Domain: annexia.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to annexia.org.
Comments · 39
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Relink static script
I wrote this script to relink a dynamically-linked program with as many equivalent static libraries as possible, with any unavailable static libraries left dynamic. I use it to ship a static version of libguestfs
Whether static binaries are a good idea, I'll leave that discussion up to others. I would say that dynamic linking should be preferred, but static linking and this script is quite useful in some circumstances.
Rich.
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Re:Big Plus!
Yes, writing scripts in C is a great idea.
It's certainly not a new idea
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Why not go fully peer-to-peer?
We designed a "peer-to-peer" MMO many years ago, although I have to say we didn't implement it and the devil is definitely in the implementation. Anyway, you can read the design docs here. After it was clear we weren't going to write it, I published the docs just to give a priority date (1998) to invalidate any stupid patents
...Rich.
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Re:Forth, the RPN notational programming language
I wrote a little "literate" FORTH tutorial if any readers of the above comment are interested in it: jonesforth.
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1998 prior art for a truly scalable, 'P2P' MMO
This is something we were working on from 1998. We documented the design in some detail, and I released the documentation to prevent people from trying to patent it: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/fleet
The innovation in this (never-built) MMO is that the design requires no server at all. It what might now be called "P2P" (although that term wasn't around at the time).
Rich.
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Javascript performance - try it for yourself
Safari, FireFox, and Opera (in that order) have been showing marked improvements in Javascript performance. To the point where Javascript performance is a major point of competition.
I was playing with haXe which is a programming language that targets both Flash and Javascript back ends. You can (within some constraints) compile the same program to both targets, so that's what I did yesterday:
- Flash version (requires Adobe plugin)
- Javascript version (requires Firefox 3 or Safari with the canvas widget)
Use keys 1-9 to change demos, and click with the mouse to fire blocks.
I found that Adobe's Flash plugin beat everything, Safari+Javascript was pretty slow, and Firefox+Javascript was in the middle (but still pretty slow compared to Flash). Gnash doesn't run this demo at all, although it can run other haXe code.
Rich.
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Javascript performance - try it for yourself
Safari, FireFox, and Opera (in that order) have been showing marked improvements in Javascript performance. To the point where Javascript performance is a major point of competition.
I was playing with haXe which is a programming language that targets both Flash and Javascript back ends. You can (within some constraints) compile the same program to both targets, so that's what I did yesterday:
- Flash version (requires Adobe plugin)
- Javascript version (requires Firefox 3 or Safari with the canvas widget)
Use keys 1-9 to change demos, and click with the mouse to fire blocks.
I found that Adobe's Flash plugin beat everything, Safari+Javascript was pretty slow, and Firefox+Javascript was in the middle (but still pretty slow compared to Flash). Gnash doesn't run this demo at all, although it can run other haXe code.
Rich.
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Re:I'm to blame as well.
You really ought to learn a little bit about how Forth works before making more of a fool of yourself in public. I wrote a tutorial here on the subject.
Rich.
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Re:What Languages?
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FleetYawn, like this one?
Rich.
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Experiences with my spam archive
I ran a spam archive for a number of years, with emails dating back to around 1997. It's a lot of trouble - classifying spam isn't 100%, so there ended up being a few personal emails in there. However the big problems were these:
- Spammers or people whose names/company names appeared in spam (actual spam, that this) would send me random legal threats. None of them panned out in the end, but you can never tell.
- Everyone would be downloading the whole archive (gigabytes) to train their filters, at first killing my DSL, later blowing my bandwidth cap.
Now, none of these things can't be overcome of course (Bittorrent, no Google indexing), but I can understand why spamarchive.org wouldn't want the hassle, particularly since they probably weren't making any money out of it.
I still make my spam archive available to legitimate researchers, and I'm glad to say that a paper has been published and another is in preparation.
Rich.
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Re:iCal
Of course not. ical runs on anything (well, any Unix at least). And you can use it on any X11 enabled display of course.
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Re:iCal!?!?
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Re:iCal ripoff
How come they own that name when the ical program which a lot of us have presumably used is something like 15 years old (and predates the web) ??
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Re:Modularised code will always have this problem.
Automatic buffer overflow protection only covers the straightforward buffer overflow problems, i.e. array index overflows. In the case of more complex pointer arithmetic, where most of these problems occur, automatic protection is not possible (at least not without losing the option of pointer arithmetic).
Actually, automatic checking is very much possible, and has been for years. For example, Bounds checking gcc (that website is down right now, so try my page on the subject). That was written in 1994, and there are newer systems available now which don't have such a serious performance penalty.
The real solution is to stop writing critical code in C. Other languages provide bounds checking, and are faster and safer than C: for example OCaml which I prefer nowadays.
Rich.
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Paper on multithreadingIt's not a particularly new idea. I wrote a pretty detailed paper at university about multithreading. You can read it here:
http://www.annexia.org/tmp/multithreading.ps
Rich.
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Another rich web app development toolMonolith, which has been around for considerably longer than Echo, is looking for a new maintainer.
It allows you to create object-oriented web apps in C which compile into tiny servers (and I mean tiny - the web server fits into the L1 cache on most computers). But they come with all the usual features like a templating system, database access and so on.
Rich.
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Spam archiveIt's down at the moment (too many people tried to download the whole thing for their Baysian filters or whatever), but I've collected all my spam since Aug 1997 here.
Rich.
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Re:Do we really need another?No offense to the guys doing wonderful work on the Mozilla project, but there are already lots of calendar apps out there.
Name one. The best I've found is ical. It's a very sad statement that although over 10 years old, no one has written anything better in that time. Yes, it has flaws. But fewer than any of the alternatives. Lots of calendar apps? Yep. But they all suck. And that's not a healthy position for us to be in.
Repeat after me: "A calendar has no place in an email user agent". Anyone that believes otherwise simply doesn't understand the issues. What people a crying out for is not a reimplementation of Outlook, but something that lets them manage their time with the same ease that Outlook does. That means sending out meeting requests, with calendars being updated as appropriate on acceptance. It means the ability to check others' calendars to look for a suitably free time slot. And it means being able to do so with the click of a button or two. It doesn't require calendaring and email to be the same application, though, and indeed, it's much better if they're not.
But projects like Evolution are too hellbent on reimplementing all the mistakes made by Microsoft to step back and actually look at doing the right thing.
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C++ templates - not just powerful, Turing complete
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poolsFor safe and efficient pools and Perl-like datatypes in C, use c2lib. </ad>
Rich.
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Spammers attack archives with copyright threatsAs reported in Ask Slashdot (but it didn't make it to the front page), the Great Spam Archive (est. about 3 years ago) has just received a threat of legal action from a spammer over, of all things, copyright infringement.
Rich.
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Spammers attack archives with copyright threatsAs reported in Ask Slashdot (but it didn't make it to the front page), the Great Spam Archive (est. about 3 years ago) has just received a threat of legal action from a spammer over, of all things, copyright infringement.
Rich.
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Re:This comes down to..But today, when 90% of the stuff served (besides images) by web servers are dynamic content, why does a web server like this get a headline?
<plug>
Very true. That's why you need a web server like rws which is tiny, and loads C-based CGIs into memory, and has a full database layer.
</plug>
Rich. -
rwsOr rws which let's you use C to write CGI scripts that are loaded into the server at run time (for extreme speed), and has database access, and hence is much more useful for dynamic webpages.
Rich.
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There are already many spam archives
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whitelists - can be effectiveI moved to a complete whitelist solution about 3 years ago. Previously I used to use the "Bcc" method of filtering, but stopped doing that after a friend invited me to a party, and it accidentally got chucked in my (public) spam archive.
$ wc -l
.whitelist
804 .whitelistIt works, but it's a pain, and I still have to manually check the spam folder once in a while to catch people writing to me out of the blue about my software. And there are still a few false positives in the archive (tell me about them, and I'll try and weed them out).
Rich.
Gratuitous spam archive advert: http://www.annexia.org/spam/
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Re:SVG
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Re:How? And what's the point?
I think you're thinking of the templates in C++. www.annexia.org/freeware/cpptemplates/.
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Re:Blender has lots going for it...I don't think that's supported currently. I know the developers are looking at increasing the number of game-oriented formats it will export but already people have written exporters themselves (using Python). You can export UV coords for textures as well.
Off the top of my head, VRML, Wavefront, DXF are natively exported and 3ds, 3DSMax and some others can be done using Python. XRacer - a WipeOut clone - uses Blender for its modelling. Check out the source which includes all the export scripts here.
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Found some Linux infoUnfortunately it looks like it's for the ethernet version only.
http://www.annexia.org/linux/btinteractive-linux-
h owto.html -
First MS site ran on FreeBSD?I seem to recall vaguely that the first MS site ran on FreeBSD. If that's true, then the Microsoft story glosses over this rather important detail for some reason
:-)Rich -- Play xracer!
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They'd have to pay me to take one ...I really can't relate to the people posting here saying these prices represent good value.
PCs have about a 3:1 price performance advantage over Ultra 5s and 10s. They come with a terrible operating system (Solaris) which, to a Linux user, is a really horrible experience. No command line editing. X runs like a dog with two legs at 1024x768x8 bits. No Gnu tools. Standard tools like `ping' which core dump all the time. Please. Thanks, but no thanks.
Rich.
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Bibliotech, London has an ONLY OSS policyAt Bibliotech, London from management downwards there is a strong OSS only policy. We use OSS software only as far as possible on the systems side, and are involved in developing and contributing back replacements for the non-free software that we still use.
Needless to say, anyone looking to escape from the terror of an anti-OSS environment is welcome to apply for a job
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Re: Backward Compatability a bad thing?I mean, look at why people use windows for the most part: they percieve that it provides them with easily used services such as email and word processing.
Ask anyone who uses Windows why they can't use XYZ alternative operating system. You'll get two answers: (1) Because some vital software they use doesn't run on XYZ. (2) Because they have hundreds or thousands of important documents in some proprietary format supported only on a Windows application.
In other words: lock in.
Bill Gates and the app vendors have very successfully locked users in to a single platform and set of applications (in fact, Billy's been more successful than most of the app vendors at this too).
Solve this problem --- help develop Wine or whatever is required --- and you solve the lock in problem. You'll have 90% of the market in no time (assuming your compatible OS is cheaper in beer terms than Windows).
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Re:Recognizing mass mailingsIt might be possible, if ISPs really made a concerted effort to filter their networks, to reduce spam. See some suggestions of mine here. I send this message to all ISPs when they spam me -- not had much effect yet
:-(http://www.annexia.org/text/spam-mea sures.html
Rich.
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XRacerI'm trying to create a clone of Wipeout, and my strategy is very much influenced by Eric Raymond's paper ``The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. This means - releasing every day, integrating lots of patches, setting up a mailing list. The whole lot.
Take a look: It's here.
The really hard stuff (for me) like modelling, sounds, textures isn't coming along very fast because in spite of what other people have said, the coding is the easy bit.
Rich.
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Re:ISP need to levy fines against spammersI encourage people to send the following message to offending domains. If enough people send it, then (eventually, one hopes) they'll get the message and actually start implementing it.
http://www.annexia.org/text/spam-mea sures.html
It advocates both technical and social fixes to the problem of spamming.
Rich. ( http://www.annexia.org/)
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Re:ISP need to levy fines against spammersI encourage people to send the following message to offending domains. If enough people send it, then (eventually, one hopes) they'll get the message and actually start implementing it.
http://www.annexia.org/text/spam-mea sures.html
It advocates both technical and social fixes to the problem of spamming.
Rich. ( http://www.annexia.org/)