Please stop developing and using some obscure application when there are better alternatives.
One of the biggest problems with expecting people to contribute to projects is that the simple act of unpacking the code and looking at it is unnerving. I mean some small packages which I expected to have a very simple structure turn out to have loads of C files and are very hard to understand.
The irony is that the newbie developer wouldn't understand why all the structure was necessary until after they had developed their own program of this type - and of course that's what we're trying to avoid.
What is desperately needed in Linux is much better overview documentation of projects. If I want to get into gaim and fix a display bug, or get into up2date and fix a download bug, right now it takes me about 3 hours just to grok the code before I even try my first edit... and even then I'm probably still a tiny bit fuzzy on what does what.
Could we come up with a standard language-independent way to document classes, functions, files, and data structures? Can we encourage more projects to have a readme file for new developers?
Or perhaps most importantly, can we encourage all projects to adopt someone who is a good programmer as a Project Documenter, who won't write any code but will just create (and UPDATE!) documentation and readme files and maybe even the project web site (God forbid I find a Linux project with an up-to-date web site! The horror!).
Another thing that would help, if the distributions out there are listening (e.g. Red Hat), is to keep the number of projects that each paid programmer is assigned down to a bare minimum. Almost all the projects for Linux are new, could use a lot of polishing, and need to keep up with very fast-developed library dependencies. Having a couple developers who round-robin to fix the problems on a lot of packages is really not good enough, they need time to really adopt a pacakge or two.
Is there a case where THIS IS NOT SUFFICIENT? Is it really that much of a win to burden the entire architecture with a feature that in its common use can be implemented completely seperately and still solve 90% of the problem?
Running GUI configuration tools on a headless web server, displaying to your local workstation. I don't want to have to configure and manage X on the web server just to do that.
I don't see many secretaries choosing what boot level to start up in the morning.
I do, where I work. Some days it's high heels, some days its sandals, generally the boot level gets higher at the end of the week... in fact on Friday they're often wearing those sexy "fuck me" high boots in preparation for going out later.
I recently wrote a silly little pam module and edited some files in gdm so I can login at my Red Hat linux terminal just by walking up and sticking in my Trek Thumbdrive.
One of the problems I've been wrestling with is that if anyone copies the file from the thumbdrive that it looks for, they can access my system as easily as I can. This hard drive would seem to suffer the same problem.
So, you say, protect the usb key just as a regular door key - you don't let people copy those. When I get my car serviced I even make a point to only hand them the car key alone, and not my apartment keys, etc.
But the small usb drives are so damn convenient as a replacement for floppies, and in fact I bought mine so I could throw files on it and take them to people's computers. But if I've got a login file on mine, the second I insert it into someone's computer I've theoretically lost security, because they could have a background process that copied off the file.
Now of course I'm not in the habit of trading files with miscreants and criminals, but you get the idea. If I'm building a process that's ostensibly for security it might as well be good.
But I haven't been able to find a way to reconcile the login issue with using the usb key elsewhere. As far as I can see, a perfect copy of my login file is as good as the original.
Books are ok, but the best thing for beginners might be simply to join a LUG (Linux User Group) and make friends with some people who are experts. When I was starting out I learned TONS just from watching other people at their consoles.
But the Metropolitan Police lost its appeal and has been ordered to pay £850, plus legal costs.
I'm from the UK living in the US and for my American friends straining their eyes at their monitors, I have to point out that yes, there really is no missing M or six zeros after that number.
We English figured out a long time ago that the fun is in wearing wigs while you make the judgment, not in ordering large amounts of money to be moved around.
I know this will sound troll-like but I've got strong feelings on this one...
Unified System Documentation
I'm sorry but most documentation does not benefit from SGML, and considering that getting free software authors to write docs AT ALL is a chore, there should be as few obstacles as possible. Maybe we need to unify the _access_ to the docs. I can basically type "man command" for any command on my system and get help, but maybe I should also be able to do "docs command|package" and get an automatically generated list of options for related man pages, html files, web sites, etc.
Standard Config Files
I've said it before and I'll say it again, XML is not a storage or configuration format, it is a transport format to serve as an intermediary between two disparate systems. It is horrible to have to edit or parse XML for human or computer. Using XML for config would be much easier for beginners and annoying for experts. That aside, instead of 80 billion ways to write a config file you'd get 80 billion DTD's. If you think you can unify all the config files on one DTD, good luck to you.
In short - XML is NOT a silver bullet. It's a different breed of the same dog.
I don't use a "trash can" on my home linux computer per se, but I do run Logical Volume Manager and one of the _best_ features is the ability to take a snapshot of a logical volume.
The snapshot uses zero bytes when you first make it, and then as activity happens on your drives it records changes (imagine a "super-diff"). The amount of space you need to allocate to the snapshot depends on how long you want it around and how frequently you write to disk.
I decided this is useful when automated so my home computer makes a place called/mnt/snap every Sunday morning with enough space (1G) to last all week. During the week I can then recover any file that existed on the previous Sunday morning, but there was no lengthy "backup" process or tape drive or anything. I like it very much.
BTW, I don't even have two HD's on my LVM. I just imlpemented it on my main drive for the sheer geekiness of it, i.e. cool features like this one. Yes, before someone points it out, I realize theoretically with just 1 drive LVM makes it slower rather than faster but (a) I didn't notice any speed difference, probably because my CPU is fast, and (b) it's a non-critical home computer.
Someone at my LUG demo'd Hurd and it looked very intriguing. The kernel was tiny and everything interesting happened on userspace. He mounted ftp sites and so on into the filesystem under his home dir without superuser privileges.
I believe in competition. If they think this is a better way to design a kernel, more power to them. I'll even switch to Hurd if they make it inticing enough.
Well most posted replies look like they're taking the psychology route. But let me offer a different point of view.
If the business is to assume that the bidding developers makes about $70,000 in salary, then you've effectively "said" to them you'll be committing yourself to this project for 26 days, whereas the other developer is "saying" 78 days. Perhaps they think this project is a two or three month project and they want someone who will be around?
I'm not just talking about coding... you have to consider delays (there will always be delays if you have to wait on them for anything, even just approval), training (sometimes dimwitted) staff on using your system, testing, approval (sometimes from a committee that will want changes), and lots of bugfixing (don't tell me you have no bugs, I don't believe you).
The more I think about it, $15k sounds more reasonable to _me_.
What really matters is that they use Instant Runoff Voting
Before you guys get too caught up promoting IRV, please read Chap 2 of Political Numeracy by Meichael Meyerson for some stiff discussion of the caveats of all voting "algorithms" including IRV (although he doesn't refer to it by that buzzword).
Slashdot Mirror
Thank God it's minimalist.
I need a minimalist window manager.
You know, because I need as much CPU time as possible to run my xmatrix desktop background.
Seriously, that thing eats up 10% on my 2.53Ghz.... but it looks soooooooooooooooo cool.
I'm going to get one so I can display /var/log/messages on it.
Then when they ask me "hey Martin is the mail server back up?" I can reply with "I dunno, let me look into my crystal ball....."
It's not that different from what I do now...
One of the biggest problems with expecting people to contribute to projects is that the simple act of unpacking the code and looking at it is unnerving. I mean some small packages which I expected to have a very simple structure turn out to have loads of C files and are very hard to understand.
The irony is that the newbie developer wouldn't understand why all the structure was necessary until after they had developed their own program of this type - and of course that's what we're trying to avoid.
What is desperately needed in Linux is much better overview documentation of projects. If I want to get into gaim and fix a display bug, or get into up2date and fix a download bug, right now it takes me about 3 hours just to grok the code before I even try my first edit... and even then I'm probably still a tiny bit fuzzy on what does what.
Could we come up with a standard language-independent way to document classes, functions, files, and data structures? Can we encourage more projects to have a readme file for new developers?
Or perhaps most importantly, can we encourage all projects to adopt someone who is a good programmer as a Project Documenter, who won't write any code but will just create (and UPDATE!) documentation and readme files and maybe even the project web site (God forbid I find a Linux project with an up-to-date web site! The horror!).
Another thing that would help, if the distributions out there are listening (e.g. Red Hat), is to keep the number of projects that each paid programmer is assigned down to a bare minimum. Almost all the projects for Linux are new, could use a lot of polishing, and need to keep up with very fast-developed library dependencies. Having a couple developers who round-robin to fix the problems on a lot of packages is really not good enough, they need time to really adopt a pacakge or two.
"I'm vaklempt....
Talk amongst yourselves....
I'll give you a file...
Here, you've got segment 1, you got segment 2....
Talk amongst yourselves...."
Running GUI configuration tools on a headless web server, displaying to your local workstation. I don't want to have to configure and manage X on the web server just to do that.
I do, where I work. Some days it's high heels, some days its sandals, generally the boot level gets higher at the end of the week... in fact on Friday they're often wearing those sexy "fuck me" high boots in preparation for going out later.
Also on sale will be T-shirts that say:
FUCK ALBANIA
and
FUCK RIAA
Sorry, you have to have seen Wag The Dog for this to be amusing.
I recently wrote a silly little pam module and edited some files in gdm so I can login at my Red Hat linux terminal just by walking up and sticking in my Trek Thumbdrive.
One of the problems I've been wrestling with is that if anyone copies the file from the thumbdrive that it looks for, they can access my system as easily as I can. This hard drive would seem to suffer the same problem.
So, you say, protect the usb key just as a regular door key - you don't let people copy those. When I get my car serviced I even make a point to only hand them the car key alone, and not my apartment keys, etc.
But the small usb drives are so damn convenient as a replacement for floppies, and in fact I bought mine so I could throw files on it and take them to people's computers. But if I've got a login file on mine, the second I insert it into someone's computer I've theoretically lost security, because they could have a background process that copied off the file.
Now of course I'm not in the habit of trading files with miscreants and criminals, but you get the idea. If I'm building a process that's ostensibly for security it might as well be good.
But I haven't been able to find a way to reconcile the login issue with using the usb key elsewhere. As far as I can see, a perfect copy of my login file is as good as the original.
You are my hero.
Good, I'll update my religion on the next census from "Jedi" to "Linux". Glad they got that formalized.
Books are ok, but the best thing for beginners might be simply to join a LUG (Linux User Group) and make friends with some people who are experts. When I was starting out I learned TONS just from watching other people at their consoles.
To: Linus Torvalds
From: bob@ibm.com
Subject: kernel-smp patch, 65000 cpu's
Dear Linus,
Please accept this patch to accommodate thousands of processors in a single machine.
[attached: patch]
To: bob@ibm.com
From: Linus Torvalds
Subject: Re: kernel-smp patch, 65000 cpu's
No problem, Bob. Just go ahead and send me one of those machines for "testing" and then I'll merge the patch in...
Linus
I'm from the UK living in the US and for my American friends straining their eyes at their monitors, I have to point out that yes, there really is no missing M or six zeros after that number.
We English figured out a long time ago that the fun is in wearing wigs while you make the judgment, not in ordering large amounts of money to be moved around.
Brings whole new meaning to giving the teacher an apple.
... And All Your Base Are Belong To Us.
I know this will sound troll-like but I've got strong feelings on this one...
I'm sorry but most documentation does not benefit from SGML, and considering that getting free software authors to write docs AT ALL is a chore, there should be as few obstacles as possible. Maybe we need to unify the _access_ to the docs. I can basically type "man command" for any command on my system and get help, but maybe I should also be able to do "docs command|package" and get an automatically generated list of options for related man pages, html files, web sites, etc.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, XML is not a storage or configuration format, it is a transport format to serve as an intermediary between two disparate systems. It is horrible to have to edit or parse XML for human or computer. Using XML for config would be much easier for beginners and annoying for experts. That aside, instead of 80 billion ways to write a config file you'd get 80 billion DTD's. If you think you can unify all the config files on one DTD, good luck to you.
In short - XML is NOT a silver bullet. It's a different breed of the same dog.
I don't use a "trash can" on my home linux computer per se, but I do run Logical Volume Manager and one of the _best_ features is the ability to take a snapshot of a logical volume.
/mnt/snap every Sunday morning with enough space (1G) to last all week. During the week I can then recover any file that existed on the previous Sunday morning, but there was no lengthy "backup" process or tape drive or anything. I like it very much.
/etc/cron.weekly/lvsnap: /mnt/snap /dev/big/snap >/dev/null /dev/big/rh >/dev/null /dev/big/snap /mnt/snap
The snapshot uses zero bytes when you first make it, and then as activity happens on your drives it records changes (imagine a "super-diff"). The amount of space you need to allocate to the snapshot depends on how long you want it around and how frequently you write to disk.
I decided this is useful when automated so my home computer makes a place called
Here's my
#!/bin/bash
umount
lvremove -f
lvcreate -L 1G --snapshot -n snap
mount -r
BTW, I don't even have two HD's on my LVM. I just imlpemented it on my main drive for the sheer geekiness of it, i.e. cool features like this one. Yes, before someone points it out, I realize theoretically with just 1 drive LVM makes it slower rather than faster but (a) I didn't notice any speed difference, probably because my CPU is fast, and (b) it's a non-critical home computer.
Someone at my LUG demo'd Hurd and it looked very intriguing. The kernel was tiny and everything interesting happened on userspace. He mounted ftp sites and so on into the filesystem under his home dir without superuser privileges.
I believe in competition. If they think this is a better way to design a kernel, more power to them. I'll even switch to Hurd if they make it inticing enough.
For Chrissakes I just got /etc/XF86Config-4 configured for the standard 17" I'm using now, I can't _wait_ to compile drivers for one of those...
Of course NASA wants to get a robot up there. It'll be on an important mission...
It's got to go stick a flag in the ground and stamp out some fake footprints.
Web, Images, Groups, Directory, News, *Porn*
That would be priceless.
Well most posted replies look like they're taking the psychology route. But let me offer a different point of view.
If the business is to assume that the bidding developers makes about $70,000 in salary, then you've effectively "said" to them you'll be committing yourself to this project for 26 days, whereas the other developer is "saying" 78 days. Perhaps they think this project is a two or three month project and they want someone who will be around?
I'm not just talking about coding... you have to consider delays (there will always be delays if you have to wait on them for anything, even just approval), training (sometimes dimwitted) staff on using your system, testing, approval (sometimes from a committee that will want changes), and lots of bugfixing (don't tell me you have no bugs, I don't believe you).
The more I think about it, $15k sounds more reasonable to _me_.
Before you guys get too caught up promoting IRV, please read Chap 2 of Political Numeracy by Meichael Meyerson for some stiff discussion of the caveats of all voting "algorithms" including IRV (although he doesn't refer to it by that buzzword).
You mean like a FOIA request for the Windows source code, the OS that it runs on? Now THAT would be funny.
Oh, they're real. Huh. I thought they were CG...