Search Results: "ron"

16 February 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: The Belisarius hexalogy by Eric Flint and David Drake

Books in this series (all published by Baen):
  1. An Oblique Approach (1998)
  2. In the Heart of Darkness (1998)
  3. Destiny’s Shield (1999)
  4. Fortune’s Stroke (2000)
  5. The Tide of Victory (2001)
  6. The Dance of Time (2006)
The premise sounds a little silly: a cyborg and a crystalline artificial intelligence travel back through time from the far future into the Sixth Century. The cyborg’s mission: to create a totalitarian world government that will create the perfect future according to one branch of fanatics. The crystal’s mission: to aid the Byzantine general Belisarius to defeat the cyborg. Never mind that premise. Here is another. Gunpowder and associated technologies are introduced in the 6th Century, first in India and second in the (Eastern) Roman Empire. What happens next? Based on an outline for a trilogy by David Drake, Eric Flint has created a masterpiece in this six-volume story. It really is a united story, not a collection of six independent novels; the story starts in the first book and ends in the sixth. There will be no more books in this series (except, perhaps, as a “sequel” series, though the authors have not hinted about this). It is a masterpiece, all right. In an action-adventure story, plot is paramount, and the Belisarius hexalogy has an unusually tight plot for the word count. The characters are well drawn; evidence of this claim is that I wept, much like Belisarius himself, when one of the significant secondary characters died – in battle, yes, but by a fortune’s stroke and not by any enemy’s design. The characterization of the societies and countries involved is suberb in my admittedly history-challenged opinion; India is described vividly, although, as Flint has mentioned, it’s extremely anachronistic (Flint himself considers this appropriate under the circumstances, and describes his portrait of 6th Century India as “impressionistic”). After a slightly slow start – it takes several not so exciting chapters for the premise of the story to be revealed – the story starts climbing like an aeroplane after takeoff, and never stops. The mood in the beginning is downright depressing, with only a tiny bit of hope, but it steadily brightens, and the last book is pure payoff, immensely satisfying to this reader. It was so satisfying, that I haven’t suffered from story world withdrawal after finishing The Dance of Time. This is unusual. I have no other option but to rate this story 5/5.

David Pashley: A Bit of a Confusing Morning

So far, in the last 12 hours, I've discovered that my payslips from this time last year bear no resemblence to reality, my pension company has failed to recieve approximately 1900GBP of money that should have been paid into it and O2 have managed to transfer my mobile number to completely the wrong SIM. I'm still waiting for April so I can call the Inland Revenue to find out what happened to all the student loan repayments I made at my previous company (Approx 700GBP). Have spoken with O2, who are going to transfer my number ot the right SIM, hopefully in the next 2 hours. Need to speak to the guy that does payroll in the office, when he comes in next. Sucks to be me. Update: Phone now works.

Wouter Verhelst: You're wrong, Erich.

That joke does translate to other languages. Not only does the dutch word for "Flower" sound exactly the same way as the dutch word for "flour", it's actually even written the same way: "bloem".

Joey Hess: don't forget the MOOs

(This is a copy of my response to the LWN article Toward a free metaverse, which won't be freely available itself for another week or so.) There's an unconcious bias in this article toward 3d graphical worlds, and I think it's important to realise that that's not a necessary component of a virtual world, although it's certianly a component that will appeal to a lot of people and that fits in nicely with some current ways of working with computers -- ie, sitting in front of expensive screens weilding a mouse. Long ago we had MOOs, MUDs, etc, and they were text based. Just words, you know. And nearly all of them were free software. It might well be that text, or speech, or the like ends up being a better interface to virtual worlds of the future, especially if they are tightly integrated and layered on top of the real world. And I'm increasingly convinced that if these worlds don't integrate into the real world, if the ideas that have been bubbling up out of ADVENTURE and the MUCKs and the MMORPGs and such don't spread out and become something larger and more inclusive than their own little pretend world, then in the end that whole area has been nothing but pointless games. Which I hope it hasn't, but perhaps I'm getting old.. Speaking of freedom, there are levels and layers, and it's possible to build the free on top of the non-free. After all, I'm typing this on a device that is present in the er, First Life, which is not particularly free in its implementation; it has non-free firmware and BIOS, and is composed of atoms of some substances that are less easily available than air, and which follow some annoyingly inflexible physical laws, and it needs a constant input of metered electricity to run. But on top of all that is some free code that gives me a measure of freedom. Similarly, it would be possible to run free code in Second Life, and given how rare it is overall for such services to support coding at all, let alone explcitly give a program (or object's) creator the freedom to make it Free, that Second Life does so seems encouraging to me. If we get a distributed standardized free online world by 2010, I'll be happy indeed. (Disclaimer: I write text based MOOS, and have never used Second Life, though I chatted with someone there on the phone today.)

15 February 2006

Martin F. Krafft: The point of repeating passwords

If I set a password for a resource, it's good to be able to enter it twice and have the system verify that the two passwords equal each other, or else a typo may bring some unpleasant surprises. If, on the other hand, I let a system know the password for an existing resource (such as a WPA-PSK for a WLAN), there is no need in entering it twice! If it doesn't work, you probably entered the password wrongly. It's amazing how little many software vendors think when coding. "Password?" -- "Ah yes, two input fields, it's safer that way." The problem is especially annoying when the software needing the password is buggy, such as the Windows XP SP2 WLAN configuration: it cannot properly process WEP passphrases with special characters, so you have to enter the 13 bytes in hex. That's 26 keystrokes, and just to be sure you don't enter the password wrongly, make that 52. Some will say that Windows users are so stupid that requiring them to enter the password twice to guard against typos and subsequent hotline calls because it doesn't work. Let them say that. PS: Erinn, this Windows-related post I dedicate specifically to you.

Martin F. Krafft: A first glance at the Draytek Vigor 2900VG

I got myself the Draytek Vigor 2900VG, as announced, to handle my home office connection needs. I've been playing with the device all morning and am somewhat undecided as to whether I should keep it, or replace it with a tiny computer without moveable parts that runs Debian, simply for the benefit of greater control. But first, let me review the device. Don't get me wrong when I say that I am not sure whether I should keep it: the router seems solid and has a lot of functionality, and with few glitches, it mostly seems to work. Go read the specs yourself if you care, in the following I want to give my view on some of the pros and cons of the device after a few hours: The device is an all-in-one, combining WAN access (DHCP, PPPoE, PPTP) with NAT (with support for a DMZ), DHCP, VPN (PPTP, L2CAP, IPsec), a stateful packet filter, a 802.11g access point with support for WPA2 and 802.1x, VoIP gateway, a 4-port switch with VLAN and rate control, static routing and RIP, QoS, UPNP, dynamic DNS updates (e.g. no-ip.com), syslog or SMTP-based logging, and a printer server for USB printers. Basic HTTP URL and content filtering is provided, though most of it comes through the interface to SurfControl (no subscription included). Content control includes the most popular IM and P2P protocols. For all that functionality, the price is quite reasonable, if you ask me. Interaction is through a web interface that can be restricted to a couple of clients only, and is password protected (though in the clear). In any case, the device also comes with a telnet console that has a larger feature set than the web interface, but lacks documentation. Several forums exist, however, to fill this hole. The router also sports SNMP! The packet filter seems limited in what it can do: TCP, UDP, ICMP, IGMP, and only the basics for each (e.g. sockets for TCP). There are 12 filter sets with 7 rules each, and if/then logic can be implemented by branching to other filter sets. However, I can well imagine that the limit can be quickly reached. For QoS, you can define three classes, and to each assign services based on sockets and diffserv. That's it, but it should be enough for most basic use cases. VPN can be achieved with L2CAP, PPTP, or IPsec, but only pre-shared secrets are supported. Users can dial-in, up to 16 "Road Warrior" profiles can be created, and 32 LAN-to-LAN tunnels can coexist. A nice feature are the 16 schedules you can define and use throughout. For instance, certain filters can be restricted to only apply during working hours, some users may only be allowed to use the VPN to dial in during specific times, WLAN can be turned off at dusk, and VoIP devices can be routed based on the time of the day. NTP ensures this all happens accurately. I am really missing a RADIUS server on the device. As it stands, I am left to run a separate RADIUS server on the LAN, or resort to WPA2-PSK, which is a little less desirable but quite okay for my case. The device can separate LAN and WLAN clients and block any traffic between the two. I have not found a way to put LAN and WLAN into their own subnets and allow traffic inbetween. The DHCP server seems okay, it does not remember leases and will simply time out leases and use them for new requests. It is not possible to lock a MAC address to a specific IP through the web interface, one has to resort to the telnet prompt, and the limit is on 10 static leases. The device has no support for DNS updates for DHCP clients, nor is there any integration with a DNS server whatsoever. This means that for 10+ clients, you'll need ZeroConf stuff or you cannot use DNS between clients on the LAN/WLAN. All of the above are minor annoyances. I have also already found a bug (which has been known for more than a year now but remains unfixed in the latest firmware from December 2005): the device has a DNS relay without a cache (ugh!). If you request an A record, it all works. If you request an AAAA or MX record, it forgets to translate the source IP of the answer and feeds the upstream forwarder's packet straight throught. Thus, it is not possible to resolve AAAA or MX records without hard-coding the DNS servers to use in the DHCP server configuration to bypass the DNS relay. That's all for now. I have not gotten around to play with VoIP stuff yet, but one of these days...

Steve Kemp: Words are very unnecessary

Today I started to get annoyed when my bash completion code wasn’t available upon my laptop. To fix this I’ve created a simple Debian package called steve-completion - with the intention that I’ll move all my custom completion code into it. This should make my environments more sane and uniform. Right now I’ve just added support for completion of upload targets to dupload, and completion of the options for the pyzor package. Over the next few days I’ll add my other code. To avoid naming conflicts the files are named /etc/bash_completion.d/foo.steve. I dislike the Steve-suffix, but I dont want to trample on files which may be made available by package maintainers. (Assuming I get round to filing wishlist bugs.) This is comparible to the steve-base virtual package I made/use which exists solely as a package to pull in dependencies such as screen, sudo, etc. (These are packages which I miss when they are not available.) I wonder how many other people have similar packages? I know I got the idea from mdz .. Update: - CVS repository.

Clint Adams: So when you wake up on a Saturday and you have to think of me

In the sack: Cocoa butter and sandalwood Wet: Sandalwood and eucalyptol Dry down: Sandalwood The touch: A solitary bud The feel: Staring into the mortality divide The magic of our lives: Fleeting. Final verdict: Robbed of a fair shake by environmental crisis.

14 February 2006

John Goerzen: Yet Another Use For Duct TApe

How can you go wrong with this headline: Physics students, duct tape extend faded couch's mileage Yes, that's right, by using a lawn mower engine and duct tape, they have motorized a couch.

Brett Parker: And here we go again...

Well, the laptop has decided that it doesn't like power... doesn't like it much at all... appears to be an issue with the socket on the back of the laptop so I get to send it back again... that's always fun :) This time, however, I've moved... so I suspect that I better give them a new address and things when I call this time! It's currently leaning against the wall with the power plugged in so that it gets enough charge for me to back things up from it tomorrow and send it back, after phoning the nice acer support lot, again... hopefully, though, it should only be gone for 3 days when I send it off :) This does mean that I have to sit infront of the other machine when I'm at home though... maybe it's time to purchase a cheap laptop for general abuse... or emergencies... or taking places... hmm... the current laptop is more of a desktop replacement type laptop... I could do with one that's more suitable for lugging about. So if anyone knows of cheap, functional laptop with reasonable specs and a >2 hour battery life, I'd be interested :)

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Shell Scripts Frontend Tool

Well, today I've started to upload things related to the CDDT code to Debian. My first upload is a simple package that has been splitted from the current CDDT runtime code, as it is useful by itself. I've called it SSFT, the initials of Shell Scripts Frontend Tool. It is a shell function library that includes functions to display messages and get data from the user; the functions use zenity, dialog or plain text to do their work, depending on the value of the SSFT_FRONTEND variable; the idea was inspired by the debconf frontends, but uses only shell code with standard utilities (with the exception of the optional zenity and dialog utilities and the use of gettext.sh from gettext to support L10N). I've tested the current code against a lot of Bourne Shell compatible shells, including posh (that one made me remove the use of the local built in and rename the variables to _l_ as a prefix), so it should work more or less OK on any modern Unix. I don't know if anybody but me will use the library, if anyone tries it and finds a bug please report it to the SSFT project or the BTS (well, that will need a little bit of waiting, but I suppose that no one will try the package until it gets into the archive).

Eric Dorland: Firefox definitely could be better

Martin F. Krafft writes about Firefox's un-UNIX-like behavior. I mostly agree with him. Aside from the X forwarding bug in the remote implementation (which has been reported numerous times already), the main problem is the inconsistency in the interface. If I run firefox from the command line everything works fine and it behaves like a normal UNIX application (ie taking over the terminal unless I background it). If I go to another terminal and run firefox file:///tmp/foo.html, this will open a new window or tab in Firefox and immediately exits. This is very un-UNIX-like, there's no way to know if the program is actually exiting or if it's just launching a new window. These leads to fun bugs with programs that call firefox as an external viewer (see #278990 and #284174). If running firefox causes it to connect to an already running instance, it should wait(2) on that process, since that would make a lot more sense from the UNIX perspective (and perhaps a -remote flag to have the "fire-and-forget" functionality we have now, because that does make sense in some situations too).

As far as I'm concerned the whole profile mechanism is a waste of code and a hold over from the old Netscape days, for people without multiuser systems. It should be dropped completely. Although we'd probably need to be able to run multiple Firefox processes on the same profile before it could be stripped out.

There is definitely a strong Windows mentality that pervades Firefox. I still remember when the extension mechanism was first introduced back in 0.9 and you needed to run as root (or the Administrator under Windows) for it to work properly. Madness. Although UNIX does seem to be more suited to an environment where processes are lightweight and short-lived. Big, monolithic applications are a more recent phenomenon.

Mike Hommey: Gripes with Firefox

Martin said:
Firefox and OpenOffice.org seem to be two flagship products of the F/OSS world. At the same time, they are probably the two best examples of programmes orthogonal to the Unix philosophy. Does that mean that the Unix philosophy is the wrong way? Holy Shit!
No, Martin, that doesn’t mean anything about the Unix philosophy. It only means Windows developers don’t have a clue about Unix.

Daniel Baumann: Debian Live Initiative

I already got some feedback about the "device driver check CD"-thing. People got confused about it, so I will tell you a bit more about my intentions (although I wanted to start doing this not until next week, duuh). What is wrong with current live systems? There are already several Debian-based live systems and they are doing a great job. But, from the Debian perspective, most of them have one or more of the following disadvantages: Why create our own live system? Debian is the Universal Operating System: IMHO we should have an official live system for showing arround and to officially represent the true, one and only Debian system with the following main advantages: Creating the Debian Live framework Such a life system framework would allow to create different images for different scenarios: The last one is this "confusing" thing I mentioned before. Wouldn't it be nice to have a live system to easy detect hardware? Imagine, you could take such an image, burn it on a CD or copy it on a USB-stick, go to your hardware shop and boot it. Since this system would use only official Debian packages, you can easily verify if your favourite piece of hardware is supported by Debian. Doubts like "it runs with Knoppix, so hopefully it runs with Debian too" are history by that. Maybe someone could implement then some sort of application which checks the hardware against Kenshis Debian GNU/Linux hardware compatibility list and displays some sort of report about the compatibility level of the tested hardware. I will definitely work on that goal. But first, I have to do a bit of research about the best techniques and create the framework arround it... Thanks to Myon for setting up the record live.debian.net.

Martin F. Krafft: Gripes with Firefox

Mozilla Firefox has done some good to the Web as a whole. I still wonder why, for $DEITY's sake, it does everything different from a normal application. To be precise, Firefox sucks just a little too much for my taste. Today's gripe: I have two machines here, my laptop and my workstation. The workstation is headless due to a broken monitor, but it's connected to the stereo. My music collection is served by libapache2-mod-musicindex over HTTP, and I have not yet figured out how to configure mocp to actually play remote playlists (any ideas?). Thus, these days I X-forward Firefox to my laptop to surf the list and select the songs. But try this: start Firefox locally, then start an instance through an X-enabled SSH session: it will open a new window of the running local session, which is really not what I want nor expect. It seems like the requirement to surf from somewhere else is an out of bounds concept for the Firefox developers. Thanks for trying (and failing) to be smart, Mr. Firefox. Why don't you rather concentrate on processing clicks and keystrokes when you should, rather than ignoring them from time to time? Update: Matt Brubeck tells me that MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 in the environment does what I want. Future versions will have a -no-remote command-line argument. I think it should become default. Please see #352809 if you have an opinion on this. PS: Firefox and OpenOffice.org seem to be two flagship products of the F/OSS world. At the same time, they are probably the two best examples of programmes orthogonal to the Unix philosophy. Does that mean that the Unix philosophy is the wrong way? Holy Shit!

13 February 2006

Joey Hess: patch followup

Followup on my previous review of Ubuntu's patches to my packages: So things have improved for my packages, at least after I made a stink about it and some people pretty clearly made it a priority to fix it. I doubt that this can be extrapolated to any other set of packages though. Total useful stuff gleaned this time: One minor build-depends fix, one icon.
Total estimated time to subit those to Debian BTS: approximatly 2 minutes.
Total time it took me to extract them from the diffs: about an hour.

12 February 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Transcript of an interview of Conan O Brien

Conan O’Brien came to Finland on Saturday to shoot some stuff for his show. Today, he was a last-minute guest in one of our national-television talk shows. The interview lasted for about fifteen minutes. I made a transcript. An excerpt:
Arto Nyberg: So how are your feelings now, when you remember yesterday’s crowd waiting for you outside the airport? Conan O’Brien: I’m still getting over it, that was a high point of my life because I’ve never… Arto Nyberg: Be honest. Conan O’Brien: I’m being honest, I’ve never… I’ve been in front of some happy, excited crowds before, but the intensity of that reaction, there were, I think, several thousand people… I’m just going to say fifty thousand… I don’t know if that’s the exact number, but let’s go with eighty thousand. Arto Nyberg: Let’s… Conan O’Brien: There were many, many people at the airport, and they were extremely excited, and they were very nice, and they seemed to genuinely like the show and… like what we’re doing, and I was excited. Arto Nyberg: Did you expect one hundred thousand people coming greet you?

Paul van Tilburg: GNOME Bashing & Early Rising

Early Rising Simon, I have been following the early riser program for 8 months now. I wrote about my experience some time ago. It still is working well for me, although I had a little trouble with it when I moved to Edinburgh. However, my headaches warn me and make sure I stay in the program. GNOME It has been quite a meme to bash GNOME the last few weeks. Since bashing generally doesn’t help the motivation of any hackers and people working hard to accomplish a goal, I want to rebuke it a bit. Two and a half years ago I got my PowerBook. After five years of using a Pentium-233 with 64MB I suddenly had some CPU power. Since my old environment (WindowMaker) was broken on PPC at the moment, I decided to go with GNOME. Coming from WindowMaker it really felt like things were done quite differently, but being open-minded I tried to let it all go. The thing is, do I really want to configure everything? I liked configuring a lot back then, it was like an addiction. Now that I have gotten used to GNOME (let’s call it The GNOME way™), it just feels bothersome, getting in my way. When I encounter a GNOME desktop I immediately can work with it and don’t feel the need to redo the complete setup. When I look back, the only things I really want to change are the programs I use, the information I see and the way I control it all. This basic stuff I easily can do with launchers, applets and keybindings. Also have I been observing and helping some new users. And somehow I still keep reaching the moment that I can hear myself say, “Ow, hehe, yeah… that doesn’t work quite right yet. Just open a terminal (eek!) and edit this and that file.” So, we are not there yet. For me GNOME offers innovation, sufficient configurability, and an efficient do-not-get-in-my-way workspace. The change from WindowMaker to GNOME has been to me as my switch from Windows to Linux, a thing I ventured into open-minded and worked out quite well. Won’t this result into a dull monoculture of desktop setups? Maybe so, but I don’t have to be different in every way just to make the statement that I am different. OK guys, bash away now… oh, and thanks GNOME people!

11 February 2006

Axel Beckert: SuSE sucks!

Since SuSE closes the security support two years after release and the recent KDE JavaShit remote code execution hole wasn’t patched as fast as I would have expected it (the patch came out after the upgrade I’m writing about here) in the SuSE 9.0 which was installed on my 2.66 GHz AMD desktop at work (it started as in 2002 as a SuSE 7.3 on a 400 MHz box and has been upgraded since then to 8.0, 8.2 and 9.0 IIRC), I decided, it’s now really time to upgrade to SuSE 10.0. (Although 10.1 will be out soon, I just don’t want to wait for it.) And since my boss only wants SuSE boxes and neither Debian (which I would prefer) nor Gentoo (which a colleague prefers), I couldn’t simply install Sarge on this box although I would have chosen that option if it would have been available. Since my former SuSE experiences told me that this would mean a lot of trouble, I took notes from the beginning, once for the blog and once for my boss to show him, that most trouble doesn’t come from me being a power user used to being allowed to touch any config file (like I am on Debian). Preparations So I begin with the preparations: Starting the 400 MHz Debian Woody box on my desktop (whose operating system is more than a year older than SuSE 9.0 and still has security support, yeah!) I usually need to build custom Debian packages for customers. There I could chat in IRC and took notes while trying to upgrade and get the whole thing working again. When everything was ready, I put the SuSE DVD in — just to notice, that it’s just a CD-ROM. So I put the SuSE 10.0 CD1 in the CD-ROM drive and typed “sudo shutdown -r now” in the shell. The box starts shutting down and tells me:
Please stand by while rebooting the system…
But it didn’t reboot. I waited for several minutes, nothing happend. Well, seems as if the SuSE upgrade already starts as I expect it to end: Horrible. Read more…

Daniel Baumann: Eiffel packaging considered painful

Our Chair of Software Engineering at the ETH Zurich is addicted to the Eiffel programming language. Thus, a PhD student is working on an Eiffel Multimedia Framework, named EiffelMedia, and I'm doing the Debian packaging. After working the second year with Eiffel stuff now, I can say that packaging Eiffel programs (not the language itself) is a major PITA, with respect to the following two aspects: Eiffel is different Eiffel is non-free

There are not one... not two... but three incompatible Eiffel compilers arround. Oh yeah... Except from some fundamental programs like Gobo Eiffel or the Eiffel Wrapper Generator (they support both all three compilers), nearly all programs are written according to the current Eiffel specifcation. So there is no real alternative to the proprietary EiffelStudio. Beeing binary-only is a major drawback too: EiffelStudio on Linux/powerpc is dynamically compiled against glibc-2.3.5, but Sarge has glibc-2.3.4. So one needs a backport of glibc, which taints the system in an unneccessary and stupid way. Please: Eiffel Software, if you are reading this, open the sources of EiffelStudio now and turn it into free software, for the greater good of us all. Make additional ports to other architectures possible and allow us, the packagers and upstreams of Eiffel programs, to drop the cumbersome support for other ancient Eiffel compilers. Let's focus us to one, single implementation and improve it.

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