2009-01-01: 2008 reading in review
This year was a rather poor year for reading quantity, unfortunately. For
the year, I only finished 68 books, the lowest yearly total (by quite a
lot) since I started writing reviews and 12 fewer than I was vaguely
aiming for. I also made little progress towards finishing another group
of award winners, although I did read all of the Hugo nominees again
before the voting (and, in a delightful surprise, my
favorite book actually
won).
The low reading count was for a variety of reasons, some good and some
bad. On the good side, things eating into reading time included playing
more video games, watching the Summer Olympics, three great visits with
close friends, and getting engrossed in photography. Those are all good
reallocations of my leisure time, and I don't regret them.
On the bad side, last year was an extremely stressful year, and my reading
volume was low some months because I was working over 50 hours a week or
for some other reason feeling too tired and too stressed to concentrate on
reading or take time for it. That's something that I hope to fix next
year. Given that much of my stress, as always, is feelings of
obligations, I'm not setting a reading target. I hope to continue
increasing the time I spend playing video games, which will cut into
reading. The goal instead is lower stress and more focus on making time
to do what I feel like doing, including reading.
This year, I read only one book I rated 10 out of 10:
The Yiddish
Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, which won both the
Hugo and Nebula awards. This is an alternative history novel rather than a
typical SF or fantasy story, which makes it all the more surprising that
it won both awards. It's an excellent book with a wonderful sense of
personality. I recommend it to both SF fans and fans of mainstream
novels.
The non-fiction highlight of the year was my discovery of George Orwell's
writing outside of the novels that people read in school. I read
three volumes of his
collected non-fiction works, the non-fiction
Homage to Catalonia
and The Road to Wigan
Pier, and the novel Animal Farm, all of which were excellent. I'm planning on
reading the remaining volume of his collected non-fiction and all the rest
of his novels.
Also in the notable non-fiction category were Nassim Nicholas Taleb's
The Black Swan and
Fooled by
Randomness, non-fiction books about randomness and markets that
anticipated the economic crash in the latter part of the year. Notable
novels were Barry Hughart's wonderfully witty
Bridge of Birds and
Jo Walton's Half a
Crown, an excellent conclusion to her Small Change series. I also
thoroughly enjoyed reading through the rest of Steven Brust's
Vlad Taltos series and all
of the Khaavren Romances
(the last of which I'm halfway through as I write this).
There is also a version of this post
with additional statistics that are probably only of interest to me.
2009-01-01: Reaching
A day of reaching for distant things, in several different ways.
It's the beginning of a new year, and the number of other people using it
as a time for reflection always sparks a bit of that for me as well. I
don't like making resolutions: the additional sense of obligation just
adds stress and makes it less likely I'll successfully follow through.
But I do like working on mindsets, imagining what the year might be like,
and starting as I plan to continue.
To that end, I've been pondering a lot today, focusing on doing one thing
at a time and not overloading myself, being quite introspective about what
I want and how I feel, and being a little productive without making a huge
effort. I finished a book today and now only have two books queued for
writing a review, and will probably have only one by the end of the
evening. And I'm about to take some time and think through what my goals
and obligations are, how much time they'll take, and how I want to
structure that time.
I hope everyone reading this has had an enjoyable holiday and a great New
Year's Day, and if you tend towards introspection today as well, that the
introspection has been productive.
(I also put up a second Nanaimo
picture in my gallery.)
2009-01-02: control-archive 1.1.0
I finally moved Usenet control message processing and archiving to a new
system, and it's now running on this code rather than the version from
before importing it into Git. This turned out to be much more of a
headache than I expected, with lots of little roadblocks along the way. I
was going to do it this morning and then go on to do other things, but it
took all day.
But, finally, done now, and one fewer thing hanging over my head.
This is the bug-fix release fixing the things I ran into along the way,
including some basic variable declaration errors in some of the scripts.
I also made update-control bulkload more tolerant of descriptions
containing tabs (since some of the older descriptions in the current list
had them, even though they're no longer accepted) and added an install
target to the Makefile.
You can get the latest release from the
control-archive distribution
page.
2009-01-02: Path forward
If January 1st is the day to decide how the next year is going to be,
January 2nd is the first day where one gets to put that into practice.
For me, that meant tackling the long-delayed move of various Usenet
services I still maintain to a new system: Big Eight control message
queuing, control message archiving, news.announce.newgroups's archive, and
moderation alias updates. I had most of the software finished and just
needed to do the shuffling and moving of things around.
I was expecting it to only take me a few hours, but there was one
frustration after another. First, I couldn't get some of the old posts
that hadn't been archived properly for news.announce.newgroups to verify
properly. The PGPMoose signatures were good; they just weren't verified
by the software after being moved. It took me a few hours and a lot of
cursing to track this down to a permissions problem (GnuPG wants very
badly to be able to write to its home directory). At least I also tracked
down a bug in the archive script that caused it to fail for Archive-Name
headers with trailing whitespace.
Then, when moving the control message archive over, I ran into my favorite
rsync bug, the one where it deadlocks after pushing a few files when
you're pushing a large tree. Tried upgrading to the backports.org version
of rsync with no luck. I finally just tar'd up the directory and copied
that over, something that I should have done much earlier rather than
fighting with the stranded rsync processes.
Then there was always one more script, one more bit that had to move....
I think it's finally all set now. Control message processing may be
delayed a bit while DNS updates, but I think everything will work, and
I'll check the logs over the next few days and be sure.
I was going to do a bunch of other stuff today, but that's all I ended up
doing. However, it was collectively about six things off my to-do list,
so I'll take that. I've been putting it off for a while due to a
subconscious feeling that it was going to be annoying, which turned out to
be correct.
Now, I think I'm going off to read for a while to take a break from the
computer, and then see if there's anything else I want to do today.
(I also posted another picture to my
gallery that wasn't quite good enough to highlight.
2009-01-03: nan-archive 1.15
This is the first public release of the script that maintains the
archive
of news.announce.newgroups on ftp.isc.org. It takes a feed of articles
from a news server (normally tinyleaf from INN CURRENT), checks PGPMoose
signatures, and stores the articles as determined by an Archive-Name
header field. It would require modification to use for another purpose,
but it may be of interest as a starting point for people who want to
maintain a newsgroup archive.
I probably won't announce new versions unless there are significant
changes, since most people probably won't be interested. You can download
the latest version from my miscellaneous
scripts page.
2009-01-03: spin 1.74
Today was apparently the first time I released a script whose CVS
repository is remote, since I uncovered a bug in spin. spin was properly
changing to the directory of the file before running cvs log for
cvs2xhtml, but it was still passing the fully qualified path to the file
to cvs. This works for local repositories, but with a remote server cvs
passes the full path to the remote server, which then fails. This release
has the simple modification to pass only the file name to cvs.
You can get the latest version of spin from my web tools page.
2009-01-03: Lintian 2.1.4
Lintian 2.1.4 has just been uploaded to unstable.
I'm trying to stick to a weekly schedule for releases while the pace of
development justifies it, so this upload is a week after the previous
upload. (We're targetting only unstable at this point and don't plan on
having any of these versions release with lenny. Lintian is the sort of
package for which the freeze isn't as relevant as it is for typical
end-user packages.) It fixes 13 bugs and, most importantly, cleans up all
the bugs that were tagged patch in the BTS. There are lots of minor
changes, including a lot of new tags for random problems. The one that
will catch the most people is that dh_clean -k is now deprecated in
favor of dh_prep (thanks, Adam D. Barratt!).
I got to spend a lot of time this week working with the new Lintian test
suite and link it a great deal. I've converted some of the more targetted
old test cases to the new framework and sent out a long message to the
team list on things that I'd like to add to it. The complete test suite
now takes a lot longer to run, since it's broken down into more separate
test cases and each one is a package build, but we're making up for that
by making it easier to run all test cases that apply to a specific tag.
There aren't many structural changes in this release, just a lot of bug
cleanup and random fixes. I think at least one more bug-fix release is
needed to get the pending bugs back to where I like to have them (under
100 total), and then I have a large backlog of structural improvements
that I'd like to work on. It's unclear, of course, how much time I'll
have to work on that.
I could happily make a full time job out of working on Lintian (well, for
a few months, at least). I wish I could spend this much time working on
it during the rest of the year, but I can still enjoy getting to dig into
it during occasional vacations, and hopefully I'll be able to do a few
things during work weeks.
Many of the patches that went into this release were based on work by
Raphael Geissert. Thanks to him for all of his work on Lintian.
2009-01-03: Focus
The challenge I always face in doing the things that I want to do at the
pace that I want to do them is maintaining focus on the right things at
the right time. It's very easy to just drift, or get drawn away by some
irrelevant detail or some debate that I don't need to be having, and lose
a lot of energy.
The flip side of that is having realistic expectations and giving my brain
a chance to relax, which is what some of those distractions are actually
doing. And that leads to a desire to pick the right sort of distractions:
ones that lower my stress rather than increase it, that are calming and
interesting and aid in transitioning from one task to another.
The other trick I'm working on learning is making decisions about how to
spend my time and both remembering that I made them and accepting the
consequences without rethinking them. For example, I didn't get very much
done on the computer today because I made a conscious decision to read
instead, and those four hours are a fairly substantial amount of the hours
I have in a day with enough focus to accomplish things. But I feel a
subconscious niggling of "not doing enough" until I think back on where
the hours went and remind myself of that.
Changing entrenched thought patterns is hard and takes a lot of time.
2009-01-04: Last vacation day
Today is, alas, the last day of vacation.
I'm not particularly interested in going back to work, and I wish vacation
had been longer, but I think I'm mostly prepared for it. I also have a
clear idea of what I need to work on first, which is helpful. So here's
to a hopeful and productive beginning to this year's work.
Today, I finished the last volume of Orwell's collected non-fiction, which
means I spent most of the day reading again. It's truly exceptional work,
and the last volume is the best. A review will be forthcoming in a few
days.
Otherwise, today was not a day for accomplishing things. I was intending
for it to be, but I decided to read instead. Hopefully I'll find time
over the week to keep my momentum on Lintian work.
2009-01-05: First day of work
I was worried that I'd really not feel like doing work today and would
have a great deal of difficulty getting motivated, but it turned out not
to be a problem. Taking my time, thinking things through, and making slow
and steady progress is working well so far.
Most of today was spent working on open-vm-tools for Debian. I discovered
that the patch I had in our local backport wasn't necessary; it was an
artifact of having accidentally unpacked a newer version of the package
over an older version. (If you use module-assistant, be sure to use the
clean action!) So I backed that out.
The problems I was having with vmxnet not being properly initialized by
the open-vm-tools init script turned out not to be related to the kernel
version, so we don't need to upgrade all VMs to the etch-n-half kernel.
Rather, the problem is that if one rebuilds the initramfs image while
vmxnet is already installed on the system, it's included in the initramfs
image. The kernel then loads it from there after the regular network
driver, it sees that the regular network driver is already there, and it
essentially disables itself. Later, when the open-vm-tools init script
unloads the regular network driver and loads vmxnet, it's already loaded.
It therefore doesn't reinitialize itself, and you end up with no network.
The solution is to have the init script remove vmxnet before removing the
regular network driver, and then loading vmxnet after it's removed does
the right thing.
I'm going to go report a bug now with the details.
2009-01-07: kadmin-remctl 2.3
I had intended for the examine command of kadmin-backend to let one see
any Kerberos principal (at least that doesn't have a very strange name),
but I'd messed up the code. I fixed it (after messing it up first in a
different way) in this release, and now you can examine most principals
even if that instance isn't otherwise managed. While I was there, I also
improved the Kerberos v5 to Kerberos v4 principal conversion for examine,
even though that code is frozen.
This release also has improved versions of my Autoconf macros for remctl,
GSS-API, and Kerberos library detection, even though this package doesn't
really need it. I wanted to do something else to improve the package
since I was doing a release anyway.
You can get the latest version from the
kadmin-remctl distribution page.
2009-01-09: Perspective
I see that I started work again and disappeared from here. *heh*.
The first week back after a long vacation is always interesting,
particularly at the start of a new year when I've been thinking through
schedules and focus. A few realizations from this week:
It takes a lot of mental focus to do a full week's work, and more
effort if I'm doing a better job. There are hours in the day for me
to do other things around work, but while during vacation it seems
like I can use those hours, it's quite difficult to do that in
practice.
I get a lot more work done when I really focus on doing work. No
music, no TV, no radio, and carefully shutting everything else down
except what I'm working on. The flip side is that I lose focus after
a while, but rather than starting a persistant distraction, getting up
and doing some little chore works much better. After something that
takes about five or ten minutes, I get focus back.
If I invest the time and energy into working properly, I get way more
done than if I'm multitasking and distracting myself. This means that
I can work fewer hours and get the same or more done. But it's more
exhausting, which means it's important that I really do work fewer
hours and cap my work time at forty hours. Otherwise, I burn out.
It's been a great first week. I'm still playing with balance, but it's
already much better than it was at the end of last year.
2009-01-11: Lintian 2.1.5
I actually uploaded this yesterday, sticking to a weekly release cycle for
the time being, but I immediately dove back in to do a bit more work.
*heh*. It's addictive.
This release is a bit more scattershot than the previous one, but I got to
close a five-digit bug number, which is always fun. There are a few new
checks for old bugs that had been lingering for a while and somewhat
better checking of *.chnages files. I also improved the Lintian test
suite to support both checks on changes files and checks on raw package
builds. I haven't used the latter to throw some of the truly pathological
conditions at Lintian yet, but that should be fun.
I should probably take a break from Lintian to work on some other things,
but it's highly rewarding once I get focused on it. One of the great
things about Lintian bugs is that most of them are nice, managable pieces
of work that I can do in an hour or two and then feel a sense of
accomplishment.
2009-01-11: First week
This was an interesting weekend on the new focused front. I ended up
working on Lintian nearly all weekend, which in retrospect was a great way
to spend it. I thoroughly enjoyed the work and got a good feeling of
accomplishment out of it.
While I was doing it, though, I was second-guessing what I wasn't doing,
so that part still needs work. I probably also need to work on balancing
between something I want to do and mixing in other fun things, since I
think I get more out of doing something I enjoy if I don't mono-focus on
it quite to that degree. Mixing in a bit of reading or video games when
my rate of forward progress slows is probably a good idea.
The weekend work upgrade went well, although there's one thing I need to
investigate tomorrow. I hate getting up early in the morning, though; I
rarely can sleep the night before because I worry about missing the
wake-up, and I rarely can go to sleep afterwards.
I added another picture of a path to
my gallery.
2009-01-15: Back into the flow
Today was the first day back into a more regular schedule (although it's
not going to last for too long — I'm heading back out of town
in a couple of weeks). I was a bit slow, which I expected since I went to
pick up my mail at the start of the day and then was a bit tired from
staying up too late last night reading. But still, not a bad day.
I have Xen basically installed, although I haven't created a guest yet.
I'm getting a feel for it, and I can see how we could make it do all the
things that we want to do, but I'm fairly sure that for our purposes it's
going to lose to VMware. I'd have fun putting on top of Xen the
management layer that we'd need to duplicate some of the functionality of
VMware, but I think it's a waste of effort (particularly with KVM coming)
and VMware is more there. It has its own annoyances (Xen is way easier to
use from a UNIX context), but we already have the infrastructure to work
around that.
The Xen user guide could use quite a bit of work. There seem to be many
other capabilities and features of Xen that aren't mentioned in it at
all.
The oddest part of Xen to me is the lack of obvious, well-documented
support for just assigning a pile of disk to a new VM and then installing
it via PXE. This is a considerably better model for us than Xen's native
model. Xen apparently supports this, from references I've seen, but I've
not been able to find the right way to configure it and it's not the
"natural" way. I think this is a shame. The PXE model is incredibly
powerful and works great with every major OS. But this mostly comes back
to VMware being a better fit for what we want to do.
It's a shame, since I'd really rather use something that's free software,
but that's not one of our evaluation criteria for this project.
2009-01-16: The second week
Have a picture of a waterfall to celebrate the start of a three-day
weekend (at least for many people in the US).
At the end of the second week of the new year, I'm quite happy with how
I'm managing to focus and allocate time. It's been a bit chaotic due to
travelling and other strangeness, and will keep being so for a while
longer. Despite that, I've had two of the more productive weeks that I've
had in quite some time. I'm also doing better at switching from one thing
to another and balacing my time among multiple projects.
And now, I get a three-day weekend to work on personal projects, play
video games, maybe read a bit more, and write a few reviews. It's good
timing for one; I'm feeling productive and can make good use of an extra
day to work on non-work things.
2009-01-17: podlators 2.2.2
This is a bug fix release that corrects indentation of verbatim paragraphs
in Pod::Text when the paragraphs contain lines that have only whitespace.
The regex that indented those paragraphs was too liberal in matching
whitespace and would indent the blank line before the paragraph rather
than the paragraph itself. The fix was from Renee Baecker. I also
expanded the test suite a little since I was doing a release.
You can get the latest version from the podlators distribution page.
2009-01-17: Slow and steady
This is the rail station for Chemainus in British Columbia. Chemainus is
on Vancouver Island a little south of Nanaimo.
I'm very happy with how today went. So far this year, despite a lot of
surprises, I'm doing a good job making realistic plans and sticking with
them. The house now has groceries to get me through the next week, I did
the weekly Lintian release on time, and I spent the afternoon
reacquainting myself with my video games. I even got a few other things
done this evening.
Tomorrow will be focused on video games, with maybe a bit of other stuff
in the evening. Monday, I'm probably going to take advantage of the
holiday to focus on various on-line things other than work that I want to
do.
2009-01-17: Lintian 2.1.6
I'm managing to do enough work on Lintian each week that it's still making
sense to stick with a weekly release cycle. So a new Saturday, a new
Lintian release.
This one was mostly a set of random bug fixes and a few new, easy tests,
cleaning up some false positives and lowering the bug count. We're now
firmly under 100 bugs, which always makes me happy. The new test suite is
also taking further shape, although I didn't do quite as much work on it
this week.
I expect the next release to be 2.2.0 and incorporate support for a
--pedantic option, contributed by Raphael Geissert. This will be a
new tag severity less even than wishlist. It's for style checks, checks
that are highly likely to have false positives, things that might be
cleaner but are unimportant, etc. People should only use
--pendantic if they're willing to see tags that are inaccurate or
don't fit their personal style and take them with a grain of salt. There
are a bunch of long-standing bugs requesting checks of that sort that are
often easy to implement, just not things we've implemented in the past
because even at the info level they'd annoy too many people.
I'm hoping to do a few more infrastructure changes and library changes for
the next release as well, but I'll see how much time I have.
2009-01-24: Lintian 2.2.0
We're still managing to keep to the weekly release cycle and put
substantial changes into each version. This makes me happy. I'm hoping
that we'll be able to keep slowly working the bug count down.
This release merges quite a bit of work done by Raphael Geissert, most
notably the addition of pedantic tags. Lintian has quite a few open bugs
for checks that are useful in only some contexts or that check coding
style issues that not everyone agrees with or wants to be bothered with,
and we've been holding off on implementing those since I'd like to
encourage everyone to enable info-level tags and I didn't want to just put
them all in there. Now we have a new level, --pedantic, which
includes all the picky stuff and the stuff that may be completely wrong.
It's up to each maintainer whether to use --pedantic at all. The
tags won't be in the default lintian.debian.org view (right now, they're not there at all). If you
do use --pedantic, please don't worry too much about making your
package pedantic-clean unless the tags really seem like a good idea.
Also, as noted in the man page, adding overrides for pedantic tags is
probably not worth the effort. You should look over the report and apply
human judgement. I expect this mode to be useful for sponsors, who want
to be alerted to possible issues but can decide for themselves which ones
to mention.
This release will also add a new page on lintian.debian.org that shows
tags sorted by severity and certainty. Not only will this be useful for
people looking for problems in the archive, it will also help the Lintian
maintainers with updating severities and certainties. (For example,
looking at the test page, I think a lot of the important tags should
probably be serious instead.)
I'm currently doing a full archive run from scratch with the new version
to make sure that I plugged the memory leak problems that Lintian had
before and to finish fixing #507849. Once that run finishes, I'll send a "bits from the Lintian
maintainers" post to debian-devel-announce with information about the
pedantic mode and the new tag page.
2009-01-25: Pod::Thread 0.12
This release was an attempt to fix the rendering of the INN
actsync documentation under
the -v option. Unfortunately, while it improves that slightly
(keeping the initial 0 rather than changing it to a bullet), it still
doesn't offer a mechanism to force use of a description list for the
arguments to -v. It looks like I'm going to have to convert
Pod::Thread to use Pod::Parser in order to get that.
The work wasn't a complete waste of time, though. I added a framework for
a test suite, so later I'll be able to do more testing of this module, and
in the process found a long-standing bug that sent saved whitespace to the
wrong output file handle during rendering.
You can get the latest release from my web
tools distribution page.
2009-01-29: Deep breaths
It's been a very hectic past few days, but all in all not a bad few days
either. I've not been posting much here because just too much has been
going on, but things are now starting to settle down and hopefully soon
I'll get to spend some time in one place, get back to a regular schedule,
and go back to a more methodical approach to life.
Reading, and book reviews, have dropped off the radar for a while, partly
due to too much going on but partly because I've started playing video
games again. That's an acceptable tradeoff. I've wanted to get back to
playing more games for a while now, and I am firmly telling myself to not
obsess over how many reviews I write or how many books I read. (Still,
hopefully I'll feel the review-writing urge soon before I forget too much
about the last books I've read.)
One good thing about travelling is having a chance to take pictures. My
mother and I walked along Salmon Creek in Oakridge, Oregon on Monday. The
above picture was one of the hundred or so that I took.
Today was supposed to be a day of catching up, but I instead spent the day
dealing with a reported security vulnerability. I'm happy with the
results (although I have an embargoed security release to do still), but
it wasn't progress towards the things that I was "supposed" to be doing.
Tomorrow I have non-work things to do in the morning, but hopefully in the
afternoon I'll find time to get caught up and organized.
2009-01-31: Lintian 2.2.1
Another Saturday, another Lintian release.
As has frequently been the case lately, much of the work was done by
Raphael Geissert, who provided several more patch sets fixing new problems
and old ones. I also finally got a chance to dig into the code that
generates the long tag descriptions and ended up rewriting it entirely,
which will remove some minor annoyances in the setup of Lintian on
lintian.debian.org.
I was expecting to have a chance to write a pile of pedantic checks, since
several of the old bug reports are easy checks to write and were just
waiting for the new tag status. I ended up working on other things and
merging patches instead, though. Maybe the next release.
One amusing note: the compressed Lintian changelog is 112KB (365KB
uncompressed). The tar.gz file for the entire Lintian release is 589KB.
So the changelog for Lintian is nearly 20% of the entire distribution.
Admittedly, we have a fairly verbose changelog style, but most Lintian
work involves large numbers of small tweaks and small patches. I think
most of the changelog size is unavoidable. I don't think this is a
problem — Lintian is not the sort of thing that one runs in
an embedded environment and within reason it doesn't matter how large the
installed size is — but it is rather funny.
I stopped the last archive-wide run because gluck was being rebooted with
a new kernel that didn't cause Perl to close huge numbers of file
descriptors on popen, and then due to other things going on my life,
didn't get a chance to restart the archive run until yesterday. It's on
binary packages starting with "p" now, so hopefully sometime tomorrow
there will be fresh Lintian results with 2.2.0 and I can post a bits from
the Lintian maintainers message.
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