Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 29

I have been nominated for a John W. Campbell Award

Last Sunday I was informed by email that I have been nominated for the 2015 John W. Campbell award for best new science-fiction writer. I was also asked not to reveal this in public until 4 April.

This is a shame.. I had a really elaborate April Fool’s joke planned where I was going to announce my nomination in the style of a U.S. presidential campaign launch. Lots of talk about a 50-state strategy and my hopes of appealing to swing voters disaffected with both the SJW and Evil League of Evil extremists, invented polling results, and nine yards of political bafflegab.

The plan was to write it so over-the-top that everyone would go “Oh, ha ha, great AFJ but you can’t fool us”…and then, three days later, the other shoe drops. Alas, I checked in with the organizers and they squelched the idea.

It is, of course, a considerable honor to be nominated, and one I am somewhat doubtful I actually deserve. But after considering the ramifications, I have decided not to decline the nomination, but rather to leave the decision on the merits up to the voters.

I make this choice because, even if I myself doubt that my single story is more than competent midlist work, and I want no part of the messy tribal politics in which I seem to have become partly swept up, there is something I don’t mind representing and giving people the opportunity to vote for.

That something is the proud tradition of classic SF, the Golden Age good stuff and its descendants today. It may be that I am among the least and humblest of those descendants, but I think both the virtues and the faults of Sucker Punch demonstrate vividly where I come from and how much that tradition has informed who I am as a writer and a human being.

If you choose to vote for Sucker Punch as a work which, individually flawed as it may be, upholds that tradition and carries it forward, that will make me happy and proud.

My Gitorious projects have moved.

Gitorious – which I preferred to GitHub for being totally open-source – is shutting down sometime in May. I had no fewer than 26 projects on there, including reposurgeon, cvs-fast-import, doclifter, and INTERCAL.

Now they’ve moved. This won’t affect most of my users, as the web pages and distribution tarballs are still in their accustomed locations at catb.org. If you’re a committer on any of these Gitirious repos, of course, the move actually matters.

Temporarily the repositories are on thyrsus.com; here’s the entire list. They may not stay there, but moving them to thyrsus.com was 90% of the work of moving them anywhere else and now I can consider options at my leisure.

On the duties of a geek-cred certification authority

Earlier today I was in an email exchange with a Tier 1 tech support guy at a hardware vendor who makes multiport serial boards. I had had a question in as to whether a particular board supported the Linux TIOCMIWAIT ioctl. Tier 1 guy referred the question to an engineer in their Linux development group, and Tier 1’s reply to me happened to include his email chain with the engineer.

The engineer wrote to Tier 1 “Is that Eric Raymond ‘ESR’? He’s a big deal in open-source circles.” This made me smile, because when I get made that way it usually means the engineer’s going to work rather harder to make me happy than he would for some random. This is helpful to get my work done!

But there is a duty which is the flip side of that privilege, and that’s what I’m here to write about today. Because if you are reading this at all, your odds of becoming a geek-cred certification authority someday are higher than average, and if that happens, it’s better if you consciously understand what you ought to be doing.

A few hours later my friend and A&D regular Ken Burnside called me to tell me that he was thinking about coming east to Balticon on Memorial Day, and of a clever plan. He has a friend who is local to Baltimore, a painfully shy introvert who he nevertheless thinks he might be able to lure to the convention to do some things with us.

The friend in question has been a major illustrator of SF games for more than thirty years. Because he’s so shy I’m not going to blow his cover, but I could name any one of several iconic illustrations that every science-fiction gamer has seen and you’d say, if you are one yourself, “Wow! That guy?” and want to shake his hand.

In addition, he runs an incredibly fact-dense website about some topics with huge appeal to SF fans and gamers, really well and professionally done with cites to real science and the actual mathematics. As hard-core geekiness goes it really doesn’t get better than this. He has one of the most interesting feeds on G+, too.

The guy is pretty reclusive. No, not his mother’s basement, but he doesn’t get out much. I’ve been thinking I wanted to meet him for a while, but Ken’s proposal crystallized this into a mission. I want to go to Balticon and befriend this guy and hang out with him, only partly because it’d be fun for me.

As much or more, I want to do it more because it’d be fun for him. I mean, how much validation does a guy like that ever get? Super-bright, shy as all hell, few peers anywhere – I suspect it would be a major event of his year to have “ESR” be personally nice to him, and I want to give him that. He’s more than earned it.

I think people like this guy are more important than they seem. It’s easy to dismiss SF games as a frivolity, but by helping the rest of us dream bigger, brighter, more wonderful futures – and doing it with rigor – they help bring those futures into being.

Really, what good is it to be a geek cred certification authority if you don’t use it to befriend and encourage and support people like this? Maybe, I can hope, I’ll help him feel a bit more confident. Reassure him that the recondite stuff he does is really valuable and that someone he respects cares about it and he should keep doing it. I’d like it if he walked away feeling a little taller because “ESR” treated him as a peer.

If you ever become a geek cred certification authority yourself (or even just a famous alpha hacker), I hope you will understand that this is part of your job. It’s the duty that goes with the privilege of being recognized by Tier 3 engineers. There will be people out there doing wonderful things, in software and outside it, for whom you will be one of the few sources of validation that matter. Actually providing that validation is a service to your civilization and the future; it helps keep their creativity flowing.

(Usually I post links to my blog from G+. I’m not going to link this one until after Balticon…)

Remembering Terry Pratchett

I think Terry Pratchett’s death finally hit home for me today. I’ve been kind of numb about it before now, but today I learned abut this proposal for GNU Terry Pratchett. And as I was commenting about it on G+ I found myself crying.

Here’s a very slightly improved version of what I said on G+. I don’t think I knew Terry well enough to give him the tribute he really deserved, so this will have to do.

What – you think Terry would want us to increase the clacks overhead on his behalf? No, no; I don’t claim to have been a really close friend of his, but I knew him for enough years and through enough conversation to object that that wasn’t like him at all.

IMO, the proper tribute is to keep his name not in excess and useless reply headers but in our hearts, thoughts, and actions.

Remember how human he was. How his comedy mellowed and broadened into deep wisdom. How he laughed at humanity’s foibles without descending into bitterness. Everything he wrote celebrated intelligence and kindness. So should we.

Fuck, I’m tearing up. Dammit, I miss him. It sucks that I’ll never get to teach him pistol 102. I will remember to the end of my life the way that his reserve cracked a little when I gave him his “hacker” ribbon at Penguicon 2003 – how the child who’d been told he couldn’t be a programmer because he was “no good at maths” felt on finally knowing, all the way down, that we accepted him as one of our own.

Because Terry loved us. He loved everybody, most of the time, but he loved the people of the clacks especially. We were one of his roads not taken, and he (rightly!) saw himself in our earnestness and intelligence and introversion and determined naivete and skewed sense of humor and urge to tinker. It mattered to him that we loved him, and in the unlikely event there’s an afterlife it will matter to him still.

So don’t forget Terry, not ever. Because if we showed him what he could have been, he showed us what we can be. Wiser. Funnier. Unafraid of hard truths, but gentle in our use of them. To remember him as he deserves, become better than you are.

The Great Beast is armored!

All my readers should be aware of the Rowhammer attack by now.

It gives me great pleasure to report that thanks to our foresight in specifying ECC memory for the design, the Great Beast of Malvern has armor of proof against this attack. The proof being over a thousand runs of the Rowhammer test.

Thank you, everyone who threw money into the Beast’s build budget. If y’all hadn’t been so generous, the build team might have had to make compromises. One of the most likely items to be cut would have been ECC…because registered ECC DRAM at the Beast’s speeds is so freaking expensive that the memory was about a third of the entire build budget. And now we’d have a vulnerable machine.

As it is, the Beast roars in triumph over the Rowhammer.

Oh, and what I’m currently doing with the Beast? Why, I’m repairing the very fabric of time..itself! Explanation to follow, probably early next week.

Newly published: Introduction to Time Service

I’ve published a background paper on precise clocks, time service, and NTP. It is Introduction to Time Service and is meant to be read as a companion to (or before) the GPSD Time Service HOWTO.

Comments, critiques, and suggestions for additions will be welcome.

Why I won’t mourn Mozilla

An incredibly shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status, says Computerworld, and reports their user market share at 10% and dropping. It doesn’t look good for the Mozilla Foundation – especially not with so much of their funding coming from Google which of course has its own browser to push.

I wish I could feel sadder about this. I was there at the beginning, of course – the day Netscape open-sourced the code that would become Mozilla and later Firefox was the shot heard ’round the world of the open source revolution, and the event that threw The Cathedral and the Bazaar into the limelight. It should be a tragedy – personally, for me – that the project is circling the drain.

Instead, all I can think is “They brought the fate they deserved on themselves.” Because principles matter – and in 2014 the Mozilla Foundation abandoned and betrayed one of the core covenants of open source.

I refer, of course, to the Foundation’s disgraceful failure to defend its newly promoted Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich against a political mob.

One of the central values of the hacker culture from which Mozilla sprang is that you are to be judged by the quality of your work alone. We aspire to be a pure meritocracy, casting aside irrelevancies of race, sex, nationality, and of political and sexual preferences.

Brendan Eich lived those values. Though he was excoriated for donating to California Proposition 8, it was never even claimed – let alone established – that he judged gay hackers on the Firefox project by anything but their code.

Another central value of the hacker culture, intertwined with judgment only by the work, is free expression – the defense of people holding and expressing unpopular opinions. It must be this way, because suppression of dissent prevents us from discovering and acknowledging that our beliefs do not align with reality. That hinders the work.

When Brendan Eich was attacked, the correct response of the Mozilla Foundation from within hacker and open-source values would have been, at minimum “His off-the-job politics are none of our business.” Ideally, it would have continued with an active defense of Eich’s right to hold and express unpopular opinions, including by donating to the causes of his choice.

That’s not what happened. Instead, the Foundation truckled to that political mob, putting Eich under enough pressure that he felt he had no alternative but to resign. By failing to defend and support Eich, the Mozilla Foundation wronged a man who had every right to expect that he, too, would be judged by his work alone.

There, are of course, also technological factors in the decline of Mozilla – an aging codebase and failure to rapidly deploy to mobile devices are two of the more obvious. But in any market-share battle, hearts and minds matter too. It’s a significant advantage to be universally thought of as the good guys.

The Mozilla Foundation threw that away. They abandoned the hacker way and trashed their own legitimacy. It was a completely unforced error.

That is why I can only think, today, that they brought their end on themselves. And hope that it serves as a hard lesson: to thrive you must, indeed judge by the work alone.

How not to botch an interview

I just dealt with an attempt to interview me by email that checked off pretty nearly every possible mistake in the form. As a public service, I now reproduce the advice I gave after bailing out halfway through the list of questions.

Asking your subject questions you should already have known the answers to in order to be qualified to do the interview is very irritating. When you do that, expect your subject to be reluctant to respond at all.

Do your homework first, then come back with questions that go beyond what the subject has revealed in his or her written work. Try to make the questions interesting and specific, not vague and general.

A good heuristic to apply before writing down each question is: how many times do I estimate the subject will have been asked this before? The likelihood that the subject will be unspeakably bored by having to repeat him or herself rises with that number. If your estimate is in double digits, discard the question.

Also, when presenting a numbered or bulleted list of questions, it’s bad form to bundle many divergent sub-questions under what is nominally a single question. It comes off as lazy and scattershot.

If you ask two dozen open-ended questions that properly require essay-length answers, you are not being respectful of the value of your subject’s time. Sharper, more focused questions to which you can expect shorter answers are better.

As an interviewer, you must put as much time and thought into making the interview experience thought-provoking for your subject as you do into making it interesting for your readers. If you do not do this, you have no grounds for complaint when your subject’s responses are curt and boring.

You botched this attempt rather badly, I’m afraid. Think carefully about these tips; they will help you improve your performance.

Leonard Nimoy: the first star geek

Leonard Nimoy, the man who played Spock, died yesterday.

There have been some surprisingly sensitive eulogies for him in the mainstream press, but they all merely skirted the edges of what may have been his most important contribution to popular culture: he made braininess sexy.

Journalists looking back at his life correctly note that despite James T. Kirk’s alpha-male swagger, Spock was the character that made women sigh. But they miss the full significance of this, a significance not easy to see because we live within the consequences of Nimoy’s achievement. He was the first star geek, a role model not just for Trek fans but for generations of bright kids after him.

If you are, like many of my readers, a fan of classic SF, ask yourself this: you had brainy heroes aplenty in your books (and rare that was outside of SF in those days) but who was the first one to be a live presence in media SF where he could influence the mundanes in a way print SF could not? That’s right; Spock. Leonard Nimoy’s methodical self-projection.

Nimoy made space in popular culture for intelligence as a positive quality in a way not seen so charismatically since perhaps as far back as Sherlock Holmes. By doing so, he paved the way for the post-Star-Wars boom in science fiction – and with it the gradual emergence of a relatively self-confident subculture of bright, imaginative people who in the 1990s would begin to label themselves ‘geeks’. And who, whether Trek fans or not, would half-consciously see him as a role model and universally mourn his passing.

Fast forward to 2015: Benedict Cumberbatch, today’s it guy for the thinking woman, could not have been without Nimoy. Indeed, that voice; those cheekbones; one wonders if he understands the debt he owes, and who he sometimes channels.

The historical emergence of geek culture, especially in its manifestation as the tribe of hackers, is one of my long-running themes on this blog. But until yesterday I, too, took Leonard Nimoy more for granted as a part of that process than perhaps I should have. As so often happens, his death puts his life in perspective.

Thank you, Leonard Nimoy, for making Spock so compelling. We already miss you. We mourn you – and, in that mourning, realize a little more about who we are and how very much we owe you.

Beware cut-price Korean monitors!

There have been a flood of big, cheap monitors (2560×1440 and up) becoming available on TigerDirect and other similar sites recently. But I’m here to tell you that these should come with warning labels, and explain why.

I’ve had some dolorous experiences with the no-name pair of big flatscreens I bought back in 2013 – the things called Aurias that I described in The Agony, the Ectasy, the Dual Monitors. Very recently I finally got both to finally work with enough stability that I’m sure I’ll be keeping them for a while.

But the troubleshooting process was arduous. Along the way I learned some important things, mainly because two friends who are unusually capable hardware troubleshooters actually took the suckers apart in my presence and explained things about the internals and the surrounding market.

Here are some of the things I learned…

The huge bargain monitors are usually factory seconds from Samsung or other name-brand vendors being resold by chop shops, pushed out the door with cheapest possible auxiliary parts surrounding the display.

One reason this gray market exists is because of the excruciatingly high standards for “medical glass” – very large, very high-performance monitors used for radiography and CAT scans and the like. These markets will not tolerate even a single stuck pixel or color even slightly off. Factory seconds of these are quite good enough for ordinary mortals but can’t be sold under the manufacturer’s brand (for fear of dilution, I gather).

What you get, then, is what I saw in my Aurias – spectacularly good displays surrounded by shoddy driver electronics. Power supplies are a particular bad spot: suspect this if your monitor develops a fast flicker but the display is undistorted. This happened to me twice. Both power supplies had to be replaced.

Remember the bogus industrial-espionage electrolytic fluid from the Great Capacitor Plague of a decade ago, the stuff that made electrolytic capacitor cans literally blow their tops? Well, there are barrels of that shit still out there and if you buy a huge cheap Korean monitor, just guess what might be in the trim capacitors in your power supply!

These things get stored (or possibly shipped) in environments so humid that the condensation can do serious water damage to the PCBs. One of mine eventually went tits-up, after the power-supply replacement, because conductive crud was shorting some leads on the mini-PCB backing the control buttons. Cleaning the crud off with a toothbrush solved the problem.

I got lucky twice. First, one of my hardware troubleshooters (Wendell Wilson, the TekSyndicate guy who built the Great Beast) was experienced enough to diagnose the power-supply issue and had the right connections in Korea to order replacements for me. Second, a local friend (Phil Salkie) physically disassembled the one with water damage, recognized that problem, and knew how to deal. (I’m now wondering if that whitish crud was condensed sea salt. it was conductive enough…)

Most of you won’t have those resources. Buy with care, and be sure about your vendor’s return policy before you do.