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Review: What Do You Care What Other People Think?, by Richard P. Feynman
| Told To | Ralph Leighton |
| Publisher | Bantam |
| Copyright | October 1988 |
| Printing | November 1989 |
| ISBN | 0-553-34784-5 |
| Format | Trade paperback |
| Pages | 248 |
What Do You Care What Other People Think? is a follow-up to the earlier Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, containing further stories told by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman to his friend Ralph Leighton. About half the book is taken up by a detailed history of Feynman's role in the investigation of the Challenger disaster; the rest is stories similar to the first book, some random letters, and a speech to the National Academy of Sciences.
According to Wikipedia, the first book was a surprise success and led to this sequel. I don't know how much credence to give this, but given the contents of the book it's entirely plausible. The first half feels like the rejects from Surely You're Joking. They're still interesting, but they're not as compelling or as coherent of a narrative as the earlier book. There's also a letter and drawing section that feels like padding and lacks the tight pacing of the stories.
One exception to this general decrease in quality, however, is the eponymous story, an account of Feynman's romance with his first wife up to her death from tuberculosis. It's quietly sweet and interestingly revealing. It's clear, even if not stated directly, that Feynman and his wife had a very close and unconventional relationship. She was dying from tuberculosis for almost their entire relationship, and they couldn't have much physical contact for fear of Feynman getting the disease. There are also hints that their relationship even before her illness fit Feynman's disregard for unjustified social rules (it was apparently somewhat open by mutual agreement, for instance). Despite this, they were obviously devoted to each other. Feynman doesn't get into many details, nor would that have been appropriate for the tone, but it's good to read about such a relationship presented in a positive light.
The strength of the book is the second half, the story of the Challenger investigation. It's an entertaining mix of Feynman's descriptions of his unconventional and impatient efforts to cut through bureaucracy and the details of how this sort of investigation happens. The first time I read this book, I was interested primarily in the scientific explanation for why the Challenger exploded, which this story conveys quite clearly. On this re-read, I was more interested by the obstacles and difficulties of a government investigation and the way presentation, record-keeping, and committee agreement interact with the attempt to find the truth. At first glance, this looks like a story of incompetent bureaucracy getting in Feynman's way, but Feynman shows it as more complex and trickier than that (and shows the role of the press in a surprisingly positive light).
The story also highlights the communication problems at NASA and some of the institutional brokenness that led to the accident, and has since led to other accidents. Here, Feynman covers ground also studied by Edward R. Tufte, critiquing the way scientific and engineering decisions are made and how communication works inside the organization. It's a sad account, but also an interesting example of pathologies of decision-making.
This book is neither as compelling nor as entertaining as Surely You're Joking, but if you liked the first book, it's worth looking for this one as well. It is, to a large extent, the rejects from the first book, but it shows a few more interesting angles of Feynman's life. The Challenger investigation story is food for thought about post-mortems, investigations, and how to do oversight while still letting smart people get to the truth. Recommended, but read Surely You're Joking first.
Rating: 7 out of 10
Review: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, by Richard P. Feynman
| Told To | Ralph Leighton |
| Editor | Edward Hutchings |
| Publisher | Bantam |
| Copyright | February 1985 |
| Printing | April 1989 |
| ISBN | 0-553-34668-7 |
| Format | Trade paperback |
| Pages | 317 |
Richard Feynman was a Nobel-prize-winning physicist best known for his alternative formulation of quantum mechanics and his work on quantum electrodynamics. Like many physicists of his generation, he also worked on the Manhattan Project to construct a nuclear bomb during World War II. Late in life, he became renowned for his participation in the panel investigating the Challenger disaster. He was also a professor at Caltech, where he won the highly prestigious Oersted Medal for teaching.
This is a book full of fascinating stories and adventures that for the most part fall into none of those categories, which is one of the most compelling things about Feynman. He's not only brilliant, he's eccentric, forthright, astonishingly self-confident, and compulsively curious about things that range far wider than his area of expertise.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman is an autobiography by anecdote. It leaves out much of the structure and framework of an autobiography and skims over what a conventional biography would treat as the meat of Feynman's career (much of the physics, much of his personal life, almost the entirety of his teaching career). Instead, reading it is like listening to Feynman tell funny stories and tall tales about his life. The book isn't horribly clear about authorship — it's based on taped stories related to and apparently written down by Robert Leighton, but was published while Feynman was still living and was presumably reviewed by him — but it communicates a clear voice and mischievous sense of humor.
The stories start with Feynman's childhood, when he figured out how to repair radios and made a reputation for himself doing so around the neighborhood, and run through his career at Caltech. The most memorable are probably the stories of the Manhattan Project, particularly his famous account of how he figured out how to crack the office safes used in the project and then made use of that later on several occasions to recover important files (as well as to play with people's heads). There are few weak stories, though; nearly every one is a gem. Many of them are accounts of how some topic piqued Feynman's curiosity, often with a dare or a challenge as extra incentive, and they're full of fascinating little experiments or practical applications of physics. Very little of it is the deep quantum physics that Feynman is known for. One of his charms is that the everyday physics of daily life seems just as fascinating to him, and he's just as willing to share that fascination as his interest in the deep magic realms of theoretical physics.
Apart from physics, the other constant themes of these stories are a desire to poke at how the world works, both things and people, and an audacious self-confidence that he often uses to fool people into thinking he knows more than he does. Examples of the former include his experiments with dream analysis and lucid dreaming, his studies of ants, and his forays into drawing and bongo drumming. Examples of the latter are imitating the cadence of language and leaving people with the impression that he spoke languages he didn't understand at all (or making himself fully understood without speaking the language) or getting remarkably lucky solving math problems in his head. And when he finds something (usually some set of rules) that he doesn't think make sense, he's merciless about poking sticks at it: subtly exposing a hole in the fence at Los Alamos, frequenting and testifying for a topless bar, or participating in the high school textbook selection process in California. One comes away from this book feeling like the universe makes so much more sense when Feynman explains it, and simultaneously realizing how difficult it would be to muster the self-confidence to get away with much of what he gets away with.
This is my second reading, the first about fifteen years ago, and Surely You're Joking stood up to re-reading marvelously. I'm not sure what combination it is of Feynman's natural storytelling method, Leighton's recording, or Hutchings' editing, but these stories are compulsively readable, brisk and to the point, well-paced, and told with the easy, off-handed style of someone who wants to let the reader in on all the jokes. Feynman can be self-deprecating without false modesty, a talent that makes the stories fun rather than painful even when you're shaking your head and thinking "I can't believe he did that." He rescues even a frankly sexist story about picking up women with enough charm, sense of experiment, self-deprecation, and odd sense of honor that it only provoked the occasional cringe.
This is one of those rare books that I think everyone should read at least once. It's brief, compellingly entertaining, and communicates the experimental, investigative outlook on the world that I think is the hardest thing to capture and teach about physics and the scientific mindset in general. Feynman both tells great stories and, in the process, shows some of how he thinks. There are tons of books out there on analytical thinking, how to evaluate evidence, and how to maintain an open but skeptical mind. I think a few of Feynman's anecdotes convey more practical lessons, indirectly and entirely without preachiness, than most of them put together.
Rating: 9 out of 10
I'm now using Git for nearly all of my Debian packaging except for some team-maintained packages and some packages where I'm also upstream and have not yet converted the repository. I've written up my workflow and related notes.
I think I mentioned this previously in my journal, but somewhat in passing. Since changing ones packaging workflow and adopting the new revision control systems came up again on Debian Planet, and since I've made various modifications and updates, it's probably time for another mention.
What I'm doing still doesn't maintain nice patches for pushing upstream that include complete revision history. I diff the feature branches against upstream to produce patches, which works reasonably well. Something like TopGit would probably be an improvement, but I haven't had a chance to experiment with this yet.
The Shibboleth packaging team is using this repository format. The AFS and Kerberos packaging team is using a simplified version of it.
Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008
| Editor | Gordon van Gelder |
| Issue | Volume 115, No. 1 |
| ISSN | 1095-8258 |
| Pages | 162 |
Nothing particularly outstanding in the non-fiction this issue, although I'm becoming more interested in Swanwick's The Dragons of Babel the more I read about it, and Kathi Maio is enjoyable as always.
"Fullbrim's Finding" by Matthew Hughes: I think Henghis Hapthorn is the best of Hughes's decadent future stories, and while I'm not enough of a fan to buy and read the novels, I was happy to see him return for another short story. The upcoming change in the nature of the world is put on the back burner, and instead we get a typical sort of investigation leading up to a surprising discovery about the world. A Douglas Adams concept written in Hughes's dryly ironic style is surprisingly effective and ties rather well into Hapthorn's self-interested cynicism. Like all of Hughes's work, it's a bit slow, but it's a solid entry in the series. (6)
"Reader's Guide" by Lisa Goldstein: I loved this story at the start, when it's a reader's guide showing a surprising awareness of its own banality and throwing in the sorts of questions that you always wish such a guide would ask. While Goldstein maintains that tone, it reminds me favorably of some of the old-time Internet jokes, such as the famous fake final exam. But then it turns into a sort of fantasy story about the Lord of Story and about a muse of sorts, some of which is vaguely interesting but not new and nowhere near as funny. The start is great stuff, but I don't think I really needed the ending or the explanation of what was going on. (7)
"The Roberts" by Michael Blumlein: This long novella is the heart of the issue. It tells the story (via an extended fictional biography at the start) of a world-famous architect and his loves, about his passion for his work that chokes other people out of his life, and about his reptition of the same pattern of romantic problems through success and failure. Blumlein does okay with this introduction, but it feels occasionally like an infodump and the SFnal elements aren't horribly compelling. The story doesn't take off until he turns his attention to creating a lover with whom he won't follow the same pattern.
Grace is a fascinating character and the heart of the story. She's made to love Robert, and hence has to function (and be written) within some fairly tight limitations, but still manages to develop not only into her own character but to take a constructed personality and transform it into a credible person just slightly askew from a typical human. It's fascinating and well-done. The rest of the plot didn't work for me as much, and I found the ending vaguely inconclusive and unsatisfying, but Grace is an interesting idea well-executed and worth reading the story for. (6)
"Enfant Terrible" by Scott Dalrymple: This is a brief and creepy story about dangerous children who aren't actually children. Neither the pacing nor the characters clicked for me, but I did like the step towards parody of adults who seem to lose all intelligence when around children. I wish Dalrymple had developed the idea more completely, though, rather than going for the easy thriller setup. (5)
"Poison Victory" by Albert E. Cowdrey: Cowdrey writes excellent character-driven stories on the edge of horror. This one doesn't have many fantastic elements, but for horror, Nazis are an adequate substitute. "Poison Victory" is an alternate history in which Germany defeated Russia and the Third Reich continues on in 1949. It's told from the perspective of a Nazi war hero who was awarded control of a portion of Russia and dives into the point of historical diversion via flashback as the viewpoint character tries to maneuver German politics and hide his opposition to Hitler. The plot doesn't exactly crackle, but Cowdrey's characterization is excellent and the alternate history is chillingly credible. I'm not much of a fan of Nazi stories, but this is a good one and much less stereotyped than most. (7)
"The Dinosaur Train" by James L. Cambias: It's a story about a travelling circus in an alternate world in which dinosaurs were discovered. It features generational conflict, caring for dinosaurs, and circus acts. If that sounds great to you, you'll probably like it; if you're now asking "and... what else?", you can safely skip it. A neat idea, but a slight story with an entirely stock conflict and resolution. (5)
Rating: 6 out of 10
I decided to start overhauling my Usenet article format page a bit since I'm working on the USEFOR draft again, and decided that finding the size of each file to indicate the size next to links (which the IETF pages do and which I think is cool for an at-a-glance feel of the size of specifications) was tedious. So this version of spin now supports a \size command, which inserts the size in bytes of a local file. It automatically scales the units to produce a nicely readable number.
I also made the error handling of a botched macro definition a little less spectacular in its failure, although it could still use work.
You can get the latest version from my web tools distribution page.
Here, have another beach photograph. A bit generic, but I do love the way the sky's color varies.
In other news, I just uploaded version 11 of the USEPRO draft, which I expect to be the final version before IETF Last Call (maybe with an additional version to fix some minor issues like typos). We had an end-of-the-month deadline to finally get this out the door. It's a significant improvement over RFC 1036, and the working group is burned out. The chairs finally picked a resolution for the main open issue remaining, and I'm fairly happy with the result.
The Olympics have consumed my brain, so there haven't been many updates (although I'm working on a new release of remctl; there's a lot of work to incorporate). I love watching the Olympics in saturation like this, but two weeks is the right length or maybe a bit too long. I want to watch the rest and will also be happy when it's over.
Having the constant visual input and partial focus on something like this is a drain. I've been pleasantly surprised at how much I've finished over the last few weeks, but it leaves me feeling a bit stretched. Ideally, I'll get the remctl release out next week before I go on vacation, but that may or may not happen. I still have significant patches to integrate.
The end of next week, I go on vacation, during which I will read, play video games, watch DVDs, and generally let my brain relax fully.
Review: An Age Like This (1920 - 1940), by George Orwell
| Series | Collected Writing #1 |
| Editor | Sonia Orwell |
| Editor | Ian Angus |
| Publisher | Nonpareil |
| Copyright | 1968 |
| Printing | 2004 |
| ISBN | 1-56792-133-7 |
| Format | Trade paperback |
| Pages | 551 |
George Orwell (the pseudonym used by Eric A. Blair originally only for his book-length work, adopted shortly before publication of his first book) is best known today for his satirical, dystopian novels Animal Farm and, particularly, 1984, which is now a classic of English literature taught to high school students. During his lifetime, however, he was best known for his journalism and essays. An Age Like This is the first volume of a four-volume collection of his short non-fiction work and surviving personal letters, omitting journalism with no import outside of when it was written and letters of no significance, but including all available essays and many personal letters.
I bought this first volume after reading several of Orwell's essays that are freely available on-line (specifically "Looking Back on the Spanish War", which isn't in this volume, and "Boys' Weeklies", which is) and being so impressed by his clear writing and intelligent commentary that I wanted to read a great deal more. Still, I always approach a comprehensive collection such as this with some trepidation. Often selective collections are selective for a reason; a comprehensive collection may accomplish little other than adding failed and uninteresting material, rough drafts, and other dross. Much to my delight, it became clear that was not the case within fifty pages. This 550 page volume has kept me engrossed for a week and pushed entirely aside the novel I was reading at the same time. Immediately upon finishing it I ordered the other three volumes.
The consistent level of quality is doubtless partly due to Orwell's own practice of not keeping large quantities of notebooks, rough drafts, unpublished writing, and the other material that usually makes up an author's papers. Apart from the personal letters, everything included here was written and accepted for publication, and the version included is generally the version edited for publication. But even in his personal correspondance, Orwell is succinct, expressive, and forthright.
Despite the quantity of personal correspondance included here, particularly from before Orwell became established as a writer, this collection is not very autobiographical. Orwell mentions personal affairs but doesn't discuss them at length; meeting and marrying Eileen O'Shaughnessy, which happens during the time period, is only mentioned in a small handful of letters (and primarily in the context of worries over whether they'll have sufficient money to make the marriage work). I liked this effect. One is never overwhelmed with biographical minutia, but enough tidbits are mentioned in passing to piece together a mental picture of Orwell's day-to-day concerns and experiences as a struggling writer. Like all the material of this book, it doesn't wear out its welcome.
Orwell's primary themes in the time period covered by An Age Like This can be roughly grouped into two: writing about the poor and working class in England in the 1930s, and writing about the Spanish Civil War, its aftermath, and the build-up to World War II. Intermixed with both are regular book reviews, which Orwell wrote regularly for several publications throughout this period, and essays on other topics (primarily literary). They're largely unconnected with the other material (except in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, which affected Orwell so deeply that even all of his book reviews for a time afterwards are of books about the war) but are enjoyable reading in their own right, even if many of the books reviewed have passed into obscurity.
An Age Like This starts a bit slow, as Orwell's early material is not quite as well-written or well-polished as the work later in this volume, but his essays about the life of tramps, migrant workers, and working class families are remarkable examples of investigative journalism. He writes about their lives after having joined them, lived with them, and done the work alongside them. He describes a spike (a homeless shelter, essentially) from personal experience, with vivid and concise detail. He tries to get himself thrown into prison so that he can write about the conditions. And in each essay he tries to capture the emotional impression and the mindset of the people he's around, with bits of vivid description that humanize everyone involved.
One of the four longer pieces included here is a diary Orwell kept while researching The Road to Wigan Pier, a non-fiction book on the English working class (which I immediately ordered after reading this collection). For that research, Orwell travelled into coal mining territory and stayed with mining families and describes his impressions both of the mine and of the surrounding living conditions and towns. This is fascinating material even if one is already familiar with the brutal working conditions in a coal mine, full of sharply observed details and real journalistic research (exact sums of weekly incomes and expenditures, descriptions of families, and impressions of different towns). Orwell has a knack for finding bits of day-to-day life that capture the essence of a situation. I'll never forget his analysis of the lack of funding and availability of baths for coal miners and the implications for simple cleanliness, which he combines with trenchant commentary on those who claim that miners just aren't interested in being clean.
At the end of 1936, Orwell enlisted to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the side of one of the communist groups against Franco. He served on the front until wounded by a sniper. Much of the rest of An Age Like This is concerned with the Spanish Civil War, Orwell's disgust with the way in which it was reported and misreported in the English press, and the complicated, multi-sided conflicts between Marxism, anarchism, democratic socialism, capitalism, fascism, and Soviet communism. Orwell entered the Spanish Civil War a cautious leftist and came out of it a believer in democratic revolutionary socialism and strongly opposed to Soviet communism, a position that modern history at least in the US has nearly written out of existence. The essays, letters, and book reviews here take apart the multiple sides in the Spanish Civil War and recomplicate it far beyond the simplistic communist versus fascist treatment one often hears.
The Spanish Civil War leads into the build-up of war with Hitler, which Orwell also complicates and shows sides that aren't part of the modern mythology of a grand, just war of good democracies against evil fascists. Orwell works through his deeply ambivalent feelings towards the war in letters and essays, writing about the growth of fascism in the English government, the Soviet-backed communism that was essentially the same thing in different clothing but was the only accepted political alternative on the left, and the lack of a credible political alternative to address the underlying problems that he saw. Orwell is not a pacifist but starts opposed to a war that seems designed to do little but favor one set of fascists over another, comes around reluctantly to fighting Hitler as a necessity, is deeply suspicious of an alliance with Stalin, and feels the stir of patriotism and distrusts it simultaneously. His letters capture the uncertainty and dire pessimism of the time better than any other material I've read on the start of World War II. It's telling that the Britain that Orwell describes is practically unknown to someone with only a typical US schooling in history (I can't speak for British). We've conveniently forgotten that fascism was ever popular outside of Germany.
And there's yet more in this volume. The full contents of the essay collection Inside the Whale and Other Essays are included here: a fascinating analysis of Dickens as a class writer and social and moral reformer, an extended review of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and an essay on the political and class world-view of the boys' weeklies. Included also is the rebuttal reply from the editor of one of those weeklies, which is delightful and unintentionally humorous in its steadfast defense of keeping from boys all concerns of politics or economic problems and glorifying nobility since nobles are a better sort of person. There are also essays on a wide variety of topics, including a delightful retrospective on working in a bookstore.
This is fasciating writing. Orwell, through both letters about his own life and his writings about the world around him, provides a depth of insight, observation, and analysis of the 1930s that restores the richness and complexity missing from popular history. He does so in compelling, succinct essays that kept me up reading late into the night. If you like politics or book reviews, it's an easy sell, but I was even hooked on descriptions of social conditions and days in the life of the working class, types of writing that I usually find unreadably boring. The chronological presentation mixes different topics together so that none get too tiring, and also provides a picture of the growth of a writer and a writer's career that is interesting for much the same reasons that reading the blogs of authors today is interesting. Highly recommended.
Rating: 9 out of 10
I added support to spin for setting links to RSS feeds for a page in its header using an \rss command prior to the \heading command. I also added support for a \sitemap command that includes the entire structure of the site as a list in the page. There are some additional documentation fixes and a bug fix where state from one page was not fully cleared before starting to process the next page.
These features were added to be used on my site, of course. The pages with corresponding RSS feeds now have the appropriate tags in the page headers, which means that modern browsers with RSS support will provide an easy interface to subscribing to the feed. There is also a new sitemap for my web site. I don't know how useful it will be to anyone, but it looks impressive at least.
You can get the new version of spin from my web tools page.
The latest photograph, another from my Oregon coast trip last year.
This is the first picture I've posted that's vertical rather than horizontal, but all the software and layout seems to have coped fairly well. The only potential problem is that the vertical height of the rows of pictures in galleries containing vertical pictures is a bit larger, which may look odd down the road. It doesn't yet, so I won't bother trying to figure out how to fix it yet. (I can probably fix it with judicious use of vertical padding around images that are horizontal.)
I'm fairly happy with what I'm getting done while still watching the Olympics. I'm less happy that that's involved resurrecting dead AFS servers for the past couple of days, although thankfully the problems were all known ones from accidentally running a back revision of the file server.
When I moved my old journal into my web site, I removed some redundancy by deleting the individual journal copies of book reviews in favor of keeping the canonical version in the reviews section of my site. As a side effect of that, though, and the way the various index files in my journal are generated, that meant that reviews stopped appearing in my regular journal web page. They were in the RSS feeds, but to know that a new review was posted when browsing my web site, you'd have to go to the review section specifically.
I didn't think much of this, but I've since discovered that this has apparently confused at least one person. Plus, the more I thought about it, the less sense it made.
So tonight, I took some time while watching the Olympics to hack on the various bits of software that generate my web site to automate generation of the main index page for my journal (instead of semi-automated the way it was before). This means that reviews will now appear in the regular journal page like any other post and age out like all the rest.
In the process, I also cleaned up URL handling so that I can use relative URLs in journal posts and they're always made absolute for all the RSS feeds (I'm not completely sure how all RSS readers handle relative links, particularly when turning the RSS feed into HTML to display on some other site). This means that images references in my journal entries will now get proper size tags in HTML because they're relative filenames that spin knows how to deal with.
With all the other things going on in life right now, one of the things that's suffering is reading. My yearly total is likely to be far below the last few years, although a bit after the Olympics I do get to have a week of vacation which is going to be devoted mostly to reading and playing video games.
But, of course, that doesn't mean I can stop buying books, particularly since there are new books out by a few authors I like to support. I also picked up some very nice classic editions of some famous books.
Elizabeth Bear — Hell and Earth (sff)
Philip K. Dick — Four Novels of the 1960s (sff)
Philip K. Dick — Five Novels of the 1960s and 1970s
(sff)
Thomas M. Disch — The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of
(nonfiction)
Richard P. Feynman — The Feynman Lectures on Physics:
The Definitive Edition (nonfiction)
Ralph Keyes — Nice Guys Finish Seventh
(nonfiction)
Karl Schroeder — Pirate Sun (sff)
Charles Stross — Saturn's Children (sff)
After reading a lot about Feynman recently, I finally decided that I wanted to own a copy of his lectures on physics, even if I'm not likely to read them soon. The Library of America has published two very nice collections of Philip K. Dick's short novels, and I couldn't resist picking those up, particularly since I'd only read one of the nine novels included in them.
Three new photographs posted today, including a new gallery of photographs of random objects, often junk, that caught my eye and look more interesting in a close photograph. Here's the first:
To for quick links to all three new photographs, see the recent gallery.
I've added a gallery of recently posted photographs to my photograph page, which should make it easier for people to keep up to date with new photographs I'm posting. It will also make me feel less like I need to mention each one here if I feel like posting a few things that don't feel worth announcing in a journal entry.
Another beach photograph today.
The recent gallery only has three pictures right now, but will eventually hold the most recent eighteen.
Week before last, I had an absolutely fantastic visit with long-time friends. It was the first time that all four of us were able to get together in one place physically in eight years. We spent the whole week talking, mixing in some game playing, a long tour of Stanford, photography and comic book geeking, and watching some DVDs and TV shows, but mostly just talking. We went until 5am several days and at least 2am almost every night.
Then Monday, the day after the end of that visit, the power supply failed in the eyrie.org shell system and main web server (or at least I'm fairly sure that's what the symptoms meant). I then forgot that it had a weird power supply (ATX-GES) and wasted $70 (well, I could still return it) on a power supply that didn't work. Since ATX-GES power supplies are basically impossible to find and the converter cables weren't available locally, I went through some worrying about what to do, and then decided to just accelerate the migration to hosted VMs.
So, that's what I spent basically all of Monday and Tuesday on, and some of Wednesday, but it's all set up now and is working great. I cleaned up a bunch of old accounts too, which will reduce the mail load and provide fewer opportunities for someone to brute-force some old account. I'm very happy with the results; the new system seems quite responsive, I'm well under the bandwidth cap, and I now have a good template and installation system for making changes.
Since I didn't want to take vacation to fix my machine (I have other vacations coming up to use that time on), the rest of the week was catchup, trying to get a full week's work in. Of course, then the Olympics started Friday evening, so I'm now into my intensive Olympic-watching mode.
So, I'm basically packing as much as possible into every day right now. I have a bunch of web site work that I still want to do, I have lots of services left to migrate off of my other main eyrie.org system, and I still have lots of writing ideas from our visit that I want to explore with friends and have only just started. And there are the Olympics, which as usual have more coverage per day than I can actually watch.
This summer didn't look like it was going to be this busy going in. I guess they never do.
The current goal is to make sure that I do two full weeks of work these next two weeks, and spend all the rest of my time watching the Olympics. Everything else, as usual, will take something of a back seat. Then I have one regular week, and then vacation, during which I can catch up on all sorts of other things.
This release flushes out pending changes that I'd committed some time back but never released. It fixes a bug in checking the error status of kasetkey (used for AFS kaserver integration) and better handles a missing REMOTE_USER environment variable.
As of this release, the AFS kaserver integration support is deprecated and no longer tested, since Stanford no longer runs an AFS kaserver realm.
kadmin-remctl is now maintained in Git and the Git repository is now publicly accessible and browsable.
You can get the latest version from the kadmin-remctl distribution page.
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