Last years, Francis Tyers has been working as Debian maintainer for Apertium packages and upstream (Apertium is an open-source machine translation platform), and I've been sponsoring it all this time.
I suspect that Lamers Bus Lines, Inc. (golamers.com) may be the most
disproportionately photographed bus line in America by young
Internet-savvy photographers.
These photographs, and many more, are taken from Flickr:
When it comes to the most insulting bus company, however, the
unfortunate typography that rendered the Pioneer Valley Transit
Authority buses dangerously close to "puta" may give Lamers a
run for their money in Spanish speaking communities.
Via Lifehacker, legal cost-free books under copyright from Wowio. This is a great idea, and I give it even odds for being the future of books. (Or at least, part of books’ future).
What is WOWIO?Technorati Tags: Wowio, Books, DRM, Digital Rights Management, Copyright
WOWIO is a new kind of online bookstore that enables readers to download ebooks for free, using commercial sponsorships to compensate authors and publishers. Readers get free ebooks. Sponsors get a powerful new channel to communicate their message to precisely the people they want to reach. Publishers get a new means of distributing their books, expanding their readership, and monetizing their intellectual property.
Does WOWIO use any kind of digital rights management (DRM)?
Since anyone can defeat the most “sophisticated” DRM with the print screen button, we believe that technology-based DRM is essentially a fraud. Our approach takes the market incentive out of misbehaving, rewards people for doing the right thing, and tries to stay out of the way of honest users. To help keep everyone honest, however, readers must authenticate their identity and agree to a licensing agreement when they set up their account. Then, each ebook is serialized with the reader’s authenticated name and a unique serial number, as well as other less visible markers. WOWIO will immediately terminate the account of anyone caught illegally distributing ebooks, and will prosecute serious offenders.
There are many reasons to hate Java, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
But in the last weeks I found some more, half of them aren't even fault of the
standard API (the usual culprit), and I want to share my frustration with the
rest of the world.
It has no unsigned types
Say you want to manage binary protocols, files, etc. You'd like to
store and retrieve bytes and words in machine format, of course, but
you'll have a hard time finding the right value because you can't have
a goddamn unsigned byte!
So if you want —for example— to read the length of a string
which can be bigger than 127 as a single byte, you'll end doing some
aberration like this:
byte strl = foo_retrieve_byte();
int real_strl = strl < 0 ? 256 + strl : strl;public class FooException extends BarException
public FooException() super();
public FooException(String s) super(s);
public FooException(Throwable t) super(t);
public FooException(String s, Throwable t) super(s, t);
public class FooException extends BarException try
j = JdbcWrapper.new(foo);
j.doSelect(bar);
unrelatedObject.unrelatedMethod();
j.doUpdate(baz);
finally
j.close();
stty -echo to do the job. Well, you'll find a little
surprise!
Even if you don't ask for the process' reader/writer streams, the Runtime
class will pipe(2) and dup(2) your child process' standard streams. With this
excellent approach you cannot have a child process output stuff to the user,
nor even errors; you cannot allow the child process access the tty (stty
obviously can't do shit with a piped stdin).
And there's no fucking way to tell it to stop crippling your
standard streams!
The only solution I could find was a very ugly shell hack:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(
new String[] "sh", "-c", "stty echo > /dev/tty < /dev/tty 2>&1"
);SIGINT and friends and
call stty again to restore the console. HA! You will find that there's no
standard way of doing that, and if you really need it, you have to resort to
undocumented com.sun.* classes which aren't even guaranteed to be
present in every JVM.
My solution was to set up a shutdown hook, which solved this problem, but
would not solve other very common problems that are solved usually with signal
handlers.
Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian
Today's edition of El Pa s, the most
read Spanish newspaper, celebrates the 10th anniversary of it's
weekly technology section
Ciberpa s with a special
edition which takes a look back at the last 10 years of computing, and also
looks forward to what the future will bring us.
Merc Molist interviewed Carlos Atar s, my mate at
Softcatal
Jordi Mas and myself, on what
happened during the last 10 years of Free Software and where we are heading.
The paper edition features a *gasp* half page picture of me laying on the
grass, but is otherwise identical to the
online version.
I need to add, this feels a bit strange. :) It's the first time I see myself
refered to as just Mallach , but I realise I'm getting old...
experimental, but building isn't sufficient in some
cases, e.g. when runtime errors come into play).debian-mentors@.DELAYED/n NMU in case the maintainer reacts
and has good reasons to postpone an upload, without having to bug
the original uploader (who also has stuff to do and sometimes
happens not to be available in due time).REJECTs for this or that package.debian-private@, having a nice^Wspammed @d.o
address, or getting an lwn access could be added here, but that's
only bonus stuff compared to the previous items (and I'm probably
forgetting others).
Oh, yeah, I know, patience is the key. I'm not sure about how many
months we're supposed to wait for an answer from James.
I'm not sure how many years we're supposed to wait for the various
DAM problems to be solved.
Lucas is very worried about bringing fresh blood into Debian.
Maybe there's some already, but it's not allowed to flow in.
Many thanks to all developers who are making it less frustrating by
doing mass-sponsoring; and to everyone showing sympathy. Not listing
you all, you know who you are.
For years, several important (or not so important) people have
forecast the end of email. While most of what they were saying
couldn t be disagreed with (important people always speak in vague,
vacant terms), it wasn t until about a year ago that I noticed any
effects. But over the past twelve months, I found myself frequently
having to remind people of tasks, mostly outstanding emails, across
the whole spectrum, and including companies who could make money
from me if only they d bother replying.
Statistics somewhere say that 90% or more of all mail is spam. I
have very few problems with spam (and would like to describe my
mail filter in a future post, but that ll take time), but I have no
problem imagining how most email users out there, who are stuck
with technology from the nineties (thanks mostly to Microsoft), are
really drowning and thus fail at the basics of correspondence.
So what s next? How should we continue to communicate, now that
email has been fully embraced by the business world while it has
grown to be more of a burden than a gain for the majority?
Or is our society simply accumulating more and more
slackers?
NP:
Barclay James Harvest: Time Honoured Ghosts
Zack, Wouter: Yup, Perl 6's scheme changes to reduce confusion to the programmer and to make the language better Huffman coded. Why?
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Martin blogs about
how the Camel book mentions the fact that scalars, arrays, and hashes
have completely separate namespaces, as if this is a problem. Well, I
disagree.
As with anything in Perl: yes, obviously it's possible to confuse
yourself with this feature, and yes, obviously it's true that if you do
this, you will get to keep both pieces of your program. So don't do that
then.
However, when used properly, I find that it actually helps me
improve readability of my programs.
Let's say we have a subroutine which returns a reference to a
filehandle to a bunch of data in a format that we know how to parse. We
don't know what the filehandle points to (and we don't care, either),
but we do know what the data is. So we store the filehandle in some
scalar, and then proceed to parse the data into a hash.
Now we could use variable names such as $fh and
%hash, but I'll hope that everyone agrees with me that this is
very bad practice. So, instead, we should name the variables
after what they contain. Say our data file contains books:
$books = get_books_fh(); while(<$books>) (... parse $author out of $_ ...) push @ $books $author , $_;The filehandle to which $books is a reference, points to some useful data; and the %books hash table contains the exact same data, only structured in a different, more useful way. So why give them a different name? They're the same thing, call them the same way. Personally, I find this makes a whole lot of sense. And you can do the same thing with arrays vs hashes, or scalars vs arrays. Of course you can also write code that uses $somevar and @somevar, with no semantic connection between the two. That is stupid, so don't do it. The fact that you can do stupid things with Perl, however, should not mean the language sucks. You see, other than some other programming language I could think about, Perl does not assume its users are stupid, or inexperienced, or dummies, or whatever. Yes, that does mean that new users will get confused; but it also allows experienced users to Get Stuff Done in a proper way. And, well, I'm sure you can do stupid things with python, too.
nice run_long_script.shWhat that does of course is reduce the priority of the process so that the CPU scheduler only runs it when nothing else (of a higher priority) wants to run. What it doesn't do however is run the process without any impact whatsoever on your other tasks. The reason is that the background process can still ruin the performance of your computer by monopolizing the hard disk.
ionice -c3 commandThe only problem is that you can only reduce the IO priority of a process as root. The reason being that if you're not careful you could have a high priority (CPU priority that is) IO-blocked by a lower-priority process.
sudo ionice -c3 makeit will run the whole thing as root, which is probably not what you want. So you could do something like:
sudo ionice -c3 sudo -u myusername maketo run the compilation as yourself. Though one problem persists: sudo strips out your environment. So things like distcc and ccache may not work anymore.
#!/bin/bash
nice fakeroot make-kpkg --revision=custom.1.0 kernel_image &
BACKGROUND_BUILD=$!
sudo ionice -c3 -p $BACKGROUND_BUILD
wait $BACKGROUND_BUILD exit 1
In June last year, I bought a TomTom GPS device. Their use of Linux on the device was a clear plus in their favour, but it was only that, given that overall they’re the best devices available.
Unfortunately, the TomTom HOME software that is needed to manage the device is not as good as the device itself.
An account on their website is needed for updates and the online shop, and as I usually do, I used an email address in the form jb+something@jblache.org. That’s a trick most of us use to trace back the origin of spam, usually revealing that some company sold its customer database. I’ve been doing that for years.
I was quite happy that the website did not reject the address as being invalid; that’s something that happens everytime the random web developer maintaining the site decides to start “validating” email addresses, for some value of email addresses.
For the following 8 months I’ve been using this address as the account login (don’t really have the choice, anyway) with the TomTom HOME software. Last month, the v2 of the said software was finally made available for Mac OS X.
Where the v1 used to accept my email address, the v2 would now reject it. You guessed it, Joe Random developer decided to start validating email addresses in TomTom HOME.
I reported the regression (and here, something must be said about their infamous support website), with pointers to the relevant RFCs. In the following email ping-pong, they managed to:
Nobse, why insist on watching such a boring spectacle? :-)
The only good moment in a F1 Grand Prix happens when a Ferrari car
wins and we can listen to "Fratelli d'Italia", the italian national
anthem and, by far, my favourite national anthem.
At least the music is among my favourites...the words, as often in
national anthems, carry a nationalist philosophy which I don't really
share.
This includes our French "Marseillaise" and its
"Make impure blood soak our fields' furrows". We should use a "lalala" version, just like they're doing in Spain for the "Marcha Real". The French version of Wikipedia gives interesting explanations about the controversy for La Marseillaise words. Strangely, the English version does not.
Because you all love me and deeply want to know what on Earth I'm doing with my life/want to hire me, I'll put you out of your misery and let you know that I've just accepted an offer from Red Hat to Next.