2011-01-01: 2010 reading in review
For the year of 2010, I finished and reviewed 56 books. That's exactly
the same number of books I finished and reviewed in
2009, which I consider a significant
milestone; this is the first year since I've been keeping track that the
number of books I read year over year did not decline. That was despite
another fairly stressful and chaotic year. (A goal for 2011: manage
committments and stress better so that, next year, I can say that the year
was not chaotic and stressful.)
Once again, I rated three books 10 out of 10 this year, two non-fiction
and one fiction. The novel was Guy Gavriel Kay's magnificent
Under Heaven, which
may be the best book he's written yet. I expect to see it appear in at
least award shortlists next year, if not win the World Fantasy award. Kay
is high on my list of authors I want to re-read. His novels are almost
uniformly exceptional, and I'd like to have reviews up of all of them.
The two non-fiction books receiving 10 out of 10 this year both received
that rating by being inspiring.
Coders at Work by
Peter Seibel is an exceptional collection of interviews with programmers
that fired me up to learn more about the craft and was the direct
inspiration for learning Java this past year.
Do It Tomorrow is
another time management book, this one by Mark Forster, and has now
surpassed Getting
Things Done as my favorite time management book (although I think I
needed to read Getting Things Done first to get the most out of
it). There was no other non-fiction this year that particularly stood
out, although if you're interested in the Supreme Court and the
intersection of law and politics,
The Nine is worth a
look.
Fiction highlights were thick on the ground this year. China Miéville's
The City & The City
deservedly won four major awards and was probably the best book published
in 2009. Raphael Carter's
The Fortunate Fall
deserves its genre classic status (if often below readers' radar) and is
possibly the best cyberpunk novel I've read. Jacqueline Carey's
Namaah's Curse
continues her current series and maintains the level of quality, and is a
must-read for any Jacqueline Carey fan.
Silence in Solitude
is the second and best of Melissa Scott's inventive and thoroughly
enjoyable alchemical space opera trilogy Roads of Heaven. And,
finally, Bone and
Jewel Creatures is a hard-cover novella by Elizabeth Bear in a new
universe, a book with a small print run by a small press that's likely to
escape the notice of a lot of readers, but which is some of the best solo
work that Bear has done. I'm now eagerly awaiting the full-length novel
set in that same universe.
I think it's unlikely that I'm going to increase my reading much beyond
the level it's been at the last two years, so I'm lowering my (missed)
goal from 60 books a year to 52, or a book a week. That said, I would
have read 60 books last year if it weren't for coming down with a nasty
cold towards the end of the year that ate about a week and a half. One
thing I noticed this year was that the main obstacle wasn't the reading
but the review writing: review publication dates were clustering around
the ends of the month when I tried to finish up reviews. Spacing that out
better would make it easier to keep up with reading and reviewing.
There is also a version of this post
with additional statistics that are probably only of interest to me.
2011-01-01: New year, new start
Welcome to 2011!
Last year, while having some good points, was overall a mess. But one of
the lovely things about Stanford's mandatory Christmas shutdown is that it
provides a nice breathing period and an opportunity to relax before
planning and getting ready for a new year. (And, this year, a chance to
recover from the cold that knocked out a bunch of December for me.) So
I've been unsubscribing from mailing lists, organizing to-do lists, and
getting myself into the right mindset for the next year.
I'm a strong believer in starting as one means to go on. The best way for
this to be a lower-stress, lower-obligation, more enjoyable year is to
make it a lower-stress, lower-obligation, more enjoyable January. No
resolutions: that's too much of an obligation. But I will say that one
thing 2011 is going to have a lot more of is video games.
I don't think I've mentioned here, but if you enjoy the Xbox 360 at all,
TrueAchievements is the best
gaming site on the web. Its claim to fame is that it adjusts the gamer
score of achievements based on how many people who have the game have
acquired that achievement, resulting in an adjusted gamer score that takes
the difficulty of achievements into account. But as fun as that is, it
also has a comprehensive database of games, tracks all one's game progress
and that of one's friends and provides a feed summary of that, collects
reviews and solution guides for achievements, and quite a bit more. I've
been an off-and-on gamer for years, but TrueAchievements is what really
got me into gaming again. Now I have a rather substantial backlog of
games and I'm itching to spend a fair bit of 2011 playing them.
Just one day of vacation left, and then it's back to work. There's
another month of coding left in our major Java project that's been
consuming me since October, and then another couple of months of
integration, so I'm still going to be slow on Debian work and other
software releases. After that, my opportunities to get back to open
source development look much stronger. But I'm going to see if I can
weave a bit more Policy and Lintian work into my schedule than I have
been.
Here's to a smooth, balanced, and more comfortable and enjoyable 2011.
2011-01-02: control-archive 1.5.0
Well, I thought I'd tested the new chkscope support for checkgroups
processing before I released and deployed 1.4.0, but apparently I didn't.
So I deployed untested code that broke checkgroups processing entirely,
through a combination of multiple bugs, resulting in removing the first
group listed in any checkgroups message. Sigh.
This release fixes multiple different problems with checkgroups processing
and should now work properly. I also reprocessed all the checkgroups that
had come in and been processed with the broken version, so the groups that
were erroneously removed should now all be added again. Many apologies to
anyone who was tracking the ISC newsgroup list.
You can get the latest version from the
control-archive distribution page.
2011-01-02: Back to work
It's back to work tomorrow. (Well, actually, it was partly back to work
this weekend; I've already put in five hours for the week so far, which
will make up for a travel day on Tuesday.) I'm basically ready. We'll
see if that holds when I try to do some more serious development tomorrow,
but I'm doing the lighter stuff fairly well already.
Must remember to make a list for tomorrow before I go to sleep so that I
can start the year off right in terms of task management.
I unfortunately never got to Debian Policy or Lintian during this
vacation, which means that's my current top priority (apart from video
games) when I get some free time away from work again. I know that I'll
pick up a lot of momentum on both as soon as I start. I'm currently stuck
in that awkward place where the amount of work feels overwhelming, so I
never do anything. The only solution to that is to just start on
something small.
It was an excellent vacation, even if I was sick for the beginning of it
and didn't get done everything I wanted to (I never do). I'm feeling as
relaxed and refreshed as I have been since the middle of October.
2011-01-03: Good start
Returning to posting pictures deserves a texture picture to celebrate.
Today was the first day back to work, and so far, so good. I didn't
(despite planning on doing so) make a list the night before, but I did
make one in the morning after properly using my initiative slot, and then
I finished everything that was on it. I'm very pleased about that.
Tomorrow will be a travelling day, but I've already built up a bit of a
cushion to make up for the lost hours. If I manage to get work done in
the morning and evening tomorrow, I may even be able to take off a bit
early Thursday to play more video games. (That continues to be a high
priority!)
There won't be much time for Debian or other free software work, other
than things I'm doing as part of regular work, for the rest of this week,
since with travel I'll be a bit short on hours. A more normal schedule
will resume next week.
2011-01-04: Home again
Here, have a chain picture.
I'm back home, for the first time since mid-December. It was a good
travel day. I started reading Prince of the Marshes last night and
read about half of it today, and so far it's the best book about the Iraq
war I've ever seen. I suspect I'll be able to recommend it highly.
And, despite travelling for most of the day, I got two significant things
done for work, including finishing the coding project that I was going to
do the week before vacation when I got sick. That means I still got it
done in the iteration for which it was originally planned, which makes me
quite happy.
Tomorrow, it's back to work normally. But I've already saved up enough
time that I should be able to head home early Thursday to play a few bonus
mid-week video games.
2011-01-05: Back in the office
It's fun occasionally taking pictures of the beach that don't include the
ocean. (My favorite picture subject, as you might have guessed, although
partly that's because I've not finished sorting through most of my
non-beach pictures for things I want to post.)
Today was the first day back in the office. On the productivity front, I
give myself a B. All the important things got done today, but I spent a
bit too much time poking at mail. However, one of the things I poked at
was getting caught up on the most urgent Lintian mail, which makes me
happy.
The rest of the week is going to be heavy on meetings, so productivity is
going to be hard to find, particularly since I'm going to take part of
tomorrow afternoon to play video games. Taking mid-week breaks is
something I'm going to try to do more of this year; I usually have worked
up a surplus of an hour or two by the middle of the week, and rather than
just always working extra hours, I think I'll be happier and just as
productive by going home early and playing video games.
Other indulgences for today: changing my Xbox Live gamertag to something
more creative, even if it does cost $10. I should think about usernames
before I pick them.
I got to play some Defense Grid last night, and more tonight, and I'm
about to play a bit more when I get done posting this. It's lovely to be
back home with my game system again.
2011-01-06: Game playing progresses
I still haven't gone through more pictures, so you get more beach
photographs from 2008. This one is of runoff from a dirt bank into loose
sand, which makes an interesting texture and color contrast.
I decided during vacation that my first priority for this year was to play
more video games, since I'd developed quite a craving. That's working
great so far. I went home a bit early today and started the epilogue of
Prince of Persia, which is fiddly in places but still fun. And
then did some more work on AFS in the evening.
So far, I feel like I'm being more productive when I'm working and better
balancing the various things I want to do, but I know a lot of that is
coming off a vacation and feeling fully refreshed and recharged. (I
really don't know how people manage jobs where they get almost no
vacation. I can tell the changes in my productivity levels, and they're
vast.) I'm hopeful that some of it is improvements in attitude and life
balancing that will persist even after it's been a while since a vacation,
but making sure I get regular vacations will be important too.
As expected, meetings plus heading home early took a large chunk out of
today, and I blew off my initiative slot this morning and didn't work from
a to-do list. Ah well, tomorrow is another day, and I still wasn't
entirely unproductive.
2011-01-07: Made it
I love fast shutter speed pictures of ripples in water.
Since before vacation (when I was sick with a cold and too bleh to do
anything about it), what I've mostly wanted to do is play video games. I
spent most of vacation thinking about it, but came back on a Tuesday so
I've just been catching moments here and there from work. Finally, it's
the weekend, so if I keep feeling like it I can spend two solid days doing
nothing else.
I'm really looking forward to it.
Normal service of book reviews, free software work, Debian work, and so
forth will resume at some point, since I know this surge of gaming won't
last, but I'm going to enjoy it while I'm in the mood and not feeling
overwhelmed by anything else.
2011-01-12: Surfacing
There, I've now broken my streak of posting a photo a day, so I can go
back to doing it. Streaks create obligation, and obligation is bad.
Last weekend went exactly as planned: I spent basically the entire weekend
playing video games. And since that was so much fun, I've been playing
games in the evening the last couple of days as well. I polished off
Prince of Persia, cleaned up a few achievements in some other
games, and the last few evenings have been getting the achievements out of
Crystal Defenders (which is not a very good game and which wasn't
worth the $5 I paid for it, but at least I can get the achievements out of
it).
This is all warmup for next weekend, which is a three-day weekend and
during which I'm going to start some brand new games. Well, at least one,
depending on how much that one sucks me in.
All this has made it rather hard to focus on anything else, and for the
moment I'm not trying too hard and just running with this. When I'm in
the middle of one of these obsessions, I always feel like I'm dropping
everything else and won't get back to it, but past experience indicates
that I'll eventually get tired of whatever I'm focusing on and will feel
like doing other things. This time, I'm not stressing about it and just
rolling with what I feel like doing. If I really don't come out of this
game-playing trend, I can intentionally refocus later.
So postings here, and other things like free software work, will be slow
for a while, and I'll be over here obsessing over games.
2011-01-23: rra-c-util 3.1
This release is mostly in support of
pam-afs-session 2.1, which I'll be
announcing next. It contains fixes for the embedded kafs layer for Mac OS
X, a replacement for strndup if missing (which inexplicably Mac OS X
doesn't have in its C library), and new capabilities in the pam-util
library for vectors and list configuration parameters.
This release also has a few fixes to the Kerberos Autoconf probes and the
beginnings of a license cleanup. Many more files are now in the public
domain (or as close as one can legally get), using new language that
originally came from IETF lawyers, and the Autoconf macros are under a
more permissive license used by the FSF for many Autoconf macros. All
files meant to be copied into another package now include explicit license
statements.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2011-01-23: pam-afs-session 2.1
The primary purpose of this release is to fix various compilation and
functionality problems on platforms other than Debian Linux. Missing
configuration for the pam_syslog and pam_vsyslog functions is now
included, which should fix compilation problems on all platforms other
than recent Linux PAM. There are also fixes to the embedded kafs layer
for Mac OS X, including a replacement for strndup, and fixes for GCC
attribute markers.
This release also allows the program PAM configuration option to include
arguments, which are passed to the program run. Previously, one had to
write a shell script that wrapped the actual program. These options are
separated from the command by space, tab, or comma in the configuration.
Comma will be the most useful in PAM configuration files.
Because of this change, program paths containing spaces, tabs, and commas
are no longer supported. Hopefully this won't cause problems.
You can get the latest version from the
pam-afs-session distribution page.
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