Planet Andy

kuro5hin : The DVD Shelf--The Departed (2006)

Thursday 22 February 2007 16:25 GMT

Planet Classpath : Jim Pick: Northern Voice

Thursday 22 February 2007 16:05 GMT

I’m going to be a the Northern Voice conference/unconference this weekend. Looks like fun!

Planet Classpath : Jim Pick: BC Budget

Thursday 22 February 2007 15:58 GMT

The provincial budget came down, and there’s some really good news in it for me. They’ve raised the first time home-buyer exemption to $375,000. That’s awesome, because I wasn’t going to buy anything under the previous limit of $325,000. It will save me $6500 in taxes!

And it looks like the Liberals (our right-wing party) are finally going to raise the welfare rates a little ($50/month), and build some more social housing. Not enough though, in my opinion. I last lived downtown around 1995, and I don’t remember that many homeless people. Now they are everywhere. Considering that the last increase in welfare was in 1993 (fourteen years ago!), it’s not really that surprising. It’s sad that a city like Vancouver with so much visible wealth can do so little for the segment of society that really has no chance.

Planet Gnome : JP Rosevear: Firefox and SSL

Thursday 22 February 2007 15:48 GMT

Signing on to wireless at the Salt Lake City Airport this morning:

Found a way to work around it by turning on various ssl2 commands in about:config, probably not the safest thing to do and I’ll turn it off again but I really need to get on the network. Boo Sprint for using this (interestingly the credit card submission piece didn’t have this problem).

Planet Gnome : Tuomas Kuosmanen: Mobile blogging

Thursday 22 February 2007 15:17 GMT

I am posting this from the N800 using maemo-blog! Um, er… “Hello world!”

OSNews : Review: openSUSE 10.2

Thursday 22 February 2007 14:49 GMT

OSNews : Creating a Read-Only Mirror of Your SVN Repository

Thursday 22 February 2007 14:26 GMT

Daily WTF : CodeSOD: Removing Spaces, the Easy Way

Thursday 22 February 2007 14:00 GMT

There are tons of functions in so-called "standard" libraries, but sometimes the function you want just isn't there. Luckily, string functions are so simple to write that anyone can do it!

Submitted for your consideration, an example from Randy, who says, "I think the design kind of speaks for itself." The following code demonstrates how to get rid of unwanted spaces.

  Private Function RemoveSpace(ByVal strFldName As String) As String
      Try
          Dim i As Integer
          RemoveSpace = ""
          For i = 1 To strFldName.Length
              If Mid(strFldName, i, 1).Equals(" ") Then
              Else
                  RemoveSpace = RemoveSpace & Mid(strFldName, i, 1)
              End If
          Next
      Catch ex As Exception
      End Try
  End Function

From Randy,

I don't even know what the hell the Try/Catch is supposed to be doing, not to mention that the programmer expanded a (typically) one-line operation to thirteen plus a number extra function calls and boolean logic.

Looking around, there are a lot of bad ways to do this. For instance, I found this floating around on a forum; it's how to remove every + from a string.

  char * p = s;
  while ( (p=strchr(s,'+')) != NULL )
      strcpy( p, p+1 );

I'd like to see what else you can come up with. Here's my own C++ reference implementation for how to do it in place.

  char* RemoveSpaces( char *str )
  {
      if ( NULL == str ) return NULL;

      char * to = str;

      for ( char* from = str ; '\0' != *from ; ++from )
          if ( ' ' != *from )
              *(to++) = *from;

      *to = '\0';
      return str;
  }

Uraeus : New Schroedinger release out

Thursday 22 February 2007 13:23 GMT

The plan is to try to make much more frequent releases from here out as things are coming together fast now and the package is at least generally useful for testing.

Be aware that the weakest link in the package is currently the encoder, but this is also what David is focusing on at the moment so expect to see big strides forward in the next few weeks and months in terms of quality of encoded video. Could be we need to tweak the encoder setting further also, although David tried add some sensible defaults for this release.

Here is a couple of screenhots of Totem in action playing a movie I transcoded from a HD Quicktime clip.

The pipeline used to create this movie was:

gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=animusic2dvd_m720p.mov ! decodebin2 name="decode" decode. ! ffmpegcolorspace ! videoscale method=1 ! "video/x-raw-yuv, width=(int)640, height=(int)360" ! ffmpegcolorspace ! schroenc ! queue ! oggmux name=mux ! gnomevfssink location=file:///tmp/anime.ogg decode. ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! queue ! mux.

Planet Gnome : Christian Schaller: New Schroedinger release out

Thursday 22 February 2007 13:23 GMT

The plan is to try to make much more frequent releases from here out as things are coming together fast now and the package is at least generally useful for testing.

Be aware that the weakest link in the package is currently the encoder, but this is also what David is focusing on at the moment so expect to see big strides forward in the next few weeks and months in terms of quality of encoded video. Could be we need to tweak the encoder setting further also, although David tried add some sensible defaults for this release.

Here is a couple of screenhots of Totem in action playing a movie I transcoded from a HD Quicktime clip.

The pipeline used to create this movie was:

gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=animusic2dvd_m720p.mov ! decodebin2 name="decode" decode. ! ffmpegcolorspace ! videoscale method=1 ! "video/x-raw-yuv, width=(int)640, height=(int)360" ! ffmpegcolorspace ! schroenc ! queue ! oggmux name=mux ! gnomevfssink location=file:///tmp/anime.ogg decode. ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! queue ! mux.

Planet Gnome : Jono Bacon: United, not divided

Thursday 22 February 2007 12:08 GMT

We are all part of different communities. From our local communities (your street) right up to nationwide groupings (your political party, consumer demographics etc), we are all part of something. While many of the communities are non-interactive and just being part of the audience makes you a member, there are of course communities that we actively choose to be a part of. As many of you will know, I am part of two distinctive communities that I participate in - Free Software and Metal.

I often compare and contrast the two communities, and when I was younger I felt quite emotionally torn between the two. I remember being 16 and battling with myself as to whether I enjoyed playing my guitar more or enjoyed using BBSs more. On one side, the guitar thing was cool, likely to attract women and more of a physical and artistic endeavour that played to my creative side. I am also a physical person and the buzz I get from playing a guitar (creative but defined) and from playing drums (raw physicality) appeal to my different sides. Then, contrast this with computers. Obviously far less cool in the minds of most, but my interest in computers flexed my mental muscles and a different type of social muscle. On one side the music side of me gets me out to gigs, drinking with people, headbanging, dancing, stage diving etc, but the computer side, and particularly around that time, put me in touch with people all over the world. This was a huge buzz and incredibly exciting.

But, I was torn. Which group did I want to fit into? Life could have certainly turned out quite different if I had picked one over the other, and I found it difficult to figure out what I wanted from life and which box I wanted to fall into. As time went on, my interests naturally moved me in different directions as I explored these different areas.

One such example is that I totally screwed up my A-Levels. I joined a band (called Conspiracy) which was well established and spent lots of time performing live. Although I was always a consistent worker at school, this experience was so mind blowing that it got in the way of school work and my mind was always focused on playing to crowds of sweaty metallers who would elegantly beat the shit of each other on the dancefloor to our music (for a better explanation of such beatings, see the Wikipedia Moshing article). Likewise, as time went on, I found myself increasingly interested in Linux. I spent my year out between A-Levels and University working in Cranfield Bookshop in Milton Keynes, and with very little work to do and a business that was being sold to Waterstones, I spent my days just reading the computer books there. After the year was out, I had read most of the books I was interested in, and I used to wear self-printed Linux t-shirts to advocate Linux to people who came into the shop.

I was two people - Linux t-shirt wearing Linux fan by day, Overkill t-shirt wearing metaller by night. Mentally, the two sides were still separate, but as time meandered on, they meshed into the same person. Why should I have these separate sides? Why can’t I be one person with both? Surely it would be good to influence both sides with their merits? The stuffier technical corners of the Linux world could do with some of the raw social input from the metal world, and the metal world could do with some of the thinking and structure of the Linux world. It was then that I realised that community cannot live in a vacuum; well, it can, but it suffers greatly if it does.

Even within specific sub-communities, internal bickering can cause divides. A great example is the metal world. There are a great many styles of metal, such as:

• Heavy Metal - traditionally anthemic, like a heavy version of rock. Examples include Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath.
• Thrash Metal - a combination of Heavy Metal and Punk, fast, speedy metal, clear vocals and chunky-ish guitars. Examples include Metallica, Megadeth and Exodus.
• Black Metal - metal that focuses on Satan and upside down crosses, screechy growly high vocals, often deliberately produced to sound like it was recorded in a dustbin, aside from Satan the subject is often cold weather, artists wear make-up and look like badgers. Examples include Immortal, Cradle Of Filth and Mayhem.
• Death Metal - thick, chunky, aggressive metal with growly vocals where the vocals are more of an instrument than a vocal (less melody and more rhythm), often subjects are about violence and squalor, very cool. Examples include Decapitated, Cannibal Corpse, Deicide and Napalm Death.
• Power Metal - anthemic, German sounding, speedy, high singing vocals, often sing about being a brother of true metal, spandex essential, excellent. Examples include Manowar, Stratovarius, Primal Fear and Helloween.
• Hardcore - thick, crunchy, rhythmic, shouty vocals, subject matter typically rebellion and honour, dancing is a combination of moshing and karate, listeners often look like chavs, very cool. Examples include Hatebreed, Raging Speedhorn and Stamping Ground.
• Stoner Rock - does exactly what it says on the tin, loose, groovy, usually sung vocals. Examples include Black Label Society, Down and Spiritual Beggars.
• Industrial - slightly dancy, machine like, very rhythmic and accessible, listeners are often strange. Examples include Nine Inch Nails and Rammstein.
• Mathcore - take Hardcore or Death Metal and apply crazy time signatures that make it impossible to headbang to. Examples include Cryptopsy and Meshuggah.
• Speed Metal - thrash turned upto 11. Examples include Cacophony and The Great Kat.

Each of these different sub-styles of metal are often very cynical to the other sub-communities. As an example, a Thrash Metal fan may be sneering to an Industrial fan, despite having so much in common. Each community has this view because a community not only instills an ethic, but also a gauge of how true you are to that community. Power Metal fans are particularly affected by this as their style is not just about music but about being a real brother or sister of metal. This may sound crazy to many of you, but it is deep in the hearts of people who listen to that style of music. If you are not into metal, you are not my friend.

This is all understandable - we are social creatures and we form our own groupings, but when we break these barriers down and work together interesting things happen. Take for example Slipknot. Traditionally from Death Metal bands, the jumpsuit-masked nutters combined Death Metal, Hardcore, Nu Metal, Thrash and bits of Drum n’ Bass to create a unique and interesting sound. They broke down the barriers, explored how they could combine different styles and community and hit on a winning formula. Not only did they creatively innovate but they broke down social barriers in the metal world - they opened peoples minds.

In recent years this kind of change has been rampant in the free software world. We are seeing different communities working together, breaking down social and technical barriers and exploring how we can do different things in different ways. While this is great, we need to always remain open to those outside our community - breaking down the barriers within the free software community is one thing, but we also need to realise that outside our wonderful community are so many interesting opinions, ideas and opportunities. It is an exciting time for free software and if we can harness our similarities and revel in our differences, we can do some amazing things.

Planet Gnome : Prashanth Mohan: Knowledge is Power

Thursday 22 February 2007 11:15 GMT

People say information is power. I believe that sharing of information is power. Open access to the world?s information is what one should look at — Dr. Vinton Cerf

[Source: http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/feb212007/index158322007221.asp]

Technorati Tags: quotes, internet

LWN : KOffice 1.6.2 released (KDE.News)

Thursday 22 February 2007 10:14 GMT

Planet Classpath : Mark Wielaard: Fosdem GNU Classpath+OpenJDK DevJam Developer Room poster

Thursday 22 February 2007 09:15 GMT

Coming to the Fosdem libre java event this year? Then you will need this little brochure of all the fun things going on:

And don’t forget to check out the full Fosdem schedule. Lots of fun stuff to see and do!

OSNews : Opera Mini 3.1 Released

Thursday 22 February 2007 09:01 GMT

grifferz : There goes the neighbourhood

Thursday 22 February 2007 06:47 GMT

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/49590

“If we turn the lights out, close the curtains and stay real quiet, do you think he’ll believe we’re not in?” — Entire Ubuntu community

See also.

Planet Classpath : Casey Marshall: Predictable things you forgot to predict

Thursday 22 February 2007 06:46 GMT

The plan was that our office was supposed to move to a newly built-out, much larger space, this week. We couldn’t go into our new cubicles today, because the movers and IT staff were moving and setting up the office, but we were supposed to have the lab (we have a lab! That’s kind of awesome) to show up to, and get some work done if we can.

But hey, guess what! The place isn’t even finished yet! As in, not even remotely done yet; as in, painting still going on, electricians still wiring things. I can’t imagine it being done by tomorrow, or even be done and cleaned up by next week. The new building also turns out to really, really suck, because there’s no accessible stairway, if you are going up to the office. There’s a fire stair that dumps you out into an alley, but you can’t get in that way from the outside.

I did think, weeks ago, that this was all going to get botched, because that’s the way these people operate. They can’t plan, nor execute. But I had this hope this morning that they’d get it mostly done, and that we wouldn’t be disturbed too much, and that finally we’d all get together and start, like, changing the world or something.

And, there was someone else’s junk all over my workbench, and my lab stuff scattered all over the place. I can’t wait to see how badly my workstations, monitor, and now rare and out-of-production keyboard fare.

JJ : Senior Software Engineer at DonorsChoose.org (New York, NY)

Thursday 22 February 2007 04:12 GMT

Planet Classpath : Dalibor Topic: FOSDEM, Java One, and other conferences

Thursday 22 February 2007 03:09 GMT

Good Math Bad Math : This Year's Turing Award Winner

Thursday 22 February 2007 03:09 GMT

Today, the ACM announced the winner of the Turing award. For those who don't know, the Turing award is the greatest award in computer science - the CS equivalent of the Nobel prize, or the Fields medal.

The winner: Fran Allen. The first woman ever to win the Turing award. And the first Turing award winner that I've personally known. Fran deserves it, and I'm absolutely overjoyed to see her getting the recognition she deserves. Among her many accomplishments, Fran helped design Fortran and create the worlds first optimizing compiler.

One of my fondest memories of work is from 8 years ago. My advisor, Lori Pollock, was up for tenure. Fran was picked as one of the outside reviewers for her tenure case. So in the course of doing the review, she read the papers that Lori and I wrote together - and liked them. The next time she was in my building, she came to my office to introduce herself and talk to me about the papers I'd written. I was absolutely stunned - Fran Allen came looking for me! to talk to me!

Since then, I've learned that that's just the kind of person she is. Fran is a brilliant woman, one of the smartest people I've had to opportunity to meet: a person who has done amazing things in her career. And she's also one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. She's approachable and friendly, and has searched out many junior researchers to give them a bit of encouragement. She's been a mentor to more people that I could hope to count. She's just a thoroughly amazing person.

I can't even begin to say how happy I am for her. She's earned the greatest award that exists for computer science, and I'm thrilled to see that the ACM recognized that. And knowing Fran, I'm particularly happy that she's the first woman recipient of the award, because she's worked so hard in her career to help women overcome the biases of so many people in the mathematical sciences.

Congratulations, Fran!

Don Marti : Nobody reads this stuff.

Thursday 22 February 2007 00:52 GMT

A little background here: If you refer to the Novell/Microsoft not-quite-license as "eating a bug for money" (as I did in a conversation with Jeremy Allison) you get a call from Novell. Not surprising, I guess. I really want to understand this patent thing from Novell's point of view, so I talked with Carlos Montero-Luque, Justin Steinman, and Kevan Barney. Pretty high ratio of questions asked to questions answered, but I'm starting to get the point.

From Novell's point of view, the deal is supposed to be about giving customers some peace of mind over being sued for patent infringement. But the document that is supposed to explain this to customers is missing some information, and the documents that are actually supposed to contain the missing information are secret.

I don't think this is some big conspiracy, just the result of rushing something through without reading it very carefully. Novell and Microsoft are too big to pull off a conspiracy, but they're both bureaucratic enough to do paperwork that ends up being full enough of dumb mistakes to be pretty much meaningless.

Simple things first. If you still believe people read this stuff, try reading it. Covenant to Customers has two obvious mistakes: Novell spelled "Novel" and the awkward "on account of a such Customers' use of specific copies", which looks like the result of someone starting a singular-to-plural edit and not finishing. The page has been up since November 2 of last year. Not a big deal, but like I said, nobody reads this stuff.

Now go back and read "Covenant to Customers" again. You get a bunch of Capitalized Words, some of which show up in the definitions section, and some of which don't. One of the terms is "Clone Product". You don't get sued for running a Covered Product, but Covered Product doesn't include Clone Product, and Clone Product isn't defined. So which of the products included in the SUSE distribution are Clone Products? I asked, but that list is not available.

Justin Steinman: "Two examples of what might be considered a clone product might be OpenOffice.org and Samba, to be specific. Both of those are open source technologies that mimic technology offered by Microsoft."

But no, you don't get a list of what is and isn't a clone product, and Steinman says, "All the end customer really cares about is if they are using anything that is part of the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform they have a covenant not to sue from Microsoft."

You have a Covenant, so you're all squared away, right? But the Covenant says it covers Covered Products, and Covered Products doesn't include Clone Products, and you don't get a copy of the definition of Clone Products. Covered or not? You're just as mystified about the answer to "Will Microsoft sue me?" as you were before.

Another good one: "Microsoft reserves the right to update (including discontinue) the foregoing covenant pursuant to the terms of the Patent Cooperation Agreement..." Yes, the Patent Cooperation Agreement that you don't get to see.

Put it all together, and you get, "We promise not to sue you for running some but not necessarily all of the software you get from Novell, unless we stop promising not to sue you, and we won't tell you which software you get from Novell we might sue you for now, or under what circumstances we'll stop promising not to sue you for the rest."

If you were doing a EULA parody site with a voting system, people would reject this kind of thing as too over the top. "By opening the box you agree to the EULA inside the box" is one thing, but this is a little extreme. But nobody reads this stuff.

So, as a Linux customer, Novell user or not, it looks like you have the same protection from a Microsoft lawsuit after this deal as you did before. Linus Torvalds told BusinessWeek, "I'm not that concerned about the threat of Microsoft enforcing patents against Linux. I think their mode of operation isn't through the legal system. I think they hate lawyers more than most companies. They've been on the receiving end. [CEO Steve] Ballmer and [Chairman Bill] Gates have pride in the fact that their competition may have tried to crush them with legal wars, but they overcame. I think they would have a hard time using legal tactics. They would be ashamed."

That sense of wanting to win by product, not by litigation, is what protects you in the short term. What protects you long term is that the IT industry is just a series of recruiting contests. A company wins recruiting contests by serving good fajitas and letting an employee get a $70 laptop power supply without spending $200 in time on getting approval to buy it. A company loses recruiting contests when it's seen as succeeding through legal attack, not great product. Who wants to work on a product that customers have to be sued to buy? If a company's litigiousness makes it miss a round of recruiting, it misses the round of product that those recruits would have built, and game over.

Anyway, the check is cashed, the bug is eaten, Microsoft seems equally likely to sue you for running Linux no matter where you get it -- not very -- and if all goes well, a lot of that money will go to the many helpful, hard-working developers at Novell who are doing useful work. I guess what I learned here is that the patent deal doesn't really give Novell customers any special assurances. The combination of Covenant and secret agreements means that Novell customers are in the same boat as other Linux users, and isn't "hanging together" on patents the whole point?

OSNews : AmiKit 1.3.0 Released

Wednesday 21 February 2007 22:44 GMT

OSNews : Demystify Linux Bash Test and Comparison Functions

Wednesday 21 February 2007 22:36 GMT

Good Math Bad Math : Conservapedia and Math

Wednesday 21 February 2007 20:58 GMT

Many of my fellow SBers have been mocking the recently unveiled Conservapedia. Conservapedia claims to be a reaction to the liberal bias of Wikipedia. Ed, PZ, Afarensis, Tim, John, and Orac have all piled on already. But why should they get to have all the fun?

Conservapedia has an extensive list of what they claim to be examples of the liberal bias of Wikipedia. My SciBlings have already covered most of the nonsense to be found within, but one point is clearly mine to mock: grievance number 16:

Wikipedia has many entries on mathematical concepts, but lacks any entry on the basic concept of an elementary proof. Elementary proofs require a rigor lacking in many mathematical claims promoted on Wikipedia.

JJ : Senior Software Engineer at Sonos, Inc. (Cambridge, MA / Santa Barbara, CA)

Wednesday 21 February 2007 20:31 GMT

Daily WTF : Error'd: Please Retype The Bible

Wednesday 21 February 2007 20:00 GMT

I know, I know, the real WTF is TheDailyWTF.com's CAPTCHA software. Har har. Just be glad we don't use patterns as long as this one that B. P. found.

Planet GP2X : Gp2x Gaming League Round 2: Metal Slug 5

Wednesday 21 February 2007 19:41 GMT

LWN : LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 22, 2007

Wednesday 21 February 2007 19:29 GMT

KernelTrap : Linux: 2.6.21-rc1, Dynticks Merged

Wednesday 21 February 2007 18:39 GMT

Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.21 kernel, ending the two-week merge window [story], "there's a lot of changes, as is usual for an -rc1 thing, but at least so far it would seem that 2.6.20 has been a good base, and I don't think we have anything *really* scary here." Linus noted that the tickless kernel patch [story] was finally merged into the mainline kernel, "the most interesting core change may be the dyntick/nohz one, where timer ticks will only happen when needed. It's been brewing for a _loong_ time, but it's in the standard kernel now as an option." Thomas Gleixner explained a year ago how this could result in cooler CPUs and power savings, "the tickless kernel feature (CONFIG_NO_HZ) enables 'on-demand' timer interrupts: if there is no timer to be expired for say 1.5 seconds when the system goes idle, then the system will stay totally idle for 1.5 seconds."

As for the rest of the changes, Linus added, "there's a ton of architecture updates (arm, mips, powerpc, x86, you name it), ACPI updates, and lots of driver work. And just a lot of cleanups." Release candidate kernels can be downloaded from your nearest kernel.org mirror. You can browse through all the changes using the gitweb interface. Kernel Newbiews maintains a useful summary of all the changes going into the latest version of the Linux kernel.

read more

tonytiger : FOSDEM baby!

Wednesday 21 February 2007 18:32 GMT

If you’re going to FOSDEM this weekend and I know you, drop me an e-mail or text or whatever and we’ll arrange to meet up! A printable schedule of the weekend has been released.

LWN : Ten Leading Open Source Innovators (Earthweb)

Wednesday 21 February 2007 18:08 GMT

LWN : The Road to KDE 4: CMake, a New Build System for KDE (KDE.News)

Wednesday 21 February 2007 16:46 GMT

Daily WTF : Immaculate Backup

Wednesday 21 February 2007 16:30 GMT

Murphy's Law 198§44: the more complete a backup/recovery solution becomes, the less likely it is to ever be used.

With nearly half a century of experience using computers to run their business, Chris M's company knew that law all too well. Ever since that fateful Wednesday -- still known throughout the company as The Crash of ‘68 -- they swore, Never Again. And forty years later, they’ve kept their promise.

Over the years, Chris’s employer has come as close to a Perfect Technology Infrastructure as anyone. They hire the best network administrators money can buy and give them whatever resources they need to ensure that the infrastructure remains solid. And that they do.

The company’s backup and retention plan is nothing short of immaculate. Every system they’ve ever purchased -- from that old payroll program on the System/360 to that bizarre parts database for OS/2 -- can be brought back to life, if not physically than through virtualization. A walk through their “software archive” was a treat for many; new technicians are often astonished to learn, not only of the existence of 8-inch floppy disks, but that the company still has the 8-inch install disks for CP/M. And a drive to run them on.

Naturally, thanks to the aforementioned Murphy’s Law, this elaborate backup and retention is rarely, if ever, called into use. The only excitement the network technicians ever get is that occasional, frantic, “Oh Crap! I accidentally deleted that critical PowerPoint presentation” call. And even that is easily solved by walking the user through their self-service file restoration system.

But a little while back, the network technicians received a restoration request that actually sounded interesting. A production manager needed a report of the “old old” part numbers for a long out-of-production assembly. “Old old” referred an ancient mainframe system that had been replaced by the “old” system over ten years go and finally shut down in 2001. Restoring the “old old” system meant setting up a new emulation environment, mounting the old disk image, and praying that it boots up without a hitch.

This was the first time ever that an actual user had requested such a restoration, so the network technicians were naturally a bit nervous. But thanks to their meticulous planning and procedures, everything went fine. The system booted up without a hitch and the production manager was summoned to log in to the terminal they had set up for him. He sat down at the chair, keyed in his username, and then paused for a moment.

“Now, what was my password five years ago?”

And speaking of backup, I've been using the online backup service Data Deposit Box at home and the office for a little more than two years now. Of course, I’ve never actually had to recover data now that I’ve started using backup, but it’s a pretty solid service and has made, if nothing else, downloading production data for testing purposes a lot easier.

kuro5hin : Black Forest Cherry Pie

Wednesday 21 February 2007 16:25

JJ : Software Engineer at GrammaTech (Ithaca, NY 14850)

Wednesday 21 February 2007 15:23 GMT

JJ : C++ coders with Graphics Familiarity at gpu4hpc (Sunnyvale, CA)

Wednesday 21 February 2007 14:42 GMT

JJ : Software Developer at Veson Nautical Corporation (Boston, MA)

Wednesday 21 February 2007 14:34 GMT

Daily WTF : CodeSOD: Taking the U out of UUID

Wednesday 21 February 2007 14:00 GMT

Paul N, spotted this ColdFusion code in a third-party shopping cart system he'd been tasked with modifying (to make it usable):

<cfset IDstring = CreateUUID()>

<cfset ThisCustomerID = Left(IDstring, 9) & LSDateFormat(Now(), 'MM-DD-YY')>

I guess a UUID was too unique for them - so they've nicely enhanced the chance of collision, while also giving themselves a considerably lower maximum number of unique IDs per day.

LWN : Wednesday's security updates

Wednesday 21 February 2007 12:22 GMT

Mandriva has updated ekiga (format string vulnerability), GnomeMeeting (same vulnerability), and gnucash (temporary file vulnerability).

Red Hat has updated php (buffer overflows).

Ubuntu has updated moinmoin (cross-site scripting, information leak), and php (buffer overflows and other vulnerabilities).

Planet GP2X : Pipes Is Ready

Wednesday 21 February 2007 08:38 GMT

Good Math Bad Math : Using Monads for Control: Maybe it's worth a look?

Wednesday 21 February 2007 01:52 GMT

So, after our last installment, describing the theory of monads, and the previous posts, which focused on representing things like state and I/O, I thought it was worth taking a moment to look at a different kind of thing that can be done with monads. We so often think of them as being state wrappers; and yet, that's only really a part of what we can get from them. Monads are ways of tying together almost anything that involves sequences.

XKCD : Swingset

Wednesday 21 February 2007 00:00 GMT

Don Marti : Framing the DRM debate

Tuesday 20 February 2007 23:46 GMT

Solveig Singleton gives us a good example of Debate Framing on the DRM issue. Information is "product", the recipient is a "consumer" and if someone doesn't like a DRM system, he or she should simply "walk away."

The framing here is that transfers of information within the technical, contractual, and legal sphere of a DRM system are commercial transactions.

This is not always the case, and many of the situations where it's not are the most important ones. We build information systems for different purposes, some would say higher and better purposes, than selling each other copies of songs for 99 cents. Information transfer is not a subset of commerce, and a DRM system that might adequately represent the EULA for commercial use of some information is not sufficient to regulate all usage. Here's a counterexample -- a use of copied bits that is (1) not a commercial transaction, and (2) not a case in which the user can refuse the copyright holder's terms and get replacement information somewhere else. A documentary.

Outfoxed was produced using clips from Fox News without permission but clearly within the US tradition and law of fair use. Robert Greenwald and his team made the decision to record Fox News and use the recordings in the documentary in order to substantiate the film's arguments.

This is classic political speech and fair use, and American judges would give it the highest-available consideration under the law. Fortunately for Greenwald, Fox News is still available in formats whose copying is not restricted under the DMCA.

Here's the problem for the future, though. Documentarians typically don't reverse engineer media technologies. And the DMCA doesn't allow a developer to invent a DRM-circumventing tool and distribute it for non-infringing uses. So, without serious DMCA reform, the Digital Television Transition means we're likely to end up with a form of political speech, delivered via CableCARD, that's not legally available for the kind of quotation in context of criticism that previous media generations have grown up expecting.

If you're criticising Rupert Murdoch's politics, you don't have an alternate supplier of bits. You can't comment on his decisions regarding coverage of the war in Iraq and then paste in a Jonathan Coulton video to back it up. Some of the most important uses of information depend on copying bits from people who do not choose to enter into a commercial relationship with you.

When we're talking about what is and isn't reasonable to include in a software license or in laws covering DRM, we have to resist the "copying is transaction" framing and keep in mind that a communications relationship is not necessarily a commercial relationship. You can have a political discussion, or an argument on the Internet, with someone who is neither your supplier nor your customer.

Does the threat of fair-use copying as part of a debunking piece help keep the polarized and fragmented American media honest? Is the fact that the Spocko of the future won't be able to cut and paste clips really a good thing? Let's think about those kinds of questions when the subject of DRM comes up, instead of slamming everything into the product/transaction box.

Good Math Bad Math : The Koufax Awards

Tuesday 20 February 2007 22:11 GMT

So as many other folks have been pointing out, the Koufax awards have come out with their "Best Expert Blog" nominations, and I'm incredibly pleased to say that GM/BM was nominated!

In case you're not familiar, the Koufaxes are one of the really serious, prestigious web-awards, aimed primarily at the left-leaning blogosphere.

I realize that my chances of actually winning are pretty damned slim; on the other hand, since PZ is disqualified because he won last year, that means that the rest of us have a chance. Voting isn't open yet, but when it is, I'll mention it here. I would really like to make a good showing. The BlogAwards, where GM/BM came in fourth are a very sloppily run silly award; the Koufaxes mean something.

Thanks to whoever nominated me!

Aquarion : Article - Pancake Day

Tuesday 20 February 2007 21:40 GMT

Today, I did this:

I made pancakes.

I used to be terrible at pancakes – Ben always made them – but this is how you make pancakes:

Fail. Lots.

You need a decent sized frying pan – non-stick – a ladle and some batter. The batter is made out of some flour, a few splashes of milk, some eggs, optionally cinnamon, vanilla extract and sugar. The amounts of these vary from person to person, but I usually start with about 300g flour, a few eggs, and add milk and whisk until it’s fairly thin (liquid rather than sludge).

Heat your frying pan lots. Add a very small amount of oil. Ladle some batter into the middle of the frying-pan and marble-madness the pan until it stops spreading easily (this should, ideally, be almost exactly as it reaches the edges of the pan, if not, adjust amount in ladle or your expectations). Allow to cook for a little while as the shiny un-cooked batter parts turn into duller cooked batter parts as far as they are going to, and then flip.

To flip a pancake, either:

1. Remove the pan from the heat. Make a rapid movement down with the pan, whilst pushing it slightly away from you, so that the pancake has a “spin” on it as it exits the pan. Then catch it in the middle of the frying pan, not the edge. Or…
2. Get someone else to do (I) Or…
3. Use the slice. You coward.

Retrieve the pancake from the floor/ceiling/wall/cat, and/or leave it in the pan for a half a minute to a minute to brown on the other side. Place on a plate underneath another plate to keep them warm. This doesn’t work terribly well, so eat them soon.

Terrible hardship.

Always, and this is important, remember three important lessons:

1. The cook who doesn’t reserve some pancakes doesn’t get any pancakes
2. The first three pancakes you make on any day will be useless.
3. If a teflon pan catches fire, it’s not non-stick anymore. In fact, it is a Stick pan.

These lessons have been hard earned, learn from my failures.

Good Math Bad Math : Another Revolution in Physics Crackpottery: Electromagnetic Gravity

Tuesday 20 February 2007 20:52 GMT

It's that time again - yes, we have yet another wacko reinvention of physics that pretends to have math on its side. This time, it's "The Electro-Magnetic Radiation Pressure Gravity Theory", by "Engineer Xavier Borg". (Yes, he signs all of his papers that way - it's always with the title "Engineer".) This one is as wacky as Neal Adams and his PMPs, except that the author seems to be less clueless.

At first I wondered if this were a hoax - I mean, "Engineer Borg"? It seems like a deliberately goofy name for someone with a crackpot theory of physics... But on reading through his web-pages, the quantity and depth of his writing has me leaning towards believing that this stuff is legit.

Kevin Smith : Fat-Fuck vs. Food, Week 4

Tuesday 20 February 2007 18:38 GMT

Daily WTF : Roll Your Own Clustered Index

Tuesday 20 February 2007 18:30 GMT

It was a slow day for Levi C. His company had an excellent staff and meticulous development and testing procedures, so calls for maintenance were rare. He was beginning to feel like the Maytag repairman of maintenance programmers. Fortunately, he was delighted to get a call from one of his favorite clients.

"Hi Levi, if you have any spare time, could you check out this report that's running slow? It's for a system we had developed by another company. It's really no big deal, just if you have a second..." Bored and eager to help, he got all the information he could about the issue. He tried running the report for the previous month, and it was indeed running slow. He ran the report again for the past two months, and it timed out.

Because this system was new to him, he called up one of the old developers. "Oh, yeah, one or our developers forgot to initialize the database a few months back." Forgot to initialize the database? Levi thought.

Levi checked the query used to run the report. It had several thousand UNIONs that combined CustomerHistory_2007_02_75, CustomerHistory_2007_02_74, CustomerHistory_2007_02_73, and so on. Talking to one of the developers, he found that the tables were named to include a year, month, and customer ID. Forgetting to "initialize the database" meant failing to create a CustomerHistory table for each customer ID that month, or forgetting to update reports that queried the thousands of tables in the database. No, creating the tables wasn't automated - it had to be done manually.

The developers absolutely had to remember to create a new table for each customer at the beginning of each month. If they forgot to add the tables, the whole system would fail over. What's worse, their database server was configured to cache table definition data for only the last 64 accessed tables - a far cry from the thousands of tables commonly used in the system. Each table had the same schema as all of the others, including one autoincrementing ID field, and each table started the index from 1. If you wanted to retrieve a particular row of customer data, you'd have to know the year, month, customer ID, and row ID. If a column was to be added, thousands of tables would need to be changed.

Why was this implementation chosen? The developers either didn't know about or didn't trust in MySQL's ability to cluster data. By creating thousands of tables, they'd created their own method of clustering data. As for their plan to optimize the database, you know what they say - "aim for the stars, hope not to get the exact polar opposite of what you were actually trying to accomplish."

kuro5hin : Crime Detective Story Part 4

Tuesday 20 February 2007 16:25

Don Marti : Hard questions

Tuesday 20 February 2007 15:25 GMT

What happens when your wiki runs out of disk space? That's a good question for a lot of software, actually.

John Robb ponders "open source" processes for creating information and asks, "If in the majority of cases, this information isn't developed through markets or commercial entities, what happens to political power? Is it possible that this economic reorganization will recast the value of tribes (or their modern equivalent as communities, both physical and virtual) as an organizational model?" So how do peer production and Do-ocracy as organizational methods relate to how the human brain is hardwired for groups of about 150? That could influence the answer to lots of questions. If we're really capable of forming overlapping "monkeyspheres" and scale-free networks, that's a lot different from old-school tribalism, where you're in the same tribe with the same people for everything.

Tyler Cowen wants to know why anyone would pay to go to a conference when you can read the speaker's writings much more cheaply. (Shameless plug! LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit videos! Presentations! Podcasts!)

How could a IT journalist say that "The behavior of the paper and its brass is so bizarre and self-defeating that it serves as a model for nothing any other institution is likely to do." when IT companies go into bizarre legal flame-outs all the time?

Ed Felten asks, "Why aren't the authorities working as hard as they can to traitor-trace compromised players?"

Uraeus : OpenOffice almost ate my document

Tuesday 20 February 2007 14:39 GMT

Out of the blue came my saviour. Abiword was able to import the document and save it again in a RTF format that OpenOffice was able to read and all my changes to the document were saved from oblivion. Abiword had a weird error where it 'blinked' on certain section of the document, but that was a small issue compared to the almost destruction caused by OpenOffice :)

GingerDog : Blogging Dogs

Tuesday 20 February 2007 14:22 GMT

I found this somewhere online yesterday;

Enjoy.

Planet GP2X : Check the Wiki for the latest project information.

Tuesday 20 February 2007 14:13 GMT

Chris Bacon : Happy Pancake Day!

Tuesday 20 February 2007 13:48 GMT

And I guess while we're on the topic of celebrations, Happy chinese new year too. I went to China town here in Bangkok to "celebrate" but after standing waiting in front of a stage for 3 hours with nothing happening, hungry tired etc, we gave up and decided to go and eat random fried squid and vegetables from astreet vendor before we died. The only other incident was that the nice large baloon I bought for my friend was "baned" from traveling on the metro, so got given away to an over joyed tuk-0tuk driver. Made his day bless him. The other cool event recently was I "traveled" to go and see one of my thai friends homes (and family that live in it) an hour outside bangkok. It was cool to be out of the city for a day, and the family were lovely, My friends brother has 3 kids and they were too cute. (Dont worry, I'm not feeling broody)

Bryn_S : SVN Guide

Tuesday 20 February 2007 09:58 GMT

Jon Atkinson (a friend of mine) has written a nice simple introduction to SVN, covering the initial creation of the repository, checking in and checking out. If you’re working with people who’ve not used it before, it’s well worth pointing them at it…

For your reading pleasure: Jon’s “a simple guide to Subversion”

B

Joel On Software : Customer service

Monday 19 February 2007 20:56 GMT

“Now I was fuming. Squiggly lines were coming up out of my head. I was a half hour late to work and had to go to the locksmith for a third time. I was tempted just to give up on him. But I decided to give this loser one more chance.”

Seven steps to remarkable customer service

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Mozilla Developer News : Mozilla Developer Days in March

Monday 19 February 2007 20:34 GMT

Mozilla will be holding two developer days this March, in Boston and Mountain View:

• Mountain View: Sunday, March 25, 2007, Mozilla Corporation HQ
• Boston: Friday, March 30, 2007, exact location TBD

Please see the wiki page for details, and to express your interest in attending either — or both!

kuro5hin : I Don't Know What This New Internet Will Look Like

Monday 19 February 2007 16:25

Kermodeans : Xmas Countdown

Monday 19 February 2007 12:16 GMT

Matt Revell : SkyCon over

Monday 19 February 2007 11:04 GMT

I’m sitting in Shannon airport, overlooking the marsh lands at the edge of the river Shannon, having spent the past few days at SkyCon, in Limerick.

Jono, Stuart and I were here to talk on our various areas of interest, and grabbed the opportunity to record an episode of LugRadio. We interviewed some cool people and the show will be out next Monday, as usual.

My talk was about translating using Launchpad. Ireland is one Europe’s most important centres for localisation and it was astounding just how many people I met that are involved in either software translation or documentation.

On my first day at SkyCon, I met up with Noirin, who works as a technical author and uses Launchpad’s Translations for her work on free software projects. Her enthusiasm for Launchpad was great.

“I love Launchpad,” she told me.

Launchpad’s Translations does exactly what she needs and makes it easy.

Noirin confirmed my belief that we’re on the cusp of a new wave of people in the free software community who aren’t coders but who care about software freedom and can plug many of the skills gaps in the community.

Launchpad works for Noirin because it lets her concentrate on one thing: being a translator. She doesn’t have to care about po files or even know that GetText exists.

We need to find ways that enable non-coders - like me - to get the most from the time they have to spend on software projects. Whether it’s a service/software like Launchpad, or a community like SpreadFirefox, I can’t wait to see how our community is going to make the most of the skills that the rest of the world has to offer.

Uraeus : The beauty of free software

Monday 19 February 2007 10:16 GMT

The Webbs : Back to school...

Monday 19 February 2007 03:24 GMT

Kermodeans : Competiiiiiiiitioooooooooon Tiiiiiiiiiiiime!

Monday 19 February 2007 01:58 GMT

XKCD : Open Source

Monday 19 February 2007 00:00 GMT

resiak : HTML email, mutt, and Markdown

Sunday 18 February 2007 22:51 GMT

(Yes, this is another technical post. Sorry, embitteredpoet. For those of you uninterested in the rest of this post, take a look at a stuffed squirrel riding a go-cart for sale on eBay.)

Like most geeks, I am not a big fan of HTML email. This is partly because my email client is mutt, which is text-only, and partly because HTML email tends to be full of mad flashing things, images and other badness.

When I write email, I tend to use text formatting similar to that of Markdown. By design, Markdown source is human-readable, so it's a pretty sensible set of conventions to use for emphasis, links etc. in plain text. This works pretty well for people with similar tastes in email clients, but is suboptimal for people who use things capable of rendering rich text. Ideally, those people would see the text as rendered by running it through the markdown command — that is, as HTML. One way to accomplish this would be to write plugins for every graphical email client under the sun; the other, more practical way is to render it before I send the email and send HTML email.

I'm instinctively offended by the suggestion, but neither of my reasons for hating HTML email apply here: I'd still send the Markdown source as the plain text version, and the messages wouldn't be any more full of crap than they are in plain text. I think I should duct tape this functionality onto the side of mutt. My Googlings have not found anyone else who's done this before, but I figure I should check: dear Lazyweb, have you seen scripts to do this that I could use rather than writing my own? I'd probably write a script that acts as /usr/sbin/sendmail as far as mutt is concerned, but which checks the plain-text bit for Markdown syntax and generates the text/html part if necessary.

(Also, I should make pyljpost.vim understand Markdown, but that involves learning Python.)

kuro5hin : The freedom to be unpopular

Sunday 18 February 2007 16:25

GingerDog : Birthday - Glee Club

Sunday 18 February 2007 10:49 GMT

28

And so yet another year passes, and I feel increasingly old and frail.

Thanks to Chris, Sam, Kristabel and Dean, Tom and Claire, David and Jenny and obviously my darling wife Katherine for organising a great night out - as normal we went to Wagamama (where they can't give you the right bill) and then the Glee Club for some late night comedy.

Planet GP2X : Gaming: When did it change?

Sunday 18 February 2007 05:07 GMT

You see, I post one article and out pops another. Funny how that is. The rants are on people!

A thought pops into my head: A lot of games you finish (be it at the end or just when you've had enough) with relief, while others you genuinely enjoy or miss upon completion. A hearty 'wtf' to the former.

When Half Life 2 came out I thought I'd pick it up as I'd ignored much of the genre before that. A few weeks later when I emerged from the bleery eyed depths, terribly afraid of zombies and head-suckers, I was pretty spent. Good times.

RPGs are famous for 'the grind', and frankly its not an RPG to me unless you need to level up, spend time in (non-meaningless) dungeons and obsess over item statistics. I'm happy with this, and demand it, but the pacing must be ever so carefully managed lest it turn boring or tedious. As long as they play out like Dungeon Master or Wizardry, I'm golden.

I know the "MMO"s out there (for non-gamers, think Everquest, the marriage ruiner of the early 2000's) are basicly just cesspools of life destroying grind. They charge by the month, like a magazine, so they just want you to hang around. They reward grinders, people who spend serious time to get anywhere. After all, shouldn't people who play 800 hours a month win.. win more than sensible humans? A complex question that, but the answer is -- as long as they pay. (Its not about winning you see, its about keeping you around grinding - sure you get the good parts every once in awhile, like a Pavlovian experiment. In between, you get to grind away like a job at the laundromat.) These games are fun (if they weren't, lives would not be destroyed. We all know everything worth doing is worth destroying a life over, right?), but they cross over -- when you hit the wall and break away, are you more relieved than anything?

Metal Gear Solid would be a good game, were it not for the thirty-seven gajillion Cut-Scenes of Intense Boredom +5. Final Fantasy too .. too. And don't think esteemed franchises such as Gran Turismo are immune from this vinegar ... what were they thinking when introduced concepts whereby the player has to earn his licenses to get anywhere good? For that matter, easter eggs in games are awesome.. but this recent trend requiring you to clear a game in certain speeds or certain completions to 'unlock' the extras.....

Theres a lot of really great computer and console gaming going on, but go talk to Eugene Jarvis of Robotron game. Or Sid Meiers of Civilization. Get to the good parts, the interesting parts fast. We don't need to be all powerful up front, but we want to be immersed, we want to see the meat before the sun sets. We want to play, and go out for drinks afterwards. Sure, we might want to be able to play 160 hours a month like a full time job, but we do not want you to build that mechanic right in. And, one last thing -- didn't button mashing go out of vogue with Street Fighter and Everquest? I'm looking at you Blizzard.

Planet GP2X : Cinema: _The Goonies_ - its full of awesome

Sunday 18 February 2007 04:07 GMT

Sorry, been an entire month since last I wrote; its been busy, I tell you.

Our little one is due in about 5 days (though rarely do they arrive on the due date itself I'm told.) I expect some day the child will look up with big eyes and ask 'What was it like when you were growing up, old man?' I know now a reply that can come easily: 'There was pirate booty, mutants, mafiaso and video games'. When the child shakes his head with disgust, I'll point them to The Goonies as proof invariable.

After a long day of chores, we crawled to the couch to check pay-per-view. It was easy to pass up such instant classics as Little Man (the Custer's Revenge of movies, a Yars Revenge it is not!), but when we stumbled over Goonies it was nearly a must watch -- I'd never seen it. The Gremlins, sure, but not The Goonies. Yes - its true - I missed a movie that was made into a video game. I know, I know my friends, it happens.

I am trying not to say 'they don't make them like that anymore', but lets tick off the proverbial fingers shall we: Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, E.T. Should you challenge this assertion, I will insert sed fingers to ears - lalalalalalanotlistening!

Let me be blunt -- some great movies were made back in the day; they had a certain ingrediant thats been lacking ever since. Yes my dear friends, The Goonies was full of teh eighties.

Watch it. Good times. Not tossing bread crumbs to the gease in the park good times, but water slides good times.

Aside: I'll see if I can find a moment to pick up this new PC game - Supreme Commander - the sequal to Total Annihilation. Like I'll have time :P

fuzzix : So, what?s changed in two years?

Saturday 17 February 2007 23:46 GMT

A couple of years ago I was rendered in portrait (by myself…) thusly

What’s changed since then? I don’t smoke so much, I shave even less and use a different background colour in my text editor. Turbulent times indeed.

Aquarion : Journal - Scary

Saturday 17 February 2007 20:44 GMT

Okay, so, Every single american I know is smart, aware of other cultures, and not a victim of selective editing.

However:

Via M, New housemate

Uraeus : On Sawfish, Metacity and Linus

Saturday 17 February 2007 16:58 GMT

At best this is an extrapolation of the quite strict policy of Metacity in particular and the general GNOME policy of 'no GUI options before thinking'. This policy did come into effect with GNOME 2.x and it came about both due to UI design usability discussions, but also as a result of seeing our config menu's get clogged with options which mostly where there due to bugs, missing features and a heterogen deployment environment below GNOME. It was decided to focus on actually trying to solve these lower level issues instead of offering config options to work around them. A talk by Jim Getty's at GUADEC called 'Draining the swamp' being considered the call to arms on that issue. Projects such as HAL, the rejuvenated X.org effort and many other freedesktop projects came about almost as a direct consequence of this.

There was also some misconceptions on the Sawfish to Metacity switch that happened in this time period. It is not correct to say that Sawfish got replaced by Metacity due to it being deciding its high degree of configurability was bad, far from it. Sure there where people who felt Sawfish went a bit overboard in that regard, but that was not the reason it got ditched as the default GNOME window manager. The reason for that was simply that after Eazel went backrupt and Sawfish maintainer John Harper had to find a new job, he ended up at Apple. And thus due to Apple corporate policy, and probably long hours at work, he couldn't maintain Sawfish anymore. The troublesome thing about Sawfish was that it was written in its own Lisp dialect so as part of Sawfish you got both an extra lisp interpreter and GTK+ bindings for it. This meant that the C/C++ skills in the GNOME community didn't lend themselves well to fixing bugs in Sawfish. The two libraries and Sawsfish itself thus went unmaintained as John went away and nobody where interested/felt qualified to take it over. Thus the GNOME developers had to look around for a new window manager and it was decided that one should aim for one written in C like the rest of the desktop libraries to lessen the chance of future maintenance prolems. To answer this call Havoc Pennington stepped up with Metacity and it was quickly adopted by a lot of GNOME developers and users and subsequently chosen as the standard.

Metacity was philosophically very different from Sawfish and Havoc was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to an idea that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem. This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME as mentioned above, but in the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore fashion that for most other modules. But due to Havoc's high profile in the community and beyond it I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceivedthe project as a whole which is the main reason I see for this hard killed perception to live on.

Anyway, back to Linus and his irritation with Metacity. I can't not say if his patches will go in or not, its not my call. But I did at least add them properly to bugzilla for Linus to ensure they get reviewed and commented on at least.

The Webbs : Welcome to Burrabadine

Saturday 17 February 2007 00:14 GMT

Kermodeans : In which Maggie shows the depths of her ignorance again.

Friday 16 February 2007 21:22 GMT

KernelTrap : Linux: Improving Syslets, User Interface

Friday 16 February 2007 20:54 GMT

Ingo Molnar [interview] posted a second version of his syslets subystem patch set, which offers asynchrous system call support [story]. He noted that the effort is a work in progress, and that there are still outstanding issues to be fixed, "the biggest conceptual change in v2 is the ability of cachemiss threads to be turned into user threads. This fixes signal handling, makes them ptrace-eable, etc," going on to list numerous fixes since the first release. He noted that prior to releasing a third version of the patch set he will add support for multiple completion rings, add logic to share the 'spare thread' between the rings to further reduce startup costs, and remove reliance on mlock().

Linus Torvalds commented, "I'm still not a huge fan of the user space interface, but at least the core code looks quite clean. No objections on that front." He referred to earlier comments in which he had reacted strongly to the syslets userland interface saying, "I dislike it intensely, because it's so _close_ to being usable. But the programming interface looks absolutely horrid for any 'casual' use, and while the loops etc look like fun, I think they are likely to be less than useful in practice. Yeah, you can do the 'setup and teardown' just once, but it ends up being 'once per user', and it ends up being a lot of stuff to do for somebody who wants to just do some simple async stuff." He later noted that he was in particular concerned with the "register" functionality, which Ingo then simplified.

read more

KernelTrap : Linux: Page Replacement Requirements

Friday 16 February 2007 20:18 GMT

Rik van Riel [interview] posted some thoughts on the page replacement requirements of the Linux VM, noting that the same kinds of bugs have been getting fixed and reintroduced over the past few years, "this has convinced me that it is time to take a look at the actual requirements of a page replacement mechanism, so we can try to fix things without reintroducing other bugs. Understanding what is going on should also help us deal better with really large memory systems." He added his thoughts from this email to the linux-mm wiki, which he plans to update as new requirements surface.

The initial requirements shortlist included seven items: "1) must select good pages for eviction; must not submit too much I/O at once. Submitting too much I/O at once can kill latency and even lead to deadlocks when bounce buffers (highmem) are involved. Note that submitting sequential I/O is a good thing; 2) must be able to efficiently evict the pages on which pageout I/O completed; 3) must be able to deal with multiple memory zones efficiently; 4) must always have some pages ready to evict. Scanning 32GB of "recently referenced" memory is not an option when memory gets tight; 5) must be able to process pages in batches, to reduce SMP lock contention; 6) a bad decision should have bounded consequences. The VM needs to be resilient against its own heuristics going bad; 7) low overhead of execution." He continued on with some more in depth discussion of the various requirements.

read more

schwuk : Herd 4 is loose

Friday 16 February 2007 15:36 GMT

Feisty Herd 4 has hit the streets. Usual provisos apply to pre-release software, but if you have a spare box (or virtualisation software) it?s worth a look to see what is coming in the final release..

Kermodeans : Wittertainment is now a global phenomenon!

Friday 16 February 2007 13:38 GMT

Bryn_S : links for 2007-02-16

Friday 16 February 2007 13:19 GMT

• Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Joel Johnson Returns…to Spank Us All for Supporting Crap - Gizmodo

  We’re all a bunch of ignorant half-witted schmucks… find out why here…

  (tags: article blog culture daily hardware technology writing gizmodo gadgets politics)

schwuk : Keeping Quiet Reason #1

Friday 16 February 2007 10:50 GMT

In the past I?ve hinted at reasons why I?ve been so quiet on here (and why most of my recent content has been non-technical).

Well, the cat?s out of the bag on one the reasons now:

Thanks to Jono I am co-authoring the 2nd edition of The Official Ubuntu Book due out around the release of Feisty.

I?m even on Amazon!

Uraeus : More on GStreamer Windows and Mac support

Friday 16 February 2007 10:31 GMT

Anyway to show of where we are at here is a screenshot. The screenshot shows our small proof of concept Windows mediaplayer playing a video under Windows. For a more full featured experience look to future versions of Songbird.

We are a little shorter along on the Mac side of things as the Mac videosink is currently leaking memory like crazy and screenshots of audio playback tend to be a bit less interesting :). We expect squish those leaks and polish it up further in the next few weeks so I can provide a nice screenshot of GStreamer on MacOS X too.

We are implementing the GStreamer XOverlay interface accross all these video sinks. That means that you should be able to write a video player without any kind of special casing across platforms for video and audio output, GStreamer's output autodetection should take care of it for you. So for Songbird it will let them write the code embedding the video window once and it will work using native video output on both Windows and MacOSX in addition to under X Windows of course. When these elements are 100% finished and polished up I think porting things like Totem or Pitivi to Windows and MacOSX should be quite trivial in theory with both GTK+ and GStreamer running natively on these platforms. That said practice tend to prove that there would be some work involved :)

It should also be mentioned that thanks to Songbird we are not only able to provide these elements to the community, but they will be fully documented and polished up. This means the Windows and MacOS X output support will be 100% solid and not just 'checkbox' level.

XKCD : Lisp

Friday 16 February 2007 00:00 GMT

grifferz : What?s wrong with software RAID?

Thursday 15 February 2007 20:23 GMT

Ante, what’s wrong with Linux software RAID plus LVM for that? SATA RAID is generally “fakeraid”, and Linux software RAID will most likely outperform even the real 3ware SATA RAID. The only thing something like 3ware has going for it is battery backup — as an expensive optional extra.

jcmasters : Something I found on Amazon.com?

Thursday 15 February 2007 20:05 GMT

I’d like to thank the academy. Seriously though, thanks to the people who made this happen - my publisher (Debra, Carol, Kit and folks at Wiley), my friends (Kat, David, Matthew, Richard, Chris) and everyone else involved.

Jon.

Stuart Langridge : At Skycon

Thursday 15 February 2007 18:41 GMT

Well, I’m at Skycon. I’m flying the LugRadio flag by myself for today, though; Ade can’t make it at all, and Matt and Jono missed the plane through some incompetence bad luck. So I have to drink four times the amount of beer.

I can do that.

I’m speaking tomorrow; Matt and Jono will be here then too, so they won’t miss their talks. Skycon people: you don’t get rid of LugRadio that easily.

KernelTrap : OpenBSD: NDAs Versus Free Drivers

Thursday 15 February 2007 17:06 GMT

Greg Kroah-Hartman's announcement for free Linux driver development [story] included the necesssary legal framework to honor NDAs when creating GPL'd drivers. This allowance was discussed on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list. In a public exchange with Greg KH, Stephan Rickauer said, "now these companies have a great excuse to keep specs locked up tight under NDA, while pretending to be 'open.' The OpenBSD project has made clear more than once how this will hurt Free Software in the long run. Signing NDA's ensures that Linux gets a working driver, sure, but the internals are indistinguishable from magic. It is a source code version of a blob." OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt [interview] called the free driver effort a farce, "you are trying to make sure that maintainers of code -- ie. any random joe who wants to improve the code in the future -- has LESS ACCESS to docs later on because someone signed an NDA to write it in the first place. You are making a very big mistake."

Greg pointed the discussion to his FAQ in which the final question asks about the BSD operating systems and the answer states, "what about them? They are free to do whatever they wish, I have no input into their development at all, sorry." Greg further clarified, "well, as my goal is to have a GPL driver for everything, I don't see how this can hurt :) Now others can have different goals, and that's great and fine. I'm not saying you can't work on something if you wish to do so."

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KernelTrap : Linux: Syslets, Generic Asynchronous System Call Support

Thursday 15 February 2007 16:11 GMT

Ingo Molnar [interview] posted a set of 11 patches introducing "the first release of the 'Syslet' kernel feature and kernel subsystem, which provides generic asynchrous system call support". Ingo explains:

"Syslets are small, simple, lightweight programs (consisting of system-calls, 'atoms') that the kernel can execute autonomously (and, not the least, asynchronously), without having to exit back into user-space. Syslets can be freely constructed and submitted by any unprivileged user-space context - and they have access to all the resources (and only those resources) that the original context has access to."

Ingo goes on in his email to explain in greater detail how syslets work, then adds, "as it might be obvious to some of you, the syslet subsystem takes many ideas and experience from my Tux in-kernel webserver :) The syslet code originates from a heavy rewrite of the Tux-atom and the Tux-cachemiss infrastructure." He also offered some benchmark results, showing a 33.9% speedup comparing uncached synchronous IO to syslets, and a 19.2% speedup comparing cached synchronous IO to syslets, "so syslets, in this particular workload, are a nice speedup /both/ in the uncached and in the cached case. (note that i used only a single disk, so the level of parallelism in the hardware is quite limited.)"

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Everybody loves Eric Raymond : 0×90 0×90 0×90

Thursday 15 February 2007 11:38 GMT

jcmasters : HOWTO: visit a doctor

Thursday 15 February 2007 10:47 GMT

Life in the US is often interesting, from an introspective viewpoint anyway. Yesterday, I decided that this sore throat wasn’t going to get better on its own and needed some antibiotical assistance. So, I figured it was about time to register with a doctor and take care of all that jazz. Actually finding a doctor wasn’t too bad - I just used my health insurance provider’s website to find one down the street, called and got an apointment a few hours later. But when I got there, there was more fun to be had:

• Fill in registration form.
• Fill in more registration forms.
• Fill in background form (all ok so far, overdone, but ok).
• Fill in survey about depression. So I’m not depressed but they wanted to check I wasn’t about to kill myself as part of their paranoid default paperwork for new patients. I was tempted to write that the hassle involved in treating a sore throat was making me re-consider…but it’s not worth assuming a sense of humor exists.
• Fill in survey about domestic violence. Yeah, that’s right. A sore throat requires this kind of information.
• Take my blood pressure, weight, oxygen, heartrate, other vitals.
• See doctor, who repeats most of the above.
• Tell doctor “dude, I’ve got the same symptoms as someone who’s now already on antibiotics, I’m not dying, I just want a prescription and then I promise not to come back until I’m actually sick again”.
• Doctor takes swabs of my throat to send off for analysis (presumably because they can claim this as an additional expense to my insurance company).
• Discover the doctor is actually an OK dude. Originally Canadian and therefore versed in the Province based system in Canada, we had a good discussion about his support for universal healthcare, which local charities are good to donate to (I constantly feel guilt/annoyance that so many people here don’t have health coverage…and it really pisses me off) and the differences between US, Canadian and European healthcare systems.
• Get prescription.
• Go to CVS to claim it. They can’t find me in the insurance database. Phone calls, more waiting (and of course, I’m grumbling about the merits of universal healthcase by this point) and eventually after a wait they are able to process it.
• Got antibiotics.

Thank goodness I only had a sore throat. I hate to think how bad it would be if I actually had anything particularly wrong with me. It’s not that any one thing was annoying/excessive, it’s just the overall experience that’s typically overblown and rediculous. Anyway, they’ve even more than in the UK, convinced me to avoid seeing a doctor here again unless I really feel like hours of fun and enjoyment just to deal with a trivial sore throat

Irony of the day: being asked a bunch of times for your “social security” number and thinking to yourself “that’s right, social security, because the government here really provide for the people”. I like a lot of things about the US, but nobody is ever going to sell me on how healthcare works here…and now I’ve briefly experienced the whole broken mess for myself. People here do know the healthcare system is broken, it’s just that nobody can agree on how to fix it (read: rightwing types unwilling to pay higher taxes for universal healthcare benefits to wider society).

The number one reason I’m pissed off? Because of the disparity. I get good coverage through my employer, but so many millions of people don’t get anything - I hate to think about their experiences. Health should not be about who you work for, what job you do or how much you can afford to pay…not in an advanced society, anyway. I wish people who vote for fucktarded losers would finally realize this. But they won’t, because it’s not in keeping with unrealistic, unmaintainable tax cuts and general cuts to federal programs in order to spend more on fighting daddy’s war…

Jon

Don Marti : Internet slang of the future

Thursday 15 February 2007 05:35 GMT

Massively Pair Programming: writing code in front of a large audience, with the audience acting as your pair programming partner. -- James Ward, Technical Evangelist, Adobe.

Yes, Flash is getting an Eclipse-based IDE and a standard, shared with Mozilla, progamming language. There's even a...creative...approach to the problem of different library versions everywhere: an open-source liballthestuffflashneeds library that distributions can compile. Fixed ABI on the top, your distribution's OpenSSL and sound interface on the bottom.

Got a chance to ask Jerry Carter about getting started with LDAP for a sane small office setup. Answer: check out the documents at padl.com and plan to throw away your first LDAP schema as you get familar with it. Will do. Also see Jerry's book, and come on by the show floor tomorrow afternoon to ask some questions. more info.

Matt Revell : At SkyCon in Limerick this weekend

Wednesday 14 February 2007 09:08 GMT

I’m heading over to Limerick, this weekend, for SkyCon.

It looks as though it’s going to be a really cool event, sharing much the same spirit as LugRadio Live. The programme of speakers is nicely varied, with hardcore FOSS geekery through to talks on the social implications of technology.

I’ll be speaking, on Launchpad, at 11am on Sunday. Jono and Stuart are coming too, so we’ll be covering the whole thing for LugRadio too. Sadly, our bald bald friend can’t make it, so it looks as though we now have a tradition of only three of us attending foreign events.
If you’re in Ireland, or anywhere near an airport that’ll get you to Shannon, scrap your plans for the weekend and get over to Limerick. I’m seriously impressed by how well organised SkyCon has been, from a speaker’s perspective, so I’m sure the actual event’s going to be fantastic.

It’d be great to hook up with anyone that wants to chat about Launchpad and Bazaar. Email/grab me on irc (mrevell in #launchpad) if you want to arrange a particular time.

Aquarion : Journal - Expand your taste in music

Wednesday 14 February 2007 07:18 GMT

I have found a new way of expanding upon your musical tastes, and it goes like this:

Stage One, Lose your iPod.

This sounds like a bad thing, I admit, but to be entirely honest this was the easiest part of the entire enterprise. There I was, sitting in a pub somewhere in Soho (The John Snow, London Pub Fans. No relation to the news reader) and the iPod fell from the iPocket of my iJacket. Obviously I had, at the time, no idea of its latest desperate bid for freedom, and discovered nothing of the plan for an hour or so, on the tube home, when I discovered nothing of the iPod. Headphones? Yes. Desire to listen to loud bangy music? Check. iPod? Nope.

I was… distraught. Unhappy. It’s not that music is a large part of my life, or that I spend almost all my existence with a background soundtrack of music or other people (Currently listening to: One More Won’t Kill Me, by the Hedrons, the iTunes store free single of the week), except in the ways that it, you know, is. My iPod was lost, my iPod was gone, alas and a lack of music. I walked home to the sounds of the Underground, Walthamstow High Street on a Sunday evening, and the quiet of a sleeping flat.

When you order an iPod from the Apple store, they ask if you want something engraved on the reverse. Being something of a creative soul, I spent hours – literally – wracking my brain for a pithy two line quote to go on the back of my music store. /dev/music was good, but too geeky. “If music be the food of love, play carbonara” too Shakespearian, any Divine Comedy lyric too long. Bored of the entire enterprise, I eventually just fed it my email address.

Very few times in my existence will I be more thankful for my lack of creative endeavour on demand, as the Pod was picked up by – amazingly – an honest soul, who is also an aspiring DJ, and emailed me to let me know he’d found the little black box of magic. Picking it up, it wasn’t working, so he’d plugged it in at home, and iTunes had – in its helpful way – erased it and replaced it with his music, which is what it contained when it got back into my hot little hands yesterday. Hours upon hours of new music to listen to, until eventually I marked down the stuff I liked, plugged it into my laptop, and got my music back on it once again.

It is good to sometimes be reminded that parts of humanity are worth the effort.

Stuart Langridge : Belkin Wireless-G USB adapter in Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy

Wednesday 14 February 2007 01:59 GMT

I’ve got a Belkin F5D7050 wireless USB adapter. It didn’t work under Ubuntu. This is because Edgy ships an old fucked version of the driver. If Ubuntu is loading the “rt73usb” driver, and it’s not working for you, that’s why. Download and install the CVS version as per the Ubuntu wiki instructions and it works perfectly. Superb.

Mozilla Developer News : Removing some nsIDOM*Listener interfaces

Tuesday 13 February 2007 21:47 GMT

The following event listener interfaces have been removed on trunk: nsIDOMMutationListener.h nsIDOMPaintListener.h, nsIDOMScrollListener.h, and nsIDOMPageTransitionListener.h. Those have either never been used in Gecko or have been unused for a long time.

If you’re using those interfaces currently, convert your code to use normal DOM’s addEventListener() and handleEvent() methods.

Also, note that use of any interfaces in http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/dom/public/coreEvents/
should be avoided ( Gecko:Obsolete_API ) .

Don Marti : Welcome back to the Linux business, Blake!

Tuesday 13 February 2007 21:35 GMT

Blake Stowell has left SCO to work at Linux-using Omniture. (via Groklaw.)

Blake has always been one of the smart PR professionals out there, even when SCOX gave him very little good material to work with. I think he's the inventor of the technique of keeping two relatively content-free partner press releases ready to slap a date on and push out, so that you can push any bad news below the fold on your company's finance.yahoo.com page. Good trick. Will be fun to see what he can do when the subject of the release is a company with racks full of Linux boxes doing something useful.

mrben : Away for a bit

Tuesday 13 February 2007 16:14 GMT

Well - I fly out to Mozambique tomorrow - very excited, and a little bit scared too. I’m taking a digital camera and a video camera, so there’ll be lots of evidence. Plus I think I’m going to invest in a low-tech blog (aka a notebook) so that I have some stuff to post on my return, although if I get a moment I may post while I’m there, if at all possible.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to my sponsorship - only £184 to go at the moment, but it’s coming down nicely

Don’t break anything while I’m gone

mrBen

Bryn_S : links for 2007-02-13

Tuesday 13 February 2007 13:19 GMT

• Module: ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper

  Rails guide for adding in confirmation dialog boxes

  (tags: rails development documentation ruby useful)

• InVisible - Ruby on Rails Reference 1.1.2

  Quick guide for ruby on rails

  (tags: article blog development documentation howto learning programming rails reference Ruby software technology tutorial tips useful webdesign rubyonrails cheatsheet)

Andy Balaam : My RSS feed has moved

Tuesday 13 February 2007 13:00 GMT

I've moved to a new web space provider, and changed over to WordPress instead of my home-grown DIYBlog system. The URL for the blog remains www.artificialworlds.net/blog, and, thanks to some beautiful JavaScript hackery, I hope all the permalinks will remain valid, but the RSS feed itself has moved to www.artificialworlds.net/blog/?feed=rss2

Matt Revell : Virgin Media is Virgin by numbers

Tuesday 13 February 2007 08:41 GMT

I moaned, a couple of days ago, about how the NTL:Telewest to Virgin Media rebrand seems to be less about the substance of the brand and more a quick paintjob.

Virgin Enterprises is famous for successfully applying its brand to disparate products and services. While not every product is a roaring success - e.g. Virgin Cola - Branson’s team has previously molded the brand to the relevant segments’ needs and expectations. While Virgin Money is clearly targeted at above average earners 25 - 45, Virgin Trains and Virgin Atlantic are sufficiently broad not to alienate any of their massive potential customer-bases.

So, it’s a surprise that the Virgin Media brand is so poorly targeted. Visit the website. It’s all 19 year old models in heavy eye make-up, with ridiculous hair-dos and a “look more weird than handsome/pretty” smugness. Since launch, they have thrown in a couple of stock photos of perfect families staring glibly at laptops, but their jarring presence only highlights how poorly the Virgin Media marcomms reflect the incredibly broad range of people whose house is passed by cable.

The worst offences lie in the copy: it patronises the hell out of the reader, its saccharine chumminess is likely to alienate rather than make people think they’ve found a friend and, oddly for a company so keen on ramping up average revenue per customer, it relentlessly makes references that would have been embarrassing in student-targeted ads.

“Hello you…” is how the rebrand announcement greeted existing NTL:Telewest customers. Phone deals talk about calling Aunty Doris in Australia. The website offers to help you “tell your ADSL from your ELBO”; every copywriter has come up with something equally as ridiculous, spent ten minutes trying to convince themselves that it can work, then given up and got back to work.

The problems, I think, are that Virgin Mobile people have no doubt been heavily involved in the rebrand. Virgin Mobile has always been about teenagers, and as a MVNO with no network investment and a saturated market, it’s okay to be that specific. Virgin Media, though, has to squeeze every last penny out of the network that costs billions of pounds to build and resulted in previous incarnations going down the pan.

But this clearly is just old NTL, with some Telewest influence, cracking through a Virgin gloss. The Virgin brand doesn’t yet fit and it shows.

The logo, the copy, the colours are all meant to be evidence of the true brand - i.e. the philosophy that informs everything the company does. Once the NTL:Telewest people start living the Virgin brand (sorry, horrible phrase), then perhaps it’ll come together a little more and, instead of appearing like Virgin by numbers, the company will work out who it’s talking to and what it’s trying to do for them.

kNo : Note to self #39

Monday 12 February 2007 18:48 GMT

Never say ever again:

If "this-thing-that-may-not-happen-but-that-could-happen", I'm going to eat my hat

Kevin Smith : I wussed out in front of Alanis!

Monday 12 February 2007 17:51 GMT

GingerDog : PHP 5.2.1

Monday 12 February 2007 17:46 GMT

PHP 5.2.1, PCRE and Suhosin

With the impending 'Month of Bugs' for PHP, and the new release of version 5.2.1 the other day it seemed as if it would be a good time to upgrade.

My initial attempts were met with failure, as I tried to upgrade an internal server at work over the weekend. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug with the bundled pcre library, which seems to manifest itself with the patch I apply to Smarty to enable proper OO method chaining... after quite a lot of head scratching, I installed pcre version 7.0, and compiled PHP against that. Problem solved.

Next off, I thought I might as well upgrade our internet facing servers, and also install Suhosin, which appears to be the successor to the Hardening Patch I've been using for some time. Thankfully this patch/upgrade caused no hassle what so ever :-)

See also here