Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 40

How to train a cat for companionship

Some people with cats seem to regard them as a sort of mobile item of decor that occasionally deigns to be interacted with; they’re OK with aloofness. My wife and I, on the other hand, like to have cats who are genuinely companionable, follow us around when they’re not doing anything important like eating or sleeping, purr at the sight of us, and greet us at the door when we come home.

My wife and I had a cat like that for nearly twenty years. Sugar died in April, and we’ve been developing an understanding with a new cat for a bit over two weeks. We’re doing some the same things to establish trust with Zola that we did with Sugar. They seem to be working; Zola gets a little more present and interactive and nicer to us every day.

Accordingly, here are our rules for training a cat to be companionable. You may find some of these obvious, but I suspect that the ‘obvious’ set is widely variable between people, so they’re all worth writing down.

A general point is that cats respond as well as people do to (a) being treated affectionately, and (b) having a clear sense of what people expect from them. Kindness and consistent signaling make for a friendly and well-mannered cat.

1. Choose a breed or genetic line that is predisposed to be people-friendly.

Maine Coons are a good bet for this. I’ve read that Sphinxes are too, but a lot of people find hairless cats sufficiently weird that the choice wouldn’t work for them. Siameses are in my experience a particularly bad bet. In general be wary of purebred cats other than Coons, as they are likely to have been selected for breed traits that don’t include sociability; thus, your second best genetic bet after a Coon or Coon mix is probably a mongrel.

(Sugar we believed to be a shorthaired Coon mix. Zola is a purebred Coon or as near as makes no difference.)

2. Let the cat choose you

It helps a lot if the cat likes you on first sight and smell. My wife and I are strong believers in interviewing a lot of cats and paying close attention to which one is friendliest. A cat from a generally people-friendly breed that seems to like you right off is the best choice.

Note: if you’re so new with cats that you don’t know how to introduce yourself, offer it the back of your hand to sniff (moving slowly so as not to startle it). If it doesn’t back away after taking your scent, lightly stroke its head and back, paying close attention to how it reacts.

(Sugar chose us under unusual circumstances involving the death of her previous humans and the nasty stormy night we brought her home for what might have been a temporary stay. Zola chose us at the rescue center.)

3. Be kind from the beginning, and respect the new cat’s boundaries

If you chose a cat who is either generally twitchy and fearful or specifically nervous around you, you screwed up the previous steps and should start over. Otherwise, the cat should be OK with being gently touched and petted – but don’t try to love-bomb it right way. Let it get its bearings in your house and re-approach you. This will happen naturally at feeding times, if at no other.

Cats vary in the amount of time they take to orient themselves in a new environment and gain some confidence. Sugar was very extroverted and landed on her feet instantly once she got over being panicked by the bad circumstances under which we brought her home. Zola hid for about three hours before emerging to head-bump us. If it takes much longer than that you have the option of luring the cat out of hiding with food.

4. Know basic cat-speak.

Googling for “cat body language” will turn up good hits on basic cat kinesics. I’ll add here a couple of things I think are generally underemphasized.

One is that some human imitations of cat signals actually work pretty well. You can slow-blink at your cat to convey affection and reassurance. You can imitate a purring noise and the cat will interpret that correctly as a desire to be social with it. If your cat likes to rub its face on you to show affection and possessive feelings, you can rub your face on it right back to return the message. Sometimes you have to compensate for the differences in scale; I find, for example, that gently rubbing a cat’s forehead with the tip of my nose works well.

Cats are generally most receptive to being touched on the back and upper flanks, and on top of the head. Less so on the lower flanks and belly; it’s a sign of trust and relaxation when a belly touch doesn’t make them tense at least a little. Trust your intuition; the vulnerable zones on a cat are analogous to those on a human and should be treated with similar respect.

Cats like to be gently scratched around the sides and back of the neck, under the chin, and on the tops of their heads. These are the places they have trouble reaching when they groom themselves.

When moving your hand towards a cat to touch it, don’t rush. Slow and smooth is best. Stopping the approach motion for a moment just before contact is a way of asking permission that gives the cat a chance to politely decline, which will improve the quality of the interaction when you do make contact.

Even aloof cats often like to be touched if you negotiate with them properly. If you always give a cat the option to politely refuse contact, it will never have to do so emphatically with nipping or clawing. With Sugar and Zola I can count the number of times this has happened to me in twenty years on the fingers of one hand and still have fingers left over.

Mammalian body language for affection is very strongly conserved across phyletic lines, so trust your instincts.

5. Hand training.

Never, ever swat a cat with your hand; if you have to discipline it, yell at it loudly and immediately or spritz it with a squirt bottle. You want your cat to strongly associate human hands with petting and good things. If you do this, and always reward a cat for coming towards a waggling hand with gentle petting, you’ll be able to get it to follow you around with hand motions. If you get this really right, the cat will probably develop a habit of expressing affection by licking your hands.

Advanced hand training includes teaching the cat that when you repeatedly pat a chair or bedclothes it should jump up to where the hand is. Again, reward correct behavior with petting. Cats can catch on fast this way; Zola has already learned this response in only two weeks, though he’s not 100% reliable at it yet. That will come.

6. Positive reinforcement.

Negative reinforcement doesn’t work well on cats; they seem to have trouble connecting the aversive stimulus to the behavior you want them to avoid. This is why if you’re going to yell at your cat, or squirt-bottle it, you have to do that immediately – after even a second or two of delay they are unable to causally connect the punishment with the misbehavior.

Positive reinforcement works much better – and not just on housecats; people who train the big felines report the same thing. If you reward behaviors that you like, your cat will get the message. A cat that knows what you like and knows it can get positive attention reliably will be a secure and happy cat that holds its tail high; training by reward is good for its peace of mind as well as yours.

7. Do cats love?

Some people think cats are mercenary creatures who aren’t really capable of love but engage in affectionate behavior solely to get what they want from humans. I think that attitude is a sign of failure to notice that human “love” can be reductively analyzed that way with almost equal justice, but doing so is not helpful to being happy. So it is with cats.

You get into philosophical territory here: what is love, anyway? I think it is the condition in which some other being’s happiness becomes necessary to your own. Some cats behave as though the happiness of their humans is necessary to their own; Sugar was definitely one, and Zola shows clear signs of becoming another. Doubtless this is a recruitment of very old circuitry for pack bonding and rewarding parental investment that is common to all mammalian lineages.

I knew Sugar loved me, in whatever sense the verb is meaningful for either cats or humans, when she wrapped herself around my feet and rested her face on my instep while I programmed. Cats are less complicated than humans; if you treat them with kindness and can make them feel secure and happy, love generally follows.

Review: Unexpected Alliances

Unexpected Alliances (M.R. LaScola; Two Harbors Press) is, alas, a horrible example of why the absence of editorial gatekeepers in indie publishing can be a bad thing.

Here’s a clue: if you see nothing wrong with a near-future first-contact scene in which the commander of an armada of 30,000 starships many light years from Earth introduces herself as Nancy Hartley from the planet Ultron, you shouldn’t be writing SF.

The relatively short portion of the book I managed to read before I gave up

also featured talking dragons and 7-foot-tall nonhuman aliens who casually interbreed with humans. The prose reads like something a bright 9-year-old might write. It’s a sort of pile of glittery SF and fantasy fripperies quoted with absolutely no regard to whether they make any sense, or even any sense that they ought to make sense.

It’s a brave new world. Anyone can publish. Sometimes they shouldn’t.

Review: Soulminder

In Soulminder (Timothy Zahn; Open Road Integrated Media), an invented device called a “soul trap” can capture the personality and memories of a dying human in a form that can be restored into the person’s brain if the physical damage that killed them can be repaired. While the device is initially conceived as a device to save the lives of trauma patients and people undergoing dangerous surgery, the fun doesn’t really start until the discovery that under some circimstances the device can be used to body-swap.

While not one of the groundbreaking stars of SF, Timothy Zahn has produced solid and interesting work in the past. I quite enjoyed the four-book series that began with Night Train to Rigel. His earlier, related Blackcollar and Cobra sequences were not bad either. Zahn is intelligent and careful with his worldbuilding; though I don’t read Star Wars tie-ins, my impression from what I see on the shelves is that he’s writing the best of them these days.

This could have been a step up – a fine example of the kind of near-future extrapolative SF that changes just one thing and explores the consequences in a rigorous way. Alas, Soulminder reads like it was phoned in while the author was having a bad day. There are clever bits, but it’s a sour little grind of a book which illustrates the fact that, while characterization is not tremendously important in idea-as-hero SF, the author at least has to write characters you don’t actively dislike.

Everybody is brooding and angry and obsessive all the time, the protagonist’s backstory is purest melodrama, the one competent man is unpleasantly arrogant, and various mildly clashing idealisms seem curdled and unengaging. The resulting mess is not really redeemed by clever plotting, in part because it reads like a fixup collection of short-story-length episodes rather than an integrated novel.

I can’t recommend this book. There isn’t enough fun here.

Replacing freecode: a proposal

“Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…” Three days ago freecode.com abruptly shut down, claiming “low traffic”, but there has been enough public mourning since to make me pretty sure it fills a need that’s still there. There was nowhere else you could go that was quite so good for getting a cross-sectional view of what the open-source world is doing, independently of any given forge site or distro.

Web frameworks have gotten much more powerful since the original Freshmeat was built 17 years ago; today, I think building a replacement wouldn’t be a huge project. It is not, however, something I am willing to try to do alone. Whether or not this goes forward will depend on how many people are willing to step up and join me. I figure we need a team of about three core co-developers, at least one of whom needs to have some prior expertise at whatever framework we end up using.

In the remainder of this post I’m going to sketch a set of project goals, including both some trimming away of freshmeat/freecode features I thought were unnecessary and some new ideas to address problems in its design.

First, let’s be clear about the problem we’re solving. We want a central place where people can post project release announcements so other people can monitor and search release activity, which also serves as a searchable index of project metadata. The project’s main view is to be a timeline of recent release announcements.

Here are some project goals and constraints I think are important:

1. Avoid moderation overhead.

Freshmeat/freecode required that every project creations and release be pre-moderated by humans. This was a serious bottleneck, and may have been the site’s undoing by imposing staffing costs on the operators. We need to avoid this.

I propose that we can do so simply by having a “report as spam or garbled” link on each displayed announcement. There will still be some human overhead to process these, but experience with social media such as G+ that have this feature suggests that it scales reasonably well.

2. Open-source software only.

Freshmeat/freecode blurred its mission and complicated its job by accepting release announcements for proprietary projects. Let’s not do that.

3. A tool for remote-scripting operations

I hate sites that force me to do clicky-dances on a web interface when the information to be submitted would naturally fit on a job card to be processed by a client. Forge sites that don’t let me remote-script a release action are major culprits – they force me to do irritating hand-work every time I ship.

Freshmeat/freecode had a web-accessible JSON API, and I maintained a freshmeat-submit tool that spoke it. The new site needs to do likewise.

4. Bring back Trove

Free tags are great, and the new site should have them, but I don’t think they’re enough by themselves. I think we lost something very useful when freecode dropped the Trove taxonomy. (Admittedly I may be biased, since I was Trove’s original designer.) The new site should bring back Trove, and have tag folksonomy too, and should use tags as a feeder to the gradual extension of Trove.

5. Simplify, simplify, simplify

In my opinion, Freshmeat/freecode tried to do too much. The “heartbeat” feature, for example, always struck me as pretty useless; nowadays, especially, if I want to view stats on development activity I’ll go to Ohloh. I never saw any good reason to carry links to screenshots; selling the project’s niftiness is what the project’s website is for. There are other features that could have been pared away without loss.

The most important way to hold down complexity is to be careful to specify a clean, simple functional design. Let’s avoid the bells, whistles, and gongs this time.

6. Some thoughts about implementation and other issues.

I’m pretty sure I could get hosting space for the public site at Sunsite.

My #1 candidate for a framework to use is Django. Because Python, and the documentation suggests Django would be well matched to requirements. My mind is open to alternatives.

I’m thinking of this as ‘freshermeat’. We’ll need a better name.

If this sounds like a project you want to sign up for, so indicate in the comments on my blog or G+.

Why VA bought Slashdot

Jeff Covey has responded to the demise of reshmeat/freecode by reminiscing about his past at Freshmeat. He reports a rumor that VA bought Andover just because the CEO thought it would be cool to own Slashdot.

I set the record straight in a comment on the post. No, that’s not why it happened; Larry Augustin never would have made a business decision for a reason that flimsy. In fact, buying Slashdot was my idea, and I had a solid reason for proposing it. The rest of my comment explaining this follows.

I can supply a missing piece of the story. VA Linux’s purchase of Andover was my idea.

Here’s how it happened. It was just after the record-breaking IPO, and the U.S.’s crazy accounting rules more or less forced us to do an acquisition to maintain our valuation. There were four acquisition targets short-listed: Andover, SGI, SuSE, and a Linux service business I forget the name of that cratered spectacularly not long after. The other board members argued back and forth but were unable to reach a resolution

Up to that point I had been pretty quiet in the board meetings, keeping my mouth shut and my ears open. It was with considerable surprise that I realized that I remembered something basic that the other directors had forgotten – most mergers fail through cultural incompatibility between acquirer and acquiree. I’ve never been to business school, but I hear that anyone who does learns this early.

So I stood up and reminded everybody about the compatibility issue and made the case that our first acquisition needed to above all be an easy one. Then I said “At Linux conferences, think about which of these crews our people puppy-pile with on the beanbag chairs.” Light began to dawn on several faces. “The Slashdot guys. It has to be Andover, ” I said.

Silence. The king-shark VC on the board, Doug Leone, thought for a moment and said “There’s a lot of wisdom in that.” And so it was decided.

That is the only time I recall driving a major decision at VA, but it was enough to earn my stock options. Media businesses like Andover don’t deliver huge growth, but they’re reliable cash cows. Which turned out to be exactly what VA needed to survive the dot.com bust and eventually morph into GeekNet.

Review: the Human Reach novels

The Human Reach novels are a planned trilogy by John Lumpkin of which two books have so far been published: Through Struggle, The Stars (2011) and The Desert of Stars (2013. A third, The Passage of Stars, is planned.

These books bear comparison with Thomas Mays’s A Sword Into Darkness, previously reviewed here, in that they are military SF that works very hard at getting the tactics and technology of future space combat right, and leaned on the excellent Atomic Rockets website to do it. But the differences are as interesting as the similarities.

In the Human Reach novels, major nations on Earth have colonized the solar systems of many near stars through a network of artificial wormholes. As newly-fledged U.S. Space Force officer Neil Mercer reports for his first assignment, war is brewing between China and Japan for reasons no one understands. Though his ambition was to pilot dropships circumstances sidetrack him into military-intelligence work, for which he has an unexpected aptitude. Neil’s first assignment directly involves him in a mission which brings the U.S. into the war, but the strategic motives for his own country’s involvement are also mysterious.

Yes, there’s an answer, but revealing it would spoil some major plot points. Through the unusual move of making his protagonist an intelligence officer rather than a ship commander, the author focuses these books on the strategy of interstellar war and the dirty tricks waged by all sides out of sight of the space battles.

Space battles there are in plenty, however, and carefully thought out they are too. These books read rather as though they could have been based on an Attack Vector: Tactical or Squadron Strike campaign, and the designer of those games (A&D regular Ken Burnside) is credited in the acknowledgments.

As with A Sword Into Darkness, author John Lumpkin has put exceptional effort into designing his setting and making the details plausible. Lumpkin lacks Mays’s background of on-deck experience in real warships, so the military-culture stuff is not as crisply real – but Lumpkin makes up for that with a wider canvas that includes (for example) gritty sequences about insurgency operations on a conquered planet and deadly intrigues in an extraterrestrial banana republic.

This result is very enjoyable work, earning a place in the upper reaches of contemporary military SF and sure to appeal especially to wargamers and military-history buffs. Books like this and A Sword Into Darkness are pushing the state of the art, setting new and higher standards for verismilitude in the form. It’s a good thing to see.

UPDATE: The author says he plans The Passage of Stars for 2015, and that it probably won’t be the final book.

freecode-submit is dead – because freecode.com is

Well, that’s annoying. The freecode.com release-announcement site stopped accepting updates yesterday. The site says it shut down due to low traffic.

Accordingly, I’ve issued a final archival version of freecode-submit and shipped a version of shipper that no longer tries to do freecode notifications, issuing a complaint instead.

Had to revise the How to Become a Hacker, too. I used to advise newbs to watch that site for projects they might want to join. Can’t do that any more.

With this site gone, where can people go for a cross-sectional view of what open source is doing? Bummer….

Review: Shadow of the Storm

Shadow of the Storm (Martin J. Dougherty; Far Future Enterprises) is a tie-in novel set in the universe of the Traveller role-playing game. It’s military SF set against a troubled political background, with the Solomani Confederation facing off against the Third Imperium in a tense peace and the Confederation’s border worlds restive.

Lieutenant Simon Crowe wants to defend his nation against the Imperium, but the Confederation’s internal politics are so vicious that it’s sometime difficult to know who is friend and who is enemy. Decorated for heroism after the Battle of Pavel, he is beached after an incident in the Boötes War for thwarting a rogue political officer’s plan to slaughter troop transports that had surrendered.

But being restored to command isn’t necessarily an improvement. His new ship is a prototype, his crew is a collection of misfits, and they’re ordered onto patrol half-armed because the Confederation’s shortage of hulls has become acute. And rebellion is brewing…

The constraints of tie-in books are not conducive to great SF. The most one can reasonably expect of a work like this is that it will manage to be an entertaining read even if you’re not a fan of the property it’s attached to.

The author actually carries this off pretty well. The space battles don’t reach the SFnal quality level of the big one in my previous review subject A Sword into Darkness, but that’s because where Mays is a railgun engineer Dougherty is a martial artist; the action scenes of duel and personal combat in this book are actually better. They are grounded in an extensive knowledge of sword and empty-hand fighting and are very well done.

Old-time Traveller players like myself will, of course, find additional value in this book. The events take place during the period of the Classic Campaign and the Fifth Frontier War, as a rump Solomani Confederation schemes to retake the lost homeworld Terra while the Imperium is distracted by a larger war with the Zhodani.

In sum, this is a decent read even if you don’t know the Traveller background but just like military SF, with bonus goodness if you like the setting. I’m glad I read it.

Review: A Sword Into Darkness

A Sword Into Darkness (Thomas Mays; self-published) is better than I was expecting. There’s been a fair bit of buzz about it on G+ and elsewhere in the corners of the net I frequent; the buzz led me to expect a well-executed work of space opera and military SF that could stand comparison with (for example) John Ringo’s Live Free Or Die and its sequels. There’s a bit more here than that, as it turns out.

Make no mistake, it has got space battle. Oh, boy, has it got space battle. So well done and so physically plausible that almost the first thing I did after finishing this novel was to call up my friend Ken Burnside – author of the world’s best tabletop space-combat sims (including Saganami Island Tactical Simulator, the Honorverse game) and ask him “Ken, did you have a hand in this? Because [parts of] it smelled a lot like an Attack Vector Tactical game…”

“Atomic Rockets” Ken replied. Ken writes a lot of content for this site, which is an excellent resource for writers seeking to harden their SF. If you want to find out how to plot space battles that won’t make people who know physics and engineering wince, it’s where you go…and it was pretty clear that Mays did (which he has since confirmed to me).

Otherwise…characterization OK by the standards of space opera and idea-as-hero-SF (which is a lowish bar, but I’m fine with that – if you want elaborate involuted character studies, you know where to find them). Plotting competent. Prose better than one might expect, especially from a newish author.

A couple of virtues raise this above the level of midlist space opera. For one, the author is career Navy who has stood watches as a tactical officer and wrote his master’s thesis on railguns; he uses that expertise to add both psychological and technical verismilitude in unobtrusive but effective ways.

For another, some cliches of the form are deliberately averted; as one example, there are no larger-than-life omnicompetent heroes. I won’t spoilerize by ticking off all the other aversions, but a genre-savvy reader will notice and find they bring a certain freshness to the production.

Yet another is that Mays has managed to invent a reason for aliens to go to the colossal expense of invading Earth with sub-lightspeed starships that is both novel and plausible-seeming.

This is harder than it sounds. Want metals? Mine your own asteroid belt. Want volatiles? Scoop ‘em off comets or an ice moon or somewhere without a deep gravity well and obstreperous natives. Want energy? You have easy access to your home sun. Want slaves? Build robots. You can’t want our women, the orifices won’t fit and the pheromones are all wrong.

It’s really rather difficult to come up with a rational motive for interstellar invasion even if you have cheap FTL. If you don’t, the cost goes way up and the hackneyed old scenarios look even sillier. Nevertheless, Mays actually pulls this off; I won’t reveal how.

Though the novel ends as a self-contained story, there’s a clear setup for a sequel. I will definitely want to read it.

Review: The Mandala

The Mandala (Timothy R. O’Neill, Publish Green) is an airport thriller with an SF premise. In the badlands of northern Montana there appears something that produces gravitational pulses powerful enough to perturb satellite orbits, and drives people who wander too near it insane. Satellite imagery reveals a vast, intricate pattern of subtle changes in the ground surrounding the site, with no correlates at all from ground level. Something about it has spooked the Russians enough that there are rumblings of nuclear threat. Can the enigma be solved before it triggers atomic apocalypse..or worse?

Many tropes of the airport thriller genre duly check in – an alphabet soup of secret government agencies, a maverick hero with a troubled past, ancient conspiracies, a race against time to uncover a world-shattering secret.

The SF premise works OK, but the real reason to bother with this one is unexpected: the dialogue is brilliant and funny! The characters do not speak in the usual bureaucratese or action-hero grunting; they’re as nervously, mordantly witty as escapees from a Noel Coward play.

This bit of style seemed as incongruous as a camouflage pattern in day-glo colors at first, but I got used to it and spent much of the rest of the book periodically succumbing to did-he-really-write-that giggles, occasionally regaling my wife with the choicest bits. And when was the last time you read an airport thriller with laugh-out-loud lines?