2018 Changes

This page lists all changes to my web site in 2018, except for new journal entries, along with a brief description. For more recent changes and the current RSS feed, see the current changes page. For older changes, see the changes for 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, and 2008.

December 2018

2018-12-31 — Review: The Dragon's Path

Review of The Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham.

2018-12-30 — Review: All Systems Red

Review of All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

2018-12-29 — Review: Clockwork Boys

Review of Clockwork Boys by T. Kingfisher.

2018-12-27 — Review: The Consuming Fire

Review of The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi.

2018-12-26 — Review: I Beat the Odds

Review of I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher & Don Yaeger.

2018-12-25 — C TAP Harness 4.4

Add new test_cleanup_register_with_data function, like test_cleanup_register except it takes an additional anonymous pointer and passes it to the callback. Fix error checking for malloc failure in bstrndup.

2018-12-25 — Review: A Red-Rose Chain

Review of A Red-Rose Chain by Seanan McGuire.

2018-12-24 — Review: The Million

Review of The Million by Karl Schroeder.

2018-12-21 — Review: The Phoenix Empress

Review of The Phoenix Empress by K Arsenault Rivera.

2018-12-18 — Review: Revenant Gun

Review of Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee.

2018-12-17 — Review: Grand Central Arena

Review of Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor.

2018-12-08 — Broken link cleanup

Another periodic cleanup of broken links.

2018-12-03 — Review: The Winter Long

Review of The Winter Long by Seanan McGuire.

2018-12-02 — Review: Linked

Review of Linked by Albert-László Barabási.

November 2018

2018-11-28 — Review: The Blind Side

Review of The Blind Side by Michael Lewis.

2018-11-20 — Review: Skeen's Leap

Review of Skeen's Leap by Jo Clayton.

2018-11-19 — Review: Hidden Figures

Review of Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly.

2018-11-18 — Add winners of 2018 World Fantasy Award

Add the winners of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for best novel (a tie between The Changeling by Victor LaVelle and Jade City by Fonda Lee).

2018-11-03 — Broken link cleanup

Another periodic cleanup of broken links.

2018-11-03 — Add winner of 2018 British Fantasy Award

Add the winner of the 2018 British Fantasy Award for best fantasy novel (the Robert Holdstock Award): The Ninth Rain, by Jen Williams.

October 2018

2018-10-31 — Review: In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman

Review of In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman by William J. Cook.

2018-10-27 — Review: Record of a Spaceborn Few

Review of Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers.

2018-10-24 — Review: Move Fast and Break Things

Review of Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin.

2018-10-22 — Review: The Stone Sky

Review of The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin.

September 2018

2018-09-23 — Broken link cleanup

Another periodic cleanup of broken links.

2018-09-17 — Review: The Collapsing Empire

Review of The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi.

2018-09-02 — Review: So Good They Can't Ignore You

Review of So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport.

August 2018

2018-08-31 — DocKnot 1.06

Put URL footnotes immediately following the paragraph containing the link, rather than the bottom of the text segment. Do not wrap paragraphs that seem to be a bunch of short lines. Support broken quotes in the thread template. Update make warnings description to mention Clang. Adjust the README.md wording for release mailing list information pages. Add support for additional developer documentation and contributed program documentation links in thread output.

2018-08-27 — Review: So Lucky

Review of So Lucky by Nicola Griffith.

2018-08-24 — Review: Overwhelmed

Review of Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte.

2018-08-24 — Add Hugo award winner for best novel

Add the 2018 winner of the Hugo award for best novel (The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin).

2018-08-19 — Review: Riders of the Storm

Review of Riders of the Storm by Julie E. Czerneda.

2018-08-18 — Broken link cleanup

Another periodic cleanup of broken links.

2018-08-01 — Add 2018 Mythopoeic Award for best adult novel

Add the 2018 winner of the Mythopoeic Award for best adult novel (Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley).

July 2018

2018-07-25 — Add 2018 World Fantasy nominees

Add the nominees for the 2018 World Fantasy award for best novel.

2018-07-20 — Review: The Power of Habit

Review of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

2018-07-18 — Add Clarke winner

Add the winner of the 2018 Clarke Award for best novel (Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock).

2018-07-15 — Review: Effective Python

Review of Effective Python by Brett Slatkin.

2018-07-15 — Broken link cleanup

Another periodic cleanup of broken links. This update converts a lot of my blog roll links to https. (I manually checked all of them to see which now support https, even if they weren't issuing permanent redirects. A depressing number of sites only use temporary redirects, so broken link checkers don't catch them.)

2018-07-07 — Add John W. Campbell winner

Added the 2018 winner of the John W. Campbell award for best novel (The Genius Plague by David Walton).

June 2018

2018-06-23 — Review: The Trouble with Physics

Review of The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin.

2018-06-23 — Add Locus Award winners

Added the 2018 Locus Award winners for best SF novel (The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi) and best fantasy novel (The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin).

2018-06-04 — Review: The Obelisk Gate

Review of The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin.

2018-06-03 — rra-c-util 7.2

Add new Python Autoconf macros RRA_PROG_PYTHON, RRA_PYTHON_MODULE, and RRA_LIB_PYTHON. The RRA_PROG_PERL macro now makes PERL a substitution variable and checks that the Perl library and headers are present. RRA_LIB_BDB, RRA_LIB_OPENSSL, RRA_LIB_SASL, and RRA_LIB_ZLIB now check the header files for the library as well as the library itself. Rename docs/urls to style/obsolete-strings and add a test for RRA_MAINTAINER_TESTS. Fix updating Perl module versions using the new-style package syntax. Skip more Automake files in the all_files function of Test::RRA::Automake. Add more exclusions to the docs/spdx-license tests.

2018-06-03 — wallet 1.4

Significant improvements to the experimental Active Directory support. Pass in the realm when loading configuration from krb5.conf. Remove stray references to strlcpy and strlcat. Detect and substitute in the path of Perl during configure. Update the build and test framework.

May 2018

2018-05-29 — Review: Bull by the Horns

Review of Bull by the Horns by Sheila Bair.

2018-05-20 — Add 2018 Nebula winner for best novel

Add the winner of the 2017 Nebula Award for best novel (given in 2018, so recorded here as 2018): The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin.

2018-05-14 — Review: Thanks for the Feedback

Review of Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen.

2018-05-13 — Review: Twitter and Tear Gas

Review of Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci.

2018-05-12 — Review: Deep Work

Review of Deep Work by Cal Newport.

2018-05-11 — Review: Always Human

Review of Always Human by walkingnorth.

2018-05-07 — Broken link cleanup

Another periodic cleanup of broken links. This one had a substantial number of updates to author blogs (many moves from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth or their own sites).

2018-05-07 — podlators 4.11

Fix documentation of the default value of the sentence option in Pod::Text. Correctly honor the width option in Pod::Text::Termcap. Fix wrapping of long =item text and clearing of attributes at the end of lines in Pod::Text::Color and Pod::Text::Termcap. Correctly get the terminal width when COLUMNS isn't set in Pod::Text::Termcap. Fix the "none" value of the errors option in Pod::Man and Pod::Text.

2018-05-06 — rra-c-util 7.1

Add new test for valgrind errors for use with valgrind testing. Enable new valgrind testing for this package. Fix misplaced va_end in putil_log_failure. Avoid testing the client IP address in network_bind_all tests. Add cppcheck maintainer tests and fix issues found. Clean up Autoconf output from krb5-config tests. Define UINT32_MAX on systems that don't have it. Switch public domain licenses to a standard FSF all-permissive license. Skip more Autoconf and Automake files in the all_files function of Test::RRA::Automake. Update perlcriticrc for Perl 5.24 syntax.

2018-05-06 — C TAP Harness 4.3

Add support for valgrind and libtool test options to selectively invoke valgrind on tests and run tests properly with valgrind even if they are libtool shell wrappers. Report test failure data as left and right instead of seen and expected. Fix string comparisons in is_string involving NULL pointers and the literal "(null)" string. Update Perl test scripts to the versions from rra-c-util.

2018-05-05 — DocKnot 1.05

Add support for Travis-CI and Shields.io CPAN badges in README.md. Move description of Lancaster Consensus environment variables to the testing section. Add support for new packaging/extra metadata file. Correctly handle multi-paragraph debian/summary metadata. Fix formatting bug in README with additional bootstrap documentation. Require Perl 5.24 or later.

2018-05-05 — remctl 3.15

Fix an output truncation bug when a command consuming input from standard input exits before consuming all input. Add more protocol and command-line option validation. Add better maintainer static analysis, valgrind, and compiler warning checks.

2018-05-04 — 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award nominees

Add nominees for the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke award.

April 2018

2018-04-30 — Review: Vallista

Review of Vallista by Steven Brust.

2018-04-29 — Review: Full of Briars

Review of Full of Briars by Seanan McGuire.

2018-04-14 — INN 2.6.2

Add new syntaxchecks parameter to inn.conf that can disable message ID syntax checks, better header sanitization support in mailpost, TLS 1.3 support, and support for using GnuPG v1. Always use the OVDB helper server, fix a header checking bug in inews, fix some control command reporting in the daily status report, and fix buffindexed on systems with a native page size larger than 16KB.

2018-04-01 — remctl 3.14

Fixs a security issue with server commands configured with the sudo configuration option. A client with access to run a command with a sudo configuration option may be able to corrupt the memory of remctld and run arbitrary commands. remctl-shell is not affected.

March 2018

2018-03-31 — Review: Russell's Attic Interstitials

Review of Russell's Attic Interstitials by S.L. Huang.

2018-03-31 — Add Philip K. Dick winner and Hugo nominees

Add the nominees for the 2018 Hugo for best novel, and the winner of the 2018 Philip K. Dick award (Bannerless, by Carrie Vaughn).

2018-03-24 — DocKnot 1.04

Fix a test suite bug on Windows.

2018-03-18 — control-archive 1.8.0

Signing IDs with whitespace are now supported. Summaries when there is no log file for the summary period don't produce an error. Use gpg1 explicitly with flags to allow weak digest algorithms. Multiple fixes to README.html to update email addresses, URLs, package versions, and various other details. Clean up the grisbi.* key. Drop everything related to gov.*.

2018-03-17 — DocKnot 1.03

Add support for support/extra metadata. Add SPDX explanation to the default README and README.md templates. Add SPDX license identifiers to all substantial files.

2018-03-17 — Add 2018 Tiptree winner

Add the 2018 winner of the Tiptree award (Who Runs the World? by Virginia Bergin).

February 2018

2018-02-28 — Review: Coding Freedom

Review of Coding Freedom by E. Gabriella Coleman.

2018-02-24 — Add 2018 Nebula Award nominees for best novel

Add the 2018 nominees for the Nebula Award for best novel.

2018-02-19 — Regenerate control-archive page using DocKnot

control-archive now has DocKnot metadata, so regenerate its web page from that data. Fixes various non-https URLs and other issues and makes the page more consistent with other software pages.

2018-02-17 — Add RFC 8315, Cancel-Locks in Netnews articles

Add newly published RFC 8315, Cancel-Locks in Netnews articles, along with the additional I-Ds that led up to its publication. Remove it from the list of I-Ds that are being actively worked on.

2018-02-11 — Add 2017 Prix Aurora winner

Add the winner of the 2017 Prix Aurora winner for best novel (Quantum Night, by Robert J. Sawyer).

2018-02-11 — Add 2017 Sunburst award winner

Add the winner of the 2017 Sunburst award in adult fiction (Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey).

2018-02-11 — NPR SF/F Top 100 book list

Add the 2011 NPR list of the best SF/F books (which actually contains a lot of series) along with links to reviews and ratings where available.

2018-02-11 — pgpcontrol 2.6

Add support for using gpg to verify signatures to allow for insecure digest algorithms.

2018-02-11 — Add finalists for the John W. Campbell award

Add a list of all the finalists (or, for earlier years, the second and third place winners) for the John W. Campbell Memorial award for best science fiction novel, with ratings and links to reviews where available.

2018-02-07 — Add uscan information to Git for Debian packaging documentation

Mention using the --uscan flag to gbp import-orig rather than downloading the upstream tarball separately, and writing a debian/watch file. Add more details on setting the upstream-vcs-tag pattern. Move the special cases section into the packaging workflow. Document Files-Excluded as a way of repacking upstream source.

2018-02-04 — Update Debian packaging with Git notes

Remove the introduction to basic Git commands, standardize on DEP-14 layout, document the gbp pq workflow instead of feature branches, use dgit for the final build and upload, and modernize the git-buildpackage commands.

2018-02-04 — Document using sbuild with btrfs

Document my current approach for setting up sbuild with btrfs for building Debian packages.

2018-02-02 — Remove changes from December 2017

Remove the changes from December 2017 from the Recent changes page.

January 2018

2018-01-30 — Review: My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

Review of My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman.

2018-01-29 — Review: Reap the Wild Wind

Review of Reap the Wild Wind by Julie E. Czerneda.

2018-01-28 — Review: Roads and Bridges

Review of Roads and Bridges by Nadia Eghbal.

2018-01-22 — Add sample innshellvars.pl.local

Add a sample innshellvars.pl.local alongside the INN::Config documentation, since this is loaded by INN::Config.

2018-01-20 — Reorganize magazine review index

Restructure the magazine review index to be more compact and less repetitive.

2018-01-15 — Add links to additional sample INN configuration files

Expand the INN documentation links for CURRENT and 2.6 to include sample files for everything that has some documentation (omitting some of the more niche Perl and Python filtering files).

2018-01-14 — Drop dead link to www.newsreaders.com

newsreaders.com has been taken over by a different business and no longer has NNTP information. Remove the dead link. Thanks, Thomas Hochstein.

2018-01-07 — Fix bad Unicode conversions on old journal entries

Two old book reviews converted from Moveable Type had broken HTML entities. Convert to proper Unicode characters. Thanks, Thomas Hochstein.

2018-01-07 — Mark Moveable Type with XEmacs instructions obsolete

I no longer use Moveable Type, so be clear that I'm no longer using these instructions and aren't maintaining them.

2018-01-06 — Broken link cleanup

Another periodic cleanup of broken links.

2018-01-01 — 2017 reading in review

Add an overview of my 2017 reading, main book recommendations, and reading statistics.

2018-01-01 — Rotated 2017 changes

Move all web site changes from 2017 to a separate page and remove all entries older than December of 2017 from the current changes page.

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2020-01-02