2010-01-01: 2009 reading in review
Despite the best of intentions, 2009 was an even worse year for reading
than 2008. For the year, I finished
56 books, 12 fewer even than last year and again the lowest total since
I've started writing reviews. This was also the first time since I
started writing reviews that I went a month without posting any new ones.
Given the sort of year last year was, though, I think this is both an
anomaly and to be expected. It was a stressful and packed year, with a
few major events like an illness in the family that ate up a lot of time,
attention, and emotional energy. Hopefully, those factors will not
repeat. On the good side, I also devoted quite a bit more time to playing
video games in 2009, which necessarily took away some time from reading.
That is likely to continue.
Even though the quantity was down, the quality of books I read this year
were a delight. I rated three books 10 out of 10 this year, two
non-fiction and one fiction. The novel was Ursula K. Le Guin's
Voices, the second
book (after Gifts)
of the Annals of the Western Shore. The entire series is very good, but
that book was exceptional: a deep and moving look at occupation, anger,
friendship, tradition, and cultural identity. I highly recommend it and
the entire series.
Two non-fiction books got 10 out of 10 this year. The first was Ben
Goldacre's Bad
Science, an eye-opening look at how the scientific process is abused,
ignored, and misreported in medicine, including detailed looks at medical
misinformation ranging from the comical to the deadly. I recommend it to
anyone exposed to the regular stream of medical alarmism and alternative
medical theories that come from the popular news media. The second was
Rory Stewart's exceptional The Places in Between, the story of his walk across Afghanistan
shortly after the fall of the Taliban. I picked up this book after seeing
Rory Stewart on Bill Moyer's Journal and it didn't disappoint. It
is an insightful and often beautiful look at the people and interior of
Afghanistan in a way that rarely appears in the news media.
Other non-fiction highlights of the year ranged from the
last volume of Orwell's
edited non-fiction to Marcus du Sautoy's excellent book on the Riemann
Hypothesis, The Music
of the Primes. Along the way, I read Jane Jacobs's
The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, which fully deserves its classic status, and
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, which is a fascinating and very informative look at the
psychology of a concentrated and productive state of mind. I also re-read
George Gamow's One Two
Three... Infinity, a favorite from my childhood, which is still one of
the best bits of popular science writing that I've ever read.
The other fiction series find of the year was Karen Traviss's Wess'Har
series, the entirety of which I read this year. While I thought the
middle of the series sagged, both the
beginning and
end are excellent. Other
fiction worth special note is the first book of Jacqueline Carey's new
D'Angeline novel, Naamah's Kiss, which starts a new series that I'm now eagerly
looking forward to; Robin McKinley's
Sunshine, the best
urban fantasy with vampires novel that I've ever read; and the non-SF novel
A Coffin for
Dimitrios by Eric Ambler.
There is also a version of this post
with additional statistics that are probably only of interest to me.
2010-01-01: Begin as you mean to continue
Another picture of the beach near the Chinook Winds at Lincoln City, this
one taken from the balcony of my hotel room a bit more than a year ago.
As you can tell, I've been sorting through more old pictures and
annotating them.
Today was an excellent day. Most notably, it was a well-balanced day,
with a bit of reading, a bit of enjoying football, and a bit of being
productive. I worked on Lintian some, for the release tomorrow, and I
updated my web site in a few places, but I also went and read for a while
and sorted through a bunch of pictures. A good omen for the new year, I
think.
My charities page has gotten a
substantial update and is now a more complete list of the charities I
support. I tried to add a bit of explanation for why I support each one.
I'm completely caught up on book reviews for the first time since the
middle of November, so it will be a few days before I post another one.
I'm most of the way through Iain M. Banks's Against a Dark
Background, after which I have some Le Guin queued up. Two more days of
vacation, and then it's back to work. I'm feeling ready for it, though,
and I'm doing much better with working from a to-do list and focusing,
which will make work more rewarding and productive than it was at the tail
end of last year.
I hope everyone else's new year started off as well.
2010-01-02: control-archive 1.2.1
I haven't really accumulated enough to warrant that much of a release, but
there were a few problems with the previous release and some outdated
documentation, so what the heck. This release fixes some information for
szaf.* and updates the key for eternal-september.*. It also changes the
config README to stop mentioning a component length requirement that we're
no longer enforcing.
You can get the latest version from the
control-archive distribution page.
2010-01-02: Lintian 2.3.1
This is primarily a bug-fix release, cleaning up some issues introduced in
2.3.0. Specifically, it fixes collection of the contents of *.a files,
fixes the severity of spelling errors in man pages, properly parses
Depends starting with a newline for weak-library-dev-dependency, and fixes
the spurious display of archive areas in some cases in the HTML reports.
This release also includes Raphael Geissert's work to eliminate unpack
level two (which means having a full unpacked copy of the package) in
favor of a collection script that does this and a new type of collection
that's automatically removed after processing. This is the first step
towards eliminating the internal Lintian distinction between unpack and
collection scripts and implementing both using the same mechanisms.
As usual, there are a variety of other fixes and improvements, but there
shouldn't be any major user-visible changes in this release.
Note that, following advice from Joey Hess, Lintian now warns about
missing ${misc:Depends} dependencies for any package that uses debhelper,
since any debhelper script may start adding dependencies there. This was
already mostly in place in 2.3.0, but is the source of a large number of
new warnings in the archive.
2010-01-02: filter-syslog 1.23
This release adds a third type of configuration line that specifies a
regex to match against the entire syslog line, which can be used to filter
out non-standard or malformatted lines (such as ones where the program
contains whitespace).
You can get the latest version from the
filter-syslog distribution page.
2010-01-02: Fiddly bits
A rope buried in the sand near Road's End at Lincoln City, Oregon. One of
those ordinary items that catch my eye when I'm walking around with a
camera.
One of the tricky parts of being productive that I'm still working on
fitting into my time and task management is that a lot of the things I do
prompt response. I ask people for help with something and get replies, I
submit patches and get feedback, and I release software and get questions
or patch submissions. When I get that mail in, it tends to act as an
interrupt, and then I spend the time that I would spend working on my
to-do list processing that mail instead. Sometimes that's the right
prioritization, but sometimes it's not.
Also, when I'm in catch-up mode, trying to feel like I'm getting more on
top of things, that incoming mail feel like setbacks. This is another
version of the basic time management problem for me: I want to be "caught
up," which is not a meaningful concept. What I want to aim for is
productive, making effective use of my time. It's hard to pull my mind
around to that, though.
This hit a bit today, but what ended up working was to just ignore the
mail for a while and start another project off my to-do list that would
take a while. Once I finished that, I felt more positive about getting
things done. Even better, in the long run, would be to move the mail into
pending folders and add it to the to-do list, but one step at a time.
One day of vacation left. I could use another week, but I'll also enjoy
getting back home. I'm not horribly enthused about switching from the
things I'm working on now back to work projects, but I'll cope.
2010-01-03: Antisocial
A close-up of the chain of a dog
collar that was draped over a piece of driftwood on the beach at Lincoln
City, Oregon.
Today is the last day of vacation. Tomorrow I head back home and do a bit
of work in the evening, and then it's back to a regular schedule and back
to working on work projects instead of whatever I feel like. I'm not
entirely ready for the work project part, but I am looking forward to
being back in my own place. I've had a very good past two weeks, but I'm
also feeling the antisocial reaction from being around people for a couple
of weeks.
Work will, unfortunately for my introversion, involve more meetings and
interaction with people during the day, but it will be nice to have the
evenings to myself. Plus, I get to work from home on Wednesday.
I'm generally annoyed at the distribution of holidays, since they tend to
cluster in November through February, but I must admit that I'm glad
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is coming up soon. I suspect I'll spend much
of that weekend playing video games, since I didn't do any of that over
vacation.
2010-01-04: Back home
Wave patterns in the sand. I know this is made by the wind, and there's
some standard explanation for the physics of it that probably explains
ripples on water as well, but I've never gone and looked it up. One of
those things I should do one of these days.
I'm back home, after a really great train ride. It was calming and
relaxing, I finished a book (The Lathe of Heaven, which surprised
me as Le Guin tends to do), and I feel much more ready to tackle the world
than I was afraid I would.
Today was a travel day, so I gave myself permission to not get anything
else done besides travel, even if I was hoping I would. And indeed, that
was all I got done. Oh well. The main point of today is to transition
back to my regular schedule and my regular patterns.
Tomorrow is the test of my new system and my new focus on using to-do
lists more effectively.
2010-01-05: reminder 1.11
Version 6.x of Date::Manip now chokes on date modifications with two
consecutive pluses (<date> + +2 weeks, for example), which caused
reminder to choke on repeating reminders where the repeat time started
with a plus. Since this was previously supported syntax, continue to
support it by stripping off a leading plus in the reminder data before
adding a plus to do the date calculation.
You can get the latest version from the reminder distribution page. New Debian packages will be uploaded to my
personal repository.
2010-01-05: Back to work
I'm keeping a Zen-like mood from the calm of vacation, so you get more
sand texture, this time under water.
This was about as good of a first day back to work as I could have hoped
for. The only place where it fell short is that I didn't make forward
progress on my current big project, but just about everything else
worked. The schedule worked, I felt unhurried and capable, I crossed
things off my to-do list, I made commits on multiple projects, and I
worked out a tricky bit of work I've been wanting to do for a while. I'm
feeling very positive about it.
Tomorrow, I need to do grocery shopping, and then I get to work from
home. This will be another significant test, since I've had a great deal
getting started when working from home before vacation. I'm going to do
shopping first-thing to see if that settles me down, and then see if I can
dive directly into work before getting caught up in answering e-mail.
I'm still working on my evening schedule. I'm supposed to be in bed
reading by now, and I'm running late. I did that yesterday as well by
about a half-hour. This may just be acceptable variation, or it may be
something I want to push harder on. Still deciding.
In general, one of the challenges is how much I want to have a fairly
strict schedule and how much I want to let things move around. Ten years
ago, this would have been an easy question: moving things around was how I
was the most productive. But as I get older, I'm finding more and more
signs that I'm benefiting from a fairly strict schedule. Among other
things, it seems to be useful in kicking me out of sitting around staring
at the screen being unproductive. But I still haven't figured out the
balance.
(You're likely to get lots of noodling about schedules and time management
for the next few weeks. This is what I'm always like immediately after
clearing my head from vacation.)
2010-01-06: Fail better
A climbing vine hiding in the shadows of steps. I played a bit with the
contrast on this. Must remember how much that helps with making things
jump out.
Today was the first work from home day after vacation, with one of the
major goals being to get started sooner and work more smoothly than I had
been before vacation. I can't say that it was a complete success, but I
think I failed better. I like that way of looking at things: for a lot of
things in life, the goal isn't really to do it perfectly, but to keep
trying and keep failing better.
The plus side is that I got up and did the grocery shopping first thing,
as planned, and that went very well. I also got the laundry done between
doing other things and thinking through work problems. And I got a long
period of mostly uninterrupted solid work done, understanding and
reworking some patches.
The minus for today is that I'm increasingly feeling like I prioritized
badly and what I did today was not really the highest priority. It's
something that I need to get done, so this is not a completely grounded
feeling, and there are pluses to doing what I'm doing. But it's been
niggling at me. I also didn't start on real project work until late again
(afternoon, although not as late as was typical before vacation), and I
didn't work from my to-do list, so some fast tasks didn't get done today.
All of that plus some goofing off during the day created pressure to run
late and not stop when the day was over, which meant that I didn't get
this post and photo done early, which in turn means that I didn't get a
review written this evening. However, I'm letting tasks move to later
days instead of pushing my schedule, which is exactly what I want to be
doing.
I think ideally I'd like to post the photo and the noodling about life in
the morning instead of the evening, since in the evening I want to be
writing book reviews. I may try experimenting with that tomorrow.
So far, a firm schedule is looking like a fairly good idea. We'll see
what happens when we get to the weekend, when there will be more pressure
to stay up late and do things with friends. I haven't quite worked out
how to fit that into my schedule yet.
2010-01-07: Morning routine
A rock with what looks like the imprints of fingers feels like a good
image for determination. Not one of the best pictures I've ever taken,
but I thought it was an unusual-looking rock and worth posting.
This is the first morning I'm trying gathering my thoughts and posting a
picture in the morning instead of in the evening, so I have few additional
thoughts since last night. My schedule is holding, I seem to be getting
enough sleep, I'm quite happy about having extensive reading time every
evening, and I'm in general feeling quite positive about life. The goal
for today is to get caught up on the little tasks that I didn't do
yesterday, but only after making some concrete forward progress on my main
project. Then, if I have time, I'll work on finishing off the things I
did yesterday and the day before.
2010-01-08: First week
Well, I didn't post this first thing today because I had a meeting at 10am
and, while I got up early enough to take the time to do it, I took that
time to write a necessary document for my current major project instead.
That was something that had been on my to-do list for a while, so getting
it done since I felt inspired to write it was more important.
Other than that, today was mostly meetings, and I think I abruptly ran out
of steam this evening. Everything from about 6pm on has felt rather hard.
So I didn't get laundry done this evening, I still have a bunch of little
work stuff I need to clean up, I'm a bit dissatisfied with some things I
did this evening, and I didn't get my weekly review done and will have to
do it tomorrow. A bit of a foggy evening, hence the picture.
However.
This was a kick-ass first week after vacation. I set new patterns that I
think are good ones and I stuck with them, I got a lot of exercise, I got
unblocked on my major work project and made good forward progress, and I
managed to deal with some emotional disruptions and unexpected setbacks
without having them stop me. And I read every evening, and I finished
another book this week. So that was a great start to the year.
I'm carrying over a few more things to tomorrow and my weekend than I
wanted to (laundry, weekly review), but I stuck with my schedule. I'm
going to go read and sleep after posting this, which means I'll be able to
get up nice and early, as opposed to around noon like I was before
vacation, and have a full Saturday to get caught up and to relax, watch
the playoffs or play video games, listen to new music, and enjoy myself.
All in all, a great start to the year. Begin as one means to continue.
2010-01-09: Day off
This was the picture where I learned how much fun taking digital pictures
into the sun is. Of course, I had to do some rotation and cropping since
I was shooting it blind, but I'm very happy with how it came out. The
birds next to the sun make it.
Today ended up being a day off. I did do some laundry and got through all
the accumulated paper mail from before and during vacation, but otherwise
I played video games and watched TV. I didn't even do any of the online
things that I was planning on doing.
I'm a little annoyed by that, but I shouldn't be. Have to give myself
space to take days off. Although I do wish I would have posted this entry
earlier in the day and written a review.
My schedule is fighting back a bit. I woke up too early this morning, and
I'm running late this evening (I should have gone to walk already, but
will have to do so after posting this). But still holding so far.
Tomorrow will hopefully be a more interesting day. (But playing some
video games for the first time since before vacation was good.)
2010-01-10: reminder 1.14
The fixes for compatibility with Date::Manip 6.x in reminder 1.11 turned
out to not be complete. I fixed only one place that used repeat
intervals, but the removal of a leading + had to be done in all other
sites as well. There was also a problem with marking reminders done in
Date::Manip 6.x due to a different interpretation of "today" as a date.
While testing, I also found a few other bugs: reminders wouldn't be
considered active and wouldn't have their active interval advanced if they
were due at exactly the time reminder was run, and edited reminders that
failed validation and were re-edited wouldn't be properly revalidated.
Those bugs are also now fixed.
You can get the latest version from the reminder distribution page. New Debian packages have been uploaded to
my personal Debian repository.
2010-01-10: Football
This seagull hunkered down in a pool and eyeing the camera pretty much
matches how I feel today. I spent the day watching the playoffs and
eating.
I go back and forth on watching football. It's probably the organized
sport that I follow the closest, in terms of being occasionally willing to
watch the whole season and not just the playoffs. At times when I was
younger, I followed it obsessively. Then I didn't follow it at all for
years. Now, it's an occasional thing; I turn it on if it's on and I feel
like watching TV. So far, the playoffs have been a disappointment both in
terms of who's winning and in terms of the quality of the games, although
the Phoenix and Green Bay late game was rather exciting.
I suspect, ideally, I should watch less TV over all and cutting back on it
would help my concentration, so I'm pushing back a little on automatically
turning the TV on during weekend days.
The weekend is sadly almost over, but I get another long weekend next
weekend. I feel somewhat more tired than I normally do, but I'm not sure
yet if that's a normal downswing or if it's an effect of better scheduling
and focus leading to doing more and hence burning more energy. I'll
probably have a better idea after another week.
2010-01-11: Meeting Monday
In honor of the winter weather throughout much of the US, have a picture
of snow. This was taken during a freak spring snow in Nanaimo a few years
ago.
New week, new focus, new plans. I'm starting off the week somewhat
deluged with meetings, including a meeting with the executive director of
my part of the organization to express some concerns about a proposed
plan. That's unsurprisingly eating a lot of brainspace. Tomorrow, I have
a pile of upgrades, patching, and conversions to work on. Then the rest
of the week should be more open and provide some time for project work.
I'm hoping, though, that I can also work between meetings; that's
something that I was bad at towards the end of last year and that I'd like
to get better at.
Primary goals for today: finish the planning, organization, and completion
of quick tasks I left from Friday, and then start making progress on
testing packages for the next phase of the current big project. I'm
taking it as a very good omen that I woke up by myself before my alarm and
feeling quite rested.
I'm always surprised by this each time I get back from vacation, but once
again I'm struck by how little energy I have in a week to do anything
productive other than work. It's extremely difficult to find the energy
to work on Lintian, for instance, or new releases of software that aren't
work related, or Debian Policy. There's a long weekend coming up, which
should help, but it's just a mite frustrating and long weekends are
sparse. It would be lovely if I were able to do some of that work in the
evenings, but even though I have the time, mustering the energy is very
difficult. I always say that I wish I had more time to do all the things
I want to do, but actually I couldn't use the time if I had it unless I
also got more energy in each day. Eight hours of heads-down, concentrated
work takes a lot out of one.
Some people have a regular job, work on Debian, and have children. I have
no idea how they manage it.
2010-01-12: Long, long day
Today started at a little before 8am and lasted until 9pm. It was really
productive, even though a lot of it was meetings, and contained some
significant milestones, but I'm still rather tired. I have a review
queued up (finally), but I don't have the energy to post it this evening
or to write another. These things can wait.
Our Puppet configuration repository has now been converted from Subversion
to Git (which takes a while when we've had over 21,000 commits). The
OpenAFS project is approaching an important milestone for charitable
status (not directly, but through an umbrella organization). I got a few
quarterly patchings done and a KDC upgrade finished, cleared my last to-do
item for a project I can drop, and got a few other minor things done as
well. Very happy about that.
Now, I'm going to go read for a while and then sleep the sleep of the
productive. I've already worked an extra six hours this week and will be
doing an upgrade Friday night, so I think I'm going to finish one or two
moderate things tomorrow morning and then take the rest of the day off.
2010-01-13: Day of relaxation
I declare today in advance to be a day of relaxation. Both Monday and
Tuesday were meeting-heavy and interaction-heavy, I get to spend today at
home, I have a surfeit of productive hours for the week, and I don't need
to work as hard.
I think the plan is to prepare some testing builds this morning and
confirm that my password strength
checking stuff is working as expected, at least on Heimdal and possibly
on MIT as well if I feel inspired. Then, I'll either do a bit of work on
kstart or go play video games for a while,
depending on what I feel like.
It's been a good year so far. I'm feeling myself settle into a schedule,
and I'm also feeling considerably more on top of things than I normally
do.
2010-01-14: Almost weekend
Sand on an asphalt walkway from the Chinook Winds down to the beach.
A lot has been happening this week, even with taking Wednesday largely
off. I had another two hours of meetings today (on two completely
different topics than any of the other meetings I had previously this
week), plus drove a friend to a routine eye appointment this morning. The
week has felt very packed, and I'm looking forward to the weekend a lot.
But it's also been very productive. I had one minor bug-fix patch to
Heimdal accepted today, sent two more, and finished testing both the
external password check and password quality check module components for
Heimdal in the next version of krb5-strength. Now I just need to test the new version of the MIT
Kerberos patch and submit that, and I can release 1.0 and be done with
half of the KDC modifications that I'm working on. This evening, I wrote
most of the documentation that I needed.
Tomorrow, I'm going to take some time and do a real weekly review and
figure out where I stand and what the priorities are for the next week. I
will hopefully have time to apply a pile of patches for some other
software and do a few releases, either this weekend or next week.
Now, off to read a bit before sleeping.
2010-01-15: WEEKEND!
I like the symbolism of this picture: a plant growing out of a hole in a
concrete wall. I think this fits a lot of things about the way that I
like to think about my job. For instance, the free software that I write
comes out of solving problems on my job a little like that. And I find
all sorts of fun things to do even in things I don't enjoy that much,
which become like that plant.
I'm doing the last bit of work that I have to do for the week right now,
and then I'm done and have a nice, long weekend.
I had a completely kick-ass week. Despite having ten hours of meetings, I
got nine hours of project time in, which is remarkable. Overhead came in
at about fifteen hours on the week, which given that we're going through
reorg discussions is excellent.
The reorg is actually going to make my job considerably more fun, although
I'm feeling guilty because I feel like it has the net effect of taking a
bunch of boring work away from me and giving it to other people.
Hopefully they won't find it boring! But any reorg, no matter how good,
consumes just amazing amounts of time. It seriously hurts productivity
usually for at least a month if not more. I don't think managers usually
realize that a reorg costs something like $300,000 or more in lost
productivity and work that didn't happen if you value time spent dealing
with the reorg according to the salaries of the people involved. It may
be more than that. Do they really think that the changes will recoup that
much money in the long run? For nearly all reorganizations, I'm dubious.
But I can still focus my own reaction on what's productive, and I did that
last week.
I haven't done much except work, though, partly because I've been putting
in that extra effort. I even largely took Wednesday off and still hit 41
hours for the week (and I played video games on Wednesday, rather than
doing something requiring brain). I'm not letting myself focus on using
this weekend to do work-like things, but I may do some catching up if it
feels fun.
I didn't do my regular weekly review today, so I'll do that tomorrow, and
take stock against my goals for the year.
2010-01-16: Two week recap
A pile of chain in the grass. For some reason, this seems nicely symbolic
of what it feels like to have a good underlying structure of organization
but have new things that came in that I should deal with and haven't
organized yet.
It's been about two weeks now since I got back from vacation, which means
two weeks trying a new schedule, a new set of habits, and attempting a new
attitude. I still haven't done my weekly review, but it's feeling like
time to take stock, and I'll probably do a bit more of that tomorrow.
Overall, I think I'm fairly happy with the changes. Keeping a consistent
schedule seems to be a good move for me (and deserves a bit more focused
attention, since it's drifting just a little bit right now). I'm also
being more productive at work and making serious progress on the project
that had me feeling overwhelmed before vacation, despite a reorg going on
at the same time.
It takes longer to do things than I think it should. It takes longer to
keep generally caught up on my life than I expect. Today, for instance,
feels like a day in which I did almost nothing, but I played video games
for several hours, put away clothes, did the dishes, and sorted through
several days of pictures, not to mention went through all the paper mail
for the week. That's not nothing at all. It's just not to-do list sorts
of things, which is different. I'm not going to do things faster than I
am now (although I'm continuing to work on focus and not multitasking so
much), so I need to change my expectations.
I also have to keep reminding myself that taking a day entirely off and
doing something like reading or playing video games is a lot more
effective and leads to more productivity than feeling tired but poking at
things absently, accomplishing neither relaxation nor productivity.
2010-01-17: Picture sorting continues
One thing that I'm happily making progress with since the start of the
year is sorting through pictures. The primary reason why I've been able
to post a photograph every day is that I sorted through enough to have an
index of pictures that I know I want to post. I have about five days left
from my 2008 beach pictures, which is one of three large blocks of
pictures where I've not yet written notes about where I was when I took
them and what I was thinking.
I caught up on sleep last night, which was good. Now I'm watching the NFL
playoffs. I'm not pushing myself to do very much since the TV is also on,
which is always distracting, but I'm tentatively planning on catching up
on some non-work on-line stuff later today.
A few other things that have gone well so far this year:
I've walked the treadmill every single day since I got back home. No
exceptions, no excuses, no deciding it's too late. I still haven't
gotten back to normal eating patterns, and I'm working on that, but
exercise is the most important factor there. I just need to keep that
up.
So far, I'm doing quite a bit better at working from a to-do list and
not just working on whatever shows up in my e-mail. I still need to
do some work in this area, but it's definitely better. I'm also
putting a few things off that aren't really urgent and balancing my
time a bit better, I think.
One of the big things that I want to create time for this year is to start
learning programming again. For the last several years, I've been resting
on existing skills, existing languages and techniques, and implementing
things well within my current knowledge. I don't want to rest on that. I
think the first step is to learn AJAX and JavaScript, which is going to be
increasingly important at work. I'd also like to resurrect some of my
efforts to learn different languages and read a few of the many language
books that I've bought over the years and then never cracked open.
There's basically no chance that I'll be able to start on this before
March, so this is future pondering at the moment, but I'll be disappointed
if I come out of this year with the same programming skill set as I
currently have.
2010-01-17: control-archive 1.3.0
Thomas Hochstein did a comprehensive review of German regional hierarchies
and sent me a bunch of updates, and this release includes those updates.
In some cases, there was no active control message sender but the
hierarchy was still in use, so the control.ctl generation software now
supports that and adds a standard comment.
While I was at it, I added support for comments in the general
configuration syntax and added a new reserved hierarchy type, so many of
the special entries can now be handled with regular configuration. The
key fingerprint pseudo-header now looks like all the others, with a colon
instead of an equal sign.
There are a few other, more minor hierarchy and documentation updates.
You can get the latest release from the
control-archive distribution
page.
2010-01-17: faq2html 1.29
It's been quite a while since I've released a new version of any of my web
tools (over a year, it looks like). I noticed a problem with converting
the control-archive change summary to HTML. The entry for the 1.2.1 release was wrapped in
a <pre> tag. This release of faq2html has a one-line fix for that
problem, making the conversion less aggressive about using <pre> for
single-line paragraphs that look like regular text and end in a colon.
You can get the latest version from my web
tools distribution page.
2010-01-18: rra-c-util 2.2
I've been noticing that one design mistake I made in my library of shared
C code is to use a single header file, util/util.h, to prototype all of
the functions. I should have figured this out a while back, since I made
the same mistake in INN originally. The specific problem with rra-c-util
is that it made it hard to update to a new release, since I'd have to
merge changes to util/util.h with changes local to that particular
package.
This release therefore eliminates util/util.h in favor of separate header
files for each function group. As I update packages to this release, I'll
do the same thing for the functions that are local to that package.
Also in this release, I've tagged all functions with the relevant GCC
function attributes, adding alloc_size, malloc, and nonnull where
appropriate. This should help optimization and, in some cases, compiler
diagnostics. kafs/kafs.h now defines HAVE_KAFS so that users have a
simple way of knowing whether any AFS support is compiled in, and there
are a few other, more minor improvements.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2010-01-18: Life is good
Immediately following a storm is one of my favorite times to take
pictures, right up there with late afternoon light.
Today was a university holiday (Martin Luther King, Jr. day, one of those
that most governments in the US get, but only some private employers), so
I got to have an extra-long weekend. As always, I didn't get done
everything that I was tentatively planning on, but I'm still extremely
happy with the whole weekend. I did a fairly good job of focusing and
gave quality attention to everything that I did throughout the weekend,
which is the goal I'm truly striving for. I even made up a missed
exercise session this morning, so I can still say that I exercised every
day since I got back from vacation.
No playoffs today, so the TV was off for most of the day. When I'm
watching it, I can see a remarkable difference in my ability to
concentrate based on whether the TV is on. I'm not sure what this is
going to mean for getting around to watching the various TV things I do
want to watch, but I suspect I should do another significant purge of what
I'm mentally committing to watching and focus on using music instead.
Attention studies at Stanford have shown that attempting to multitask with
any other input except music causes serious cognitive impairment,
but music doesn't appear to have the same negative effect. I was one of
those people who always thought he was good at multitasking, but most such
people are nowhere near as good as they think they are.
When I first came to Stanford, I gave up TV entirely and didn't watch it
except very occasionally at a friend's house for about seven years. It's
occasionally tempting to do that again, not as completely but reserving it
for video games, movies and TV collections that I know I want to watch,
and the occasional rare program. I would miss good news programming, but
Bill Moyer's Journal is going off the air anyway, and while
The Daily Show is funny, I'm not sure I'd miss it that much. It
would mean cutting way back or stopping watching the food shows I started
watching, but it might be worth it. Worth additional pondering.
I still don't have all of the things I want to do in life all lined up and
balanced — Debian and book reviews are the ones getting a bit
short-changed at the moment — but I'm doing so vastly better
than I was before vacation.
2010-01-19: kstart 3.16
This release fixes several k5start bugs around specifying the ticket cache
and setting its ownership and mode. It fixes segfaults and behaves
correctly if -k is not specified but -o, -g, or -m are specified, and it
allows the argument to -k to be prefixed with FILE: (but still
requires a file-based ticket cache).
Also with this release both k5start and krenew gained an -L option, saying
to log any messages via syslog as well as to standard output and standard
error. This should help with debugging when the -b flag is used to
background the process.
In other, more minor changes, kstart now builds against Heimdal without
using deprecated functions and the test suite properly supports a Heimdal
userspace. The distribution includes some missing files, including one
that fixes a build problem on Solaris 9. And support for PAGs is now
advertised in -h if it was compiled in.
You can get the latest version from the kstart distribution page.
2010-01-20: On a roll
This has been a good week. It's been a somewhat tiring week, and I ran
myself into some internal pressure because I chose to work on
kstart at the start of the week and then on
AFS packaging, neither of which are current top priorities, but I made up
for it today by getting all of the other things that I had to get done
this week done except for one.
Pressure is going to be high for KDC work for the next couple of weeks.
I'm not sure that everything is going to get done before I go on partial
vacation, and my current target timeline is very aggressive. But I'm
making good progress. The next big hurdle is doing comprehensive testing
and some local packaging, and then testing replication. Once that's in
place, everything else should settle down.
New releases of wallet and
kadmin-remctl should be coming before
too much longer.
Yesterday was the first day this year during which I didn't post a
picture. I could have pushed through that evening and done so, and I made
a conscious decision not to. I get too hung up on every single day
patterns, particularly when they're unbroken, and breaking them from time
to time helps me get over that. I'm doing fairly well right now at not
pressuring myself. There are only two things that I'm going to push a bit
on: structuring my evenings better, and catching up on book reviews.
Two things I've been enjoying recently and highly recommend:
Coders at Work by Peter Seibel. This made the rounds a while
back (in large part because jwz blogged about it, and Joel on Software
said one of those bizarre and half-wrong-headed Joel on Software sorts
of things about it). However, it really is as good as all that. I'm
finding it fascinating and highly entertaining, and it's also renewing
a great deal of personal interest in software design. If you write
code, I recommend this book highly. I'll post a full review when I'm
done with it, of course.
History of World Literature by Grant L. Voth, from
The Teaching Company. I've been
listening to courses from The Teaching Company for a few years now and
have always learned something, but some of the courses are just better
than others. Mostly, this isn't the topic (although that helps) but
the delivery. Voth is possibly the best of any instructor I've
listened to so far, and this course is absolutely fascinating. I'm
getting new insights even on works with which I'm already deeply
familiar and which I've previously studied in depth. This
unfortunately appears to be the only course he's done, since I'd buy
anything he does.
2010-01-21: Plan B
Well, today didn't go according to plan at all. I was going to take the
afternoon off and totally didn't. This was for moderately good reasons
(it was raining, I got a ride to play card games this evening, and I got
some other on-line non-work stuff done), but I'm still mildly annoyed that
I haven't figured out how to handle this work/life balance thing.
But I have now fixed the GNU Backgammon builds for Debian, hopefully, and
I caught up on some long Usenet messages I wanted to reply to and fixed
kstart packages. And I played cards tonight, so it's all good. I need to
go exercise before sleep, and I'm running a late schedule again, both of
which are kind of annoying, but hopefully I can make up for that somewhat
tomorrow and then over the weekend.
The good side is that this week has been intensely productive and I'm much
more caught up on lots of things that had been bugging me.
2010-01-22: Welcome weekend
For a short week, it's felt like a very long one. I worked forty hours on
top of the holiday, so 48 hours for the week, which is a lot. That also
involved going into work on Wednesday instead of working from home,
failing to go home early both Thursday and Friday, and pushing myself
through several things I didn't want to do. But I thnk it paid off; I got
a lot done, and I have now cleared the way for several rather fun things
to work on for next week amidst somewhat annoying testing setup.
Tonight, I hit one of those overwhelmed but feeling like I need to keep
doing things moods, particularly since I still haven't written another
book review and it's getting to me. But I'm taking that as not a sign to
push through and do more, given the past week, but to just step away and
relax. The world isn't going to end if book reviews are slow in coming.
Tomorrow is going to be devoted to playing video games unless I wake up
wanting very strongly to do something else entirely, since I need the
unwinding time. Then, if I choose, I can decide to be productive during
the games on Sunday.
And tonight, I read until I fall asleep and then sleep for as long as I
want. I'm rather torn about what to read, since reading more about
programming may not fit my mood, but I'm not sure I have fiction around
that quite fits my mood either. Still pondering.
2010-01-23: Video game day
This picture isn't entirely in focus, but I love the color and texture of
the rope.
The video game playing didn't go entirely according to plan, since I slept
in and then Xbox Live didn't want to let me start the game that I was
planning on playing. But I still got about three hours of video game
playing in and watched a bunch of trailers that I'd queued up to watch. I
may get a bit more in tomorrow morning before the football games. And the
grocery shopping is done.
Still rather tired, but I think this was a good recovery day. Tomorrow is
going to be another one.
2010-01-24: Term::ANSIColor 3.00
This release is due to the hard work of Jakob Ilves, who pointed out that
the existing color escape sequences produced poor results on emulators
with sixteen color support and explained why. Unfortunately, while
emulators with eight-color support treat the basic colors as full
intensity, emulators with sixteen-color support tend to treat the regular
eight colors as low intensity and the additional colors as regular
intensity. This release therefore adds bright_* versions of all the
regular colors, which will look better on sixteen-color emulators.
There unfortunately isn't any good way to figure out whether the emulator
supports sixteen colors, and on eight-color emulators the new codes will
just be ignored. Unfortunately, for reliable colors one needs to use the
base colors, which will look dim. The module can't offer much help in
working around that, but at least all the colors are now available for use
for programs that can assume sixteen-color emulators.
You can get the latest version from the Term::ANSIColor distribution page.
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