Search Results: "tar"

30 May 2007

Martin F. Krafft: Information management 2.0

Dear Lazyweb: my information management is in dire need of an upgrade. In particular, I am looking for two features, the second of which is an extension of the first. So let's start with the first: Given a certain issue a job, a project, I write and receive emails, send and receive letters, make and receive phone calls, and author all kinds of documents. In addition, I may have other tidbits of information, such as bookmarks and contact information of the involved people, which are related to the issue at hand. I can store the documents and letters in folders on my filesystem, but what emails and bookmarks and contact information are isolated from the filesystem by the application through which I access this information, even though they may be stored in standard formats. I do not want to create redundant information by copying emails to the respective folders in the filesystem, not only because of the error potential in forgetting that one message which you later need. What I want is a high-level view ideally command-line based into my information, such that for any given project, I can easily and immediately access all related correspondence, documents, and data. I almost want something like a customer relation management system (CRM), except that I don't want to organise my data contact-centric, but rather issue-centric: an issue may involve nobody, a dozen other people, or be about one single person. I took a brief look at beaglefs and was briefly impressed that it did not depend on roughly 5 gigabytes of GNOME/Mono, but then also decided that it's not what I wanted, because it's too fileystem-centric and I also do not want a hundred mounted pseudo filesystems in my home directory. Beagle, on the other hand, does have half a million dependencies and plugins for almost every other application that has half a million dependencies, but it's basically unusable to people who use simple, non-graphical tools for their information management. I am going to check strigi-daemon and doodle, but I don't really expect any different. Does anyone know of a high-level tool that I could use to tie together all my information sources/types? Then, on to the second feature I want: tags. You know it, tags are web 2.0 and web 2.0 is sexy and since I want to be sexy, I need tags. They are also marginally useful and I could use them to place the link the email from a friend about Debconf7 to his name, Debian, the conference, as well as the client we're going to be visiting on the way back. Or I could associate the slides for my talk on method diffusion with Debian, the conference, and my Ph.D. research. Marginally useful but soooo sexy. Tags should be hierarchical, such that foo::bar::baz is a subset of foo and foo::bar (and a query for foo would automatically yield results for foo::bar::baz too). Wildcards should be supported, such that I could search for foo::+::baz and also find foo::bla::baz, and of course you should be able to perform the standard logical functions, such as AND/OR/NOT on them. Enrico calls this "faceted categorisation" and I would never question him on such topics. I do like the idea of a filesystem, backed by an index, but otherwise using metadata stored in extended filesystem attributes, which is what BeagleFS does. However, I'd like it to be ad-hoc, such that the query is not a mount option, but rather determined by the filesystem syscalls. For instance, the directory listing of /TAGS/foo::bar/ should contain all files tagged with foo::bar; /TAGS/-foo::bar/, /TAGS/foo::bar,+::baz/, and /TAGS/foo::+.bla::+/ could be the shell-friendly ways to encode NOT, OR, and AND. If you think about it for a minute, then it's actually not that hard and should be a weekend job to implement on top of FUSE, but it'll only really work when each filesystem node corresponds to exactly one entity. Contacts and bookmarks are trivial to implement that way (VCards and .lnk files), but e-mail is not: with the two popular storage backends mailbox and Maildir, an e-mail message is either a set of lines in a file, or a file in a directrory hierarchy. At first, Maildir may sound like the ticket, but when you consider that a message's new status is encoded in the path and not in the message's filename or content, while the filename is used to encode other status and index information, such as deleted or a message's size, it quickly becomes a nightmare this is why I consider mairix to be more or less unusable other than for quick, one-time searches. To be able to properly deal with email in the filesystem I am proposing, one would need to use mailboxes that only ever stored one message (which would be a waste of space and is not supported by any of dozens of e-mail processing or reading tools), or a new format that used only extended filesystem attributes for metadata, never location of a file or its name. And that does not exist yet, isn't debugged, let alone supported by any tools. Where to, Lazyweb? Comments welcome. NP: Gazpacho: When Earth Lets Go Update: as many have noted, of course I am looking for something like the semantic web, or closely related to it however, given the current state of things, that doesn't get us any further. Also, I don't want any of the Web or social and community stuff that seems to be an inseperable part of the semantic web or the OWL. I just want the semantics for a single-user environment. Thus, NEPOMUK, which three people have pointed to, is not what I am looking for. On the issue of one-mail-per-file, Remi Vanicat pointed me to Gnus' nnml storage: 
If you use this back end, Gnus will split all incoming mail into files, one
file for each mail, and put the articles into the corresponding directories
under the directory specified by the  nnml-directory  variable.
As long as nnml is a Gnus-specific format, it's useless to me. I want to continue using standard tools like mutt, procmail, formail, and IMAP servers.

Enrico Zini: vim-changelog

Editing ChangeLog with vim Turns out vim has a changelog.vim plugin to edit ChangeLog files. With \o you start a new entry. A look at /usr/share/vim/vim70/ftplugin/changelog.vim can show some more.

Joey Hess: atari

The Atari 130XE was my first computer. Not the first computer I used, but close. I got it around 1986, when I was in 4th grade. My dad and I bought it at some store, probably Sears. I paid part of the money for it, and he paid part. I think he planned to use it for word processing, since he also got the one piece of commercial software I ever had for it, AtariWriter Plus. We also picked up one game for it, some kind of space battle thing on a cartridge, with a special controller, and a huge, clunky trackball. That game never worked (maybe it was for some other model of Atari?), so I was stuck with playing with programming in BASIC. The Atari had a nice manual that made this very fun to learn. At some point in here, I think in the first year I had it, disaster struck. I had a cup of OJ at the computer and it fell onto the keyboard. I didn't know that you could just toss a computer in a sink and take it out and blow-dry it and it'd be fine, so I did nothing. Until keys began to not work, and others to repeat over and over. Not sure if the OJ etched the circuit board, or just gummed up the connections, but the Atari was out of operation. A bit later, I'm not sure how long, "I" wrote to someone at Atari's offices in Sunnyvale, CA, asking if I could get it fixed, and "I" sent it out there and miracuously they sent back a completely new Atari. I knew it was new, because it was much cleaner than the one I sent out. I'm not sure why I remember doing this, since it seems likely it was really my parents writing the letters and doing the shipping. I am still grateful to that unnamed person at Atari, who may have known at the time he was at the last days of the company's heyday, and sent that replacement to an already out of date and out of warantee machine. The several years after I got it back were probably my most productive on the Atari. I wrote a lot of games and other programs. Often I'd see some program on another computer, like the original Tetris, or Lode Runner on a C64, and write up my own clone on the Atari. I did a lot of semi-original stuff too. I was a pretty horrible programmer, by the way. I remember whaling at code over and over, pretty much at random, until I randomly found something that sort of worked. Well, hey, it was just BASIC.. At one point I found a book at the library about Atari game programming. It had one thing that blew me away; some weird ATASCII characters that if entered just right, in the middle of a BASIC program, would let you redefine the Atari's character set, so you could use characters for sprite based graphics. That was some precompiled assembly code, and while I used it, I had no idea how to change it, or write anything like it. By the time I learned what assembly was and started looking for an Atari Assembler, it was too late to buy one. Anyway, the key thing was that, if I didn't write the software, I didn't have any software. Especially a few years later there was no chance of even buying any, and without a modem, I wasn't tied into any BBS scene. The Atari was its own little island, with its own little colony of unique programs growing up without fear of competition. That, and the lack of an assembler to get really low-level (though I did plenty of PEEKs and POKEs), defined my early programming time, and have probably defined where I went and what I did since. I remember when this ended. My dad got a second computer, a 286 laptop, and I started getting ahold of programs from friends at school and putting them on it. At one point I got ahold of Battle Chess, and I realized that here was a game that I couldn't hope to replicate myself on the Atari. For the first time I compared my attempts on the Atari to the wider world, and found them wanting. The last program I wrote for the Atari was in 1992, when I lent it to Mary Calhoun to use as a display in the waiting room of her office and wrote a program to handle that. This is also the only program that has my name on it, and even a copyright notice. By then I had moved on and was clearly trying to do programs that were more like the stuff I was seeing on the PC.

29 May 2007

Joey Hess: atari fun

I set up my Atari 130XE today, for the first time in eight years. Eight years ago I got it working long enough to make several backups of all the program disks, which are all going on 20 years old. Unfortunatly all the disks with the tetris clone I wrote fail to boot. All the other programs are still surviving. Playing with the Atari is still fun! I need to get a SIO cable and a SIO2PC and transfer these programs off and put them in subversion.
Update: Tetris is on those disks, they're just not bootable, but it can be loaded by hand. Then it fails at line 10380 since the high score files are missing. (This is not the well-polished tetris disk I remember..) Fixable: 
10380 RETURN
Then it works. Yay!

Dirk Eddelbuettel: JPM Chase Corporate Challenge 2007

Last Thursday was the 2007 edition of the JP Morgan Chase Corp. Challenge. Record crowd of almost 23000 in Chicago's Grant Park. Just like last year, I didn't try hard enough to be closer to the starting line. Which means that one ends up running more or less zig-zag for some time. Oh well, my hand-stopped 22:17 is still pretty close to the PR from two years ago. Overall once again a really nice event, and we managed to have more folks from work show up, both to run, and to have a cold one or two afterwards.

Jos Parrella: Axesstel, Inc.: FOAD

Yesterday I wrote in Planet Debian requesting information on how to copy binary files to a Linux-based Axesstel modem. Meanwhile, I wrote Axesstel Customer Service with a friendly thank you for making a great product and kindly asking them for pointers. I’ve had some degree of satisfaction when writing to the Customer Services of several enterprises, and I really hoped this would be another one. 48 hours later, they replied with this message: Dear Customer,
First, thank you very much for purchasing Axesstel product and your kind feedback.
Unfortunately, we cannot released requested information because it is against security policy. We hope for your understanding.
Also, we recommend that you refrain yourself from accessing internal commands of the unit because it may violated service agreement enforced by your local service provider.
Once again, thank you for your understanding.
Axesstel Support So, if you have an Axesstel modem or if you are interested on having a free OS in your Axesstel, you may join the Laxative project in BerliOS or just make some noise in your blog, webpages or mailing lists with your Axesstel-related projects. If you happen to work at a place where you export your Security Policy to any aspect of your relationship with your customesr and where you tell them to refrain themselves of trying to improve your products for free, please read on about Open Source Hardware and its business models. It might be the time to start sharing information and sleeping without guilt :)

Nico Golde: libacpi general purpose acpi library

During the last time I developed a general purpose library for ACPI on linux.
Initially I just wanted to rewrite yacpi but since there is no shared lib for acpi information I decided to
put the important stuff in a seperate library.

Before releasing it I want some people to test it because my notebook doesn't support all of the information it can gather.

If you want to help me a bit, download a snapshot from:
http://nion.modprobe.de/libacpi-unreleased.tar.gz.

Install cmake, unpack the tarball and do:
$ cmake .
$ make
$ ./test-libacpi

and send me the output of test-libacpi together with tmpfile which should be generated like:

for i in find /proc/acpi -type f ; do
    echo -e "FILE: $i ================\n" >> tmpfile
    cat $i >> tmpfile
done

via mail to:


Thanks!

UPDATE: yes I totally fucked up the install instructions and the generation of the tmpfile :-) Sorry.
And in case I didn't reply to every mail I got until now, thanks very much for you help all!

Alastair McKinstry: Rare Earth: Why Complex life is uncommon in the Universe by Ward and Brownlee

Rare Earth proposes that Complex life is rare in the Universe. Paradoxically it first points out how abundant simple life is on Earth, in deep ocean vents, several km below the Earths surface, geysers: places that a few decades ago we would have considered completely inhospitable turn out to host life. But, they argue, complex animal and plant life (eucaryotic life) takes special conditions that they argue are probably unique. This book is an excellent starting location for someone learning about the state of the art in astrobiology. It summarises well the myriad sciences involved in why life exists on Earth, from astrophysics (is our place in the Galaxy special), planetary development (why only Earth appears to have life in our Solar system), through aspects of geology and biology that we begin to understand. I well recommend this book to anyone interested in these fields. It also has a sufficient reference section to continue the discussion.

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Eric Dorland: Late to the distributed party

Two blog posts in one day!

Distributed revision control systems are all the rage these days and I think the time has come to adopt one. I've always thought they were a good idea, but Subversion worked well and suited my needs well enough. I was also somewhat put off by the number of choices and didn't want to switch to something that would turn out to be a dud. But now there seem to be two main contenders, Git and Mecurial. I think Linus' recent talk on git also helped rekindle my interest.

Despite Linus' protestations of greatness, I was thinking of using Mercurial since it seems to fit better with my Subversion centric view of the world and it appears that Mozilla is going to move to it from CVS. I already have a few CVS and Subversion repositories for various things and I would like to keep that history. So I fired up Tailor and started converting a mail archive I have in an svn repo. The repo is only 1.5G, but Tailor was slow. Surprisingly slow. It then failed right near the end of the conversion. I'm also not sure exactly how much history Tailor is preserving. Does it deal with things like file moves properly?

Disheartened, I took a look at git instead. It seemed to have a tool called git-svnimport that sounded very promising. I ran it against the same svn repo and it proceeded to consume all the memory on my system and cause it to thrash like mad. My machine became so unresponsive that I had to log in remotely to kill the import.

So in the end, dear lazyweb, what tools should one use to convert a Subversion repository to Mercurial and/or Git?

Cameron Dale: May-28-2007: Start of Coding / New Release

The start has finally arrived, today is officially the first day of coding for the 2007 Google Summer of Code. To commemorate this occasion, I have prepared the next release (the second so far) of the software package I am writing for it, DebTorrent. You can download it from the Alioth project. Some of the changes in this release are: You can read detailed instructions for how to download using it in the README file, but the basic idea for using DebTorrent as part of an update is to: This is still an alpha release, but at least it has some more functionality than the previous one. Feel free to test it, but keep in mind that at this early stage most of the torrents will be unseeded.

Eddy Petrișor: po compendiums, just wait a little

It seems that my idea caught Javier's attention and he is already asking to use the scripts for Spanish.

As I have said before, those scripts will work for all languages in due time. Currently, as a test, they are running (or they should starting from tomorrow morning) only for the po material for the languages fr, de, ro and vi.

I intent to make compendiums for po-debconf material, po material[*] separately and another one made from all of them.

Stay tuned. Of course, a proper annoucement on debian-i18n@l.d.o will be done when I'll have something pretty ok.

Meanwhile, unpatient souls can take a peak at the current results

(I just enabled es, just for fun; es is broken, too?!? - or maybe the scripts are doing something wrong :-P - curious people can check, the logs are available.)


[*] which is more tricky since there is a need to merge fr_FR with fr/fr_CA with fr, de_DE with de, de_AT with de... and so on, but zh_TW does not have a zh to be merged with. Also the ll_CC strings should have higher precedence than ll strings.

Ian Haken: GSoC, vlosuts, and other acronyms

Summer of Code officially started today, and as such it was time to start hacking out some code for it. For the past couple of weeks I've been casually looking over an upgrade testing suite for Ubuntu (website, bzr repo). It's fairly sophisticated and does a lot of things that I'd like to bring to Debian. However, after considering it for awhile, I decided that I would prefer to start on the Debian version from scratch. This decision came about for a few reasons:

At any rate, I will probably end up reusing many pieces of the code from that tester.

Updates posted here as progress continues.

28 May 2007

Eric Dorland: The Ghost of Browser Past

Even though Iceweasel has been a reality since November, it seems that there is still some backlash about the rename. Thanks very much to Andrew for jumping to my defense (and also for organizing dinner the last time I was in Mountain View, it was a fun evening). Nothing he said was fundamentally incorrect, but it doesn't paint the full picture.

Once upon a time (somewhere around Firefox 0.9) we happily shipped the fox hugging the globe icon. Then it was pointed out the copyright license on that piece of artwork wasn't DFSG free (and probably wouldn't be free under any reasonable free software or even open content license), so we removed it and used the plain globe icon they shipped in the tarball instead. Eventually the Mozilla Foundation asked us to remove mozilla- from the package name (it was mozilla-firefox at the time) which we did, and the issue of the icon and trademark came up. After explaining why we couldn't ship the icon they gave us permission to continue to use the name. They said they would periodically check up to make sure we weren't shipping crap that would harm the brand. This seemed a fairly good compromise and we accepted.

This situation persisted for a year or so, in both Debian and Ubuntu, but then the Mozilla Corporation (who was now in possession of the trademarks) insisted we couldn't use the name without the non-free logo. They also wanted to approve any changes made before they were uploaded. They are certainly within their rights to do this, but to hear Mr. Fowler tell it we were on a crusade to purge the name from the distro. We were not, we were content with the status quo. I also must take exception with Mr. Fowler stating: "They've persisted, despite the best efforts of the Mozilla project team to engage with the Debian packagers to resolve the situation." I think from the discussion we were trying our best to reach some sort of compromise and the Mozilla side seemed firmly entrenched in their position, not offering us a lot of alternatives. The non-free nature of the logo and the unprecedented "control-freak" review process didn't leave us with a lot of alternatives.

Ubuntu does ship the officially branded version of the Firefox, but they have a weaker set of freedom guidelines than Debian. Whether you think that is good or bad is personal choice, but one of the reasons I like Debian so much is its commitment to free software, even if that means not everything is as easy or expedient as one would like.

With respect to the new name and icon, this is again a matter of personal taste. I do tend to think "Iceweasel" doesn't have that much sex appeal but it was a popular choice and had the benefit of having already been used to refer to a potential name fork of Firefox. And BTW this is really only a name fork, the amount of changes we've actually put in to the tree (beyond renaming ones) are minimal. In fact the last time it was checked, our patches were a strict subset of the patches Ubuntu uses in their Firefox package. So Iceweasel is in fact functionally identical to Firefox with what I like to think are some minor improvements from upstream.

As to your other points, I will admit to being poorly-socialized, but I think most who have met me wouldn't call me self-obsessed, egotistical or a moron.

I think Debian is developing a bit of a bias against it where we're assumed to be a bunch of crazy Free software nuts, and the presumption is anytime we act against the grain we're the ones being unreasonable despite any evidence to the contrary. I don't know how we can fight this perception, but I think we should.

Miriam Ruiz: FoF in Debian!

Frets on Fire is, according to the Wikipedia, a music video game, a clone of the Guitar Hero video games, in which the player emulates playing a guitar with the keyboard of their computer. The keyboard is also meant to be picked up like a guitar in order to play, with one hand pressing the fret buttons and another pressing the pick buttons. There is support for joysticks however, meaning that the Guitar Hero controllers can be used as well. The game also includes a tutorial and a built-in song editor. The source code written for the game is written in Python, and released under the GNU General Public License. The game included some non-DFSG-free song files and some internal fonts which needed to be replaced in order for the game to enter Debian repositories. There’s a pack of new songs made by Carlos Viola Iborra and released under a free license. Thanks Carlos! This package of songs has entered the repositories too and is called fretsonfire-songs-sectoid. The original songs that were included in the game, made by Tommi Inkil , will probably be included in the non-free repositories soon, as a package called fretsonfire-songs-inkila. I’d like to thank the developers of FoF, Sami Ky stil , Joonas Kerttula and Tommi Inkil , for their full cooperation during all this process. You’re great, guys! :)

Andrew Pollock: [debian] Tone down the hate

Ben Fowler has a bit of rant about the Iceweasel situation in Debian. Take a chill pill, Ben. As I understand it, from when I recently had dinner with Eric Dorland, the problem is no longer the name Firefox(tm), but the fact that the logo is non-free. I think we're required to ship the logo with the product if we call it Firefox. I believe that Ubuntu is glossing over the non-freeness of the logo. Heck, they're free to not be bound by the Debian Free Software Guidelines, they're not Debian. I think the Mozilla Corporation granted permission to Debian to redistribute the logo, but that permission wouldn't flow on to derivatives, so didn't really cut the mustard. I'm sure Eric will correct me if I've said anything fundamentally incorrect. In summary, sure, the whole Iceweasel situation is suboptimal, but I don't believe it exists for the reasons you feel it does.

27 May 2007

Miriam Ruiz: Debian multiple binary packages: example 2

Some days ago I wrote a small example of creating multiple binary packages from a source where the program was built and installed with autotools. Now I’ve remade the example, starting from a system built directly using a make script, and which doesn’t provide an install target. Even more, it is supposed to get the data from a directory relative to the working directory. This is, in fact, a scheme often found when packaging games. The debian/rules script uses quilt to apply the necessary patches, so that absolute directories are used for the data file.

26 May 2007

Chris Lamb: Pro Prolog is pro.

A lot of computer problems (and some puzzles) simply involve backtracking over the solution space and checking constraints, yet these can be fairly clunky to describe in imperative languages. Compounding this, the high cost of method calls in most VM and dynamic languages make any reasonably sane-looking implementation (read: recursive) rather slow. A much better idea is to use a language that makes this really easy, like Prolog: I have a Compiler Design exam in less than a weeks time, and a common question involves being given a number of definitions of compilers in terms of their source and target languages, along with the language the compiler itself is implemented in. The task is simply to work out whether it is possible to translate from a specified language to another. This is just two stanzas in Prolog: 
can_translate(Src, Tgt, [L])   :- t_diagram(Src, Tgt, _, L).
can_translate(Src, Tgt, [H T]) :- t_diagram(Src, Via, _, H),
   can_translate(Via, Tgt, T).
Compilers can be then just be defined with 
t_diagram(source, target, implemented in, name).
and querying the translation pipeline is done with 
?- can_translate(source, target, Result)
(Modifying it so that it works with cycles isn’t very tricky, either.)

Jeff Bailey: Going through the inbox

Wow - I'm finally starting to go through my email inbox from when Leif was born and starting to say thanks to folks for their support. I read them all at the time, but it's crazy to go back 3 months and see how many people were cheering for us.

There will be more photos up this weekend. =) Recent things for him include creeping off of his blanket on the floor and rolling from his back to his front in bed. It's amazing how the simplest things are "OMG come see this, quickly!" events. =)

Alexander Schmehl: Doing stuff I should have done quite some time ago...

Yesterday I did something, I should have done a long time ago. I donated blood. I donated blood several times already, especially when I was in army service and a nearby University hospital called for help, when they where running low. I must confess it wasn't only the feel good factor that motivated me back then; you could donate blood during your duty hours, got some money, something to eat a way better than the normal food we got and additionally you where freed from heavy duty for two days. Even after I got out of military service, I went a couple of times to donate blood. But for some reason -- I don't know why -- I stopped for a couple of years. Well; the funny thing is, that the German red Cross has often these collect blood sessions in a nearby school, which is on my way back to university, but even that didn't worked. I always had something else in mind or planed for that evening. However, the other day we found a flier of one of those collect blood sessions yesterday evening. And so we went there... and where surprised how many people wanted to donate blood! I can't remember that I ever had to wait to donate blood, but this time they said they had many first time donors, which need special care. Rest of the story is easy: After some interesting conversation (You know how that works? -- Yes, I look away, and you do the rest and tell me nothing!), Meike and myself had half a liter less, and enjoyed a very nice meal. As I already said: I don't understand, why I didn't did it for such a long time; nice atmosphere, nice things to eat, nice people taking care of you... I'm going to donate more often. Perhaps you want to try it, too?

Cord Beermann: I'm a criminal

The German parliament changed the law on 25th may 2007.

It's now forbidden to build, program, give, distribute or get software, which can be used to attack computers. that's something i do on a daily basis. (think nmap)

so it is only a question of time that i get caught.

German pressrelease of the CCC

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