2013-06-01: control-archive 1.6.0
control-archive is the software that maintains the archive of control
messages and the active and newsgroups files on
ftp.isc.org. It had been a
couple of years since I'd done a new release for the record, although
there aren't many changes. There are a few minor fixes to the code and
documentation, plus hierarchy updates for a few hierarchies.
You can get the latest release from the
control-archive distribution
page.
2013-05-29: Review: Get Everything Done
Review: Get Everything Done, by Mark Forster
| Publisher |
Hodder & Stoughton |
| Copyright |
2000 |
| ISBN |
0-340-74620-3 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
190 |
Mark Forster is the author of my (current) favorite time management book,
Do It Tomorrow, and several excellent
blog posts. I've
therefore been rather curious about some of his earlier books, and finally
decided to order this one. It appears to only have been published in the
UK, so it can be a bit expensive in the US unless you can find it used.
The main reason why I like Forster's writing so much is that he's a theory
and neat trick sort of author instead of a single system author. A lot of
time management writing (such as Getting
Things Done) presents a single system that's supposedly universal. If
that system happens to work for you, great. If it doesn't, the usefulness
of the book drops off rapidly. You have to work through the basic
principles, which are often sidelined in the book, and come up with
variations on your own.
Forster is the other sort of time management author: he throws out a
flurry of tricks and tactics and lets you see which ones stick. He
doesn't have a single system; indeed, one of the most entertaining parts
of Get Everything Done is a parable about following many of the
common time management systems and having one's life get worse and worse.
Instead, he talks about the underlying theory, about the different
approaches he's tried and their tradeoffs, and about lots of little tricks
that he's found help in one situation or another. It's more of a toolkit
than a system.
This is, of course, only as good as the clarity of presentation. In both
Do It Tomorrow and here, the clarity is excellent. For example,
one of the most eye-opening ideas he explores in this book is that time
management is a horrible name for the field. Time continues on no matter
what you do; you can't increase it, and you can't save it. Rather, what
you're actually doing is attention management: for each moment,
you're deciding where to direct your attention. Things to which you turn
your attention will change; things that you don't pay attention to will
not change (except possibly for the worse). I'm quite fond of this
reframing of the problem.
Forster's thinking about time, or, rather, attention management is not as
fully-developed here as in the later Do It Tomorrow. Much of the
latter book is about the theory and practice of to-do lists. The
techniques presented here were, at least for me, less immediately
inspiring, although still thought-provoking. Much of the book focuses on
internal resistance and procrastination, on the concept of self-control
and decision-making as a mental "muscle" that has to be exercised, and on
a philosophy of attention management that slowly builds up to doing
whatever one is resisting the most at the moment. I haven't had a chance
to work through the exercises that he offers (Forster's books tend to be
full of illuminating exercises), so I don't have a fully-formed opinion on
their efficacy. I was able to put Do It Tomorrow into practice
more immediately.
However, one thing this book does do is tackle directly the problem of
trying to do too many things. Since this, more than organization, is the
heart of my personal attention management problems, I was delighted to see
this. Most attention management books at least give lip service to the
problem, but they provide little useful guidance. David Allen's
Getting Things Done effectively rules it out of scope: the goal of
the system is to free you to act on your decisions, but there's little or
no attention paid to the practical problem of making those decisions. As
a result, I had serious trouble with GTD when I tried to use it. My
project and next action lists would simply grow without bound, and GTD
offered no useful assistance with culling them.
Deciding what to do is, of course, a hard problem, but Forster here offers
some specific and useful techniques and spends some time on the necessity
of culling one's backlog. He also states directly the problem that
everyone else seems to dance around: if you don't cull your committments,
no attention management system will actually help you. It will just
enable you to do trivia more efficiently, and therefore allow you to fill
your life with even more of it, while still feeling just as overwhelmed as
before. The bluntness is refreshing, and the exercises in cataloging
commitments with time values and then forcing yourself to reduce the
commitment list to the doable look quite helpful.
I would still start with Do It Tomorrow rather than this book,
since I think some practical approaches to to-do list management are one
of the best places to start with attention management. But I'm glad I
picked up this book as well, despite the cost of the UK import, and I plan
on working through the exercises in it. Unlike David Allen, who has one
basic system and whose other book was
interesting but not as helpful, Forster's toolkit approach means that more
books mean more ideas and more possible tools. He doesn't stick with one
concept and polish it; he tries a lot of different ideas and then analyzes
their strengths and weaknesses. If Do It Tomorrow spoke to you,
I recommend grabbing this one as well.
(Yes, it's somewhat amusing for me to read and review this book
immediately after The Making of the
Indebted Man, since to an extent attention management is part of the
remaking of the self that's the obligation of the debtor in Lazzarato's
construction of the nature of debt. It was something that occurred to me
while reading this book. But I think Forster does a good job of showing
attention management as a tool to direct one's efforts towards an internal
goal rather than externally-imposed goals.)
Rating: 8 out of 10
2013-05-28: Review: The Making of the Indebted Man
Review: The Making of the Indebted Man, by Maurizio Lazzarato
| Translator |
Joshua David Jordan |
| Publisher |
Semiotext(e) |
| Copyright |
2011, 2012 |
| Printing |
2012 |
| ISBN |
1-58435-115-2 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
199 |
This is a continuation of my effort to catch up on Marxist thought while
pondering workplace governance, this time following the recommendations of
a friend after a related conversation (about pension systems and basic
income guarantee in a Usenet group — Usenet isn't dead yet). As opposed
to Democracy at Work, which is a
popularization, The Making of the Indebted Man has more of the
density of a scholarly text. The version I'm reading is also in
translation, which I suspect makes it even harder going in places.
The basic thesis, though, is clear: debt is far more central to the way
that we construct not only economic systems but social systems and even
internal models of our own nature than is often realized. We prefer to
think of societies as structured around mutual exchange, but in practice
they're more often constructed around concepts of debt and credit that
have been fully internalized and used to construct a moral code for a
responsible debtor. And this is not a neutral construction; rather, it is
a key support mechanism of capitalism and of the financial and economic
status quo, used (both intentionally and accidentally) to reduce
uncertainty and to support exploitation and economic domination.
This is one of those perspectives that didn't occur to me prior to reading
this book but which is startlingly obvious in retrospect. Once Lazzarato
starts pointing it out, the prevelance and universality of debt as a basic
structure of social and economic life is striking. The creditor and
debtor concept extends not just to obvious examples, such as consumer
credit or mortgages, but also to education (via student loans), law
enforcement ("pay one's debt to society"), employment (most employers,
particularly during economic downturns, have successfully inverted the
natural direction of the creditor relationship and have made employees
feel in debt to the employer for having a job), and social services
(unemployment and welfare benefits come with significant, if often
unstated, debt-like requirements). Debt is also the great leveller.
It now cuts across race, gender, and social class. Apart from a small
handful of extremely rich individuals and corporations, Lazzarato claims,
convincingly, that nearly everyone is enmeshed to some extent in a network
of debt, or at least in in attitudes and moral pressures of a debtor.
Nor is this a static situation. The role of debt in our social lives
seems to be constantly increasing. The past fifteen years in particular
have seen drastic increases in debt during a debt-funded economic boom
combined with debt-funded asset bubbles. Even after the financial
collapse, much of that growth of debt persists. Lazzarato, probably in
part because he's Italian, focuses on national debt (more on that in a
moment); as an American, I'd identify student loan debt as a more
compelling example in the United States. Other countries probably have
their own examples.
For a system to be this widespread, it must serve some social purpose.
Lazzarato sees it as an instrument of control. Debt has been very
effectively built up as a moral obligation, and (unlike a society of
mutual support) it's a very one-sided moral obligation that strongly
favors existing power. The debtor is held to a tight moral standard of
repayment of debts, and is morally condemned by all of society, including
their peers, for a failure to repay. But there is little or no
corresponding moral pressure on the creditor: perhaps a half-hearted
dislike of high interest rates or occasional pressure to not change
previously agreed terms, but nothing like the moral pressure applied to
the debtor. To be a creditor is to have an agreed-upon, one-sided right
to dictate to the debtor the terms on which they must conduct a portion of
their life, and the larger the debt, the larger the portion. The debtor
is expected to realign their life, at least in part, around paying off the
debt, including choice of profession, decisions about when to quit a job,
about how to prioritize personal spending, and so forth. This is all so
automatic and so deeply ingrained that, even while writing this, I'm
nodding along and thinking "well, of course." Lazzarato offers an
opportunity to take a step back and think about the implications,
particularly of the deeply one-sided web of obligations this creates.
A Marxist analysis adds another level of consideration. One of the basic
questions of Marxist thought is why workers put up with exploitation by
capitalists. In a Marxist analysis, workers provide the productive output
of society, which is then redirected and controlled by a relatively small
capitalists. The workers massively outnumber the capitalists. Why would
they be content for this situation to continue? Marx, of course, thought
they wouldn't be, that the periodic crises of capitalism would eventually
result in a socialist revolution by the workers. But by and large this
hasn't happened. Why?
Lazzarato offers debt as a partial explanation. The profits redirected by
capitalists are returned to workers to some extent, but as debt rather
than payment. This allows workers to participate to some extent in the
growth of societal wealth from constantly increasing productivity, while
simultaneously entangling workers in a system of moral control. Company
stores, starvation wages, and other confiscatory practices are clear
mechanisms of external control that provoke directed outrage. Debt is
something that the debtor has nominally agreed to (however much the
situation is manipulated to make that agreement almost inevitable), and to
which attaches a deep tradition of moral responsibility. The worker has
respected grounds on which to object to inequitable treatment; the debtor
is wholly responsible for repayment, and is rarely considered to have
grounds to complain about the debt. Most of the historical attempts to
balance those scales, such as laws and religious rules against usury or
the historical Jewish rule of Jubilee, have fallen by the wayside.
This is a rather extended summary of what I got out of the book. I'm
doing that in part because the book itself is somewhat heavy going.
Lazzarato makes extensive use of specialized terms (often not defined) and
fills the book with references to other works without much in the way of
useful summary. It's the sort of book where, if you're not already
well-versed in the field, you may need to just keep reading through some
passages to find a point of reference that makes the argument
retroactively make sense. I had a particular difficulty with
"subjectivation," a term that Wikipedia tells me is from the writings of
Michel Foucault (a major source for this book), which Lazzarato uses
extensively but never adequately defines. Some external research
indicates that this is a very difficult term to define, which explains why
I was never quite comfortable with my understanding. I think Lazzarato is
using it to get at the process of internalization of the morality of debt
and the way that a debt society forces individuals into a mode of economic
individualism in which many of their personal choices are bent towards
making themselves better (more reliable, more trustworthy) debtors. But
I'm not completely sure.
There are also places in which I think Lazzarato takes his argument too
far, although one of those, I think, reflects a difference in national
economic status. He makes quite a lot of national debt in this book,
placing it in the universal position of the overarching debt that turns
every citizen into a debtor even if they've avoided other debts. This
is possibly true in countries whose national debts are held in other
currencies, or in countries like Italy that are part of the Euro (which,
if one is not Germany or France, amounts to much the same thing). It's a
dubious assertion for countries like the UK, Japan, or the United States,
where the national debt is held in their own free-floating currency and
is largely owed domestically, and partly plays into some frustratingly
incorrect political rhetoric.
One of the key dynamics of debt, namely the extreme power imbalance
between debtor and creditor, is missing in countries with sovereign debt
in their own currency, since those countries can always (if they're
willing to pay the inflation price) simply print money to pay off national
debt. Creditors know this, and therefore interest rates are much lower,
the amount of leverage the creditor has is quite limited, and the sorts
of debt crises seen in Italy and elsewhere in the Euro periphery are not
seen. Lazzarato is understandably writing from the Italian perspective,
but I think he weakens his argument by lumping national debt so completely
into the same category as the other types of exploitative debt he
discusses. The principle does feel universal to me, but the best examples
of debt vary by country, so one has to be careful about generalizing
specific examples.
Another place where I simply disagree with his conclusions is around some
of the more dramatic presentations of subjectivation. Lazzarato talks,
at one point, about how debt reduces debtors to mechanical components,
and uses as an example an ATM machine, which he portrays as uniquely
dehumanizing through the mechanical process that someone has to follow to
withdraw money. There may be some point here about the dehumanization
of debt and its subsumption into the foundation of day-to-day social
interaction, but he lost me entirely with the unwarranted technophobia of
the specific example. The idea that machines and automation make us less
human is an old argument that's orthogonal to the thrust of his argument.
It reminded me of old contentions that human relationships made on-line
aren't real, which is nonsense.
Overall, this is a fascinating and insightful discussion hampered by a
difficult and sometimes overly elliptical presentation, a bit too much
drama and grand theorizing, and a few poor choices of examples. I found
the basic idea extremely valuable, but the amount of work required to
extract it occasionally irritating. (This could be partly due to the
limits of translation, but I suspect most of the difficulty was present in
the original.) I'm not sure that I would recommend the book, but I
definitely recommend considering the underlying ideas.
Debt now works alongside the employment relationship as a primary means of
reinforcing economic and social control and hierarchy. This is likely via
accidental development rather than any grand plan, but it's now being
actively exploited by the creditors of society, large corporations most
notably. Viewed in that light, the explosive growth of student loan debt
in the United States is particularly frightening. After Lazzarato's
extensive examination of the distortive effects of permanent debt, not
just on economics and society but on our own conceptions of our selves and
our duties and roles in life, the idea of trapping a generation in debt
from the moment of their financial independence is deeply troubling, even
nauseating.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2013-05-27: Review: Advanced Perl Programming
Review: Advanced Perl Programming, by Sriram Srinivasan
| Publisher |
O'Reilly |
| Copyright |
August 1997 |
| ISBN |
1-56592-220-4 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
392 |
The problem with buying lots of books is that one frequently doesn't read
them soon after purchase. And while nearly all fiction and most
non-fiction doesn't have a time limit, technical books are more of a
problem. As you might have guessed from the publication date and subject
matter of this book, it's one I waited too long to read.
I picked up Advanced Perl Programming not too long after it was
first published in 1997. I bought it primarily for the chapters on XS
programming, since I was just starting to develop and help maintain code
that built Perl interfaces for C libraries. And then it sat on my
bookshelf in the office, and then at home, until it was 16 years old.
That's problematic for a general Perl programming guide; it's particularly
troublesome for a book that dives deep into internals. That said, I still
got some interesting information from it.
Advanced Perl Programming is something of a grab bag of different
and largely unrelated topics. It starts with a data structures overview
(which is mostly about references), covers typeglobs and the Perl symbol
table, briefly discusses closures, and then dives deeper into eval.
That's followed by an overview of modules and object-oriented programming
in Perl. The general Perl topics close with a solid (if outdated)
discussion of tied objects and a somewhat rambling and remarkably general
discussion of persistance. Srinivasan then covers some recommended module
APIs for networking and graphics (Tk, specifically) while working through
some complex examples, takes a deeper dive into eval and code generation,
and concludes with three chapters on XS and embedded Perl interpreters.
This is all solid material, but a lot of it is at least partly obsolete.
The chapters on modules and object-oriented programming fare the worst;
you'll find much better guides to those topics elsewhere. Data structures
also fare poorly, partly because Srinivasan is still happy to use symbolic
references, now considered bad style due to lack of compile-time checking.
(That does mean, though, that this is one of the best introductions to
symbolic references that you'll find, since few other Perl programmers
discuss them.) But the rest of the book is fairly solid, if limited by
age. If I'd read it when I first started with XS, it would have indeed
helped. Advanced Perl Programming contains a succinct and clear
overview of Perl internals and data representation (assuming, of course,
it's not changed drastically, but I didn't notice any significant issues
from what I know of internals from quite a lot of XS programming),
particularly when combined with the earlier chapter on typeglobs and the
symbol table.
It is interesting, though, to see how much accepted Perl style has
changed. Srinivasan is quite fond of eval with a scalar argument to
construct code at runtime, something that most current authors recommend
against when it can be avoided. The loss of static syntax checking means
the technique is often hard to debug and can cause surprising runtime
errors. Several of the more advanced tricks in this book are built on
that framework, including a moderately interesting templating system that
he constructs from scratch in this book. The examples here are also
missing the focus on use strict, warnings, and avoiding special
variables and unusual constructs that you see in more recent Perl books.
This is a very thoughtful book, with several structural techniques that I
appreciated and would like to see more technical writers use. One is the
comparisons to the approaches of other languages at the end of most
chapters. It puts Perl's approach in a broader context and encourages
thought about alternative ways to view a particular feature and
implementation tradeoffs in Perl's choices. Another is the careful
discussion of design approaches and possibilities during the construction
of larger examples. I think there's a tendency in technical books to
spend a lot of time developing the best possible implementation of
something and then show that completed example. Even with a detailed
analysis of its construction, this can be less useful than a broader
discussion of possible approaches, including dead ends.
The problem, of course, is that 16 years is a long time, even for a
relatively mature programming language, and Perl has changed. There are
significant improvements not only to the standard library but to Perl core
functionality that have happened since this book was written. The chapter
on tying, which is otherwise excellent, is badly out of date on what
functionality and methods are available and is no longer a reliable guide
to using that feature except for simple cases. Similar problems plague
the chapter on persistence, which develops the concept from basics that
most programmers reading an advanced book no longer need, and which has
been rendered mostly obsolete by further developments in the Perl module
ecosystem.
I think the best parts of this book, the ones that cover material that I
think is still relatively accurate and that are not well-covered by other
resources, are the chapters on typeglobs and on XS. The typeglob
discussion is both clear and informative, covering material and techniques
that are used in a few core Perl modules and that I've never seen
adequately addressed elsewhere. I'd subsequently picked up XS and Perl
embedding the hard way: lots of trial and error and reading difficult POD
documentation. I wish I'd read this book earlier, since Srinivasan does a
great job of basic orientation. He doesn't go far enough for me (the book
I probably wanted was Extending and Embedding Perl by Jenness and
Cozens, published five years later), but I would have been up and running
with basic XS much faster by starting here.
If this were 1997, or even 2000, I would probably recommend this book,
albeit with a few caveats. Higher Order
Perl is the place you should go for discussion of closures, rather than
here (although of course it didn't exist then). I wasn't fond of string
eval even in 1997, and I still think it produces code that, while
efficient and quite powerful, is horribly difficult to understand. And
the introduction to modules is adequate but not compelling; most other
introductions to object-oriented programming and module construction in
Perl are better. But even discarding those chapters (and the mostly
unnecessary Tk reference), there's a lot of great material here that would
have been quite helpful in 2000.
Unfortunately, this is not the sort of technical book that ages well, and
while I did pick up some useful background knowledge and a much better
understanding of typeglobs, I mostly read this book because I wanted to
salvage some knowledge from a book that sat for far too long on my
shelves. There's really no reason to buy it today. If you run across it
in a library, there are a few chapters that are still worth reading, but
by and large if you know enough Perl to know where to be careful of
landmines due to changes in Perl since the book was written, you also know
enough Perl to not really need this book.
Rating: 5 out of 10
2013-05-27: Collected haul
I've been slow lately in writing these up (and, for that matter, in doing
most other things related to reading; things have been rather busy
lately). This is a bunch of here-and-there purchases over the last few
months, including Powell's Indiespensible shipments.
Sandra Barret — Face of the Enemy (sff)
Anne Bishop — Written in Red (sff)
Lois McMaster Bujold — Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (sff)
Cary Caffrey — The Girls from Alcyone (sff)
Jenni Fagan — The Panopticon (mainstream)
Niels Ferguson, et al. — Cryptography Engineering (non-fiction)
Jen Kirchner — The Fourth Channel (sff)
Anothony Marra — A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (mainstream)
Steve McConnell — Code Complete (non-fiction)
Seanan McGuire — Velveteen vs. The Junior Super-Patriots (sff)
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, et al. (ed.) — Some of the Best from Tor.com:
2012 (sff anthology)
Lisa O'Donnell — The Death of Bees (mainstream)
Susan Palwich — Flying in Place (sff)
Kim Stanley Robinson — 2312 (sff)
John Scalzi — Redshirts (sff)
Ian Tregillis — Bitter Seeds (sff)
Leon Trotsky — The History of the Russian Revolution (non-fiction)
Simon Van Booy — The Illusion of Separateness (mainstream)
Chris Anne Wolfe — Shadows of Aggar (sff)
Barbara Ann Wright — The Pyramid Waltz (sff)
That's a lot of stuff. It includes a couple of non-fiction O'Reilly books
from sales, a few months of Powell's Indiespensible subscriptions, a
variety of books I picked up after a discussion of good lesbian fiction on
Tor.com (romance without the obnoxious gender tropes, or at least as many
of them), and the rest of the Hugo nominees for the year.
I got a ton of reading done earlier this month. I wish I could say the
same thing about reviews, but I only wrote a few. That's something that I
want to try to catch up on soon, so there will probably be a flurry of
those posted soon. I've already read Blackout and Redshirts
of this year's nominees (a review of the latter is coming), so at least
I'm not too far behind on the reading. Throne of the Crescent Moon
is in progress now.
2013-05-15: Review: Asimov's, July 2011
Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2011
| Editor |
Sheila Williams |
| Issue |
Volume 35, No. 7 |
| ISSN |
1065-2698 |
| Pages |
112 |
Williams's editorial is a mildly interesting piece about story titles.
Silverberg's column is a more interesting (and rather convincing) rebuttal
of the joke that fiction authors are "professional liars," combined with
an examination of a fake and fantastic 14th travelogue that (at least in
Silverberg's telling) was widely believed at the time. The precis of
Silverberg's argument is that lying requires an intent to deceive, which
is a property of deceptive memoir writers but not of fiction authors.
Di Filippo's review column, as usual, is devoted almost entirely to
esoterica, although I was moderately interested to hear of Stableford's
continued work on translating early French SF. None of it seems
compelling enough to go buy, but good translations of early works seem
like a good thing to have in the world.
"Day 29" by Chris Beckett: The conceit of this novelette is an
interstellar travel system akin to a transporter that allows
near-instantaneous travel between worlds. The drawback is that all
memories from somewhere between 40 and 29 days before transit up until
transit are wiped. The progatonist is a data analyst who is about to
travel, and therefore by agency rule is required to stop doing work on day
40 before transmission since he can't be held legally liable for anything
he has no recollection of doing. (I would like to say that I find this
implausible, since one could always keep records, but it's exactly the
sort of ass-covering regulation that a human resources department would
come up with.)
The premise is quite interesting: what do you do during that period that
you're going to forget? Beckett wisely mixes Stephen's current waiting
period on the colony world with his diary of his original waiting period
on Earth the first time he went through the transmission process, and the
latter adds greatly to the reader's appreciation of the weirdness of the
forgotten interval.
Unfortunately, this is a story more about psychological exploration than
about plot, and Stephen just isn't very interesting. The telepathic but
possibly nonsentient aliens add weirdness but not much else, and the
ending of the story provided little sense of closure or conclusion for me.
A good idea, but not the execution I wanted. (5)
"Pug" by Theodora Goss: Since I grew up with a pug, I have a
soft spot for a story featuring one; sadly, though, this story has
insufficient pug in it. This is a quiet fantasy (Asimov's calls it
SF, presumably on the basis of parallel worlds and a hypothesized
scientific explanation, but it reads like fantasy to me) featuring
Victorian girls, including one with a bad heart. They discover a hidden
door to other versions of their world and do some minor exploration.
There's little or nothing in the way of plot; the story is more of an
attempt to capture a mood. It's mildly diverting, but I wish it had gone
somewhere more substantial. (5)
"Dunyon" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: A Rusch story is often the
highlight of an issue, and this is no exception. The protagonist is the
owner of a bar in a space station that's become a combination of a refugee
camp and a slum. War and chaos have created desperate people, most of
whom are attempting to find some way to resources and get out of the
bottom of society. The story is about a rumor: a mythical system named
Dunyon that's safe and far away. And it's about how people react to that
rumor. There's nothing particularly surprising about the direction the
story goes (it's fairly short), but Rusch is always a good storyteller.
(7)
"The Music of the Sphere" by Norman Spinrad: I've had mixed
feelings about Spinrad's fiction (and some of his essays), but I liked
this story, despite its implausibility. It's set in the near future,
featuring an expert in cetaceans and dolphin perception and a composer
obsessed with both loud music and classical musical style. Just from that
description, you can probably predict much of the story, but I thought it
had some neat ideas about dolphins, whales, and alternate perception and
aesthetics. (Note: neat, not necessarily biologically plausible.)
Enjoyable. (6)
"Bring on the Rain" by Josh Roseman: In a change of pace from
the rest of the issue, this is a post-apocalyptic story of caravans of
wheeled ships traversing a scorched and ruined landscape in search of
weather systems and rain. The feel is of an inverted Waterworld,
but with more emphasis on military tactics and cooperating fleets. The
transposition of fleet maneuvers to huge ground vehicles adds some extra
fun. The plot has little to do with the background and is a fairly stock
military adventure scenario, but it's reasonably well-told. The story
feels like an excerpt from a larger military-SF-inspired adventure, but
the length keeps the quantity of tactics and maneuvering below the
threshold where I would get bored. (6)
"Twelvers" by Leah Cypess: This is a sharp and occasionally
mean story of adolescent cruelty and alienation. Darla is a "twelver," a
child who was carried an extra three months in the womb using
newly-invented medical technology because of a belief in the advantages
this would bring in later life. Unfortunately for all those who used this
technique, what it also brought was a preternatural calm and an unusual
reaction to emotions. Darla finds it almost impossible to get upset at
anything, and that, of course, prompts the cruelty and abuse of other
children. Most of the story is a description of that abuse, leading up to
Darla stumbling into a nasty solution to her immediate problem. It's all
very believable (well, apart from the motivating biology), but I didn't
enjoy reading about it, and I'm certainly not convinced that the ending
will lead to anything good. (5)
"The Messenger" by Bruce McAllister: This is a very short time
travel story, where time travel is used to try to unwind old family pain.
This world follows the unalterable history model: no changes to the past
are possible, and anything you do in the past has already happened. The
mechanics are mostly avoided. Instead, McAllister concentrates on his
mother, his father, and their complex relationship. I would have needed a
bit more background on the characters to care enough about them for the
story to be fully effective, but while the heartstring-pulling is kind of
obvious, it's still a solid story. (6)
"The Copenhagen Interpretation" by Paul Cornell: This is the
most ingenious of the stories in this issue. It's set in a future world
that extends what seemed to me to be pre-World-War-I great power politics,
although there may be a hint of the Cold War. Great nations have reached
a careful balance of power, and spies and secret services work to sustain
that balance. The progatonist is one of those agents, making use of
advanced technology like space folds in the service of a cause that he
doesn't entirely believe in. Cornell mixes in mental conditioning,
artificial people, space travel, and even aliens (maybe) in a taut
thriller plot that, for me, gained a great deal from the unexplained
strangeness of its background. If you like diving into the deep end and
following a fast-moving plot against a background of strangeness, this is
the sort of SF you'll enjoy. (7)
Rating: 6 out of 10
2013-05-15: WebAuth 4.5.3
Good news: we finally tracked down the intermittant redirect looping bug
so that I could fix it! Bad news: it was also a security vulnerability.
Thankfully, it was fairly specific: you had to be using FastCGI for the
login page and you also had to be using the $REMUSER_REDIRECT
option. But in those situations, WebAuth versions from 4.4.1 through
4.5.2 could potentially leak authentication state from one user to
another.
The full scenario is somewhat tedious to explain, but the short version is
that, in 4.4.1, I switched over to using a single persistent
CGI::Application object instead of re-creating it for each request. This
takes better advantage of FastCGI. However, CGI::Application doesn't
reset header properties between requests, and while we mostly did that
internally, there was one specific case around REMOTE_USER redirects where
we didn't.
For more details, including a patch for those who don't want to upgrade,
see the security
advisory.
WebAuth 4.5.3 has been released with only this fix relative to 4.5.2.
You can get the latest release from the
official WebAuth distribution site or
from my WebAuth distribution pages.
2013-05-14: WebAuth 4.5.2
Last weekend, I spent several hours carefully going over some of the
WebLogin code to try to track down a weird bug that we ran into in our UAT
environment. The bad part is that I didn't find it, although restarting
Apache made it disappear. The good part is that I found a bunch of other
bugs that would have been troublesome later.
This release is just a WebLogin bug fix release, cleaning up those issues
plus a few other things we've found in testing for our upcoming production
upgrade. Specifically, there's now a way to preserve
remember_login across a failed login attempt, clearing of failed
login attempts after a successful one works properly, cookies are set
correctly on the error page, and WebLogin no longer erroneously clears
cookies when redirecting to check for cookie support.
You can get the latest release from the
official WebAuth distribution site or
from my WebAuth distribution pages.
2013-05-14: backport 1.30
Debian wheezy has been released (yay!), so I've updated my backport script
to backport to wheezy by default and shuffled the meanings of stable and
oldstable. The whole script badly needs a rewrite and needs to become
more configuration-driven, but I sadly don't have the time at the moment,
so will have to make do with this.
If anyone else is using it, you can get the latest copy from my
scripts page.
Also done: suite names changed for local Stanford repositories. jessie
added to our local Debian mirroring. reprepro pull rules changed
accordingly. All local build chroots updated, with new ones created for
wheezy and wheezy-backports.
Still to do: update suite names and pull rules for the eyrie.org Debian
repository (which isn't used much any more). Delete the old per-service
lenny-based distributions, since we've gotten everything off of lenny that
cared about them. Add a new jessie build chroot to our local build
servers. Update our FAI installation to build wheezy by default and to
use a wheezy NFS root.
reprepro makes this whole process so massively easier than it was with
debarchiver.
2013-05-03: Review: Democracy at Work
Review: Democracy at Work, by Richard Wolff
| Publisher |
Haymarket |
| Copyright |
2012 |
| ISBN |
1-60846-247-1 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
220 |
I've been reading (mostly on-line) and thinking quite a bit lately about
workplace governance models, economic structure, and why the current
organization of the US workplace bothers me so intensely, partly triggered
by reading John Kenneth Galbraith's The
Affluent Society. The economic monoculture has made that process
particularly frustrating. It's rare to find a discussion, even in the
context of organizational strategies that are considered radical, that
avoids the standard frame of productivity and business value. Most
discussion is long on tactics and short on strategy and examination of
goals. Wolff's appearance on Moyers & Company was a rare breath of
fresh air, enough so that I grabbed his book shortly afterwards.
Wolff is a Marxian economist (meaning that he makes use of Marxist
analysis of economics and capitalism while separating them from Marxist
politics and Marx's advocacy of revolutionary socialism), which for me was
part of the interest. Marxist thought of any branch is not common in the
United States; we're regularly deprived of several sides in the
international conversation on economic models. I was taught Marxist
theory in elementary and high school (in retrospect, surprisingly
even-handedly and well, despite the biases of my schooling), but none of
the later developments of Marxist thought. I think that's a typical
experience here; in the United States, Marxism culminated in Mao and
Stalin, and no further development of the underlying theories is ever
mentioned.
Democracy at Work is subtitled A Cure for Capitalism and
does indeed advocate a concrete alternative to capitalist business
structures. But this is only the last third of the book (and in some ways
the least useful, as I'll discuss in a moment). The first two-thirds of
the book is basically a remedial education in modern, as opposed to
historic, Marxian economics for US readers like myself who have never
heard it before, cast in the context of the current financial crisis.
This may well be old hat for Europeans, but if you've been wondering what
(at least some) modern-day Marxists actually believe, or are saying to
yourself "there are modern-day Marxists after the collapse of the Soviet
Union?", I recommend this book to your attention. It's an excellent
summary, which I read with the delightful feeling of an expanding
viewpoint and the discovery of new directions from which to look at a
problem.
There's quite a bit in this section that's worth thinking about, including
another take on the nature of the recent economic collapse and how that
fits into a Marxian analysis of capitalist crises. But there was one
point in Wolff's explanation that I found particularly helpful. He
completely restructured my understanding of the Marxian analysis of worker
exploitation and profit allocation.
There are two angles of Marxist economic thought and socialist economics
that get a great deal of attention, at least in the United States, in
history and economics classes: the role (or lack thereof) of markets in
price setting, and the ownership of the means of production. Defenders of
capitalism like to focus on the former, since it's quite easy to identify
the advantages of theoretical free markets in finding ideal prices and
balancing supply and demand, whereas central planning of prices and
production has resulted in some catastrophic and deadly failures.
(Although I will note, with passing interest, that those failures predate
large-scale computing, and there are now large corporations that manage
budgets larger than some countries via centralized command-and-control
economic practices.) Defenders of socialism are more likely to focus on
the ownership of the means of production, since it's easy to show
prima facie unfairness in owners of capital extracting vast
profits without having to do any work themselves, only be lucky enough to
start with large quantities of money.
Wolff, however, argues that both of these focuses misses a core critique
by Marx of the workplace structure in capitalism, and that, by ignoring
that critique, supposedly Marxist countries did not create anything that
was actually Marxist in implementation. The Soviet Union was just as much
a capitalist country as the United States is. It was state capitalism
rather than private capitalism, but the core capitalist structure was
intact.
Wolff arrives at this conclusion, which may be well-trodden ground in
parts of the world that include active Marxist thought but which was quite
startling to this American, by treating the ownership of capital as a
partial distraction. He focuses on a more direct question and practical
question: who determines what a worker does on a day-to-day basis and how
that product is used? Who determines what profits are collected and how
they are spent? In private capitalism, this is done by the owners of the
capital: large shareholders, major investors, and the managerial class
that they hire. In Soviet state capitalism, this is done by national
politicians, bureaucrats, and the managerial class that they hire.
In neither model is it done by the workers themselves. The Soviet model
gives theoretical ownership of the capital to the workers, but that
ownership is diffused, centralized, and politicized, redirected through
the mechanisms of the state, and therefore is effectively ignored.
Ownership and control is entirely captured by the political class.
Both of these systems are capitalist in Wolff's view of Marx: there is a
class of owners and managers, who control the terms and nature of work and
who allocate the profits, and a class of workers, who have to do what
they're told, are not paid full value for their labor, and don't have a
say in how the profits their work generates are spent. At the most
important level of day-to-day autonomy and empowerment, they are
functionally identical. They are both equally hierarchical and
exploitative; the only difference is in whether the system is controlled
by rich individuals or by well-connected politicians. (And, as any study
of modern politics quickly reveals, the distinction between those two
groups in most countries is murky at best.)
Wolff convincingly recasts modern economic history as a constant pendulum
swing between private capitalism and state capitalism. Crises in one
system push countries towards the other system; subsequent crises push the
country back towards the first system. Regulation grows and shrinks,
companies are nationalized and then privatized, but both systems are
united in excluding the worker from any meaningful control over their work
life.
The first two-thirds of the book was full of insights like this for me. I
didn't agree with all of it, but all of it was worthwhile and
thought-provoking. But I was a bit leery of Wolff's proposed solution.
My past experience with critics of capitalism is that the critique is
often quite compelling, but the proposed solution is much less believable.
And, sadly, that concern was warranted here as well.
The core of Wolff's proposal is predictable but possibly sound: a
restructuring of the workplace to be radically democratic. The business
would be owned entirely and exclusively by the people who work for it,
equally regardless of the job of the worker, and the workers would decide
democratically or via elected repesentatives from among the workers how to
allocate the profits of the business, what standards and business
practices should be followed, and how the work is to be done. I was
particularly interested to hear that this model (workers' self-directed
enterprises) has apparently been successful in Spain in the form of the
Mondragon Cooperative. Given all the tricky, small details that have to
be resolved in an actual workplace, an existence proof is worth more than
pounds of theory.
Unfortunately, like a lot of proposed alternatives, Wolff's description of
WSDEs is quite fuzzy and involves a lot of hand-waving. I was never able
to build, from this book, a coherent and complete mental model of how such
a workplace would function. Wolff tends to surround every specific in a
halo of contingencies, possibilities, and alternative models, and is
maddeningly nonspecific on such practical matters as how line management
would work, how such a business would do financial planning or project
approval, how competing interests in different parts of the organization
would be balanced, and other practical governance matters that fill my
work life. Maybe the answer to all of that is just "democracy," but I'm
dubious.
Democracy has a number of well-known flaws that I thought weren't
adequately addressed. For example, democracies are often quite happy to
further and reinforce existing prejudice (such as sexism or racism), and
are prone to yielding control to the most charismatic. Democracies also
have an informed voter problem, which seems like it would be particularly
acute if democracy is going to make detailed business decisions. And, for
larger organizations, control by pre-existing money could re-enter the
equation via propaganda and campaigning around votes. Some of this gap in
the book could be addressed via a more in-depth look at how Mondragon and
any other real-life examples work, but that is sadly missing here. (I am
interested enough now, though, that I'd read a good popular treatment of
the history and methodology of Mondragon, although I don't think I'm up to
working through an academic study.)
The hierarchical, dictatorial management structure imposed by capitalism
is so awful that WSDEs don't have a particularly high bar to meet to be
fairer and more empowering than what we have today. The question, rather,
is would they function sufficiently well that the business would be able
to make effective decisions, and that's unclear to me from this book.
This is, as Wolff spends some time discussing, particularly difficult when
in direct competition with capitalist enterprises. This sort of endeavor
will probably trade some degree of economic efficiency and raw marketplace
power for improvements to fairness and empowerment, but that means it's
going to require support from the surrounding society, which is a huge
obstacle. I doubt there's a free lunch here: true fairness and equity
also leading to improved economic efficiency in a capitalist context is a
nice dream, but not horribly practical.
Wolff also seems to suffer from something else I associate with Marxist
thought: a preferential focus on a very narrowly-defined type of
productive worker, apparently left over from Marx's original critique in
the context of industrialization. Wolff inserts a very odd and quite
awkward distinction in his WSDE model between workers who directly produce
the product that's sold, and who in his model therefore produce the
profits of the business, and all other workers in the business. He then
gives special privileges to the former group to decide how much profit to
return in worker compensation and how much to use for other purposes, thus
making the supporting workers second-class citizens within this supposedly
equal workplace.
Speaking as someone who works in IT, and hence would be classified by
Wolff into the supporting rather than directly productive category, I do
not find this division at all convincing, and Wolff never provides a
coherent explanation for why he introduced it. He only says that it's
necessary for the governance of the business to not be exploitative, which
seems to assume that there is a special economic role played by the
workers who work directly on a saleable product. Maybe there is some
analysis that could convince me of this, but, if so, it's not present in
this book. It struck me as a recipe for continuing the exploitation of
the most invisible and powerless workers in capitalism: janitors,
groundskeepers, and other low-paid service jobs.
I wish the whole book were as insightful and pointed as the first
two-thirds, but alas I found the WSDE discussion to be somewhat muddled
and utopian. "How do we get there from here" is always the hardest part
of this type of discussion, and Wolff has no special skill in that
department. But, despite that, I got a lot of fascinating ideas and new
conceptual frameworks out of this book, and I'm tempted to read it again.
I suspect some of this, similar to my discovery
of promises and infinite streams in programming, is filling in of odd
gaps in my personal education rather than a discovery of unusual, new
ideas. But if you too have gotten your political education within the US
capitalism über alles bubble, this book may fill in similar gaps
in your knowledge. If so, it's a very rewarding experience.
If you're curious about a preview of Wolff's perspective without paying
for the book, I recommend watching the
first episode of Moyers & Company in which he appeared. Wolff is
a clear and engaging speaker, and his interview provides a good feel for
his discussion style and his general perspective.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2013-05-01: Review: The System of the World
Review: The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson
| Series |
The Baroque Cycle #3 |
| Publisher |
William Morrow |
| Copyright |
2004 |
| ISBN |
0-06-052387-5 |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
892 |
This is the third book of the three-volume Baroque Cycle. I think
you could, if you really wanted, read it without reading the previous
volumes; Stephenson is certainly long-winded enough that you can pick up
most of what's going on while you read. It's been a year since I read the
second volume, and I only resorted to Wikipedia a couple of times to
remember plot elements (and mostly from the first book). However, I
wouldn't recommended starting here. Many of the character relationships,
and most of the underpinning of the plot, is established in the previous
volumes and given more significance by them. You would also miss
The Confusion, which is the best book of
the series, although none of this series rises to the level at which I'd
recommend it except under specific circumstances.
Quicksilver establishes the characters
of Daniel Waterhouse, a fictional Puritan whose family was close to
Cromwell and who became a friend to Isaac Newton in the days following the
Restoration; Jack Shaftoe, a vagabond who wanders Europe in a sequence of
improbable adventures; and Eliza, who becomes a friend to Leibniz and a
spy for William of Orange. The Waterhouse sections are prominent in
Quicksilver: full of the early history of the Royal Society,
alchemy, and a small amount of politics. Of those three characters, Eliza
is by far the most interesting, which meant that I was delighted when
The Confusion dropped Waterhouse almost entirely and mixed Eliza's
further story with more improbable but entertaining sea adventures of Jack
Shaftoe.
You will immediately sense my root problem with The System of the
World when you hear that it is almost entirely about Daniel Waterhouse.
While Eliza and Jack both appear, they play supporting roles at best, and
Eliza's wonderful sharp intelligence and pragmatic survival skills are
left out almost entirely.
Instead, this is a novel about Waterhouse's return to England after
spending quite a bit of time in the American colonies working on
calculating machines. He is almost immediately entangled in dangerous
politics from multiple directions: the precarious national politics in
England near the end of the reign of Queen Anne, Isaac Newton's attempts
to maintain the currency of England as Master of the Mint, and a bombing
attempt that may have been aimed at him, may have been aimed at Newton,
and may have been aimed at someone else entirely. Much of the book
consists of an extended investigation of this bombing plot, skullduggery
involving counterfeiters, and attempts to use the currency and the Mint as
part of the political conflict between Whigs and Tories, mixed in with
attempts to construct a very early computer (this is Stephenson,
after all). Leibniz and Eliza come into this only as confidants of the
Hanoverians.
All this may sound exciting, and there are parts of it that hold the
attention. But this book sprawls as badly as Quicksilver did.
There's just too much detail without either enough plot or enough clarity.
Stephenson tries to make you feel, smell, and hear the streets of London
and the concerns of an idiosyncratic group of semi-nobles during one of
the more interesting junctures of British history, but he does that by
nearly drowning you in it, and without providing enough high-level
guidance. For most of the book, I felt like I was being given a tour of a
house on my hands and knees with a magnifying glass. It's a bad sign when
the reader of a historical novel is regularly resorting to Wikipedia, not
to follow interesting tangents of supporting material, but to try to get a
basic sense of the players and the politics involved because the author
never explains them clearly.
If you're more familiar with the details of British history than I am, and
can more easily follow the casual intermixing of two or three forms of
address for the same historical figure, you may not have that problem.
But I think other structural issues remain, and one of the largest is
Waterhouse himself.
Jack Shaftoe, and particularly Eliza, are more interesting characters
because they're characters. They're not always particularly
believable, but they attack the world with panache and are constantly
squirming into the center of things. Stephenson's portrayals of Newton,
Leibniz, the Duke of Marlborough, Sophia of Hanover, Peter the Great, and
the other historical figures who show up here are interesting for
different reasons: Stephenson has history to draw on and elaborate, and
it's fascinating to meet those people from a different angle than dry
lists of accomplishments. History has a way of providing random details
that are too bizarre to make up; Isaac Newton, for example, actually did
disguise himself to infiltrate London criminal society in pursuit of
counterfeiters while he was Master of the Mint!
Waterhouse, for me, has none of these advantages. He is an invented
character in whom I have no pre-existing interest. He drifts through
events largely through personal connections, all of which seem to be
almost accidental. He's welcome in the councils of the Royal Society
because he's apparently a scientist, but the amount of actual science we
see him doing is quite limited. His nonconformist background allies him
squarely with the Whigs, but his actual position on religious matters
seems much less set than the others around him. What he seems to want,
more than anything else, is to help Leibniz in the development of a
computer and to reconcile Newton and Leibniz. And he's not particularly
effective at either.
In short, he has little in the way of memorable character or dynamism,
despite being the primary viewpoint character, and seems to exist mostly
to know everyone and be everywhere that's important to the story. He
feels like an authorial insertion more than a character. It's quite easy
to believe that Stephenson himself would have loved to be in exactly the
role and situation that Waterhouse finds himself in throughout the book,
in the middle of the councils of the wise and powerful, in just the right
position to watch the events of history. I can sympathize, but it doesn't
make for engrossing reading. Novels live and die by the strength of their
characters, particularly their protagonists; I want more than just a
neutral viewpoint.
The third major structural problem that I had with this book is that I
think Stephenson buries his lede. After finishing it, I think this is a
book with a point, a central premise around which all the events of the
story turn, and which is the philosophical culmination of The
Baroque Cycle as a whole. But Stephenson seems oddly unwilling to state
that premise outright until the very end of the book. For the first half,
one could be forgiven in thinking this is a story about alchemy and the
oddly heavy gold that's been a part of the story since The
Confusion, or perhaps about foundational but forgotten work on
computation that preceded Babbage by a century. But those all turn out to
be side stories, sometimes even without a proper conclusion. I appreciate
honoring the intelligence of the reader, and I presume that Stephenson
would like to guide the reader through the same process of realization
that the characters go through, but I think he takes this much too far and
fails to make the realization clear.
I'll therefore state what I believe is the premise outright, since I think
it's a stronger book with this idea in mind: The System of the
World is a continuation of the transformational economics shown in
The Confusion into the realm of politics. Specifically, it's about
the replacement of people with systems, about the journey
towards Parliamentary supremacy, central banking, and the persistent
state, and about the application of scientific principles of consistency
and reproducibility to politics and economics (however fitfully and
arbitrarily). Quicksilver was about the rise of science; The
Confusion was, in retrospect, about the rise of economics; and The
System of the World tries to be about the rise of technocratic modern
politics, barely perceptible among the squabbles between Tories and Whigs.
I think that's a fascinating premise, and I would have loved to read a
book that tackles it head-on. That's a concept that is much more familiar
from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the context of Marxism,
early socialism, technological utopianism, and similar attempted
applications of scientific analysis to political and human behavior for
the betterment of human civilization. Shifting that 200 years earlier and
looking at a similar question from the perspective of the giants of the
Enlightenment feels full of of potential. There are moments when I think
Stephenson captures the sense of a seismic shift in how economies are run,
knowledge is established, and civilizations are knit together. But, most
of the time, it just isn't clear. There's so much other stuff in this
book, and in the whole series: so many false starts, digressions,
abandoned plots, discarded characters, and awkward attempts at romance (as
much as I like the characters, Stephenson's portrayal of the relationship
between Eliza and Jack is simply ridiculous and not particularly funny)
that the whole weight of the edifice crushes what I think is the core
concept.
Stephenson is never going to be sparse. When you start a Stephenson
novel, you know it's going to be full of chunks of partly digested
encyclopedia and random research findings that may have nothing to do with
the plot. But his best books (Snow
Crash, The Diamond Age, even
Cryptonomicon) have an underlying
structure off of which all of those digressions are hung. You can see the
bones beneath the flesh, and the creature they create is one you want to
get to know.
I'm not sure there are any bones here, and that may be the peril, for
Stephenson, of writing historical fiction. I wonder if he felt that the
structure of history would provide enough structure by itself that he
could wrap a few plots around the outside of it and call it good. If so,
it didn't work, at least for me. A lot of things happen. Some of them
are even exciting and tense. A lot of people meet, interact, and show off
their views of the world. A great deal of history, research, and sense of
place is described in painstaking detail. But at the end of the book, I
felt like I had to reach for some sort of point and try to retrofit it to
the story. Lots happened, but there wasn't a novel. And that
makes it quite hard to get enthused by the book.
If you adored Quicksilver, I suspect you will also like this. I
think they're the most similar. If, like I did, you thought The
Confusion was a significant step up in enjoyment in the series and were
hoping the trend will continue, I'm sad to report that it didn't.
If you were considering whether to read the whole series and were waiting
to see what I thought of the end, my advice is to give The Baroque
Cycle a pass unless you absolutely love Stephenson's digressions, don't
care if they're about history instead of current technology, and cannot
live without 3,000 pages of them. It's not that they're bad books, but
they're very long books, they take a significant investment of time and
attention, and I think that, for most readers, there are other books that
would repay a similar investment with more enjoyment.
Rating: 5 out of 10
2013-05-01: WebAuth 4.5.1
Unfortunately, as always seems to happen with large releases, one of the
features that we added in WebAuth 4.5.0 wasn't adequately tested and had
some lingering issues.
In this case, it was a last minute change: from a UI perspective, we
decided it was better to present the user with a checkbox (checked by
default) saying "remember my login on this computer" instead of a checkbox
(off by default) saying "this is a public computer; don't remember me."
People are much more familiar with the former than the latter.
Unfortunately, due to how HTML checkboxes work, this required changing the
default in the code, and that turned out to break single sign-on
completely. We were assuming we should not maintain single sign-on
credentials by default, so all the WebLogin interactions that never passed
through the forms so that the form could establish a default would delete
the cookies.
This should be all sorted out in this release, along with a few other edge
cases that became apparent when I thought harder about this. The
documentation also makes clearer the required template changes when
upgrading from versions prior to 4.5.0. We also snuck in one new feature:
the user information service can pass a message to the user through to the
confirmation page.
You can get the latest release from the
official WebAuth distribution site or
from my WebAuth distribution pages.
2013-04-30: Review: Questions for a Soldier
Review: Questions for a Soldier, by John Scalzi
| Publisher |
Subterranean |
| Copyright |
2005 |
| Printing |
2012 |
| ISBN |
1-59606-468-4 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
28 |
Yet another short story from the Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle
collection, which is padding out my numbers this year since I don't seem
to be writing as many reviews. It was originally published as a chapbook
and then reprinted in Subterranean Magazine, and is now available
on the Kindle for 99 cents.
Questions for a Soldier is really a short story, and slight even
for that. It's a pendant to Old Man's
War, a close-up of one stop in a good will tour that John Perry, the
protagonist of that novel, does during it. In universe, it's basically a
propaganda piece for the Colonial Defense Force that fleshes out some more
of the background, mainly from the CDF side, of Scalzi's future universe.
What Scalzi is doing here is mildly interesting: he's trying to capture
the style of this sort of public affairs, feel-good speaking engagement
but balance that against his portrayal of Perry as an honest straight
shooter. Perry does a lot of the careful presentation of both sides that
one would expect from someone who knows he's standing up to represent one
side of an issue but doesn't want to make the propaganda too obvious. As
a portrayal of a political speech of the subgenre "trying not to act like
a politician," I think Scalzi successfully captures the tone.
That's probably also why I found it vaguely annoying, since I think such
speeches are a classic form of manipulation. Take someone (who may even
honestly be a person of good will), put them up in front of a crowd, don't
tell them what they have to say but make sure they're representing
something that they're at least somewhat proud of, and let social pressure
and expectations take care of the rest. The person will come across as
honest and open (since they consider themselves to be), they don't
actually know anything damaging, and they'll want to present their side in
a good light. Humans are wonderful at rationalizations. The audience
comes away feeling like the people they may be politically opposed to are
human, and good people, and they can't be doing anything that upsetting
since that fellow was a nice, upstanding person who told some great war
stories and was clearly putting themselves in danger to protect the rest
of us. It blunts political outrage and anger, justified or not, with a
bit of "we're all on the same side and we're all good people" emotional
camaraderie without any danger of any real revelations, uncomfortable
information, or dangerous theories being expressed.
Scalzi does a good job holding up a mirror here, and he also gives Perry
the opportunity to make the solid (if quite predictable and dangerously
incomplete) case for a professional military (and a completely cliched
case for world, or galactic, peace). It all sounds quite believable
because Perry obviously believes it. (That does not mean that
Scalzi believes it; he's writing a character in a time, place, and
role when the character believed those things.)
But, at the end, it's a bit of political fluff that isn't really a story
(no plot) and adds little to the larger series in which it was embedded.
The later novels in the Old Man's War series raise the questions
asked here in a much more forceful and direct way, in ways that produce at
least a few answers. The general style is the sort of speech that you
could find almost anywhere in US politics. If you have the collection
anyway, it's mildly interesting to take apart what Scalzi is portraying
here and think about it a bit, but it's completely missable.
Rating: 5 out of 10
2013-04-26: WebAuth 4.5.0
Time to finally release three months of work!
This is a very large feature release for the multifactor support in
WebAuth and for the integration with the user information service, which
is the way that WebAuth interacts with local site policy. (Currently, you
still have to write your own to a well-defined protocol, although we do
hope to provide Perl modules to help with this in the future.)
The major driving motivation for this release is to add the infrastructure
required to set long-lived persistent cookies in a browser that contribute
factors to authentications, which allows WebAuth to support "remember this
device" functionality and to only require multifactor from devices from
which a user has not previously authenticated. This includes a new token
type, new attributes the user information service can send (including a
way to invalidate such tokens), and new data that's sent back to the user
information service. The user information service also now has the
ability to add arbitrary additional factors to the current authentication,
something that is intended to provide a hook for a local help desk to
bypass multifactor for a user for some time if required.
This release also contains substantial contributions by Benjamin
Coddington at UVM to improve multifactor interactions, including sending
the OTP type back to the user information service if WebLogin knows it, a
mechanism for the user information service to communicate a message to the
user that's displayed on the multifactor login page, opaque state that can
be sent back and forth between WebLogin and the user information service,
and the ability for the user information service to add specific
authentication factors to the required set for a particular
authentication.
Other improvements in multifactor handling include the ability to set a
lifetime on factors obtained via OTP login, a fix for a long-standing bug
where an initial multifactor factor would satisfy a session requirement
for random multifactor, and logging of even ignored errors when contacting
the user information service.
There are other changes too. This release touches almost every part of
WebAuth. The change to WebAuthForceLogin in 4.4.0 was reverted since, on
further consideration, the original semantics seemed more useful.
Password change handling in WebLogin was fixed (it's been broken for some
time). Apache 2.4 error logging for all modules is much improved, and
mod_webauth and mod_webkdc now produce better error logs for all versions
of Apache. And WebLogin now communicates password expiration times to its
templates in seconds since epoch in addition to a pre-formatted English
time for better localization support.
William Orr contributed a new WebAuthLdapOperationalAttribute directive
for mod_webauthldap that allows it to query operational attributes and
include them in the environemnt.
There are two backward-incompatible changes for WebLogin. First, WebAuth
now supports a user checkbox indicating either to remember their login on
that device or to not remember their login (local site templates can
present it either way). However, proper implementation of this matching
the normal expected wording of "remember me on this device" required
changing the default, so a straight upgrade from an earlier version will
result in no single sign-on. To preserve behavior, either a template
change to add the checkbox (checked by default) or a configuration change
are required.
Second, support for getting password expiration times directly with remctl
to a kadmin-remctl backend has been removed in favor of using data from
the user information service by way of the WebKDC.
Finally, I got to do a lot of cleanup of the API, fix diagosis of undef
passed to Perl XS functions, and fixed a compilation error with Heimdal.
You can get the latest release from the
official WebAuth distribution site or
from my WebAuth distribution pages.
2013-04-10: Hugo nominee haul
I need to write up new Kindle books, of which there are now quite a few
due to various sales plus the Hugo nominee slate, but I got another set of
paper books and they're sitting in front of me. So here's a list.
Saladin Ahmed — Throne of the Crescent Moon (sff)
Elizabeth Bear — Shattered Pillars (sff)
Ta-Nehisi Coates — The Beautiful Struggle (non-fiction)
Guy Gavriel Kay — River of Stars (sff)
Jenny Larson — Let's Pretend This Never Happened (non-fiction)
Domenica Ruta — With or Without You (non-fiction)
Jay Wexler — The Odd Clauses (non-fiction)
Ahmed's book is the remaining Hugo nominee that I didn't already pick up.
I'm delighted to see the diversity on the Hugo and particularly the Nebula
slate this year, and I'm curious to see the spin that Ahmed brings to the
epic fantasy genre.
Bear's book is the sequel to Range of Ghosts, another book I'm very
much looking forward to reading to but haven't yet. I'm rather behind on
reading Bear's work right now.
Let's Pretend This Never Happened, With or Without You, and
The Beautiful Struggle are all memoirs, of varying degrees of
seriousness. I've gotten hooked on Coates's writing at
The Atlantic,
and I highly recommend it if you've not yet seen it. Domenica Ruta's
memoir is the latest Indiespensible selection.
Jay Wexler's book was recommended by Lowering the Bar, a legal humor blog whose entire archives I'm slowly
reading.
But the highlight of this order is Kay's River of Stars, which is
a sequel of sorts to one of my
favorite books ever. This
is probably the book I'll read during my next vacation.
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