2008-01-01: Debian Policy work
There. I declare myself caught up with Debian Policy work.
There are, of course, still tons of open proposals that need attention and
it's going to take us quite some time to work through the backlog. But
when I did the initial bug triage, I identified a set of proposals that had
concrete wording and previous seconds that we could deal with first. I've
now gone through all of those proposals, analyzed them, resurrected
discussion, and in most cases proposed new patches. Now I can sit back for
a while and wait for reactions, seconds, and suggestions.
Also today I decided to stop using arch like RCS and really try this
distributed revision control thing. So now all of my queued pending
patches are on arch branches. Annoyances so far: deleting branches in arch
is obnoxious, unless I'm missing something, and getting a diff between
branches requires far too much typing and produces a diff full of arch
implementation crap I don't care about. But it works and takes much less
disk space (particularly if I aggressively delete pristine trees.)
I have three bug fixes applied to my personal tree, one patch from Colin
for man page internationalization that's waiting for a few more seconds,
and nine other changes queued up waiting for review or to time out on
people's chances to object.
But tomorrow is the last day of vacation, and I plan on not doing Policy
work tomorrow. I may play video games. I may work on lintian, since the
repository is back and there are a ton of straightforward changes queued up
to handle.
2008-01-02: Last vacation day
Tomorrow, it's back to work, although I get to work remotely for a few days
before being back in the office. So, the plan was to spend today
completely relaxing, doing whatever I felt like doing.
Of course, then what I felt like doing was Debian work.
This sort of thing often happens to me, and I'm doing a lot of pondering of
how to deal with it. On the one hand, I do enjoy working on code and
accomplishing things, so when I have time to do whatever I want, that's a
reasonable thing to do. On the other hand, I wonder if it adds to my
overall stress to not be better at taking longer breaks or balancing that
work with other things.
Adding to the complications, often the bit of work I'm doing isn't really
something I want to do (like debugging html_reports this morning).
Instead, what I want is the end result. So I'd enjoy reading more than the
hours of debugging work, but the result of the debugging is neat and better
than just having read.
It's surprisingly hard to figure out what I want to do, sometimes.
Anyway, I'm about half-caught-up with lintian now and have kicked off
several things that will mean more lintian work in the future, which means
that my grand plans to start reorganizing and rewriting chunks of it will
probably wait again. And tomorrow, it's time to shift gears and go back to
doing work-like stuff.
2008-01-04: Introspection
A lot of introspection will be important for me over the next few weeks as
I get back from vacation and get back into my routine. I do not
want to go back to feeling as stressed and out of control as I did right
before vacation. So those of you who just read the journal for the book
reviews will have to put up with occasion nattering on, since I seem to
think better about some of these things if I write them down and post them
to teh Intrawebs.
For the first two days, things have gone fairly well. The main downside is
that my estimates were way off on the first two coding tasks I tackled
(estimate: 4 hours, actual: 9 hours), and that got to me a little and made
me feel like I wasn't getting anything done. But it's just an emotional
response, and if I take a step back and keep reminding myself "oh,
remember, that stuff took way longer than you expected," it's okay. I know
I need to get better at estimates in the long run, but that's a problem
that I can live with for right now.
I did struggle with motivation today and probably should have used my to-do
list, switched away from the Big stuff, and started doing little things
until I recovered a sense of accomplishment. Instead, I distracted myself
by working on lintian and bit off a major rewrite of a chunk of code, which
wasn't horribly wise. Got it done, though, so it's not hanging over me.
Now, however, it's the weekend, which means a firm shift in gears away from
doing day-job stuff. That's one of the changes I want to make: preserving
weekends for myself. Day job stuff can wait. Book review writing and
video game playing would be a good use of the weekend.
2008-01-05: lintian 1.23.42
There's still more work that could be done, but the changelog was up to 148
lines, so it was time to get the release out. One of the bugs fixed was
rather annoying, and in any change this large I will have broken something
or other. So it's time to get broader testing.
It's amazing how much stuff there is to do on lintian on an ongoing basis.
There are always little changes and fixes to help it understand packages
better, and it's wonderfully rewarding to work on even without making major
architectural changes. Although I still do want to find time to do that at
some point.
I expect there will be additional releases before this package makes it
into testing, both to fix the inevitable bugs and to clean out more of the
bug backlog.
2008-01-06: 2007 in Books
The reading accomplishment for this year was finishing all of the
Nebula winners
(although I haven't yet read Seeker, the 2006 winner awarded in
2007, since I want to read the previous books in the series). I've now
read all Hugo winners
and nearly all Nebula winners. Maybe in the coming year I'll tackle
another set.
This year, I read three books I rated 10 out of 10. The highest rating
usually doesn't mean the book was any better written than a 9 out of 10;
rather, it means the book spoke to me particularly strongly. One was the
re-read of
Bambi,
a classic I loved as a child and loved even more as an adult. The other
two were new novels first published within the last couple of years:
Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's subversive animal fantasy
A
Companion to Wolves; and, to close out the year,
The
King's Last Song, Geoff Ryman's spectacular mainstream novel about
Cambodia. All three are, of course, highly recommended.
The non-fiction highlight of the year was Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's
The
Smartest Guys in the Room. This detailed story of the rise and fall of
Enron is exceptional journalism and a cautionary tale about the state of
oversight in US capitalism. The documentary made based on that book was
also good, although a bit overdone in its musical background.
There are almost too many other notable books to mention them all, but I
will particularly recommend Jo Walton's
Ha'penny
and Elizabeth Moon's
The
Speed of Dark as books that deserve a wide audience. Charles Stross's
Glasshouse
was the best traditional science fiction novel I read all year and should
have won a Hugo. It alas lost to a far inferior and uncritical Vernor
Vinge paean to the wonders of technology.
Below are some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of
interest to me.
In 2007, I read and reviewed 92 books (one fewer than last year). Books
are counted as complete on the date that I finished the first draft of my
review. Overall statistics with change from last year:
| Books read |
92 |
(-1) |
| Total pages |
30,807 |
(-852) |
| Average rating |
6.94 |
(-0.09) |
| Pages per day |
84.4 |
(-2.3) |
| Days per book |
3.97 |
(-0.05) |
So not as much as last year, but not that much of a change.
This year, I decided not to set a reading goal (after coming in under 100
books last year), but of course spent the year occasionally worrying about
how many books I was reading anyway. However, I think I have a good
baseline now, one that will let me keep up with the authors and fields I
want to follow and still leave time for other things. I'm aiming for about
80 books a year.
Breakdown by genre:
| SF and fantasy |
69 |
75% |
| Mainstream |
5 |
5% |
| Graphic novels |
6 |
7% |
| Non-fiction |
12 |
13% |
Of the SF and fantasy novels, here's a rough breakdown of the books by
reason for seeking them out:
| Award winners |
16 |
23% |
| Award series |
5 |
7% |
| Genre classics |
6 |
9% |
| Current SF&F |
8 |
12% |
| Favorite authors |
16 |
23% |
| Re-reads |
5 |
7% |
| Recommendations |
7 |
10% |
| Random |
6 |
9% |
Finishing the Nebula winners was a large chunk of my reading at the start
of the year. All in all, 30% of my SF and fantasy reading for the year was
reading either award-winning books or earlier books in the series that lead
up to award-winning books. 12% was keeping up with the field (including
reading all Hugo nominees), and another 23% was following favorite authors.
2008-01-08: Back to work
I've been back to work for the past few days, but working remotely.
Tomorrow I really head back to work, which thankfully involves an interim
of a nice train trip and a good opportunity to read.
As usual, I'm already ahead on work hours for the week. Today was spent
working on the WebLogin upgrade, unfortunately not as directly as I would
like since the test system isn't set up properly for serial console.
However, I also needed to make a new WebAuth release for the upgrade, so I
could work on that part.
The libapache-mod-auth-kerb Debian package is kind of a mess. I need to
file at least one bug report for a patch that we need, and may file bug
reports about various other problems as well. But I think I have something
working locally for our purposes.
I'm not horribly enthused about heading back to work. This was not a year
where I came out of vacation ready to tackle things again. It's been more
of an endurance year, with a whole pile of frustrations and stressful
deadlines. Thankfully, there are more long weekends coming up this month
and next month.
2008-01-09: Small book haul
I'm back home. I must say, it's rather nice to be home and be able to
settle into my own place, as much as I'm not really in the mood to be back
to work. I could use a couple of weeks of just staying home.
I came home to a book shipment and have another book I picked up a while
back that I never mentioned here. I made another large Powell's order over
the break, too, so more will be coming.
Edward Gorey -- Amphigorey (graphic novel, sort of)
M. John Harrison, et al. -- Parietal Games (nonfiction)
Parietal Games is a collection of M. John Harrison's non-fiction
writing about literature, as well as some essays about him and his writing.
It's just the sort of combination of reviews and essays that I love to
read about the SF&F field. It was rather expensive (small press only
printed in the UK), but Borderland Books was great about tracking it down
for me.
Tomorrow is the first day back in the office, punctuated by meetings and a
trip to the bank and the post office.
I have two books (Fire Logic and Runaway) in the queue
waiting for a chance to review and a third book (Urban Shaman)
already reviewed and waiting for editing. But tonight I think I'm going to
go read more Mort and then go to sleep.
Hopefully by the end of tomorrow I'll have a test weblogin server up for
the upgrade at the end of this month and can go back to working on the
wallet.
2008-01-11: First Week
End of the first full week back at work (although not the first full week
back at home). Time to take a step back and take stock of how things are
going. (This is one of those annoying self-centered introspective blog
posts that you probably want to skip if you just read for the book reviews.
*grin*)
I'm exhausted this evening, I think because I started working the moment I
got home from the train ride and have been doing a flurry of "coming back
home" things ever since. That's been a good use of initial momentum. I
have a physical appointment made, picked up my mail, have walked every
night on the treadmill since I've gotten back, am mostly unpacked, and have
taken care of a pretty good variety of random chores. That's definitely a
positive for the week (and since I didn't get as much done on major
projects, I need to stress to myself how much of a positive it is).
Also a positive is eating habits. I think changing habits is all about
taking advantage of energy and momentum. If I'm thinking about something,
that's the time to see just how much I can do about it, the time to pay
close attention, and the time to carefully monitor what might be
sustainable. So far, I'm eating far better than I had been, without a lot
of effort. As long as that's feeling comfortable, I'm going to keep it up,
and I'm doing well enough that I have some distance to slip as long as I
can keep the slip gradual and under control and not as backlash. (The
trick is to not push, just take advantage of momentum, so that I don't get
into the guilt and guilt backlash cycle.)
One interesting discovery is that, yes, I really wasn't all that thrilled
to come back to work, and that didn't change when I got back. It's not
that I'm unhappy, but I'm not raring to go do a ton of work for Stanford
right now either. Also, all the pressure and insufficient time problems
are still there, just like they were before vacation. However, I'm dealing
with all of that much better, and I'm easing myself back into things rather
than burning out again right away. The month of January is going to be
painful and a lot of deadlines are simply going to slip, but I'm also not
going to do work on the weekends and I'm going to do a minimum of work in
the evenings. I need more space to relax, calmly think about what other
projects I want to work on, and read and play video games more.
Of course, another thing that will make this month weird is that the
football playoffs are in full swing, so the next weekend and some of the
weekend after are spoken for and simply need to be worked around.
So far, so good. Surprises are tiredness and the realization that the
problems I was having before break weren't just being burned out. But the
strategy is working so far.
2008-01-13: First challenge
This weekend ended up being my first major challenge to the new year and my
new plans around improving my attitude and some of my habits. Verdict: I
fell down some, but it ended on a positive note.
When I'm running a stress surplus and feeling like I'm barely keeping my
head above water, it's like the emotional equivalent of running a large
credit card debt. As long as everything goes as planned, it all works out
and feels somewhat under control. However, what one loses, sometimes
without realizing it, is the ability to deal with the unexpected, since all
of one's energy (financial or emotional) is already committed and there
isn't a nice surplus available.
The unexpected was relatively minor in the grand scheme of things (car
battery didn't have enough of a charge to start the car, thus preventing me
from going to the store Saturday like I'd planned), but I really felt the
impact of not having that surplus of emotional energy. I'm pretty much
tapped out right now, particularly given that I'm tackling several
difficult things right off the bat this year since I had some momentum:
better eating habits, seeing a new doctor and getting my lab work up to
date, better work management. So it was a nasty surprise, and I went into
one of my tailspin cycles fretting over whether I could use the battery
charger that I have safely. (Don't research car battery chargers on the
Internet. The warnings are spectacularly dire and overblown.)
The tailspin cycles are a problem. I do this too easily. However, I know
from experience that they're mostly another sign of stress, and reducing
unrelated stress often helps prevent them quite a bit. Otherwise, I've not
found effective ways of dealing with them other than lots and lots of
research and questions and then pushing through, doing things, and getting
familiar with them. Around anything that involves physical injury, I'm
just highly risk-adverse, and I've been that way my entire life, so it's
not like I'm going to make any sort of drastic change overnight. Part of
the overall stress reduction goal is to give myself permission to fall down
occasionally and concentrate on learning from it and moving forward.
The weekend ended well. The trickle charger worked just fine, the car
starts without any trouble now (leaving a car for a month and a half
without being driven is hard on the battery), and tomorrow I'll see about
making an appointment to have it serviced and the battery replaced. Even
though the car gets almost no usage, the battery is 7 years old, and the
almost no usage part is probably harder on the battery than constant usage.
Grocery shopping is now done, which should help with eating healthy. I
gave into stress and ate a lot that I shouldn't have this weekend, and
didn't exercise yesterday (or write a journal entry), but that's another
stumble that I learn from and move on.
I do wish I had another day, since I feel like I only got one day, or less,
of real time away.
2008-01-14: WebAuth 3.5.5
I was planning on having 3.6.0 out by now, but best laid plans and all.
I've been doing a lot of other development work recently.
This release fixes a memory allocation error in mod_webauthldap that could
lead to memory for an environment variable being freed and dangling
pointers left in the system environment table, which PHP in particular is
rather unhappy about. It also fixes various things about WebLogin, most
notably cookie detection in the presence of Negotiate-Auth and Shibboleth
integration.
3.6.0 will contain much better multiple realm support and possibly WebLogin
enhancements for multiple realms and additional user ID lookups in a local
database.
You can get the latest version from the WebAuth distribution page. I need
to create WebAuth pages off my own pages as well.
2008-01-15: First 2008 haul
I just got my first Powell's order of 2008. There are so many wonderful
books out there that I want to read and so little time to read!
Elizabeth Bear -- Dust (sff)
Phil Co -- Level Design for Games (non-fiction)
Leslie R. Crutchfield & Heather McLeod Grant -- Forces for Good (non-fiction)
Jack McDevitt -- A Talent for War (sff)
Jack McDevitt -- Polaris (sff)
Toni Morrison -- Playing in the Dark (non-fiction)
Graham Robb -- The Discovery of France (non-fiction)
Felix Salten -- Bambi's Children (mainstream)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- The Black Swan (non-fiction)
Bill Willingham, et al. -- Fables: Legends in Exile (graphic novel)
The Jack McDevitt books are earlier in the same series as Seeker,
which won the Nebula last year. I should finally read that to get back to
100% on the Nebula winners.
I'm finding lots of interesting non-fiction lately, which I'm very happy
about, although it's making it harder to keep up with new SF. I still need
to read MacLeod's The Execution Channel, since I expect it to be one
of the Hugo nominees. But next, after the books I'm reading now, is
Dust, which I've been eagerly awaiting all year.
2008-01-16: Random food note
The Lucerne "Limited Edition" gingerbread-flavored light yogurt is
delicious.
Google tells me that "Limited Edition" means "seasonal," since they had it
last year as well. Why they only do this flavor during certain times of
the year is beyond me, but then I never got the whole seasonal thing
anyway. When we run out of oil and the world's transportation system
collapses, I will greatly bemoan my inability to get summer fruit in winter
thanks to it being summer in South America. (Shortly thereafter I will
stop moaning and start screaming as I am devoured by feral dogs, given how
useless my skills will be after the collapse of civilization.)
Yeah, so I didn't feel like writing a book review today and I didn't
accomplish anything useful to brag about. How'd you guess?
2008-01-18: Weekend
I got my car back this morning, and with luck I'll get no further surprises
and this weekend will be the nice, relaxing weekend that last weekend was
supposed to be. The current hope is to spend tomorrow doing chores and
running around so that I can spend the rest of the weekend vegetating.
Right now, what I want more than anything else is large stretches of time
entirely to myself. Maybe I'll read. Maybe I'll play video games. Maybe
I'll just sleep.
I'm currently working on The Lady of Sorrows by Cecelia
Dart-Thorton, which is still slow and repetitive but just interesting
enough to keep me reading, and The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction, since I was in the mood for something non-fiction. I'm about to
go read more of the latter. Queued up behind both of those is Dust,
by Elizabeth Bear, which I've been waiting for for nearly a year.
The book after that will be my 400th review, so as is traditional for the
round numbered reviews, I'll re-read something that I loved the first time.
I think this time it'll be Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. And then
maybe I'll start on Jack McDevitt's series.
See, this is why I rarely borrow books from people. Everywhere I look in
my apartment, I see books I already own that I'm looking forward to
reading.
This weekend may (or may not) also be a chance for me to catch up on book
reviews, in a further clearing of the plates and tidying up loose ends.
2008-01-26: Guardian SF reviews
Link via David Langford. A book reviewer
for the Guardian is doing what I did a while back except in a
more structured way. He's going through every Hugo winner. The
first post covers Alfred Bester's
The Demolished Man rather well. For the
second, he counts the retro-Hugos (which I don't for various reasons)
and looks at Fahrenheit 451. Interesting stuff, and I hope he
continues through all of the Hugos.
2008-01-28: wallet 0.6
This release finishes up hopefully all of the wallet modifications needed
before we can go into production at Stanford, although there is still a lot
of cleanup required for a solid 1.0 release. There are several new client
features, most notably krb5.conf configuration, a -u option to obtain
Kerberos tickets, and merging of keys into an existing keytab. The server
now supports naming policy enforcement and has a real wallet-admin program
to handle database initialization.
You can get the latest version from the
wallet distribution
page.
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