2016-01-01: 2015 Book Reading in Review
2015 was another very busy year, but one of stabilization, rebuilding, and
recovery. I got through the ramp-up period with my new job, found a
better role inside the company for my personal talents and preferences,
and ended the year on a professional high note. I also moved, to a place
I like much better. It was a year for taking things as they come,
focusing on priorities, letting other things slip, and being realistic
about how much I can do.
All of that, plus quite a lot of company, a business trip, and a few other
unexpected distractions, meant less reading than I would have preferred.
However, I did catch up completely on review writing, which is another
happy sign of stabilization. Reviews came in spotty bursts, but they did
come.
The only explicit reading goal I'm making for 2016 is to read more than I
did in 2015. I'm still working out the best priorities and schedule for
me, and finding the best work/life balance points, so a predictable
reading schedule will have to wait a while longer.
The below statistics are confined to the books I reviewed in 2015, but
thanks to significant catch-up work, I've only read one book that I have
not yet reviewed (and I finished that one on December 31st). That book
will be counted in 2016.
Once again, the year saw two 10 out of 10 books, and once again, my
favorite book of the year was written by Ann Leckie. The conclusion of
the Imperial Radch trilogy, Ancillary Mercy, is as good or better than the start. The second
book of the trilogy, Ancillary Sword, was also among my 2015 reviews and got 9 out of
10. I highly recommend the entire trilogy, beginning with
Ancillary Justice
(my book of the year in 2014), to
anyone who hasn't read it.
The second 10 out of 10 was non-fiction: Randall Munroe's
What If? collection,
featuring some material from the web site feature that accompanies
xkcd and some original material. These are
longer essays exploring interesting bits of science, math, and guesswork
in the context of hypothetical questions that usually become surprisingly
destructive. As the review says, try a few samples from the web site and
see if this is your thing. I loved it.
Despite my continuing low reading totals, this was a year full of fiction
stand-outs. Becky Chambers's
The Long Way to a
Small, Angry Planet was the surprise of the year for me: a
heart-warming, delightful story of chosen family. Jo Walton's
My Real Children was
less of a surprise because I already knew she is an excellent writer, but
it was probably the best-written book I read all year. In turns sad,
thoughtful, and determined, it's slice-of-life fiction so good that it
overcame my normal dislike of that subject matter. Other fiction
highlights are parts of series: the first two Steerswomen books by
Rosemary Kirstein (The Steerswoman and
The Outskirter's
Secret), which dance between fantasy and scientific discovery, and
Seanan McGuire's One
Salt Sea, the best of all the October Daye books I've read.
In non-fiction, the other book that stands out is Jenny Lawson's
Let's Pretend This
Never Happened. This combination of memoir and stand-up comedy in book
form is one of the funniest things I've read, and it mixes that humor with
self-awareness and generous openness. It's a book about being a little
crazy and a lot anxious, finding ways to cope by laughing at yourself, and
inviting the rest of the world to join in.
Finally, Sydney Padua's The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage straddles the
line between fiction and non-fiction, but certainly deserves a place in
the year-end round-up. Full of great art, humor, steampunk, footnotes
galore, and numerous forms of geekery, it's a collection I've been waiting
for since Padua's very occasional comic got its moment of Internet fame.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
2016-01-02: podlators 4.04
Now that I've fixed the major test suite problems with podlators, failure
reports are now (mostly) useful. There's still the occasional failure to
create a directory for temporary files, which I think is just a problem
with the testing system, but Windows test failures revealed an actual test
suite bug.
This release also merges the changes made for merging podlators into blead
Perl, which were relatively minor, and changes the package metadata to
point to GitHub as the repository. That seems to be the growing
convention in the Perl community and makes it easier for people to submit
pull requests. I'm still maintaining my own public repository, but Git
makes it easy to replicate things in multiple places. (Bug tracking will
remain in the CPAN RT.)
You can get the latest release from the podlators distribution page.
2016-01-03: control-archive 1.7.0
First new release in a while. There haven't been a lot of changes to
Usenet hierarchies. The primary change is more aggressive dropping of
control messages for reserved hierarchies, mostly to suppress pointless
email to news administrators.
There were also the following hierarchy updates:
- wpg.* no longer has an active maintainer
- Update metadata and PGP key for dictator.*
These changes are already live on the ftp.isc.org control.ctl file. You
can get the latest version from the control-archive distribution page.
2016-01-16: podlators 4.05
Getting all the details right in a highly portable Perl core module that
tries to support very old versions of Perl is tricky! And I clearly
didn't do a good job of documenting previous decisions.
This release reintroduces pod2man.PL and pod2text.PL generator scripts to
get the right Perl invocation. I thought ExtUtils::MakeMaker and
Module::Build now took care of this, but apparently they only take care of
this on UNIX platforms, not on the non-UNIX platforms that require special
execution logic.
Thanks to a patch by Niko Tyni, this version of Pod::Man also falls back
to non-utf8 behavior if the utf8 option is specified but the Encode module
doesn't exist. This can help with some cross-build situations.
I also finally figured out the problem with occasional test failures on
random platforms: I was trying to clean up the temporary directory used by
tests after each test, but the CPAN test systems run all the tests in
parallel, so the tests were racing with each other. This release just
leaves the temporary directory around and deletes it in make clean.
You can get the latest version from the podlators distribution page.
2016-01-17: rra-c-util 5.10
Despite the name of the package, most of the changes in this release are
actually to the Perl test infrastructure.
I decided to finally standardize the versions of the modules embedded in
wallet, but discovered the need to add an exclusion list so that I don't
have to change the version of the schema module. (That currently drives
database schema upgrades.) While doing that, I rediscovered that I have
two versions of the module version check that shared a ton of code, so
they've now been refactored into a module (and then debugged again, since
I broke various things about the Automake integration).
This release also fixes use of UNIX-specific path delimiters in my
standard Perl docs/synopsis.t test, which fixed some failing tests in
podlators.
I would have been done with this somewhat sooner, but the Travis-CI tests
for rra-c-util started failing in the IPv6 server test, and it took a lot
of debugging to figure out why. It turned out that the environment allows
creation of IPv6 sockets but not connecting to them, and my test for
whether IPv6 was working didn't account for that. Now it does, so those
tests are properly skipped when IPv6 is half-configured.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2016-01-17: wallet 1.3
It's been over a year since the last release of the wallet, a system for
storing and retrieving secure credentials (currently relying on Kerberos
authentication). There were a ton of pending changes, mostly thanks to
work from Jon Robertson and Bill MacAllister.
I'm still really itching to rewrite all of this code, which is also part
of why I haven't uploaded packages to Debian proper yet. I no longer like
the way that I designed it, particularly in the Perl modules used by the
server side, and want to rewrite it rather substantially. Thankfully, I'm
starting to use it for work again, although only as a supplement to
another in-house key management system. I might just barely be able to
justify investing some effort in that as part of my job. We'll see. In
the meantime, it feels awkward and clunky to work with, which makes me
itch when I'm preparing new releases.
In any event, this release adds preliminary support for using Active
Directory as a backend for Kerberos keytabs, and adds both nested (ACLs
that are groups of other ACLs) and external (run an external command to
make authorization decisions) ACLs. It also adds a root instance variant
of ldap-attr, and a new object type: password, which will automatically
generate a password if one wasn't already stored.
There are a few new wallet commands: update, which will always change the
content of an object even if marked unchanging, and acl replace, which
will replace all instances of an ACL as an owner field with some other
ACL. There are also multiple new wallet reports, and various bug fixes to
how ACLs are displayed.
You can get the latest version from the wallet distribution page.
2016-01-23: git-pbuilder 1.40
(Yeah, yeah, I still haven't rewritten this in Python so that it can be
properly merged with the git-buildpackage distribution.)
Simon Fowler found that using git-pbuilder create with a user-supplied
--basepath option fails because git-pbuilder always creates a --basepath
option and passes it in. The solution, for which he provided a patch, is
to just use the supplied --basepath if one is already present.
This is fixed in the latest release, along with a minor coding style fix.
You can get the latest release from my scripts distribution page.
2016-01-31: podlators 4.06
More build system changes, this time to (hopefully) finish merging with
core so that we don't have to maintain separate build systems and
machinery between core and this package. This time, there aren't even any
real test suite changes. I was thinking about continuing converting the
test suite to the new snippet-based format, but ran out of steam today.
You can get the latest version from the podlators distribution page.
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