Search Results: "leo"

12 November 2022

Debian Brasil: Participa o da comunidade Debian no Latinoware 2022

De 2 a 4 de novembro de 2022 aconteceu a 19 edi o do Latinoware - Congresso Latino-americano de Software Livre e Tecnologias Abertas, em Foz do Igua u. Ap s 2 anos acontecendo de forma online devido a pandemia do COVID-19, o evento voltou a ser presencial e sentimos que a comunidade Debian Brasil deveria estar presente. Nossa ltima participa o no Latinoware foi em 2016 A organiza o do Latinoware cedeu para a comunidade Debian Brasil um estande para que pud ssemos ter contato com as pessoas que visitavam a rea aberta de exposi es e assim divulgarmos o projeto Debian. Durante os 3 dias do evento, o estande foi organizado por mim (Paulo Henrique Santana) como Desenvolvedor Debian, e pelo Leonardo Rodrigues como contribuidor Debian. Infelizmente o Daniel Lenharo teve um imprevisto de ltima hora e n o pode ir para Foz do Igua u (sentimos sua falta l !). Latinoware 2022 estande 1 V rias pessoas visitaram o estande e aquelas mais iniciantes (principalmente estudantes) que n o conheciam o Debian, perguntavam do que se tratava o nosso grupo e a gente explicava v rios conceitos como o que Software Livre, distribui o GNU/Linux e o Debian propriamente dito. Tamb m recebemos pessoas da comunidade de Software Livre brasileira e de outros pa ses da Am rica Latina que j utilizavam uma distribui o GNU/Linux e claro, muitas pessoas que j utilizavam Debian. Tivemos algumas visitas especiais como do Jon maddog Hall, do Desenvolvedor Debian Emeritus Ot vio Salvador, do Desenvolvedor Debian Eriberto Mota, e dos Mantenedores Debian Guilherme de Paula Segundo e Paulo Kretcheu. Latinoware 2022 estande 4 Foto da esquerda pra direita: Leonardo, Paulo, Eriberto e Ot vio. Latinoware 2022 estande 5 Foto da esquerda pra direita: Paulo, Fabian (Argentina) e Leonardo. Al m de conversarmos bastante, distribu mos adesivos do Debian que foram produzidos alguns meses atr s com o patroc nio do Debian para serem distribu dos na DebConf22(e que haviam sobrado), e vendemos v rias camisetas do Debian produzidas pela comunidade Curitiba Livre. Latinoware 2022 estande 2 Latinoware 2022 estande 3 Tamb m tivemos 3 palestras inseridas na programa o oficial do Latinoware. Eu fiz as palestras: como tornar um(a) contribuidor(a) do Debian fazendo tradu es e como os SysAdmins de uma empresa global usam Debian . E o Leonardo fez a palestra: vantagens da telefonia Open Source nas empresas . Latinoware 2022 estande 6 Foto Paulo na palestra. Agradecemos a organiza o do Latinoware por receber mais uma vez a comunidade Debian e gentilmente ceder os espa os para a nossa participa o, e parabenizamos a todas as pessoas envolvidas na organiza o pelo sucesso desse importante evento para a nossa comunidade. Esperamos estar presentes novamente em 2023. Agracemos tamb m ao Jonathan Carter por aprovar o suporte financeiro do Debian para a nossa participa o no Latinoware. Vers o em ingl s

11 November 2022

Debian Brasil: Participa o da comunidade Debian no Latinoware 2022

De 2 a 4 de novembro de 2022 aconteceu a 19 edi o do Latinoware - Congresso Latino-americano de Software Livre e Tecnologias Abertas, em Foz do Igua u. Ap s 2 anos acontecendo de forma online devido a pandemia do COVID-19, o evento voltou a ser presencial e sentimos que a comunidade Debian Brasil deveria estar presente. Nossa ltima participa o no Latinoware foi em 2016 A organiza o do Latinoware cedeu para a comunidade Debian Brasil um estande para que pud ssemos ter contato com as pessoas que visitavam a rea aberta de exposi es e assim divulgarmos o projeto Debian. Durante os 3 dias do evento, o estande foi organizado por mim (Paulo Henrique Santana) como Desenvolvedor Debian, e pelo Leonardo Rodrigues como contribuidor Debian. Infelizmente o Daniel Lenharo teve um imprevisto de ltima hora e n o pode ir para Foz do Igua u (sentimos sua falta l !). Latinoware 2022 estande 1 V rias pessoas visitaram o estande e aquelas mais iniciantes (principalmente estudantes) que n o conheciam o Debian, perguntavam do que se tratava o nosso grupo e a gente explicava v rios conceitos como o que Software Livre, distribui o GNU/Linux e o Debian propriamente dito. Tamb m recebemos pessoas da comunidade de Software Livre brasileira e de outros pa ses da Am rica Latina que j utilizavam uma distribui o GNU/Linux e claro, muitas pessoas que j utilizavam Debian. Tivemos algumas visitas especiais como do Jon maddog Hall, do Desenvolvedor Debian Emeritus Ot vio Salvador, do Desenvolvedor Debian Eriberto Mota, e dos Mantenedores Debian Guilherme de Paula Segundo e Paulo Kretcheu. Latinoware 2022 estande 4 Foto da esquerda pra direita: Leonardo, Paulo, Eriberto e Ot vio. Latinoware 2022 estande 5 Foto da esquerda pra direita: Paulo, Fabian (Argentina) e Leonardo. Al m de conversarmos bastante, distribu mos adesivos do Debian que foram produzidos alguns meses atr s com o patroc nio do Debian para serem distribu dos na DebConf22(e que haviam sobrado), e vendemos v rias camisetas do Debian produzidas pela comunidade Curitiba Livre. Latinoware 2022 estande 2 Latinoware 2022 estande 3 Tamb m tivemos 3 palestras inseridas na programa o oficial do Latinoware. Eu fiz as palestras: como tornar um(a) contribuidor(a) do Debian fazendo tradu es e como os SysAdmins de uma empresa global usam Debian . E o Leonardo fez a palestra: vantagens da telefonia Open Source nas empresas . Latinoware 2022 estande 6 Foto Paulo na palestra. Agradecemos a organiza o do Latinoware por receber mais uma vez a comunidade Debian e gentilmente ceder os espa os para a nossa participa o, e parabenizamos a todas as pessoas envolvidas na organiza o pelo sucesso desse importante evento para a nossa comunidade. Esperamos estar presentes novamente em 2023. Agracemos tamb m ao Jonathan Carter por aprovar o suporte financeiro do Debian para a nossa participa o no Latinoware. Vers o em ingl s

Debian Brasil: About Debian Brasil at Latinoware 2022

From November 2nd to 4th, 2022, the 19th edition of Latinoware - Latin American Congress of Free Software and Open Technologies took place in Foz do Igua u. After 2 years happening online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was back in person and we felt Debian Brasil community should be there. Out last time at Latinoware was in 2016 The Latinoware organization provided the Debian Brazil community with a booth so that we could have contact with people visiting the open exhibition area and thus publicize the Debian project. During the 3 days of the event, the booth was organized by me (Paulo Henrique Santana) as Debian Developer, and by Leonardo Rodrigues as Debian contributor. Unfortunately Daniel Lenharo had an issue and could not travel to Foz do Igua u (we miss you there!). Latinoware 2022 booth 1 A huge number of people visited the booth, and the beginners (mainly students) who didn't know Debian, asked what our group was about and we explained various concepts such as what Free Software is, GNU/Linux distribution and Debian itself. We also received people from the Brazilian Free Software community and from other Latin American countries who were already using a GNU/Linux distribution and, of course, many people who were already using Debian. We had some special visitors as Jon maddog Hall, Debian Developer Emeritus Ot vio Salvador, Debian Developer Eriberto Mota, and Debian Maintainers Guilherme de Paula Segundo and Paulo Kretcheu. Latinoware 2022 booth 4 Photo from left to right: Leonardo, Paulo, Eriberto and Ot vio. Latinoware 2022 estande 5 Photo from left to right: Paulo, Fabian (Argentina) and Leonardo. In addition to talking a lot, we distributed Debian stickers that were produced a few months ago with Debian's sponsorship to be distributed at DebConf22 (and that were left over), and we sold several Debian t-shirts) produced by Curitiba Livre community). Latinoware 2022 booth 2 Latinoware 2022 booth 3 We also had 3 talks included in Latinoware official schedule. I) talked about: "how to become a Debian contributor by doing translations" and "how the SysAdmins of a global company use Debian". And Leonardo) talked about: "advantages of Open Source telephony in companies". Latinoware 2022 booth 6 Photo Paulo in his talk. Many thanks to Latinoware organization for once again welcoming the Debian community and kindly providing spaces for our participation, and we congratulate all the people involved in the organization for the success of this important event for our community. We hope to be present again in 2023. We also thank Jonathan Carter for approving financial support from Debian for our participation at Latinoware. Portuguese version

25 October 2022

Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.7 on CRAN: Enhancements

A new version of our nanotime package arrived at CRAN today as version 0.3.7. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations. This release adds a few more operators, plus some other fixes, that were contributed in several PRs by Trevor Davis. The NEWS snippet has the full details.

Changes in version 0.3.7 (2022-10-23)
  • Update mkdocs for material docs generator (Dirk in #102)
  • Use inherits() instead comparing to class() (Trevor Davis in #104)
  • Set default arguments in nanoduration() (Trevor Davis in #105)
  • Add as.nanoduration.difftime() support (Trevor Davis in #106)
  • Add +/- methods for nanotime and difftime objects (Trevor Davis in #110 closing #108, #107)

Thanks to my CRANberries there is also a diff to the previous version. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository and all documentation is provided at the nanotime documentation site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

4 October 2022

Jonathan Dowland: rewrite rule representation

I've begun writing up my phd and, not for the first time, I'm pondering issues of how best to represent things. Specifically, rewrite rules. Here's one way of representing an example rewrite rule:
streamFilter g . streamFilter f = streamFilter (g . f)
This is a fairly succinct representation. It's sort-of Haskell, but not quite. It's an equation. The left-hand side is a pattern: it's intended to describe not one expression but a family of expressions that match. The lower case individual letters g and f are free variables: labelled placeholders within the pattern that can be referred to on the right hand side. I haven't stipulated what defines a free variable and what is a more concrete part of the pattern. It's kind-of Haskell, and I've used the well-known operator . to represent the two stream operators (streamFilters) being connected together. (In practice, when we get to the system where rules are actually applied, the connecting operator is not going to be . at all, so this is also an approximation). One thing I don't like about . here, despite its commonness, is having to read right-to-left. I adopted the habit of using the lesser-known >>> in a lot of my work (which is defined as (>>>) = flip (.)), which reads left-to-right. And then I have the reverse problem: people aren't familiar with >>>, and, just like ., it's a stand-in anyway. Towards the beginning of my PhD, I spent some time inventing rewrite rules to operate on pairs of operators taken from a defined, known set. I began representing the rules much as in the example above. Later on, I wanted to encode them as real Haskell, in order to check them more thoroughly. The above rule, I first encoded like this
filterFilterPre     = streamFilter g . streamFilter f
filterFilterPost    = streamFilter (g . f)
prop_filterFilter s = filterFilterPre s == filterFilterPost s
This is real code: the operators were already implemented in StrIoT, and the final expression defined a property for QuickCheck. However, it's still not quite a rewrite rule. The left-hand side, which should be a pattern, is really a concrete expression. The names f and g are masquerading as free variables but are really concretely defined in a preamble I wrote to support running QuickCheck against these things: usually simple stuff like g = odd, etc. Eventually, I had to figure out how to really implement rewrite rules in StrIoT. There were a few approaches I could take. One would be to express the rules in some abstract form like the first example (but with properly defined semantics) and write a parser for them: I really wanted to avoid doing that. As a happy accident, the solution I landed on was enabled by the semantics of algebraic-graphs, a Graph library we adopted to support representing a stream-processing topology. I wrote more about that in data-types for representing stream-processing programs. I was able to implement rewrite rules as ordinary Haskell functions. The left-hand side of the rewrite rule maps to the left-hand side (pattern) part of a function definition. The function body implements the right-hand side. The system that applies the rules attempts to apply each rewrite rule to every sub-graph of a stream-processing program. The rewrite functions therefore need to signal whether or not they're applicable at runtime. For that reason, the return type is wrapped in Maybe, and we provide a catch-all pattern for every rule which simply returns Nothing. The right-hand side implementation can be pretty thorny. On the left-hand side, the stream operator connector we've finally ended up with is Connect from algebraic-graphs. Here's filter fuse, taken from the full ruleset:
filterFuse :: RewriteRule
filterFuse (Connect (Vertex a@(StreamVertex i (Filter sel1) (p:_) ty _ s1))
                    (Vertex b@(StreamVertex _ (Filter sel2) (q:_) _ _ s2))) =
    let c = a   operator    = Filter (sel1 * sel2)
              , parameters  = [\[  (\p q x -> p x && q x) $(p) $(q)  ]]
              , serviceTime = sumTimes s1 sel1 s2
               
    in Just (removeEdge c c . mergeVertices ( elem  [a,b]) c)
filterFuse _ = Nothing
That's perhaps the simplest rule in the set. (See e.g. hoistOp for one of the worst!) The question that remains to me, is, which representation, or representations, to use in the thesis? I'm currently planning to skip the abstract example I started with and start with the concrete Haskell encoding using QuickCheck. I'm not sure if it seems weird to have two completely separate implementations of the rules, but the simpler QuickCheck-checked rules are much closer to the "core essence" of the rules than the final implementation in StrIoT. And the derivation of the rules comes earlier in the timeline than the design work that led to the final StrIoT implementation. The middle-option is still compromised, however, by having concrete expressions pretending to be patterns. So I'm not sure.

3 October 2022

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities September 2022

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

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian QA services: deploy changes
  • Debian wiki: approve accounts

Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors All work was done on a volunteer basis.

15 August 2022

John Goerzen: The Joy of Easy Personal Radio: FRS, GMRS, and Motorola DLR/DTR

Most of us carry cell phones with us almost everywhere we go. So much so that we often forget not just the usefulness, but even the joy, of having our own radios. For instance: From my own experience, as a person and a family that enjoys visiting wilderness areas, having radio communication is great. I have also heard from others that they re also very useful on cruise ships (I ve never been on one so I can t attest to that). There is also a sheer satisfaction in not needing anybody else s infrastructure, not paying any sort of monthly fee, and setting up the radios ourselves.

How these services fit in This article is primarily about handheld radios that can be used by anybody. I laid out some of their advantages above. Before continuing, I should point out some of the other services you may consider:
  • Cell phones, obviously. Due to the impressive infrastructure you pay for each month (many towers in high locations), in areas of cell coverage, you have this ability to connect to so many other phones around the world. With radios like discussed here, your range will likely a few miles.
  • Amateur Radio has often been a decade or more ahead of what you see in these easy personal radio devices. You can unquestionably get amateur radio devices with many more features and better performance. However, generally speaking, each person that transmits on an amateur radio band must be licensed. Getting an amateur radio license isn t difficult, but it does involve passing a test and some time studying for the exam. So it isn t something you can count on random friends or family members being able to do. That said, I have resources on Getting Started With Amateur Radio and it s not as hard as you might think! There are also a lot of reasons to use amateur radio if you want to go down that path.
  • Satellite messengers such as the Garmin Inreach or Zoleo can send SMS-like messages across anywhere in the globe with a clear view of the sky. They also often have SOS features. While these are useful safety equipment, it can take many minutes for a message to be sent and received it s not like an interactive SMS conversation and there are places where local radios will have better signal. Notably, satellite messengers are almost useless indoors and can have trouble in areas without a clear view of the sky, such as dense forests, valleys, etc.
  • My earlier Roundup of secure messengers with off-the-grid capabilities (distributed/mesh messengers) highlighted a number of other options as well, for text-only communication. For instance:
    • For very short-range service, Briar can form a mesh over Bluetooth from cell phones or over Tor, if Internet access is available.
    • Dedicated short message services Mesh Networks like Meshtastic or Beartooth have no voice capability, but share GPS locations and short text messages over their own local mesh. Generally they need to pair to a cell phone (even if that phone has no cell service) for most functionality.
  • Yggdrasil can do something similar over ad-hoc Wifi, but it is a lower-level protocol and you d need some sort of messaging to run atop it.
This article is primarily about the USA, though these concepts, if not the specific implementation, apply many other areas as well.

The landscape of easy personal radios The oldest personal radio service in the US is Citizens Band (CB). Because it uses a lower frequency band than others, handheld radios are larger, heavier, and less efficient. It is mostly used in vehicles or other installations where size isn t an issue. The FRS/GMRS services mostly share a set of frequencies. The Family Radio Service is unlicensed (you don t have to get a license to use it) and radios are plentiful and cheap. When you get a blister pack or little radios for maybe $50 for a pair or less, they re probably FRS. FRS was expanded by the FCC in 2017, and now most FRS channels can run up to 2 watts of power (with channels 8-14 still limited to 0.5W). FRS radios are pretty much always handheld. GMRS runs on mostly the same frequencies as FRS. GMRS lets you run up to 5W on some channels, up to 50W on others, and operate repeaters. GMRS also permits limited occasional digital data bursts; three manufacturers currently use this to exchange GPS data or text messages. To use GMRS, you must purchase a GMRS license; it costs $35 for a person and their immediate family and is good for 10 years. No exam is required. GMRS radios can transmit on FRS frequencies using the GMRS authorization. The extra power of GMRS gets you extra distance. While only the best handheld GMRS radios can put out 5W of power, some mobile (car) or home radios can put out the full 50W, and use more capable exterior antennas too. There is also the MURS band, which offers very few channels and also very few devices. It is not in wide use, probably for good reason. Finally, some radios use some other unlicensed bands. The Motorola DTR and DLR series I will talk about operate in the 900MHz ISM band. Regulations there limit them to a maximum power of 1W, but as you will see, due to some other optimizations, their range is often quite similar to a 5W GMRS handheld. All of these radios share something in common: your radio can either transmit, or receive, but not both simultaneously. They all have a PTT (push-to-talk) button that you push and hold while you are transmitting, and at all other times, they act as receivers. You ll learn that doubling is a thing where 2 or more people attempt to transmit at the same time. To listeners, the result is often garbled. To the transmitters, they may not even be aware they did it since, after all, they were transmitting. Usually it will be clear pretty quickly as people don t get responses or responses say it was garbled. Only the digital Motorola DLR/DTR series detects and prevents this situation.

FRS and GMRS radios As mentioned, the FRS/GMRS radios are generally the most popular, and quite inexpensive. Those that can emit 2W will have pretty decent range; 5W even better (assuming a decent antenna), though the 5W ones will require a GMRS license. For the most part, there isn t much that differentiates one FRS radio from another, or (with a few more exceptions) one GMRS handheld from another. Do not believe the manufacturers claims of 50 mile range or whatever; more on range below. FRS and GMRS radios use FM. GMRS radios are permitted to use a wider bandwidth than FRS radios, but in general, FRS and GMRS users can communicate with each other from any brand of radio to any other brand of radio, assuming they are using basic voice services. Some FRS and GMRS radios can receive the NOAA weather radio. That s nice for wilderness use. Nicer ones can monitor it for alert tones, even when you re tuned to a different channel. The very nicest on this as far as I know, only the Garmin Rino series will receive and process SAME codes to only trigger alerts for your specific location. GMRS (but not FRS) also permits 1-second digital data bursts at periodic intervals. There are now three radio series that take advantage of this: the Garmin Rino, the Motorola T800, and BTech GMRS-PRO. Garmin s radios are among the priciest of GMRS handhelds out there; the top-of-the-line Rino will set you back $650. The cheapest is $350, but does not contain a replaceable battery, which should be an instant rejection of a device like this. So, for $550, you can get the middle-of-the-road Rino. It features a sophisticated GPS system with Garmin trail maps and such, plus a 5W GMRS radio with GPS data sharing and a very limited (13-character) text messaging system. It does have a Bluetooth link to a cell phone, which can provide a link to trail maps and the like, and limited functionality for the radio. The Rino is also large and heavy (due to its large map-capable screen). Many consider it to be somewhat dated technology; for instance, other ways to have offline maps now exist (such as my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro, which has those maps on a watch!). It is bulky enough to likely be left at home in many situations. The Motorola T800 doesn t have much to talk about compared to the other two. Both of those platforms are a number of years old. The newest entrant in this space, from budget radio maker Baofeng, is the BTech GMRS-PRO, which came out just a couple of weeks ago. Its screen, though lacking built-in maps, does still have a GPS digital link similar to Garmin s, and can show you a heading and distance to other GMRS-PRO users. It too is a 5W unit, and has a ton of advanced features that are rare in GMRS: ability to pair a Bluetooth headset to it directly (though the Garmin Rino supports Bluetooth, it doesn t support this), ability to use the phone app as a speaker/mic for the radio, longer text messages than the Garmin Rino, etc. The GMRS-PRO sold out within a few days of its announcement, and I am presently waiting for mine to arrive to review. At $140 and with a more modern radio implementation, for people that don t need the trail maps and the like, it makes a compelling alternative to Garmin for outdoor use. Garmin documents when GPS beacons are sent out: generally, when you begin a transmission, or when another radio asks for your position. I couldn t find similar documentation from Motorola or BTech, but I believe FCC regulations mean that the picture would be similar with them. In other words, none of these devices is continuously, automatically, transmitting position updates. However, you can request a position update from another radio. It should be noted that, while voice communication is compatible across FRS/GMRS, data communication is not. Garmin, Motorola, and BTech all have different data protocols that are incompatible with radios from other manufacturers. FRS/GMRS radios often advertise privacy codes. These do nothing to protect your privacy; see more under the privacy section below.

Motorola DLR and DTR series Although they can be used for similar purposes, and I do, these radios are unique from the others in this article in several ways:
  • Their sales and marketing is targeted at businesses rather than consumers
  • They use digital encoding of audio, rather than analog FM or AM
  • They use FHSS (Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum) rather than a set frequency
  • They operate on the 900MHz ISM band, rather than a 460MHz UHF band (or a lower band yet for MURS and CB)
  • The DLR series is quite small, smaller than many GMRS radios.
I don t have space to go into a lot of radio theory in this article, but I ll briefly expand on some of this. First, FHSS. A FHSS radio hops from frequency to frequency many times per second, following some preset hopping algorithm that is part of the radio. Although it complicates the radio design, it has some advantages; it tends to allow more users to share a band, and if one particular frequency has a conflict with something else, it will be for a brief fraction of a second and may not even be noticeable. Digital encoding generally increases the quality of the audio, and keeps the quality high even in degraded signal conditions where analog radios would experience static or a quieter voice. However, you also lose that sort of audible feedback that your signal is getting weak. When you get too far away, the digital signal drops off a cliff . Often, either you have a crystal-clear signal or you have no signal at all. Motorola s radios leverage these features to build a unique radio. Not only can you talk to a group, but you can select a particular person to talk to with a private conversation, and so forth. DTR radios can send text messages to each other (but only preset canned ones, not arbitrary ones). Channels are more like configurations; they can include various arbitrary groupings of radios. Deconfliction with other users is established via hopsets rather than frequencies; that is, the algorithm that it uses to hop from frequency to frequency. There is a 4-digit PIN in the DLR radios, and newer DTR radios, that makes privacy very easy to set up and maintain. As far as I am aware, no scanner can monitor DLR/DTR signals. Though they technically aren t encrypted, cracking a DLR/DTR conversation would require cracking Motorola s firmware, and the chances of this happening in your geographical proximity seem vanishingly small. I will write more below on comparing the range of these to GMRS radios, but in a nutshell, it compares well, despite the fact that the 900MHz band restrictions allow Motorola only 1W of power output with these radios. There are three current lines of Motorola DLR/DTR radios:
  • The Motorola DLR1020 and DLR1060 radios. These have no screen; the 1020 has two channels (configurations) while the 1060 supports 6. They are small and compact and great pocketable just work radios.
  • The Motorola DTR600 and DTR700 radios. These are larger, with a larger antenna (that should theoretically provide greater range) and have a small color screen. They support more channels and more features (eg, short messages, etc).
  • The Motorola Curve (aka DLR110). Compared to the DLR1060, it adds limited WiFi capabilities that are primarily useful in certain business environments. See this thread for more. These features are unlikely to be useful in the environments we re talking about here.
These radios are fairly expensive new, but DLRs can be readily found at around $60 on eBay. (DTRs for about $250) They are quite rugged. Be aware when purchasing that some radios sold on eBay may not include a correct battery and charger. (Not necessarily a problem; Motorola batteries are easy to find online, and as with any used battery, the life of a used one may not be great.) For more advanced configuration, the Motorola CPS cable works with both radios (plugs into the charging cradle) and is used with the programming software to configure them in more detail. The older Motorola DTR650, DTR550, and older radios are compatible with the newer DLR and DTR series, if you program the newer ones carefully. The older ones don t support PINs and have a less friendly way of providing privacy, but they do work also. However, for most, I think the newer ones will be friendlier; but if you find a deal on the older ones, hey, why not? This thread on the MyGMRS forums has tons of useful information on the DLR/DTR radios. Check it out for a lot more detail. One interesting feature of these radios is that they are aware if there are conflicting users on the channel, and even if anybody is hearing your transmission. If your transmission is not being heard by at least one radio, you will get an audible (and visual, on the DTR) indication that your transmission failed. One thing that pleasantly surprised me is just how tiny the Motorola DLR is. The whole thing with antenna is like a small candy bar, and thinner. My phone is slightly taller, much wider, and only a little thinner than the Motorola DLR. Seriously, it s more pocketable than most smartphones. The DTR is of a size more commonly associated with radios, though still on the smaller side. Some of the most low-power FRS radios might get down to that size, but to get equivolent range, you need a 5W GMRS unit, which will be much bulkier. Being targeted at business users, the DLR/DTR don t include NOAA weather radio or GPS.

Power These radios tend to be powered by:
  • NiMH rechargable battery packs
  • AA/AAA batteries
  • Lithium Ion batteries
Most of the cheap FRS/GMRS radios have a NiMH rechargable battery pack and a terrible charge controller that will tend to overcharge, and thus prematurely destroy, the NiMH packs. This has long ago happened in my GMRS radios, and now I use Eneloop NiMH AAs in them (charged separately by a proper charger). The BTech, Garmin, and Motorola DLR/DTR radios all use Li-Ion batteries. These have the advantage of being more efficient batteries, though you can t necessarily just swap in AAs in a pinch. Pay attention to your charging options; if you are backpacking, for instance, you may want something that can charge from solar-powered USB or battery banks. The Motorola DLR/DTR radios need to sit in a charging cradle, but the cradle is powered by a Micro USB cable. The BTech GMRS-PRO is charged via USB-C. I don t know about the Garmin Rino or others. Garmin offers an optional AA battery pack for the Rino. BTech doesn t (yet) for the GMRS-PRO, but they do for some other models, and have stated accessories for the GMRS-PRO are coming. I don t have information about the T800. This is not an option for the DLR/DTR.

Meshtastic I ll briefly mention Meshtastic. It uses a low-power LoRa system. It can t handle voice transmissions; only data. On its own, it can transmit and receive automatic GPS updates from other Meshtastic devices, which you can view on its small screen. It forms a mesh, so each node can relay messages for others. It is also the only unit in this roundup that uses true encryption, and its battery lasts about a week more than the a solid day you can expect out of the best of the others here. When paired with a cell phone, Meshtastic can also send and receive short text messages. Meshtastic uses much less power than even the cheapest of the FRS radios discussed here. It can still achieve respectable range because it uses LoRa, which can trade bandwidth for power or range. It can take it a second or two to transmit a 50-character text message. Still, the GMRS or Motorola radios discussed here will have more than double the point-to-point range of a Meshtastic device. And, if you intend to take advantage of the text messaging features, keep in mind that you must now take two electronic devices with you and maintain a charge for them both.

Privacy The privacy picture on these is interesting.

Cell phone privacy Cell phones are difficult for individuals to eavesdrop, but a sophisticated adversary probably could: or an unsophisticated adversary with any manner of malware. Privacy on modern smartphones is a huge area of trouble, and it is safe to say that data brokers and many apps probably know at least your location and contact list, if not also the content of your messages. Though end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal can certainly help. See Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances for more details.

GMRS privacy GMRS radios are unencrypted and public. Anyone in range with another GMRS radio, or a scanner, can listen to your conversations even if you have a privacy code set. The privacy code does not actually protect your privacy; rather, it keeps your radio from playing conversations from others using the same channel, for your convenience. However, note the in range limitation. An eavesdropper would generally need to be within a few miles of you.

Motorola DLR/DTR privacy As touched on above, while these also aren t encrypted, as far as I am aware, no tools exist to eavesdrop on DLR/DTR conversations. Change the PIN away from the default 0000, ideally to something that doesn t end in 0 (to pick a different hopset) and you have pretty decent privacy right there. Decent doesn t mean perfect; it is certainly possible that sophisticated adversaries or state agencies could decode DLR/DTR traffic, since it is unencrypted. As a practical matter, though, the lack of consumer equipment that can decode this makes it be, as I say, pretty decent .

Meshtastic Meshtastic uses strong AES encryption. But as messaging features require a paired phone, the privacy implications of a phone also apply here.

Range I tested my best 5W GMRS radios, as well as a Motorola DTR600 talking to a DLR1060. (I also tried two DLR1060s talking to each other; there was no change in rnage.) I took a radio with me in the car, and had another sitting on my table indoors. Those of you familiar with radios will probably recognize that being in a car and being indoors both attenuate (reduce the strength of) the signal significantly. I drove around in a part of Kansas with gentle rolling hills. Both the GMRS and the DLR/DTR had a range of about 2-3 miles. There were times when each was able to pull out a signal when the other was not. The DLR/DTR series was significantly better while the vehicle was in motion. In weaker signal conditions, the GMRS radios were susceptible to significant picket fencing (static caused by variation in the signal strength when passing things like trees), to the point of being inaudible or losing the signal entirely. The DLR/DTR remained perfectly clear there. I was able to find some spots where, while parked, the GMRS radios had a weak but audible signal but the DLR/DTR had none. However, in all those cases, the distance to GMRS dropping out as well was small. Basically, no radios penetrate the ground, and the valleys were a problem for them all. Differences may play out in other ways in other environments as well: for instance, dense urban environments, heavy woods, indoor buildings, etc. GMRS radios can be used with repeaters, or have a rooftop antenna mounted on a car, both of which could significantly extend range and both of which are rare. The DLR/DTR series are said to be exceptionally good at indoor environments; Motorola rates them for penetrating 20 floors, for instance. Reports on MyGMRS forums state that they are able to cover an entire cruise ship, while the metal and concrete in them poses a big problem for GMRS radios. Different outdoor landscapes may favor one or the other also. Some of the cheapest FRS radios max out at about 0.5W or even less. This is probably only a little better than yelling distance in many cases. A lot of manufacturers obscure transmit power and use outlandish claims of range instead; don t believe those. Find the power output. A 2W FRS transmitter will be more credible range-wise, and the 5W GMRS transmitter as I tested better yet. Note that even GMRS radios are restricted to 0.5W on channels 8-14. The Motorola DLR/DTR radio gets about the same range with 1W as a GMRS radio does with 5W. The lower power output allows the DLR to be much smaller and lighter than a 5W GMRS radio for similar performance.

Overall conclusions Of course, what you use may depend on your needs. I d generally say:
  • For basic use, the high quality, good range, reasonable used price, and very small size of the Motorola DLR would make it a good all-arounder. Give one to each person (or kid) for use at the mall or amusement park, take them with you to concerts and festivals, etc.
  • Between vehicles, the Motorola DLR/DTR have a clear range advantage over the GMRS radios for vehicles in motion, though the GPS features of the more advanced GMRS radios may be more useful here.
  • For wilderness hiking and the like, GMRS radios that have GPS, maps, and NOAA weather radio reception may prove compelling and worth the extra bulk. More flexible power options may also be useful.
  • Low-end FRS radios can be found very cheap; around $20-$30 new for the lowest end, though their low power output and questionable charging circuits may limit their utility where it really counts.
  • If you just can t move away from cell phones, try the Zoleo app, which can provide some radio-like features.
  • A satellite communicator is still good backup safety gear for the wilderness.

Postscript: A final plug for amateur radio My 10-year-old Kenwood TH-D71A already had features none of these others have. For instance, its support for APRS and ability to act as a digipeater for APRS means that TH-D71As can form an automatic mesh between them, each one repeating new GPS positions or text messages to the others. Traditional APRS doesn t perform well in weak signal situations; however, more modern digital systems like D-Star and DMR also support APRS over more modern codecs and provide all sorts of other advantages as well (though not FHSS). My conclusions above assume a person is not going to go the amateur radio route for whatever reason. If you can get those in your group to get their license the technician is all you need a whole world of excellent options opens to you.

Appendix: The Trisquare eXRS Prior to 2012, a small company named Trisquare made a FHSS radio they called the eXRS that operated on the 900MHz band like Motorola s DLR/DTR does. Trisquare aimed at consumers and their radios were cheaper than the Motorola DLR/DTR. However, that is where the similarities end. Trisquare had an analog voice transmission, even though it used FHSS. Also, there is a problem that can arise with FHSS systems: synchronization. The receiver must hop frequencies in exactly the same order at exactly the same time as the sender. Motorola has clearly done a lot of engineering around this, and I have never encountered a synchronization problem in my DLR/DTR testing, not even once. eXRS, on the other hand, had frequent synchronization problems, which manifested themselves in weak signal conditions and sometimes with doubling. When it would happen, everyone would have to be quiet for a minute or two to give all the radios a chance to timeout and reset to the start of the hop sequence. In addition, the eXRS hardware wasn t great, and was susceptible to hardware failure. There are some that still view eXRS as a legendary device and hoard them. You can still find them used on eBay. When eXRS came out in 2007, it was indeed nice technology for the day, ahead of its time in some ways. I used and loved the eXRS radios back then; powerful GMRS wasn t all that common. But compared to today s technology, eXRS has inferior range to both GMRS and Motorola DLR/DTR (from my recollection, about a third to half of what I get with today s GMRS and DLR/DTR), is prone to finicky synchronization issues when signals are weak, and isn t made very robustly. I therefore don t recommend the eBay eXRS units. Don t assume that the eXRS weaknesses extend to Motorola DLR/DTR. The DLR/DTR radios are done well and don t suffer from the same problems. Note: This article has a long-term home on my website, where it may be updated from time to time.

5 June 2022

John Goerzen: Visiting Germany: Reflections on Schloss Charlottenburg

200 years ago, my ancestors migrated from Prussia to Ukraine. They left for many reasons, many of which boiled down to their strong pacifism in the midst of a highly militarized country. Last week, my wife, the boys, and I walked through the favorite palace of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the king of Prussia who was responsible for forcing my ancestors out Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Photos can t possibly convey the enormity and the riches of this place, even after being attacked during multiple wars (and used by Napoleon for a time). My ancestors would never have been able to get into to this place. We, on the other hand, walked right through the king s bedroom, audience room, and chapel. The chapel, incidentally, mixing church and state; a fine pipe organ along with a statue of an eagle holding the Prussian crown. I could pause and enjoy the beauty of the place; the oval rooms overlooking the acres of sculpted gardens outside and carefully tree-lined streets leading to the palace, the artwork no doubt worth many millions, the gold and silver place settings, the rare tapestries. And I could also reflect on the problems with such great wealth and power, and the many lives lost and refugees created by the wars the Prussian kings started. (First of several reflections on our wonderful recent trip to Germany with the boys)

11 March 2022

Dirk Eddelbuettel: dtts 0.1.0 on CRAN: New Package

Leonardo and I are thrilled to announce the first CRAN release of dtts. The dtts package builds on top of both our nanotime package and the well-loved and widely-used data.table package by Matt, Arun, Jan, and numerous collaborators. In a very rough nutshell, you can think of dtts as combining both these potent ingredients to produce something not-entirely-unlike the venerable xts package by our friends Jeff and Josh but using highest-precision nanosecond increments rather than not-quite-microseconds or dates. The package is still somewhat rare and bare: it is mostly just alignment operators. But because of the power and genius of data.table not all that much more is needed because data.table gets us fifteen years of highly refined, tuned and tested code for data slicing, dicing, and aggregation. To which we now humbly add nanosecond-resolution indexing and alignment. The package had been simmering for some time, and does of course take advantage of (a lot of) earlier work by Leonardo on his ztsdb project. We look forward to user feedback and suggestions at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

6 March 2022

Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.6 on CRAN: Updates

Leonardo and I are pleased to another update to our nanotime package bringing it to version 0.3.6 which landed on CRAN earlier today. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package (as well as the RcppDate package for additional C++ operations) and offers efficient high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations. This release corrects subsetting with %in% operator, integrates it better fit in the mixed S3/S4 setup, fixes a negative period parse, and updates class comparisons to rely on inherits(). The NEWS snippet has the full more details.

Changes in version 0.3.6 (2022-03-06)
  • Fix incorrect subsetting with operator %in% (Leonardo in #100 fixing #99).
  • Fix incorrect parsing for negative nanoperiod (Leonardo in #100 fixing #96).
  • Test for class via inherits() (Dirk).

Thanks to my CRANberries there is also a diff to the previous version. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository and all documentation is provided at the nanotime documentation site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

3 March 2022

John Goerzen: Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances

Note: this post is also available on my website, where it will be updated periodically. When things are difficult maybe there s been a disaster, or an invasion (this page is being written in 2022 just after Russia invaded Ukraine), or maybe you re just backpacking off the grid there are tools that can help you keep in touch, or move your data around. This page aims to survey some of them, roughly in order from easiest to more complex.

Simple radios Handheld radios shouldn t be forgotten. They are cheap, small, and easy to operate. Their range isn t huge maybe a couple of miles in rural areas, much less in cities but they can be a useful place to start. They tend to have no actual encryption features (the privacy features really aren t.) In the USA, options are FRS/GMRS and CB.

Syncthing With Syncthing, you can share files among your devices or with your friends. Syncthing essentially builds a private mesh for file sharing. Devices will auto-discover each other when on the same LAN or Wifi network, and opportunistically sync. I wrote more about offline uses of Syncthing, and its use with NNCP, in my blog post A simple, delay-tolerant, offline-capable mesh network with Syncthing (+ optional NNCP). Yes, it is a form of a Mesh Network! Homepage: https://syncthing.net/

Briar Briar is an instant messaging service based around Android. It s IM with a twist: it can use a mesh of Bluetooh devices. Or, if Internet is available, Tor. It has even been extended to support the use of SD cards and USB sticks to carry your messages. Like some others here, it can relay messages for third parties as well. Homepage: https://briarproject.org/

Manyverse and Scuttlebutt Manyverse is a client for Scuttlebutt, which is a sort of asynchronous, offline-friendly social network. You can use it to keep in touch with your family and friends, and it supports syncing over Bluetooth and Wifi even in the absence of Internet. Homepages: https://www.manyver.se/ and https://scuttlebutt.nz/

Yggdrasil Yggdrasil is a self-healing, fully end-to-end Encrypted Mesh Network. It can work among local devices or on the global Internet. It has network services that can egress onto things like Tor, I2P, and the public Internet. Yggdrasil makes a perfect companion to ad-hoc wifi as it has auto peer discovery on the local network. I talked about it in more detail in my blog post Make the Internet Yours Again With an Instant Mesh Network. Homepage: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Ad-Hoc Wifi Few people know about the ad-hoc wifi mode. Ad-hoc wifi lets devices in range talk to each other without an access point. You just all set your devices to the same network name and password and there you go. However, there often isn t DHCP, so IP configuration can be a bit of a challenge. Yggdrasil helps here.

NNCP Moving now to more advanced tools, NNCP lets you assemble a network of peers that can use Asynchronous Communication over sneakernet, USB drives, radios, CD-Rs, Internet, tor, NNCP over Yggdrasil, Syncthing, Dropbox, S3, you name it . NNCP supports multi-hop file transfer and remote execution. It is fully end-to-end encrypted. Think of it as the offline version of ssh. Homepage: https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/

Meshtastic Meshtastic uses long-range, low-power LoRa radios to build a long-distance, encrypted, instant messaging system that is a Mesh Network. It requires specialized hardware, about $30, but will tend to get much better range than simple radios, and with very little power. Homepages: https://meshtastic.org/ and https://meshtastic.letstalkthis.com/

Portable Satellite Communicators You can get portable satellite communicators that can send SMS from anywhere on earth with a clear view of the sky. The Garmin InReach mini and Zoleo are two credible options. Subscriptions range from about $10 to $40 per month depending on usage. They also have global SOS features.

Telephone Lines If you have a phone line and a modem, UUCP can get through just about anything. It s an older protocol that lacks modern security, but will deal with slow and noisy serial lines well. XBee SX radios also have a serial mode that can work well with UUCP.

Additional Suggestions It is probably useful to have a Linux live USB stick with whatever software you want to use handy. Debian can be installed from the live environment, or you could use a security-focused distribution such as Tails or Qubes.

References This page originated in my Mastodon thread and incorporates some suggestions I received there. It also formed a post on my blog.

22 February 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Children of Earth and Sky

Review: Children of Earth and Sky, by Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: New American Library
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 0-698-18327-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 572
Nine hundred years have passed since the events of Lord of Emperors. Twenty-five years ago, Sarantium, queen of cities, fell to the Osmanlis, who have renamed it Asharias in honor of their Asherite faith. The repercussions are still echoing through the western world, as the Osmanlis attempt each spring to push farther west and the forces of Rodolfo, Holy Emperor in Obravic and defender of the Jaddite faith, hold them back. Seressa and Dubrava are city-state republics built on the sea trade. Seressa is the larger and most renown, money-lenders to Rodolfo and notorious for their focus on business and profit, including willingness to trade with the Osmanlis. Dubrava has a more tenuous position: smaller, reliant on trade and other assistance from Seressa, but also holding a more-favored trading position with Asharias. Both are harassed by piracy from Senjan, a fiercely Jaddite raiding city north up the coast from Dubrava and renown for its bravery against the Asherites. The Senjani are bad for business. Seressa would love to wipe them out, but they have the favor of the Holy Emperor. They settled for attempting to starve the city with a blockade. As Children of Earth and Sky opens, Seressa is sending out new spies. One is a woman named Leonora Valeri, who will present herself as the wife of a doctor that Seressa is sending to Dubrava. She is neither his wife nor Seressani, but this assignment gets her out of the convent to which her noble father exiled her after an unapproved love affair. The other new spy is the young artist Pero Villani, a minor painter whose only notable work was destroyed by the woman who commissioned it for being too revealing. Pero's destination is farther east: Grand Khalif Gur u the Destroyer, the man whose forces took Sarantium, wants to be painted in the western style. Pero will do so, and observe all he can, and if the opportunity arises to do more than that, well, so much the better. Pero and Leonora are traveling on a ship owned by Marin Djivo, the younger son of a wealthy Dubravan merchant family, when their ship is captured by Senjani raiders. Among the raiders is Danica Gradek, the archer who broke the Seressani blockade of Senjan. This sort of piracy, while tense, should be an economic transaction: some theft, some bargaining, some ransom, and everyone goes on their way. That is not what happens. Moments later, two men lie dead, and Danica's life has become entangled with Dubravan merchants and Seressani spies. Children of Earth and Sky is in some sense a sequel to the Sarantine Mosaic, and knowing the events of that series adds some emotional depth and significant moments to this story, but you can easily read it as a stand-alone novel. (That said, I recommend the Sarantine Mosaic regardless.) As with nearly all of Kay's work, it's historical fiction with the names changed (less this time than in most of this books) and a bit of magic added. The setting is the middle of the 15th century. Seressa is, of course, Venice. The Osmanlis are the Ottoman Turks, and Asharias is Istanbul, the captured Constantinople. Rodolfo is a Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, holding court in an amalgam of northern cities that (per the afterward) is primarily Prague. Dubrava, which is central to much of this book, is Dubrovnik in Croatia. As usual with Kay's novels, you don't need to know this to enjoy the story, but it may spark some fun secondary reading. The touch of magic is present in several places, but comes primarily from Danica, whose grandfather resides as a voice in her head. He is the last of her family that she is in contact with. Her father and older brother were killed by Osmanli raiders, and her younger brother taken as a slave to be raised as a djanni warrior in the khalif's infantry. (Djannis are akin to Mamluks in our world.) Damaz, as he is now known, is the remaining major viewpoint character I've not mentioned. There are a couple of key events in the book that have magic at the center, generally involving Danica or Damaz, but most of the story is straight historical fiction (albeit with significant divergences from our world). I'd talked myself out of starting this novel several times before I finally picked it up. Like most of Kay's, it's a long book, and I wasn't sure if I was in the mood for epic narration and a huge cast. And indeed, I found it slow at the start. Once the story got underway, though, I was as enthralled as always. There is a bit of sag in the middle of the book, in part because Kay didn't follow up on some relationships that I wish were more central to the plot and in part because he overdoes the narrative weight in one scene, but the ending is exceptional. Guy Gavriel Kay is the master of a specific type of omniscient tight third person narration, one in which the reader sees what a character is thinking but also gets narrative commentary, foreshadowing, and emotional emphasis apart from the character's thoughts. It can feel heavy-handed; if something is important, Kay tells you, explicitly and sometimes repetitively, and the foreshadowing frequently can be described as portentous. But in return, Kay gets fine control of pacing and emphasis. The narrative commentary functions like a soundtrack in a movie. It tells you when to pay close attention and when you can relax, what moments are important, where to slow down, when to brace yourself, and when you can speed up. That in turn requires trust; if you're not in the mood for the author to dictate your reading pace to the degree Kay is attempting, it can be irritating. If you are in the mood, though, it makes his novels easy to relax into. The narrator will ensure that you don't miss anything important, and it's an effective way to build tension. Kay also strikes just the right balance between showing multiple perspectives on a single moment and spending too much time retelling the same story. He will often switch viewpoint characters in the middle of a scene, but he avoids the trap of replaying the scene and thus losing the reader's interest. There is instead just a moment of doubled perspective or retrospective commentary, just enough information for the reader to extrapolate the other character's experience backwards, and then the story moves on. Kay has an excellent feel for when I badly wanted to see another character's perspective on something that just happened. Some of Kay's novels revolve around a specific event or person. Children of Earth and Sky is not one of those. It's a braided novel following five main characters, each with their own story. Some of those stories converge; some of them touch for a while and then diverge again. About three-quarters of the way through, I wasn't sure how Kay would manage a satisfying conclusion for the numerous separate threads that didn't feel rushed, but I need not have worried. The ending had very little of the shape that I had expected, focused more on the small than the large (although there are some world-changing events here), but it was an absolute delight, with some beautiful moments of happiness that took the rest of the novel to set up. This is not the sort of novel with a clear theme, but insofar as it has one, it's a story about how much of the future shape and events of the world are unknowable. All we can control is our own choices, and we may never know their impact. Each individual must decide who they want to be and attempt to live their life in accordance with that decision, hopefully with some grace towards others in the world. The novel does, alas, still have some of Kay's standard weaknesses. There is (at last!) an important female friendship, and I had great hopes for a second one, but sadly it lasted only a scant handful of pages. Men interact with each other and with women; women interact almost exclusively with men. Kay does slightly less awarding of women to male characters than in some previous books (although it still happens), but this world is still weirdly obsessed with handing women to men for sex as a hospitality gesture. None of this is too belabored or central to the story, or I would be complaining more, but as soon as one sees how regressive the gender roles typically are in a Kay novel, it's hard to unsee. And, as always for Kay, the sex in this book is weirdly off-putting to me. I think this goes hand in hand with Kay's ability to write some of the best conversations in fantasy. Kay's characters spar and thrust with every line and read nuance into small details of wording. Frequently, the turn of the story rests on the outcome of a careful conversation. This is great reading; it's the part of Kay's writing I enjoy the most. But I'm not sure he knows how to turn it off between characters who love and trust each other. The characters never fully relax; sex feels like another move in ongoing chess games, which in turn makes it feel weirdly transactional or manipulative instead of open-hearted and intimate. It doesn't help that Kay appears to believe that arousal is a far more irresistible force for men than I do. Those problems did get in the way of my enjoyment occasionally, but I didn't think they ruined the book. The rest of the story is too good. Danica in particular is a wonderful character: thoughtful, brave, determined, and deeply honest with herself in that way that is typical of the best of Kay's characters. I wanted to read the book where Danica's and Leonora's stories stayed more entwined; alas, that's not the story Kay was writing. But I am in awe at Kay's ability to write characters who feel thoughtful and insightful even when working at cross purposes, in a world that mostly avoids simple villains, with a plot that never hinges on someone doing something stupid. I love reading about these people. Their triumphs, when they finally come, are deeply satisfying. Children of Earth and Sky is probably not in the top echelon of Kay's works with the Sarantine Mosaic and Under Heaven, but it's close. If you like his other writing, you will like this as well. Highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

5 February 2022

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in January 2022

Welcome to the January 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our reports, we try outline the most important things that have been happening in the past month. As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
An interesting blog post was published by Paragon Initiative Enterprises about Gossamer, a proposal for securing the PHP software supply-chain. Utilising code-signing and third-party attestations, Gossamer aims to mitigate the risks within the notorious PHP world via publishing attestations to a transparency log. Their post, titled Solving Open Source Supply Chain Security for the PHP Ecosystem goes into some detail regarding the design, scope and implementation of the system.
This month, the Linux Foundation announced SupplyChainSecurityCon, a conference focused on exploring the security threats affecting the software supply chain, sharing best practices and mitigation tactics. The conference is part of the Linux Foundation s Open Source Summit North America and will take place June 21st 24th 2022, both virtually and in Austin, Texas.

Debian There was a significant progress made in the Debian Linux distribution this month, including:

Other distributions kpcyrd reported on Twitter about the release of version 0.2.0 of pacman-bintrans, an experiment with binary transparency for the Arch Linux package manager, pacman. This new version is now able to query rebuilderd to check if a package was independently reproduced.
In the world of openSUSE, however, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his monthly reproducible builds status report.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 199, 200, 201 and 202 to Debian unstable (that were later backported to Debian bullseye-backports by Mattia Rizzolo), as well as made the following changes to the code itself:
  • New features:
    • First attempt at incremental output support with a timeout. Now passing, for example, --timeout=60 will mean that diffoscope will not recurse into any sub-archives after 60 seconds total execution time has elapsed. Note that this is not a fixed/strict timeout due to implementation issues. [ ][ ]
    • Support both variants of odt2txt, including the one provided by the unoconv package. [ ]
  • Bug fixes:
    • Do not return with a UNIX exit code of 0 if we encounter with a file whose human-readable metadata matches literal file contents. [ ]
    • Don t fail if comparing a nonexistent file with a .pyc file (and add test). [ ][ ]
    • If the debian.deb822 module raises any exception on import, re-raise it as an ImportError. This should fix diffoscope on some Fedora systems. [ ]
    • Even if a Sphinx .inv inventory file is labelled The remainder of this file is compressed using zlib, it might not actually be. In this case, don t traceback and simply return the original content. [ ]
  • Documentation:
    • Improve documentation for the new --timeout option due to a few misconceptions. [ ]
    • Drop reference in the manual page claiming the ability to compare non-existent files on the command-line. (This has not been possible since version 32 which was released in September 2015). [ ]
    • Update X has been modified after NT_GNU_BUILD_ID has been applied messages to, for example, not duplicating the full filename in the diffoscope output. [ ]
  • Codebase improvements:
    • Tidy some control flow. [ ]
    • Correct a recompile typo. [ ]
In addition, Alyssa Ross fixed the comparison of CBFS names that contain spaces [ ], Sergei Trofimovich fixed whitespace for compatibility with version 21.12 of the Black source code reformatter [ ] and Zbigniew J drzejewski-Szmek fixed JSON detection with a new version of file [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:
  • Fr d ric Pierret (fepitre):
    • Add Debian bookworm to package set creation. [ ]
  • Holger Levsen:
    • Install the po4a package where appropriate, as it is needed for the Reproducible Builds website job [ ]. In addition, also run the i18n.sh and contributors.sh scripts [ ].
    • Correct some grammar in Debian live image build output. [ ]
    • Shell monitor improvements:
      • Only show the offline node section if there are offline nodes. [ ]
      • Colorise offline nodes. [ ]
      • Shrink screen usage. [ ][ ][ ]
    • Node health check improvements:
      • Detect if live package builds encounter incomplete snapshots. [ ][ ][ ]
      • Detect if a host is running with today s date (when it should be set artificially in the future). [ ]
    • Use the devscripts package from bullseye-backports on Debian nodes. [ ]
    • Use the Munin monitoring package bullseye-backports on Debian nodes too. [ ]
    • Update New Year handling, needed to be able to detect real and fake dates. [ ][ ]
    • Improve the error message of the script that powercycles the arm64 architecture nodes hosted by Codethink. [ ]
  • Mattia Rizzolo:
    • Use the new --timeout option added in diffoscope version 202. [ ]
  • Roland Clobus:
    • Update the build scripts now that the hooks for live builds are now maintained upstream in the live-build repository. [ ]
    • Show info lines in Jenkins when reproducible hooks have been active. [ ]
    • Use unique folders for the artifacts from each live Debian version. [ ]
  • Vagrant Cascadian:
    • Switch the Debian armhf architecture nodes to use new proxy. [ ]
    • Misc. node maintenance. [ ].

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. In January, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

And finally If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

16 January 2022

Chris Lamb: Favourite films of 2021

In my four most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction, the fiction and the 'classic' novels that I enjoyed reading the most in 2021. But in the very last of my 2021 roundup posts, I'll be going over some of my favourite movies. (Saying that, these are perhaps less of my 'favourite films' than the ones worth remarking on after all, nobody needs to hear that The Godfather is a good movie.) It's probably helpful to remark you that I took a self-directed course in film history in 2021, based around the first volume of Roger Ebert's The Great Movies. This collection of 100-odd movie essays aims to make a tour of the landmarks of the first century of cinema, and I watched all but a handul before the year was out. I am slowly making my way through volume two in 2022. This tome was tremendously useful, and not simply due to the background context that Ebert added to each film: it also brought me into contact with films I would have hardly come through some other means. Would I have ever discovered the sly comedy of Trouble in Paradise (1932) or the touching proto-realism of L'Atalante (1934) any other way? It also helped me to 'get around' to watching films I may have put off watching forever the influential Battleship Potemkin (1925), for instance, and the ur-epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) spring to mind here. Choosing a 'worst' film is perhaps more difficult than choosing the best. There are first those that left me completely dry (Ready or Not, Written on the Wind, etc.), and those that were simply poorly executed. And there are those that failed to meet their own high opinions of themselves, such as the 'made for Reddit' Tenet (2020) or the inscrutable Vanilla Sky (2001) the latter being an almost perfect example of late-20th century cultural exhaustion. But I must save my most severe judgement for those films where I took a visceral dislike how their subjects were portrayed. The sexually problematic Sixteen Candles (1984) and the pseudo-Catholic vigilantism of The Boondock Saints (1999) both spring to mind here, the latter of which combines so many things I dislike into such a short running time I'd need an entire essay to adequately express how much I disliked it.

Dogtooth (2009) A father, a mother, a brother and two sisters live in a large and affluent house behind a very high wall and an always-locked gate. Only the father ever leaves the property, driving to the factory that he happens to own. Dogtooth goes far beyond any allusion to Josef Fritzl's cellar, though, as the children's education is a grotesque parody of home-schooling. Here, the parents deliberately teach their children the wrong meaning of words (e.g. a yellow flower is called a 'zombie'), all of which renders the outside world utterly meaningless and unreadable, and completely mystifying its very existence. It is this creepy strangeness within a 'regular' family unit in Dogtooth that is both socially and epistemically horrific, and I'll say nothing here of its sexual elements as well. Despite its cold, inscrutable and deadpan surreality, Dogtooth invites all manner of potential interpretations. Is this film about the artificiality of the nuclear family that the West insists is the benchmark of normality? Or is it, as I prefer to believe, something more visceral altogether: an allegory for the various forms of ontological violence wrought by fascism, as well a sobering nod towards some of fascism's inherent appeals? (Perhaps it is both. In 1972, French poststructuralists Gilles and F lix Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus, which plays with the idea of the family unit as a metaphor for the authoritarian state.) The Greek-language Dogtooth, elegantly shot, thankfully provides no easy answers.

Holy Motors (2012) There is an infamous scene in Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 film collaboration between Luis Bu uel and famed artist Salvador Dal . A young woman is cornered in her own apartment by a threatening man, and she reaches for a tennis racquet in self-defence. But the man suddenly picks up two nearby ropes and drags into the frame two large grand pianos... each leaden with a dead donkey, a stone tablet, a pumpkin and a bewildered priest. This bizarre sketch serves as a better introduction to Leos Carax's Holy Motors than any elementary outline of its plot, which ostensibly follows 24 hours in the life of a man who must play a number of extremely diverse roles around Paris... all for no apparent reason. (And is he even a man?) Surrealism as an art movement gets a pretty bad wrap these days, and perhaps justifiably so. But Holy Motors and Un Chien Andalou serve as a good reminder that surrealism can be, well, 'good, actually'. And if not quite high art, Holy Motors at least demonstrates that surrealism can still unnerving and hilariously funny. Indeed, recalling the whimsy of the plot to a close friend, the tears of laughter came unbidden to my eyes once again. ("And then the limousines...!") Still, it is unclear how Holy Motors truly refreshes surrealism for the twenty-first century. Surrealism was, in part, a reaction to the mechanical and unfeeling brutality of World War I and ultimately sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind. Holy Motors cannot be responding to another continental conflagration, and so it appears to me to be some kind of commentary on the roles we exhibit in an era of 'post-postmodernity': a sketch on our age of performative authenticity, perhaps, or an idle doodle on the function and psychosocial function of work. Or perhaps not. After all, this film was produced in a time that offers the near-universal availability of mind-altering substances, and this certainly changes the context in which this film was both created. And, how can I put it, was intended to be watched.

Manchester by the Sea (2016) An absolutely devastating portrayal of a character who is unable to forgive himself and is hesitant to engage with anyone ever again. It features a near-ideal balance between portraying unrecoverable anguish and tender warmth, and is paradoxically grandiose in its subtle intimacy. The mechanics of life led me to watch this lying on a bed in a chain hotel by Heathrow Airport, and if this colourless circumstance blunted the film's emotional impact on me, I am probably thankful for it. Indeed, I find myself reduced in this review to fatuously recalling my favourite interactions instead of providing any real commentary. You could write a whole essay about one particular incident: its surfaces, subtexts and angles... all despite nothing of any substance ever being communicated. Truly stunning.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Roger Ebert called this movie one of the saddest films I have ever seen, filled with a yearning for love and home that will not ever come. But whilst it is difficult to disagree with his sentiment, Ebert's choice of sad is somehow not quite the right word. Indeed, I've long regretted that our dictionaries don't have more nuanced blends of tragedy and sadness; perhaps the Ancient Greeks can loan us some. Nevertheless, the plot of this film is of a gambler and a prostitute who become business partners in a new and remote mining town called Presbyterian Church. However, as their town and enterprise booms, it comes to the attention of a large mining corporation who want to bully or buy their way into the action. What makes this film stand out is not the plot itself, however, but its mood and tone the town and its inhabitants seem to be thrown together out of raw lumber, covered alternatively in mud or frozen ice, and their days (and their personalities) are both short and dark in equal measure. As a brief aside, if you haven't seen a Roger Altman film before, this has all the trappings of being a good introduction. As Ebert went on to observe: This is not the kind of movie where the characters are introduced. They are all already here. Furthermore, we can see some of Altman's trademark conversations that overlap, a superb handling of ensemble casts, and a quietly subversive view of the tyranny of 'genre'... and the latter in a time when the appetite for revisionist portrays of the West was not very strong. All of these 'Altmanian' trademarks can be ordered in much stronger measures in his later films: in particular, his comedy-drama Nashville (1975) has 24 main characters, and my jejune interpretation of Gosford Park (2001) is that it is purposefully designed to poke fun those who take a reductionist view of 'genre', or at least on the audience's expectations. (In this case, an Edwardian-era English murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie, but where no real murder or detection really takes place.) On the other hand, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is actually a poor introduction to Altman. The story is told in a suitable deliberate and slow tempo, and the two stars of the film are shown thoroughly defrocked of any 'star status', in both the visual and moral dimensions. All of these traits are, however, this film's strength, adding up to a credible, fascinating and riveting portrayal of the old West.

Detour (1945) Detour was filmed in less than a week, and it's difficult to decide out of the actors and the screenplay which is its weakest point.... Yet it still somehow seemed to drag me in. The plot revolves around luckless Al who is hitchhiking to California. Al gets a lift from a man called Haskell who quickly falls down dead from a heart attack. Al quickly buries the body and takes Haskell's money, car and identification, believing that the police will believe Al murdered him. An unstable element is soon introduced in the guise of Vera, who, through a set of coincidences that stretches credulity, knows that this 'new' Haskell (ie. Al pretending to be him) is not who he seems. Vera then attaches herself to Al in order to blackmail him, and the world starts to spin out of his control. It must be understood that none of this is executed very well. Rather, what makes Detour so interesting to watch is that its 'errors' lend a distinctively creepy and unnatural hue to the film. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud used the word unheimlich to describe the experience of something that is not simply mysterious, but something creepy in a strangely familiar way. This is almost the perfect description of watching Detour its eerie nature means that we are not only frequently second-guessed about where the film is going, but are often uncertain whether we are watching the usual objective perspective offered by cinema. In particular, are all the ham-fisted segues, stilted dialogue and inscrutable character motivations actually a product of Al inventing a story for the viewer? Did he murder Haskell after all, despite the film 'showing' us that Haskell died of natural causes? In other words, are we watching what Al wants us to believe? Regardless of the answers to these questions, the film succeeds precisely because of its accidental or inadvertent choices, so it is an implicit reminder that seeking the director's original intention in any piece of art is a complete mirage. Detour is certainly not a good film, but it just might be a great one. (It is a short film too, and, out of copyright, it is available online for free.)

Safe (1995) Safe is a subtly disturbing film about an upper-middle-class housewife who begins to complain about vague symptoms of illness. Initially claiming that she doesn't feel right, Carol starts to have unexplained headaches, a dry cough and nosebleeds, and eventually begins to have trouble breathing. Carol's family doctor treats her concerns with little care, and suggests to her husband that she sees a psychiatrist. Yet Carol's episodes soon escalate. For example, as a 'homemaker' and with nothing else to occupy her, Carol's orders a new couch for a party. But when the store delivers the wrong one (although it is not altogether clear that they did), Carol has a near breakdown. Unsure where to turn, an 'allergist' tells Carol she has "Environmental Illness," and so Carol eventually checks herself into a new-age commune filled with alternative therapies. On the surface, Safe is thus a film about the increasing about of pesticides and chemicals in our lives, something that was clearly felt far more viscerally in the 1990s. But it is also a film about how lack of genuine healthcare for women must be seen as a critical factor in the rise of crank medicine. (Indeed, it made for something of an uncomfortable watch during the coronavirus lockdown.) More interestingly, however, Safe gently-yet-critically examines the psychosocial causes that may be aggravating Carol's illnesses, including her vacant marriage, her hollow friends and the 'empty calorie' stimulus of suburbia. None of this should be especially new to anyone: the gendered Victorian term 'hysterical' is often all but spoken throughout this film, and perhaps from the very invention of modern medicine, women's symptoms have often regularly minimised or outright dismissed. (Hilary Mantel's 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost is especially harrowing on this.) As I opened this review, the film is subtle in its messaging. Just to take one example from many, the sound of the cars is always just a fraction too loud: there's a scene where a group is eating dinner with a road in the background, and the total effect can be seen as representing the toxic fumes of modernity invading our social lives and health. I won't spoiler the conclusion of this quietly devasting film, but don't expect a happy ending.

The Driver (1978) Critics grossly misunderstood The Driver when it was first released. They interpreted the cold and unemotional affect of the characters with the lack of developmental depth, instead of representing their dissociation from the society around them. This reading was encouraged by the fact that the principal actors aren't given real names and are instead known simply by their archetypes instead: 'The Driver', 'The Detective', 'The Player' and so on. This sort of quasi-Jungian erudition is common in many crime films today (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, Layer Cake, Fight Club), so the critics' misconceptions were entirely reasonable in 1978. The plot of The Driver involves the eponymous Driver, a noted getaway driver for robberies in Los Angeles. His exceptional talent has far prevented him from being captured thus far, so the Detective attempts to catch the Driver by pardoning another gang if they help convict the Driver via a set-up robbery. To give himself an edge, however, The Driver seeks help from the femme fatale 'Player' in order to mislead the Detective. If this all sounds eerily familiar, you would not be far wrong. The film was essentially remade by Nicolas Winding Refn as Drive (2011) and in Edgar Wright's 2017 Baby Driver. Yet The Driver offers something that these neon-noir variants do not. In particular, the car chases around Los Angeles are some of the most captivating I've seen: they aren't thrilling in the sense of tyre squeals, explosions and flying boxes, but rather the vehicles come across like wild animals hunting one another. This feels especially so when the police are hunting The Driver, which feels less like a low-stakes game of cat and mouse than a pack of feral animals working together a gang who will tear apart their prey if they find him. In contrast to the undercar neon glow of the Fast & Furious franchise, the urban realism backdrop of the The Driver's LA metropolis contributes to a sincere feeling of artistic fidelity as well. To be sure, most of this is present in the truly-excellent Drive, where the chase scenes do really communicate a credible sense of stakes. But the substitution of The Driver's grit with Drive's soft neon tilts it slightly towards that common affliction of crime movies: style over substance. Nevertheless, I can highly recommend watching The Driver and Drive together, as it can tell you a lot about the disconnected socioeconomic practices of the 1980s compared to the 2010s. More than that, however, the pseudo-1980s synthwave soundtrack of Drive captures something crucial to analysing the world of today. In particular, these 'sounds from the past filtered through the present' bring to mind the increasing role of nostalgia for lost futures in the culture of today, where temporality and pop culture references are almost-exclusively citational and commemorational.

The Souvenir (2019) The ostensible outline of this quietly understated film follows a shy but ambitious film student who falls into an emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man. But that doesn't quite cover the plot at all, for not only is The Souvenir a film about a young artist who is inspired, derailed and ultimately strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is also partly a coming-of-age drama, a subtle portrait of class and, finally, a film about the making of a film. Still, one of the geniuses of this truly heartbreaking movie is that none of these many elements crowds out the other. It never, ever feels rushed. Indeed, there are many scenes where the camera simply 'sits there' and quietly observes what is going on. Other films might smother themselves through references to 18th-century oil paintings, but The Souvenir somehow evades this too. And there's a certain ring of credibility to the story as well, no doubt in part due to the fact it is based on director Joanna Hogg's own experiences at film school. A beautifully observed and multi-layered film; I'll be happy if the sequel is one-half as good.

The Wrestler (2008) Randy 'The Ram' Robinson is long past his prime, but he is still rarin' to go in the local pro-wrestling circuit. Yet after a brutal beating that seriously threatens his health, Randy hangs up his tights and pursues a serious relationship... and even tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter. But Randy can't resist the lure of the ring, and readies himself for a comeback. The stage is thus set for Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which is essentially about what drives Randy back to the ring. To be sure, Randy derives much of his money from wrestling as well as his 'fitness', self-image, self-esteem and self-worth. Oh, it's no use insisting that wrestling is fake, for the sport is, needless to say, Randy's identity; it's not for nothing that this film is called The Wrestler. In a number of ways, The Sound of Metal (2019) is both a reaction to (and a quiet remake of) The Wrestler, if only because both movies utilise 'cool' professions to explore such questions of identity. But perhaps simply when The Wrestler was produced makes it the superior film. Indeed, the role of time feels very important for the Wrestler. In the first instance, time is clearly taking its toll on Randy's body, but I felt it more strongly in the sense this was very much a pre-2008 film, released on the cliff-edge of the global financial crisis, and the concomitant precarity of the 2010s. Indeed, it is curious to consider that you couldn't make The Wrestler today, although not because the relationship to work has changed in any fundamentalway. (Indeed, isn't it somewhat depressing the realise that, since the start of the pandemic and the 'work from home' trend to one side, we now require even more people to wreck their bodies and mental health to cover their bills?) No, what I mean to say here is that, post-2016, you cannot portray wrestling on-screen without, how can I put it, unwelcome connotations. All of which then reminds me of Minari's notorious red hat... But I digress. The Wrestler is a grittily stark darkly humorous look into the life of a desperate man and a sorrowful world, all through one tragic profession.

Thief (1981) Frank is an expert professional safecracker and specialises in high-profile diamond heists. He plans to use his ill-gotten gains to retire from crime and build a life for himself with a wife and kids, so he signs on with a top gangster for one last big score. This, of course, could be the plot to any number of heist movies, but Thief does something different. Similar to The Wrestler and The Driver (see above) and a number of other films that I watched this year, Thief seems to be saying about our relationship to work and family in modernity and postmodernity. Indeed, the 'heist film', we are told, is an understudied genre, but part of the pleasure of watching these films is said to arise from how they portray our desired relationship to work. In particular, Frank's desire to pull off that last big job feels less about the money it would bring him, but a displacement from (or proxy for) fulfilling some deep-down desire to have a family or indeed any relationship at all. Because in theory, of course, Frank could enter into a fulfilling long-term relationship right away, without stealing millions of dollars in diamonds... but that's kinda the entire point: Frank needing just one more theft is an excuse to not pursue a relationship and put it off indefinitely in favour of 'work'. (And being Federal crimes, it also means Frank cannot put down meaningful roots in a community.) All this is communicated extremely subtly in the justly-lauded lowkey diner scene, by far the best scene in the movie. The visual aesthetic of Thief is as if you set The Warriors (1979) in a similarly-filthy Chicago, with the Xenophon-inspired plot of The Warriors replaced with an almost deliberate lack of plot development... and the allure of The Warriors' fantastical criminal gangs (with their alluringly well-defined social identities) substituted by a bunch of amoral individuals with no solidarity beyond the immediate moment. A tale of our time, perhaps. I should warn you that the ending of Thief is famously weak, but this is a gritty, intelligent and strangely credible heist movie before you get there.

Uncut Gems (2019) The most exhausting film I've seen in years; the cinematic equivalent of four cups of double espresso, I didn't even bother even trying to sleep after downing Uncut Gems late one night. Directed by the two Safdie Brothers, it often felt like I was watching two films that had been made at the same time. (Or do I mean two films at 2X speed?) No, whatever clumsy metaphor you choose to adopt, the unavoidable effect of this film's finely-tuned chaos is an uncompromising and anxiety-inducing piece of cinema. The plot follows Howard as a man lost to his countless vices mostly gambling with a significant side hustle in adultery, but you get the distinct impression he would be happy with anything that will give him another high. A true junkie's junkie, you might say. You know right from the beginning it's going to end in some kind of disaster, the only question remaining is precisely how and what. Portrayed by an (almost unrecognisable) Adam Sandler, there's an uncanny sense of distance in the emotional chasm between 'Sandler-as-junkie' and 'Sandler-as-regular-star-of-goofy-comedies'. Yet instead of being distracting and reducing the film's affect, this possibly-deliberate intertextuality somehow adds to the masterfully-controlled mayhem. My heart races just at the memory. Oof.

Woman in the Dunes (1964) I ended up watching three films that feature sand this year: Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Woman in the Dunes. But it is this last 1964 film by Hiroshi Teshigahara that will stick in my mind in the years to come. Sure, there is none of the Medician intrigue of Dune or the Super Panavision-70 of Lawrence of Arabia (or its quasi-orientalist score, itself likely stolen from Anton Bruckner's 6th Symphony), but Woman in the Dunes doesn't have to assert its confidence so boldly, and it reveals the enormity of its plot slowly and deliberately instead. Woman in the Dunes never rushes to get to the film's central dilemma, and it uncovers its terror in little hints and insights, all whilst establishing the daily rhythm of life. Woman in the Dunes has something of the uncanny horror as Dogtooth (see above), as well as its broad range of potential interpretations. Both films permit a wide array of readings, without resorting to being deliberately obscurantist or being just plain random it is perhaps this reason why I enjoyed them so much. It is true that asking 'So what does the sand mean?' sounds tediously sophomoric shorn of any context, but it somehow applies to this thoughtfully self-contained piece of cinema.

A Quiet Place (2018) Although A Quiet Place was not actually one of the best films I saw this year, I'm including it here as it is certainly one of the better 'mainstream' Hollywood franchises I came across. Not only is the film very ably constructed and engages on a visceral level, I should point out that it is rare that I can empathise with the peril of conventional horror movies (and perhaps prefer to focus on its cultural and political aesthetics), but I did here. The conceit of this particular post-apocalyptic world is that a family is forced to live in almost complete silence while hiding from creatures that hunt by sound alone. Still, A Quiet Place engages on an intellectual level too, and this probably works in tandem with the pure 'horrorific' elements and make it stick into your mind. In particular, and to my mind at least, A Quiet Place a deeply American conservative film below the surface: it exalts the family structure and a certain kind of sacrifice for your family. (The music often had a passacaglia-like strain too, forming a tombeau for America.) Moreover, you survive in this dystopia by staying quiet that is to say, by staying stoic suggesting that in the wake of any conflict that might beset the world, the best thing to do is to keep quiet. Even communicating with your loved ones can be deadly to both of you, so not emote, acquiesce quietly to your fate, and don't, whatever you do, speak up. (Or join a union.) I could go on, but The Quiet Place is more than this. It's taut and brief, and despite cinema being an increasingly visual medium, it encourages its audience to develop a new relationship with sound.

7 January 2022

Ayoyimika Ajibade: Everyone Struggles

Starting anything new always has in it an element of uncertainty, doubt, fears, and struggle to forge ahead, this has been my current situation as an outreachy intern working on the transition of nodejs16 and webpack5 which is about updating all packages that depend on nodejs14 and webpack4 to work well with the updated version of nodejs16 and webpack5 in the Debian operations system. Juicy right! As a software developer struggling to grasp both basic and advanced knowledge of a concept can seem daunting, much like learning anything new, you can be overwhelmed when you are surrounded and know there is a whole lot of other new concept, tools, process, languages you have to learn that are linked to what you are currently learning, as you are struggling to grasp the fundamental idea of what you are currently learning. imbued in any struggle to get a solution to the problem is where innovation and inventions lie in, and our learning becomes improved as we dive into fact-finding, getting your hypothesis after a series of tests and ultimately proffering a solution Some of my struggles as I intern with Debian has been lack of skill of the shell scripting language as that is one of the core languages to understand so as to navigate your way around maintaining packages for Debian, also funny enough having just an intermediate knowledge of the javascript programming language as arguably having a basic knowledge of javascript is necessary to building and testing javascript packages in Debian as I know only the basic of javascript since my core language is Python, that I struggle with. The good thing is that the more I keep at it the faster the chance of the struggles reducing Now to the fun part! having a community of developers who have been through the struggling phase is divine, as they make your learning experience much easier, my mentors and other community member have made learning to package modules for Debian much easier as all hands are on deck to always help out with our challenges. I remember it felt so wonderful when my first contribution got merged and I became more encouraged to update more packages. These helped me a lot in the contribution stage for Debian as I better familiar with how the system worked. I m super grateful to my mentors and co-intern as they are always there to assist me.

How I Navigate my way through my struggles I guess the first thing about any challenge is to be aware of it and admit your limitations of particular knowledge, then you move on to creatively seek solutions by asking for help from those who know the way. Voila! Now comes the part where you have to take up their solutions, ideas, opinions and make it work for your particular case scenario that is a skill set that all Software developers must-have. Going through documentation has immensely helped solve my problems much faster and build new knowledge, as I get the fundamental idea of why and how things work. I also try to break each concept down into steps, achieve my goals for each step, then build all solutions in each step together, surfing the internet to find solutions also has a huge benefit.

Vocabulary terms Used in Debian
  1. uscan => a tool to identify and download upstream source code from the repository, also compressing it into the required format.
  2. apt => a package manager to manage packages in Debian, similar to pip in python, npm in javascript.
  3. stretch/buster/bullseye/bookworm/sid => old old stable Debian9 - The codename for the release before the previous stable release (stretch). old stable Debian10 - The previous stable release (Buster). stable Debian11 - The current stable release (Bullseye). testing Debian12 - The next-generation stable release (Bookworm). unstable - The unstable development release (Sid) where new or updated packages are introduced. To understand more on debian release cycle
  4. reverse-rebuild => is building all modules that depend on a package in Debian while building the main package.
  5. lintian => A helper tool used to check for inconsistencies and errors in a Debian Package based on Debian standards.
  6. pkg-js-tools => A collection of tools to aid packaging Node modules in Debian.
  7. dpkg-buildpackage => A command to build upstream code in an unclean chroot or environment.
  8. quilt => A patch creation and management automation script. quilt helps manage a series of patches that a Debian package maintainer needs to be applied to upstream source when building the package.
  9. autopkgtest => a script used to test an installed binary package using the source package's tests
  10. RFS => (Request For Sponsorship) Working in the Debian ecosystem includes two roles either as a Debian Maintainer with restricted rights and privileges like uploading to the Debian archive or as a Debian Developer with all rights and privileges such as uploading to the Debian archive, as a new contributor or a Debian maintainer (with few rights and privileges) in Debian you can RFS so that your pull request (PR) can be merged to the Debian archive by a Debian Developer, much like your contribution has been accepted
There are so many terms and tools you have to get accustomed to, but they are easy to understand and use, as enough and frequently updated wiki documentation are available to guide you through, plus a whole lot of community members you can ask questions from. strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle. Napoleon Hill

1 January 2022

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2021: Classics

In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction and fiction I enjoyed in 2021. But in the last of my 2021 book-related posts, however, I'll be going over my favourite classics. Of course, the difference between regular fiction and a 'classic' is an ambiguous, arbitrary and often-meaningless distinction: after all, what does it matter if Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (from 1951) is a classic or not? The term also smuggles in some of the ethnocentric gatekeeping encapsulated in the term 'Western canon' too. Nevertheless, the label of 'classic' has some utility for me in that it splits up the vast amount of non-fiction I read in two... Books that just missed the cut here include: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (moody and hilarious, but I cannot bring myself to include it due to the egregious antisemitism); Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (so angry! so funny!); and finally Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Of significant note, though, would be the ghostly The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Heart of Darkness (1899) Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness tells the story of Charles Marlow, a sailor who accepts an assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in the African interior, and the novella is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa. Loosely remade by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now (1979), I started this book with the distinct possibility that this superb film adaptation would, for a rare treat, be 'better than the book'. However, Conrad demolished this idea of mine within two chapters, yet also elevated the film to a new level as well. This was chiefly due to how observant Conrad was of the universals that make up human nature. Some of his insight pertains to the barbarism of the colonialists, of course, but Conrad applies his shrewd acuity to the at the smaller level as well. Some of these quotes are justly famous: Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares, for example, as well as the reference to a fastidiously turned-out colonial administrator who, with unimaginable horrors occurring mere yards from his tent, we learn he was devoted to his books, which were in applepie order . (It seems to me to be deliberately unclear whether his devotion arises from gross inhumanity, utter denial or some combination of the two.) Oh, and there's a favourite moment of mine when a character remarks that It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting. Tired of resting! Yes, it's difficult to now say something original about a many-layered classic such as this, especially one that has analysed from so many angles already; from a literary perspective at first, of course, but much later from a critical postcolonial perspective, such as in Chinua Achebe's noted 1975 lecture, An Image of Africa. Indeed, the history of criticism in the twentieth century of Heart of Darkness must surely parallel the social and political developments in the Western world. (On a highly related note, the much-cited non-fiction book King Leopold's Ghost is on my reading list for 2022.) I will therefore limit myself to saying that the boat physically falling apart as it journeys deeper into the Congo may be intended to represent that our idea of 'Western civilisation' ceases to function, both morally as well as physically, in this remote environment. And, whilst I'm probably not the first to notice the potential ambiguity, when Marlow lies to Kurtz's 'Intended [wife]' in the closing section in order to save her from being exposed to the truth about Kurtz (surely a metaphor about the ignorance of the West whilst also possibly incorporating some comment on gender?), the Intended replies: I knew it. For me, though, it is not beyond doubt that what the Intended 'knows' is that she knew that Marlow would lie to her: in other words, that the alleged ignorance of everyday folk in the colonial homeland is studied and deliberate. Compact and fairly easy-to-read, it is clear that Heart of Darkness rewards even the most rudimentary analysis.

Rebecca (1938) Daphne du Maurier Daphne du Maurier creates in Rebecca a credible and suffocating atmosphere in the shape of Manderley, a grand English mansion owned by aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter. Our unnamed narrator (a young woman seemingly na ve in the ways of the world) meets Max in Monte Carlo, and she soon becomes the second Mrs. de Winter. The tale takes a turn to the 'gothic', though, when it becomes apparent that the unemotional Max, as well as potentially Manderley itself, appears to be haunted by the memory of his late first wife, the titular Rebecca. Still, Rebecca is less of a story about supernatural ghosts than one about the things that can haunt our minds. For Max, this might be something around guilt; for our narrator, the class-centered fear that she will never fit in. Besides, Rebecca doesn't need an actual ghost when you have Manderley's overbearing housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, surely one of the creepiest characters in all of fiction. Either way, the conflict of a kind between the fears of the protagonists means that they never really connect with each other. The most obvious criticism of Rebecca is that the main character is unreasonably weak and cannot quite think or function on her own. (Isn't it curious that the trait of the male 'everyman' is a kind of physical clumsiness yet the female equivalent is shorthanded by being slightly slow?) But the na vete of Rebecca's narrator makes her easier to relate to in a way, and it also makes the reader far more capable of empathising with her embarrassment. This is demonstrated best whilst she, in one of the best evocations of this particular anxiety I have yet come across, is gingerly creeping around Manderlay and trying to avoid running into the butler. A surprise of sorts comes in the latter stages of the book, and this particular twist brings us into contact with a female character who is anything but 'credulous'. This revelation might even change your idea of who the main character of this book really is too. (Speaking of amateur literary criticism, I have many fan theories about Rebecca, including that Maxim de Winter's estate manager, Frank Crawley, is actually having an affair with Max, and also that Maxim may have a lot more involvement in Mrs Danvers final act that he lets on.) An easily accessible novel (with a great-but-not-perfect 1940 adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca is a real indulgence.

A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess One of Stanley Kubrick's most prominent tricks was to use different visual languages in order to prevent the audience from immediately grasping the underlying story. In his 1975 Barry Lyndon, for instance, the intentionally sluggish pacing and elusive characters require significant digestion to fathom and appreciate, and the luminous and quasi-Renaissance splendour of the cinematography does its part to constantly distract the viewer from the film's greater meaning. This is very much the case in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as well whilst it ostensibly appears to be about a Saturnalia of violence, the 'greater meaning' of A Clockwork Orange pertains to the Christian conception of free will; admittedly, a much drier idea to bother making a film around. This is all made much clearer when reading Anthony Burgess' 1962 original novel. Alex became a 'true Christian' through the experimental rehabilitation process, and even offers to literally turn the other cheek at one point. But as Alex had no choice to do so (and can no longer choose to commit violence), he is incapable of making a free moral choice. Thus, is he really a Man? Yet whilst the book's central concern is our conception of free will in modern societies, it also appears to be a repudiation of two conservative principles. Firstly, A Clockwork Orange demolishes the idea that 'high art' leads to morally virtuous citizens. After all, if you can do a bit of the old ultra-violence whilst listening to the glorious 9th by old Ludvig van, then so much for the oft-repeated claims that culture makes you better as a person. (This, at least, I already knew from personal experience.) The other repudiation in A Clockwork Orange is in regard to the pervasive idea that the countryside is a refuge from crime and sin. By contrast, we see the gang commit their most horrific violence in rural areas, and, later, Alex is taken to the countryside by his former droogs for a savage beating. Although this doesn't seem to quite fit the novel, this was actually an important point for Burgess to include: otherwise his book could easily be read as a commentary on the corrupting influence of urban spaces, rather than of modernity itself. The language of this book cannot escape comment here. Alex narrates most of the book in a language called Nadsat, a fractured slang constructed by Burgess based on Russian and Cockney rhyming slang. (The language is strange for only a few pages, I promise. And note that 'Alex' is a very common Russian name.) Using Nadsat has the effect of making the book feel distinctly alien, but it also prevents it from prematurely aging too. Indeed, it comes as bit of a shock to realise that A Clockwork Orange was published 1962, the same year as The Beatles' released their first single, Love Me Do. I could probably say a whole lot more about this thoroughly engrossing book and its movie adaptation (eg. the meta-textual line in Kubrick's version: It's funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen... appears verbatim in the textual original), but I'll leave it there. The book of A Clockwork Orange is not only worth the investment in the language, but is, again, somehow better than the film.

The Great Gatsby (1925) F. Scott Fitzgerald I'm actually being a little deceitful by including this book here: I cannot really say that The Great Gatsby was a 'favourite' read of the year, but its literary merit is so undeniable (and my respect for Fitzgerald's achievement is deep enough) that the experience was one of those pleasures you feel at seeing anything done well. Here you have a book so rich in symbolic meaning that you could easily confuse the experience with drinking Coke syrup undiluted. And a text that has made the difficulty and complexity of reading character a prominent theme of the novel, as well as a technical concern of the book itself. Yet at all times you have in your mind that The Great Gatsby is first and foremost a book about a man writing a book, and, therefore, about the construction of stories and myths. What is the myth being constructed in Gatsby? The usual answer today is that the book is really about the moral virtues of America. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Indeed, as James Boice wrote in 2016:
Could Wilson have killed Gatsby any other way? Could he have ran him over, or poisoned him, or attacked him with a knife? Not at all this an American story, the quintessential one, so Gatsby could have only died the quintessential American death.
The quintessential American death is, of course, being killed with a gun. Whatever your own analysis, The Great Gatsby is not only magnificently written, but it is captivating to the point where references intrude many months later. For instance, when reading something about Disney's 'princess culture', I was reminded of when Daisy says of her daughter: I hope she'll be a fool that's the best thing of a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool . Or the billboard with the eyes of 'Doctor T. J. Eckleburg'. Or the fact that the books in Gatsby's library have never been read (so what is 'Owl Eyes' doing there during the party?!). And the only plain room in Gatsby's great house is his bedroom... Okay, fine, I must have been deluding myself: I love this novel.

31 December 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2021: Fiction

In my two most recent posts, I listed the memoirs and biographies and followed this up with the non-fiction I enjoyed the most in 2021. I'll leave my roundup of 'classic' fiction until tomorrow, but today I'll be going over my favourite fiction. Books that just miss the cut here include Kingsley Amis' comic Lucky Jim, Cormac McCarthy's The Road (although see below for McCarthy's Blood Meridian) and the Complete Adventures of Tintin by Herg , the latter forming an inadvertently incisive portrait of the first half of the 20th century. Like ever, there were a handful of books that didn't live up to prior expectations. Despite all of the hype, Emily St. John Mandel's post-pandemic dystopia Station Eleven didn't match her superb The Glass Hotel (one of my favourite books of 2020). The same could be said of John le Carr 's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which felt significantly shallower compared to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy again, a favourite of last year. The strangest book (and most difficult to classify at all) was undoubtedly Patrick S skind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and the non-fiction book I disliked the most was almost-certainly Beartown by Fredrik Bachman. Two other mild disappointments were actually film adaptions. Specifically, the original source for Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac didn't match Alfred Hitchock's 1958 masterpiece, as did James Sallis' Drive which was made into a superb 2011 neon-noir directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. These two films thus defy the usual trend and are 'better than the book', but that's a post for another day.

A Wizard of Earthsea (1971) Ursula K. Le Guin How did it come to be that Harry Potter is the publishing sensation of the century, yet Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea is only a popular cult novel? Indeed, the comparisons and unintentional intertextuality with Harry Potter are entirely unavoidable when reading this book, and, in almost every respect, Ursula K. Le Guin's universe comes out the victor. In particular, the wizarding world that Le Guin portrays feels a lot more generous and humble than the class-ridden world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Just to take one example from many, in Earthsea, magic turns out to be nurtured in a bottom-up manner within small village communities, in almost complete contrast to J. K. Rowling's concept of benevolent government departments and NGOs-like institutions, which now seems a far too New Labour for me. Indeed, imagine an entire world imbued with the kindly benevolence of Dumbledore, and you've got some of the moral palette of Earthsea. The gently moralising tone that runs through A Wizard of Earthsea may put some people off:
Vetch had been three years at the School and soon would be made Sorcerer; he thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
Still, these parables aimed directly at the reader are fairly rare, and, for me, remain on the right side of being mawkish or hectoring. I'm thus looking forward to reading the next two books in the series soon.

Blood Meridian (1985) Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian follows a band of American bounty hunters who are roaming the Mexican-American borderlands in the late 1840s. Far from being remotely swashbuckling, though, the group are collecting scalps for money and killing anyone who crosses their path. It is the most unsparing treatment of American genocide and moral depravity I have ever come across, an anti-Western that flouts every convention of the genre. Blood Meridian thus has a family resemblance to that other great anti-Western, Once Upon a Time in the West: after making a number of gun-toting films that venerate the American West (ie. his Dollars Trilogy), Sergio Leone turned his cynical eye to the western. Yet my previous paragraph actually euphemises just how violent Blood Meridian is. Indeed, I would need to be a much better writer (indeed, perhaps McCarthy himself) to adequately 0utline the tone of this book. In a certain sense, it's less than you read this book in a conventional sense, but rather that you are forced to witness successive chapters of grotesque violence... all occurring for no obvious reason. It is often said that books 'subvert' a genre and, indeed, I implied as such above. But the term subvert implies a kind of Puck-like mischievousness, or brings to mind court jesters licensed to poke fun at the courtiers. By contrast, however, Blood Meridian isn't funny in the slightest. There isn't animal cruelty per se, but rather wanton negligence of another kind entirely. In fact, recalling a particular passage involving an injured horse makes me feel physically ill. McCarthy's prose is at once both baroque in its language and thrifty in its presentation. As Philip Connors wrote back in 2007, McCarthy has spent forty years writing as if he were trying to expand the Old Testament, and learning that McCarthy grew up around the Church therefore came as no real surprise. As an example of his textual frugality, I often looked for greater precision in the text, finding myself asking whether who a particular 'he' is, or to which side of a fight some two men belonged to. Yet we must always remember that there is no precision to found in a gunfight, so this infidelity is turned into a virtue. It's not that these are fair fights anyway, or even 'murder': Blood Meridian is just slaughter; pure butchery. Murder is a gross understatement for what this book is, and at many points we are grateful that McCarthy spares us precision. At others, however, we can be thankful for his exactitude. There is no ambiguity regarding the morality of the puppy-drowning Judge, for example: a Colonel Kurtz who has been given free license over the entire American south. There is, thank God, no danger of Hollywood mythologising him into a badass hero. Indeed, we must all be thankful that it is impossible to film this ultra-violent book... Indeed, the broader idea of 'adapting' anything to this world is, beyond sick. An absolutely brutal read; I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Bodies of Light (2014) Sarah Moss Bodies of Light is a 2014 book by Glasgow-born Sarah Moss on the stirrings of women's suffrage within an arty clique in nineteenth-century England. Set in the intellectually smoggy cities of Manchester and London, this poignant book follows the studiously intelligent Alethia 'Ally' Moberly who is struggling to gain the acceptance of herself, her mother and the General Medical Council. You can read my full review from July.

House of Leaves (2000) Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves is a remarkably difficult book to explain. Although the plot refers to a fictional documentary about a family whose house is somehow larger on the inside than the outside, this quotidian horror premise doesn't explain the complex meta-commentary that Danielewski adds on top. For instance, the book contains a large number of pseudo-academic footnotes (many of which contain footnotes themselves), with references to scholarly papers, books, films and other articles. Most of these references are obviously fictional, but it's the kind of book where the joke is that some of them are not. The format, structure and typography of the book is highly unconventional too, with extremely unusual page layouts and styles. It's the sort of book and idea that should be a tired gimmick but somehow isn't. This is particularly so when you realise it seems specifically designed to create a fandom around it and to manufacturer its own 'cult' status, something that should be extremely tedious. But not only does this not happen, House of Leaves seems to have survived through two exhausting decades of found footage: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are, to an admittedly lesser degree, doing much of the same thing as House of Leaves. House of Leaves might have its origins in Nabokov's Pale Fire or even Derrida's Glas, but it seems to have more in common with the claustrophobic horror of Cube (1997). And like all of these works, House of Leaves book has an extremely strange effect on the reader or viewer, something quite unlike reading a conventional book. It wasn't so much what I got out of the book itself, but how it added a glow to everything else I read, watched or saw at the time. An experience.

Milkman (2018) Anna Burns This quietly dazzling novel from Irish author Anna Burns is full of intellectual whimsy and oddball incident. Incongruously set in 1970s Belfast during The Irish Troubles, Milkman's 18-year-old narrator (known only as middle sister ), is the kind of dreamer who walks down the street with a Victorian-era novel in her hand. It's usually an error for a book that specifically mention other books, if only because inviting comparisons to great novels is grossly ill-advised. But it is a credit to Burns' writing that the references here actually add to the text and don't feel like they are a kind of literary paint by numbers. Our humble narrator has a boyfriend of sorts, but the figure who looms the largest in her life is a creepy milkman an older, married man who's deeply integrated in the paramilitary tribalism. And when gossip about the narrator and the milkman surfaces, the milkman beings to invade her life to a suffocating degree. Yet this milkman is not even a milkman at all. Indeed, it's precisely this kind of oblique irony that runs through this daring but darkly compelling book.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014) Claire North Harry August is born, lives a relatively unremarkable life and finally dies a relatively unremarkable death. Not worth writing a novel about, I suppose. But then Harry finds himself born again in the very same circumstances, and as he grows from infancy into childhood again, he starts to remember his previous lives. This loop naturally drives Harry insane at first, but after finding that suicide doesn't stop the quasi-reincarnation, he becomes somewhat acclimatised to his fate. He prospers much better at school the next time around and is ultimately able to make better decisions about his life, especially when he just happens to know how to stay out of trouble during the Second World War. Yet what caught my attention in this 'soft' sci-fi book was not necessarily the book's core idea but rather the way its connotations were so intelligently thought through. Just like in a musical theme and varations, the success of any concept-driven book is far more a product of how the implications of the key idea are played out than how clever the central idea was to begin with. Otherwise, you just have another neat Borges short story: satisfying, to be sure, but in a narrower way. From her relatively simple premise, for example, North has divined that if there was a community of people who could remember their past lives, this would actually allow messages and knowledge to be passed backwards and forwards in time. Ah, of course! Indeed, this very mechanism drives the plot: news comes back from the future that the progress of history is being interfered with, and, because of this, the end of the world is slowly coming. Through the lives that follow, Harry sets out to find out who is passing on technology before its time, and work out how to stop them. With its gently-moralising romp through the salient historical touchpoints of the twentieth century, I sometimes got a whiff of Forrest Gump. But it must be stressed that this book is far less certain of its 'right-on' liberal credentials than Robert Zemeckis' badly-aged film. And whilst we're on the topic of other media, if you liked the underlying conceit behind Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle yet didn't enjoy the 'variations' of that particular tale, then I'd definitely give The First Fifteen Lives a try. At the very least, 15 is bigger than 7. More seriously, though, The First Fifteen Lives appears to reflect anxieties about technology, particularly around modern technological accelerationism. At no point does it seriously suggest that if we could somehow possess the technology from a decade in the future then our lives would be improved in any meaningful way. Indeed, precisely the opposite is invariably implied. To me, at least, homo sapiens often seems to be merely marking time until we can blow each other up and destroying the climate whilst sleepwalking into some crisis that might precipitate a thermonuclear genocide sometimes seems to be built into our DNA. In an era of cli-fi fiction and our non-fiction newspaper headlines, to label North's insight as 'prescience' might perhaps be overstating it, but perhaps that is the point: this destructive and negative streak is universal to all periods of our violent, insecure species.

The Goldfinch (2013) Donna Tartt After Breaking Bad, the second biggest runaway success of 2014 was probably Donna Tartt's doorstop of a novel, The Goldfinch. Yet upon its release and popular reception, it got a significant number of bad reviews in the literary press with, of course, an equal number of predictable think pieces claiming this was sour grapes on the part of the cognoscenti. Ah, to be in 2014 again, when our arguments were so much more trivial. For the uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman that centres on Theo Decker, a 13-year-old whose world is turned upside down when a terrorist bomb goes off whilst visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, killing his mother among other bystanders. Perhaps more importantly, he makes off with a painting in order to fulfil a promise to a dying old man: Carel Fabritius' 1654 masterpiece The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years (and almost 800 pages), the painting becomes the only connection to his lost mother as he's flung, almost entirely rudderless, around the Western world, encountering an array of eccentric characters. Whatever the critics claimed, Tartt's near-perfect evocation of scenes, from the everyday to the unimaginable, is difficult to summarise. I wouldn't label it 'cinematic' due to her evocation of the interiority of the characters. Take, for example: Even the suggestion that my father had close friends conveyed a misunderstanding of his personality that I didn't know how to respond it's precisely this kind of relatable inner subjectivity that cannot be easily conveyed by film, likely is one of the main reasons why the 2019 film adaptation was such a damp squib. Tartt's writing is definitely not 'impressionistic' either: there are many near-perfect evocations of scenes, even ones we hope we cannot recognise from real life. In particular, some of the drug-taking scenes feel so credibly authentic that I sometimes worried about the author herself. Almost eight months on from first reading this novel, what I remember most was what a joy this was to read. I do worry that it won't stand up to a more critical re-reading (the character named Xandra even sounds like the pharmaceuticals she is taking), but I think I'll always treasure the first days I spent with this often-beautiful novel.

Beyond Black (2005) Hilary Mantel Published about five years before the hyperfamous Wolf Hall (2004), Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black is a deeply disturbing book about spiritualism and the nature of Hell, somewhat incongruously set in modern-day England. Alison Harte is a middle-aged physic medium who works in the various towns of the London orbital motorway. She is accompanied by her stuffy assistant, Colette, and her spirit guide, Morris, who is invisible to everyone but Alison. However, this is no gentle and musk-smelling world of the clairvoyant and mystic, for Alison is plagued by spirits from her past who infiltrate her physical world, becoming stronger and nastier every day. Alison's smiling and rotund persona thus conceals a truly desperate woman: she knows beyond doubt the terrors of the next life, yet must studiously conceal them from her credulous clients. Beyond Black would be worth reading for its dark atmosphere alone, but it offers much more than a chilling and creepy tale. Indeed, it is extraordinarily observant as well as unsettlingly funny about a particular tranche of British middle-class life. Still, the book's unnerving nature that sticks in the mind, and reading it noticeably changed my mood for days afterwards, and not necessarily for the best.

The Wall (2019) John Lanchester The Wall tells the story of a young man called Kavanagh, one of the thousands of Defenders standing guard around a solid fortress that envelopes the British Isles. A national service of sorts, it is Kavanagh's job to stop the so-called Others getting in. Lanchester is frank about what his wall provides to those who stand guard: the Defenders of the Wall are conscripted for two years on the Wall, with no exceptions, giving everyone in society a life plan and a story. But whilst The Wall is ostensibly about a physical wall, it works even better as a story about the walls in our mind. In fact, the book blends together of some of the most important issues of our time: climate change, increasing isolation, Brexit and other widening societal divisions. If you liked P. D. James' The Children of Men you'll undoubtedly recognise much of the same intellectual atmosphere, although the sterility of John Lanchester's dystopia is definitely figurative and textual rather than literal. Despite the final chapters perhaps not living up to the world-building of the opening, The Wall features a taut and engrossing narrative, and it undoubtedly warrants even the most cursory glance at its symbolism. I've yet to read something by Lanchester I haven't enjoyed (even his short essay on cheating in sports, for example) and will be definitely reading more from him in 2022.

The Only Story (2018) Julian Barnes The Only Story is the story of Paul, a 19-year-old boy who falls in love with 42-year-old Susan, a married woman with two daughters who are about Paul's age. The book begins with how Paul meets Susan in happy (albeit complicated) circumstances, but as the story unfolds, the novel becomes significantly more tragic and moving. Whilst the story begins from the first-person perspective, midway through the book it shifts into the second person, and, later, into the third as well. Both of these narrative changes suggested to me an attempt on the part of Paul the narrator (if not Barnes himself), to distance himself emotionally from the events taking place. This effect is a lot more subtle than it sounds, however: far more prominent and devastating is the underlying and deeply moving story about the relationship ends up. Throughout this touching book, Barnes uses his mastery of language and observation to avoid the saccharine and the maudlin, and ends up with a heart-wrenching and emotive narrative. Without a doubt, this is the saddest book I read this year.

30 December 2021

Chris Lamb: Favourite books of 2021: Non-fiction

As a follow-up to yesterday's post listing my favourite memoirs and biographies I read in 2021, today I'll be outlining my favourite works of non-fiction. Books that just missed the cut include: The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell for its thrilleresque narrative of a modern-day Robin Hood (and if you get to the end, a completely unexpected twist); Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide to the American Status System as an amusing chaser of sorts to Kate Fox's Watching the English; John Carey's Little History of Poetry for its exhilarating summation of almost four millennia of verse; David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for numerous historical insights, not least its rejoinder to our dangerously misleading view of ancient barter systems; and, although I didn't treasure everything about it, I won't hesitate to gift Pen Vogler's Scoff to a number of friends over the next year. The weakest book of non-fiction I read this year was undoubtedly Roger Scruton's How to Be a Conservative: I much preferred The Decadent Society for Ross Douthat for my yearly ration of the 'intellectual right'. I also very much enjoyed reading a number of classic texts from academic sociology, but they are difficult to recommend or even summarise. These included One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. 'These are heavy books', remarks John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible... All round-up posts for 2021: Memoir/biography, Non-fiction (this post) & Fiction (coming soon).

Hidden Valley Road (2020) Robert Kolker A compelling and disturbing account of the Galvin family six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia which details a journey through the study and misunderstanding of the condition. The story of the Galvin family offers a parallel history of the science of schizophrenia itself, from the era of institutionalisation, lobotomies and the 'schizo mother', to the contemporary search for genetic markers for the disease... all amidst fundamental disagreements about the nature of schizophrenia and, indeed, of all illnesses of the mind. Samples of the Galvins' DNA informed decades of research which, curiously, continues to this day, potentially offering paths to treatment, prediction and even eradication of the disease, although on this last point I fancy that I detect a kind of neo-Victorian hubris that we alone will be the ones to find a cure. Either way, a gentle yet ultimately tragic view of a curiously 'American' family, where the inherent lack of narrative satisfaction brings a frustration and sadness of its own.

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021) Cat Flyn In this disarmingly lyrical book, Cat Flyn addresses the twin questions of what happens after humans are gone and how far can our damage to nature be undone. From the forbidden areas of post-war France to the mining regions of Scotland, Islands of Abandonment explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live in an attempt to give us a glimpse into what happens when mankind's impact on nature is, for one reason or another, forced to stop. Needless to say, if anxieties in this area are not curdling away in your subconscious mind, you are probably in some kind of denial. Through a journey into desolate, eerie and ravaged areas in the world, this artfully-written study offers profound insights into human nature, eschewing the usual dry sawdust of Wikipedia trivia. Indeed, I summed it up to a close friend remarking that, through some kind of hilarious administrative error, the book's publisher accidentally dispatched a poet instead of a scientist to write this book. With glimmers of hope within the (mostly) tragic travelogue, Islands of Abandonment is not only a compelling read, but also a fascinating insight into the relationship between Nature and Man.

The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) Robert O. Paxton Everyone is absolutely sure they know what fascism is... or at least they feel confident choosing from a buffet of features to suit the political mood. To be sure, this is not a new phenomenon: even as 'early' as 1946, George Orwell complained in Politics and the English Language that the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable . Still, it has proved uncommonly hard to define the core nature of fascism and what differentiates it from related political movements. This is still of great significance in the twenty-first century, for the definition ultimately determines where the powerful label of 'fascist' can be applied today. Part of the enjoyment of reading this book was having my own cosy definition thoroughly dismantled and replaced with a robust system of abstractions and common themes. This is achieved through a study of the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome and Paris. Moreover, unlike Strongmen (see above), fascisms that failed to gain meaningful power are analysed too, including Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Curiously enough, Paxton's own definition of fascism is left to the final chapter, and by the time you reach it, you get an anti-climatic feeling of it being redundant. Indeed, whatever it actually is, fascism is really not quite like any other 'isms' at all, so to try and classify it like one might be a mistake. In his introduction, Paxton warns that many of those infamous images associated with fascism (eg. Hitler in Triumph of the Will, Mussolini speaking from a balcony, etc.) have the ability to induce facile errors about the fascist leader and the apparent compliance of the crowd. (Contemporary accounts often record how sceptical the common man was of the leader's political message, even if they were transfixed by their oratorical bombast.) As it happens, I thus believe I had something of an advantage of reading this via an audiobook, and completely avoided re-absorbing these iconic images. To me, this was an implicit reminder that, however you choose to reduce it to a definition, fascism is undoubtedly the most visual of all political forms, presenting itself to us in vivid and iconic primary images: ranks of disciplined marching youths, coloured-shirted militants beating up members of demonised minorities; the post-war pictures from the concentration camps... Still, regardless of you choose to read it, The Anatomy of Fascism is a powerful book that can teach a great deal about fascism in particular and history in general.

What Good are the Arts? (2005) John Carey What Good are the Arts? takes a delightfully sceptical look at the nature of art, and cuts through the sanctimony and cant that inevitably surrounds them. It begins by revealing the flaws in lofty aesthetic theories and, along the way, debunks the claims that art makes us better people. They may certainly bring joy into your life, but by no means do the fine arts make you automatically virtuous. Carey also rejects the entire enterprise of separating things into things that are art and things that are not, making a thoroughly convincing case that there is no transcendental category containing so-called 'true' works of art. But what is perhaps equally important to what Carey is claiming is the way he does all this. As in, this is an extremely enjoyable book to read, with not only a fine sense of pace and language, but a devilish sense of humour as well. To be clear, What Good are the Arts? it is no crotchety monograph: Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art? (1897) is hilarious to read in similar ways, but you can't avoid feeling its cantankerous tone holds Tolstoy's argument back. By contrast, Carey makes his argument in a playful sort of manner, in a way that made me slightly sad to read other polemics throughout the year. It's definitely not that modern genre of boomer jeremiad about the young, political correctness or, heaven forbid, 'cancel culture'... which, incidentally, made Carey's 2014 memoir, The Unexpected Professor something of a disappointing follow-up. Just for fun, Carey later undermines his own argument by arguing at length for the value of one art in particular. Literature, Carey asserts, is the only art capable of reasoning and the only art with the ability to criticise. Perhaps so, and Carey spends a chapter or so contending that fiction has the exclusive power to inspire the mind and move the heart towards practical ends... or at least far better than any work of conceptual art. Whilst reading this book I found myself taking down innumerable quotations and laughing at the jokes far more than I disagreed. And the sustained and intellectual style of polemic makes this a pretty strong candidate for my favourite overall book of the year.

28 December 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: Out of Office

Review: Out of Office, by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright: 2021
ISBN: 0-593-32010-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 260
Out of Office opens with the provocative assertion that you were not working from home during the pandemic, even if you were among the 42% of Americans who were able to work remotely.
You were, quite literally, doing your job from home. But you weren't working from home. You were laboring in confinement and under duress. Others have described it as living at work. You were frantically tapping out an email while trying to make lunch and supervise distance learning. You were stuck alone in a cramped apartment for weeks, unable to see friends or family, exhausted, and managing a level of stress you didn't know was possible. Work became life, and life became work. You weren't thriving. You were surviving.
The stated goal of this book is to reclaim the concept of working from home, not only from the pandemic, but also from the boundary-destroying metastasis of work into non-work life. It does work towards that goal, but the description of what would be required for working from home to live up to its promise becomes a sweeping critique of the organization and conception of work, leaving it nearly as applicable to those who continue working from an office. Turns out that the main problem with working from home is the work part, not the "from home" part. This was a fascinating book to read in conjunction with A World Without Email. Warzel and Petersen do the the structural and political analysis that I sometimes wish Newport would do more of, but as a result offer less concrete advice. Both, however, have similar diagnoses of the core problems of the sort of modern office work that could be done from home: it's poorly organized, poorly managed, and desperately inefficient. Rather than attempting to fix those problems, which is difficult, structural, and requires thought and institutional cooperation, we're compensating by working more. This both doesn't work and isn't sustainable. Newport has a background in productivity books and a love of systems and protocols, so his focus in A World Without Email is on building better systems of communication and organization of work. Warzel and Petersen come from a background of reporting and cultural critique, so they put more focus on power imbalances and power-serving myths about the American dream. Where Newport sees an easy-to-deploy ad hoc work style that isn't fit for purpose, Warzel and Petersen are more willing to point out intentional exploitation of workers in the guise of flexibility. But they arrive at some similar conclusions. The way office work is organized is not leading to more productivity. Tools like Slack encourage the public performance of apparent productivity at the cost of the attention and focus required to do meaningful work. And the process is making us miserable. Out of Office is, in part, a discussion of what would be required to do better work with less stress, but it also shares a goal with Newport and some (but not most) corners of productivity writing: spend less time and energy on work. The goal of Out of Office is not to get more work done. It's to work more efficiently and sustainably and thus work less. To reclaim the promise of flexibility so that it benefits the employee and not the employer. To recognize, in the authors' words, that the office can be a bully, locking people in to commute schedules and unnatural work patterns, although it also provides valuable moments of spontaneous human connection. Out of Office tries to envision a style of work that includes the office sometimes, home sometimes, time during the day to attend to personal chores or simply to take a mental break from an unnatural eight hours (or more) of continuous focus, universal design, real worker-centric flexibility, and an end to the constant productivity ratchet where faster work simply means more work for the same pay. That's a lot of topics for a short book, and structurally this is a grab bag. Some sections will land and some won't. Loom's video messages sound like a nightmare to me, and I rolled my eyes heavily at the VR boosterism, reluctant as it may be. The section on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) was a valiant effort that at least gestures towards the dismal track record of most such efforts, but still left me unconvinced that anyone knows how to improve diversity in an existing organization without far more brute-force approaches than anyone with power is usually willing to consider. But there's enough here, and the authors move through topics quickly enough, that a section that isn't working for you will soon be over. And some of the sections that do work are great. For example, the whole discussion of management.
Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what David Graeber would call a "bullshit job." But that's because bad management is a waste; you're paying someone more money to essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as "just the way it is," the less they're going to value management in general.
I admit to a lot of confirmation bias here, since I've been ranting about this for years, but management must be the most wide-spread professional job for which we ignore both training and capability and assume that anyone who can do any type of useful work can also manage people doing that work. It's simply not true, it creates workplaces full of horrible management, and that in turn creates a deep and unhelpful cynicism about all management. There is still a tendency on the left to frame this problem in terms of class struggle, on the reasonable grounds that for decades under "scientific management" of manufacturing that's what it was. Managers were there to overwork workers and extract more profits for the owners, and labor unions were there to fight back against managers. But while some of this does happen in the sort of office work this book is focused on, I think Warzel and Petersen correctly point to a different cause.
"The reason she was underpaid on the team was not because her boss was cackling in the corner. It was because nobody told the boss it was their responsibility to look at the fucking spreadsheet."
We don't train managers, we have no clear expectations for what managers should do, we don't meaningfully measure their performance, we accept a high-overhead and high-chaos workstyle based on ad hoc one-to-one communication that de-emphasizes management, and many managers have never seen good management and therefore have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. The management problem for many office workers is less malicious management than incompetent management, or simply no effective management at all apart from an occasional reorg and a complicated and mind-numbing annual review form. The last section of this book (apart from concluding letters to bosses and workers) is on community, and more specifically on extracting time and energy from work (via the roadmap in previous chapters) and instead investing it in the people around you. Much ink has been spilled about the collapse of American civic life, about how we went from a nation of joiners to a nation of isolated individual workers with weak and failing community institutions. Warzel and Petersen correctly lay some blame for this at the foot of work, and see the reorganization of work and an increase in work from home (and thus a decrease in commutes) as an opportunity to reverse that trend. David Brooks recently filled in for Ezra Klein on his podcast and talked with University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, which I listened to shortly after reading this book. In one segment, they talked about marriage and complained about the decline in marriage rates. They were looking for causes in people's moral upbringing, in their life priorities, in the lack of aspiration for permanence in kids these days, and in any other personal or moral failing that would allow them to be smugly judgmental. It was a truly remarkable thing to witness. Neither man at any point in the conversation mentioned either money or time. Back in the world most Americans live in, real wages have been stagnant for decades, student loan debt is skyrocketing as people desperately try to keep up with the ever-shifting requirements for a halfway-decent job, and work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, even for people who don't have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Employers have fully embraced a "flexible" workforce via layoffs, micro-optimizing work scheduling, eliminating benefits, relying on contract and gig labor, and embracing exceptional levels of employee turnover. The American worker has far less of money, time, and stability, three important foundations for marriage and family as well as participation in most other civic institutions. People like Brooks and Kass stubbornly cling to their feelings of moral superiority instead of seeing a resource crisis. Work has stolen the resources that people previously put into those other areas of their life. And it's not even using those resources effectively. That's, in a way, a restatement of the topic of this book. Our current way of organizing work is not sustainable, healthy, or wise. Working from home may be part of a strategy for changing it. The pandemic has already heavily disrupted work, and some of those changes, including increased working from home, seem likely to stick. That provides a narrow opportunity to renegotiate our arrangement with work and try to make those changes stick. I largely agree with the analysis, but I'm pessimistic. I think the authors are as well. We're very bad at social change, and there will be immense pressure for everything to go "back to normal." Those in the best bargaining position to renegotiate work for themselves are not in the habit of sharing that renegotiation with anyone else. But I'm somewhat heartened by how much public discussion there currently is about a more fundamental renegotiation of the rules of office work. I'm also reminded of a deceptively profound aphorism from economist Herbert Stein: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." This book is a bit uneven and is more of a collection of related thoughts than a cohesive argument, but if you are hungry for more worker-centric analyses of the dynamics of office work (inside or outside the office), I think it's worth reading. Rating: 7 out of 10

15 December 2021

Dirk Eddelbuettel: nanotime 0.3.5 on CRAN: Update

Another (minor) nanotime release, now at version 0.3.5, just arrived at CRAN. It follows the updates RDieHarder 0.2.3 and RcppCCTZ 0.2.10 earlier today in bringing a patch kindly prepared by Tomas Kalibera for the upcoming (and very useful) UCRT changes for Windows involving small build changes for the updated Windows toolchain. nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package for (efficient) high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations. The NEWS snippet adds more details.

Changes in version 0.3.5 (2021-12-14)
  • Applied patch by Tomas Kalibera for Windows UCRT under the upcoming R 4.2.0 expected for April.

Thanks to my CRANberries there is also a diff to the previous version. More details and examples are at the nanotime page; code, issue tickets etc at the GitHub repository. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

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