Berlin Alexanderplatz

I've recently watched Berlin Alexanderplatz a pretty interesting 2020 German film. As you can guess from its title, it's set in Berlin, with part of the action happening in the AlexanderPlatz area (the metro station under construction, the square itself...) It's a modern adaptation of the 1929 influential novel of the same title.

I hardly can remember the last time I watched such a long film (3 hours), and indeed I appreciate its extension, I think there's nothing in the film that could be removed. The story is pretty good, Francis-Franz, an African illegal immigrant reaches Germany after a traumatic journey. He aims to start a new life, leaving behind his past, where he has done too many mistakes "I want to be good". But his new path won't be easy, he'll be confronted with the best and the worst, solidarity and explotaition, love and hate, all the tastes of this think we call life... There's violence, there's partying, there are ugly men and beautiful women, there's pain, too much pain...

Films set in places I like, I know or for which I'm deeply attracted are of particular interest to me, and given that Berlin fullfills these 3 premises this film was an easy winner for me. We don't see the exterior of the building, but based on its interior, the psycopath drug dealer Reinhold seems to live in one of those Eastern Germany times appartments East Berlin central area, that are now quite appreciated by "modern types". Again based on the interior of the flat and the corridor, Franz's girlfriend seems to live in one of those nice 4-5 German buildings from before WWII. There are freak parties, strip clubs, some classy prostitution... nice ingredients... also drug addiction, exploited women, exploited illegal workers, beautiful young women hanging out with shitheads I guess just to get free lines... the unkind ingredients...

I appreciate that Francis-Franz does not complain about the evil, racist, white Europeans... He's exploited at first (as people at the bottom of society have been exploited for centuries), but then he seems to mainly experience the usual Western opennes that is ther norm in most of Europe rather than the imaginary racism that I've rarely seen. It's good to see realism rather than the typical fake victimization and left wing self-hatred...

I don't know if the groups of Africans that we see in the film selling drugs in Tiergarten really exist. I didn't notice them the last times that I've been in that area. Maybe they are a fictional reflection of the groups that have been a permanent disturbing presence around Görlitzer park since 2011.

Playing with Ix.Net and IAsyncEnumerable

When IAsyncEnumerable was introduced along with C# 8 many of us missed missed that Linq to Objects had not been extended to work with IAsyncEnumerables as it does with IEnumerables. Well, the community took the effort in their own hands and it's called System.Linq.Async. It's also called (or it's part of, I'm a bit confused about it) Ix.NET (Interactive Extensions for .Net, one part of the Reactive Extensions for .Netproject) and is sort of the equivalent to the nice javascript library IxJS about which I talked in this post.

As expected, it includes all the main linq methods "Select, Where" so that you can filter, transform... your async pull streams. But in addition, you have methods like SelectAwait, WhereAwait... These methods use an async function (a function returning a Task) rather than a normal function. This means that you can project, filter... your asynchronous streams both with synchronous and asynchronous functions. Let's see an example where I apply first and async function, then filter with a synchronous one and finally apply a synchronous function:

private static async IAsyncEnumerable<string> GetCurrentTrendyCities()
{
    foreach (var city in new List<string> {"Paris", "Toulouse", "Berlin", /*"Bruxelles",*/ "Hamburg" })
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Obtaining Trendy City");
        await Task.Delay(1000);
        Console.WriteLine("Trendy City Obtained");

        yield return city;

    }
}

public static async Task<Country> SearchCountryAsync(string city)
{
    await Task.Delay(2000);
    return countries.FirstOrDefault(country => country.MainCities.Contains(city));
}

private static async Task RunAsyncEnumerableSample(IAsyncEnumerable<string> asyncCities)
{
    var countries = asyncCities.SelectAwait(async (city) => {
        var country = await SearchCountryAsync(city);
        return (city, country);
    })
    .Where (cityCountryTuple => cityCountryTuple.country != null)
    .Select(cityCountryTuple => $"{cityCountryTuple.city} - {cityCountryTuple.country.Name.ToUpper()}");
    
    await foreach(var cityCountry in countries)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(cityCountry);
    }

}


RunAsyncEnumerableSample(GetCurrentTrendyCities());

        

Sometimes we need to apply asynchronous functions to synchronous enumerables. The Linq to Objects extension methods are designed to work with synchronous functions, so when using them with functions returning a Task, you'll end up working all over your methods chain with IEnumerable<Task<TResult>> rather than with IEnumerable<TResult> which makes the thing a bit odd. Let's see what I mean:

IEnumerable<string> citiesToSearch = new List<string> {"Paris", "Toulouse", "Berlin", "Hamburg" };
var cityPromises = citiesToSearch.Select(async (city) => await SearchCountryAsync(city))
    .Select(async (country) => (await country).Name.ToUpper());

foreach (var cityPromise in cityPromises)
{
    var city = await cityPromise;
    Console.WriteLine(city);
}

A much more elegant solution is obtaining an IAsyncEnumerable from your IEnumerable (with ToAsyncEnumerable) and then use the Linq.Async methods, like this:

IEnumerable<string> citiesToSearch = new List<string> {"Paris", "Toulouse", "Berlin", "Hamburg" };
IAsyncEnumerable<string> asyncCities =  citiesToSearch.ToAsyncEnumerable();          
var countries = asyncCities.SelectAwait(async (city) => await SearchCountryAsync(city))
    .Where (country => country != null)
    .Select(country => country.Name.ToUpper());

await foreach(var country in countries)
{
    Console.WriteLine(country);
}

Mbappé

It feels really nice when you think poorly (very poorly) of someone and then you are proven wrong. That's what has happened to me recently with the French football player, Mbappé, after reading this exemplary interview.

I have to say that I don't like football, watching it and even less playing. I particularly hate the business around it, the idolatry for some players that in too many occasions are just a bunch of arrogant rednecks... Anyway, 3 years ago, due to some personal circunstances, I quite followed the world cup, and I first knew about this French player, Kylian Mbappé. The guy seemed quite humble, well behaved, a normal French guy born to immigrant parents, that having grown up in a poor neighbourhood (in the infamous Seine-Saint-Denis department) was very far away from Anti-French Maghrebian scum (racaille) like Benzema...

However, in the last year a couple of things made me think that Mbappé was just one more "Francais de papier", with no other interest in France than sucking it dry... After the brutal murder by an Islamist of French teacher Samuel Patty several members of the French National team recorded a video to promote respect for the Educational System and its workers. How odd that not a single Muslim player decided to take part in that video... Mbappé was also missing, which even led some people to fear that he had converted to Islam (he was raised as a Christian)... Little after that I found that he had given a signed t-shirt to an Islamist Russian MMA Champio that had asked for "punishing" Charlie Hebdo and its readers. Yes, it's pretty likely that Mbappé knew nothing about this... but well, it didn't smell good to me. By the way, a Russian Islamist... if you still think that Putin is a protector of Christianity you better face reality... Putin is in pretty good terms with the Islamists ruling Chechnya, he did not side at all with Christian Armenians against Turkish Islamist Azerbaijan scum... and so on, and so on...

So when I read the aforementioned interview I was pretty delighted. Mbappé is an idol for many French youngsters, many of them young guys of immigrant descent living in bad areas. All the French youth (but particularly those of non-French ancestry) are subject day after day to a massive stream of anti-French propaganda, vomited by the Left, the Islamists and the Indigenists... "You have to hate France for its evil past and its evil present, you have to identify with the culture of your ancestors rather than the culture of this country, you have to reject to assimilate..." So when the child of 2 immigrants says what he says in that interview, it's important, really important. Many others have said it, like Patrice Quarteron, but they can not reach such a crowd as Mbappé.

I'm going to translate below (sorry for my lack of skills) part of the interview:

• Are you very attached to France?
  Absolutely. I was born in France, I've grown up in France, France has given everything to me. And I try to give in return, each time that I play with the National Team. I think that my love for France does not need to be proved. Playing for France is above anything.
  
  
• Let's talk about your origins (Cameroonian and Algerian). Is Identity a concern for you?
  No. But I can understand that you ask me about. For me, that's always been clear: I've been born in France, my parents are French, I've grown up in France. I'm 100% French. For sure, I'm very proud of my origins, because that's part of my history, my roots. But me, my contry, it's France.
  
  
• You often talk about "the New France". Do you define yourself as black or arab?
  Not at all. For me, saying that you are black, arab, white, is creating a wall, and in this new France, there are no walls, we are all together.
  
  
• However, there are strong tensions around this issues...
  We should not see France darker that it is! For sure I think that there are problems in this country, but I swear to you, me, someone who is lucky to travel a lot, that this is a very good country.
  
  
• Your parents enrolled you in a private, catholique school. Are you religious?
  I am a believer, but not a practitioner. This college was chosen because of its calm, it gave me an environment that I needed. I was a turbulent, hyperactive child.
  
  
• Your love for France, it comes from your parents?
  I've always been educated with this form of recognition for France, because France does things for other people, and to me and my parents, she has given us a lot. Therefore you have to be proud of your country. The Americans are proud of being Americans. Why French peopler are not proud of being French?
  

The interview was originally published in a "progressist" magazine, so I can imagine that the journalist was a Left-wing idiot. The questions are very insistent on the same topic, very inquisitional, as if he was expecting the typical answer that the Left loves ("France is evil, France is racist, you evil colonizers...") and as he was getting just the contrary he could not understand it and continued to insist, anxious for a "normal" answer. No way, question after question the answers are perfect, I can taste the feeling of dismay of the blood thirsty Leftist journalist :-D

An additional, very important point. You can read that he attended a Catholic School. We can guess that if he had attended a Public School in Seine Sant Denis, with a majority of Left wing teachers and a 90% of muslim pupils, Mbappé would be now quite a different (worse) person, maybe he would be closer to Benzemá than to the person he is.

Kill External Thread

Out of curiosity I was looking into how to kill a specific thread from outside the host process. For that I wrote a basic .Net 5 application creating a couple of threads. I create those Threads with the lowest level option available in .Net, the Thread class. The first interesting thing is that the this class has just a ManagedId property, that has nothing to do with the real OS level Thread ID, and indeed .Net does not provide a way to obtain that OS Thread ID. The explanation for this is here

An operating-system ThreadId has no fixed relationship to a managed thread, because an unmanaged host can control the relationship between managed and unmanaged threads. Specifically, a sophisticated host can use the CLR Hosting API to schedule many managed threads against the same operating system thread, or to move a managed thread between different operating system threads.

This is a bit surprising to me. While Task.Run is clearly a high level mechanism (at this moment the code will run in a thread from the Thread Pool), using the Thread constructor and its Start method seemed to me like the Managed equivalent to the Windows API CreateThread function or to the Posix pthread_create in Linux. I've been doing some tests in .Net 5 both in Windows and Linux, and the Thread constructor seems to use a new OS thread, but well, not sure if after using a certain number of "new Thread(---).Start" calls it could begin to reuse previous threads.

In the old .Net 2-3-4 times... a simple Windows Console application in which you were not explicitly creating any threads (other than the main thread that runs the application) had indeed 3 threads: that main thread, a CLR thread and a Finalizer thread. When running a simple .Net 5 console application on Windows or Linux I can see many more threads (like 10 threads when started, and then, even while doing nothing, new threads show up and die...) I print the current threads from inside the application like this:

private static IEnumerable<string> GetThreadsIDs()
        {
            var processThreads = new List<ProcessThread>();
            foreach (ProcessThread pTh in Process.GetCurrentProcess().Threads){
                processThreads.Add(pTh);
            }
            return processThreads.Select(pTh => pTh.Id.ToString());
        }

Printing that threads list right before and right after calling into "new Thread(delegate)" you can "almost" identify the OS Thread ID of that new Thread. I say almost because indeed you'll see 2 or 3 new threads in the list, but if you wait and run some external command to get updated list of threads, you'll see how some threads come and go... but you'll also see that one of those new threads remains... so that seems to be the thread that corresponds to your "new Thread(delegate)".

To get the list of threads of a given process I use this command in linux (the Thread ID here is shown as "SPID", and other tools seem to call it "LWP"):
ps -T pid

and this one in Windows Powershell:
Get-Process -ID pid | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Threads | Select-Object ID

It's interesting to note that in Linux, the Thread ID of the first thread in one process is the same as the Process ID. My understanding is that each thread is represented by a task structure. For the first thread in the process the taskId and ProcessId fields in that task have the same value, then for the other tasks you'll have a new Thread ID, but the same Process ID. I'm talking about modern Threads implementations, NPTL ("Native posix thread library")

As we can kill a process given its process ID (kill -9, System Monitor, Task Manager...) how about using the Thread ID to kill a certain Thread?

Well, we can do that in Windows from the UI of Process Explorer or ProcessHacker, or from the command line by means again of Process Hacker, like this (I guess it's using the Windows API TerminateThread function):
ProcessHacker.exe -c -ctype thread -cobject threadId -caction terminate

In Linux I've read that you can send a signal (9 or 15 to kill it) to the target thread with the tgkill(threadId, signal) function, but have not found any utility doing that. I just found this, that is doing a syscall(SYS_tgkill, tgid, tid, sig);, but it's not working for me... So for the moment I have no way to kill a thread of another process in Linux.