove is about empathy. It's about human connection, even when people seem unlikable, unreachable, or angrily off-putting. And it's a book about seeing the best inside other people, and about finding ways to be persistently oneself while still changing enough to find new connections, and about recognizing those moments when someone is showing you their best without getting caught up on the surface presentation. The man Ove is the center of this story, the subject of tight third person perspective for nearly all of the book. He's 59 when the story opens, but by the end of the book, mostly through flashback chapters, the reader knows his childhood and early adulthood and much of the story of his marriage. At first, he seems to be an obnoxious, surly, angry curmudgeon, the sort of old man who yells at clouds. But the joy of this book is how the reader's perception changes, how one gains sympathy, and then respect, first for Ove's unshakable inner sense of morality that he got from his father and then for his rule-based approach to how the world should work. One never entirely agrees with him, but Backman demystifies and explains Ove's thought process and ties it into a different generation and a different way of interacting with work (although Ove was still uncommon even in his youth, just not as unique). As I write this review, news and opinion in the United States are very focused on the plight of the white working class and how that does or does not explain recent election results. Backman is Swedish (I read this book in translation), so it's not coming from US culture and the cultural fault lines are not quite the same. But I think this book says something deeply valuable and fascinating about the working-class culture of Ove's youth, something that's much less about specific politics and much more about how it feels to make things with one's hands, to build or rebuild one's own house, or to work for thirty years at the same job and not be interested in a promotion to management. Backman does a truly spectacular job conveying the sense of angry frustration at the changes in work and life, the difficulty communicating one's internal feelings meaningfully, and the quiet joy of finding those places in life where one can do things properly. Ove is, of course, not the only character in this book, and every character here is a delight in their own idiosyncratic ways. The main story arc involves the various people in his neighborhood, particularly his new next-door neighbors: a pregnant Iranian woman and her very laid-back husband who is incapable of doing things around the house but keeps trying. I think Parvaneh, the woman, is my favorite character of the story except for Ove, and it's fitting that she's the first to work out the broad outlines of what's happening in Ove's life and the tricky path to effectively helping him. In a way, she's Ove's opposite: fiery, mercurial, talkative, and meddling. But she sees things in Ove that no one else seems to notice. (And the scene between her and Ove when she's learning to drive is a thing of beauty.) This is a book that could have been extremely sad, and yet isn't. It's a book about somber, depressing topics that somehow manages to be delightfully funny. And it's about a curmudgeon who persistently fails to have any sort of stereotyped heart of gold, but is nonetheless one of the most satisfying, fascinating, ethical, and good-willed characters I've ever read about. It manages to treat a collection of very different characters with individualized deep empathy and appreciation, while never pushing them all into the same mold. And the ending is wonderful. I rarely read slice of life stories, but this one is worth making an exception for. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 10 out of 10

Review: A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman

Translator:	Henning Koch
Publisher:	Washington Square
Copyright:	2012, 2014
Printing:	May 2015
ISBN:	1-4767-3802-5
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	337

Ove is 59 years old and drives a Saab. He's grumpy, often taciturn, very particular in how things should be done, and extremely judgmental about how other people do them. He is the sort of person who regularly rants about how poorly things are done these days and how much better they used to be. Ove does not like change. A Man Called Ove opens with him terrorizing the employees of an Apple Store, trying to buy a computer, but this incident is actually foreshadowing, and will only make sense at the very end of the book. The story actually begins in the second chapter, with Ove making his morning rounds of the neighborhood in which he lives, discovering an out-of-place bicycle and a mangy cat, and then starting to put a hook in his ceiling. But just as he's getting started, he's interrupted by new neighbors, who are incapable of backing up a trailer properly without scraping it against his house. Not that motor vehicles are allowed in the area anyway. That inauspicious beginning changes Ove's life, mostly through the sheer persistence of other people's disasters. It's not obvious at first that it will, and at the start A Man Called Ove could be a funny collection of stories about a curmudgeon. But as Backman shows more of Ove's life and tells more of his background and situation, it becomes something so much more, something satisfying and heart-breaking and deeply human. I've been struggling to review this book because I find it hard to capture what makes it so wonderful. Making that even harder, several key plot elements are introduced gradually in the story in ways that add a lot to the rhythm of the plot, and I don't want to spoil them. I think the closest I can get in a spoiler-free review is that A Man Called Ove is about empathy. It's about human connection, even when people seem unlikable, unreachable, or angrily off-putting. And it's a book about seeing the best inside other people, and about finding ways to be persistently oneself while still changing enough to find new connections, and about recognizing those moments when someone is showing you their best without getting caught up on the surface presentation. The man Ove is the center of this story, the subject of tight third person perspective for nearly all of the book. He's 59 when the story opens, but by the end of the book, mostly through flashback chapters, the reader knows his childhood and early adulthood and much of the story of his marriage. At first, he seems to be an obnoxious, surly, angry curmudgeon, the sort of old man who yells at clouds. But the joy of this book is how the reader's perception changes, how one gains sympathy, and then respect, first for Ove's unshakable inner sense of morality that he got from his father and then for his rule-based approach to how the world should work. One never entirely agrees with him, but Backman demystifies and explains Ove's thought process and ties it into a different generation and a different way of interacting with work (although Ove was still uncommon even in his youth, just not as unique). As I write this review, news and opinion in the United States are very focused on the plight of the white working class and how that does or does not explain recent election results. Backman is Swedish (I read this book in translation), so it's not coming from US culture and the cultural fault lines are not quite the same. But I think this book says something deeply valuable and fascinating about the working-class culture of Ove's youth, something that's much less about specific politics and much more about how it feels to make things with one's hands, to build or rebuild one's own house, or to work for thirty years at the same job and not be interested in a promotion to management. Backman does a truly spectacular job conveying the sense of angry frustration at the changes in work and life, the difficulty communicating one's internal feelings meaningfully, and the quiet joy of finding those places in life where one can do things properly. Ove is, of course, not the only character in this book, and every character here is a delight in their own idiosyncratic ways. The main story arc involves the various people in his neighborhood, particularly his new next-door neighbors: a pregnant Iranian woman and her very laid-back husband who is incapable of doing things around the house but keeps trying. I think Parvaneh, the woman, is my favorite character of the story except for Ove, and it's fitting that she's the first to work out the broad outlines of what's happening in Ove's life and the tricky path to effectively helping him. In a way, she's Ove's opposite: fiery, mercurial, talkative, and meddling. But she sees things in Ove that no one else seems to notice. (And the scene between her and Ove when she's learning to drive is a thing of beauty.) This is a book that could have been extremely sad, and yet isn't. It's a book about somber, depressing topics that somehow manages to be delightfully funny. And it's about a curmudgeon who persistently fails to have any sort of stereotyped heart of gold, but is nonetheless one of the most satisfying, fascinating, ethical, and good-willed characters I've ever read about. It manages to treat a collection of very different characters with individualized deep empathy and appreciation, while never pushing them all into the same mold. And the ending is wonderful. I rarely read slice of life stories, but this one is worth making an exception for. It's one of the best books I've ever read. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 10 out of 10

I've just pushed out the release files for Obnam version 1.4, my backup application, and Larch, my B-tree library, which Obnam uses. They are available via my home page (http://liw.fi/). Since Debian is frozen, I am not uploading packages to Debian, but .deb files are available from my personal apt repository for intrepid explorers. (I will be uploading to Debian again after the freeze. I am afraid I'm too lazy to upload to experimental, or do backports. Help is welcome!) From the Obnam NEWS file:

• The ls command now takes filenames as (optional) arguments, instead of a list of generations. Based on patch by Damien Courouss .
• Even more detailed progress reporting during a backup.
• Add --fsck-skip-generations option to tell fsck to not check any generation metadata.
• The default log level is now INFO, instead of DEBUG. This is to be considered a quantum leap in the continuing rise of the maturity level of the software. (Actually, the change is there just to save some disk space and I/O for people who don't want to be involved in Obnam development and don't want to have massive log files.)
• The default sizes for the lru-size and upload-queue-size settings have been reduced, to reduce the memory impact of Obnam.
• obnam restore now reports transfer statistics at the end, similarly to what obnam backup does. Suggested by "S. B.".

Bug fixes:

• If listing extended attributes for a filesystem that does not support them, Obnam no longer crashes, just silently does not backup extended attributes. Which aren't there anyway.
• A bug in handling stat lookup errors was fixed. Reported by Peter Palfrader. Symptom: AttributeError: 'exceptions.OSError' object has no attribute 'st_ino' in an error message or log file.
• A bug in a restore crashing when failing to set extended attributes on the restored file was fixed. Reported by "S. B.".
• Made it clearer what is happening when unlocking the repository due to errors, and fixed it so that a failure to unlock is also an error. Reported by andrewsh.
• The dependency on Larch is now for 1.20121216 or newer, since that is needed for fsck to work.
• The manual page did not document the client name arguments to the add-key and remove-key subcommands. Reported by Lars Kruse.
• Restoring symlinks as root would fail. Reported and fixed by David Fries.
• Only set ssh user/port if explicitily requested, otherwise let ssh select them. Reported by Michael Goetze, fixed by David Fries.
• Fix problem with old version of paramiko and chdir. Fixed by Nick Altmann.
• Fix problems with signed vs unsigned values for struct stat fields. Reported by Henning Verbeek.

The Ubuntu Technical Board conducts a regular review of the most popular Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas (previous reviews conducted by Matt Zimmerman and Martin Pitt). This time it was my turn. Apologies for the late arrival of this review. Contact lens in the Unity Dash (#27584) Unity supports Lenses, which provide a consistent way for users to quickly search for information via the Dash. Current lenses include Applications, Files, and Music, but a number of people have asked for contacts to be accessible using the same interface. While Canonical's DX team isn't currently working on this for Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04, we'd love somebody who's interested in this to get involved. Allison Randal explains how to get started, including some skeleton example code and several useful links. Displaying Ubuntu version information (#27460) Several people have asked for it to be more obvious what Ubuntu version they're running, as well as other general information about their system. John Lea, user experience architect on the Unity team, responds that in Ubuntu 11.10 the new LightDM greeter shows the Ubuntu version number, making that basic information very easily visible. For more detail, System Settings -> System Info provides a simple summary. Volume adjustments for headphone use (#27275) People often find that they need to adjust their sound volume when plugging in or removing headphones. It seems as though the computer ought to be able to remember this kind of thing and do it automatically; after all, a major goal of Ubuntu is to make the desktop Just Work. David Henningson, a member of Canonical's OEM Services group and an Ubuntu audio developer, responds on his blog with a summary of how PulseAudio jack detection has improved matters in Ubuntu 11.10, and what's left to do:

The good news: in the upcoming Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10), this is actually working. The bad news: it isn't working for everyone.

Making it easier to find software to handle a file (#28148) Ubuntu is not always as helpful as it could be when you don't have the right software installed to handle a particular file. Michael Vogt, one of the developers of the Ubuntu Software Center, responded to this. It seems that most of the pieces to make this work nicely are in place, but there are a few more bits of glue required:

Thanks a lot for this suggestion. I like the idea and it's something that software-center itself supports now. In the coming version 5.0 we will offer to "sort by top-rated" (based on the ratings&reviews data). It's also possible to search for an application based on its mime data. To search for a mime-type, you can enter "mime:text/html" or "mime:audio/ogg" into the search field. What is needed however is better integration into the file manager nautilus. I will make sure this gets attention at the next developer meeting and filed bug #860536 about it. In nautilus, there is now a button called "Find applications online" available as an option when opening an unknown file or when the user selects "open with...other application" in the context menu. But that will not use the data from software-center.

Show pop-up alert on low battery (#28037) Some users have reported on Brainstorm that they are not alerted frequently enough when their laptop's battery is low, as they clearly ought to be. This is an odd one, because there are already several power alert levels and this has been working well for us for some time. Nevertheless, enough people have voted for this idea that there must be something behind it, perhaps a bug that only affects certain systems. Martin Pitt, technical lead of the Ubuntu desktop team, has responded directly to the Brainstorm idea with a description of the current system and how to file a bug when it does not work as intended.

The Border Gateway Protocol is what network operators use to exchange the various routes forming the Internet. It's a pretty critical piece of infrastructure. Most providers are probably using proprietary solutions using dedicated hardware, but free software on comodity hardware can also be an option for some networks. In Debian, we already have Quagga and Bird that both implement BGP on top of Linux for quite a while. Back in time, FOSDEM feb. 2006, Ging is being demonstrated. Immediately my mind races with something like: waow, we could port OpenBGPD on that! OpenBGPD is another BGP routing daemon. This new effort was started in 2003 by Henning Brauer for OpenBSD. To sum up its goal, it was meant to be secure, reliable, lean, easy to configure, fast and memory efficient. This is quite the opposite of Quagga codebase, which is inherited from an older project, Zebra which was mostly documented in Japanese. Another issue I have seen hapenning with Quagga on Linux is that its blocking implementation and the time that the kernel needs to insert/remove routes made the daemon unresponsive enough to created cascading failures. The IPv4 Internet is nowdays made of more than 350 000 prefixes, so when a network peer fails, the router needs to process those changes while continuing to answer other peers. Otherwise, they will kill the session meaning yet another 350 000 prefixes to process on both sides. And again when the session is restored. Leading to more downtime, flaps, and failures. OpenBGPD was ported to FreeBSD. The port is maintained by Hiroki Sato. Starting with this port and using libbsd made the creation of a package for Debian GNU/kFreeBSD pretty doable while at DebCamp11. It probably still has some pretty rough edges and the manpage needs to be reviewed (and some unsupported features trimmed, maybe), but the package should be usable. So OpenBGPD is now in Debian, and it could be one of the killer features of a port that some describe as a toy OS. Unfortunately I did not yet have access to proper network equipment to test the package on real production scenario (with 2 or 3 full BGP views). If you have a lab (or feel adventurous) and have access to such gears, please have a try!

FOSDEM is a 2-day weekend of insanity. 218 talks this year; if you want to understand exactly how insane that is, have a look at the schedule grid. There are 19 rooms where events are held; possibly more, since I understand not every devroom has sent in its schedule yet. Might be hard for people to make a choice that way, I guess. Now there're supposed to be abstracts of each talk on the FOSDEM website, but reading them all can be quite tedius. In an effort to help, at least for the Debian devroom, here's the schedule for our devroom with a bit of explanation of what it's about. Note that this is mainly aimed at people not familiar with Debian; those who are should probably understand it enough by looking at the titles. Saturday: 13:00 - 14:00: 'Outside broadcast on a budget - the DebConf video team and DVswitch'. DVswitch is the software used to create those excellent Debian videos. The best ones yet, IMO, are the ones of Debconf8. Check them out. There's nothing Debian-specific about DVswitch, except that it was written by Debian people. It's a great way to do live Internet .ogg streaming by using nothing more than DV cams, Firewire, and plain old Ethernet. 14:00 - 15:00: 'Ultimate Debian Database: datamining Debian made easy!'. UDD is a SQL database containing a shitload of data related to Debian, and which should allow easy datamining. Hence the title. This probably won't be of any interest to people who are not either a Debian Developer or a statistician, but I might be mistaken. 15:00 - 16:00: 'Introducing DDE, Debian Data Export'. This is a new project Enrico came up with, and which is related to the same subject as the previous talk. I don't know much more beyond what's in the abstract. However, given the fact that Enrico is going to be doing this talk, it can't be bad. Seriously. 16:00 - 17:00: 'The Debian status quo on the Openmoko Neo Freerunner'. Yup, Debian runs on the OpenMoko, and has done so since Debconf8, last august. This talk should give some more insight; if you have an OpenMoko, this definately is for you. 17:00 - 17:30: 'Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices'. I've been running Debian on a Thecus N2100 for a few years now, and it's great. There are more options, however, and Martin does most of the hard work related to these devices. He's done a similar talk on the two previous FOSDEMs (go check out the videos), and this one will mainly be an update on what's going to be new in Lenny. 17:30 - 18:15: 'Grid Computing with Debian, Globus and ARC'. These guys are a group of academics from three different universities who've been doing grid computing (i.e., something like 'SETI@Home', but then somewhat different) with Debian and some other technologies. They'll be explaining how, exactly. I don't know much about this talk; it could be great, or it could fail miserably. I guess we'll see. 18:15 - 19:00: 'What does the DPL do?'. This is really firmly targetted at Debian people. If you're not in the least interested in how Debian does things, you'll be bored. Sunday 09:15 - 10:00: 'The state of Virtualization in Debian'. If you're a Debian user interested in virtualization, this talk is for you. Henning will explain what virtualization options exist in the upcoming 'Lenny' release, and how to use them. 10:00 - 11:00: 'TDebs'. This might not be too interesting to you unless you happen to be involved in Debian infrastructure. TDebs don't exist yet, but will sometime soon; Neil will be explaining how, why, and what. 11:00 - 12:00: 'Internationalization in Debian: How to improve further?' If you're interested in i18n, this is probably for you. 12:00 - 13:00: 'The Common Debian Build System (CDBS)'. CDBS is one way to build a Debian package. This is probably only of interest to Debian people. 13:00 - 14:00: 'Release management in Debian - can we do better?'. Frans isn't a member of the release team, but has some criticism on how they function. He intends to present his arguments in order to start a discussion. This is Debian internal kitchery, really. 14:00 - 15:00: 'Lenny - the road to release'. Neil is a member of the release team, and is going to explain how we got to the current state. I hope he'll also explain why we still haven't released. I guess we'll see :-) 15:00 - 16:00: 'The long road to KDE4 in Debian'. Um, yeah. I'm not a KDE guy, but I understand some other people are. In any case, might be an interesting talk even if you don't use Debian, since I understand it will look at some of the new features in KDE (and how they relate to packaging). 16:00 - 17:00: 'Debian and Google Summer of Code 2008: wrap-up and insights'. I guess Leslie will be there. The speaker was a student working on Debian during this year's SoC, and he will present what's been accomplished. There, that's it. Now my only hope is that there'll be many people attending. If previous editions are any indication, however, that won't be a problem.

I just came home from Berlin where we founded the OLPC Germany association ("OLPC Deutschland" e.V. in the last two days, which mostly ment deciding on our final constitution.

The meeting was quite relaxed, it contained just of two five hour sessions, followed by a very good and quite cheap dinner in a vietnamese restaurant with free wifi.

During the 3h trip back we already received two applications for new members :-) I happen to know this, because somehow I ended up on the board of the new association...

And so it was mostly a Debian free weekend, though not really: I slept at Henning Glawes place, a fellow DD and FAI developer and enjoyed his hospitality a lot, even if it was really short. Plus, I discussed with Matthias Schmitz the future of the munin package in Debian. Quick summary: get 1.2.6 out and into Lenny and expose the 1.3.x branch to more testing via experimental, so that hopefully 1.4 will be ready in time for Lenny+1. SSL support are the two words I'll mention now and here, why 1.4 is nifty, but there are more reasons. Check it out ;-)

And now I'll go afk to relax, saturday morning was also the first day I woke up completly free from fever...

I enjoyed reading the ArchitectNotes on the Varnish wiki:

Take Squid for instance, a 1975 program if I ever saw one: You tell it how much RAM it can use and how much disk it can use. It will then spend inordinate amounts of time keeping track of what HTTP objects are in RAM and which are on disk and it will move them forth and back depending on traffic patterns.

Well, today computers really only have one kind of storage, and it is usually some sort of disk, the operating system and the virtual memory management hardware has converted the RAM to a cache for the disk storage.

So what happens with squid's elaborate memory management is that it gets into fights with the kernel's elaborate memory management, and like any civil war, that never gets anything done.

Varnish was designed by FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp. There is something to be said about user-space apps designed by kernel developers: they're always super fast because kernel developers know how to make the most of the system, having spent hours optimizing the kernel itself for some usage patterns.

This is why git (designed by Linus Torvalds, for those of you who've lived under a rock for the past three years) is so much faster than other comparable systems, for example. It uses tricks such as giving the O_NOATIME flag to open() to avoid updating access times on files where it knows that they don't matter, and it's a "huge time-saver". (Of course, you can also just mount your partitions with noatime and enjoy a similar performance boost in all applications!)

Debconf7 TODO: These are my personal goals for the debcamp week:

• Develop xen-tools to fix bugs reported by Henning.
• Unify debootstrap.
• Get involved in discussions of Debian init-systems.

The second item is the one that I'm most interersted in right now, but I'll leave it a day to see if there is any useful feedback or massive objections right now. The debootstrap problem Right now there are two versions of debootstrap - the "Debian one" and the "Ubuntu one". The Ubuntu debootstrap package has support for installing additional suites; dapper, feisty, etc.. (My current understanding is that the Ubuntu debootstrap can still install Etch, Sarge, etc.) Right now if you want to bootstrap an Ubuntu system on a Debian host you're out of luck unless you install the Ubuntu debootstrap package. There is no real reason why this should be the case. Either distribution should be able to install the other. Why I care I wrote/maintain xen-tools. This package allows you to create Xen guests of different distributions. Most of the time the tool will install a distribution by invoking "debootstrap ...". It would be nice if this could work upon a plain Debian system such that installing Dapper, Fiesty, etc, was supported. What We Can't Solve There are problems with debootstrap which I'm not going to attempt to solve. The most obvious one is that Sarge's debootstrap cannot install Etch. There are a few open bugs in the Debian BTS which I will triage though, since some of them are safe to close. The Approach There are three approaches for this: <dl>

The hack

Download the source to Ubuntu's package. Test it can install Sarge, Etch & Lenny. Then upload to Debian.

What I'll do

I'll do three things:

• Triage open bugs on debootstrap.
• I'll compare the two scripts + manpages, to see if they've diverged.
• I'll move the Ubuntu scripts into the Debian package.

The neat way forward

Split debootstrap into :

• debootstrap
  • Compatability package, to pull in the next three:
• debootstrap-common
  • The tool.
• debootstrap-debian
  • Contains the scripts/support for installing Sarge, Etch & Lenny.
• debootstrap-ubuntu
  • Contains the scripts/support for installing Dapper, Feisty, etc.

</dl> This second approach should be straightforward. The first thing to do is to test that actual debootstrap script differ little between the two distributions. That should be simple enough. The next thing is to create the additional packages. Acceptance? For this work to be useful it needs support from the maintainers of the Debian & Ubuntu packages. (I guess mostly the Debian maintainers actually.) Progress The good news is that between the version of debootstrap in Ubuntu right now, debootstrap-0.3.3.3ubuntu4, and that in Debian sid, debootstrap-0.3.3.3, the code has only one minor change. There is only a minor typo-fix in the manpage too. So I can move the scripts into the package trivially...

Today I was at the business day at linuxforum. The first exciting thing about the day was if it was possible to actually get there after violent criminals have been ruining Copenhagen all night long. My bus took a detour, but I ended up at the rigth place finally. Today there was talks and some companies have been running their booths. The most interesting talk today was Poul-Henning Kamps talk about varnish. Another interesting topic was how lego tried something new - work with the community around their mindstorms stuff with great success. Tomorrow it is a bit more techie-day where the local LUGs are having booths also, and with exiting talks about Qt programming and a spamfilter deathmatch.

A busy night which resulted in a new release of xen-shell, this coincided with me noticing that is being used by a Dutch ISP. (Fun sometimes googling your own name, or the name of software projects!) I’ve added the project to freshmeat, under the obvious name, but no Debian package yet. I will probably make one soon though. After that I fixed many many bugs/feature suggestions reported against xen-tools by Henning Sprang - a name I know a lot from the Xen lists. Assuming I don’t get distracted there will be a new release of that tomorrow. All the tests pass, and the code seems to work so I’m pretty sure it’ll go OK. I’ve noticed though that my release speed is almost inversely proportional to the number of interested users.

After it has been removed from sid earlier, it's now gone from etch, too. That's the end of an era:

From: Debian testing watch <noreply@henning.makholm.net>
Subject: tuxracer REMOVED from testing
To: tuxracer@packages.qa.debian.org
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:08:13 -0700

One of the nicest games to kill some time and more important: To test if you configured your X correctly including 3D acceleration is now gone from Debian. Luckily there is ppracer as successor, but I think I'll miss tuxracer nevertheless ;)