2006-01-01: haven down again
Well, haven's down again. I'm guessing CPU fan at this point, since it was
apparently powered off which makes me think thermal shutdown. I'll have to
deal with it when I get back. Hopefully nothing will be hurt by queuing
for a few days.
Now I have to figure out how to replace a CPU fan, something that I haven't
had a great deal of luck with in the past.
2006-01-01: kstart 2.9
That ended up being a rather fun way to spend the day, although Kerberos
portability is always even harder than I expect it to be. But I now have a
good Autoconf macro that can uses krb5-config where appropriate, can handle
both static builds and reduced dependencies for builds for Linux
distributions, supports MIT Kerberos and Heimdal, supports KTH Kerberos for
krb4, and supports libraries for gssapi, krb5, or krb4. I can now use that
macro for all the Kerberos packages that I maintain, which should save some
time.
I really need to write up a web page about how to port Kerberos
applications between MIT and Heimdal and across the various versions of
both. Other people would probably find this useful.
Anyway, all that's now in the latest kstart, and while I was in there and
fixing a few other portability issues, I also ported the setpag support to
the kafs library so Heimdal folks can be even happier. Plus, now k5start
always uses krb5_err and krb5_warn for Heimdal (and has substitutes when
using MIT), which means the error messages will be better and it doesn't
call any internal functions.
You will be able to get the latest version from the
kstart distribution
page once haven is back up. In the meantime, the source tarball can be
downloaded from my
software archive.
2006-01-01: remctl 1.12
In testing, Quanah tracked down a problem with initializing memory when
parsing the configuration file in remctld. I've also updated the Kerberos
library probe macros to the version I just finished for kstart, which among
other things should fix --enable-static builds when a krb5-config is
available.
You will be able to get the latest version from
remctl distribution
page when haven is back up. In the meantime, you can download the source
tarball from my
software archive.
2006-01-01: svnlog 1.10
While doing other things, I noticed that svnlog wasn't reporting property
changes on directories correctly in the summary. This release fixes that;
that's the only change.
You will be able to get the latest version from the
svnlog distribution
page once haven is back up. In the meantime, you can download it from
my software archive.
I've also updated the deb packages in my personal repository for both
unstable and stable.
2006-01-02: Sneaky productivity
Well, I was going to write a summary of the last year's reading and write
another review this weekend, but while trying to keep myself busy and stop
worrying about my computer and what I'll have to do to fix it when I get
back home, I ended up pushing myself into another weekend of productivity.
I think I'm going to see about taking it slow after I get back,
particularly if the productivity streak fades.
Today, I decided to start working on what's required for the next WebAuth
release. The main thing I want to do that's still undone is to update the
WebAuth protocol documentation, and I didn't really want to maintain it in
the HTML that Roland originally wrote it in. I've also been wanting to
learn RFC 2629 XML for writing protocol specifications. So that's what I
did today.
2000 lines of XML later, the protocol document has had a thorough editing
job, various bits have been clarified and improved, and I've updated it in
a few places where things have changed. I'm rather happy with the results;
the HTML is a little strange in places, but overall it looks better, and
now it's easier to edit and I can produce a text form as well. Plus,
should we ever want to submit an I-D, this will make it much easier
(although the specification would still require a lot of work to get it in
shape for that).
The one thing that absolutely drives me nuts about xml2rfc is that it
doesn't do hanging indent paragraphs (HTML description lists) properly. It
always puts the first line of the paragraph on the same line as the tag,
with just some whitespace between it and the tag. This looks horrible. I
finally just added <vspace> tags at the beginning of every single
element in such lists to make it look halfway decent in text.
Other than that, the format is fairly intuitive and works quite well while
still being minimal. I approve.
Tomorrow, I travel. Then I fix my computer, which hopefully will be
painless. Then I'll be much more relaxed, and I can finish a few more
WebAuth changes and release 3.4.0. Then S/Ident and kftgt releases, and
I'll have the decks clear to start the work on the new remctl protocol.
2006-01-03: haven back up
haven (and therefore www.eyrie.org) should now be back up. I'm pretty sure
that I was right about diagnosing thermal shutdown from a failing CPU fan,
as the fan was making grinding noises and only spinning at 3500rpm. It's
now been replaced with a much larger and much nicer fan that's spinning
happily away at 4560rpm and which has the CPU 4C cooler when idling.
It'll be a couple of days before I'm confident that this was the problem
and the problem was fixed, since it ran for a while before shutting down
before, but I'm hopeful.
The train trip back home was one of the best trips I've had -- good book,
good music, no problems, fast journey, and I even caught the shuttle just
right at the end of it. And since I spent most of the vacation working, I
don't even have much catching up to do.
I'm still going to write something about the last year in reading, but
maybe not tonight. It's been a bit of a long day.
2006-01-03: Post-vacation haul
After reading various reviews and hearing lots of recommendations, as well
as an excellent article in Locus, I've been thinking about catching
up on some of the less-known classics of the SF field, writers who don't
get as many reprints but who are fondly thought of. NESFA has been doing a
good job of reprinting several of those authors, so this is the first of
what will probably be several orders from their catalog.
Charles L. Harness -- An Ornament to His Profession
(sff)
Robert Sheckley -- Dimensions of Sheckley (sff)
Cordwainer Smith -- The Rediscovery of Man (sff)
These are all collections, the Sheckley of short novels and the others of
short stories. They're all substantial hardcover volumes. Now I just have
to find time to read them.
Currently reading: Faster by James Gleick and Incubus Dreams
by Laurell K. Hamilton. I've finished Accelerando by Charles Stross
and need to write a review. (Short version: good stuff, but Lady of
Mazes was better.)
2006-01-04: WebAuth and SPNEGO
I think this is done. It required some additional work to get the weblogin
script to run as an error handler and still have all the right pieces to
work properly, but now I have a weblogin script that tries to authenticate
the user with SPNEGO first and falls back on username and password if that
fails.
Now I just have to decide how much more work I want to do before I release
the new version of WebAuth. I at least want to fix the Kerberos library
probes to use my current work on other packages, and I need to write up new
documentation on how to configure WebAuth to work with SPNEGO.
What I'm not sure about is whether I'm going to try to improve the audit
logging from mod_webkdc, and try to improve the documentation even more.
There's always more to do, and at some point I have to stop and release it
and go to work on other things.
Alas, no book stuff tonight either. Too busy catching up with work,
sending out long mail, getting started on an exercise regimen again, and
doing the grocery shopping.
2006-01-05: remctl and WebAuth today
Well, no book joy for you all today either, alas. Tonight was ping pong
instead of doing other things. But between meetings today I did get the
new remctl protocol specification mostly written (just in an e-mail for
now; I still need to write the actual XML specification), and I started
redoing the configure system for WebAuth to take advantage of the new
Kerberos library probes I've worked out.
The tricky part about WebAuth is that it has a ton of library dependencies
and the configure system is set up to only link the required components
with the right libraries. That means I can't just dump everything into
CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS, and LIBS, which means I couldn't use the new Autoconf
macros verbatim. I currently have something based on them but stripped
down, but now I'm thinking whether I want to make the new Autoconf macros
even smarter. I could, and give them an option to set a different set of
variables than the default ones, but I'm not sure it's worth the additional
complexity. What I have now for WebAuth should work.
Finishing this, finishing --enable-reduced-depends for Debian, testing it,
updating the XML protocol documentation one more time, writing
documentation on how to configure SPNEGO, and rolling the user
authentication documentation into the mod_webauth and mod_webauthldap
manuals is my minimum set of things I want to do for the next release. I'm
considering also trying to kill the remaining compiler warnings, but we'll
see.
Tomorrow, I should do a bit of AFS work. This weekend, I want to do a bit
of Debian work.
Now, I'm going off to read some more.
2006-01-06: 2005 in books
Finally, here's the summary of reading for 2005.
| Books read: |
101 |
| Total pages: |
36,369 |
| Average rating: |
6.75 |
| Pages per day: |
99.7 |
| Days per book: |
3.61 |
I read seven more books this year than last year, and about 2,000 more
pages. Other than that, 2005's reading looked very much like 2004 in
quantity and pace. I'm almost at 100 pages a day. I think I'm going to
keep aiming for 100 books a year; this seems to be a comfortable pace.
(Although there are many more graphic novels that I want to read, and if I
end up reading quite a few of those, that will increase the book count.)
The biggest accomplishment for the year was finishing reading all of the
Hugo award winners for best novel. I think that may be why my average book
rating is slightly down from last year; I pushed through reading some books
that I wasn't as fond of. I'm not sure if I'm going to finish off another
award series this year, but I might; the Nebulas or the Tiptrees are
possibilities.
The best book I read last year was Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder,
which is one of the best hard SF novels I've ever read. A close second is
Vellum by Hal Duncan, an amazing debut novel and one that pulls off
some techniques that should have made me hate the book and instead made me
love it. Other notable and recommended books read last year are
Thomas the Rhymer (Ellen Kushner), The Last Light of the Sun
(Guy Gavriel Kay), Only Forward (Michael Marshall Smith), The
Player of Games (Iain M. Banks), and Anansi Boys (Neil Gaiman).
The mainstream novel find of the year was The Dogs of Babel by
Carolyn Parkhurst, although I didn't read much mainstream. The non-fiction
find was David Langford, whose collections of essays and reviews are very
much worth reading.
Nearly all my reading this year, 83 books, was SF. Of those, 11 were
recently published notable books and another 51 were genre classics of one
variety or other (mostly award winners of some kind). I read 7 non-SF
novels or short-story collections, 3 graphic novels, and 8 non-fiction
books (3 of which were book review collections or writing about SF). As
much as I like making my way through the award winners, I'd like to change
that balance a little, reading more non-fiction and more non-SF (and
probably more graphic novels as well).
2006-01-07: Slow Saturday
So, I mostly did nothing today. Not that this is a problem, since it's the
weekend, but still, it ended up being a very quiet day. The only thing
that's solidly in the accomplishment department is that I went and got my
mail and then sorted through several large stacks of low-priority mail from
which bills and such had previously been removed. Lots went into the
recycling.
I have a ton of fairly nice magazines that I'm never going to read, mostly
environmentalist magazines of one variety or another, that I need to do
something with. I could just throw them away, but I hate to do that if
someone else might enjoy them. I think I'm going to try to find somewhere
on campus to drop them off and let other people pick them up if they want
them, near a recycling can so that people can throw them away if no one
wants them.
I did get one more book in the mail:
Nalo Hopkinson -- The Salt Roads (sff)
Hopkinson was selling copies of her books to fund a new computer, and I
wanted this one to read at some point anyway, so I jumped at the
opportunity.
Thankfully, my sore neck from this morning is now much better. I must have
slept on it wrong. I need to get back to doing back and neck exercises.
2006-01-08: Accelerando
Review: Accelerando, by Charles Stross
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: July 2005
ISBN: 0-441-01284-1
Pages: 390
If you've been reading current science fiction, and particularly if you've
been reading the discussion around current science fiction, you've probably
heard of the concept of the Singularity. If you haven't, briefly, it's the
idea that technological development is an exponential curve, which means
that technological change will keep getting faster and faster until it
vertically spikes. This is the Singularity, since beyond this point
whatever exists afterwards will probably be incomprehensible to those of us
who live on this side of the spike.
The Singularity is an interesting idea in future extrapolation. It's a
difficult idea, however, for fiction. The author is postulating
inhabitants of their fictional world that the reader is, by definition,
incapable of understanding. Even more challenging, it's a science fiction
setting that's indescribable. Normally, science fiction thrives on
description, extrapolation, and explanation, but since the Singularity is
incomprehensible, there is no hope of a pay-off through final explanation
of the world after it. Fantasy deals with this sort of situation
routinely, but usually relies on mythic resonance and poetic justice to
help the reader understand creatures and situations that may not have a
literal explanation. It's hard to apply those techniques to science
fiction and not have it end up feeling like Star Wars.
In this fixup novel of nine short stories previously published in
Asimov's, Charles Stross tackles writing about the Singularity
head-on, runs into many of these problems, and only partly overcomes them.
He does steadfastly avoid going mythical with the story and keeps
Accelerando in the realm of relatively hard science fiction the
whole way, which wins points for effort. On the other hand, he dodges
writing about the Singularity directly, taking the same route Vinge did in
Marooned in Real Time and writing about the people who were left out
of the Singularity for one reason or another. The result is a lot of fun
in places, a great speculative romp, but also unsatisfying.
This is not the sort of fixup that feels like it naturally could have been
a novel. It's very obvious that each chapter of this book was originally a
separate short story; I've not read the original stories, and I'm sure
they've been integrated somewhat, but Accelerando is more a
collection of tightly linked short stories than a single story. This has
some advantages: the novel as a whole retains the much faster pace of short
story fiction. The ideas and speculation come fast and fierce, and Stross
knows computers, information theory, and science well enough to write some
engaging speculation. He also doesn't think small: computer-assisted
thought, ubiquitous AIs, uploading of human and non-human personalities,
post-Singularity economics, runaway intelligent corporations, interstellar
travel in a tiny probe, multiple copies of the same person, and alien
civilizations fill this book at short story density. It's a wild ride, but
characterization suffers. Stross does three generations in less than 400
pages, and while some of the characters are interesting and likeable, none
of them get more than short story characterization; the supporting
characters don't even get that.
The weakest part of this book is definitely the first three chapters.
Manfred, a gift-economy inventor and contributor to the free patent
foundation, has a variety of mostly meaningless adventures that serve
primarily to illustrate a slowly increasing rate of technological change
and introduce the reader to computer-assisted cognition. Manfred isn't a
bad character, but his life is driven by disfunctional and not particularly
interesting romantic relationships and some of the plot devices are a
little too blatant. (For example, given the personal identification
technology that's clearly available, how could his cognitive assistance
device be stolen and used by someone else that easily? It sets up a story
that makes interesting points about identity, but the setup is hard to
swallow.)
Thankfully, once the focus shifts to Manfred's daughter Amber,
Accelerando becomes far more interesting. I enjoyed the middle
section of the book the most by far, even if the resolutions still betray
their short fiction origins with their abruptness. She's the most
interesting and most fully-fleshed character of the book, and I was
engrossed by her attempts to get free of her mother and her mission to a
nearby router of a galactic network. Her chapters also have the best
interactions with the AI Aineko (enigmatic post-Singularity AIs make
excellent cats).
Unfortunately, the end of the book falls apart a little. The political
struggles surrounding Amber's return aren't as engrossing, and I found the
last chapter distinctly unsatisfying and burdened by an ending that made no
emotional sense to me. Stross also sets up multiple mysteries that are
directly related to the Singularity -- what the post-Singularity
intelligences around the Sun are doing, where the alien router network came
from, what's going on in the distant galaxy with its strange heat output --
all of which are left unresolved at the end of the book. This may just
mean that sequels are coming, but one of the serious problems with the
whole Singularity theory is that it's likely the answers to those questions
should be incomprehensible to the reader. Unsatisfiable curiosity isn't a
great ending note for this sort of book.
Many reviewers have raved about Accelerando, and it does do some
things well. Amber is an excellent character, Stross's future speculation
is genuinely interesting and hangs together well, and his style and the
constant references to information theory and ubiquitous computing create
the sense of alienation, of looking at the world in new and fresh ways,
that characterizes radical technological change. Even with the roughness
from being a fixup, it's a good bit of hard sf. Still, I think Stross's
earlier
Iron
Sunrise was a better novel, despite being less ambitious.
Accelerando also falls well short of the standard set by Karl
Schroeder's exceptional
Lady
of Mazes, which contains less technological speculation but more
philosophy, stronger characters, and a much more coherent story.
Accelerando is still worth reading, and I expect it will garner a
Hugo nomination, but both fixups and Singularity fiction are hard. Trying
hard things is a hallmark of good writers, but even good writers aren't
always successful.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2006-01-09: A catch-up day
I decided to take a break from all regular work today and instead devote
the day to trying to dig out from under an e-mail backlog. I wasn't quite
as successful as I was hoping, since I only got through work mail and not
personal mail (much of which is actually work-related), but I did at least
get that far. I also finished setting up the new system builds for all of
networking's DNS and DNS-related servers, so that migration should be about
ready to kick off.
I'm taking the next two Fridays off work to try to catch up on various
non-work stuff, including reading, Debian work, INN work, and personal mail
(what I don't manage to catch up on this week). Since we also get MLK day
off, that will mean a nice four-day weekend this coming weekend.
One more book arrived in the mail today:
Samuel R. Delaney -- The Motion of Light in Water (non-fiction)
This is Delaney's autobiography, published by University of Minnesota
Press. I bought it on impulse after seeing it mentioned on-line. So far,
I've not been a huge fan of Delaney's fiction (although I've not read his
best work), but I am a huge fan of his non-fiction writing. He had a
recent article in NYRSF that was absolutely fascinating.
Also arriving in the mail today were my copy of Serenity (even if I
wish for the season that wasn't, I still liked the movie well enough to own
it) and the fifth season of West Wing. Yes, I still enjoyed it
after Sorkin, even if it wasn't quite as good. Sorry to break ideological
purity.
I have a book and a magazine finished and waiting for me to find the time
to write reviews.
Currently reading: Faster by James Gleick, The Last Unicorn
by Peter S. Beagle (fluff, but entertaining -- I'll probably finish it
tonight).
2006-01-10: Pam Noles on SF diversity
Anyone who cares at all about diversity in the SF genre, who was upset
about the Earthsea casting, or who didn't even understand what the issue
about the Earthsea casting was really should read this essay by Pam Noles.
(ETA in 2017: Sadly apparently no longer on-line.) Fantastic stuff, and
the sort of thing that I was utterly oblivious to when I was growing up.
As Ursula Le Guin herself said, "I think it is possible that a good many
readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don't
notice, maybe don't care. Whites of course have the privilege of not
caring, of being 'colorblind.' Nobody else does."
One of the most important things I've learned from reading alt.polyamory
over the years is the concept of privilege, what it means to be privileged,
and how the people who are often the most oblivious to questions of
privileged are the people who have privilege since they can afford to
ignore it. This essay ties into those same lessons. It is an
extremely important concept, one that I think every person, and
certainly every privileged person, needs to understand and internalize.
Thanks to Emerald City for
the find and the link.
2006-01-11: Still behind
I'm still behind, but I'm getting closer to caught up. Work personal mail
is staying empty, I'm dealing with some of the minor deliverables for my
current projects, and I widdled 12 messages out of my personal inbox.
Tomorrow I need to write a statement of work and then I think I'm still
going to do more catch-up.
I picked up two more Logitech Marble Mouse trackballs today, one for work
and one for my officemate. I've fallen in love with the one I have at
home.
A magazine and two books waiting to be reviewed, but I think they're going
to have to wait a little longer, as I put off writing a review until too
late today. I have Friday off, so I can catch up on writing reviews as
well as other things then.
2006-01-13: Stupid fans
So today I decided I'd finally try to deal with the fan issue in my desktop
system at home, since the fan has been making all sorts of noise for a
while now and it's the reason why I no longer leave the system on all the
time the way that I prefer. Given that the sound varies a lot and seems to
be linked to the system powering up the fan when it gets too hot, I figured
it was probably the main fan.
With some help from a friend, I worked out what I probably needed and
headed to Fry's. Which is almost all casemod fans, so I had a hard time
finding quite what I wanted, but then I got something that seemed like it
would probably work. (And also went grocery shopping, to try to make it
more of a productive day.)
Well, I came home, took out the old fan, put in the new one, and the little
sleave that holds the fan and slides it down over the heatpipe cooler in
this Shuttle case wouldn't slide. Fan too thick. Crap. On top of that,
the old fan was a 0.5 amp fan and this is only a 0.2 amp fan, so it wasn't
clear that this fan could actually move enough air to do sufficient
cooling.
However, rather than giving up on this, I was creative (since I didn't want
to go back to the store). The metal tabs on the cheap little sleave would
bend, so I bent them out, slipped the fan in so that the tabs were on the
other side of its plastic mount, and bent them back again. There's room in
the case for the fan to stick out a little. That worked fine, and I put
the new fan in, and then realized that I'd put the fan in backwards so that
the airflow was the wrong way. With this sort of case, I really don't
trust that to be okay, so out it came again. This time, one of the metal
tabs broke off, but I think three mount points for this fan is still fine.
(Really, two is probably fine; it doesn't vibrate a lot and just needs to
be held in front of the heat sink.)
Anyway, with the new fan installed, the system does seem a little quieter,
but the video card fan is still making a lot of noise. I'm wondering if
maybe the real problem all along has only been the video card fan and the
fan that I took out is actually fine. *sigh*. But at least I learned a
lot about changing fans, and I need to do this sort of thing more if I'm
ever going to get more comfortable with hardware.
Tomorrow, if I'm feeling energetic, off comes the case again and I'll see
if I can get the video card fan out easily. If I can and if it looks
vaguely standard, it's back to Fry's to see if I can find a replacement for
it as well.
I think this all counts for productivity on a vacation day, although it
wasn't one of the things that I was planning on getting done. Oh well.
2006-01-13: ietf-nntp archives complete
Thanks to prompting and data from Stan Barber and the discovery that
Mailman is actually pretty good at this stuff, the
ietf-nntp archives are
now complete. I've integrated all the posts from Stan's old list into the
current list that I run, and the whole history back to 1996 is now
available for the curious.
I need to update my personal NNTP pages badly, since they still predate the
completion of our work and the closing of the working group.
2006-01-14: gnubg
I spent essentially the entire day today, apart from watching football, on
packaging GNU Backgammon. This turned out to be more work than I expected,
but it's really interesting work and I'm learning a lot. This program has
an insane number of dependencies, from BLAS math libraries to Guile and
Python to a ton of different graphics and sound libraries for the new 3D
board support.
Most of the afternoon was spent working on the build dependencies, which
aren't really documented in the upstream documentation and therefore
required going through configure.in seeing what libraries it looks for.
Then there were some gcc 4 problems that had to be fixed, and I had to
remove the manual because it was covered under the GFDL.
This seemed like a good project to start learning quilt with, so I read
through the quilt manual and then set it up (which required poking around
some since I used the wrong setting in my .quiltrc originally). Now, all
that's left is forcing it to link dynamically with Python (the upstream
configure.in always chooses the static library), writing two more man pages
for utility programs that didn't have any, and mailing some patches and
some questions to upstream (including the request to relicense the manual).
I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to package the manual for non-free
or just refer people to the web version.
Other than that, I did clean up the kitchen, shelve about half the books
that needed shelving (just the mass market paperbacks left to go), and
cleaned the place up a little. I didn't get much reading done, nor did I
do any INN work, catch up farther on my personal e-mail, do any of the
piles of Debian work I want to get to, or write any book reviews. Ah well.
It's wonderful -- it's felt like Sunday all day today and yet it's only
Saturday and I have a whole weekend left before a three-day work week.
Now, it's off to do some reading. I'll hopefully be able to finish gnubg
packaging and upload the new version (to sit in NEW, since I broke some
things out into a separate gnubg-data package) tomorrow.
2006-01-15: Punt, Pass, Kick
No one reading this is likely to care. But I have to rant.
At the beginning of the fourth quarter (ooo, look at the cynical
manipulation to force an audience from the people who do other things
during halftime because it's always a waste of time) of one of the NFL
playoff games today, we had a pointless listing of winners of something
called the "Punt, Pass, Kick" competition for kids. There are so many
things wrong with this that I can hardly list them all.
First, I'm happy the kids got their moment of glory, but given that we saw
only meaningless clips without scoring, no one cares. Particularly no one
cares about listing off the names of six random kids while showing them on
the screen, without showing any actual competition. I prefer at least some
sporting competition in publicity stunts I'm subjected to.
Second, "punt, pass, kick"? Where "pass" involves heaving the ball
downfield as far as one can without any accuracy? What does this have to
do with the sport? Did the NFL ever consider that maybe these kids might
want to do something like the NFL skills competition that has something to
do with the actual game?
Third, oh look, separate girls and boys competitions. I don't know why the
utterly sexist NFL even bothers with the girls competition, since none of
those girls will be allowed to play in the NFL anyway (or even in college).
Oh, sure, it's probably not technically against the rules, but I'm sure
that sexual harassment will be applied until they get the point. The
presence of girls in this is pure publicity stunt on the part of the NFL,
and while I hope the girls participating had fun, I have to wonder if
they'll feel a little used later on when they realize that the NFL never
cared about their gender, except maybe as sideline reporters.
And of course the TV commentators don't point out any of this because
they're bought off by the NFL.
I like sports. I watch a lot of sports. But sometimes the distinctions
between professional wrestling and a professional sports league like the
NFL start looking a little thin. With the paid-off commentators, the
old-boys club of mutual support, and the unwillingness of anyone on TV to
point out when something is stupid, the corporate packaged entertainment
aspects of this start smelling.
2006-01-15: The Last Unicorn
Review: The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 1968
ISBN: 0-345-27505-5
Pages: 248
The unicorn has lived in her forest for longer than time has meaning. It
is always spring, always beautiful, and the unicorn loves watching the life
around her. But one day, she overhears two hunters talking, saying that
all the unicorns are gone from the world. Suddenly caught by fear and
loneliness at the idea, she leaves her forest to search for other unicorns.
Along the way, she joins up with a failed magician, discovers a cursed
land, and learns far more about humans than she expects.
This book surprised me. From its reputation, I was expecting a charming
fairy tale; instead, it's more of a self-conscious, postmodern story that
reminded me slightly of The Princess Bride. In fact, it's
self-conscious enough and thin enough in its mythic veneer that it's not
really enjoyable as a pure adventure fantasy. There are too many
deliberate anachronisms (characters in a medieval setting reading
magazines, lots of very modern attitudes by the characters) and not quite
enough in the world. One comes away with the feeling that Beagle's world
is populated only by a few hundred people at most, and people are created
only when they have some purpose in the story.
This isn't necessarily a problem, though, since trying to read The
Last Unicorn as a straightforward fantasy would be ignoring what it tries
to accomplish. It is, instead, an extended metaphor on the nature of
perception and myth. Beagle's world is full of people creating their own
realities through their beliefs, not seeing the amazing when it doesn't fit
their expectations, and being unable to change their perspectives even when
their whole world changes. It is a fairy tale about belief, but it's also
a fairy tale about accepting truth even when it isn't what one wants to
believe in.
The tone is set early on, when the unicorn encounters a farmer who tries to
capture her, thinking she's just a pretty white mare. The horn and the
different body type didn't fit his perception of the world, so he just
didn't see them. The point becomes more obvious after she's captured by a
travelling menagerie, where a mostly failed magician uses magic to make
people see ordinary beasts as mythical creatures, including the unicorn.
People go in expecting to see the unbelievable, so the illusion works, but
they're also half-expecting to be fooled, and so it takes illusion magic to
fool them into seeing the unicorn for what she really is. And, in the best
part of the scene, one of the captured creatures is a spider who truly
believes it has touched Arachne the Weaver, and who is destroyed by the
breaking of the menagerie magic.
Beagle keeps playing with these themes throughout. There is a band of
outlaws styled after Robin Hood but slamming into realistic problems.
"And we don't steal from the rich and give to the poor," Dick Fancy hurried
on. "We steal from the poor because they can't fight back -- most of them
-- and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day. We
don't rob the fat, greedy Mayor on the highway; we pay him tribute every
month to leave us alone."
A village given unnatural bounty from a curse that blights the rest of the
land continues to live like misers because they don't want to be too used
to the bounty when the curse is broken. The king who is a magical power in
his own right, who can take everything he wants, is dissatisfied by
everything and doesn't know how to take pleasure from what he has. And the
magician is sunk deep in depression because he can't cast spells properly,
even though he is capable of great feats when he's swept up in the feel of
the moment and not analyzing too much.
There's quite a bit here to unpack, although Beagle's presentation isn't
always successful. He's at his best when portraying the sense of unworldly
wonder that people feel towards the unicorn; that's the part that feels the
most like well-written traditional fantasy, except he avoids the pat ending
and maintains an inhuman distance between the way the unicorn sees the
world and the way people do. Wonder is not something that one can embrace
and hold close; by doing so, it loses its power to inspire and becomes
something entirely different. Beagle makes a subtle and intriguing
argument for loss and distance as integral components to wonder. Unicorns
are what they are because they are rarely seen and even more rarely
recognized; people have to make their own wonders based on fleeting
memories and glimpses, or the wonder becomes a trap.
Less successful are the texture of the plot and the thinness of the
narrative. The ideal book of this sort for me is enjoyable on multiple
levels, both as a story and as a metaphor. The Last Unicorn has
only the metaphor; the world in which it's told makes little sense and
achieves consistency only through sly references and self-referential
jokes. As a result, the elements Beagle throws in as references to
standard fantasy tropes (the singing butterfly, for example) sometimes feel
strangely out of place, and the incidents along the quest stand out as
isolated parables rather than fitting into a particularly coherent story.
If you like analyzing symbolism, there's a lot here to have fun with. I've
only touched on a few major themes; I could go on and on (the Bull's light
as the light of reason that overcomes wonder and files it away in its
proper place, the path to becoming a true king passing through the lost of
the innocence of idealism, the competing definitions of hero). But still,
I found the book vaguely unsatisfying. The skeleton was so obvious that I
never got swept up in the illusion of story, and as a result, while I can
unpack metaphor as an intellectual exercise, The Last Unicorn
resonated with me emotionally in only a few places. This is the exact
opposite effect from what I was expecting.
I recommend it as a classic, and for the crying spider, the unicorn herd,
and Molly's interaction with the unicorn. But I wouldn't call it one of
the great fantasy stories.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2006-01-16: Debian day
Well, I finally got the latest version of GNU Backgammon uploaded last
night, so today I spent the day catching up on other Debian work.
libpam-krb5 should now be ready for upload again (there were serious
problems with password changing that are now fixed), and I caught up
completely with the Debian Perl group and did a bunch of other random work
for them. It's kind of fun to just pick off a random Perl module that the
group maintains, bring the packaging up to date, upgrade to the latest
upstream source, and upload it.
Still a bunch of other things on the to-do list that I need to get to, but
this was a wonderfully productive four-day weekend and has me feeling far
more caught up. And this is a short week and then another three-day
weekend.
2006-01-17: Productive, no reviews
One of these days, I'm going to get book reviews written again.
Today was one of those days where I didn't really get started until late in
the day, but then got on a nice productivity streak that salvaged the whole
day. I've now written the needed statements of work for the Kerberos
project, gotten farther on building networking systems, built and
configured our new load-balance and pobox DNS server and made it ready for
testing, and started on the new weblogin deployment with SPNEGO support.
In a day with volleyball and meetings, that's not at all bad.
However, I just finished all that about 25 minutes ago and spent the last
25 minutes dealing with the fact that the current xdm upgrade in unstable
crashes xdm, and thereby crashed my entire session while I was in the
middle of doing work. And now it's time to go walk and read.
Tomorrow, I go pick up new framed artwork, possibly try to find a new fan
for my video card if I'm feeling up to it, maybe eat out for lunch, and
then work on updating documentation to our new web page templates and
getting the WebAuth 3.4.0 release out. And maybe writing a review.
2006-01-20: podlators 2.0.1
Unfortunately, various people were using Pod::Man directly to generate man
pages, and Pod::Simple changed the API for the formatting objects so that
you couldn't reuse an object. So podlators 2.00 broke all sorts of things.
The new Pod::Simple maintainer came up with a good improvement that lets
Pod::Man (and Pod::Text) simulate the old interface, and now that
Pod::Simple 3.04 is out with that change, I've released podlators 2.0.1
with that and a few other fixes.
You can get the latest version from the
podlators
distribution page.
2006-01-21: Productivity turnaround
Well, today turned out to be a much better day than I was expecting. I
woke up not feeling like doing anything and was afraid that the
whole day was going to be a waste. The tentative plan was to play some
video games, and I felt completely unlike even doing that.
But I managed to get myself going, figured out that I was willing to at
least work on catching up on mail, went into work where it was nice and
quiet and I have a good setup for doing intensively private mail catchup,
and started poking at things.
Several Debian package uploads, lots of lintian patches, and a ton of work
on kstart later, I'm feeling rather happy with myself. And most of this
work turned out to be things that I needed to do for our K5 migration
anyway, which means I may get to take some time off later this week in
balance.
I need to remember that I can do this if I try, that I can push
through and find something to do and then I feel much better.
2006-01-22: kstart 3.0
I figure adding a new program is worth a major version bump.
Buck Huppmann pointed out that it would be nice if k5start could do K5
ticket renewal rather than always obtaining a new ticket, since you can do
a renewal of a renewable ticket without having to have a keytab (at least
up to its renewable lifetime). After thinking about that for a bit, I
realized that we actually need that at Stanford to replace our old ugly
keeptoken program that reauthenticates a user to K4. So I started poking
at it during my surprisingly productive day and ended up finishing it off
tonight.
While I was at it, I also removed the pointless executability check to make
sure that aklog could be run, since it prevented people from setting
KINIT_PROG to something including flags. Adam Megacz reported that one.
(It's great to see these programs used by other people!)
You can get the latest version from the
kstart distribution
page.
Now, bed. Tomorrow, football.
2006-01-22: Green Rider
Review: Green Rider, by Kristen Britain
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 1998
ISBN: 0-88677-858-1
Pages: 471
I had a bad feeling about this book from the endorsement by Terry Goodkind
on the cover, and even more of a bad feeling from Britain's praise of
Goodkind's excellence and quality in his writing, but it was a loan from a
friend and I was hoping it would surprise me. Alas, not much in the way of
surprise here.
It's not that this is necessarily a bad book. It's not a particularly good
book, suffering from first novel problems, spotty pacing, and some shallow
character stereotypes, but this isn't worse than quite a lot of other
fantasy out there. No, the problem is that it's so unremittingly
derivative and unoriginal that I couldn't help but keep comparing it to
other, better books with the same plot elements.
Karigan G'ladheon (tell-tale apostrophe) runs away from school to start her
coming of age story. She is, of course, entirely in the right, but she's
driven out of school by the corrupt political establishment by offending
the wrong person. She stumbles across a dying messenger who is part of the
elite Green Rider corps and who gives her a message that she has to
deliver. From there, there's the kindly old ladies who give her magical
equipment and teach her about her hidden powers, a long journey through
endless woods where she meets noble woodsmen and elves while dodging or
escaping from evil mercenaries (one of whom she tries to convert back to
the side of the good guys), and an eventual rescue of the king and country
from the revival of dark powers. Oh, and at one point there are light
sabers.
If you get the feeling you've read this book before, you're right.
There are a few moments of intriguing world-building, and a few moments of
emotional satisfaction from the standard fantasy tropes that still have
some power left in them. Britain does a decent job with horses and outdoor
living, better than most, and the strange catacombs and guarded bodies of
the dead is a mildly interesting idea. But the world is just too full of
reworkings of Tolkien and company, unbelievably smug and stupid bad guys,
or supposedly medieval characters with far too modern sensibilities. I had
to laugh at the anti-monarchy protestors with their modern political
tactics; I suppose the one advantage of that anachronism is that it's not a
fantasy retread.
Britain's writing style also doesn't help. To quote the opening paragraph:
The granite was cold and rough against the gray-cloaked man's palms. It
was good, solid granite, from the bones of the earth itself. He traced
barely perceptible seams between the huge blocks of the wall. It was the
seams, he believed, that held the key. The key to the wall's destruction.
The whole book is like this. If the repetition, simple and monotonous
phrasing, too-obvious attempts at surprise, and purely servicable
descriptions don't bother you, you may not mind this book. For me, it was
symptomatic of all of the other problems with the story.
This is the first book of a series (of course), which promises to drag
Karigan into the "Greenies" whether she likes it or not. I had the second
book in my to-read pile as well (more have not yet been published), but I'm
not going to bother. Only worth looking at if you're desperately in need
of a generic, simple fantasy that asks little of the reader, and I think
there are better options available even for that.
Rating: 4 out of 10
2006-01-23: New WebAuth almost ready
Despite way too many meetings today (I did successfully get out of one), I
managed to do real work, which is the second major surprise in three days
for productivity. I've finished writing the new documentation for using
SPNEGO with WebAuth, fixed a huge variety of minor issues in the WebAuth
source, and fixed one noticable bug in the module. Everything is all set
for the WebAuth 3.4.0 release except testing and actually rolling it, which
I'll do tomorrow when I'm fresh.
Alas, I also need to release a new podlators to fix various issues.
Hopefully I will have time to do that tomorrow after doing WebAuth. If
not, I'll do it on Wednesday; Stanford owes me some hours back after all
the work I've been doing lately at night and on the weekend.
Still no progress on INN, just due to lack of time.
And of course, now, I'm designing a site-wide logout mechanism for WebAuth
in my head that I really don't have time to work on right now, and I
volunteered myself to do about four days worth of work on our internal
ticket system in staff meeting today.
At least I'm not bored!
2006-01-24: WebAuth 3.4.0
WebAuth 3.4.0 has finally been released, after a couple weeks of work
spread out over the last couple of months. This is the big SPNEGO support
release. The Weblogin server component now supports any Apache auth
mechanism to do the initial login, allowing bypass of username/password
authentication. This lets one use an SPNEGO module such as mod_auth_kerb
to do SPNEGO authentication and get single sign-on back. It will also
allow use of such things as client-side certificates down the road.
I also finally got rid of every compiler warning in WebAuth so it now
builds clean under -Wall, and rewrote the protocol specification completely
so it should be cleaner and somewhat more readable now. There are other
minor bug fixes and documentation improvements.
You can get the latest version from the WebAuth site, which still needs
some web page work as soon as I can find the time.
2006-01-24: OpenAFS HTML docs
Finally, I found the time to sit down and figure out what needed to be done
to generate good HTML documentation from the new OpenAFS POD manual pages.
It doesn't help that, while Sean Burke's code always works quite well once
I figure out how to use it, it's nearly unreadable to me and extremely
difficult to work with.
He apparently thinks much the same about mine, so there is that.
Anyway, I gave up on Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch the first time around because I
just couldn't understand it and started writing something to use thread and
spin. But that was going to introduce a bunch of other work that I would
have to do on pod2thread, work that I didn't really want to do, so I went
back to looking at Pod::Simple::HTMLBatch. Amazingly enough, I actually
figured out how to subclass Pod::Simple::HTML to do what I wanted, and then
I figured out that I could abandon the broken indexing support and just do
my own index.
Some style sheet fiddling, and the result is HTML documentation (that link
is to a temporary staging area, so if you're reading this message several
months later, it'll probably be dead).
The script has been committed to the repository, and now I await comments.
Obviously some navigation between the pages would be useful, and the pages
look rather plain (I'm thinking about talking F<> into being
something other than italics for the web pages), but it really worked out
better than I was expecting for the first cut. The content is all there
and very readable. Pod::Simple::HTML doesn't have the horrific problems
that the current Pod::HTML has.
Anyway, thankfully I got that done, since tomorrow I need to build
weblogin-dev, bring up a test server for doing SPNEGO, and then release a
new podlators. And maybe take some time to myself, since I've been working
flat-out the last few days.
Once again, unlikely to get a walk in tonight. And I overslept something
fierce this morning, not waking up until 11. All signs that I should slow
down, except I keep getting things done!
2006-01-25: podlators 2.0.2
This release fixes the problems that showed up while integrating it into
Perl core, and also fixes a compatibility problem with old Perl releases.
No major changes, just bug and test suite fixes.
You can get the latest version from the
podlators
distribution page.
At some point, I really need to find the time to do the work to support
groff and its extended character set support. That will make non-ASCII man
pages much easier to deal with.
2006-01-26: Terrorism and war
Hamas, as you have probably heard by now, swept the Palistinian elections
in a surprise victory. Hamas is, for those who really don't follow
regional politics at all, a hard-line anti-Israeli party and one that
supports or has supported terrorist acts. (I'm being fuzzy since you can
hardly say a word about the Israeli/Palistinian conflict without stepping
on something that someone wants to argue with. Suffice it to say that
they're closely associated with the Bad Guys in the standard US portrayal
of the conflict.)
There is much hand-wringing about this, including an ironically amusing
statement from the US President that he doesn't see how Hamas could be
legitimate participants in the Arab/Israeli peace process. Given that
they're now the legitimate government of Palestine, one wonders just what
that means.
Anyway, listening to the hand-wringing and the denunciations of terrorism
got me started on an essay that I'd been thinking about for a while. It
was going to be a journal post, but then it got far too long, so now it's
an essay on my
web site. This is the best I've been able to explain why the constant
denunciations of terrorism feel problematic to me.
2006-01-28: podlators 2.0.3
The "Windows doesn't let you do what?" release. Not that I didn't
already know about Windows's issues in this department.
Pod::Simple has the annoying behavior of not closing files that it opened
itself, namely output files passed into the parse_from_filehandle method (a
backwards compatibility method that's looking less and less backwards
compatible the more I look at it). As a result, the podlators test suite
failed on Windows because Windows doesn't let you delete an open file.
This release has only a test suite workaround. The long-term solution is
for Pod::Simple to close file handles that it opened itself when reinit is
called.
You can get the latest version from the
podlators
distribution page.
2006-01-28: spin 1.62
I'm probably the only one who will care about this one, as it's an update
of the handling of \quote, which is one of the few functions left in spin
that's very idiosyncratic to my own web site. Quotes that weren't centered
left the attribution floating out in space in a way that made it look sort
of like that person supposedly wrote the page, rather than just the quote,
so I've now hacked in a little more logic that puts an em-dash before the
attribution and uses a different class if the quote isn't centered. In the
style sheets, I now float those attributions over to the right-hand margin.
The inconsistency in attributions is annoying, but I think that overall
this still looks better.
You can get the latest version from my
web tools distribution
page.
I really need to rewrite spin as a Perl module. I've been meaning to do
that for quite a while, and it would make things a lot easier for some
things we do with spin for work. (For bonus points, I could write an
Apache filter that would let us just put raw thread files up and convert
them to HTML on the fly, but I think I'll only do that if I'm really
bored.)
2006-01-29: Slow day
I think I was overdue for a downtime day. I was wondering if yesterday
would be that, but yesterday I ended up going into work and doing intense
catchup, so it caught up with me today. I read (belatedly) a con report
from the last Worldcon, read part of the latest
Emerald City, watched a really good final
round of golf (and Tiger even won), cleaned up the apartment a little, and
otherwise did not very much.
There's a long discussion in comments about my essay a while back about
terrorism, which isn't surprising. The last couple deserve a response, but
for whatever reason writing that felt too stressful to me today. So
tomorrow, maybe. This always happens to me with political issues. I come
up with something that I really want to say, and then I'm often better off
personally not actually saying it, since even if I get my point across, it
always requires a ton of energy afterwards to deal with the comments. I do
a lot of saying "that isn't the point I was driving at," the discussion
drifts into other things that I have strong opinions about but haven't
thought through to the degree that I'd thought through the original
material, and the whole thing ends up feeling rather stressful.
This is why I never want to be involved in politics. I just can't take the
discussion day in and day out. Also, it seems like nearly everyone, myself
most definitely included, who discusses politics gets sucked into a very
confrontational way of phrasing things ("you're forgetting" versus "did you
think about?", that sort of thing), and that just makes it worse.
Ah well, it could be quite a lot worse -- it's actually a very interesting
thread, and about as good of a discussion as I could hope for. It's just
still a huge energy drain, and I always end up begrudging that
energy afterwards. And yet, at the time, the comment always seems too
important to not make. I'm not sure there's a good solution. At my most
cynical, I find it easy to decide that no one ever actually changes their
mind, all political discussion is just a matter of repeating one's personal
positions, and none of it matters in the slightest in the long run. I'm
not even sure my own behavior contradicts that, so I can hardly expect more
of anyone else.
I'm actually not feeling as cynical as this sounds. I've just been wanting
to get that off my chest all day, and that's the reason why I rarely post
about politics even though I almost always have a strong opinion.
Anyway, good dinner out tonight with Quanah and Digant, the latter being a
new employee on the Linux client support side of things at work. I think
he's going to be a great addition to the team. Staff meeting tomorrow
where we're supposed to talk about build systems, which should be an
adventure, and then later tomorrow afternoon I have to sit in on a meeting
about taking over support of some Oracle servers for undergraduate
admissions. Thankfully the meeting load looks light for the rest of the
week.
2006-01-30: Kidnapped
Review: Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Publisher: Signet
Copyright: 1886
ISBN: 0-451-51972-8
Pages: 239
Kidnapped is one of the few classics assigned in elementary school
that I actually read in elementary school, and one of the few books I had
to read for school that I really liked. I think it's a great book for
convincing kids that classics can be readable and fun, although it is a
boy's adventure novel and as an adult I found it thin in places.
David Balfour had a quiet upbringing in the Scotland Lowlands, but his
parents have both died and it's time to go out into the world to seek his
fortune. He's set on his path by the local minister, pointed at a nearby
city where he has relations. From there, he discovers he is the rightful
heir to a family fortune, is betrayed by his uncle, kidnapped into a sea
voyage, meets and pairs with a rogue, makes his way across the wild
Scottish Highlands, and in short follows the standard path of the coming of
age adventure story.
It's amusing how much Kidnapped matches the standard blockbuster
fantasy plot without being a fantasy at all. This sort of adventure story
is often written as fantasy these days, with the otherness of magic and
medieval cultures replacing the otherness of historic Scotland and its
wilds, and yet little of the plot changes without the fantasy element.
Without the escalating discovery of power or the mythological structure,
there's less going on, but the complexities of Scottish politics fill in
and feel deeper than most fantasy politics.
Strange places, attractive rogues, adventure on the high seas, and a bit of
Scottish political intrigue make this an adventure and provide the obvious
appeal, but the strength of Stevenson's writing lies in the character
interactions. Not the characters themselves as much: David is a solid
everyman, young and a bit brash and full of self-confidence. Alan is a
classic rogue, with some fighting skill, a gift of gab, and a gambling
problem. The other characters also tend to stick closely to stock types,
and none change much over the course of the adventure. But they all feel
deep and nuanced because Stevenson's touch with dialogue and interaction is
exceptional.
David expresses an attitude of superiority and adventure in the
first-person narration that fits his age and mingles with a straight-laced
attitude from his upbringing that occasionally catches him by surprise.
Alan isn't just a rogue with a heart of gold; he's obnoxious to David as
well, when he's in that mood. David doesn't quite know how to deal with
their conflicting political beliefs. When they finally have a serious
fight, it's one of the most honest fights I've seen in a book of this sort;
they fight like adults with real resentment, true to their characters,
rather than like petulant children or angsting teenagers.
There are some flaws. I found the beginning and end of the book by far the
strongest, and got rather tired of the extended wander across the Scottish
Highlands punctuated by only a few significant events. The final
resolution of David's inheritance is a wonderful set piece but a touch too
easy (although Stevenson does a great job making the victory a bit less
than complete for practical reasons). And this is still a boy's adventure
novel, an exciting romp and not much more than that. But it's a great
example of the genre.
While a complete story, it also ends on something of a to-be-continued
cliff-hanger around the political situation that David stumbles into,
something that I found frustrating as a kid. The sequel, so that others
can avoid the hunt that I went on, is available now as Catriona even
though it was originally published as David Balfour.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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