Scarlett Gately Moore: Kubuntu: Noble Numbat Beta available! Qt6 snaps coming soon.
I was looking over the list of live music I'd seen this year and realised that
avante-garde composer William Basinski was actually last year and I had
forgotten to write about it!
In November 2022, Basinski headlined a night of performances which otherwise
featured folk from the venue's "Arists in Residence" programme, with some
affiliation to Newcastle's DIY music
scene.
Unfortunately we arrived too late to catch any of the other acts: partly
because of the venue's sometimes doggiest insistence that people can only
enter or leave the halls during intervals, and partly because the building
works surrounding it had made the southern entrance effectively closed, so
we had to walk to the north side of the building to get in1.
Basinski was performing work from Lamentations. Basinski himself presented
very unexpectedly to how I imagined him: he's got the Texas drawl, mediated
through a fair amount of time spent in New York; very camp, in a glittery
top; he kicked off the gig complaining about how tired he was, before a mini
rant about the state of the world, riffing on a title from the album: Please,
This Shit Has Got To Stop.
We were in Hall 1, the larger of the two, and it was sparsely attended; a
few people walked out mid performance. My gig-buddy Rob (a useful barometer
for me on how things have gone) remarked that it was one of the most unique
and unusual gigs he'd been to. I recognised snatches of the tracks from the
album, but I'm hard-placed to name or sequence them, and they flowed into
each other. I don't know how much of what we were hearing was "live" or
what, if anything, was being decided during the performance, but Basinski's
set-up included what looked like archaic tape equipment, with exposed loops
of tape running between spools that could be interfered with by other tools.
The encore was a unique, unreleased mix of Melancholia
(II),
which (making no apologies) Basinski hit play on before retiring backstage.
I didn't take any photos. From memory, I think the venue had specifically
stated filming or photos were not allowed for this performance. People at prior
shows in New York and London filmed some of their shows; which were
substantially similar: I've included embeds of them above.
Lots of Basinski's work is on Bandcamp; the three pieces I particularly
enjoy are Lamentations,
Lamentations by William Basinski
On Time Out of Time,
On Time Out of Time by William Basinski
and his best-known work,
The Disintegration Loops.
The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski
| Publisher: | W.W. Norton & Company |
| Copyright: | 2023 |
| ISBN: | 1-324-07434-5 |
| Format: | Kindle |
| Pages: | 255 |
Welcome to the June 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project
In our reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
We are very happy to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit which set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023, in the vibrant city of Hamburg, Germany.
Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens.
If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page] which has more details about the event and location. (You may also be interested in attending PackagingCon 2023 held a few days before in Berlin.)
This month, Vagrant Cascadian will present at FOSSY 2023 on the topic of Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust:
Corrupted build environments can deliver compromised cryptographically signed binaries. Several exploits in critical supply chains have been demonstrated in recent years, proving that this is not just theoretical. The most well secured build environments are still single points of failure when they fail. [ ] This talk will focus on the state of the art from several angles in related Free and Open Source Software projects, what works, current challenges and future plans for building trustworthy toolchains you do not need to trust.Hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy and taking place in Portland, Oregon, FOSSY aims to be a community-focused event: Whether you are a long time contributing member of a free software project, a recent graduate of a coding bootcamp or university, or just have an interest in the possibilities that free and open source software bring, FOSSY will have something for you . More information on the event is available on the FOSSY 2023 website, including the full programme schedule.
Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, William Enck, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar recently published an academic paper in the 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy titled It s like flossing your teeth: On the Importance and Challenges of Reproducible Builds for Software Supply Chain Security . The abstract reads as follows:
The 2020 Solarwinds attack was a tipping point that caused a heightened awareness about the security of the software supply chain and in particular the large amount of trust placed in build systems. Reproducible Builds (R-Bs) provide a strong foundation to build defenses for arbitrary attacks against build systems by ensuring that given the same source code, build environment, and build instructions, bitwise-identical artifacts are created.However, in contrast to other papers that touch on some theoretical aspect of reproducible builds, the authors paper takes a different approach. Starting with the observation that much of the software industry believes R-Bs are too far out of reach for most projects and conjoining that with a goal of to help identify a path for R-Bs to become a commonplace property , the paper has a different methodology:
We conducted a series of 24 semi-structured expert interviews with participants from the Reproducible-Builds.org project, and iterated on our questions with the reproducible builds community. We identified a range of motivations that can encourage open source developers to strive for R-Bs, including indicators of quality, security benefits, and more efficient caching of artifacts. We identify experiences that help and hinder adoption, which heavily include communication with upstream projects. We conclude with recommendations on how to better integrate R-Bs with the efforts of the open source and free software community.A PDF of the paper is now available, as is an entry on the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security website and an entry under the TeamUSEC Human-Centered Security research group.
comp.unix.programming. Larry notes that it starts with Jayan asking about comparing binaries that might have difference in their embedded timestamps (that is, perhaps, Foreshadowing diffoscope, amiright? ) and goes on to observe that:
The antagonist is David Schwartz, who correctly says There are dozens of complex reasons why what seems to be the same sequence of operations might produce different end results, but goes on to say I totally disagree with your general viewpoint that compilers must provide for reproducability [sic]. Dwight Tovey and I (Larry Doolittle) argue for reproducible builds. I assert Any program especially a mission-critical program like a compiler that cannot reproduce a result at will is broken. Also it s commonplace to take a binary from the net, and check to see if it was trojaned by attempting to recreate it from source.
SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ], Chris Lamb made it easier to parse our summit announcement at a glance [ ], Mattia Rizzolo added the summit announcement at a glance [ ] itself [ ][ ][ ] and Rahul Bajaj added a taxonomy of variations in build environments [ ].
27 reviews of Debian packages were added, 40 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_mkdocs toolchain issue was added by Chris Lamb [ ], and the deterministic flag on the paths_vary_due_to_usrmerge issue as we are not currently testing usrmerge issues [ ] issues.
bullseye, bookworm, trixie and sid , but he also mentioned amongst many changes that not only are the non-free images being built (and are reproducible) but that the live images are generated officially by Debian itself. [ ]
CFLAGS environment variable. [ ]
F-Droid added 21 new reproducible apps in June, resulting in a new record of 145 reproducible apps in total. [ ]. (This page now sports missing data for March May 2023.) F-Droid contributors also reported an issue with broken resources in APKs making some builds unreproducible. [ ]
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE
bcachefs (sort find / filesys)build-compare (reports files as identical)build-time (toolchain date)cockpit (merged, gzip mtime)gcc13 (gcc13 toolchain LTO parallelism)ghc-rpm-macros (toolchain parallelism)golangcli-lint (date)gutenprint (date+time)mage (date (golang))mumble (filesys)pcr (date)python-nss (drop sphinx .doctrees)python310 (merged, bisected+backported)warpinator (merged, date)xroachng (date)elinks.multipath-tools.mkdocstrings-python-handlers.fribidi.jtreg7.python-bitstring (forwarded upstream).gradle-kotlin-dsl.libsdl-console.kawari8.freetds.gbrowse.bglibs.advi.afterstep.simstring.manderlbot.erlang-proper.comedilib.libint.newlib.binutils-msp430.c-munipack.python-marshmallow-sqlalchemy.mplayer.menu.mini-buildd.pnetcdf.liblopsub.wcc.shotcut.icu.libapache-poi-java.atf.valgrind.
The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In June, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:
amd64, armhf, and i386 architectures to Debian bookworm, with the exception of the Jenkins host itself which will be upgraded after the release of Debian 12.1. In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the email configuration for the @reproducible-builds.org domain to correctly accept incoming mails from jenkins.debian.net [ ] as well as to set up DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signing [ ]. And working together with Holger, Mattia also updated the Jenkins configuration to start testing Debian trixie which resulted in stopped testing Debian buster. And, finally, Jan-Benedict Glaw contributed patches for improved NetBSD testing.
#reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org
This isn't a book review, although the reason that I am typing this now is
because of a book, You Are Not Alone: from the creator and host of
Griefcast, Cariad Lloyd, ISBN: 978-1526621870 and I include a handful of
quotes from Cariad where there is really no better way of describing things.
Many people experience death for the first time as a child, often relating to a
family pet. Death is universal but every experience of death is unique. One of
the myths of grief is the idea of the Five Stages but this is a
misinterpretation. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance
represent the five stage model of death and have nothing to do with
grief. The five stages were developed from studying those who are
terminally ill, the dying, not those who then grieve for the dead person and
have to go on living without them. Grief is for those who loved the person who
has died and it varies between each of those people just as people vary in how
they love someone. The Five Stages end at the moment of death, grief is what
comes next and most people do not grieve in stages, it can be more like a
tangled knot.
Death has a date and time, so that is why the last stage of the model is
Acceptance. Grief has no timetable, those who grieve will carry that grief for
the rest of their lives. Death starts the process of grief in those who go on
living just as it ends the life of the person who is loved. "Grief eases and
changes and returns but it never disappears.".
I suspect many will have already stopped reading by this point. People do not
talk about death and grief enough and this only adds to the burden of those who
carry their grief. It can be of enormous comfort to those who have carried
grief for some time to talk directly about the dead, not in vague pleasantries
but with specific and strong memories. Find a safe place without distractions
and talk with the person grieving face to face. Name the dead person. Go to
places with strong memories and be there alongside. Talk about the times with
that person before their death. Early on, everything about grief is painful and
sad. It does ease but it remains unpredictable. Closing it away in a box inside
your head (as I did at one point) is like cutting off a damaged limb but
keeping the pain in a box on the shelf. You still miss the limb and eventually,
the box starts leaking.
For me, there were family pets which died but my first job out of university
was to work in hospitals, helping the nurses manage the medication regimen and
providing specialist advice as a pharmacist. It will not be long in that
environment before everyone on the ward gets direct experience of the death of
a person. In some ways, this helped me to separate the process of death from
the process of grief. I cared for these people as patients but these were not
my loved ones. Later, I worked in specialist terminal care units, including
providing potential treatments as part of clinical trials. Here, it was not
expected for any patient to be discharged alive. The more aggressive
chemotherapies had already been tried and had failed, this was about pain
relief, symptom management and helping the loved ones. Palliative care is not
just about the patient, it involves helping the loved ones to accept what is
happening as this provides comfort to the patient by closing the loop.
Grief is stressful. One of the most common causes of personal stress is
bereavement.
The death of your loved one is outside of your control, it has happened, no
amount of regret can change that. Then come all the other stresses, maybe about
money or having somewhere to live as a result of what else has changed after
the death or having to care for other loved ones.
In the early stages, the first two years, I found it helpful to imagine my life
as a box containing a ball and a button. The button triggers new waves of pain
and loss each time it is hit. The ball bounces around the box and hits the
button at random. Initially, the button is large and the ball is enormous, so
the button is hit almost constantly. Over time, both the button and the ball
change size. Starting off at maximum, initially there is only one direction of
change. There are two problems with this analogy. First is that the grief ball
has infinite energy which does not happen in reality. The ball may get smaller
and the button harder to hit but the ball will continue bouncing. Secondly, the
life box is not a predictable shape, so the pattern of movement of the ball is
unpredictable.
A single stress is one thing, but what has happened since has just kept adding
more stress for me. Shortly before my father died 5 years ago now, I had moved
house. Then, I was made redundant on the day of the first anniversary of my
father's death. A year or so later, my long term relationship failed and a few
months after that COVID-19 appeared. As the country eased out of the pandemic
in 2021, my mother died (unrelated to COVID itself). A year after that, I had
to take early retirement. My brother and sister, of course, share a lot of
those stressors. My brother, in particular, took the responsibility for
organising both funerals and did most of the visits to my mother before her
death. The grief is different for each of the surviving family.
Cariad's book helped me understand why I was getting frequent ideas about going
back to visit places which my father and I both knew. My parents encouraged
each of us to work hard to leave Port Talbot (or Pong Toilet locally) behind,
in no small part due to the unrestrained pollution and deprivation that is
common to small industrial towns across Wales, the midlands and the north of
the UK. It wasn't that I wanted to move house back to our ancestral roots. It
was my grief leaking out of the box. Yes, I long for mountains and the sea
because I'm now living in a remorselessly flat and landlocked region after
moving here for employment. However, it was my grief driving those longings -
not for the physical surroundings but out of the shared memories with my
father. I can visit those memories without moving house, I just need to arrange
things so that I can be undisturbed and undistracted.
I am not alone with my grief and I am grateful to my friends who have helped
whilst carrying their own grief. It is necessary for everyone to think and talk
about death and grief. In respect of your own death, no matter how far ahead
that may be, consider Advance Care Planning and Expressions of Wish as well
as your Will.
Help your loved ones cope with your death by describing what you would like to happen.
Document how your life has been arranged so that the executor of your Will can find the right documents to inform:
- your bank,
- your mortgage company,
- your energy company,
- your mobile phone company,
- your house and car insurers and the like.
If you've got a complex home setup with servers and other machines which would be unfamiliar to the executor of your Will, then entrust someone else with the information required to revoke your keys, access your machines etc. and then provide the contact information for that person to your executor.
Arrange for your pets to be looked after.
Describe how you would like your belongings to be handled - do you want every effort made to have your clothes and furnishing recycled instead of going to landfill?
Where are the documents for the oven, the dishwasher and the central heating system so that these can be included in the sale of your property?
If there are loans outstanding, make sure your executor or a trusted person knows where to find the account numbers and company names.
What about organ donation? Make sure your executor knows your wishes and make sure your loved ones either agree or are willing to respect your wishes.
Then the personal stuff, what do you want to happen to your social media accounts, your cloud data, your games, DVD and CD collection, your photos and other media? Some social media companies have explicit settings available in your account to describe if you want the data deleted after a certain amount of time, after a notification from some government service or to set up some kind of memorialised version or hand over control of the account to a trusted person.
Anti-EV poster by Toyota
:wq for today.
Very few highly-anticipated movies appear in January and February, as the bigger releases are timed so they can be considered for the Golden Globes in January and the Oscars in late February or early March, so film fans have the advantage of a few weeks after the New Year to collect their thoughts on the year ahead. In other words, I'm not actually late in outlining below the films I'm most looking forward to in 2023...
Barbie No, seriously! If anyone can make a good film about a doll franchise, it's probably Greta Gerwig. Not only was Little Women (2019) more than admirable, the same could be definitely said for Lady Bird (2017). More importantly, I can't help feel she was the real 'Driver' behind Frances Ha (2012), one of the better modern takes on Claudia Weill's revelatory Girlfriends (1978). Still, whenever I remember that Barbie will be a film about a billion-dollar toy and media franchise with a nettlesome history, I recall I rubbished the "Facebook film" that turned into The Social Network (2010). Anyway, the trailer for Barbie is worth watching, if only because it seems like a parody of itself.
Blitz It's difficult to overstate just how important the aerial bombing of London during World War II is crucial to understanding the British psyche, despite it being a constructed phenomenon from the outset. Without wishing to underplay the deaths of over 40,000 civilian deaths, Angus Calder pointed out in the 1990s that the modern mythology surrounding the event "did not evolve spontaneously; it was a propaganda construct directed as much at [then neutral] American opinion as at British." It will therefore be interesting to see how British Grenadian Trinidadian director Steve McQueen addresses a topic so essential to the British self-conception. (Remember the controversy in right-wing circles about the sole Indian soldier in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017)?) McQueen is perhaps best known for his 12 Years a Slave (2013), but he recently directed a six-part film anthology for the BBC which addressed the realities of post-Empire immigration to Britain, and this leads me to suspect he sees the Blitz and its surrounding mythology with a more critical perspective. But any attempt to complicate the story of World War II will be vigorously opposed in a way that will make the recent hullabaloo surrounding The Crown seem tame. All this is to say that the discourse surrounding this release may be as interesting as the film itself.
Dune, Part II Coming out of the cinema after the first part of Denis Vileneve's adaptation of Dune (2021), I was struck by the conception that it was less of a fresh adaptation of the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert than an attempt to rehabilitate David Lynch's 1984 version and in a broader sense, it was also an attempt to reestablish the primacy of cinema over streaming TV and the myriad of other distractions in our lives. I must admit I'm not a huge fan of the original novel, finding within it a certain prurience regarding hereditary military regimes and writing about them with a certain sense of glee that belies a secret admiration for them... not to mention an eyebrow-raising allegory for the Middle East. Still, Dune, Part II is going to be a fantastic spectacle.
Ferrari It'll be curious to see how this differs substantially from the recent Ford v Ferrari (2019), but given that Michael Mann's Heat (1995) so effectively re-energised the gangster/heist genre, I'm more than willing to kick the tires of this about the founder of the eponymous car manufacturer. I'm in the minority for preferring Mann's Thief (1981) over Heat, in part because the former deals in more abstract themes, so I'd have perhaps prefered to look forward to a more conceptual film from Mann over a story about one specific guy.
How Do You Live There are a few directors one can look forward to watching almost without qualification, and Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke Howl's Moving Castle, etc.) is one of them. And this is especially so given that The Wind Rises (2013) was meant to be the last collaboration between Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Let's hope he is able to come out of retirement in another ten years.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Given I had a strong dislike of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), I seriously doubt I will enjoy anything this film has to show me, but with 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark remaining one of my most treasured films (read my brief homage), I still feel a strong sense of obligation towards the Indiana Jones name, despite it feeling like the copper is being pulled out of the walls of this franchise today.
Kafka I only know Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland through her Spoor (2017), an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk's 2009 eco-crime novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I wasn't an unqualified fan of Spoor (nor the book on which it is based), but I am interested in Holland's take on the life of Czech author Franz Kafka, an author enmeshed with twentieth-century art and philosophy, especially that of central Europe. Holland has mentioned she intends to tell the story "as a kind of collage," and I can hope that it is an adventurous take on the over-furrowed biopic genre. Or perhaps Gregor Samsa will awake from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a huge verminous biopic.
The Killer It'll be interesting to see what path David Fincher is taking today, especially after his puzzling and strangely cold Mank (2020) portraying the writing process behind Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). The Killer is said to be a straight-to-Netflix thriller based on the graphic novel about a hired assassin, which makes me think of Fincher's Zodiac (2007), and, of course, Se7en (1995). I'm not as entranced by Fincher as I used to be, but any film with Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton (with a score by Trent Reznor) is always going to get my attention.
Killers of the Flower Moon In Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese directs an adaptation of a book about the FBI's investigation into a conspiracy to murder Osage tribe members in the early years of the twentieth century in order to deprive them of their oil-rich land. (The only thing more quintessentially American than apple pie is a conspiracy combined with a genocide.) Separate from learning more about this disquieting chapter of American history, I'd love to discover what attracted Scorsese to this particular story: he's one of the few top-level directors who have the ability to lucidly articulate their intentions and motivations.
Napoleon It often strikes me that, despite all of his achievements and fame, it's somehow still possible to claim that Ridley Scott is relatively underrated compared to other directors working at the top level today. Besides that, though, I'm especially interested in this film, not least of all because I just read Tolstoy's War and Peace (read my recent review) and am working my way through the mind-boggling 431-minute Soviet TV adaptation, but also because several auteur filmmakers (including Stanley Kubrick) have tried to make a Napoleon epic and failed.
Oppenheimer In a way, a biopic about the scientist responsible for the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project seems almost perfect material for Christopher Nolan. He can certainly rely on stars to queue up to be in his movies (Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh, etc.), but whilst I'm certain it will be entertaining on many fronts, I fear it will fall into the well-established Nolan mould of yet another single man struggling with obsession, deception and guilt who is trying in vain to balance order and chaos in the world.
The Way of the Wind Marked by philosophical and spiritual overtones, all of Terrence Malick's films are perfumed with themes of transcendence, nature and the inevitable conflict between instinct and reason. My particular favourite is his stunning Days of Heaven (1978), but The Thin Red Line (1998) and A Hidden Life (2019) also touched me ways difficult to relate, and are one of the few films about the Second World War that don't touch off my sensitivity about them (see my remarks about Blitz above). It is therefore somewhat Malickian that his next film will be a biblical drama about the life of Jesus. Given Malick's filmography, I suspect this will be far more subdued than William Wyler's 1959 Ben-Hur and significantly more equivocal in its conviction compared to Paolo Pasolini's ardently progressive The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). However, little beyond that can be guessed, and the film may not even appear until 2024 or even 2025.
Zone of Interest I was mesmerised by Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2013), and there is much to admire in his borderline 'revisionist gangster' film Sexy Beast (2000), so I will definitely be on the lookout for this one. The only thing making me hesitate is that Zone of Interest is based on a book by Martin Amis about a romance set inside the Auschwitz concentration camp. I haven't read the book, but Amis has something of a history in his grappling with the history of the twentieth century, and he seems to do it in a way that never sits right with me. But if Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (1997) proves anything at all, it's all in the adaption.
| Series: | Discworld #25 |
| Publisher: | Harper |
| Copyright: | November 2000 |
| Printing: | August 2014 |
| ISBN: | 0-06-230736-3 |
| Format: | Mass market |
| Pages: | 435 |
The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise. For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.The dwarfs used the lead to make a movable type printing press, which is about to turn William de Worde's small-scale, hand-crafted newsletter into a newspaper. The movable type printing press is not unknown technology. It's banned technology, because the powers that be in Ankh-Morpork know enough to be deeply suspicious of it. The religious establishment doesn't like it because words are too important and powerful to automate. The nobles and the Watch don't like it because cheap words cause problems. And the engraver's guild doesn't like it for obvious reasons. However, Lord Vetinari knows that one cannot apply brakes to a volcano, and commerce with the dwarfs is very important to the city. The dwarfs can continue. At least for now. As in Moving Pictures, most of The Truth is an idiosyncratic speedrun of the social effects of a new technology, this time newspapers. William has no grand plan; he's just an observant man who likes to write, cares a lot about the truth, and accidentally stumbles into editing a newspaper. (This, plus being an estranged son of a rich family, feels very on-point for journalism.) His naive belief is that people want to read true things, since that's what his original patrons wanted. Truth, however, may not be in the top five things people want from a newspaper. This setup requires some narrative force to push it along, which is provided by a plot to depose Vetinari by framing him for murder. The most interesting part of that story is Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, the people hired to do the framing and then dispose of the evidence. They're a classic villain type: the brains and the brawn, dangerous, terrifying, and willing to do horrible things to people. But one thing Pratchett excels at is taking a standard character type, turning it a bit sideways, and stuffing in things that one wouldn't think would belong. In this case, that's Mr. Tulip's deep appreciation for, and genius grasp of, fine art. It should not work to have the looming, awful person with anger issues be able to identify the exact heritage of every sculpture and fine piece of goldsmithing, and yet somehow it does. Also as in Moving Pictures (and, in a different way, Soul Music), Pratchett tends to anthropomorphize technology, giving it a life and motivations of its own. In this case, that's William's growing perception of the press as an insatiable maw into which one has to feed words. I'm usually dubious of shifting agency from humans to things when doing social analysis (and there's a lot of social analysis here), but I have to concede that Pratchett captures something deeply true about the experience of feedback loops with an audience. A lot of what Pratchett puts into this book about the problematic relationship between a popular press and the truth is obvious and familiar, but he also makes some subtle points about the way the medium shapes what people expect from it and how people produce content for it that are worthy of Marshall McLuhan. The interactions between William and the Watch were less satisfying. In our world, the US press is, with only rare exceptions, a thoughtless PR organ for police propaganda and the exonerative tense. Pratchett tackles that here... sort of. William vaguely grasps that his job as a reporter may be contrary to the job of the Watch to maintain order, and Vimes's ambivalent feelings towards "solving crimes" push the story in that direction. But this is also Vimes, who is clearly established as one of the good sort and therefore is a bad vehicle for talking about how the police corrupt the press. Pratchett has Vimes and Vetinari tacitly encourage William, which works within the story but takes the pressure off the conflict and leaves William well short of understanding the underlying politics. There's a lot more that could be said about the tension between the press and the authorities, but I think the Discworld setup isn't suitable for it. This is the sort of book that benefits from twenty-four volumes of backstory and practice. Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork cast ticks along like a well-oiled machine, which frees up space that would otherwise have to be spent on establishing secondary characters. The result is a lot of plot and social analysis shoved into a standard-length Discworld novel, and a story that's hard to put down. The balance between humor and plot is just about perfect, the references and allusions aren't overwhelming, and the supporting characters, both new and old, are excellent. We even get a good Death sequence. This is solid, consistent stuff: Discworld as a mature, well-developed setting with plenty of stories left to tell. Followed by Thief of Time in publication order, and later by Monstrous Regiment in the vaguely-connected industrial revolution sequence. Rating: 8 out of 10
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Desde de setembro de 2015, o
time de publicidade
do Projeto Debian passou a publicar a cada dois meses
listas com os nomes dos(as) novos(as)
Desenvolvedores(as) Debian (DD - do
ingl s Debian Developer) e
Mantenedores(as) Debian
(DM - do ingl s Debian Maintainer).
Estamos aproveitando estas listas para publicar abaixo os nomes dos(as)
brasileiros(as) que se tornaram Desenvolvedores(as) e Mantenedores(as) Debian a
partir de julho de 2015.
Desenvolvedores(as) Debian / Debian Developers / DDs:
Marcos Talau
Desde de setembro de 2015, o
time de publicidade
do Projeto Debian passou a publicar a cada dois meses
listas com os nomes dos(as) novos(as)
Desenvolvedores(as) Debian (DD - do
ingl s Debian Developer) e
Mantenedores(as) Debian
(DM - do ingl s Debian Maintainer).
Estamos aproveitando estas listas para publicar abaixo os nomes dos(as)
brasileiros(as) que se tornaram Desenvolvedores(as) e Mantenedores(as) Debian a
partir de julho de 2015.
Desenvolvedores(as) Debian / Debian Developers / DDs:
Marcos Talau
:wq for today.
TL;DR: firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change
this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below.
In my opinion, the way we deal with (non-free) firmware in Debian is a
mess, and this is hurting many of our users daily. For a long time
we've been pretending that supporting and including (non-free)
firmware on Debian systems is not necessary. We don't want to have
to provide (non-free) firmware to our users, and in an ideal world we
wouldn't need to. However, it's very clearly no longer a sensible path
when trying to support lots of common current hardware.
Background - why has (non-free) firmware become an issue?
Firmware is the low-level software that's designed to make
hardware devices work. Firmware is tightly coupled to the hardware,
exposing its features, providing higher-level functionality and
interfaces for other software to use. For a variety of reasons, it's
typically not Free Software.
For Debian's purposes, we typically separate firmware from
software by considering where the code executes (does it run on a
separate processor? Is it visible to the host OS?) but it can be
difficult to define a single reliable dividing line here. Consider the
Intel/AMD CPU microcode packages, or the U-Boot firmware packages as
examples.
In times past, all necessary firmware would normally be included
directly in devices / expansion cards by their vendors. Over time,
however, it has become more and more attractive (and therefore more
common) for device manufacturers to not include complete firmware
on all devices. Instead, some devices just embed a very simple set
of firmware that allows for upload of a more complete firmware "blob"
into memory. Device drivers are then expected to provide that blob
during device initialisation.
There are a couple of key drivers for this change:
I was reminded of this record over the weekend, as Radio 4's Front Row was
discussing the 50th anniversary of Kubrick's movie. To me, the
soundtrack has a strange, whimsical, almost cynical element to it (especially
with the selection of things like Pomp and Circumstance), but I was
familiar with the movie before the soundtrack and it might just be the
association that triggers those feelings.
Some Django applications use Model Mommy in unit tests:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-model-mommy
Upstream, model mommy has been renamed model bakery:
https://model-bakery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Model Bakery is a rename of the legacy model_mommy s project. This is because the project s creator and maintainers decided to not reinforce gender stereotypes for women in technology. You can read more about this subject hereHence: https://bugs.debian.org/1005114 and https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/python-model-bakery_1.4.0-1.html So this is a heads-up to all those using Debian for their Django unit tests. Model Mommy will no longer get updates upstream, so model mommy will not be able to support Django4. Updates will only be done, upstream, in the Model Bakery package which already supports Django4. Bakery is not a drop-in replacement. Model Bakery includes a helper script to migrate: https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/python-model-bakery/-/blob/master/utils/from_mommy_to_bakery.py This is being packaged in /usr/share/ in the upcoming python3-model-bakery package. It is a tad confusing that model-mommy is at version 1.6.0 but model-bakery is at version 1.4.0 but that only reinforces that Django apps using Model Mommy will need editing to move to Model Bakery. I'll be using the migration script for a Freexian Django app which currently uses Model Mommy. Once Model Bakery reaches bookworm, I plan to do a backport to bullseye. Then I'll file a bug against Model Mommy. Severity of that bug will be increased when Django4 enters unstable (the 4.0 dev release is currently in experimental but there is time before the 4.2 LTS is uploaded to unstable). https://packages.debian.org/experimental/python3-django Model Bakery is in NEW and Salsa Update: Django 4.2 LTS would be the first Django4 release in unstable.
Welcome to the 35th post in the ravishingly rabiant R recommendations, or R4. Today s post is about apt and R tools.
Many of us have been running RStudio off our local machines for as long as binaries have been provided. Which is by now probably a bit over a decade. Time flies.
And as nice it is to have matching binaries, in my case in the .deb format used on Debian or Ubuntu, it is wee bit a painful to manually download a file and then install it. Twice the pain if you are lucky enough to be on a system where you can also run RStudio Server. And now three times as painful as you may need a matching quarto-cli binary for the nice quarto service.
So wouldn t it be nice to have an apt-getable repo? And to autoMAGICall get updated versions when they are available? Oh yes. And I had been bugging JJ from day one. And JJ would almost listen intendly, nod briefly and firmly, and issue an assured we will look into it. Well, they are still looking
Luckily, years ago, Carl wrote a helper script for our use in Rocker. I promptly adopted these and kept them in the littler examples directory as a pair of script getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r, later complemented by getQuartoCli.r. And I used these for years, somewhere between weekly and monthly.
But it is still very manual: three script calls, one sudo dpkg -i call. And as our good friends at RStudio don t seem to be coming forward with a repo, I created one at GitHub thinking I could serve the files via GitHub Pages. Which of course I cannot as the .deb file for rstudio is well above the 100mb limit. So that seemed to be a bit of a setback. But after a bit of pondering, and recognizing that I am now in the fortunate position to have symmetric broadband access at home, I reckoned that until the bandwidth use gets excessive I will serve this as truly personal package archive (or tPPA) from here. Note that this is calibrated for my use so Ubuntu amd64 it is. Nothing else. And that it installs dailies . Which may cause issues for some people. You have warned. Reading tis paragraphs signifies agreement with the terms and limitations. Just kidding.
A quick screenshot from an update earlier is here. Note that I use the fabulous wajig wrapper by Graham Williams here as my frontend to apt, dpkg and more as I have for even longer than I have use RStudio. Its use is tangential here; sudo apt upgrade would have done the same (and is essentially being called). And it demonstrates the main benefit: we are now automated as the cron scheduler launches an update of the PPA at which ever frequency you chose (currently twice a week for me) and after that it becomes part of the normal apt updates we do anyway (and which I do about daily). So that s main gist: automated apt upgrades of rstudio, rstudio-server, and quarto-cli.
And you can find the underlying code in the GitHub repo ppa-rstudio which I put together a good week ago. I am currently updating the tPPA twice a week from crontab and have had two full upgrades already.
And who knows, maybe with a bid of prodding RStudio may come around. One can always hope.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can 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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