Well, having been an open source developer for almost the 10 years, I know a bit about this. Firstly you need to code as securely as you can. Do the research, make sure you know whats going, and audit your own code thoroughly.
Don't believe no one else is looking, because they are. I've had one person ask me a few innocent questions about my code, then email a back a week later to say I'd passed their security audit just fine. I've also been unlucky enough - just once - to have the full disclosure email about a security vulnerability. And yes, that feels bad.
Do your very best; don't worry, and enjoy being part of the open source community.
All this talk about making sure data lasts for the future. Well, I'm currently mining old data that was laid down well before my birth date, that's old family photographs back to the 1860's.
For the first time I'm seeing images of my great, great grandfather and his family candidly posed in an Aberdeen studio. My great grandfather and his brothers on an old tintype photo plate.
Some of the images are in a fairly poor state, but half an hour with the Gimp has got them back into serviceable condition.
When my relatives submitted to the new craze of photography some 150 years ago, did they ever believe that one of their descendants would lovingly resurrect the data? On a machine that would have been a complete fantasy to them.
Oh, and how do I know who they all are? Simple; they wrote their names on the back of the photos for posterity.
I had lots of problems getting NVidia to work with FC1. Things would kind of work, but other things wouldn't. Getting TuxRacer to work is a good litmus test.
Then I found this page of unofficial FC1 FAQ. Yay...!!
Here's what to do - it worked for me:
Use these instructions if there are no RPMs available, or if the available RPMs don't work for you.
Make sure you have the lastest drivers.
Now print this out, or write it down. Then:
You must have kernel-source installed for this to work. Check the "Add/Remove Applications" tool in System Settings on the red-hat menu.
Shut down X (as root, do telinit 3 in a terminal).
Log in as root and go to the directory where you downloaded the nVidia drivers.
Type CC="gcc32" sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run --add-this-kernel.
There will be some whirring and wailing, and then do CC="gcc32" sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2-custom.run That will do a correct install of your nVidia drivers.
Follow nVidia's instructions to set up the driver. (Read the "EDITING YOUR XF86CONFIG FILE" section.)
You can now restart X by typing telinit 5.
If none of this works, do rpm -e --nodeps XFree86-Mesa-libGL and then restart your computer. The need to do this should soon be eliminated -- watch this FAQ or the fedora-list. Note that if you update XFree86, this package will be reinstalled and you will need to remove it again. This solves the "DRI" problem.
At least one of my users is familiar with both projects and prefers WebCollab.
Apart from that it's Open Source and the code is reasonably easy to follow. Tailor matching to your organisation shouldn't be too hard. Judging by the patches and comments I get, some of users are doing just that
Being a New Zealander, I've followed the Richard Pearse case with interest over a number of years.
There is no doubt that Pearse flew, and that he flew very well - and with a machine much more advanced than the Wright Brothers had. What Pearse lacked was a camera at the end of the runway to record the auspicious event for posterity.
Interest in Pearse's achievements did not surface until the 1970's, when a aviation historian chanced upon a discovery of Pearse's plane wreckage. Most of the research is from eyewitness accounts 60 years after the event. The eyewitnesses (all now dead) are hazy on exact dates, and often contradictory on what actually happened.
But there is enough to know that Pearse did fly. Whether he beat the Wright Brothers to do so, we will probably never know.
What is incredible is that a farmer in a remote part of New Zealand, with no outside help, was able to competently put together a reasonably sophisticated airplane from farm junk, and then manage to coax it into the air.
For that fact alone Pearse deserves to be admired.
About a year ago I was faced with the same problem; I run a deployment program for design/construction rollout of telecommunication cellsites. (Not software development, but the problems in civil engineering are probably quite similar).
I took from an open source project (then in it's infancy), and enhanced it for our needs. We now have web based project management software that fits our needs very well.
Of course, we fed our improvements back into the source (and I have become one of the developers). Isn't that what open source is about?
So, use the force behind open source, develop your own from what you can get. Then return, what you've learnt to the community.
Oh, and if you're interested: Have a look at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/core-lan-org
Actually punch cards predate computers by a wide margin; punch card weaving machines were in the forefront of the industrial revolution. And my grandmother used Hollerith cards (with steel pins to align the data fields) in an early 20th century census.
My first horror was 'mark sense' cards for us lower-than-low students. Instead of punching the card, we had to mark it with a soft pencil. The cards were then read by a photo-electric cell. After a few hours use, the machine would clog with pencil graphite and we'd have to wait for the white coat man to reluctantly clean it - again. With a queue of students, all with assignments due today, it was a bad scene.
Later I graduated to punch cards. My second horror. I couldn't type for nuts - still can't I guess. Eighty columns to be filled; one wrong keypress and the card ruined. By the time I got to seventy odd columns things would getting pretty stressed.
Then you had to give your precious card deck to the men in white coats (again), and wait... Sometimes half an hour; until they finally brought back your printout. And yes, 'Syntax error in line 2: Operator entered DS'.
Keep punch cards where they belong; an interesting relic of history.
Describing the state of computing today as unstable and unreliable, he [Purcell] said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing.
So, Bill Gates himself is concerned about what 'we' [Microsoft] put 'everyone' [consumers] through. I would doubt that Bill would have any press comment attributed to him by a Microsoft staffer, unless it had been thoroughly vetted by the spin doctors. This is of course to make sure that it fits the official PR line that Microsoft wants to put out.
My pick is that this is either a hoax, or Microsoft are signalling a major new PR direction. Linux is a major threat, and it's seen by the consumer's as more reliable and stable than Microsoft offerings.
New PR direction - make Windows look more robust in the public eye. Start by apologising (from the very top man) for the past, move onto promises of fixes etc. Microsoft knows it's got a poor reputation for stability; it wants the business server market; it has to improve it's image.
For those interested in the background, here is an edited Times article that I
collected when the Coffee Pot closed down:
WEDNESDAY MARCH 07 2001
*First star of the Internet retires*
BY JOANNA BALE
THE world's first Internet star is retiring after ten years in the
spotlight.
The unlikely star is a £40 coffee percolator that made its debut in front
of the camera when computer scientists at Cambridge University became
frustrated at walking down several flights of stairs only to find the pot
empty. They set up a camcorder, pointed it at the pot and wrote a program
to relay the image to their screens upstairs, so they would always know
when it was full.
When the World Wide Web was invented soon afterwards, they put it online as
the world's first webcam. Although it is the Internet equivalent of
watching paint dry, it became cult viewing, with 2.4 million visitors.
But now Cambridge's Trojan Room webcam and its subject are being consigned
to the history books because the university computer department is moving.
Dan Gordon, 33, a research scientist, said: "It will be turned off simply
because there is no more need for it.
"It became very popular because it was up and running when there really
wasn't very much else to look at on the Internet. We've kept it going using
old machines, but it quite often breaks down."
Quentin Stafford-Fraser, the man behind the pot website, said: "I first
rigged it up because we were fed up of traipsing half-way around the
building to find there was no coffee in the pot. At first, the image was
only updated about three times a minute - it is now one frame a second -
but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only
greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.
It must have been 25 years ago when I first saw an HP caclulator. They were bolted to the workbench in a University Physics Lab. It left a lasting impression. The Rolls Royce of calculators...
A few years later, I brought my first HP calculator - an HP34C, I think - I used it when I first started my first job as a Structural Engineer. Some ten years later, I sold the HP34C to a 'serious HP collector' in Australia. I hope it still working hard for him too.
A succession of employers have given me HP's for my daily work, mainly HP41 variants. They were all quality machines that provided years of solid service under heavy use.
I fondly remember the HP11C(?) that the Surveyors lost when being chased by a dog. They got it back the next day - from the offending dogs kennel - by a clever diversionary tactic. The dog had been chewing the calculator overnight, and teeth marks were clearly visible on the aluminium band. And the calculator? Well it's still in daily use.
Meccano wasn't just for kids. People used to prototype gadgets and ideas with Meccano.
My favourite was the Meccano analogue differential computer that I saw in a museum around 1985. It was built during World War II to solve differential equations and occupied the area of good couple of dining tables. I think it was used by the British War Office for bombing calculations?
A equation was feed in the machine in analogue fashion by moving a mechanical probe over a graphical plot on paper. From here a series of cogs, levers gears, and whatever else, somehow analysed the equation to give a graphical output to a pen on a similar probe arm.
They even had some sample inputs and outputs they had run through it. Having just finished my University Engineering maths papers and being a kid brought up on Meccano, it left a lasting impression.
Alas, the Meccano computer is no more. The museum is run by keen amateurs; during building renovations someone cleaned out a pile of slightly rusting Meccano from a storeroom...
In case anyone else remembers, the museum is MOTAT in Auckland, NZ
Slashdot Mirror
Well, having been an open source developer for almost the 10 years, I know a bit about this. Firstly you need to code as securely as you can. Do the research, make sure you know whats going, and audit your own code thoroughly.
Don't believe no one else is looking, because they are. I've had one person ask me a few innocent questions about my code, then email a back a week later to say I'd passed their security audit just fine. I've also been unlucky enough - just once - to have the full disclosure email about a security vulnerability. And yes, that feels bad.
Do your very best; don't worry, and enjoy being part of the open source community.
All this talk about making sure data lasts for the future. Well, I'm currently mining old data that was laid down well before my birth date, that's old family photographs back to the 1860's.
For the first time I'm seeing images of my great, great grandfather and his family candidly posed in an Aberdeen studio. My great grandfather and his brothers on an old tintype photo plate.
Some of the images are in a fairly poor state, but half an hour with the Gimp has got them back into serviceable condition.
When my relatives submitted to the new craze of photography some 150 years ago, did they ever believe that one of their descendants would lovingly resurrect the data? On a machine that would have been a complete fantasy to them.
Oh, and how do I know who they all are? Simple; they wrote their names on the back of the photos for posterity.
I had lots of problems getting NVidia to work with FC1. Things would kind of work, but other things wouldn't. Getting TuxRacer to work is a good litmus test.
Then I found this page of unofficial FC1 FAQ. Yay...!!
Here's what to do - it worked for me:
Use these instructions if there are no RPMs available, or if the available RPMs don't work for you.
Make sure you have the lastest drivers.
Now print this out, or write it down. Then:
If none of this works, do rpm -e --nodeps XFree86-Mesa-libGL and then restart your computer. The need to do this should soon be eliminated -- watch this FAQ or the fedora-list. Note that if you update XFree86, this package will be reinstalled and you will need to remove it again. This solves the "DRI" problem.
Disclaimer: I am the author/maintainer of WebCollab.
A possible alternative to RT is WebCollab.
At least one of my users is familiar with both projects and prefers WebCollab.
Apart from that it's Open Source and the code is reasonably easy to follow. Tailor matching to your organisation shouldn't be too hard. Judging by the patches and comments I get, some of users are doing just that
.Being a New Zealander, I've followed the Richard Pearse case with interest over a number of years.
There is no doubt that Pearse flew, and that he flew very well - and with a machine much more advanced than the Wright Brothers had. What Pearse lacked was a camera at the end of the runway to record the auspicious event for posterity.
Interest in Pearse's achievements did not surface until the 1970's, when a aviation historian chanced upon a discovery of Pearse's plane wreckage. Most of the research is from eyewitness accounts 60 years after the event. The eyewitnesses (all now dead) are hazy on exact dates, and often contradictory on what actually happened.
But there is enough to know that Pearse did fly. Whether he beat the Wright Brothers to do so, we will probably never know.
What is incredible is that a farmer in a remote part of New Zealand, with no outside help, was able to competently put together a reasonably sophisticated airplane from farm junk, and then manage to coax it into the air.
For that fact alone Pearse deserves to be admired.
About a year ago I was faced with the same problem; I run a deployment program for design/construction rollout of telecommunication cellsites. (Not software development, but the problems in civil engineering are probably quite similar).
I took from an open source project (then in it's infancy), and enhanced it for our needs. We now have web based project management software that fits our needs very well.
Of course, we fed our improvements back into the source (and I have become one of the developers). Isn't that what open source is about?
So, use the force behind open source, develop your own from what you can get. Then return, what you've learnt to the community.
Oh, and if you're interested: Have a look at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/core-lan-org
Actually punch cards predate computers by a wide margin; punch card weaving machines were in the forefront of the industrial revolution. And my grandmother used Hollerith cards (with steel pins to align the data fields) in an early 20th century census.
My first horror was 'mark sense' cards for us lower-than-low students. Instead of punching the card, we had to mark it with a soft pencil. The cards were then read by a photo-electric cell. After a few hours use, the machine would clog with pencil graphite and we'd have to wait for the white coat man to reluctantly clean it - again. With a queue of students, all with assignments due today, it was a bad scene.
Later I graduated to punch cards. My second horror. I couldn't type for nuts - still can't I guess. Eighty columns to be filled; one wrong keypress and the card ruined. By the time I got to seventy odd columns things would getting pretty stressed.
Then you had to give your precious card deck to the men in white coats (again), and wait... Sometimes half an hour; until they finally brought back your printout. And yes, 'Syntax error in line 2: Operator entered DS'.
Keep punch cards where they belong; an interesting relic of history.
The last line is very interesting:
Describing the state of computing today as unstable and unreliable, he [Purcell] said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing.
So, Bill Gates himself is concerned about what 'we' [Microsoft] put 'everyone' [consumers] through. I would doubt that Bill would have any press comment attributed to him by a Microsoft staffer, unless it had been thoroughly vetted by the spin doctors. This is of course to make sure that it fits the official PR line that Microsoft wants to put out.
My pick is that this is either a hoax, or Microsoft are signalling a major new PR direction. Linux is a major threat, and it's seen by the consumer's as more reliable and stable than Microsoft offerings.
New PR direction - make Windows look more robust in the public eye. Start by apologising (from the very top man) for the past, move onto promises of fixes etc. Microsoft knows it's got a poor reputation for stability; it wants the business server market; it has to improve it's image.
For those interested in the background, here is an edited Times article that I
collected when the Coffee Pot closed down:
WEDNESDAY MARCH 07 2001
*First star of the Internet retires*
BY JOANNA BALE
THE world's first Internet star is retiring after ten years in the
spotlight.
The unlikely star is a £40 coffee percolator that made its debut in front
of the camera when computer scientists at Cambridge University became
frustrated at walking down several flights of stairs only to find the pot
empty. They set up a camcorder, pointed it at the pot and wrote a program
to relay the image to their screens upstairs, so they would always know
when it was full.
When the World Wide Web was invented soon afterwards, they put it online as
the world's first webcam. Although it is the Internet equivalent of
watching paint dry, it became cult viewing, with 2.4 million visitors.
But now Cambridge's Trojan Room webcam and its subject are being consigned
to the history books because the university computer department is moving.
Dan Gordon, 33, a research scientist, said: "It will be turned off simply
because there is no more need for it.
"It became very popular because it was up and running when there really
wasn't very much else to look at on the Internet. We've kept it going using
old machines, but it quite often breaks down."
Quentin Stafford-Fraser, the man behind the pot website, said: "I first
rigged it up because we were fed up of traipsing half-way around the
building to find there was no coffee in the pot. At first, the image was
only updated about three times a minute - it is now one frame a second -
but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only
greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.
It must have been 25 years ago when I first saw an HP caclulator. They were bolted to the workbench in a University Physics Lab. It left a lasting impression. The Rolls Royce of calculators ...
...
A few years later, I brought my first HP calculator - an HP34C, I think - I used it when I first started my first job as a Structural Engineer. Some ten years later, I sold the HP34C to a 'serious HP collector' in Australia. I hope it still working hard for him too.
A succession of employers have given me HP's for my daily work, mainly HP41 variants. They were all quality machines that provided years of solid service under heavy use.
I fondly remember the HP11C(?) that the Surveyors lost when being chased by a dog. They got it back the next day - from the offending dogs kennel - by a clever diversionary tactic. The dog had been chewing the calculator overnight, and teeth marks were clearly visible on the aluminium band. And the calculator? Well it's still in daily use.
I'm going to miss HP calculators
Meccano wasn't just for kids. People used to prototype gadgets and ideas with Meccano.
...
My favourite was the Meccano analogue differential computer that I saw in a museum around 1985. It was built during World War II to solve differential equations and occupied the area of good couple of dining tables. I think it was used by the British War Office for bombing calculations?
A equation was feed in the machine in analogue fashion by moving a mechanical probe over a graphical plot on paper. From here a series of cogs, levers gears, and whatever else, somehow analysed the equation to give a graphical output to a pen on a similar probe arm.
They even had some sample inputs and outputs they had run through it. Having just finished my University Engineering maths papers and being a kid brought up on Meccano, it left a lasting impression.
Alas, the Meccano computer is no more. The museum is run by keen amateurs; during building renovations someone cleaned out a pile of slightly rusting Meccano from a storeroom
In case anyone else remembers, the museum is MOTAT in Auckland, NZ