2006-07-02: Kerberos PAM modules
I've started working on a new upstream release of the Kerberos PAM module
that's currently used in Debian. I started poking at this last week and
got a bit more done today. I still want to finish cleaning up the code for
style and refactoring a bit more, but I'm mostly at the point where I need
to write documentation and do testing.
It's a bit annoying to be duplicating the work that other people are
putting into the Red Hat PAM module that most distributions use, but I
really don't like it, plus it doesn't support various features that I've
already added to the Debian module. I think the Debian one is better
structured and easier to deal with, and I managed to add most of the
interesting-looking features from the Red Hat module to it in an afternoon
of programming.
With a real upstream release, it will be easier to maintain the Heimdal and
MIT versions of the package from the same source. I can also then upload a
new version for the etch release that should fix all of the outstanding
Debian bugs.
Not sure how much work I'm going to get done on it this week, since I'm on
vacation and want to spend plenty of time reading and writing, but so far,
so good.
2006-07-03: More PAM progress
I think I'm done with all of the code modifications I wanted to make to the
Kerberos PAM module, and I've written the new README file. I now need to
rewrite the man page and then do some fairly extensive testing to ensure
that I didn't break anything and that the new option reading code will
work.
The parts that are left are the most annoying parts, since writing
documentation and doing testing is always rather tedious, but when I get
this done I will be able to cross something major off my to-do list. It's
an odd thing to be working on during vacation, perhaps, but I was really
enjoying working on this before vacation and now I want to finish it.
Even still, though, I may take more time to read tomorrow and spend less
time working on it. Today I wanted to be in front of the computer anyway,
so it was easy to work on it in the background.
2006-07-05: Used bookstore haul
I swung by the used bookstore in Roseville today since I'm here on vacation
and gave it a pass the last time I was down. It's gotten quite packed with
books, enough that it's a little annoying to look for things, but I still
managed to find an eclectic mix of stuff to buy.
Marion Zimmer Bradley -- The Mists of Avalon (sff)
Steven Brust -- Five Hundred Years After (sff)
Steven Brust -- Taltos (sff)
Bill Bryson -- Notes from a Small Island (nf)
Algis Budrys -- Hard Landing (sff)
Octavia Butler -- Clay's Ark (sff)
M. John Harrison -- The Centauri Device (sff)
Charlaine Harris -- Dead Until Dark (sff)
Joseph Heller -- Catch-22 (mainstream)
Christopher Hinz -- Ash-Ock (sff)
Aldous Huxley -- Brave New World (sff/mainstream)
Tanith Lee -- The Silver Metal Lover (sff)
James H. Schmitz -- The Hub: Dangerous Territory (sff)
Rex Stout -- And Be a Villain (mystery)
Roger Zelazny (ed.) -- Forever After (sff anthology)
Most of this won't be near the top of the reading pile, but will instead go
into the stacks for later reading on a whim.
2006-07-08: Vacation too short
I'm really not ready for vacation to be over. I just started really
relaxing Wednesday or Thursday, and don't feel like heading back already,
particularly given that I have a bunch of things I have to take care of as
soon as I get back.
Oh well.
I finished reading all the Hugo-nominated short fiction today, which didn't
change which ones I think should win but does mean that I've now read
"Singing My Sister Down." Which is an excellent short story, although it's
not really genre. "A Clockwork Atom Bomb" is also pretty good.
"TelePresence" by Michael Burstein, on the other hand, is proof that the
Hugo nomination process has some deep problems (not that this is news). I
think that's possibly the worst single piece of short SF fiction I've ever
read. I think most of the words were spelled correctly; beyond that, there
isn't a flaw of SF or writing style that it doesn't have. Gah.
Now I want to write up a page about the 2006 Hugo nominees, since I've read
every one of the fiction nominees except the latest George R.R. Martin (I
should get a copy of that, but I really don't want to buy it in hardcover).
Maybe tomorrow, along with at least one more review.
Not much else happened today. None of the development work that I was
hoping to do while on vacation happened other than some work on the
Kerberos v5 PAM module, but that's okay. I did get a lot of reading done,
which was the other major plan, and I have done a lot of relaxing the last
few days.
2006-07-10: Pre-vacation haul
This was the Powell's order that I placed before vacation (as opposed to
the trip to the used book store or the order I placed during vacation,
since in the words of another, buying a book is buying the illusion that
you'll have time to read it).
Mostly, I was going after the other two Nicola Griffith novels.
Peter S. Beagle -- Tamsin (sff)
M.J. Engh -- Arslan (sff)
Nicola Griffith -- Stay (mystery)
Nicola Griffith -- The Blue Place (mystery)
Kazuo Ishiguro -- Never Let Me Go (sff)
Janet Kagan -- Hellspark (sff)
I have two reviews pending, probably three by the end of the night or by
the end of tomorrow night at the latest. Although I might write one
tonight.
2006-07-12: Upgrade tomorrow
Well, I was going to write a review, but just as I was stopping work
(early, since I started this morning at 7am after waking up and not being
able to get back to sleep), we uncovered a problem with WebLogin not
reporting errors properly, so I dropped everything to fix that. Turned out
to be a missing form attribute (plus another, more minor problem that I'll
fix in the 3.5.2 release).
Between that, finishing on catching up after vacation, and writing a new
man page for pam-krb5, that was the day. Add a little grocery shopping,
baking bread, and exercising, and now it's time to go read for a bit. The
review of Worldwired will have to wait for tomorrow.
Kind of a shame, since I was almost completely caught up with reviews, but
I'm poised to finish several more things soon so it's going to be the
weekend before I'm truly caught up. But that also means I've been reading
a lot this month, which is a good feeling.
Plane reservations for the AFS Hackathon are all made, and I'll make hotel
reservations tomorrow. I'm not really looking forward to travelling again
so soon, but the nice thing about a five and a half hour plane flight (plus
the inevitable waiting in the airport) is that I should be able to finish a
couple more books even if I don't read at all while I'm there.
Currently reading: Jhereg by Steven Brust (yes, I finally started on
that series).
2006-07-13: WebAuth 3.5.2
A friendly web site analyzer contacted our security office and let us know
about a cross-site scripting attack that was possible against our WebAuth
Weblogin servers. Turns out that HTML::Template doesn't escape values
substituted into HTML pages unless you explicitly tell it to. Doh. I'm
embarassed that I've missed this for years.
I've now released WebAuth 3.5.2 with this fixed in the sample templates,
but any site running WebAuth with customized login templates needs to also
fix this in their other templates. For more information, see the release
announcement. There are also a few other accumulated fixes for the
Weblogin code in this release.
You can get the latest version from the WebAuth download page.
2006-07-13: "No Women" Cheese
Dear Lazyweb,
A bit of Google searching seems to reveal that "Beecham's No Women Cheese"
is a classical music joke of some kind, but I don't think I quite get it.
Does anyone out there reading this know more and feel like filling me in?
(Despite the very strange name, this is excellent cheese, some of the best
that I've found. Particularly in combination with oatmeal spice bread.)
2006-07-13: Term::ANSIColor 1.11
Just documentation and test suite fixes, but I added code to test the POD
for warnings using Test::Pod if it could be loaded. I also switched the
source over to Subversion. I still need to do that for lots and lots of my
personal files; I'm still using CVS in way too many places.
You can get the latest version from the
Term::ANSIColor
distribution page.
2006-07-16: pam-krb5
This evening, I finally got over the hump of starting testing and debugging
on the new Kerberos v5 PAM module I've been working on (based on the one
currently in Debian). The bzr repository is now publically available and
the module basically works. There were, as expected, a bunch of stupid
mistakes which are now fixed, and I've tested all the basic functionality.
The next step is to use it myself for a few days and make sure that all the
bits I expect to have work do work for me. I'm also going to ask a few
other people to test it and make sure it works for them, and then assuming
that all looks good, upload it to Debian. I should make a tarball release
first for testing, though, since not everyone is going to want to pull it
from bzr.
For those that do, though, the bzr repository is at
http://archives.eyrie.org/software/bzr/pam-krb5/ which has the nice
property of also doubling as a checked out source tree. The TODO file is
currently nonsense; I need to finish it, write a NEWS file, and write a
way to generate a changelog. But that should only take an hour, tops.
2006-07-17: Week of meetings
This week is the week of meetings at work. It looks like I'm going to get
some work done on Wednesday (my work from home day, thank heavens) and
Friday; the rest of the week is mostly a writeoff, although there is some
free time on Thursday if I can use it effectively. I have mornings to get
through mail and do some small things, but the major work I have pending is
remctl 2.0 and pam-krb5 2.0, and both of them require some extended
concentration.
I do hope that I'll finish the first draft of the server code for remctl
2.0 on Wednesday. The only thing that might get in the way is if it's too
hot and I can't concentrate; hopefully, that won't happen.
The meetings today were... mostly worth going to, particularly the planning
meetings for our web upgrades late today. Still, I would have preferred
coding and accomplishing things.
Currently, the unbalance of my to-do list is continuing. I'm down to only
a few more than 30 to-do actions on my work list, but I'm still hovering
around 50 on my personal list. I'm still trying to figure out a way to
address that balance, since I often need to do other things (like read) on
the weekends to unwind.
2006-07-20: Point and applaud
No updates lately for the simple reason that way too much has been going
on. I have something like fifteen hours of meetings this week; if it
weren't for oases on Wednesday and tomorrow, no non-meeting work would
happen at all. (It's very difficult for me to get anything else
substantial done on a day when I have over four hours of meetings, even
though logically I should be able to work the difference of the meeting
hours and the eight-hour day.)
I'm currently fighting hard against talking about politics: fighting
because of what's going on in the world right now I despair of changing any
entrenched positions or reaching any conclusion to a discussion that
justifies the (extremely high) amounts of stress, and hard because I am so
deeply angry and disgusted that I have a hard time not railing at the
world. Not so much at what's being done, as that is sadly predictable and
no different than what has been happening for years, but at the lies that
are being told about it.
Into that mood, though, came the following
journal
post from Ken MacLeod:
Nothing has done more to corrupt humanity than the attempt to civilise
warfare. Just War Theory is an utter perversion of the moral sense, a
doctrine of literally mediaeval barbarism, invented by clerics to regulate
wars between Christian kings. Its finest moral discrimination to date is
that it's legitimate to kill a munitions worker on his way to work, but a
crime to kill him on his way home. It tells us that to aim a bomb at an
enemy soldier and kill a hundred civilians is -- if the necessity is there
-- legitimate collateral damage, but to deliberately aim one bullet at one
enemy civilian is murder. In its pedantic, casuistic jesuitry it still
stinks of the cringing, quibbling fusspots who invented it, and retains too
its usefulness to a useless and barbaric ruling class. It does nothing
whatsoever to restrain their behaviour. Its only function is to befuddle
those who oppose, protest and fight them. It justifies every horrific,
predictable consequence of imperialist assault as an unintended
consequence, and condemns every horrific, predictable consequence of
resistance to that assault as an intended consequence. Their violence
against civilians is mass murder, ours is collateral damage.
Amen, sir, and bravo. Letting out some of the vitriol I feel helps a great
deal; having someone else let it out for me is even better.
Comments disabled. Listen or don't, think or don't, and hold what opinion
you wish of me; I'm not in the mood to discuss it with you.
2006-07-21: Anti-Disney haul
I expect I'll get into this more when I write reviews, but I've recently
been putting a finger on exactly why Disney annoys me so much despite (or
perhaps because of) the company's ability to generate cute and inoffensive
stories. This order was primarily to acquire the original treatments of
works that have been distorted or overwritten by the Disney treatment.
J.M. Barrie -- Peter Pan (children's)
Elizabeth Bear -- Blood and Iron (sff)
Barry Lopez -- Resistance (mainstream)
Sarah Monette -- Mélusine (sff)
Dodie Smith -- The 101 Dalmatians (children's)
Dodie Smith -- Starlight Barking (children's)
I have another book already finished and ready to review and am nearly done
with Delany's About Writing. I'll probably start something new
tonight.
2006-07-23: Now with series information
Well, I didn't get done many other things that, in an ideal world, I should
have done today, but I did cross one very long-term project off my to-do
list. The index of my book
reviews now contains series information, and it doesn't even seem to look
too hideous or cluttered.
There are several bits left to do on this project; I'm not completely
finished. I have to update the software I use to build the structure
around reviews to cope with having series information and adding it in
correctly when I write a new one. Not horribly difficult, but probably an
hour or two of programming. I then want to go through all of the
individual reviews themselves, make sure that the sidebar review
information says something useful, and add notes to the end of the review
about which book comes next in the series. That will take a while, but
it's a good thing to do while I'm otherwise brain-dead.
I'm probably also at the point where I need to break up the main page into
separate indexes, probably one per first letter of last name for SF authors
and one index page for each of the other types of books. But I'll want to
keep one unified index as well, for those that want it. That's a bit
farther down the road.
I also switched things around so that the books outside of series were
listed before the books in series, since that looked better with the series
information. I haven't yet done the same thing in the rating index and
probably should for meaningless consistency.
Hopefully, the whole thing doesn't look too hideous on anyone's browser.
Tomorrow, another actual review, assuming work doesn't eat my brain.
2006-07-27: spin 1.63
While revising my review index to add series information, I noticed that
there wasn't a way to add class information to <dt> tags. That's now
been fixed (and my release process has been updated to use Subversion since
that's what I keep the source for my web pages in).
You can get the latest version from my
web tools distribution
page.
2006-07-29: Asimov's, March 2006
Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2006
Editor: Sheila Williams
Issue: Volume 30, No. 3
ISSN: 1065-2698
Pages: 144
The non-fiction bits this month were interesting enough to be worth a
comment. I usually find Sheila Williams's editorials rather pedestrian,
but this month she explained the point of sudoku and some of its history.
Since I was probably the last person on earth who hadn't heard the
explanation, I appreciated that. Silverberg talks about life on Earth that
lives in extreme conditions -- mostly details I've heard before, but he
expresses them well. Joe Lazzaro provides an update on current space
flight initiatives, and Paul Di Filippo provides a satisfyingly long set of
book reviews.
The stories were on the good side of average. Several grabbed my attention
in different ways, but none of them were entirely satisfying.
"The Gabble" by Neal Asher: A follow-on of sorts from Asher's
previous story
"Softly
Spoke the Gabbleduck", this one dives a bit deeper into the origin of the
apparently sentient but incomprehensible gabbleduck as it follows two
anthropologists exploring a world of bizarre creatures. The drama comes
from the puzzles more than much plot action and characterization outside of
the puzzle of the story felt desultory to me. The climax has some drama
but doesn't really answer questions, and takes matters towards an
explanation that I personally find unsatisfying. Overall, not bad, but a
bit of an eh. (6)
"46 Directions, None of Them North" by Deborah Coates: A teenage
girl wants to go to Alaska because that's where the aliens are landing.
She knows that theoretically from messages on her cell phone, but mostly
because she believes. This story is rather silly, trying perhaps too hard
for a tone of breathless teenage drama. What I did like, though, was the
dynamic between the protagonist, her father, and finally her mother. Her
father dropped out of the corporate life and is her idol, but he won't take
her to Alaska. It's only when she manages to reach a part of her mother
that's both like and completely unlike her father that the story reaches an
emotional connection. I didn't like that the protagonist never seemed to
understand what was going on, but the final emotional twist gained more
depth the more I thought about it. (6)
"Dark Eden" by Chris Beckett: I liked the setup here: a space
program based on random jumps to try to find life, so far unsuccessful, and
a good set of characters with competing motives and of types not often seen
in this sort of story (a Christian crusader, a promiscuous womanizer, and a
black female cop). Unfortunately, the plot dies halfway through, the
background all but disappearing and turning the story into a pure character
dynamic between the womanizer and the black female cop. Both are decent
characters; neither are sufficiently powerful to keep the story interesting
when they hold the stage alone. By the end, I thought the story lost all
purpose and direction. (5)
"Rwanda" by Robert Reed: Second person present is at best a
challenging voice in which to write a story, particularly when the reader
is being put in the position of a small child, and I'm not sure it worked
here. Still, it does fit Reed's desire to have a character explain the
world to the reader, and I'm not sure the sting in the tail of this story
could have been handled another way. "Rwanda" tries to immerse the reader
in minute observations of the world and then twist emotions as the specter
of war and genocide is slowly introduced; it's not ineffective, but I found
the viewpoint frustrating and at times forced. I'm not sure the ambiguity
in the ending explanation was intentional or just a side effect of the
position from which the reader has to hear the story. Memorable, but not
entirely successful. (6)
"Dead Men Walking" by Paul J. McAuley: This is an odd story; it
feels like part of some larger whole (and it is part of a larger story
sequence) and seemed incomplete on its own. The plot takes a lot from spy
novels and reaches a clear conclusion: an assassin who escaped his handlers
and struck out to live a normal life tries to track down the murderer who
is in danger of exposing him. But without any additional background, I
felt like the story was mostly exposition and I never felt like the
protagonist was placed in the larger world. The story doesn't lack
emotional subtext, but I think I needed to see his background in more than
just an infodump to feel the intended emotional punch of the climax. (6)
"Companion to Owls" by Chris Roberson: I adored this background.
The protagonist cleans ghosts off the roof of a giant cathedral, one large
enough that people spend their entire lives on the roof, in the middle
sections, or in the basement. There are some particularly persistant
ghosts in the steeple for which he's responsible, so he has to escort a
necromancer who can perform the stronger sort of banishing. The plot
itself didn't do much for me and the conclusion was a bit too predictable,
but I'd love to see more in this world, particularly a story that digs
deeper into its history, politics, and dynamics. (7)
"The Kewlest Thing of All" by David Ira Cleary: Set in a San
Francisco marked by sea rise, largely floating on pontoons in the ocean,
this story is apparently about the conflict between a corporate-driven
identity and a choice of identity driven by whatever is aesthetically cool.
Body modification in the form of implants that display patterns like
screens are ubiquitous, as are deeper forms of genetic modification,
apparently including some sinister forms that tie people to particular
corporations. The story starts as an anti-establishment rebellion, but
driven by a surprisingly dictatorial counter-establishment; by the end of
the story, one despairs of any real escape from the consumerism and
consumption that seems to be driving everything, even "kewl." Inbetween,
the story jerks and jumps erratically, leaving me unsure what it was saying
and what the reader is expected to make of the rather pathetic protagonist
and her efforts at recruitment to kewl. I'm not sure what to make of the
ending; I think there's a sharp, cynical observation about the futility of
counter-culture movements lurking there, but I didn't get enough help from
the author to fully unpack it. Interesting, but mostly frustrating. (6)
Rating: 6 out of 10
Permanent
review page
All posts