2006-06-01: Baycon haul
I was up this morning at 6am and couldn't really go back to sleep, so alas
tonight wasn't the night for really getting caught up. I had the time, but
not the energy or focus. But I can at least list the books purchased this
time.
Douglas Adams -- The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide (sff)
J.G. Ballard -- The Unlimited Dream Company (sff)
Iain M. Banks -- Against a Dark Background (sff)
Iain M. Banks -- Excession (sff)
Mark Budz -- Clade (sff)
Avram Davidson -- Peregrine: Secundus (sff)
Cory Doctorow -- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (sff)
Steven Erikson -- Gardens of the Moon (sff)
George R.R. Martin -- The Armageddon Rag (sff)
Richard K. Morgan -- Broken Angels (sff)
Richard K. Morgan -- Market Forces (sff)
Larry Niven -- The Magic Goes Away (sff)
James H. Schmitz -- The Witches of Karres (sff)
Charles Stross -- Toast (sff)
Tricia Sullivan -- Maul (sff)
Connie Willis -- Impossible Things (sff)
The Douglas Adams, with a leather-like binding and looking like a Great
Work of Literature, is just too funny. I couldn't pass that up,
particularly for only $20.
Not sure when I'm going to get a chance to read all of this, although now
that I've finished the third of the Song of Ice and Fire I'll make faster
progress until I start the fourth.
2006-06-02: Weekend work
Well, not doing very well at getting book reviews written, but I expect
they'll wait. I still have a strong memory of the three books I have
pending, and maybe I'll find some time tomorrow. The problem has been that
by the time I have enough free time to think about writing one, I'm tired
enough that the words won't come.
My parents are here for the weekend, which means good cooking and also
doing things around the house. My dad resized my old waterbed frame a
little for my bedroom, and tomorrow we're going to take out my old bed
frame and fit the air mattress into the waterbed frame, after which I'll
have a headboard and drawers under my bed again. This will be very nice.
Then, two large shelves from Ikea to put together and lots of pictures to
hang. We may not get through all of that tomorrow, but there's Sunday to
work on it as well.
By the end of the weekend, hopefully I will have gotten all of the new
books shelved, all the furniture rearranged, and will feel more in control
of my apartment and the space again. Which I need. There's so much going
on lately at work and elsewhere, and so many things I'm trying to keep
track of or are feeling behind on, that I need to practice stress
management techniques and getting in control of my surroundings is a huge
one for me.
So, you get life ramblings tonight instead of any of the other things I've
been meaning to write up. But perhaps more tomorrow.
2006-06-03: Putting things together
My old bed frame and foundation has been disassembled and is sitting in the
garage, and my air bed is now sitting in my old waterbed frame, which my
father cut down to size for me and then brought down and assembled. It
looks great. And both the Ikea shelves have now been put together and
placed, and I finally sorted through all of my comics and resorted them.
Now I need to figure out how I'm going to store them long term, since I
don't think I want to keep them in the shelves, but there are options.
Tomorrow, we hang pictures, bolt the shelves to the wall, and I shelve all
my new books and get that part of things organized. And then my apartment
will be back in shape and significantly improved.
Down to only one more place I have marked out for shelves, though. At some
point, I'm going to have to start boxing up books.
2006-06-04: Old Man's War
Review: Old Man's War, by John Scalzi
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 0-765-31524-6
Pages: 316
John Perry is a recent widower who just turned 75. So he's joining the
army.
That's the hook, a quick double-take. On Perry's future Earth, you can
sign up when you're 65 to join the (space-faring) military when you're 75.
If you do, they make you young again in order to fight. That's the only
way to get access to the technology, and once you leave the planet and join
the military, you're never allowed to return to Earth again even if you
survive (but Perry has no real reason to stay, since the death of his
wife). There are various hand-waving explanations about how mature
soldiers make better decisions, none of which are particularly convincing.
However, the lack of adequate explanation for this bizarre recruiting
practice is noticed by the characters and seems likely to be the focus of
future books in the series.
Apart from the unusual recruiting age and associated discoveries about how
the regeneration technology actually works, this book is remarkably like
Heinlein's
Starship
Troopers except less preachy and with more plot. One gets the standard
basic training, the boding with fellow recruits, the quick advancement of
the main character, and even an alien war (although one that's rather more
believable than Heinlein's genocidal xenophobes). Scalzi has two
significant advantages, however: he can show all of this through the eyes
of an intelligent, thoughtful, cynical adult instead of kid, and he does a
much better job with characterization and plot.
This is not to say that the book is without substantial flaws. Old
Man's War is Scalzi's first novel, and despite garnering quite a bit of
quick acclaim and a Hugo nomination, the book is rough in places,
particularly in the latter half. However, his treatment of psychology and
thoughtful retrospection at the beginning of the book are excellent, and
readers who grew up with Heinlein will be delighted by his grasp of
Heinlein's first person voice. Perry is flippant but competent, and best
of all feels realistically mature. Scalzi does a good job giving the
reader a feel for the mental age of his characters without much falling
into cliche.
The humor is spottier. Scalzi's main character tries to maintain a light,
scarcastic tone, and at times it works brilliantly. The scene where he
names his on-board computer support system is perfect, for instance.
Unfortunately, much of the humor, often the same joke that's handled well
at first, is then belabored and repeated. Sometimes Scalzi seems afraid
the reader will miss the joke; at other times, he seems more enamored of a
running gag than I was. Either way, repeated humor can quickly become
annoying and Scalzi crossed that line several times. I can forgive this
for the times where his timing was excellent, but overall it needed work.
One of the difficulties with Starship Troopers was that, if one
removed the political preaching, there really wasn't much plot. The
narrative is strong through boot camp and then falls apart. Old
Man's War has a similar problem; the plot doesn't fall apart to nearly the
degree, but that's because it shifts focus abruptly. For the first half of
the book, the thematic emphasis is on the nature of one's relationship with
one's body and age, the way social groups form, and the psychology of
tradeoffs around life and death. Then, abruptly, we're thrown into a
larger plot arc (clearly to be continued in the next book) about the Ghost
Brigades. There is some thematic carryover in the area of body
identification, identity, and human enhancement, but it still feels like
plot swap. I'm not sure how much more there was to be said about the
initial themes, but I wanted more, and I wanted better unification with the
identity themes of the last part of the book.
I came away from Old Man's War mildly impressed but thinking Scalzi
was trying too hard. He doesn't yet trust his readers to get the jokes the
first time, his dialogue is at times belabored, and at times the book
doesn't flow as naturally as it should. That said, it's an excellent
Heinlein-style novel while avoiding Heinlein's preachy pitfalls, and there
are scenes that prove Scalzi can really write. Definitely recommended for
Heinlein fans; for others, particularly those with a distaste for military
SF, Old Man's War is pleasant enough but one can find better books.
It's highest virtue, like much of Heinlein, is that it's accessible and
easy to read while still throwing out a few intriguing ideas.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2006-06-06: Productive day
That was better. I think today was the most productive day that I've had
for a couple of weeks.
The slides for both of my presentations for the AFS and Kerberos Best
Practices workshop next week have been written, and I now have a fairly
good idea how I'm going to structure my talks. Unfortunately, the second
half of the wallet presentation is going to involve a lot of hand-waving
since I won't have working code by the time of the conference, but oh well.
The WebAuth presentation is on firmer ground.
That was the morning's work. After a great game of volleyball, I then got
our new local krb5 packages in shape. I've imported the Debian packaging
files, switched the build system to use quilt so that I can more easily
work with the patches, and imported the initial patch for a password
verification API. Everything builds; I've not done any testing yet.
Tomorrow, I go through the Stanford-specific patches to Kerberos and start
breaking the patches out by functionality, instead of area of source base,
and turning them into something that I can contribute back to MIT. In the
process, I should be able to replace our current Kerberos packages with a
complete set of packages built from something much closer to the Debian
sources but with our patches applied, which will resolve some issues we
were seeing on AMD64.
Also, a new OpenAFS version tomorrow, I think. I'm not sure if I'm going
to just upload a new version immediately, or if I'm going to fiddle with
the debconf templates and give people a few days to unfuzzy translations.
I really should do the latter, but the broken PAM module build on AMD64 is
rather annoying.
2006-06-07: A Storm of Swords
Review: A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: November 2000
ISBN: 0-553-57342-X
Pages: 1177
This is the third book of The Song of Ice and Fire, a huge fantasy
series that is as much a single long novel as a traditional series. Martin
provides small reminders of what happened before but keeps them to a
minimum, which makes reading the series together quite nice but which means
that one should not try to jump into the middle of the series.
After the previous book,
A
Clash of Kings, I was worried that Martin was drifting into the extended
scenes and loss of interesting characters of some other fat fantasy series.
Thankfully, A Storm of Swords is a noticably better book, which
gives me hope that Martin is going to pull this off. There is still a
middle book feeling, with characters being shuffled about and sometimes
left in transitions for annoyingly long. I got very tired of reading about
Bram and Jon traipsing through wildernesses. I still wish the book were
shorter and less rambling. But Martin got away from confused and boring
battles and back to political intrigue and tightly woven plot developments,
doing a considerably better job with the major battle of this book.
The same three characters captured the lion's share of my attention and
interest. Tyrion's sarcasm and cynical intelligence makes his sections a
highlight of the book, even if he spends more of the time angsting and less
time doing things this time around. Still, I particularly liked his
interactions with the Dornishmen. Arya's story felt a bit silly at times,
as she kept getting kidnapped or captured by yet another faction just as
she was about to reach her goal, but she has a determination that I love
reading about. With Arya, I think Martin also does his best job of
symbolism. Animal symbols are used throughout The Song of Ice and
Fire, but with Arya the wolf symbolism seems both the strongest and the
most fitting. And Dany continues to steal the show.
It's amusing that in a series I enjoy largely because it's not like the
typical faux-medieval fantasy, the character I'm enjoying the most is the
most magical and most fantastic of the characters. Dany has bonded with
dragons, is spearheading in some ways the return of magic to the world, and
in this book manages several feel-good conquests and daring battles,
challenging old and corrupt regimes and winning the adoration of the common
people. It's a bit pat, and while Martin touches on some of the drawbacks
and problems, it's a little too easy. But it's so much fun, made more so
by the contrast with the rest of the book. It's more common with Martin to
feel a growing sense of dread, or to watch characters be unable to take
dramatic action for good due to their own limitations or realistic
considerations of strength and momentum of culture. Dany is the one who
gets to do the things you *wish* she would do, snatch defeat from the jaws
of victory and take on entrenched strength that no one should be able to
overthrow. I have a sneaking suspicion that there's some deeper dramatic
structure peaking through.
Despite dealing with more standard fantasy themes than the other
characters, Dany comes at it from a different angle than I usually see.
Stealing from Mongol culture rather than western medievalism was a great
idea from the start, and Dany also doesn't fit the classic growth of the
hidden ruler. Instead, she's thrust into the role of queen very early,
without an obvious Merlin analogue and without relying on any one advisor,
and many of her actions come from an intriguing sense of noblesse
oblige and personal honor. She is, in many ways, the complementary
opposite to Sansa; both girls were raised on fairy tales and romance, but
Sansa was also artificially sheltered where Dany's life had a sharp edge.
Dany is acting on her ideals, making hard choices and trying to create the
world she believes in. Sansa is left without any hard core of strength or
reserve of friendship, and therefore is battered about by the world
helplessly.
Speaking of Sansa, I have gotten over my initial hatred for the character.
My reaction now is a combination of faint pity and head-shaking. She again
manages to make her life much worse by her inability to compromise her
fantasies about how the world works and accept help where it would have
been offered, but this time it's less infuriating than predictable and sad.
Her role in the story is to show the actions of the bad guys, for which
she has a convenient victim personality. It's hard to imagine her ever
growing out of that.
Jon mostly continues as the coming of age hero, but Martin takes that story
in interesting directions and adds substantial depth. He's still too much
of an everyman for me, without sufficiently distinguished attitudes and
opinions to give me much sense of personality, but the themes are at least
intriguing. I like the way that Martin has handled the wildlings beyond
the Wall in general; after starting the book as the Great Evil, he's added
a lot of ambiguity and pulls a neat trick to play with the sympathies of
modern readers with modern political sensibilities. The surprise
resolution to the battle Jon's involved with was also well-done, logical in
the context of the world but not too predictable.
Of the remaining viewpoint characters, Davros has the best shot at joining
the top three, but I just don't like reading about Melisandre (who shows up
frequently in Davros's scenes due to the circles he runs in). Apart from
bit characters in Dany's story, she's the clearest pure villain of the
piece. She's a good one, but that means she's a creepy one, enough that
the scenes she appears in make my skin crawl.
These books are simply huge, and I think that's their biggest flaw. It
takes a tremendous amount of time to read the next volume and a lot of
dedication and missed opportunity to read other works to keep up with the
series. Martin does a great job with plot, creates rich and detailed
worlds full of complex characters (I have no idea how he managed it, but he
turned Jamie from a hissable villain into a sympathetic character and made
me care about him), occasionally writes some evocative descriptions, and
manages about as good of pacing as one can get in a 1,200-page book. This
is a good book, and better than the last. I just keep asking myself if it
was really better than the three or four other books I could have read in
the time it took me to read it. If Martin were getting where he was going
at least half again as fast as he is, I'd feel less conflicted about
continuing to read.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2006-06-08: Um, yeah
This RPM
bug log makes for interesting reading. I particularly liked:
What everyone seems to be missing here, and that Jeff is getting very sick
of repeating, is that RPM uses a "best effort" algorithm when doing
upgrades. The RPM database was not corrupted; believe me, I can show you
what a corrupted RPM database looks like.
What actually happened here is that the previous versions were removed as
part of the upgrade process, and the newer versions were installed. At
least as much as possible. :-) As many files as could be removed from the
old install were, and that install was removed from the RPM DB. As much of
the new stuff as could be installed was, but the install of some items
failed, so the new packages were not added to the RPM DB. While this may
not be what *you* think should've happened, it is consistent with RPM's
upgrade algorithm and does NOT result in a corrupted database in any way,
shape, or form.
Also:
Concerning the "best effort" policy of rpm, this has been this way since
its creation AFAIK. In some environments its not acceptable, in others it
is the sanest policy to use.
Gee, silly me. I would have thought that when the package manager couldn't
put the system into a desired state, it would stop, restore the
previous state, and ensure that at all times the package database reflects
the content of the file system. Some of us consider the presence of files
on disk that are not reflected in the package database to be a bug and
serious error condition that should never occur.
But, well, I think this puts it the best:
Clearly you want a package manager which exceeds what RPM was/is designed
and intended to do. You should either find one or write one yourself.
Yup. It's called dpkg. Which has always behaved in the manner that you
think isn't viable in many environments.
Every time I wonder if Red Hat isn't starting to get up to Debian's
quality, I find something like this and wonder why people keep running a
distribution that takes this sort of slapdash, amateurish approach to
critical system services.
I originally switched to Debian from Red Hat 7 because of the horror
stories that I heard about upgrades and the prevelance of RPM database
corruption. Some bugs may have been fixed, but I see the fundamental
attitude hasn't changed.
2006-06-10: Borderlands haul
A friend and I went up to San Francisco to Borderlands Books today, both to
do some general book shopping and to pick up an Advance Review Copy of Karl
Schroeder's latest book that they were holding for me. (Thank you!)
The results:
Elizabeth Bear -- The Chains That You Refuse (sff)
Jacqueline Carey -- Kushiel's Scion (sff)
John Clute -- Scores (non-fiction)
Naomi Novik -- Throne of Jade (sff)
Karl Schroeder -- Sun of Suns (sff)
Tomorrow, I catch a plane for Ann Arbor and hopefully will be able to get
lots of quality reading in on the plane. Next week is the AFS and Kerberos
Best Practices Workshop, which will involve a lot of networking and a
couple of presentations. But I'm really hoping to both save some time for
exercise and some time for reading.
2006-06-11: In Michigan
Just a short post tonight, as I'm in Ann Arbor and need to get to sleep to
start adjusting to the time difference. Not sure whether I'll get any
reviews written while I'm here; it will depend on how much time I have
available in the evenings, I think.
The Detroit airport train is highly amusing. Also, it doesn't hold the
doors open for any length of time at all.
I finished Slow River by Nicola Griffith on the plane. That's a
fantastic book. Griffith is now definitely on my "read everything she
writes" list.
2006-06-12: Kerberos commits
Looks like the answer to whether I'm going to get any reading done is "not
so much." On the other hand, I did get a large chunk of the Debian patches
to MIT Kerberos integrated upstream today, which feels good. I didn't get
a lot of other useful work done, but I did touch base with various of the
AFS folks, and that counts.
Tomorrow is going to be played by ear, but I expect that I'll try to do
some more e-mail catchup, finish merging patches, and maybe answer some
Debian mail I've been neglecting. And I'm going to be talking with some
UMich folks over dinner about web authentication.
Now, to bed, so that I don't make myself too tired.
2006-06-13: kstart 3.5
Adam Megacz suggested that k4start, k5start, and krenew, when running a
sub-command, should not exit on a HUP, TERM, or QUIT signal and instead
pass the signal along to the sub-command and exit if it does. This came up
in the context of using runit to manage services run under kstart, but the
same would apply to services run via daemontools. He then provided a
patch, so the only thing I had to do was integrate it.
While I was at it, I also made the build system safe for Autoconf 2.60,
since Debian now uses a 2.60 pre-release snapshot in unstable.
You can get the latest version from the
kstart distribution
page.
2006-06-14: Conference networking
Today was the first full day of the AFS and Kerberos Best Practices
Workshop, and while there wasn't a tremendous amount in the program itself
I wasn't already aware of, the discussions before and after dinner were
fantastic. I had a long talk with Sam Hartman about a whole bunch of
things, interspersed with discussions with other folks, and then after the
dinner a bunch of us stuck around and told war stories, talked about
software licensing, and shared interesting ideas.
This is what I love most about this conference. It's one of the few where
I feel like I manage to do a lot of social networking and get a lot of
really useful work-related things hashed out. It's the best opportunity I
have to talk to a bunch of people who are doing fundamentally the same
stuff and who care about fundamentally the same things as I do; it reminds
me of the heyday of Cartel, but with a lot more variety in the attendees.
We also had a very productive OpenAFS Elders lunch and a good Q&A session
at dinner. I'm still nervous about the long-term future of AFS a little
just because I see so many ways in which it could be better and we're
clearly resource-starved, but I'm also really happy with how things are
progressing and can see a lot of great opportunities.
Tomorrow, I have two talks of my own and some of the material I'm very
interested in will start (in particular, Sam Hartman's web authentication
talk).
2006-06-18: Back in California
Well, I was going to write reviews today, since I'm rather far behind, but
I got into an interesting discussion on bofh.* and couldn't keep my mouth
shut in news.groups, so there went the rest of the day. Well, that and an
unexpected nap.
Now that I'm back in town, I can watch the World Cup more easily. I should
set up the TiVo for that before going to bed tonight, although I probably
need to clean a bunch of things off it to ensure it has space.
The trip back from Ann Arbor was long, particularly since we had several
hours to kill at the airport, but uneventful. I finished Sun of
Suns on the plane, and I found a copy of The Black Powder War by
Naomi Novik in an airport bookstore and promptly bought it. Anything to
get stores like that to stock more SF, plus it's good to have the complete
series before I start reading it.
Today's bread experiment was an Italian Parmesan cheese bread that turned
out quite good. I know it's good bread when I like eating it without any
butter or mayonnaise on it. I still over-ate a little bit today, but not
as bad, and I got walking in early in the day. I should go walk again this
evening, but I'm not going to; instead, I'm going to work on getting back
into my rhythm of walking once a day rather than doing too much at once and
burning out.
Also done today: five long-boxes assembled for my comics, although none
actually put in the long-boxes yet. A box of old papers shredded. A new
version of OpenAFS uploaded to Debian (and immediately running into some
compiler mismatches with kernel modules, which I mailed debian-devel
about). I was also going to build a new version of our local Kerberos
package, but ran into some weird problems. They're now fixed, but I'll
have to do the actual builds tomorrow.
I didn't get as caught up with mail as I was hoping, so that too will have
to wait until tomorrow, but I got a start on it.
Tomorrow will be a catch-up and resynchronization day; I'm not expecting to
get a lot of regular work done. I do need to start figuring out
reservations for the AFS hackathon at the end of July, since plane fare is
just going to start getting more expensive. Maybe this time I can use the
travel agency that Stanford is theoretically supposed to be using.
2006-06-21: WebAuth 3.5.1
Finally had a free moment to get this out and get new Solaris builds and
updated stow package and Apache out. Thank you very much to Quanah
Gibson-Mount for many of the stow package builds and the Apache build.
This release mostly contains fixes to the templates that we ran into in the
process of testing Stanford's HTTP Negotiate rollout. It doesn't include
(yet) the settings CGI script we developed to manage the HTTP Negotiate
cookie; I'm hoping to get that and a few other things into 3.5.2, but
that's going to depend on when I have time to do that work.
There are a couple of general bug fixes in here too, including an
uninitialized data bug on 64-bit platforms that's been around since the
beginning (I think) and prevented reading the keyring on some platforms
some of the time.
2006-06-21: Slow River
Review: Slow River, by Nicola Griffith
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: August 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39537-9
Pages: 343
This story opens, suitably, at the side of a river, with the first person
protagonist contemplating the river as connecting fabric of civilization
but also somehow outside. The narrator has no identity but will hopefully
be acquiring one soon, pausing at the river before stepping back into life,
reborn. From there, we jump back three years as she's dumped in an alley,
naked and badly injured, brutally torn from her identity and reluctant to
reclaim it for deeper and more complex reasons. We learn her name, Lore,
after she is rescued by a woman who lives on edge, who steals and ransoms
identities, who is part of a far different world. And then we meet Lore at
the age of five, learning that water isn't safe, but more than that
learning to never take anything for granted. A lesson that, sadly, she
doesn't truly learn until much later.
Slow River is told in three narrative strands with the same
protagonist but separated in her life by time. The current story is told
in the first person, the immediate background in tight third-person past
tense, and Lore's childhood in a looser third-person present. Lore's
childhood was a story told to her, her life with Spanner was a story pushed
at her, and her life afterwards is the story she takes control of. It's
that sort of book, full of parallels, symbolism, sideways approaches to
questions of identity, and use of literary devices as cues. A quarter of
the way through, I wasn't sure it was going to come together. Halfway
through I was caught up in the plot but not sure about the characters. And
then the threads came together, the mildly unsurprising plot climax became
mere background to a beautiful character development climax, and I realized
I'd fallen in love with the book.
I want to dispense with one misconception immediately. It's easy to get
the impression from some synopses and reviews that the point of Slow
River is a cyberpunk world in which one's identity implant is their life
and loss of it turns one into a non-person. I put off reading this book
for far too long, despite loving
Ammonite,
because I'd read that story before and wasn't that interested. This isn't
what Slow River is about at all. Lore has never lost some widget of
technology she couldn't regain. She chooses to hide from her former
identity and her incredibly powerful family for other, far more tangled
reasons, reasons that the story slowly peels back in layers. The
psychological thickets underlying Lore's denial of her identity are the
heart of a fascinating study of economic class, family secrets, friendship
and loyalty, self-esteem, and self-created identity. This is not a
cyberpunk identity thriller.
The science, quite to the contrary, is water reclamation. There is some
passing reference to identity hacking, ransoming, and con games, but those
bits of technology are indistinct supports for character and plot.
Environmental engineering is the foregrounded science, and Lore's
competence, dedication, and understanding makes it far from either boring
or typically political. The politics here are about class, not
environmentalism, and even there the multinational corporation is more
ambiguous than evil. Seen through Lore's eyes, the biological process of
cleaning and recycling water takes on a complex, difficult beauty that had
me looking forward to scenes of tromping about sewage treatment plants.
One of the reasons why this succeeds so well is that Griffith has an
admirable grasp of emotional timing. Lore is a hypercompetent
environmental engineer, and if she were dropped into that role right at the
start, the story may trip over typical SF cliches. Griffith doesn't
emphasize that competence until much later in the story, though, after the
reader has seen Lore struggle with every other part of her life and has
seen enough of her childhood background to realize she's more damaged with
a monofocus than typically hypercompetent. Because of that, the competence
adds emotional depth and gives the reader a long-desired chance to root
wholeheartedly for the hero, rather than robbing the story of
believability.
Lore, as she observes herself, is a creature who has fallen from the tops
of the jungle trees down into the lower layers of growth. Each layer of
the jungle is a different ecosystem; each has its own rules, its own
preditors, its own logic. Jungle creatures who fall out of their natural
layer are completely unequipped for the world in which they find
themselves, and often die miserable deaths. But the river that cuts
through the center of the jungle also cuts through all of the layers,
leaving open space where one can, if one chooses, see them all at once for
what they are. It's both a compelling metaphor for class and a perfect
guide to Lore's emotional journey, and when Lore finds her emotional
riverbank, the resonances echo back through the story and transform and
improve the entire novel.
Griffith is going on the list of authors whose works I will buy on sight.
It's a true shame there are so few of them. Slow River doesn't grab
you with a tightly paced plot. Give it time and attention and savor
Griffith's beautiful descriptions. It more than rewards the time spent at
the end.
Rating: 9 out of 10
2006-06-23: Nicely productive day
This was one of the most productive days I've had in quite a while. Thanks
to Darren Patterson, there are now RPMs (for RHEL4) available on the
WebAuth site. I've tested an upgrade of our test cell from our old 1.2.8
AFS VLDB binaries to 1.4.1 with our kaserver patches. I handed off a few
more tasks to other people and got them off my to-do list. I caught up
with the evaluation of the www and CGI server upgrades that I needed to do.
I knocked my incoming mailbox down considerably, applied a patch to
kstart, did a bit of OpenAFS work, finished a couple more internal Debian
packages for our upcoming Kerberos upgrade, and even did a fair bit of
writing.
The day was a bit too packed for me to write a review (or, for that matter,
to exercise). Both will come tomorrow.
In other news, I really like Roundup and have been using it for an issue
tracker for some time, but Trac has now caught my eye and I'm starting to
think I should use it for the much-delayed INN issue tracker installation.
The integration with Subversion is quite nice, and the wiki features look
attractive if I can integrate them with real web authentication. Must
ponder.
2006-06-24: Bits of Debian work
Well, today turned out to mostly be a domestic day, doing laundry and
folding clothes and taking out garbage and cleaning up the kitchen. But I
did manage to get enough Debian work done that I don't feel as guilty.
A new gnubg package has been uploaded, I've fixed a few things in lintian
and we should be ready for a new upload there shortly, I'm nearly ready to
upload a new kerberos-configs, and I poked at a few other things.
I still need to give libpam-krb5 some quality time, and the krb5 package
could use an upload with fixes for the most recent bugs in the BTS, but at
least I'm not feeling like I'm abandoning Debian completely as much. I
could use a whole week to work on non-work things, and I'm not going to get
the chance until the end of the summer.
2006-06-25: Buffett on philanthropy
Most of you have probably already heard about Buffett's intended gift to
various foundations, most notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
It sounds wonderful to me; as much as I dislike the attitude and tactics
that Bill Gates has used at Microsoft, I've seen no reason to think his
charitable foundation is anything other than an unalloyed good thing.
This post, though, is more to get people to read the interview with Warren
Buffett in Fortune if you haven't already or if you didn't click through
to the second page of the article. I really respect Buffett's public
positions and statements, and that interview is full of great quotes about
philanthropy and inheritance.
This sort of thing makes me feel more optimistic about the future of the
world, and right now that's very welcome.
2006-06-26: frak 1.33
The code for reporting when a directory is changed to a symlink was calling
a function by the wrong name. Thanks to Quanah Gibson-Mount for the catch
and the analysis.
You can get the latest version from the
frak
distribution page.
2006-06-26: cvs2xhtml 1.10
Continuing the trend of weird backward-incompatible changes, the latest
version of cvs in Debian testing now includes a commitid in cvs log output.
Adjust the cvs log parser to add yet another case to deal with that. I'm
guessing that I'll probably have to add a few more for dead revisions down
the road.
I would just use Subversion for everything, but it's so convenient to
version scripts through their revision Id, and Subversion just doesn't do
that in a reasonable fashion. Feh.
You can get the latest version from my
web tools distribution
page.
2006-06-30: Vacation
Finally, for the first time since Baycon and for the first substantial
period since the beginning of April, I get to have some vacation. I'm out
all of next week, during which I'm going to watch the World Cup, read, and
possibly do a little bit of software development (but only if I feel like
it). So far, I've just been crashing... I'm very tired this evening, even
though all I did all day was travel.
Since I'm at my parents', eating and putting on weight will probably also
be involved, so I'll have to step up the exercising when I get back.
I'm almost caught up on reviews but not quite. I'm significantly behind a
100-book-per-year pace this year so far, unfortunately, but I'm trying not
to stress about it. It's an arbitrary goal anyway. June would have made
up for May a little, but I didn't get all the reviews written. Oh well.
Tomorrow I may start poking at the Debian Kerberos PAM module instead,
since I was really enjoying that last Tuesday before I went back to work on
remctl instead.
All posts