Slashdot Mirror

I made my own image tagging software, which is likely to be supported (for me, by me) as long as I care. It's probably not the right choice for most people. Anyone who wants to use mine is free to do so, but it's not well packaged. Undoubtedly missing features some people consider mandatory. It also makes some unconventional choices.

If anyone wants to try it I will answer email about it, and we can arrange to meet on IRC. There are several mode repos on the same github account (that are part of the same system).

Basic ideas:

Client/server model. Server in C, client in python.

Everything you do it kept forever. The only persistant metadata storage is a log of everything you've done.

Image files are never ever touched. They are identified by their hash. Anything messing with them will break this.

There's a fuse filesystem for searches, which you can use with whatever viewer you like. There's also a (crappy) web interface.

You can import raw files and see jpegs in the fuse fs/web client. (The embedded jpeg found in nearly all raw files.)

For the interested party, I found a github mirror of the original "Familiar Linux" distro, which is defunct.

https://github.com/amatus/fami...

It should at least open the door to permitting a more "Recent" build using updated packages for those so inclined, since they have the build system and everything there in that mirror repository.

He said that at least one of them has a GPS module, and cited the generation of the radio used.

I am not sure if Familiar Linux still has binaries and sources up or not... Let me check.

I found a github mirror of the source.
https://github.com/amatus/fami...

It should be possible to build an image using a cross-compliler.

No more Bennett Haselton submissions. That's all I want for Christmas!

Merry Christmas to us all! (or, if you prefer to read the line of code first, you can do that - click Raw to install)

No more Bennett Haselton submissions. That's all I want for Christmas!

Merry Christmas to us all! (or, if you prefer to read the line of code first, you can do that - click Raw to install)

TFA is the worst website design I've seen in several months. Here is the link to the original source, which is a bit easier to read.

On alternatives to profit-making websites emphasizing other types of transactions than exchange, see my comment: "1. Outdoor Holiday Lights 2. ??? 3. Profit!" http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

As I mention there, I've been working on-and-off towards software for supporting a social semantic desktop. Many other have of course (like with NEPOMUK), I'm just one more. The Maelstrom sounds like it may be heading in that direction too.

I have some later stuff I have not released yet, but it is pretty similar to this:
"A step towards a social semantic desktop in JavaScript using a NodeJS or PHP backend "
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

A key idea there is to write applications that spread their content state across a set of files, where you change the content state by adding a new file rather than changing an existing file.

So, for a simple example, imagine you have a document you can find by some UUID. When you make a new version of it, you write out a new file that references the same UUID but has a later timestamp. When you want to display the content, you search through all the versions of the document you have and display the one with the latest timestamp. Every actual file can be referenced by its SHA256 hash value and its length

Now, things can rapidly get more complex that that like by having hyperdocuments where only part of the document is in each file and so on. That requires a somewhat a different style of writing applications than is typical today.

In that version, you can have log files you add to, which can be generated by the system as it accepts new files and sees if they have special indexing tags. You can also have git-like variables that represent a pointer to a specific file and which can only be changed if you present the current version of the variable.

That older version is a bit more complicated than the one I'm working on, which has been progressing mostly by subtraction. :-) In the new version (not yet on GitHub, but I plan to put it there at some point), I got rid of the logs and variables, and replaced them with memory indexes of all content which is always a JSON document. Standard indexing of the files is simple and mainly just enough to find related ones which you can process or index further locally. Indexing in the server is based mainly on files having an optional ID (representing a document potentially with versions under the same ID) and having optional tags (to provide context about hyperdocuments), as well as having a SHA256 and length for direct retrieval. You can also query a server for files that match those IDs. Eventually, I see those queries as being like "magnet URIs".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

I've been writing a Single Page Application in JavaScript that uses that new backend to support "Participative Narrative Inquiry" (implementing ideas outlined in my wife's book "Working with Stories");

I think there is a great potential for such tools for community dialog and community planning and community design. I have a video related to that on the front page of site that is currently running the Pointrel20130202 software:
http://twirlip.com/

Of course *many* people have been working towards a social semantic desktop (like NEPOMUK). And there are many document-oriented databases (CouchDB, MongoDB, etc.) and a variety of other databases of different sorts. These are just my own experiments and I don't know if they will succeed in being generally useful. I remain hopeful that someone will develop a general purpose system for this and it will be useful for communications, planning, and design. Maybe Maelstrom (or Maelstrom plus some new apps written in the way described above) will be it.

The Theodore Sturgeon short sci-fi story, "The Skills of Xanadu" is

If only you could fork the project...

https://github.com/freenas/fre...

JPEG2000 in Javascript

WebP in Javascript

Another WebP in Javascript

Ideally, you have two layers:
0. Host operating system to run the bare hardware.
1. Containers to isolate running contained applications from each other, and govern their resource access.
The application runs inside the container, without any virtual anything.

With Java, in theory you could run Java on the host operating system under different user accounts. So you have the host operating system at level 0 and the JVMs running at level 1, and you use different user accounts to set different JAVA_HOMEs and give different JRE versions and Java's own security configuration features to restrict resource use (in addition to Java's own application security configurations, there's the jcgroup library https://github.com/haosdent/jc... to restrict CPU utilization, etc...)

But in practice, the JVM has had some many security vulnerability disclosures over the past few years that I wouldn't trust it. If I were to use the JVM, I would go for a three tier application: 0. host, 1. containers, 2. JVM inside containers.

Having application maintaining there own libraries is more like an loosely workaround than a solution. Some libraries of one application could share information with others applications that maintain an other version of the libraries, resulting in a inflating code and complexity to support old formats or resulting on unsupported situations. The Linux way of packaging libraries require constant support from the application providers, but the advantage is a fast evolving ecosystem, small footprint, and stable operations.

I have to see an OS that can link any libraries for any language to any application. I known that the GObject introspection project dream to bring something close to that: http://helgo.net/simon/introsp... . AFAIK, Vala (a kind of C + GObject) is the most advanced experiment in that direction with automatic binding in a number of languages already functional: https://github.com/antono/vala... . But here the OS have very little to do as the hard part of the linking process is done by the GObject introspection library of each language. Please note that GObject is able to work so well precisely because the naming schema is well defined.

It's actually popular to introduce a few new languages each year and to write a lot of libraries for each languages that do almost the same job. At some point in the future, so many choices will make more problems than it solve, mainly because of the dilution of the efforts and lack of support where the community is too small. C has a big community for good reason, but C in not used for some projects for others good reasons. Some basic object programming features is probably the most obvious one, especially when observing that many C projects organize there code like objects if not directly using GObject or similar libraries. Given the today situation, I think that C could evolve in a cleaver way without making any harm.

Whoops, broken link: "my god, can you ever..."

Microsoft has not open sourced .NET. They have open sourced a subset which is not quite enough to do anything meaningful. To write an actual application, you have to use libraries that are not part of .NET Core.

The open sourcing process is not complete yet, but the stated goal is to open source the complete server stack - i.e. everything that is needed to run an ASP.NET vNext application. It's kinda messy in that it's spread across several GitHub repos right now, but look at this and this.

Microsoft has not open sourced .NET. They have open sourced a subset which is not quite enough to do anything meaningful. To write an actual application, you have to use libraries that are not part of .NET Core.

The open sourcing process is not complete yet, but the stated goal is to open source the complete server stack - i.e. everything that is needed to run an ASP.NET vNext application. It's kinda messy in that it's spread across several GitHub repos right now, but look at this and this.

Has anyone been using this for Scala development with the android-sdk-plugin? I've been working on my first Scala android app and see it as a big improvement over Java. The only negative is that I've been using sbt+emacs instead of the blessed android dev environment (which used to be Eclipse) so I've been missing some features.

Some ideas; Do check this link http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/0... Contribute to open source projects when you don't have work https://guides.github.com/acti... Freelance through the elance or other coder for hire type sites https://www.elance.com/ Start your own IT support company/freelance/contract/game development, whatever your strongest skills are https://www.sba.gov/ Get your company registered as a state/federal contractor and bid http://www.procure.ohio.gov/pr... http://www.gsa.gov/portal/cate...

Isaac committed a change to remove the gendered pronoun.

No that change was submitted by Alex Gaynor, rejected by Ben and accepted by Isaac.

If I saw that change in my codebase, I'd be having a standing meeting really quick.

With who?

Changing a pronoun is not worth of developer resources.

It's not up to you, Joyent or Ben Noordhuis to dictate what a developer does.

I would have reversed it too -- we don't need everyone's principled opinions infiltrating the codebase and starting problems between people's values and beliefs.

Personally I wouldn't have spent effort making the change but I don't see any reason to revert it either.

What's the license?

As stated on the Microsoft GitHub page, they use MIT or Apache 2 licenses for most of their projects.

.NET source is freely available. If that's the standard we are measuring by.

Here's the entire web stack for example:

https://github.com/ASP-NET-MVC...

Compiler is open source to, and they are putting the BCL into an open source license as well (source code has been available, but under a non-open license previously for few years).

Bennet is this guy who writes lengthy rambling opinion pieces that slashdot repeatedly posts every week or so and despite a large outcry of how ridiculous that it is that he gets to use slashdot as his personal blog, they keep posting his crap again and again. So regardless of whether slashdot is open source, the parent poster used this particular implementation which is a system completely out of his control and acts of its own free will regardless of the will of its user base. If his considers this the measure by which "It can't really be considered a viable choice" then he is a hypocrate. He can always take the source and pay for his own dedicated server and invest the time to setup and implement his own slashdot, but it stands for now that he is using the implementation out of his control.

He is conveniently drawing a very curved line in the sand to place .NET into a realm he disapproves of while not measuring everything else he uses by the same standard.

That's not what the post said. It said that if you insist on using masculine pronouns to the point of rejecting pull requests which contain non-masculine pronouns, you are not being a very nice person.

The entire intent of the pull request was to change a pronoun and there was nothing else of value in it. He didn't reject a legitimate pull request that had non-masculine pronouns - he rejected two pull requests that did nothing but change a single pronoun each.

You can see them here:

https://github.com/alex/libuv/...
https://github.com/alex/libuv/...

I typically also write using non-gendered pronouns just because I like the style better. But you can bet your ass that I'm not going to accept a modification to comments in my code just to make such a minor change that has nothing to do with code. Those changes bring nothing of value to the code or comments and as such should be rejected.

That's not what the post said. It said that if you insist on using masculine pronouns to the point of rejecting pull requests which contain non-masculine pronouns, you are not being a very nice person.

The entire intent of the pull request was to change a pronoun and there was nothing else of value in it. He didn't reject a legitimate pull request that had non-masculine pronouns - he rejected two pull requests that did nothing but change a single pronoun each.

You can see them here:

https://github.com/alex/libuv/...
https://github.com/alex/libuv/...

I typically also write using non-gendered pronouns just because I like the style better. But you can bet your ass that I'm not going to accept a modification to comments in my code just to make such a minor change that has nothing to do with code. Those changes bring nothing of value to the code or comments and as such should be rejected.

their logic is that if you use any gender specific pronouns you are, by default, misogynistic?

It's one thing to accidentally use gendered pronouns in documentation but resisting when someone else tries to fix the documentation (Alex) and trying to roll back the change when someone else (Isaac) accepts it, makes the person throwing a tantrum (Ben) either a dumb prat or a sexist, take your pick. Either way, the person in question is not an asset I'd want on my project team.

Also, if you think this was an issue where Joyent were in the wrong and going against community wishes, have a look at the comments on the github merge request, the overwhelming majority of people want the merge request to be accepted, so who exactly wasn't listening to the community? Hint: it wasn't Joyent...

I'm not quite hardcore enough for Xmonad, mainly because I don't feel like dealing with Haskell at the moment. However, I'm looking into AwesomeWM now that I finally took the plunge and switched from debian-based distros to Arch Linux, and I configured Openbox to maximize (within the margin) all non-dialogue windows and strip off the decor, which makes Openbox act enough like a tiler to work on a laptop screen.

There are many "container" architectures sprouting up. LXC, with last year's release of v1.x and introduction of "unprivilieged" containers, nested containers, overlayfs support & snapshots and now recently CRIU... is a great toolset.
Recently Stephane Graber et al announced LXD (lex-dee) and Stephane put out the following email description of purpose:

https://lists.linuxcontainers....

The GitHub site has a directory for specifications which is a really interesting read because it covers things like "remote" contianer management.
https://github.com/lxc/lxd/blo...

By the way, the ChromeBook is easy to put into "developer mode" and then you can install non-Chrome software on it. I installed Crouton and a command-line Debian system. I have Bash, vim, Python, Debian build-essential, and gdb.

pieces of crap that break constantly due to horribly cheap parts

That is just as meaningless a statement about Chromebooks as it is about Android phones. . . What specific company hardware are you talking about (e.g. I have had a very good experience with Samsung and HP Chromebooks)?

Regarding your "featureless" statement, have you heard of Crouton? Also, were you aware that an increasing number of Android apps are coming to Chromebooks? Your post seems to represent the segment of /. that has not bothered to really look into chromebooks before hating them. . .

Here you have it. As a non-developer I had tried to consolidate all OS/2 source code I was able to find. On Github I have 1388 repositories of different OS/2 projects.

Disclaimer: I'm not super experienced in this stuff. I am open to correction if I have any of these points wrong.

Do we really need a full OS image running in a container?

I think we probably do.

One of the key selling points of Docker is that the container is load-and-go. Do you have some wacky old software that has a hard dependency on particular versions of some libraries? You can build a container with just the right libraries and get your software to work... and, after you do that work, the container is just another container. It may have been a pain for you to get it working, but then anyone can run it on any Docker host as easily as any other container. This seems kind of powerful to me.

Do you need to see how your software runs on CentOS and Debian? You can set up a container for each, and run the tests on a single host system.

And if you want maximum security, it's kind of neat that each docker container can use just its own private file system and containers can't affect each others' running state.

So, if you are content with running an up-to-date system, and always running the latest versions of everything, and upgrading everything together, you could make a security isolation system lighter weight than Docker, but trading off some of the simplicity and flexibility of Docker. You might think it's a good choice, but I don't think you can reasonably claim that it's better in all ways.

Containers should run a single process. We shouldn't look at containers as a more efficient VM.

As I understand it, it is considered best practice in Docker to run a single process per container. Some people do use Docker as a sort of lightweight VM but not everyone likes it.

Are you arguing that Docker is flawed because it doesn't enforce one process per container? Because I'm not seeing it. I would rather have the flexibility; if I want to use Docker as a lightweight VM, the option is there, and I don't see that as a bad thing.

Do you really want to have to run apt-get or yum inside every container?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that you don't have to run a package manager inside every container. You would have a "base system" image, and you would update that image from time to time; then you build your specific containers as layers on top of the base image.

I believe a container could simply be a script that starts up a service, and config files that configure the service, with the actual packages for the service in the "base system" image. I'm not sure if that is standard practice or what.

I'm hoping that with Docker I could make micro-servers, like a Docker container with just a web server in it, not even a Bash shell. If someone cracks my server I want him in a desert, with no tools to help him escalate his privileges. I'm not sure how feasible that is now, but I think Docker is at least headed in that direction.

I'm not opposed to this new Rocket thing, but I'm still not clear on its actual advantages over Docker.

Well, I've been looking for like 5 minutes and already found this gem:

https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/...

Here but there's not much there yet.

I would learn objective-c first because you can get more help with it. People all over the internet have been doing it for a long time. It won't be obsolete for at least a decade, so don't stress about swift being the new way to do the same things. Find tutorials online or get torrents of books/buy them. Dream up your own micro-projects, when you get stuck http://stackoverflow.com/ is your friend. This site has saved me MANY times, usually within minutes. take a look at other peoples micro-projects and full fledged ones on https://github.com/ but above all, right some code EVERYDAY.

That's not the impression I get from github ...

Umm, it's released under the GPL. So not closed source at all.

- DETEKT

What is Detekt and how does it work?

"Detekt is a free tool that scans your computer for traces of known surveillance spyware used by governments to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world. By alerting them to the fact that they are being spied on, they will have the opportunity to take precautions.

It was developed by security researchers and has been used to assist in Citizen Lab's investigations into government use of spyware against human rights defenders, journalists and activists as well as by security trainers to educate on the nature of targeted surveillance.

Amnesty International is partnering with Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to release Detekt to the public for the first time."

###

Official Sites:

https://resistsurveillance.org...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...

- version 1.1 download (Nov 20, 2014) .exe & sig
https://github.com/botherder/d...

###

- Detekt Author's GPG key:

The distributed binary is signed with my personal PGP key, the public key is available at

https://nex.sx/nex.asc

###

- More info/News stories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news...
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://threatpost.com/detekt-...
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
http://www.zdnet.com/amnestys-...

###

- Author's Twitter Page:

https://twitter.com/botherder

- DETEKT

What is Detekt and how does it work?

"Detekt is a free tool that scans your computer for traces of known surveillance spyware used by governments to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world. By alerting them to the fact that they are being spied on, they will have the opportunity to take precautions.

It was developed by security researchers and has been used to assist in Citizen Lab's investigations into government use of spyware against human rights defenders, journalists and activists as well as by security trainers to educate on the nature of targeted surveillance.

Amnesty International is partnering with Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to release Detekt to the public for the first time."

###

Official Sites:

https://resistsurveillance.org...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...

- version 1.1 download (Nov 20, 2014) .exe & sig
https://github.com/botherder/d...

###

- Detekt Author's GPG key:

The distributed binary is signed with my personal PGP key, the public key is available at

https://nex.sx/nex.asc

###

- More info/News stories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news...
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://threatpost.com/detekt-...
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
http://www.zdnet.com/amnestys-...

###

- Author's Twitter Page:

https://twitter.com/botherder

- DETEKT

What is Detekt and how does it work?

"Detekt is a free tool that scans your computer for traces of known surveillance spyware used by governments to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world. By alerting them to the fact that they are being spied on, they will have the opportunity to take precautions.

It was developed by security researchers and has been used to assist in Citizen Lab's investigations into government use of spyware against human rights defenders, journalists and activists as well as by security trainers to educate on the nature of targeted surveillance.

Amnesty International is partnering with Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to release Detekt to the public for the first time."

###

Official Sites:

https://resistsurveillance.org...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...

- version 1.1 download (Nov 20, 2014) .exe & sig
https://github.com/botherder/d...

###

- Detekt Author's GPG key:

The distributed binary is signed with my personal PGP key, the public key is available at

https://nex.sx/nex.asc

###

- More info/News stories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news...
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://threatpost.com/detekt-...
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
http://www.zdnet.com/amnestys-...

###

- Author's Twitter Page:

https://twitter.com/botherder

- DETEKT

What is Detekt and how does it work?

"Detekt is a free tool that scans your computer for traces of known surveillance spyware used by governments to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world. By alerting them to the fact that they are being spied on, they will have the opportunity to take precautions.

It was developed by security researchers and has been used to assist in Citizen Lab's investigations into government use of spyware against human rights defenders, journalists and activists as well as by security trainers to educate on the nature of targeted surveillance.

Amnesty International is partnering with Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to release Detekt to the public for the first time."

###

Official Sites:

https://resistsurveillance.org...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...
https://github.com/botherder/d...

- version 1.1 download (Nov 20, 2014) .exe & sig
https://github.com/botherder/d...

###

- Detekt Author's GPG key:

The distributed binary is signed with my personal PGP key, the public key is available at

https://nex.sx/nex.asc

###

- More info/News stories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news...
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://threatpost.com/detekt-...
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
http://www.zdnet.com/amnestys-...

###

- Author's Twitter Page:

https://twitter.com/botherder

The software is at https://github.com/botherder/d... and the way they package the thing, grandma ain't gonna to know how to use it

Can't they put out a software package that the average non-geek person could use?

Seems to be a fast dev cycle.

v1.1 released 12 hours after v1

https://github.com/botherder/d...

would be a start to use git like this (no, its outdated). And in order to pass, a commit message must contain "signed-off by: barack obama".

The middle option is definitely less secure than the last, but at the same token more secure than the first.

From a theoretical standpoint, there is no 'more' or 'less' secure. If you're insecure, you're insecure.

Script kiddies looking for default passwords and running wireshark from a van in the street hoping that a user on an unsecured wifi network will type their CC in plaintext

Well, you don't need an unsecured wifi for a MITM

ComputerCraft Institute :

https://github.com/squidsoup/c...
http://blog.nocturne.net.nz/ed...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Exactly what do you mean is backdoored?
This is a protocol for signing a certificate and anyone can view their proposal: https://github.com/letsencrypt...

http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

I've been thinking about translating it to JavaScript...

Thanks for being an (indirect) inspiration, Raymond. Hope you are on to even better things!

The Linux kernel, for instance, keeps a blacklist for this issue instead

This is true. The blacklist is contained in drivers/ata/libata-core.c for anyone who wants to take a look at it.

To find it, in that file search for: static const struct ata_blacklist_entry ata_device_blacklist []

For SSDs with (queued) TRIM problems, that list seems to contain only Crucial/Micron M500/M550. There is a lot of other devices blacklisted for various reasons. Of course they aren't blacklisted completely but just some features are disabled in them.

.NET is all going open source

Several of the ancillary libraries and other projects (Entity Framework, F#, etc.) have been open source for some time, and now .NET core is on GitHub. So far, it's only a handful of the core libraries, but the plan is to flesh out the entire framework.

Can you please provide this link when you talk about SMAA being freely available? More developers need to know about this.

Link for the Crytek stuff you're talking about, so people can have at.

• stackoverflow https://github.com/bosun-monit...
• ex-googlers https://github.com/cockroachdb...
• like bittorrent sync https://github.com/syncthing/s...
• drone.io CI https://github.com/drone/drone
• raft protocol implement https://github.com/goraft/raft which is used in a number of other projects such as the underlying projects in CoreOS (also written in Go)

and the list goes on and on with startups (http://blog.iron.io/2013/03/how-we-went-from-30-servers-to-2-go.html) and big names (https://github.com/dropbox/godropbox https://github.com/facebookgo) alike. Just google for more or explore github.

• stackoverflow https://github.com/bosun-monit...
• ex-googlers https://github.com/cockroachdb...
• like bittorrent sync https://github.com/syncthing/s...
• drone.io CI https://github.com/drone/drone
• raft protocol implement https://github.com/goraft/raft which is used in a number of other projects such as the underlying projects in CoreOS (also written in Go)

and the list goes on and on with startups (http://blog.iron.io/2013/03/how-we-went-from-30-servers-to-2-go.html) and big names (https://github.com/dropbox/godropbox https://github.com/facebookgo) alike. Just google for more or explore github.