2012-11-02: Welcome, Planet Debian
As part of a discussion about something else on debian-project, it seemed
clear that people were interested in more than just Debian-relevant posts
on the Planet Debian aggregator. I'd
previously only pushed Debian-related posts there, but I asked explicitly
and people want the full feed. So this is the first untagged post going
there (and something of a test).
The difference, for Planet Debian readers, is that you'll get a lot more
book reviews (of non-technical books), and a smattering of software
announcements. You'll also get posts like the below whenever I buy more
books. I got into the habit of making haul posts from enjoying a friend's
version of that, and now I use them as a way of keeping track of what I've
already bought until I get around to putting stuff into a real book
database. (I'm currently leaning towards
Tellico, for what it's worth.) I'll
try to add at least a bit of commentary so that it won't just be a list of
books.
If I can get back into the habit, you'll also get regular postings of
photographs. I've been out of the habit for about a year, though, so
we'll see how that goes.
Anyway, a small haul:
Kevin Barry — Dark Lies the Island (mainstream)
J. Robert Lennon — Familiar (mainstream)
Ken & Jo Walton — GURPS: Celtic Myth (RPG)
This is notable because it's my first Indiespensible shipment.
Powell's Books, from which I buy nearly
all of my books, has a subscription club called
Indiespensible, which
sends a new novel, usually from independent presses, every six weeks.
I've been eyeing this for a long time and finally decided to go ahead and
try it for a while. I mostly read science fiction and fantasy, so this is
a good way to try to read more mainstream fiction, and since I know
absolutely nothing about what's good in mainstream fiction, something
curated is a good idea. I haven't cracked open either of the books yet,
but I quite enjoyed the chocolate toffee.
GURPS: Celtic Myth was because I discovered that there was a
role-playing supplement by one of my favorite authors, so that had to be
acquired, even if I'm not a GURPS player.
2012-11-05: WebAuth 4.3.3
So, funny story. And by funny, I mean "doh."
We had a production outage of our WebLogin servers a bit before I went on
vacation because the hardware load balancer died, and then when it came
back the load was so heavy that the WebLogin servers were overwhelmed with
connections. WebLogin, due to the way that it involves accepting an
Apache connection and then turning around and connecting back to itself to
talk to the WebKDC, has a tendency to get into overload deadlocks. Worse,
because the WebLogin script runs under FastCGI, when it deadlocks waiting
for Apache to reply to it, mod_fastcgi decides that the script isn't
responding and starts killing all the scripts. It's an obnoxious meltdown
scenario.
I want to find some way of getting around this (such as running WebLogin
via ngnix and running the WebKDC on another port), but in the short term
the best solution is to just increase MaxClients to handle more load. The
limitation there is the amount of memory on the servers, which was a
problem since they were built 32-bit (for historical reasons). So, this
weekend I started working on rebuilding them all 64-bit.
Imagine my surprise when I installed WebAuth and WebLogin on the
newly-built 64-bit system and it segfaulted. It turns out that when
allocating memory for a struct, it's good to allocate enough memory for
the whole struct, not just for a pointer to the struct. (This is exactly
the reason why I hate typedefs for structs in C, but in this case it was
XS code where I don't have a good alternative, and I didn't pay close
enough attention.)
So, lots of debugging later, along with a detour to set up comprehensive
valgrind testing of WebAuth (at least all the parts of it that aren't the
Apache modules), this release fixes one uninitialized memory error and one
memory allocation size error. The latter is theoretically exploitable,
although since it's inside Perl XS code with pretty sharply bounded
external inputs, it's going to be pretty complicated to figure out how to
exploit it and therefore I decided it didn't warrant an explicit advisory.
Obviously, anyone running earlier versions of mod_webkdc or WebLogin
(4.2.0 or later, sigh) should upgrade to this release.
You can get the latest release from the official WebAuth distribution site
or from my WebAuth distribution pages.
2012-11-18: Powell's anniversary haul
Powell's was holding an anniversary sale
and giving out free gift cards with a qualifying order, so it seemed like
a good idea to pick up a few books.
Ben Aaronovitch — Midnight Riot (sff)
Patricia Briggs — Alpha & Omega (sff)
Patricia Briggs — Moon Called (sff)
Mark Forster — Get Everything Done (non-fiction)
Lynn Galli — Wasted Heart (romance)
Sam Harris — Lying (non-fiction)
K.E. Lane — And Playing the Role of Herself
(romance)
Jack McDevitt — Firebird (sff)
Marshall Rosenberg — Nonviolent Communication
(non-fiction)
Deborah Tannen — The Argument Culture
(non-fiction)
Bill Willingham, et al. — Fables: Animal Farm (graphic
novel)
I'm not sure if the Forster will be worth the cost, but I've really liked
his other writing about time management, so I thought I'd take a chance on
it. I think the Tannen and the Rosenberg are on roughly the same topic,
but I arrived at them through different recommendation paths. I've been
feeling like reading about how to communicate lately.
The McDevitt novel is the latest in the Alex Benedict series. I'm only a
couple of books away from being caught up. I've gotten lots of positive
recommendations for Aaronovitch's series, so thought I'd get the first
one.
There's also a variety of random stuff, mostly on the Kindle, that I'd not
added to one of these posts, noted here mostly for my own records.
Alpha & Omega is a novella rather than a novel, which I grabbed
because I picked up and read Cry Wolf during vacation.
All posts