2010-09-01: git-pbuilder 1.16
Getting the git-pbuilder script included in git-buildpackage has
significantly increased the usage, which means lots more people finding
new features and facilities that they need. I love that part of free
software work. Here's a new version with a few new facilities.
Since the previous release announcement (for 1.13), this adds:
New support for an ARCH environment variable, which sets the
architecture to use for the build chroot. This appends the
architecture to the base directory name and passes the
--architecture flag on to cowbuilder and pbuilder.
When called with update, create, or login, pass
any additional arguments to cowbuilder. Patch from Svend Sorensen.
Say what distribution and architecture we're building for if DIST or
ARCH is set. Error out if /usr/sbin/cowbuilder isn't available,
telling the user to install the cowbuilder package. Based on patches
from Guido Günther.
You can get the latest version from my scripts distribution page.
2010-08-29: Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, August/September 2009
Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, August/September 2009
| Editor |
Gordon van Gelder |
| Issue |
Volume 117, No. 1 & 2 |
| ISSN |
1095-8258 |
| Pages |
258 |
In the book review columns of this issue, Elizabeth Hand reviews
Cheek by Jowl, a collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin that I
very much want to read, and Laura Miller's The Magician's Book (a
non-fiction look at Narnia and children's reading), and then goes on to
review Lev Grossman's The Magicians in the light of both of them.
I love this format for a review column. It matches the way I tend to read
the genre, mixing analysis with fiction and enjoyment. I'd like to see
more like this!
The movie review column in this issue is mostly an extremely negative
review of Watchman by Lucius Shepard, which reinforces my feeling
that Shepard looks for something much different in movies than I do. But
Shepard also apparently disliked the graphic novels, and it's true that if
one didn't like the source material, the movie would have no hope.
"The Art of the Dragon" by Sean McMullen: This is the cover
story for this issue. A giant metal dragon appears from nowhere, an
impossible creature that shouldn't be able to fly, and proceeds to seek
out and destroy or devour the world's most famous art while wearing a
goofy grin. The story follows an art history Ph.D. (who hadn't been able
to find a job in that field) who was lucky enough to take the closest
pictures of the dragon when it ate the Eiffel Tower and therefore gets
sucked into the government attempts to stop the dragon. This story could
have gone many places, including a bizarre alien invasion, but McMullen
turns it into a more psychological and fantastic story about people's
reactions to disruptive events. The end caught me by surprise and was
somewhat unsatisfying, but I kept thinking about it afterwards. (7)
"You Are Such a One" by Nancy Springer: This is one of the rare
stories written in second person present. I normally find that annoying
and distracting, but I think it worked here. It breaks down the
separation between the reader and the middle-aged bank teller who's the
protagonist. The story opens with her encountering a house that she'd
only previously seen in recurring dreams, and then with the discovery that
the custodian of the house is convinced she's a ghost. The rest of the
story plays with the meaning of ghost and the effect of making an impact
on another person. The end of the story is a disturbing inversion that
left me with lingering thoughts about invisible work and seeing others as
people. A strange story, but a good one. (7)
"A Token of a Better Age" by Melinda M. Snodgrass: This is a
Roman-era fantasy story with a twist: the dragon-slaying at the center of
the story is actually of a more Lovecraftian adversary, and Snodgrass
blends in an amusing alternative history of Christianity. The best part
of the story is the interplay between the storyteller and his listener
— stories with their own built-in critical commentary are
some of my favorites — but the tweaked background also adds
interest. It stays mostly a traditional sword and sorcery adventure in
the end, and the closing pun is worth a smile at best, but it works as
entertainment. (7)
"Hunchster" by Matthew Hughes: This strange, short story about
an intuitive scientific genius and a group of card players lives in the
surprise ending, so there's not much I can say without ruining it. It's
hard to find a new take on time travel, and even this one has probably
been done, but I don't remember seeing it. Definitely a change of pace
from Hughes's normal fiction. (6)
"The Goddamned Tooth Fairy" by Tina Kuzminski: This is one of
two classic reprints in this issue and the reprint chosen by the current
editor, Gordon van Gelder. As you might expect, it's an excellent story.
It's a very domestic story, following a windower with a young daughter
into a new relationship that he's not sure he can take a chance on. The
fantastic element is lightly played in the tradition of mysterious advice
from a stranger. It all sounds very stock and the resolution is
predictable, and yet it still won my heart. Even the oldest story
patterns, when well-told and full of heart, can be surprisingly moving.
This is one of those. Well worth reading. (8)
"The Bones of Giants" by Yoon Ha Lee: I was thrilled to see a
story by Yoon Ha Lee in this issue, and while I would have been even
happier with something else set in the world of "The Unstrung Zither", I'll take an atmospheric fantasy with an
unexpected wise teacher. This story opens with Tamim on the edge of the
region known as the Pit, preparing to kill himself. He's interrupted by a
necromancer riding the bones of a giant who recruits him to fight the
sorcerer who rules the area. The story moves into one of training mingled
with a growing relationship that takes a surprise twist. It's sword and
sorcery, but deep for it and set against a rich world background. While I
won't spoil the twist, long-time fantasy readers of certain preferences
will get a thrill out of one revealed identity. Yoon Ha Lee is an
excellent writer, and I hope we'll see even more by her. (8)
"Icarus Saved from the Skies" by Georges-Olivier
Châteaureynaud: This story was written in French, originally titled
"Icare sauvé des cieux," and was translated by Edward Gauvin. I approve
of F&SF publishing some translated non-English fiction, but sadly I
didn't enjoy this particular story. It's about a man who has wings,
through some sort of mutation or genetic fluke, and his relationship with
his girlfriend and wife who is deeply enamoured of the wings. He, on the
other hand, considers them a curse and keeps considering having them cut
off. Their relationship is borderline abusive, and the ending is nasty
and left me with a bad taste in my mouth about the entire story. (3)
"The Others" by Lawrence C. Connolly: From sword and sorcery,
this issue moves to planetary exploration SF. Cara is one of a mission
team to a planet with native hunter-gatherer tribes, injured in a fight
with a native predator. The twist is that the whole mission team are
copies of herself, and normally they're all in constant contact and serve
as additional hands and bodies for complex missions. But Cara, due to her
injuries, has been cut off from that communication, and her other selves
also seem to be diverging and developing separate personalities.
It's an interesting setup, but I don't think Connolly ever took it far
enough or to a unique enough place. Most of the story is tense action in
the dark, occasionally exciting but not that memorable. The ending
reaches a conclusion of a sort, but not a very satisfying one. (6)
"Three Leaves of Aloe" by Rand B. Lee: I think this is the best
story of the issue. It's set in a future India and centers on a woman who
works in an outsourced call center, trying to support her family and
particularly her daughter. Her daughter runs into bullies at school while
borrowing her mother's cell phone (from work) and the phone is destroyed,
which sets off problems at both work and, more centrally, with the school.
The school wants to implant a "nanny chip" in her daughter to control her
aggression and anger.
As you might expect from that introduction, this is a story of family
drama and of understandings and misunderstandings between mother and
daughter. Not unusual, but the emotional tone is spot-on and the ending
is deeply satisfying. That mixes with a solid cautionary tale of messing
with people's emotions in the name of making them more tractable (which I
tended to read as criticism of over-medicating children). It's a
beautiful story of resilience and family and the hard choices of
child-raising. (9)
"The Private Eye" by Albert E. Cowdrey: This story returns to
Cowdrey's favorite haunt of Louisiana, this time to follow JJ, an unlikely
psychic. He's called in by the local Sheriff to solve a kidnapping of the
daughter of a very rich bank CEO. JJ discovers he can do more with his
abilities than read cards and eventually solves the mystery, which leads
to further humorous complications in Cowdrey's normal laid-back style.
One of Cowdrey's strengths is putting the reader in the head of not
particularly bright protagonists and pulling the reader into the story
with a combination of light-hearted humor and drama. This is a typical
entry in the middle of that pack. (6)
"Snowfall" by Jessie Thompson: This is the second classic
reprint of the issue, this time introduced by Harlan Ellison. The
introduction is Ellison at his worst: egotistical, intrusive, excessive,
and making one feel a bit sorry for Thompson and Ellison's interest in
her. Thankfully, one need not hold that against the story.
The story itself is very short, very sharp, and very stark. It's about
abuse, and it's likely to be full of triggers for some, so read with
caution if that sort of thing bothers you. It's a fantasy of reclaiming
personal identity in a broken and desperate way, and it carries a lot of
emotional impact. There isn't much story, and there isn't much closure.
It's more of a punch in the gut than a narrative. I prefer stories with
more narrative, but I can see why Ellison chose this one. (6)
"Esoteric City" by Bruce Sterling: Sterling takes a stock
fantastic premise (a deal with a devil of sorts) and twists it towards a
look at modern capitalism. The protagonist is a venture capitalist and a
necromancer, by which Sterling means someone supported by the oil
industry. He made a deal with a damned spirit, a dead Egyptian priest.
At the start of the story, he's taken to Hell to meet with the grand
Signore of industry, particularly the car industry, and warned he'll be
confronting Satan. But at the very end of the story, it takes a subtle
twist into a commentary on compromise and the role of money in social
change. Mostly light humor, but with a bit of a punch at the end. (7)
Rating: 7 out of 10
2010-08-28: Review: Julian Comstock
Review: Julian Comstock, by Robert Charles Wilson
| Publisher |
Tor |
| Copyright |
June 2009 |
| Printing |
June 2010 |
| ISBN |
0-7653-5923-5 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
689 |
The best description I have for the setting of Julian Comstock: A
Story of 22nd Century America is post-apocalyptic 19th century boy's
adventure. The cover's echoes of the Civil War, Planet of the
Apes, and Fallout are all apt and somehow merge together into a
cohesive whole: a world set after the collapse of modern civilization,
runaway global warming, and peak oil. Technology has regressed to a 19th
century world of farming, horses, and a city aristocracy. This future
world is highly religious, and not the good kind of religion. The
Dominion Church has taken over the United States, which in turn has taken
over the North American continent, apart from a long-standing war with
Europe (primarily Germany) fought mostly in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Enter Adam Hazzard, a country boy and loyal Christian, albeit one raised
in a denomination mostly favored by indentured laborers and featuring
snake charming. He is our narrator, starting the story in an
indistinguished small town notable only because his boyhood friend, Julian
Comstock, lives on a country estate there. Julian is the nephew of the
President, Declan the Conqueror, which makes him a high-class Aristo and
far out of Adam's social class. However, he's also the son of Declan's
brother, an immensely popular general whom Declan had executed on
trumped-up charges out of fear of his growing popularity. This makes
Julian's standing uneasy at best, but provides the opportunity for quiet
teenage years in a small village.
Adam and Julian are teenage boys at the start at the novel, fond of
exploring the find from local Tips (combination dig sites and dumps of
abandoned artifacts of earlier ages) and, at Julian's prompting, long and
frequently sacrilegious discussions of philosophy. They're watched over
by Sam, a loyal former companion of Julian's father. We get bits and
pieces of the world background, as well as plenty of hints that Julian is
going to become someone great, in Adam's early chapters. This book is
written in an effective mimicry of a rambling 19th century novel with a
great deal of personal commentary by the author and occasional comments
addressed to his believed audience (others of his own time). It also
makes quite effective use of footnotes, which strike an entertaining
balance between mock scholarship and ironic commentary.
In short, it reminds one of a post-apocalyptic Victorian novel as written
by Mark Twain.
And it's very well-written. Robert Charles Wilson is a well-respected
veteran SF author and quite good at stringing words together. He does an
excellent job maintaining the tone, down to an occasionally unreliable
narrator with blind spots. But if Wilson has a typical flaw, it's that he
can build a rich and complex background, put complex characters in it, and
then write a book about nothing much happening. That's my main complaint.
The book is not devoid of plot, starting with a military draft that has
the boys and their guardian fleeing their home and into a war, but it
never quite satisfied me. I spent the whole book waiting for the sudden
shift of gears into more dramatic heroism, or a grand reveal that would
drop the bottom out of the world, or some other sudden perspective shift.
It never happened. Despite Julian's meteoric rise through US politics
(heavily foreshadowed from the opening page), Julian Comstock never
seems to kick itself into that higher gear.
But putting aside my persistant feeling that the book drifted through its
nearly 700 pages without hitting the high points that I was hoping for,
what Julian Comstock does succeed in being is a detailed portrait
of a slightly abstracted, philosophical man who through determination and
quite a bit of luck takes on an established, fanatical church. It's a
story of science versus religion that's likely to appeal to the core
audience of SF, but it's also a beautiful emulation of appreciative
biography. I got the most enjoyment out of the book not from the plot but
from the delicate metafictional game that Wilson plays. The reader is
aware that this is an entirely fictional novel, but one can't help get
absorbed in the faux biography mixed with Adam's experiences with pulp
publishing industries and a nod to first-hand descriptions of trench
warfare, which builds a second layer of realism between the story and the
reader. The biographical challenges of accuracy, embelishment,
entertainment, audience, and interpretation play out on the page, often in
surprising bits of sly humor.
It's an odd connection for a story of post-apocalyptic politics, but I
suspect Julian Comstock will appeal the most to lovers of alternate
history. It also is catching a bit of the steampunk wave due to its
overall technology level, although in this case there is little or no
"punk" apart from Julian's obsession with an emulation of early motion
pictures. It's not hard SF fare; if you're looking for the mind-blowing
ideas of Spin, you may be disappointed,
and likewise if you were hoping for dramatic rising action. But as a
careful and detailed bit of world-building and character exploration with
a built-in metafictional game, it offers unexpected pleasures.
Recommended cautiously.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2010-08-26: krb5-sync 2.1
Sam Hartman ported the kadmin patch included in this package to MIT
Kerberos 1.8.3, so that seemed like a good excuse for a new release.
The patch is not yet heavily tested.
Also in this version are a few bug fixes from the previous release around
use with Heimdal. Heimdal 1.3.2 will return an error about a missing
service location plugin instead of the last error from Active Directory
when changing passwords, which caused the plugin to fail the password
change if Active Directory wasn't available. This release now correctly
queues the change (and does so for any password change error, to work
around problems like this).
Finally, there are some fixes for routine error suppression in
krb5-sync-backend with the -s flag, and the Active Directory status
manipulation code no longer uses deprecated OpenLDAP library functions.
You can get the latest version from the krb5-sync distribution page.
2010-08-25: wallet 0.12
I was hoping that this release would be the long-awaited 1.0 release, but
I want to ensure that the server has database upgrade handling before I
declare a 1.0 release. I ran out of time to finish that, so this is
another beta release, although it's in production at Stanford.
The main change in this release is the addition of the wallet-rekey client
program, which takes a keytab and retrieves new keys for every principal
listed in that keytab that's in the local realm. The new keys are then
merged back into the keytab. This is designed to make it easier to do
periodic rekeying of service keytabs.
Thanks to Ian Durkacz, this version includes a new ACL type, krb5-regex,
which is similar to krb5 but takes a Perl regular expression matching the
authenticated principal instead of a simple string match.
There are two new reports in this version: objects unused, which returns
all objects that have never been downloaded; and acls duplicate, which
returns all sets of ACLs that have exactly the same entries. The
wallet-report backend also now supports a help command which provides a
summary of commands.
You can get the latest release from the wallet distribution page. I've uploaded new Debian packages to my
personal Debian repository, although
they're nearly ready to make it into Debian.
2010-08-25: rra-c-util 2.6
This release rolls up various fixes from different projects. It adds
Kerberos portability code for old MIT Kerberos and Heimdal releases
without krb5_get_init_creds_opt_free, adds apr-config --includes to the
Apache module build flags for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and fixes probes
for UNIX domain sockets on OpenBSD.
Also in this release is a new test function for listing the contents of a
keytab and fixes to the test principal determination in the Kerberos and
remctl test libraries.
Finally, the last few releases didn't properly update the contents of the
distribution to include all the new M4 macro files in the release
tarball. This has now been fixed.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2010-08-25: C TAP Harness 1.5
This is a relatively minor release with a couple of bug fixes to bring
this package in sync with other work.
The ok_program function in the shell TAP library now only removes bits
from error messages after the second colon instead of the first. This
feature allows easier testing of programs whose error messages include the
system error, but the previous version was cutting off too much since the
program name followed by a colon generally starts error messages.
I've also now added several new GCC warning options and runtests.c will
now compile without warnings with -Wswitch-enum.
You can get the latest version from the
C TAP Harness distribution page.
2010-08-21: Review: The Whim of the Dragon
Review: The Whim of the Dragon, by Pamela Dean
| Series |
Secret Country #3 |
| Publisher |
Firebird |
| Copyright |
1989 |
| Printing |
2003 |
| ISBN |
0-14-250161-1 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
389 |
This is the third and concluding book in the trilogy starting with
The Secret Country. Unsurprisingly,
despite the false ending of The Hidden
Land, the children are drawn back into their imaginary world and its
concerns. Here, finally, the table is set, all the players have been
introduced, knowledge of what's truly going on is now more widespread, and
the characters face the third possible threat to the Hidden Land: the whim
of the dragon.
So far in this series, I've been a bit dubious of the praise that it's
gotten. I've liked it well enough to keep reading, and the background of
protagonists who invented the world in which they find themselves is
unique enough to warrant consideration. But it's been a bit more
confusing than engrossing, the characters have been hard to like, and it
hasn't grabbed me enough to rise to the level of praise I've heard about
it.
That changes significantly in this book. The Whim of the Dragon
improves considerably from not needing setup, initial exploration of
background, and creation of mysteries. The guessing can finally stop and
the revelations can begin, and they're more satisfying than I expected.
Dean brings together the themes of responsibility and imagination, finally
explains some of the strange voices that have populated previous books,
and reveals more world-building that goes deeper than what the children
invented. It's also more intense on action and events than the previous
books, embedding the world analysis into more dynamic scenes and fewer
allusive and half-explained conversations with Fence or Randolph.
I was thoroughly drawn into this book and could barely put it down.
The Whim of the Dragon is partly adventure but mostly puzzle, a
puzzle that benefits from the children bringing a different and outside
perspective to the world and drawing and chasing connections in the way
they would when they were creating it. The world seemed to come together
in my mind as I read it, and the questions and answers about the
metaphysics of the world felt like a cascade of significant, ongoing
revelations. The first two books were slow at times, but they set up a
lot and created a great effect for the conclusion.
Laura, sadly, never does get the moments of coming into her own that I was
hoping she'd get throughout the series, although she does get less
awkwardness and more of a role here. But both Ruth and Patrick improve
considerably, particularly Ruth, who gets more focus and some lovely and
difficult challenges to work through. Character growth throughout is
handled well, neither too cliched nor too easy. And while I don't want to
give away the ending, the way Dean handles the balance between the mundane
world and the Secret Country surprised me a great deal and provided a
touching and appropriate ending to the series.
Taken as a whole, this series echoes some things I've felt about the
process of creating worlds and characters, which I suspect is part of the
goal. An initial world, and an initial character, is often a conscious
creation, put together along planned lines. But the best worlds and the
best characters then start to change in the process of writing, evolve as
they interact and encounter each other, and create a form of emergent
complexity that feels like it's coming partly from outside one's mind even
if it isn't. This series externalizes that feeling, turning it into a
real experience for the children. It takes that rush of runaway creation
and uses it to fuel the conflict of the story, and also plays with the
sometimes-uncomfortable implications of being evil to one's characters in
service of that story. It didn't take this quite as far at times as I
wished it would, but it's the first series I can recall dealing directly
with the idea without being excessively self-conscious and critical.
After the first two books, I wasn't sure I'd recommend this series, but
given the conclusion, I definitely do. It's a good story, with extra
appeal for people who think about the power of creation and imagination
and who are familiar with the feeling that one's characters have a
semi-independent existence.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2010-08-16: Policy and time management
After reading Do It
Tomorrow, I was inspired to try some of the techniques that Mark Forster
proposes. I commented in the review about the closed list system, which
I'm still mostly using with some success. But I also started playing with
the initiative slot. In his system, the initiative slot is first thing in
the morning each (eligible) morning, which is used for a special project
that you want to make forward progress on.
There are several criteria for choosing a task for the initiative slot.
One of the strongest is dealing with a backlog. Since I'd been feeling
guilty about the backlog of Debian Policy work that had built up, that
seemed like a good choice. I picked up Debian Policy backlog clearing as
my initiative starting at the beginning of June after the AFS and Kerberos
Best Practices Workshop, with a goal of getting the open bug count below
100.
This has been very instructive, both from a time management perspective
and from a Debian Policy perspective. Here are a few things that I
learned on the Policy side:
The open bugs against Debian Policy by and large represent real work
that we should tackle in the Policy document. They're not all fully
thought-out proposals, but I didn't find much that I could simply
close (apart from a set of bugs requesting additional common-licenses,
once I had an analysis tool). From time to time, we've thought about
timing out old bugs that have not made any forward progress, but this
experience leads me to think that would serve us poorly.
It takes me about an hour on average to resolve a Policy bug. That
includes all the fast five-minute typo bugs (well, ten minutes; I need
to improve my Policy workflow to be a bit more efficient in the commit
process). Some bugs take easily ten hours or more, such as
#504880. I think this is on par
with or a bit slower than resolving typical bugs in compiled software
I package, and much slower than Lintian, where bugs take about a
half-hour on average to resolve, I think.
Most Policy bugs are making no forward progress because no one has
written wording and started iterating on that wording. There are some
exceptions, and this process seems to go better for me than it has for
some other contributors, but if I pick up a bug and start drafting
wording changes, I can usually bring the bug to resolution in about a
week, often less. This implies to me that our process for making
Policy changes is reasonable but we need more targetted help. This
was discussed at the BoF at DebConf and on the list afterwards and I
now have three people who have volunteered to supply some of that
targetted help and need to get more organized to make use of that
offer.
The normative (rule-affecting) versus informative (informational and
documentary) distinction in Policy is tricky and unclear, and most
bugs end up becoming normative. While I think our system for dealing
with normative bugs is reasonable, this does slow down fixes. I can
commit informative changes without review and then tweak them if
people object, and it would be nice to fix more wording issues that
way, but it's hard to avoid getting tangled up in normative issues.
Things I learned on the time management side:
I didn't work from a closed list, which is frowned on for dealing with
backlogs. I'm not sure if this ended up being a problem or not. The
correct approach, in theory, is to work out a system for dealing with
new incoming work, make sure that system is in place, and then process
backlog independently of all new work. I never did that. I never
separated out the backlog into a closed list that would get smaller.
I suspect I should have, although I'm not sure of a good way to do
that in the BTS in an area where we're already using usertags for
another purpose.
The point of the initiative slot is to unblock something or to clear a
backlog, but the initiative slot is supposed to rotate. It's not a
good way to deal with something that's going to take a long time to
resolve. In retrospect, I was excessively ambitious with my goal.
Even apart from not working from a closed list, I can average about a
half-hour a day on the initiative slot, which at an hour a bug and a
starting point of 160 bugs would mean 120 days to reach my goal.
That's too long for one task to dominate the initiative slot.
The initiative slot really works. We brought the bug count on Policy
down from about 160 to 126 over the course of those two months, and I
don't think much changed other than my level of activity and of course
the normal effect of other people getting more involved when someone
is visibly doing work. The
bug
graph is impressive. It's very obvious when I started working, and
also very obvious when the ramp-up to DebConf started and I stopped
having time to have a daily initiative slot.
Doing something that's unrelated to my day job in the initiative slot
creates an odd tension, and I'm not sure how to deal with that. On
one hand, one of my standard time management failure modes is to spend
too much time on work and not enough time on non-work tasks. On the
other hand, that's partly because I'm hypersensitive to not focusing
enough on work and overcompensate, and taking time each morning to do
non-work things doesn't help that. I'm not yet sure what to do about
this.
One of the failure modes of initiative slots that I'm already noticing
is that when I move something out of that slot, rather than continuing
to work on it at a normal pace, I have a tendency to stop working on
it altogether. This doesn't work, particularly if it was used for
backlog clearing. I just build up another backlog and then have to
use the slot to clear it again. This means I need to give more
attention to my time management outside of that slot.
I stopped using the initiative slot while travelling and haven't gotten
back into the hang of regular time management since I've gotten back. I
haven't yet decided whether to leave Policy work in the initiative slot
for right now but change the goal, or whether to swap it out for something
else. I'd like to keep momentum, but I'd also like to start using that
slot for other things. Still pondering.
2010-08-13: git-pbuilder 1.13
This supporting script for using cowbuilder with git-buildpackage came up
at DebConf, which also meant more attention on the bug requesting that it
be included in git-buildpackage. I've therefore done a few new releases
over the last few days including additional features that the example
script in git-buildpackage supported that my version of the script hadn't.
Changes since 1.10 include adding support for update, create, and login
options, which call cowbuilder with the corresponding flag instead of
doing a build, and support for taking the distribution on which to act
from the name of the script in case anyone wants to create symlinks to the
script as supported by the git-buildpackage example script. I also
switched the license to an MIT license instead of the same terms as Perl
(which didn't make much sense, since it's not written in Perl).
You can get the latest version of the script from
my scripts page, and will also be included
in the git-buildpackage package directly down the road.
Thank you very much to Guido Günther for his discussion, willingness to
include the script, and bug fixes.
2010-08-12: WebAuth 3.7.2
This release fixes an embarassing bug in option parsing in wa_keyring
introduced in 3.7.0 that caused the utility to become basically unusable.
It also fixes the option parsing so that negative values (for gc
for example) don't require -- to disambiguate from options, at
least on platforms that support + in the getopt() string.
Also fixed is an uninitialized variable in wa_keyring that caused
wa_keyring to randomly default to verbose mode, portability to old MIT
Kerberos and Heimdal libraries without krb5_get_init_creds_opt_free, and
build problems with the Perl module on platforms where shared libraries
need to be linked with explicitly.
This release also returns a user rejected error from the WebKDC if the
account is disabled or expired in Kerberos, rather than a generic Kerberos
error, which will allow WebLogin to return a better error message.
You can get the latest version from the
official WebAuth distribution page or
from my unofficial distribution page.
2010-07-30: Review: The Windup Girl
Review: The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
| Publisher |
Night Shade |
| Copyright |
2009 |
| Printing |
2010 |
| ISBN |
1-59780-158-5 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
359 |
Paolo Bacigalupi is a rising star in the SF field on the basis of his
short fiction, which garnered Hugo and Nebula nominations starting in 2005
with "The People of Sand and Slag" and a Theodore Sturgeon award in 2006
for "The Calorie Man". While
he's written a variety of short stories, those that I've read, which also
include "Pop Squad",
"Yellow Card Man",
"The Tamarisk Hunter", and
"Pump Six" (also the title of a
short story collection) have all shared an image of a dire future.
Environmental, technological, or social collapse or all three seem to be
his preferred subject material. He's an undeniably talented writer with a
knack for effective description and some fascinating (if fantastic) world
building, but I usually finish one of his stories wanting to slit my
wrists.
I've been contemplating this, his first novel, with profoundly mixed
feelings. Set in the same universe of runaway bioengineering and
environmental collapse as "The Calorie Man" and "Yellow Card Man," it had
prospects of being the same depressing portrait at much greater length.
It's also an indirect follow-up to "Yellow Card Man," which is my least
favorite of Bacigalupi's short fiction that I've read. Both of those
stories had an interesting world (more on that in a moment), but neither
of them had much in the way of a plot. They felt at times more like scene
descriptions than stories, and I wasn't sure what that would mean for a
novel.
I can happily report that The Windup Girl doesn't have those
problems. Indeed, I think Bacigalupi may be more effective at novel
length, since world-building and scene-setting is one of his strengths and
the additional pages give him more room to elaborate. Unlike some short
story writers, he handles the transition to multiple viewpoints extremely
well. The Windup Girl is full of dynamic characters and
well-interwoven plots, with a good novel climax, plenty of unexpected
twists, and a solid grasp of rising action and dramatic tension
throughout. For a first novel, this is surprisingly mature and polished
work.
He also improves on the hopeless despair of both "The Calorie Man" and
"Yellow Card Man," writing a book that manages almost a happy ending. If
you've not read his short fiction, let me assure you that's a surprising
leap. The grim universe is still here, and this book is full of nasty
things happening to desperate people, but finally the characters get a bit
of agency. He also has an opportunity to tell the story of this world in
the middle of a prolonged apocalpyse from a perspective that's more native
to what the world is becoming, which provides that sense of alienation and
perspective shift that is so often the core of the SF reading experience.
The short stories stopped at showing how much his future world sucks for
humans. The Windup Girl adds that invaluable SF "but" of future
adaptation.
This is all sounding quite positive, and indeed The Windup Girl has
just garnered three major genre awards and a raft of positive critical
attention. But there are also problems, and one of them is a particularly
difficult and tricky one.
I'll start on more mundane ground. This novel and the two previous short
stories are set after the collapse of oil, the onset of runaway global
warming, and more directly affecting the plot of all three, the onset of
runaway damage from bioengineering. The cycle of competition between
bioengineered pest-resistant crops and evolving bacteria, fungi, and other
crop pests and human diseases has been kicked into insane overdrive by the
release of intentional bioengineered diseases as weapons in fights between
agribusiness corporations. The result has been a collapse of human food
supplies and widespread plagues, and the typical human experience is now
desperate near-starvation amidst jealously guarded patented crops and
constant scientific effort to stay ahead of the next mutated plague.
So far, so good, as apocalyptic collapse of civilizations go. It's all
vaguely believably scary in the sense of everything negative that science
warns about hitting at once, turned up to eleven. However, Bacigalupi
uses this background as an excuse to write what's essentially steampunk
technology with a side dose of bioengineering, and this choice is
idiosyncratic to say the least.
The two hallmarks of Bacigalupi's world are bioengineered animals
consuming fodder as the primary source of energy in a world of starving
people (hence the obsession with calories as the measure of energy), and
springs as the mechanism for storing and transporting that energy. This
all makes some symbolic sense, particularly if one is looking for a nasty
image to crystalize concerns about the business practices of agricultural
conglomerates. It makes absolutely no scientific sense. The typical SF
reader will particularly notice Bacigalupi's magic springs, which store
mechanical energy in ways and at a density that makes them as much of a
leap as any far-future handwavium. They're also used for just about
everything that can't be powered by either giant elephants or human labor,
including places where they make no sense, like guns. (The loss of oil is
going to affect a lot of things. Gunpowder isn't one of them.) But the
use of animals eating grain and then winding giant springs as one's
primary way of generating energy is just as unbelievable as soon as you
think about it for more than a minute.
That said, if you successfully suspend disbelief, it makes for some great
images, which to me is one of the essential steampunk experiences. Night
Shade did a wonderful job with the cover of the copy I read, featuring an
elephant trundling down a market street with skyscrapers in the
background. The springs do have some of that clockwork mechanical appeal
of steampunk technology. I suspended disbelief and quite enjoyed the
world background, but it's worth a warning because the book otherwise aims
for the realistic-doom end of future extrapolation. The cognitive
dissonance of that has apparently knocked a few people out of the story.
That's one potential issue. The other is harder to talk about, but I
think much more important to talk about, and is the primary objection I've
seen circulating about this book; namely, it's a story set entirely in
Asia (namely Thailand), written by a white guy from Colorado. And in
places it shows.
I don't think it shows in trivial or obvious ways. Bacigalupi has clearly
done research and is clearly not intending to show western involvement in
the region in a positive light. It's a core part of his world background
that the world's food supply has been screwed up by specifically US
agricultural companies, and the primary white character in this book (one
of the protagonists) is a rather unethical operative for one of those
companies. The Windup Girl is, in many ways, an anti-imperialist
and anti-colonialist book. But it's anti-imperialist within a stock
western mode, showing an Asian country trying to hold its ground against
western business by partly closing the country and preserving eastern
traditions that are sometimes portrayed in an
orientalist way. The
best examples that come to mind are spoilers, so I'll just say that, for a
book set entirely in Thailand and focused around a Thai national crisis,
and in which only one of five viewpoint characters is American or
European, it ends up revolving around the actions and beliefs of white
westerners to a remarkable degree.
And then there's Emiko, the title character. I should say up-front that I
found her very compelling and enjoyable as a character, particularly in
the second half of the book. She goes through a dark take on a classic SF
coming of age story and provides much of that vital second perspective on
Bacigalupi's world that I mentioned earlier. But she's also, essentially,
a genetically engineered geisha, one of a whole race of such girls created
by a highly technological Japanese society that's portrayed (in the small
amount that it enters the story) almost entirely in stereotypes of
Japanese businessmen and geisha. She also reaches that coming of age
story by way of being repeatedly raped and abused for entertainment and
then having her escape begin by drawing the attention of a white
westerner.
Let me be very clear: all of this doesn't necessarily make this a bad book
in my eyes. I don't believe Bacigalupi is trying to reinforce these
stereotypes or the western lens through which this story is told. In many
places, I think he's attempting the exact opposite, probably with the best
of intentions. But regardless of intentions, and however much Bacigalupi
has travelled in Asia (which I believe is significantly), I think the book
has a particular cast and presentation which can reinforce those
stereotypes and skewed western perception of Asia. I'm discussing this at
some length precisely because I don't think it obviously hurts the
story. Unless one is attuned to this class of problems, either by careful
attention or by being directly affected by them, this can easily go
unnoticed. It largely did for me on first reading, and it was only after
thinking back through the book that parts of it started bothering me. And
it's the unnoticed and subtle reinforcement of stereotypes that I find the
most problematic as a reader. When it's obvious, I know how to either
adjust or decide to stop reading, but when it's subtle and unintentional,
I can pick up skewed ideas without realizing it.
This is a well-written, well-plotted book that takes a very dark world and
some rather nasty events and turns them into a compelling, engrossing
story. If you can suspend disbelief for some steampunk-style technology,
it has some great visuals and set pieces. Bacigalupi also pulls off the
difficult feat of providing a set of deeply and individually flawed
characters, including some near-villains, as viewpoint characters and
protagonists and keeping me interested in the actions and reactions of all
of them throughout the book. No one here is quite a villain, no one here
is quite a hero, and Bacigalupi does not follow most of the expected plot
paths. I'm sure that's much of why it's getting so much critical acclaim.
I found it much more satisfying and enjoyable than his short stories set
in the same universe, and I think it's the best writing that he's done
yet.
This is also a book that continues a recent trend of white western authors
writing books set in non-western countries and deeply probing local
culture and extrapolating a local future, and within that trend, I think
it falls prey to some unfortunate stereotypes and stock narrative
structures in ways that have increasingly bothered me since I finished the
book. I personally certainly know less about the area than Bacigalupi
does, but it's a book that I don't feel comfortable reading without
seeking out reactions from people who are native to the region and
listening seriously to their feelings about it. (And, to give him credit,
Bacigalupi explicitly says in an afterward that this book should not be
taken as representative of modern Thailand and provides a recommended
reading list.)
I'm therefore feeling profoundly conflicted on whether or how to recommend
this book. I enjoyed it as a reading experience, but I wouldn't have
wanted to read it uncritically. I think it's still much too dark for many
people's reading preferences, but some people will absolutely love it.
Other people will hate it. I found myself wishing that Bacigalupi had
stuck with the midwest setting of "The Calorie Man," since I think he
could have written as good and vivid of a book while avoiding the pitfalls
of an American writing about southeast Asia, but that also wouldn't have
been as daring and risky of a book.
I think the best advice I can offer is to avoid if you don't want to read
about fairly graphic rape and a rather desperate and dire world of
environmental collapse, but otherwise give it a cautious try with an
awareness of the surrounding context (I can recommend
this review at Silver Goggles). Particularly if you have previously
read and liked any of Bacigalupi's short fiction.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2010-07-29: Review: The God Engines
Review: The God Engines, by John Scalzi
| Publisher |
Subterranean |
| Copyright |
2009 |
| ISBN |
1-59606-299-1 |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
136 |
Those who have read previous Scalzi novels are warned by the first line
that this is something different. The God Engines opens with
Captain Ean Tephe, the protagonist and a starship captain, preparing to
whip the ship's god. Blood and dismemberment appears on the first page.
But with that comes sly humor, resting below the level of the narrative
and the awareness of the characters. Scalzi takes an absurd premise
— what if starships were literally powered by gods
— and extrapolates for all he's worth, creating a
surprisingly vivid universe that keeps daring you to forget how crazy it
is.
The God Engines is a novella, one of the current trend of
high-quality novellas from major authors published in hardcover format by
small presses. It can be a bit hard to justify spending that much money
for a story that's even shorter than a classic SF novel, but Subterranean
does an excellent job if you enjoy books as physical artifacts. The
printing is high quality, with a beautiful dust jacket, interior black and
white illustrations, and large, readable text. Given the slow fade of the
SF magazine industry, this sort of edition is becoming the best way to
read new novellas by prominent authors.
Scalzi here took the novella format as an opportunity to do something
different. His Old Man's War series
owed a lot to Heinlein and the tradition of SF military fiction.
The God Engines also follows a military officer and retains the
sense of responsibility and duty that underpinned the Old Man's War
series, but the challenges here are religious rather than military and the
tone and style are far different. Tephe is a worshipper of the true god,
who has subjugated most other gods to his will and uses them to power
starships that carry his followers farther out in the galaxy, occasionally
to do battle with other gods who have not yet been subjugated. Each
starship carries a god at its core, who can send the ship through space in
ways that no one understands and is kept in chains and beaten to ensure
its obedience. Each ship also carries a potential conflict between the
priests, who have responsibility for the god and for the spiritual life of
the crew, and the military, who deal with the more mundane aspects of ship
operation.
The world-building is both surprisingly good and surprisingly deep for
such a short book. The God Engines successfully gives the
impression of a deep universe with complex rules. Fans of the angels and
demons role-playing game In Nomine should particularly seek this
one out; Scalzi builds a sort of magic system based around talismans given
out by gods and used by their followers to tap their power, and the system
of worship and affiliation with gods reminded me quite a bit of some of
the complexities that In Nomine offered. But he also has an
opportunity, in the conflict between ship's officers and priests, to look
at political conflict reminiscent of communist-era political officers on
ships (familiar to any Cold War military novel).
The plot starts as a relatively straightforward conflict between Tephe and
the ship priest against a backdrop of growing unrest among the gods, but
then builds tension as Tephe and his crew are assigned to a vital mission
to gain power for their god. The book is full of hints that all is not as
it appears, but I was still expecting a relatively straightforward story
of discovery of lies and false foundations. The twist that Scalzi throws
into the end of the book is quite a bit more than that. He turns the
story on its head, with a sense of opening and a glimpse of unexpected
information that forms the sense of wonder kick of the best science
fiction.
The God Engines is just as dark as the first line implies, so be
sure you're in the mood for that, but I think it's one of the better
things Scalzi has written. There's a deep universe and I'd read more
stories in it, but the story told here is perfect for novella length: long
enough to give the reader a satisfying taste, but short enough that it can
stay focused on one narrative arc and pull off an ending that wouldn't
work in a novel. Recommended, particularly if you like stories that play
with the implications of gods and worship.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2010-07-28: Review: Ilium
Review: Ilium, by Dan Simmons
| Series |
Ilium #1 |
| Publisher |
Gollancz |
| Copyright |
2003 |
| Printing |
2004 |
| ISBN |
0-575-07560-0 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
642 |
Ilium opens with the scholar, Hockenberry, observing the Trojan
War, live. He can move among the fighting armies, appearing as one of
them when needed, and teleport to different parts of the battle. All this
is under the supervision of the Muse and the Greek gods. Their "magic"
appears to be highly advanced technology, but they function in the story
in the roles that the Greek gods played, and they have the same dominating
physical size and appearance. Hockenberry is a scholar, an expert on
Homer, and knows how the battle is supposed to play out, but no one other
than his fellow scholars and Zeus appears to have that knowledge. His
assigned role is to use gifted technology to observe and report on the
progress of the battle.
Woven with this story are two other threads. One follows a group of
humans in a low-population, garden, post-scarcity Earth with an
instantaneous teleportation network. They are the apparent remnants of a
post-human exodus to orbital rings many centuries ago, and are maintained
in an effortless, danger-free world of parties and idle amusements.
Ever-present guardians and automated medical care capable of preventing
aging and healing anything up to resurrection remove nearly all of the
risk, but they are also largely devoid of curiosity or their own
technology. Everyone lives exactly one hundred years, after which they
believe they go to join the post-humans who continue to watch over them.
Although universally believed, this is not based on any direct
interaction; they never see the post-humans, only the trappings of
protection and teleportation. The viewpoint character is perfectly
content and unquestioning about this world, but is caught up in the search
of a man nearing his hundredth year and a group of fellow adventurers, who
want to make direct contact with the post-humans.
The remaining thread of this book starts in the moons of Jupiter among
biological-machine hybrid intelligences who are exploring those moons
(and, in their free time, analyzing Shakespeare's sonnets and arguing
about Proust). Named moravecs (presumably after the futurist and
roboticist Hans
Moravec), they're observing troubling signs of probable post-human
activity on Mars after having no contact with the post-humans for many
years. This includes a complete terraforming of the world in a
startlingly short period of time. (It's at this point that one begins
suspecting a connection between their observations and Hockenberry's
thread.) This was accompanied by a massive increase in quantum-shift
energy that could pose a danger to the rest of the solar system, so a
group of moravecs are sent from Jupiter in a fast-acceleration vehicle
(with no obvious way to return) to investigate.
Ilium and its sequel Olympos were Dan Simmons's first
returns to the world of epic mythology-inspired space opera since the
incredibly successful and powerful Hyperion series. It's best known for revolving around the Trojan
War, and there's more classic plot inserted directly in the story than
with Hyperion, but there's still quite a bit more to this than only
Homer. While there are connections to the Trojan War in the other two
threads, they're largely independent of that part of the plot and the
connections only become active when the war is starting to leave its
rails. That said, Hockenberry's thread does follow the Trojan War very
closely for much of the book, and while he does a good job of explaining
the expected story, caring a little about the characters helps. That part
of the story doesn't move quickly, but the analysis of the events of the
Trojan War is entertaining if you know the story.
A somewhat slow pace throughout is one of the drawbacks of this book all
around. There is a lot of detail and a lot of events, but those events
often don't noticably move the overall plot. Ilium often feels
like an extended wander through Simmons's world-building. If one finds
the world immersive and gets drawn in, this works, and that was the case
through most of the book for me. But there were a few times when I was
anxious for something to happen, and a few tedious bits where Hockenberry
is trying to decide what to do or the other threads are in the middle of
long journeys.
The three threads of the story stay mostly separate throughout this book,
with two of them meeting only at the very end and the merger of the third
left for the sequel. That means Simmons is juggling three distinct
stories throughout, which is always a challenge for pacing. The ideal is
to keep all three stories interesting simultaneously and give each story
segment enough meat to be partly satisfying but enough suspense to make
the reader anxious for a return to it. I thought that was uneven, and at
various points in the book I had a definite favorite thread and was
anxious to return to it.
The thread that caught my attention the most, despite annoying me at the
start of the book, was the one following the future Earth residents.
Simmons does a wonderful job creating a sense of ruin, stunning visuals,
and gradual discovery. This thread takes an unfortunate (but not atypical
for Simmons) turn towards horror at the end of the book, and the payoff
wasn't quite what I was hoping for, but I loved the slow revelations. I
wanted to throttle the lead character for being so incurious and dim,
particularly for the first half of the book, but thankfully he's always
surrounded by other, more likable characters. And Simmons's tour through
abandoned monuments and mysterious remnants of the previous human
civilization creates a wonderful sense of atmosphere.
Almost all of this book is discovery: Hockenberry watching the Trojan War
go off its plot, the moravecs attempting to determine what's happening on
Mars, and the Earth dwellers exploring both their own alien and abandoned
world and the post-human artifacts. It releases a burst of action at the
end, setting up the next book, but most of the book is exploration,
theorizing, and description. When writing in this mode, Simmons is one of
the most creative large-scale world-builders I've read, and Ilium
plays to his strength. If I'm going to take an extended wander through
someone's imagination, Simmons is near the top of the list.
This is only half a book, which you should realize going in. It ends in a
cliffhanger which is continued in Olympos, and almost none of the
questions posed at the start of the book are resolved at the end. We know
more information about the post-humans and some competing theories about
what might be happening, but the threads are only starting to come
together. For the first half of a story, though, it's engrossing and
pulled me into the world, even if it's a touch slow in places.
Followed by Olympos.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2010-07-27: Policy 3.9.1 and Lintian 2.4.3
It's been my intention to mention new Lintian and Debian Policy releases
here as well, but I've not been doing very well with that (or with writing
things here in general) for the last bit. But I'll see if I can change
that up now.
I wanted to get a new Policy release out before DebConf10 and got that out
Sunday night. This doesn't have anything as dramatic as the
Breaks/Conflicts or architecture wildcard changes in 3.9.0, but there are
a lot of interesting improvements and updates. There's even more coming
in the next release, which I'm hoping will include a long-overdue
improvement to the summary of maintainer scripts.
The Lintian release is mostly just adjustments for the new version of
Policy, but I tried to take a quick pass through the open bugs and resolve
as many as I could in a day as well. Major projects in Lintian are still
on hold right now, since I just don't have enough time given the other
things that I'm trying to do.
The Policy changes of note are summarized in the upgrading checklist
included in the debian-policy package and were all listed in the
debian-devel-announce message.
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