2020-01-01: 2019 Book Reading in Review
In 2019, I finished and reviewed 40 books, the same as in 2018.
Technically, I read two more books than 2018, since I've finished two
books (one just before midnight) that I've not yet reviewed, but I'll
stick with counting only those books for which I've published a review.
I did a little bit better this year in spreading my reading out over the
year instead of only reading on vacation. Finding time to write reviews
was another matter; apologies for the flood of catch-up reviews in the
last week of December.
I met both of my reading goals for last year — maintaining my current
reading pace and catching up on award winners and nominees — but only
barely in both cases. 2020 will bring schedule and life changes for me,
and one of my goals is to carve out more room for daily reading.
I have 10 out of 10 ratings to two books this year, one fiction and one
non-fiction. The novel was Arkady Martine's exceptional debut
A Memory Called
Empire, which is one of the best science fiction novels I've read. It's
populated with a fully imagined society, wonderful characters, political
maneuvering, and a thoughtful portrayal of the cultural impact of empire
and colonialism. I can hardly wait for the sequel.
The non-fiction book was On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger, a brilliant piece of
investigative journalism that looks at the working conditions of the
modern American working class through the lens of an Amazon warehouse job,
a call center, and a McDonald's. If you want to understand how work and
life feels to the people taking the brunt of the day-to-day work in the
United States, I cannot recommend it highly enough. These jobs are not
what they were ten or twenty years ago, and the differences may not be
what you expect.
The novels that received 9 out of 10 ratins from me in 2019 were
The Calculating
Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, and
The Shell Seekers by
Rosamunde Pilcher. Kowal's novel is the best fictional portrayal of
anxiety that I've ever read (with bonus alternate history space programs!)
and fully deserves its Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Pilcher's novel is
outside of my normal genres, a generational saga with family drama and
some romance. It was a very satisfying vacation book, a long, sprawling
drama that one can settle into and be assured that the characters will
find a way to do the right thing.
On the non-fiction side, I gave a 9 out of 10 rating to
Bad Blood, John
Carreyou's almost-unbelievable story of the rise and fall of Theranos, the
blood testing company that reached a $10 billion valuation without ever
having a working product. And, to close out the year, I gave a 9 out of
10 rating to Benjamin Dreyer's
Dreyer's English, a
collection of advice on the English language from a copy editor. If you
love reading books about punctuation trivia or grammatical geeking, seek
this one out.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
2020-01-04: podlators 4.14
podlators provides the Pod::Man and Pod::Text conversion modules for
Perl. This release is a minor bug-fix release, mostly correcting a test
suite problem with old versions of Pod::Simple. The user-visible change
is to document that parse_lines and parse_string_document
expect raw bytes, not decoded characters.
The other change in this release is internal. I finally finished
refactoring the test suite, so now all parts of the test suite use
separate snippet files and modern coding style, so it should be more
maintainable in the future.
You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the
podlators distribution page.
2020-01-05: Term::ANSIColor 5.00
Term::ANSIColor is the core Perl module that provides functions to change
text attributes using ECMA-048 escape sequences.
This release adds support for true color (24-bit color), with which I was
not previously familiar but which turns out to be widely supported,
including by xterm (which calls it direct-color). The new color
attributes are in the form rNNNgNNNbNNN and on_rNNNgNNNbNNN
and work like the existing color attributes. There is no constant
support for somewhat obvious logistical reasons, so they're supported only
in the function interface. Thanks to Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯 for the initial
patch and drawing true color to my attention.
Color aliases now can expand to more than one attribute. This means that
you can do things like:
coloralias('warning', 'black', 'on_bright_red');
and have the expected thing happen. I took advantage of this to clean up
the alias handling in general, so you can also now define aliases in terms
of other aliases (although the second-level alias doesn't change when the
first-level alias changes). The alias fixes are based on work by Yanick
Champoux.
Also in this release are a few minor cleanups and documentation
improvements.
Finally, this release drops support for Perl 5.6. The minimum supported
version is now Perl 5.8. Testing on 5.6 is spotty and Travis-CI doesn't
support it, so I don't think I can truly claim it's supported any more.
You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the
Term::ANSIColor distribution page.
2020-01-05: rra-c-util 8.1
rra-c-util is my collection of utility code that I use in my various other
software packages (mostly, but not only, C).
I now forget what I was reading, but someone on-line made a side reference
to formatting code with clang-format, which is how I discovered that it
exists. I have become a big fan of automated code reformatting, mostly
via very positive experiences with Python's
black and Rust's
rustfmt. (I also use
perltidy for my Perl code, but
I'm not as fond of it; it's a little too aggressive and it changes how it
formats code from version to version.) They never format things in quite
the way that I want, but some amount of inelegant formatting is worth it
for not having to think about or manually fix code formatting or argue
with someone else about it.
So, this afternoon I spent some time playing with clang-format and got it
working well enough. For those who are curious, here's the configuration
file that I ended up with:
Language: Cpp
BasedOnStyle: LLVM
AlignConsecutiveMacros: true
AlignEscapedNewlines: Left
AlwaysBreakAfterReturnType: AllDefinitions
BreakBeforeBinaryOperators: NonAssignment
BreakBeforeBraces: WebKit
ColumnLimit: 79
IndentPPDirectives: AfterHash
IndentWidth: 4
IndentWrappedFunctionNames: false
MaxEmptyLinesToKeep: 2
SpaceAfterCStyleCast: true
This fairly closely matches my personal style, and the few differences are
minor enough that I'm happy to change. The biggest decision that I'm not
fond of is how to format array initializers that are longer than a single
line, and clang-format's tendency to move __attribute__ annotations
onto the same line as the end of the function arguments in function
declarations.
I had some trouble with __attribute__ annotations on function
definitions, but then found that moving the annotation to before the
function return value made the right thing happen, so I'm now content
there.
I did have to add some comments to disable formatting in various places
where I lined related code up into columns, but that's normal for code
formatting tools and I don't mind the minor overhead.
This release of rra-c-util reformats all of the code with clang-format
(version 10 required since one of the options above is only in the latest
version). It also includes the changes to my Perl utility code to drop
support for Perl 5.6, since I dropped that in my last two hold-out Perl
packages, and some other minor fixes.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2020-01-07: C TAP Harness 4.6
C TAP Harness is my test framework for C software packages.
This release is mostly a release for my own convenience to pick up the
reformatting of the code using clang-format, as mentioned in my previous
release of rra-c-util. There are no other user-visible changes in this
release.
I did do one more bit of housekeeping, namely added proper valgrind
testing support to the test infrastructure. I now run the test suite
under valgrind as part of the release process to look for any memory leaks
or other errors in the harness or in the C TAP library.
The test suite for this package is written entirely in shell (with some C
helpers), and I'm now regretting that. The original goal was to make this
package maximally portable, but I ended up adding Perl tests anyway to
test the POD source for the manual pages, and then to test a few other
things, and now the test suite effectively depends on Perl and could have
from the start. At some point, I'll probably rewrite the test machinery
in Perl, which will make it far more maintainable and easier to read.
I think I've now finally learned my lesson for new packages: Trying to do
things in shell for portability isn't worth it. As soon as any bit of
code becomes non-trivial, and possibly before then, switch to a more
maintainable programming language with better primitives and library
support.
You can get the latest release from the
C TAP Harness distribution page.
2020-01-08: DocKnot 3.02
DocKnot is my set of tools for generating package documentation and
releases. The long-term goal is for it to subsume the various tools and
ad hoc scripts that I use to manage my free software releases and web
site.
This release includes various improvements to docknot dist for
generating a new distribution tarball: xz-compressed tarballs are created
automatically if necessary, docknot dist now checks that the
distribution tarball contains all of the expected files, and it correctly
handles cleaning the staging directory when regenerating distribution
tarballs. This release also removes make warnings when testing C++
builds since my current Autoconf machinery in
rra-c-util doesn't properly exclude
options that aren't supported by C++
This release also adds support for the No Maintenance Intended badge for
orphaned software in the Markdown README file, and properly skips a test
on Windows that requires tar.
With this release, the check-dist script on my
scripts page is now obsolete, since its
functionality has been incorporated into DocKnot. That script will remain
available from my page, but I won't be updating it further.
You can get the latest release from CPAN or the
DocKnot distribution page. I've also
uploaded Debian packages to my personal
repository. (I'm still not ready to upload this to Debian proper since I
want to make another major backwards-incompatible change first.)
2020-01-13: New year's haul
Accumulated book purchases for the past couple of months. A rather
eclectic mix of stuff.
Becky Albertalli — Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (young adult)
Ted Chiang — Exhalation (sff collection)
Tressie McMillan Cottom — Thick (nonfiction)
Julie E. Czerneda — This Gulf of Time and Stars (sff)
Katharine Duckett — Miranda in Milan (sff)
Sarah Gailey — Magic for Liars (sff)
Carol Ives Gilman — Halfway Human (sff)
Rachel Hartman — Seraphina (sff)
Isuna Hasekura — Spice and Wolf, Volume 1 (sff)
Elizabeth Lim — Spin the Dawn (sff)
Sam J. Miller — Blackfish City (sff)
Tamsyn Muir — Gideon the Ninth (sff)
Sylvain Neuvel — The Test (sff)
K.J. Parker — Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (sff)
Caroline Criado Perez — Invisible Women (nonfiction)
Delia Sherman — The Porcelain Dove (sff)
Connie Willis — All About Emily (sff)
Several sales on books that I wanted to read for various reasons, several
recommendations, one book in an ongoing series, and one earlier book in a
series that I want to read.
We'll see if, in 2020, I can come closer to reading all the books that I
buy in roughly the same year in which I buy them.
2020-01-17: Term::ANSIColor 5.01
This is the module included in Perl core that provides support for ANSI
color escape sequences.
This release adds support for the NO_COLOR
environment variable (thanks, Andrea Telatin) and fixes an error in the
example of uncolor() in the documentation (thanks, Joe Smith). It also
documents that color aliases are expanded during alias definition, so
while you can define an alias in terms of another alias, they don't remain
linked during future changes.
You can get the latest release from CPAN or from the
Term::ANSIColor distribution page.
2020-01-19: DocKnot 3.03
DocKnot is the software that I use to generate package documentation and
web pages, and increasingly to generate release tarballs.
The main change in this release is to use IO::Uncompress::Gunzip and
IO::Compress::Xz to generate a missing xz tarball when needed, instead of
forking external programs (which causes all sorts of portability issues).
Thanks to Slaven Rezić for the testing and report.
This release adds two new badges to README.md files: a version badge for
CPAN packages pushed to GitHub, and a Debian version badge for packages
with a corresponding Debian package.
This release also makes the tarball checking done as part of the release
process (to ensure all files are properly included in the release) a bit
more flexible by adding a distribution/ignore metadata setting containing
a list of regular expressions matching files to ignore for checking
purposes.
Finally, this release fixes a bug that leaked $@ modifications to
the caller of App::DocKnot::Config.
You can get the latest version from the DocKnot distribution page.
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