
When I was young I read quite a bit. At some point, probably because of the well-meaning comments and encouragement of adults, I took on reading and books as a kind of identity. Because of that, I made an unwise jump; concieving literature as a two dimensional progression from works for children to works for adults (lets say that's the vertical dimension) and also from early works to modernism to post-modernism (obviously that's horizontal), I wanted to go up and to the right as far and fast as I could. I went quickly from Harry Potter to Nabokov, House of Leaves, and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, not Tarzan) and intentionally avoided the classics and especially things I saw as pastoral or "Victorian". I hope you can imagine what I was missing. I think I could feel it at the time, the feeling of being a bit lost and having all of the landmarks around you gesturing toward something you don't know, like Marco Polo wandering through Beijing and seeing monuments to he-didn't-know-what. On top of that, I had a confused disdain for the stuff I didn't know.

One of the most re-occuring monuments I found, especially when I started reading Umberto Eco and Borges, was to Robert Louis Stevenson. By the time I went to college I dropped a lot of my hangups and started filling in the gaps in my reading. I read and re-read Treasure Island, then Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In one of his documented lectures, Nabokov said Jekyll and Hyde was like wine with its overtones and sourness, but also its hidden threat and depth of implication. Kidnapped sits between the swashbuckling, bald-faced menace of Treasure Island and the wet alleys and psyche-plumbing of Jekyll and Hyde. Structurally, its more straight-forward than either of those works but the themes end up being more complex because of the tension between the dual genres whose conventions it must fit - a book for boys and a historical novel - and the ambiguity of the events and characters morally and politically.

The protagonist must and does, by genre convention, fit the same mold as the protagonist of Treasure Island. They are both young man with relatively average means whose fathers die and, in the course of their socially acceptable and dignified progression from boy to man that this precipitates, and even helped on by similarly civil and above-board citizens, get sidetracked by adventure. The fulfillment of the adventure doesn't only assure their place in the world, but also solidifies their character. The differences between David (Kidnapped) and Jim (Treasure Island) are representative of many of the differences of the novels themselves. David's adventure is almost entirely out of his control and he is forced to get his hands dirty a lot more than Jim does. They both serve as cabin-boys for a time, but David comes into the role because one of the mates kills the old one. The society that David inhabits is less black-and-white than Jim's; the adults are flawed and David has to reconcile them as complete beings even when they do him harm or are outright villains. The book carries the ambiguity to the end, with David implicated in murder and helping his dearest friend - a rebel and wanted man - escape to France, even though it fulfills its duty to restore the protagonist to his rightful social position after having put him through so many ordeals.

One part that sticks out to me, since it caused a memory itch that I still haven't scratched: at the beginning of the story, David is being sent off by Mr. Campbell, a friend of his father's and a minister. Mr. Campbell is one of the only morally un-ambiguous characters in the characters, but in a way one of the strangest. He tells David about his so-far-unknown aristocratic lineage and kicks off his journey, but gives him three gifts: a little bit of cash, a recipe for a healing tonic, and a Bible. The way that Mr. Campbell describes the gifts is one of the poetic highlights of the book, so I'll set it here as a temptation to read the whole thing:

```
The first, which is round, will likely please ye best at the first off-go;
but, O Davie, laddie, it’s but a drop of water in the sea; it’ll help you
but a step, and vanish like the morning. The second, which is flat and
square and written upon, will stand by you through life, like a good staff
for the road, and a good pillow to your head in sickness. And as for the
last, which is cubical, that’ll see you, it’s my prayerful wish, into a better land.”
```

This sticks with me because its beautiful (man! I have to go on about this parenthetically for a second: first the set of three always works like a spell, but the sort of mystical association of each item with shapes, like its a riddle or something, makes the items feel so much more important than they are. The mixture of the actions and metaphorical traits that he ascribes to each thing sets up this ramp of importance, faithfulness, and activity of each thing - the money will vanish, the recipe will stand by, and the Bible will guide you), but also because nothing is ever to my recollection mentioned again in the entire story. David gets sick multiple times and never uses the recipe nor does he ever consult his Bible. They *might* be implied to be stolen when he gets Kidnapped, but the crew of the brig onto which he is taken eventually give him back his money so why not also his other things? It might also be an intentional inversion of Mr. Campbell's hierarchy of the things' importances. Finally, the recipe gave me a little memory spasm. We're given the text of the recipe and, I can't put my finger on it, but I feel like its an homage to something, maybe even a trope in itself? D'Artagnan recieves a similar recipe from his mother when he leaves home for Paris, but I feel like there is something else that I'm forgetting to remember. Did Don Quixote have a nearly magic health potion recipe? In any case, David never makes the recipe and certainly never benefits from it.

Aesthetically, the book paints the Highland world in cold grey and reserves its color for the dialogue and music of the Highland people who David meets. If pushed, I prefer Treasure Island but there is something wilder, weirder, and ghostly about Kidnapped that sets it apart.

Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson


This was my second read through of this book and I was surprised how much I didn't remember how fun it is. It realizes all of what you could imagine from hearing the canned description "the devil comes to 1930's Moscow", while having a beautiful structure and being understatedly tragic, yet also delivering some morning-grey colored hope. The whole thing is magic trick like in the way that it breezes through episodes of the devil's crew's mischief intercut with the slow telling of the story of Pontius Pilate, switching more than half-way through to the eponymous protagonists, and then tieing what felt like discrete episodes into a tightly woven whole.

The book is packed, like a Soviet communal apartment, full of themes, but I wasn't really aware of them as I was reading. They've dawned on me between and after I finished reading and that's because the story is told stupid simply. The plot is stuff happening, which causes other stuff to happen; call me old-fashioned, but I think that's a pretty neat way to tell a story. The first half of the book is a cycle of: devil (or crew) interacts with some Muscovites, we see the consequences of the actions (which are funny), and these consequences lead to the next interaction between the devil (and crew) with other folks. Even the sections about Pilate are framed diagetically, first being told by the devil then being dreamed by someone then having been written by someone. The themes arise from this simple structure so breezily, and the events flow so naturally from each other, that they seem almost incidental. They're not, and that's why its a good book.

Surprisingly for a book featuring the devil and Pontius Pilate, religion isn't really a theme (unless you call considerations of the internal states of individuals and people religion, and if so, buddy I know some priests who would disagree), although obviously the Christian canon is used as a set of pastels. The book hates on Moscow specifically, but cities in general. The devil and company act like super unethical sociologists, going around and conducting experiments ranging from predicting someone's immenint death to them, to giving out money that turns into slips of paper after a few hours, to taking a guy's head off and putting it back on. An individual's reaction to these stunts is a kind of signifier for their inner state; by the end of the story the local psychiatric hospital is chock full of people who have interacted with the devil's band, while the protagonists are almost cleansed by these interactions. Mental illness is another theme. An inversion takes place over the course of the story, with the "master" starting out in the psychiatric hospital, driven insane by routine yet dehumanizing interaction with normative society, and improving as the normative society is dissected by the events of the plot.

This friction between society and individuals, and a given individual's inclination to sacrifice the sanctity of their inner state for outward security, is the heart of the tragedy of the novel. This is underlined by the Yershalam parts of the novel: Pilate sentences Yeshua only because he knows it is expected and any other outcome would ruin him, but by doing this Pilate damns himself to torment. Notably, the torment is coming from within and this is mirrored by the master's madness and Margarita's self-isolation. The morsel of hope that the novel delivers is in Yeshua - who, more than being a Jesus figure, is an individual who does not allow the outward world to dictate their actions - forgiving Pilate and the master's words freeing him from his moon-tormented stasis. In other words, the hope that we as individual's have for freedom and inner determination lies in our own and others' bravery. The master and Margarita are free because of Margarita's bravery, Pilate because of Yeshua's.

That's just one facet of the novel. There are loads more, some resonate with each other and some are relatively out of left field. Everything meshes so well together and feels so natural, despite the heaviness and absurdity of the book, because of the pacing and commitment to telling the story as a sequence of events that happens in one place over a short span of time to distinct individuals. Like the best dishes, its simple, local, honest, and rustic.

A lot of commentary on the book likes to point out how much and subtlely Bulgakov mentions the secret police and disappearances as a normal part of Soviet life. These mentions are interesting and fit really well with the overarching idea of society bending individuals into a certain moral shape, but I think people blow this aspect of the book out of proportion as a way of feeding into the idea that this was an anti-Stalinist, state-censored work. It *is* a work of genius that didn't see the light of day for a long time after the author's death, and it would have been censored if Bulgakov was silly enough to try to get it published, but the delay in publishing was partly up to his friends' advice and his death not long after he finished it. It was interesting to read that Bulgakov was one of Stalin's favorite playwrights and Stalin personally comminucated with him at least once. (Not to put too fine a point on it. Bulgakov's biography is incredible and he continually pushed up to the line of what was acceptable in the time and place he lived.)


Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov


I read this book over a few short weeks; pretty fast for me for such a tome, which speaks to how much I enjoyed it. It contains lots of different tones and moods, which lends to its evergreen freshness. Comedy passes to adventure passes to drama of multiple flavors, with a historical or psychological sketch thrown in the middle. The comedic sections are genuinely funny, most of them using the 4 main characters - and their distinguished lackeys - as the fodder for the humor (but never degrading them more than seems humane; there is always a wonderful balance between us and the author jabbing at the qualities, actions, and circumstances of the Musketeers and the characters almost recognizing themselves as the butt of the friendly joke and smiling along with us). These parts of the book also have a sharp sense of timing so that right around the time the reader is coming to the punchline in their own minds organically, it is revealed and the scene either ends or shifts into a different mode. Really, its hard for me to think of a scene or episode that overstays its welcome. Most self-contained sequences end in a single chapter or so. The longest arc that I can recall is the captivity of Lady de Winter which spans maybe 4 or 5 chapters and is well worth the space. 

The book was written and published as a serial and you can feel the influence of this. There is this easy attitude toward both plot and characterization; one is freely sacrificed a bit to maintain the other and the pace of the story. At one point d'Artagnan receives a token from the Queen, in secret, which he naturally treasures and swears to never get rid of in the hopes that he can use it to show himself to the Queen in the future. His buddies, the musketeers, frequently try to get him to sell it (its a fat diamond ring) cause they're always broke. The stakes of at least two (relatively minor) episodes are this ring, which d'Artagnan works hard to avoid losing. Towards the end of the book, as the characters are figuring out how to foil the villain's plots on them, there is a wonderful scene where they all take turns coming up with ideas and poking holes in them. Once they've settled on a plan, whose only downside is that it requires a decent amount of money. d'Artagnan thinks of the ring and agrees to sell it almost at once. 

I read the translation by Richard Pevear but haven't compared it with any others. Most of the writing is pretty crisp, as opposed to being overly flowery, especially the dialogue. There are some phrases that feel archaic or generally a bit odd - I learned the word "alguazil", a cop, which came up at least two times - but they fit pretty well with their surroundings and I think they're intentionally dressed up either by Dumas or the translation. Dumas makes it clear, to the point of pointing it out many times, that theses characters inhabit a different time with accordingly different morals and sense or honor. Usually these differences are played for laughs, so I can't help feeling that the occaisional twisted knot of a declaration is intentional.


The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas


What do you do if you need to run FFmpeg on a fresh install of an operating system; if you spin up a VM, get a new computer, or you build a docker image? In a lot of situations, you can get the binaries from your package manager. However sometimes they won't offer them (or, better said, the default repositories won't, as is the case with Amazon Linux) or they might be out of date. What's your next step? I'm sure a lot of folks would say they would build the binaries from source. What does Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the world, suggest you do? Take a look at [this official tutorial](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/processing-user-generated-content-using-aws-lambda-and-ffmpeg/) for AWS Lambda, about a quarter of the way down the page, and you'll see that they direct you to [johnvansickle.com](https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg) to get your FFmpeg binary. In fact, if you search something along the lines of "Amazon Linux install FFmpeg", the top few results all direct you to wget or curl from this site.

John hosts static binaries of FFmpeg, built from both the releases (going all the way back to 3.3) *and* the project's master git branch. Maintaining such a robust catalogue of builds is no small thing in itself, but then also serving this to *a lot* of the people who use FFmpeg on AWS is even more of a feat. If you navigate to John's site in your browser, you'll see that he has some donation links. If you're just following that AWS Lambda guide or the top search results I mentioned above, you won't see those links or probably even really consider John's time or effort or contribution to making your life a little easier.

This is probably one of the more minor examples of xkcd 2347, or maybe a slightly altered one where the label at the top is "digital infrastructure by lazy people". If John were to shut his site down who knows how many companies' build and deployment pipelines would just stop. On the other hand, its not terribly difficult to build FFmpeg from source. It would probably be a blip for a lot of engineers, an hour or two of trouble-shooting and maybe a few more to test. There are other things to consider of course - using statically built binaries made by a random guy on the internet isn't a great security practice - but overall its not that big of a deal. The biggest travesty is that whoever writes Amazon's tutorials doesn't care enough to direct the readers to their own [ffmpeg-lambda-layer](https://serverlessrepo.aws.amazon.com/applications/us-east-1/145266761615/ffmpeg-lambda-layer) or to build from source.

Who is John van Sickle anyway?

Who in the world is John Van Sickle?


I've been trying to use Emacs more lately and completely wean myself off VSCode. Projectile is a built-in "project management" (a project in this sense being a codebase) tool which, especially if paired with a language server, enables a lot of really nice functionality like being able to auto-detect your Python venv and navigate the codebase much easier. I had some problems using it for work though. We use a monorepo - which I've come to like after being hesitent about it at first - which has microservices and discreet libraries as subdirectories. Each microservice/library is, for the purposes of Projectile, its own project. The problem was that Projectile was detecting the entire monorepo as a project root, which was less than helpful.

Projectile works by detecting "sentinel files" along the path when you first open a file or directory that is not in an already detected project. Like most Emacs packages, it's written in a literate style that makes it super easy to read through [the source](https://github.com/bbatsov/projectile/blob/master/projectile.el). It looks for the sentinel files following a few different routes, all helpfully explained [here](https://docs.projectile.mx/projectile/projects.html#customizing-project-detection). My problem was that Projectile was skipping the files that *I* wanted it to use to mark the project root and instead hitting the marker at the top of the monorepo. The package provides a few ways to fix this and generally customize how projects are detected: use a `.dir-locals.el` which defines the project root in each directory of the projects that I want to define, put a `.projectile` file at the project roots, or reorder the relative priority of files and how they're used to delineate projects. I opted for the third since it's the easiest by far (since I wanted the changes to apply across lots of different directories). Inserting the snippet below in my init.el fixed all my Projectile problems (I generally work on Python and Elixir stuff, I'll probably need to add a `Cargo.toml` in there for Rust in the future):

```
(custom-set-variables '(projectile-project-root-files-bottom-up '(
    "mix.exs"        ; Elixir mix file
    "pyproject.toml" ; Pyproject file
    ".git"           ; Git VCS root dir
    )))
```

Shoot me an email if you think there's a better way to do this! 

Getting Emac's Projectile to work with monorepos


[xxd](https://linux.die.net/man/1/xxd) is a classic hexdump tool available on most Linux distros that I've encountered. Mostly people use it to inspect hexdumps from binaries, but it has a surprising amount of functionality above and beyond that: it can revert hexdumps to binary, it can *patch* hexdump output back into an existing binary file, and (the subject of this note) it can format its output as a C header file.

`xxd -i ${file}`, where `-i` stands for include, will output the contents of the input file as an array of `unsigned char` followed by the length of the array as an `unsigned int`. I've been using this lately as a quick way to include arbitrary binary data into compiled objects which I then flash onto a microcontroller or another limited system (like with my font for the GameBoy). This makes the binary really easy to address and use in the rest of my code. The downside is that this blows up the header files and can slow down compilation; this hasn't been a problem for me so far since all the projects have been prototypes or PoCs. If I were to need to do this for more mature projects, I would probably use a linker script but the longer I can put off writing linker scripts in a project, the happier I am.

As a side-note: I did a brief search for any kind of history of the xxd utility. It seems to come packaged with Vim, and the creator Tony Nugent is quoted in the [cute quotes part](https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/quotes.html) of the Vim docs, but I've also seen indications that it existed in a form before it was packaged with Vim. Email me if you have any sources or know more!

Use xxd to create C headers


This site is statically generated with Next.js and hosted on a Hetzner droplet in Germany. It is built out of HTML, CSS, and a handful of home-made React components. The content (posts and notes) are written in markdown with some front matter, which is parsed with using the gray-matter and remark libraries. The code and content for the site lives in a GitHub repo (which gets deployed to the server through a GitHub action). I recently removed all of the Cloudflare stuff that sat in front of the actual server; I got it all for free since I buy my domain through Cloudflare, but I thought it was silly that my site was inaccessible the past few times that they had an outage.

Colophon

<p>This site is statically generated with Next.js and hosted on a Hetzner droplet in Germany. It is built out of HTML, CSS, and a handful of home-made React components. The content (posts and notes) are written in markdown with some front matter, which is parsed with using the gray-matter and remark libraries. The code and content for the site lives in a GitHub repo (which gets deployed to the server through a GitHub action). I recently removed all of the Cloudflare stuff that sat in front of the actual server; I got it all for free since I buy my domain through Cloudflare, but I thought it was silly that my site was inaccessible the past few times that they had an outage.</p>


Colophon

Notes:

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