Note: Please see RC-Bug
statistics for Squeeze, calendar week 6 for an explanation of the
numbers.
| Total: | 615 | -84 |
| Affecting Squeeze: | 481 | -78 |
| Squeeze-only: | 105 | -12 |
| Unfixed bugs remaining in Squeeze: | 376 | -66 |
| ... are pending | 20 | -16 |
| ... are patched: | 50 | -15 |
| ... are duplicates: | 49 | +2 |
| ... are in Non-free or contrib: | 7 | -3 |
| ... are claimed by someone: | 12 | -2 |
| ... are fixed in the delayed queue: | 1 | -4 |
| ... are somehow marked as fixed: | 42 | -11 |
squeeze, when ignoring all these:
The movie ' Fight Club' had a profound effect on me when I first saw it in
1999. I wasn't as fond of the originating novel, although there was something
about the prose that Palahniuk used which I did enjoy.
Since then I've read more of Palahniuk's work. My favourite of his books is
actually Non-Fiction (a.k.a. Stranger than Fiction ): a collection of
essays and interviews. Reading some of the stories in that collection, it
becomes very clear where some of the concepts in his fiction originate. There
are also a number of pieces on the craft of writing. He writes some really
gushing praise about Amy Hempel:
When you study Minimalism in the novelist Tom Spanbauer's workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel's The Harvest. After that, you're ruined every other book you ever read will suck.I recently read a couple of novels, both of which reminded me a lot of Fight Club. 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture' by Douglas Coupland is an interesting tale of three or more societal drop-outs. Fight Club was written five years after Generation X and owes it a lot. 'Generation X' has curt, clipped passages and many dictionary-definition-esque side notes decoding hipster-slang, which add a lot of colour to the non-events of the story. These remind me both of the copous asides in Pratchett novels, or the chapter introductions in Philip K Dick's excellent 'Ubik'.
Historical Overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.The novel goes absolutely nowhere, but that's actually one of the appealing things about it. When I mentioned this to my partner (who, as far as I know, has not read the book), she said that it sounded like the perfect tonic to a stressful life: imagine lying on a sunbed, doing nothing, reading about people lying on sunbeds, doing nothing. This is the first of Coupland's novels that I have read, but I managed to pick up a copy of 'Generation A' (so far as a I can tell, not a sequel, as such) 70% off as part of the closing-down sale at my local Borders store, so I will probably read that too. I also recently finished The Dice Man , by Luke Reinhart. It's a tongue-in-cheek pseudo-autobiography written under a pen-name about a psychiatrist who opts to delegate all life decisions to the throw of dice. Once again, Fight Club owes a lot to this book. The unhinged situations that occur are used to shine a satirical light on modern society. 'modern society' in the book is the 1970s. The distance between society then and now adds something to the novel's value now. Having said that, the narrator is not a particularly likeable character and it's hard to relate to him. Coincidentally my dad recently read this book and described it as 'misogynistic', which might be an understatement. Mind you, most of the characters, female or otherwise, are fairly 2D: perhaps intentionally the only fleshed out human is the narrator. In my favourite scene of the book, the narrator is in a situation under the influence of more than one drug. A TV set is on in the background. As the scene progresses, the events taking place on the TV are written about with increasing prominence compared to the main events of the scene. This escalates to a point where they are of equal importance and you can no longer easily distinguish the events taking place in the real world from those taking place on the television. This is the only part of the book that I can recall that employed any narrative tricks. The rest is by-the-numbers, and mostly internal monologue. The book is also at least 50% too long: the concept just doesn't stretch as far as it's forced to.
Earlier today, Google announced the
list of accepted mentor organizations
for the Google Summer of Code 2010 (GSoC 2010).
And we are happy to report that the R Project is once again a participating organization (and now for the
third straight year) joining a rather august group of open source projects from around the globe.
An R Wiki page had been created and serves as the central
point of reference for the R Project
and the GSoC 2010. It contains a list of project ideas, currently counting
eleven and spanning everything from research-oriented topics (such as spatial
statistics or automatic differentiation) to R community-support (regarding
CRAN statistics and the CRANtastic site) to extensions (NoSQL, RPy2 data interfaces, Rserve browser integration) and more. I also just created a
mailing list gsoc-r@googlegroups.com where prospective students and mentors can exchange ideas and discuss. As for other
details, the Google
Summer of Code 2010 site has most of the answers, and we will try to keep
R-related information on the aforementioned
R Wiki page.
Debian has been selected as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code 2010.
Whether your are a Debian Developer or a Student, this might be a good time to:
Remember that the sooner we get project ideas and personal proposals, the longer we can work on them to make them into great summer projects!
You can read more about the Google Summer of Code in their website. Also, if you are interested in participating, it is very important checking the program time line.
Obey Arthur Liu
Some people want Debian 6.0 (codename "squeeze") to be released
sometime this year. Personally I think there is some kitsch
value in releasing it during DebCamp or DebConf, and there is
something to be said for doing it just beforehand so that
everyone can break unstable into insanity while rolling around
on the quad under the hot August sun. Some people want it to
happen sooner, possibly as soon as possible. Irrespective of
your preferences, or if you care at all, we will repeat the
time-honored mantra: it will be released when it's ready.
Readiness is somewhat of a subjective measure, but we typically
do not consider a potential release ready when the
RC bug count is high.
There are a lot of RC bugs right now. Typically these are
fixed at some point by their maintainers. There are also
some self-motivated individuals who enjoy fixing these bugs
themselves, and this practice predates the
RCBW initiative,
though perhaps not to the same level of combined intensity and
endurance. Then there are bug-squashing parties, or BSPs.
A BSP can be held virtually which means that a bunch of people
get together online and say that they are having a party, or it
can be at a designated physical space. I attended one of the
latter type not too long ago.
This BSP was targeted specifically to newbies or people who
might feel that they are unqualified to help squash bugs, but
wished to learn how to contribute. Some group and one-on-one
mentoring occurred, in areas of how packages are put together,
how to patch things, how to submit patches to the BTS, how to
reproduce bugs, and other more problem-specific topics.
I really don't know how successful this endeavor was since
getting metrics on the effectiveness of teaching has been a
historically difficult problem. On the other hand, we did
spend a fair amount of time actually squashing bugs, which
is a bit easier to assess. One problem we had was that
some people liked to be loud and distracting and demand
unreasonable amounts of attention for topics that had nothing
to do with bugs, Debian, or free software, but we made
progress regardless.
Marc Brockschmidt thinks we need more BSPs and more focus
on bug triage. Bug triage can be very demotivating and
many people dislike doing it. BSPs seem to have powers of
motivation through group camaraderie or friendly competition,
so I would agree that it's worth experimenting with.
Just a short announcement that my Debian BTS IRC bot which hangs out on #debian-devel-changes can now spam your favourite subproject's channel with specific bug activity and uploads.
Filtering is done with a regular expression tested against the package name. /msg me with your (channel, regex) tuples (in Python re format, please).
Several months ago, around the Central American Free Software Encounter (ECSL) in Estel , Nicaragua, I started stirring the waters The Central American regions have vibrant, beautiful Free Software communities, but have mostly (with some very notable examples, of course) shied away from being active participants in major development projects. What was I to do about it? Of course, try to get them to become Debian contributors!
During the following weeks, I talked about it with several friends from the region, and the result was an announcement and lots of arguments that followed it. Panam was decided as the host country, and many people have put a lot of work into making the MiniDebConf happen.
Mauro Rosero and Anto Recio came up with what appears to be a wonderful local venue and a set of sponsored amenities, and the Debian project is sponsoring what is needed in terms of transportation for people from the whole region (spanning from Mexico to Ecuador and Venezuela IIRC).
I am very sorry, however, that I cannot attend this meeting. This very same weekend, I will fly three hours, but in the opposite direction: I will go to Tijuana, where fate decided I will present my first round of CENEVAL equivalence exams (Acuerdo 286 Licenciatura). I expect that to be the topic of another post, to come soon.
So, while my friends will be having a good time and talking about Debian and group work, I will sit through three periods of four hours, answering an exam for the first time in a very long time. Fun, hah? Anyway, I will meet Guillermo Amaral (thanks for hosting me! ;-) ), which ensures I will not miss all of the fun ;-)
import socket
DEFAULT_PORT = 123
host = '[fe80::21c:a0ff:fb27:7196]:567'
# the port will be anything after the last :
p = host.rfind(":")
# ipv6 literals should have a closing brace
b = host.rfind("]")
# if the last : is outside the [addr] part (or if we don't have []'s
if (p > b):
try:
port = int(host[p+1:])
except ValueError:
print "Non-numeric port"
raise
host = host[:p]
else:
port = DEFAULT_PORT
# now strip off ipv6 []'s if there are any
if host and host[0] == '[' and host[-1] == ']':
host = host[1:-1]
print "host = <%s>, port = <%d>" % (host, port)
the_socket = None
res = socket.getaddrinfo(host, port, socket.AF_UNSPEC, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
# go through all the returned values, and choose the ipv6 one if
# we see it.
for r in res:
af,socktype,proto,cname,sa = r
try:
the_socket = socket.socket(af, socktype, proto)
the_socket.connect(sa)
except socket.error, e:
# connect failed! try the next one
continue
break
if the_socket == None:
raise socket.error, "Could not get address!"
# ready to send!
the_socket.send("hi!")
I ve now had my new Thinkpad T61 [1] for almost a month. The letters on the keyboard are not even starting to wear off which is unusual, either this Thinkpad is built with harder plastic than the older ones or I m typing more softly.
Memory
The first thing I did after receiving it was to arrange a RAM upgrade. It shipped with two 1GB DDR2 666MHz PC2-5300 SODIMM modules and as I want to run KVM I obviously need a lot more than that. The Intel Chipset page on Wikipedia is one of the resources that documents the Intel GM965 chipset as supporting up to 8G of RAM. Getting 4G in two 2G modules seemed like a bad idea as that would limit future expansion options and also result in two spare modules. So I decided to get a 4G module for a total of 5G of RAM. I ve updated my RAM speed page with the test results of this system [2], I get 2,823MB/s with a matched pair of DIMMs and 2,023MB/s with a single DIMM. But strangely with a pair of unmatched DIMMs Memtest86+ reported 2,823MB/s I wonder whether the first 2G of address space is interleaved for best performance and the last 3G runs at 2,023MB/s. In any case I think that losing 29% of the maximum RAM speed would be an acceptable trade-off for saving some money and I can always buy another 4G DIMM later. I had to order a DDR2-800MHz PC2-6400 module because they are cheaper than the PC2-5300 modules and my Thinkpad works equally well with either speed. I have used the spare 1G SODIMM in my EeePC701 which takes the same RAM presumably because the EeePC designers found PC2-5300 modules to be cheaper than slower modules (I think that the 701 was at the time it was released the slowest PC compatible system that was selling in quantity). The EeePC gets only 798MB/s out of the same memory. My document about Memtest86+ results has these results and more [2].
I noticed that if I run Memtest86+ booted from a USB flash device then inserting or removing a USB device can cause memory errors, but if I boot memtest86+ from a CD it seems to work correctly. So it seems that Memtest86+ doesn t disable some aspect of USB hardware, this might be considered a bug or it might just be a don t do that issue.
Misc
To get the hardware virtualisation working (needed to load the kvm_intel kernel module) I had to enable it in the BIOS and then do a hard reset (power off). Telling the BIOS to save and reboot was not adequate. This would be a BIOS bug, it knew that I had changed the virtualisation setting so it should have either triggered a hard reset or instructed me to do so.
The default configuration of Debian/Lenny results in sound not working, I had to run alsaconf as suggested on the Debian Etch on Thinkpad T61 howto [3] which solved it.
Generally I m happy with this system, the screen resolution is 1680*1050 which has 20% more pixels than the 1400*1050 screen on my Thinkpad T41p, it s a lot faster for CPU operations and should be a lot faster for video when I get the drivers sorted out (currently it s a lot slower), and I have virtualisation working again. But when you buy a system that s much like the last one but 6 years newer you expect it to be better.
Generally the amount of effort involved in the process of buying a new system, upgrading the RAM to the desired specs, installing Linux and tweaking all the options is enough to make me want to wait at least another 6 years before buying another. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that I want to get so much functionality from the machine, a machine with more modest goals (such as a Netbook) takes a lot less time to configure.
Problems
There is Bluetooth hardware which is apparently enabled by default. But a quick search didn t turn up any information on how to do the basic functions, I would like to just transfer files from my mobile phone in the same way that I transfer files between phones.
The video card is a nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1). 3D games seem slow but glxgears reports 300fps. It doesn t have Xvideo support which appears to be the reason why mplayer won t allow resizing it s display area unless run with the -zoom option, and it s also got performance problems such that switching between virtual desktops will interrupt the sound on a movie that mplayer is playing although when alsaplayer is playing music the sound isn t interrupted. Also when I play a Youtube video at twice the horizontal and vertical resolution it takes half of one CPU core. It s a pity that I didn t get an Intel video controller.
It seems that Debian is soon going to get the Nouveau NVidia drivers so hopefully video performance will improve significantly when I get them [4].
The next thing I have to do is to get the sound controls working. The older Thinkpads that I used had hardware controls, the T41p that was my previous system had buttons for increasing and decreasing the volume and a mute button that interacted directly with the hardware. The down-side of this was that there was no way for the standard software to know what the hardware was going to do, the up-side was that I could press the mute button and know that it would be silent regardless of what the software wants. Now I have the same buttons on my T61 but they don t do anything directly, they just provide key-press events. According to showkeys the mute key gives 0 71 0xf1 , the volume down button gives 0 72 0xf2 , and the volume up button gives 0 73 0xf3 . Daniel Pittman has made some suggestions to help me get the keyboard events mapped to actions that can change the sound via software [5] which I haven t yet had time to investigate. I wonder if it will ever be possible to change the volume of the system beep.
The system has an SD card slot, but that doesn t seem to work. I m not really worried at the moment but in the future I will probably try and get it going. It has a 100G disk which isn t that big, adding a 32G SD card at some future time might be the easiest way to upgrade the storage copying 100G of data is going to be painful and usually a small increment in storage capacity can keep a system viable for a while.
Any advice on getting sound, the SD card, and Bluetooth working would be appreciated. I ll probably upgrade to Debian/Testing in the near future so suggestions that require testing features won t be ruled out.
Versions 0.7.7 to 0.7.9 of Rcpp contained a
bug: protecting paths with quotes was supposed to help with Windows builds, but did the
opposite at least in 'backticks mode' for getting path and/or library
information. Using the shQuote() function instead helped. Our
thanks to the tireless R-on-Windows maintainer Uwe Ligges for an earlier
heads-up about the problem. So another quick bug-fix release 0.7.10 is now in
Debian and should be on CRAN some time tomorrow.
We also put two small improvements in, see the full NEWS entry for this release:
0.7.10 2010-03-15
o new class Rcpp::S4 whose constructor checks if the object is an S4 object
o maximum number of templated arguments to the pairlist function,
the DottedPair constructor, the Language constructor and the
Pairlist constructor has been updated to 20 (was 5) and a script has been
added to the source tree should we want to change it again
o use shQuotes() to protect Windows path names (which may contain spaces)
As always, even fuller details are in
Rcpp Changelog page and the
Rcpp page which also
leads to the downloads, the
browseable
doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats.
A local directory has
source and documentation too.
Questions, comments etc should go to the
rcpp-devel mailing list
off the R-Forge page
in which the Pre unsuprisingly continues to suck
My Palm Pre was killed by a forced over the air WebOS upgrade. You can't
avoid those upgrades, even if you are sure they'll be bad news. The
previous WebOS upgrade spared my Debian partition, but lost all other
customizations (including Palm Pre privacy fixes), and wasted hours.
When I went to use my phone and it didn't even boot, and displayed only
"http://palm.com/rom", I knew that was the last straw.
(Shouldn't forcing an upgrade that breaks a working phone to the point
that it can't even call 911 be well, illegal?)
switching cell providers in the US: suprisingly doable
I thought about ditching the smart phone and using VOIP, but I seem to have
gotten addicted. So I got a Droid. That meant switching cell phone
companies.
I've heard a lot about how horrible the US cell phone company contracts
are. My experience has me wondering if all that is well... not overblown,
but oversimplified. I was half a year into a two year contract.
Today I got my closing statement, and I really got out of it with no early
termination fee.
The trick seems to be, switch to a different cell phone company. They'll
be happy to get you out of your old contract, salivating at the chance of
locking you in to a new one. They probably have a script to use when
calling to cancel. Or "know a guy". Or claim to know a guy, then just use a
script, and get lucky. Given the hard sells and vague promises they tried
on me, I assume that these places are where all the car salesmen ended up.
Trust == 0. But it worked.
If you're good on the phone, and are looking for a new business idea: Start
a business of getting people out of their cell phone contracts, for a
reasonable fee and no other obligation. Use loopholes like rate changes. As
long as the cell phone companies can raise their monthly rate 2 cents, and
99.9999% of their users accept it, and they make untold millions of
dollars, for free, they seem to not care if the remaining fraction use a
loophole to get out. Especially if they're able to take advantage of other
comanies loopholes to switch over users. So there seems to be a niche
there in which one could prosper.
droid first impressions
So now I have a slightly larger lump in my pocket and the Pre is on a
shelf, and will either be used for future development and testing of
Debian piggyback ideas, or donated to someone like Lennart who can make
good use of it.
Compared with the Pre, the droid's hardware is all superior. The keyboard,
especially, is great, with arrow keys, and all the symbols I need. At the
same time, the phone is bigger, and oddly clunky. But in an endearing way.
Only thing I really dislike about the hardware is the "back" button is easy
to accidentially swipe while typing on the keyboard.
Compared with WebOS, the Android UI has some clunkiness and non-obvious
things. Like the status bar at the top not doing anything when you click on
it. And there being no way to close an app. Especially annoying is that this
means opening the web browser returns to whatever page I was on last, which
is never what I want. The UI is however much, much snappier.
I don't use the Google email, etc services so can't comment on them; I
assume the amount of info Google is gathering about me went up by a few
percentage points; I've blocked their analytics on my network to knock it
back down. (PS: DuckDuckGo now avoids logging IP addresses at all.)
The best thing is the ConnectBot application, which is a very usable
shell and ssh client. It's a terminal, in my pocket, which I can easily
use for an hour without feeling like my interactions are feeding through
a stifling soda straw. Between the keyboard and the app, the Pre has
nothing at all that compares.
Under the hood, Android annoys me terribly, with its lack of busybox, its
kernel that does not even have the ext* filesystem, its hard-partitioned
storage, and its general lack of every single thing I like in a Linux system.
Compare this with the Pre, which has a package manager, a userspace based
on busybox with a full standard Linux stack (all the way up to PulseAudio)
and a kernel with lots of standard filesystems, and even LVM. Sigh.
It's amazing that WebOS and Android have found such broadly different
ways to suck.
There is significant interest and activity around running a Debian chroot
on the Droid. The best tries so far put it on a loop mounted ext2
filesystem (which means you need to get ahold of a matching ext2.ko
somehow), living on the FAT formatted SSD. And there are apparently some
bad problems with IO to that starving/locking the system, so I have not
tried it.
Other day I read Refreshing The Ubuntu Brand , upcoming visual style changes for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and my only comment to this whole story was Don t tell me you re moving window control elements to the left side of window in Lucid 
For some time now I ve been troubled by some things in Gnome, and what s bothering me the most is System menu. Why? Well because the list of utilities listed both under Administration and Preferences is so long that it s almost useless. So without losing your precious seconds of your life and losing fair amount of nerves well this is what s required to find what you were initially looking for. Interesting enough is the fact (please do stress) that Gnome consists of a fine thing called gnome-control-center which is not included in any of Gnome menus. 
I really do enjoy Gnome vanilla flavor (overall am fan of vanilla flavored apps.) but what I ve been doing for quite time now is fixing this ridicule by having my own version of Systems menu, which consists of Add/Remove App. (synaptic) and Fool Control (gnome-control-center)
Final result is that I get what I m looking for in couple of seconds without any lost nerves 
Either way, after reading the redesigning Ubuntu article, this only encouraged me to go live with this suggestion. I know it s a minor change, but how about we have this implemented into Squeeze? Of course change my silly button labels; if not, what are my options? Make package that will do this for you? 
I m really interested to hear your input on this topic.
Talking about redesigning stuff, is anyone up to do start doing this with Debian homepage? Yea? Count me in 
I'm afraid that in the end I failed the challenge. As the last minutes of Saturday night ticked down, I was still mired in the minutiae of C++ Run-Time Type Identification (RTTI.) Sunday was my 12th wedding anniversary and I know from past experience that this is one day when it is advisable to step away from the computer. So I have to concede defeat for now. But I only actually spent about 48 hours on this project this week so if you really think about it, I still have 120 hours available. That's what I choose to believe anyway.
The galling thing is in theory I know how this is supposed to work. A.L.F.s model (in the model-view-controller design pattern) is a class called World. World has an array of Rooms which represent rooms in the dungeon. In my original almost working version of a few days back, this Room class had all manner of verious members for different objects in the dungeon but I decided to redesign it the right way by consolidating all the redundant bits into an abstract base class called Item which would have concrete subclasses: Potion, Treasure, Monster etc. Room now only has to hold a pointer to the Item associated with that room. (Later on I will consider allowing multiple items per room but for now there can only be one.) A factory function creates Items and assigns them to each Room (or leaves them empty) It returns a pointer to an object of the appropriate class but we can access that object through the Item* because they are derived from Item.
So far so good. The fun part happens when we want to know what the Item* really is. For example, combat makes sense for Monsters but not for Treasure. I only want to activate combat if the Item* is a Monster*. It's easy in theory:
if(dynamic_cast<Monster*>(contents))
return FIGHT;
The upload reduced RC count by one as klibc builds against recent linux-libc-dev including 2.6.34-rc1. Also libklic-dev uses them directly once installed thanks to a patch from Ben Hutchings. The klibc build saw several fixes from a big and refined Google patch queue.
The klibc-utils mount grew several useful features and ipconfig saw lots of bug fixes (send requested optional hostname, raise field length for rootpath DHCP option, ..): hpa klibc 1.5.16 release announce, Git klibc repo.
Update: According to build log there is still work todo for i386 and sparc. :)
Lenny Backports
After a couple of days I've spotted a few things that don't work so well on Lenny:blog spam
- gtk-gnutella
- gtk-gnutella is a client for a peer-to-peer filesharing system. Unfortunately the version of the client in Lenny dies on startup "This version is too old to connect".
- gimp
- The graphics program, The Gimp, doesn't show a live preview when carrying out things such as colour desaturation. Although not an insurmountable problem it is moderately annoying if you do such things often.
So I've placed backported packages online. I expected to have to backport KVM, and I guess I realised I needed a new kernel to match too. So they're available in the kvm-hosting repository; take the kernel with "birthday" in its name - the other is more minimal and has no USB support, etc.
Since I last reset the statistics the blog spam detector has reported, rejected, and refused just over half a million bogus comments. It can and should do better. I've been planning on overhauling this for some time; even to the extent of wondering if I can move the XML::RPC service into a C daemon with embedded lua/perl to do the actual analysis. (Right now the whole service is Perl, but I'm a little suspicious of the XML::RPC library - my daemon dies at times and I don't understand why.) I'd say "test suggestions welcome", but then I'd have to explain what is already done. If you're curious take a look at the code...ObSubject: Hot Fuzz
C. Guy Yarvin is a good friend of Mencius Moldbug, a
pseudonymous blogger known for iconoclastic novella-length essays on
politics and history (and occasionally computer science). Guy recently
published under his own name a novel project in language and
systems design. His own writing about his work is entertaining but verbose
(as Moldbug's readers might expect), so I will attempt to summarize it here.
Nock, Urbit, Watt
First there is Nock, a tool for defining higher-level languages
comparable to the lambda calculus, but meant as foundational system software
rather than foundational meta mathe matics. Its primitives include positive
integers with equality and increment operators, cons cells with
car/cdr/cadr/etc., and a macro for convenient branching. Nock uses trees of
integers to represent both code and data.
Next, Guy provides the rationale for Nock. In short, he asks how a
planet-wide computing infrastructure (OS, networking, and languages)
would look if designed from first priniciples for robustness and
interoperability. The answer he proposes is Urbit: a URI-like name space
distributed globally via content-centric networking, with a feudal
structure for top-level names and cryptographic identities.
Urbit is a static functional name space: it is both referentially
transparent and monotonic (a name, once bound to a value, cannot be un- or
re-bound).
Why does this require a new formal logic and a new programming language? In
Urbit, all data and code are distributed via the global namespace. For
interoperability, the code must have a standard format. Nock's minimal spec
is meant to be an un ambiguous, unchanging, totally standardized basis
for computation in Urbit. Above it will be Watt, a self-hosting language
that compiles to Nock. Urbit itself will be implemented in Watt, so Nock and
Watt are designed to treat data as code using metacircular evaluation.
The code
A prototype implementation of Watt is on GitHub. It is not yet
self-hosting; the current compiler is written in C. Watt is a functional
language with static types called molds and a mechanism for
explicit lazy evaluation. (I was suprised to find I had accidentally created
an in com patible lazy dialect of Nock despite its goal of
unambiguous semantics just by implementing it in Haskell.)
The code is not fully documented, but the repository contains draft specs for
both Watt and Urbit. Beware: the syntax and terminology are a bit
unconventional. Guy has offered a few exercises to help get started with Nock
and Watt:
Since Earth code is fifty years old, and Martian code is fifty million years old, Martian code has been evolving into a big ball of mud for a million times longer than Earth software. (And two million times longer than Windows.) Therefore, at some point in Martian history, some abject fsck of a Martian code-monkey must have said: fsck this entire fscking ball of mud. For lo, its defects cannot be summarized; for they exceed the global supply of bullet points; for numerous as the fishes in the sea, like the fishes in the sea they fsck, making more little fscking fishes. For lo, it is fscked, and a big ball of mud. And there is only one thing to do with it: obliterate the trunk, fire the developers, and hire a whole new fscking army of Martian code-monkeys to rewrite the entire fscking thing. This is the crucial inference we can draw about Mars: since the Martians had 50 million years to try, in the end they must have succeeded. The result: Martian code, as we know it today. Not enormous and horrible tiny and diamond-perfect. Moreover, because it is tiny and diamond-perfect, it is perfectly stable and never changes or decays. It neither is a big ball of mud, nor tends to become one. It has achieved its final, permanent and excellent state.Do Earthlings have the will to throw out the whole ball of mud and start from scratch? I doubt it. We can build Urbit but no one will come, unless it solves some problem radically better than current software. Moldbug thinks feudalism will produce better online reputation, but feudal reputation does not require feudal identity; it is not that much harder to build Moldbug's reputation system on Earth than on Mars. I still have not figured out the killer app that will get early adopters to switch to Urbit.
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