2014-01-01: 2013 Book Reading in Review
What a strange year.
2013 was marked by a whole sequence of entirely unexpected events,
including multiple major work upheavals. For large chunks of the year, I
had very little time or emotional energy for personal reading goals, and
particularly for writing reviews. I declared personal amnesty on most of
my intentions halfway through the year, and all the totals will reflect
that. On the plus side (although not for reading and reviews), it was a
great year for video games.
Next year, there will be no specific goals. Between continuing work
fallout, a very busy project schedule, my intent to keep playing a lot of
video games, and various other personal goals I want to take on, I'm going
to take the pressure off of reading. Things will be read and reviews will
be written (and I'm going to make more of an effort to write reviews
shortly after reading books), but I'm not going to worry about how many.
The below statistics are confined to the books I reviewed in 2013. I read
six more books that I've not yet reviewed, due to the chaos at the end of
the year. Those will be counted in 2014.
There were no 10 out of 10 books this year, partly due to the much lower
reading totals and partly due to my tendency this year to turn to safe
comfort reading, which is reliably good but unlikely to be exceptional.
There were, however, several near-misses that were worth calling out.
My favorite book of the year was Neal Stephenson's
Anathem, which
narrowly missed a 10 for me due to some fundamental problems with the plot
premise. But this is still an excellent book: the best novel about the
practice of science and philosophy that I've ever read. Also deserving
mention are K.E. Lane's And Playing the Role of Herself, lovely and intelligent lesbian
romance that's likely to appeal even to people who would not normally try
that genre, and Guy Gavriel Kay's
River of Stars. The
latter isn't quite at the level of Kay's earlier
Under Heaven, but
it's still an excellent work of alternate historical fiction in a
memorable setting.
A special honorable mention goes to Lisa O'Donnell's
The Death of Bees.
It requires a lot of warnings for very dark subject matter and a rather
abrupt ending, but it's been a long time since I've cared that much about
the characters of a book.
My favorite non-fiction book of the year was Gary J. Hudson's
They Had to Go Out,
a meticulously researched account of a tragic Coast Guard mission. The
writing is choppy, the editing could have been better, and it's clear that
the author is not a professional writer, but it's the sort of detailed
non-fiction account that can only be written by someone who's been there
and lived through similar experiences. Also worth mentioning is Mark
Jason Dominus's Higher Order Perl, which was the best technical book I read all
year and which I found quite inspiring for my own programming.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
2014-01-02: A quick copy-paste UNIX trick
I ran across this trick a long time ago and now use it regularly, but it
occurred to me today that I don't remember seeing anyone else mention it.
So, just in case it helps someone else:
I often find myself wanting to copy and paste the contents of several
small files into an email message, particularly when explaining Debian
packaging. I want to show all the file contents with little headers
showing which lines come from each file. This gets tedious if I actually
do this file-by-file. The obvious approaches, from including them into my
editor to cat'ing them one-by-one and pasting them, are tedious and
require writing the headers by hand. Obviously, cat doesn't help, since
it obliterates the difference between the files.
What does help, however, is good old head (or tail, for that matter).
People normally use those utilities with standard input or a single file,
but you can give them multiple files, and they do just about exactly what
you want. Consider this shell transcript:
% head -n 20 *.install
==> liblog4shib-dev.install <==
usr/bin/log4shib-config
usr/include/*
usr/lib/*/lib*.a
usr/lib/*/lib*.so
usr/lib/*/pkgconfig/log4shib.pc
usr/share/aclocal/log4shib.m4
debian/log4shib-config.1 usr/share/man/man1
==> liblog4shib-doc.install <==
usr/share/doc/log4shib-*/api/html usr/share/doc/liblog4shib-doc
==> liblog4shib1.install <==
usr/lib/*/lib*.so.*
Just pick some value for -n that's longer than any of the files (I
normally want to show the contents of small files anyway), run head
on all the files whose contents you want to show, and then you can cut and
paste its full output directly into your email message.
Bonus: This behavior is even guaranteed by POSIX (something that I didn't
realize until I checked while writing this post).
2014-01-03: lbcd 3.5.1
This is a small bug-fix release of this load-balancing system status
daemon. The primary purpose of the release is to merge the various fixes
to the new systemd unit files that I made in the Debian package after a
broader code review. This release also fixes a long-lived oversight and
sets lbcd's listening sockets to close-on-exec so that they're not
inherited by external weight commands (already handled under systemd by
socket activation) and improves the lbcd man page.
You can get the latest version from the lbcd
distribution page.
2014-01-04: More on displaying files with head
That was fun! Since my previous entry on using head to
display the contents of several files in a form that's easy to cut and
paste, multiple people have sent elaborations or related tricks. It
seemed like it would be a good idea to post a roundup, since I learned a
bunch.
Multiple people (I think Josh Triplett was the first) pointed out that one
can avoid having to pick a sufficiently large value of -n by
instead using:
head -n -0 *.install
With GNU head at least, a negative number says to print out all lines of
the file except that many at the end, so -0 displays the whole
file, regardless of size. Unfortunately, while this works anywhere that I
am likely to run it, it's not specified by POSIX, while the original is.
Another variation, pointed out by Buck Huppmann, is:
tail -n +0 *.install
The +0 syntax is required by POSIX, unlike the -0 syntax for
head... but unfortunately POSIX doesn't require that tail
supports multiple files and the headers, although it does for head.
Buck also pointed out that including the -v flag will always force
the header even if there's only one file, which is useful. (Although be
warned that -v isn't a POSIX-recognized flag.)
Markus Raab also pointed out the xsel utility, which I'd heard of
but hadn't ever used. If the goal is to cut and paste the output, using:
head -v -n -0 *.install | xsel -i
avoids the cut part by dumping the result directly into the X selection.
Buck pointed out xclip, which does the same thing. Both can be
used with the -o flag inside an editor to paste as well if you
don't want to reach for a mouse. In vi :r !xclip -o, and in Emacs,
C-u M-! xclip -o.
Finally, Guillem Jover metioned that:
grep . *.install
does sort of the same thing with a different output format that may be
more useful depending on what you're doing. (I find it less
human-readable but more machine-parsable.)
2014-01-05: rra-c-util 5.1
The primary addition in this release is the Autoconf macros and header
wrapper that I developed for lbcd to add
systemd support. These are inspired by the code in systemd's
daemon(7) man page but adjusted for my normal software conventions.
This is just preliminary and doesn't yet stub out all of the functions,
only the ones I've needed so far.
Also in this release, I fixed a bug with process_start_fakeroot, and hence
with remctld_start_fakeroot, introduced in the last release when I rewrote
the TAP process management add-on.
You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2014-01-06: remctl 3.7
remctl is the middleware layer that we use everywhere at Stanford. It's a
simple GSS-API-authenticated network service that supports running
commands with ACLs. There are client bindings available for a wide
variety of programming languages.
This release fixes a couple of irritating bugs: the client library leaked
memory when remctl_set_ccache was used (which was affecting mod_webkdc
from WebAuth), and Net::Remctl::Backend
didn't validate argument counts correctly when one of the arguments came
from standard input (which affected krb5-sync). I also worked around a bug in RHEL 5's Module::Build, and
added sanity checking to Net::Remctl and related classes to ensure that
the object argument wasn't undef.
Also new in this release are support in the remctld server for systemd
startup notification and socket activation, and (via the -Z) flag)
support for upstart's expect stop synchronization method.
This is mostly a "clearing the decks" release in advance of more
significant work. The next release will replace the server event loop
with libevent, in preparation for further improvements in how the server
can handle persistent worker children.
You can get the latest release from the remctl distribution page.
2014-01-15: kadmin-remctl 3.6
Another minor tweak to the remctl backend for Kerberos administrative
functions that we use at Stanford. This still isn't the long-awaited
rewrite that might make this more generally useful outside of Stanford's
specific requirements.
This release adds support for setting a password expiration on
newly-created accounts via a configuration setting in the local
configuration file. The password expiration period can be configured
per-instance. (Eventually, this should be handled via policy support
instead, but this was easier for my immediate purposes.)
This release also maps password quality error messages on create or
reset_passwd to generic messages in the Heimdal backend. This is only of
interest to sites such as ours that have patched Heimdal to do password
quality checks for administrative actions as well as user-initiated
password changes. The kadmin protocol unfortunately doesn't have a way to
pass back the verbose password quality error.
You can get the latest version from the
kadmin-remctl distribution page.
2014-01-28: C TAP Harness 3.0
This is my test harness and C and shell library for writing test suites
using the Test Anything Protocol (also used by Perl). The changes in this
release aren't that major, but I changed one API in a
non-backward-compatible way, so I bumped the major revision.
That change is to test_cleanup_register, whose callback functions now take
two arguments instead of one. The first, as before, indicates whether the
test case succeeded or failed. The second is now true if the callback is
running in the primary process (the one in which plan or plan_lazy was
called), and false otherwise. Callback functions are now called for all
processes, not just the primary one. This allows cleanup of per-process
resources, like memory, in the child processes, which allows for easier
valgrind analysis.
Also in this release, the test harness was modified to reopen standard
input to /dev/null when running a set of tests from a list, rather than
inheriting standard input from the test driver. The test harness also now
cleans up all extraneous copies of open file descriptors used during the
setup of standard input, output, and error to avoid leaking harmless but
noticeable file descriptors to tests.
You can get the latest release from the
C TAP Harness distribution page.
2014-01-28: rra-c-util 5.2
Another release of my general collection of utility libraries, Autoconf
probes, general test cases, and similar things.
The major change in this release is the addition of Autoconf probes and
portability wrappers for libevent. Now included are Autoconf macros to
probe for libevent (mandatory or optional) either via pkg-config or not,
following the pattern of other probes in rra-c-util. Also included is a
portability wrapper, probes, and some additional glue code that allows
programs to be written against the libevent 2.x API and work (mostly) with
the libevent 1.4 API, albeit with some missing functionality.
This release fixes the systemd unit directory probe to not produce shell
errors if pkg-config isn't available on the local system. It also fixes a
syntax error when building portable/krb5.h with a C++ compiler.
There are multiple improvements to the Kerberos and process TAP add-ons:
memory is properly freed in all processes, making exhaustive memory
allocation analysis easier; process output is flushed after stopping the
process instead of before; the method used to stop processes is cleaner; a
memory leak when running via fakeroot has been fixed; and full use is made
of the new test_cleanup_register API in
C TAP Harness.
This release also adds a new message_handlers_reset function that restores
all message handlers to their defaults and frees any memory allocated to
set different handlers. This again is mostly useful when doing exhaustive
memory allocation testing.
You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2014-01-28: remctl 3.8
remctl is the middleware system that we use everywhere at Stanford. It's
a very simple way to run commands, constrained by ACLs, over a
GSS-API-authenticated with good encryption.
This release doesn't have a lot of obvious user-visible changes. Rather,
it's an internal refactoring and cleanup release that will make further
changes easier.
The major change is that the process event loop, which runs the command
and sends its output back over the wire to the client, now uses libevent.
This makes the code cleaner and fixes various problems previously caused
by portability, such as the lack of proper handling of SIGCHLD forcing a
short poll interval to see if the child had exited.
While working on that, I also found and cleaned up several other minor
issues: the maximum output per remctl token now matches the protocol
maximum, rather than the arbitrary and strange choice of 65,000 octets,
and I fixed a few minor memory leaks in the server and client that no one
probably would have noticed. The server also now writes its PID file
atomically.
You can get the latest release from the remctl distribution page.
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