Recently I have been reading Muriel Gardiner's The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud. This book tells the story of Sergei Pankejeff in his own words. The "Wolf Man" is one of Freud's most famous case studies. Any student of psychoanalysis knows that there are remarkably few documented case studies in Freud's history. The Wolf Man is one of the most famous and perhaps the most important case study, in that it is among the richest, revealing a lot of the theoretical apparatus that psychoanalysis would depend on. I could not pass up the chance to read the Wolf Man in his own words. Knowing Freud's talent as a weaver and storyteller, would the story reveal fabrications and distortions in Freud's treatment (On the History of an Infantile Neurosis)?

Pankejeff's memoir largely corroborate the raw material of Freud's analysis. The real fascination, however, lies in the story of his tumultuous life, punctuated and buffetted by the geopolitical shocks of the early 20th century which still largely define today's worldview. This is a man born into immense privilege, who searched around the great cities of Europe in a desperate attempt to cure his neurosis. What was his illness? A tendency to melancholia? The actual content of his neurosis is strikingly absent in this memoir. It forms a type of absent centre that the whole document orbits around. In its name he would try every cure known to the fledgling science of psychology, and find them wanting, before encountering psychoanalysis.

The Wolf Man's adult life was immediately defined by tragedy. His sister and confidante, Anna, committed suicide at the age of 22, by consuming poison. The memoir positions her as being unable to come to terms with her feminine role. In her young womanhood, she eschewed all suitors and immersed herself in intellectualism. (This intellectualism calls to mind the type of sublimated pleasure that Freud remarks upon in the later chapters of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.) Later she became uncomfortable with her physical appearance and concerned that she would be unable to marry. A kind of role reversal plays out here: as a child, Sergei envies Anna her dolls, while Anna attempts to try on a masculine role, but is rebuffed by her peers. Her suicide comes out of a kind of suppressed despair, perhaps, and she repents her act on her deathbed, but cannot be saved.

Likewise Pankejeff's father is diagnosed adoitly as a manic depressive. He lives his public life his 'manic' phase, and simply withdraws to German sanatoria for months at a time when the 'depressive' phase comes. Pankejeff however does not find the same relief from his torments in these sanatoria. The relationship between father and son is uncomfortable, calling to mind Adler's notion of 'masculine protest'. His father dies at 49, at the peak of health. His death is not named as a suicide in this volume, but it's drily remarked that he probably took an overdose of his sleeping medicine. An Infantile Neurosis contains material on Pankejeff's "homosexual posture" and how it relates to his father. His father is never grieved for explicitly, rather, Pankejeff transfers his grief onto others and channels it into landscape painting.

Pankejeff eventually embarks on a love affair with Therese, a nurse in a German sanatorium: a "servant", falling into his familiar pattern of attraction which Freud remarks upon. Therese has a "Southern European aspect" which later turns out to be a complete phantasm. Their relationship is stormy, Therese being an archetype of the maddening woman who "drives some men to throw themselves at her feet, and others off the parapets of bridges" (de Maupassant -- who is himself referenced in this volume, along with Lermontov, whose figure looms over it.) Pankejeff eventually makes the "breakthrough to the woman", his greatest victory, in Freud's eyes; their courtship tale defies all modern logics.

After his analysis, seemingly cured, Pankejeff enjoys a life of petty-bourgeois domesticity with Therese for 20 years in the interwar period, working as a functionary at an insurance firm. Until one day he returns home and finds that Therese has gassed herself to death. Pankejeff is 52. Therese has been a troubled woman since their earliest encounter. Her suicide looks premeditated, "a decision made with forethought and reflection", the consequence of unbearable pain: "I am so sick in body and soul". The 20th century marches woefully on: Therese's act coincides with the Nazi occupation of Vienna and a wave of suicides among the Jewish population, though Therese was not herself Jewish. The memoir ends here.

As she was the only stable structure in my changeable life, how could I, now suddenly deprived of her, live on?

Freud's analysis works as a feat of psychic reverse engineering. It proceeds from a hypothesis about the dream's cause (the primal scene), and attempts to illustrate the process by which the manifest content is formed. In the case of the wolf dream, the process goes: Primal scene -> grandfather's story of the wolves -> the Seven Goats fairy tale.

What follows is a discussion of the reality of the primal scene. Freud invokes a set of imaginary critics who counterpose that the memories associated with the primal scene are in fact fabrications or phantasies. Freud claims that these critics retain the name of psychoanalysis while rejecting its profoundest and most disruptive insights. To Freud these critics (Jung and Adler) keep psychoanalysis "in name only", while Freud's theory itself already encompasses the aspects these critics choose to focus on. Specifically Freud visualizes strictly Freudian psychoanalysis as a bidirectional theory of psychic causation. That is, influence flows forward from childhood, rather than flowing exclusively backward as Jung and Adler would have it. Though Freud does not discount a backward causation. It's unclear on the exact meaning of the term primal scene and whether it always indicates an observation of coitus as in the case of the Wolf Man, or whether it simply indicates a childhood experience with the aforementioned power to cause neurosis.

Note that the primal scene is the Urszene, using the German 'ur-' prefix.

1998 exoticness...

Back in 2003, Amazon.com had a feature which was called “The Page You Made”. This page would automatically collect every item that you clicked on during a session on the site, and automatically add it to list which it would present to you. It's rather similar to the current feature, Your browsing history, except the latter doesn't seem to expire items. It would also show recommendations.

We want to make it easy for you to find what you're looking for at Amazon.com. The Page You Made and Your Recent History are meant to help you keep track of some of the items you've recently viewed and help you find related items that might be of interest. As you browse through the store, we will bring to your attention items similar to those you are looking at. Since your browsing habits change frequently, Your Recent History changes as well. Your sessions expire after a few days and are not stored on the Amazon.com site. This way we can offer you the most relevant purchase suggestions for your recent shopping sessions on the Page You Made. We also give you the ability to alter Your Recent History, by removing recently viewed products or clearing all items. To add pages to Your Recent History, just visit new items that interest you.

There is no punchline or upshot to this; just recording the existence of such a thing. 20 years later, traces of it on the internet are nearly entirely gone.

In the sales I purchased a large Western Digital external HDD. I don't really trust hard disks anymore, but all other options are uneconomical or equally untrustworthy, so it's all I have for now. At least it's guaranteed. Anyway I face some troubles when backing up. I had to use gdisk to create the GPT partition instead of parted, for reasons I can't really fathom, but I'll probably stick with gdisk until further notice now.

After repartitioning the new drive the next task was to consolidate 2 generations worth of backup data onto it. I usually stick with rsync -aPv to mirror file trees. I copied all the data from both generations into subdirectories on the same disk. However, it also contains several complete Linux filesystems with archived copies of /sys, /proc, /run, and other data that I don't really care about.

rsync -aPv expands to rsync -rlptgoDPv. -D is not really wanted, though; it's an abbreviation for --devices and --specials, which we don't want. However, all other options we want. We want to be able to do all operations as a regular user. Although some files are sensitive, the backups live in a privileged space, so perhaps we don't care too much about security within the space itself. In this case we can do chmod -R o+rX /tree. This uses X for "special execute" which will make directories world-executable while not affecting the status of the execute bit for files. It will also make everything world-readable which obviously comes with heavy caveats.

We can add the -u or --update option to the rsync command, this will overwrite identically named files in the tree with newer versions from the source. Obviously this does have the potential to lose data, but it may be a reasonable trade-off to make the filesystem more manageable; YMMV. As we're not using --delete the target tree will essentially be an accretion of files; files that get moved will potentially create duplicates. We consider this an OK trade off relative to the dangers of using --delete.

You can use the --log-file=foo.log option to store all progress to a log file which you can examine afterward. You'll want to vet the transfer reasonably carefully to make sure everything completed and you're not deleting potentially valuable things.

Just finished watching Borgen: Power and Glory and wanted to give a few thoughts on it.

Initially the most surprising thing about Borgen: Power and Glory is how similar it is to the 2010s series. Who's still here? The ubiquitous Søren Malling is back as a slightly rounder Torben Friis, whose story arc was the standout of series 3. Of course Nyborg is back, and looking much the same; Katrine Fønsmark returns with a more harried visage. A new actor plays Magnus, well-cast; Laura shows up as well, sadly only for a couple of brief cameos. Søren Ravn, also one of the highlights of series 3, is back as well. The themes tread familiar ground of power and negotiation in the political and personal sphere.

Of course, the show had to be updated for the 2020s. One notable absence is the open sexism in the newsroom. In the original series, TV1 newsroom cads would frequently assess female anchors candidly on their looks, unopposed by Friis. Not so here: Katrine Fonsmark now heads up TV1. One may find this a pristinely 'woke' appointment on the surface, but the wrinkle lies in her constant conflicts with her staff. Fonsmark, who was an intransigent rebel under Torben Friis's direction becomes, in effect, "the establishment", makes numerous concessions to pragmatism, and is in turn forced to question herself by young staffers. Mie's request for maternity leave echoes Katrine's similar injunction to Friis in Borgen, when she asks for permission to date Kasper. Fonsmark mishandles this, and the situation explodes in her face through social media. The tweets and messages sent by the characters appear on the screen to advance the plot, unlike the original series where these happened mainly by phone. This is only partially successful: it contributes to a pacing problem with the show.

Fonsmark feuds with the West Asian-looking star anchor, Narciza Aydin, who continually breaks agreements with interviewees in order to focus on pressing human rights issues. Fonsmark falls into the role that Friis formerly had with respect to herself, acting as a constraining force on a maverick reporter. However Narciza is presented rather unsympathetically (and don't you think her name is rather on-the-nose?) Fonsmark, on the other hand, seems to handle the situation rather badly, bulldozing through the office and nakedly asserting her authority. One wonders if the writers are pointing out that this, too, has changed, that these tactics no longer works in a modern office environment; whether, put bluntly, these entitled millenials are not respecting the chain-o'-command. Regardless, the viewer feels sorry for Fonsmark, for whom this conflict with Narciza precipitates a small-scale mental breakdown.

The figure of Asger Holm Kierkegaard is an interesting one. He is something of a nebbish, sharply dressed but lacking street-smarts, and somewhat lacking in a certain masculine strength -- witness his fear of flying and perpetual motion sickness. One wonders if he's intended to replace Kasper Juul. Juul was an archetype of toxic masculinity: promiscuous, troubled, emotionally inarticulate, and supremely square-jawed. Asger is few of these things, though arguably he is promiscuous, entering into an affair with the Greenlandic ambassador's wife. I enjoyed this plotline for its workaday nature: the affair was not glamourized, but rather presented as something ignoble, slightly sordid but still rather touching. The plotline with Tanja I largely did not follow, although Malik was a good character; shame that he had to die to progress the storyline.

Nyborg's storyline is good, though the international politics are sometimes inscrutable. The intense coalition politics of Borgen seems to be largely absent here, which makes sense plot-wise given Nyborg's status as foreign minister rather than PM, but I slightly rued its absence nonetheless. Nyborg's moments with Magnus are great fanservice for viewers of the original series. Their arguments and battles seem wholly believable. Nyborg's descent into cynical political manouevring, aided and abetted by Laugesen, also seems realistic, troubling as it is. Laugesen is well used here as the Dark Lord of spin. Magnus always had a troubled relationship with his mother, so the foreshadowing of the original series plays well here.

The show has been reworked to have an overarching plot for the whole series, rather than a "monster of the week" story structure, as the original series had. This mode is certainly de rigeur for a modern prestige TV series. However the show suffers from questionable pacing. The first 30 minutes of every hour-long episode struggles to keep the viewer's attention as it sets up the drama of the final half. There are facts, figures, and dialogue flying around as fast as the eye can see; blink and you could miss a key plot point. This was the biggest issue with the show to me. It would probably benefit from a second watch.

Also known, frustratingly, as "Spot It".

These last two links are problems that are not identical to the Dobble-generation problem, but are related to it.

• Mathematical/computational principles behind this game
• Creating combinations that have no more one intersecting element
• Given n k-element subsets of n, is there a small subset A of n which intersects them all?

The basic Puppet template that I use to deploy is this:

class main::my_app($server_name, $owner, $group) {
    $web_root = '/srv/http/my-app'
    $backend_root = '/usr/local/lib/my-app'
    $wsgi_path = "${backend_root}/my-app.wsgi"

    file { $backend_root:
        ensure => directory,
        owner => $owner,
        group => $group,
        mode => '0755'
    }

    apache::vhost { $server_name:
        port => '80',
        docroot  => $web_root,
        wsgi_application_group => '%{GLOBAL}',
        wsgi_daemon_process => 'my-app',
        wsgi_process_group => 'my-app',
        wsgi_daemon_process_options => {
            home => $backend_root,
            python-path => $backend_root
        }
        wsgi_script_aliases => { '/' => $wsgi_path }
    }
}

Here, wsgi_script_aliases is the really key point, as this is the canonical way to specify the entry point for a WSGI application. The other settings here are mostly form-filling.

• Permissions are set user-wise to allow syncing code easily from a dev machine.
• The value of wsgi-daemon-process needs to be unique across the whole server.
• Name the .wsgi file with the basename of the project.
• The Flask entry point should be 'app.py' as is customary.
• This then allows the .wsgi file to import the app directly.
• You can touch the script file to force a code reload. This will reload all the code, equivalent to a full process kill and restart.

The contents of my-app.wsgi can just be something like this, in the case of a Flask application:

from app import app

application = app

mod_wsgi expects the name application to contain a WSGI app.

At $WORKPLACE I've been observing with interest the different species of interactions that can happen during group chat. Let's divide them into three different areas.

$WORKPLACE_ALPHA -- An agency. This was fun, we set up bots that created a lot of noise in the channel. Remember this was pre-covid, so the chat service in question, HipChat, was a side channel, not a hard requirement for communication. Everything was conducted in a single main channel, all real-time work collaboration went through here. There was no threading. As the team was small, we were all able to keep track of things fairly well, we would sometimes go into DMs if things got complicated.

$WORKPLACE_BETA -- This was a much more stoical workplace Slack, with zero real "banter" and no arguments. I felt quite apprehensive about posting in this Slack. There were only a few channels and little activity; few problems required real-time collaboration to resolve, and if that did become necessary, it was done in DMs. Email was still heavily used here.

$WORKPLACE_GAMMA -- They use Slack as a real "replacement for email", in the way it's supposed to be used. This means a lot of channels, a LOT of threading, heavy reliance on emoji reactions, and while it does feel casual, there's also not much off-topic chat because of the emphasis on signal.

There is still heavy disagreement on the relative merits of coarse-grained vs fine-grained channels. I tend to favour coarse-grained channels, but on the other hand, when you have automations and other non-natural inputs affecting channels, channels can end up functioning more like a specialized Twitter stream or similar, in which case that channel does need to be fine-grained. It's clear that there's a positive correlation between large and coarse-grained channels and off-topic banter. (I don't mean to thereby claim that fine-grained is preferable, or the converse.)

I had to download a bunch of files from a Cloudflare-protected site. Said site is annoying to scrape, because it is heavily using JS to generate unguessable links. Selenium is a possibility but I found that it would be defeated by these Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. Cloudscraper is not feasible either because links are not present in the downloaded HTML directly.

It's an acceptable solution to click the links manually in this case, but then another problem emerges. Firefox's download manager is rather substandard. This isn't an issue in most cases, but in this particular case it was a limiting factor, as downloads would fail and not be retried. Firefox also doesn't limit in-progress downloads, meaning they would saturate the connection and fail.

One possibility is you can use aria2c in daemon mode, and use a Firefox extension to add downloads to it. Aria2c will then queue the downloads and run them in order, with optional retry. The extension embeds something called AriaNg, which provides a nice web interface on top of the aria2c daemon, so it's actually quite friendly. The only tricky part is that you may need to start aria2c yourself. You can do that using the config below, which I took from the Arch wiki.

aria2c must be invoked with the --conf-path option to use this.

continue
daemon=true
dir=/mnt/disk/mydownloads
file-allocation=falloc
log-level=warn
max-connection-per-server=4
max-concurrent-downloads=3
max-overall-download-limit=0
min-split-size=5M
enable-http-pipelining=true

enable-rpc=true
rpc-listen-all=true
rpc-secret=xyzzy

retry-wait=5

Here I've been attempting to detail my setup that I revised as of the end of 2021.

DHCP configuration -- This is done using isc-dhcp-server on Debian. I use the network range 192.168.0.x for my internal network, being fairly small. Dynamic DHCP assignments are restricted to the .16 - .127 range. I create host stanzas to store reservations, e.g.:

host sprinkhaan {
  hardware ethernet DC:53:60:F3:A7:FF;
  fixed-address 192.168.0.3;
}

I use option domain-search "phys.solasistim.net" to set up the default search domain for all DHCP clients.

DNS configuration -- This is done using BIND. All hosts receive 192.168.0.1 as their DNS server. This forwards to my ISP's DNS servers (Zen, who have been great so far). Using BIND I am able to create "split-horizon" DNS so that e.g. my Puppet server resolves to an internal IP when requested internally. The main zone file defines all hosts in phys.solasistim.net. (The original idea here was to draw a sharp distinction between physical and virtual hosts, but I've become less certain on this. Still, it's good to use a separate domain from the real solasistim.net.) The downside of this setup is that some duplication of the assignments is needed, specifically the fixed-address setup in dhcpd.conf needs to be essentially replicated in solasistim.zone. This doesn't actually matter much in practice because I don't add hosts very often.

PPP interface -- This is done using pppd and a Draytek Vigor 130. The provider file that I use for pppd is fairly standard. I based it on a useful post from a person called Ruben. The only real difference between the two configurations is that I do have to provide my real account password in chap-secrets.

Firewall configuration -- I use nftables. There's only one really notable thing that I do in nftables, which is a bit complicated, and that's clamp my TCP maximum segment size to my path MTU.

table inet filter {
    # ...
    chain forward {
        # ...
        tcp flags syn tcp option maxseg size set rt mtu
        # ...
    }
}

You can find more information on this at the nftables wiki. This problem manifests itself in strange ways with some web sites simply timing out when you attempt to connect to them, while most sites work fine. For instance lbc.co.uk and atlassian.net had this strict MTU requirement as of late 2021. There may also be other ways to address this. I know that setting MTU on clients also resolves the issue, but not all devices seem to respect the MTU setting when it's sent in DHCP. It may also be that setting mtu in /etc/network/interfaces will make a difference -- I have never tried this.

Interface configuration -- In /etc/network/interfaces, we create the regular ppp0 interface that is used for WAN access.

auto ppp0
iface ppp0 inet ppp
    provider zen

We create a bridge between two interfaces. One has a Wifi AP and one has a hardware switch.

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    address 192.168.0.1
    bridge_ports eno2 eno3

The wifi AP and switch just use their standard Draytek firmware for configuration, which seems to work fine so far.

A few notes/updates: The Vigor 130 has a CLI interface that is accessible via telnet (I believe). This allows some more advanced operations to be performed. There were also some concerns about whether the Zen connection should be Annex A or Annex B. I think we eventually came to the conclusion that it should be Annex A. During the setup of the line, there were frequent connection drops, where the pppd log would read "Modem hangup". These eventually seem to have just gone away without further intervention on my part. I can only assume this was the "line training" phase that is much discussed on UK broadband forums.