I use both rdiff-backup and duplicity, and I can't speak highly enough of them. Top notch software. Easy to use, well documented, and with great functionality.
In The Practice of Programming Brian W. Kernigan and rob pike said:
As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.
gpg and pgp already have a symmetric encryption wrapper around the secret keyring. And since I leave the disk in the drive (but ejected 1/2 inch) all the time it's really no hassle for a great deal of extra security.
Nice for small, ultra-secret data like gpg keys
on
Death to the 3.5" Floppy?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I keep my gpg private key on a floppy. My ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg file is a symlink to/mnt/floppy/secring.gpg. When I need to sign or decrypt something I push the floppy in, mount it, use the key, unmount, and eject.
My box has been hacked a few times, but I like knowing for certain that the key wasn't taken.
Re:Okay, so maybe I'm being stupid but...
on
802.11b on your Tivo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd rather use ethernet, but if you're trying to keep a cord free house I guess this could be useful. The networking additions for the TiVos allow you to access the mpeg video from your PC -- which makes it easy to share or archive them.
The comments to the effect of "it's called hibernation, and has done it for years" are missing the point. That hibernation is a BIOS supported dump to disk. It's a feature on most laptops and works with just about any OS -- it's worked on my Linux laptop for years.
I think the feature to be discussed is Operating System (not BIOS) level support of the hibernation of a single process. It'd be nice if I could do a:
kill -HIBERNATE `cat/var/longoperation.pid`
and have that program get frozen to disk. Then if I could resurrect just that process later it'd be a handy feature for the long running program that you want to postpone until after you've done whatever you needed to do in single user mode.
I think part of the wide-spread disappointment with UML is the 'UML is class diagrams' mindset. Most people know UML includes other diagrams besides class diagrams, but when they sit down with the intent to use UML to design or document a system, they start chunking out class diagrams, and often at a rediculously fine level of detail.
The Squence diagrams are my favorites, but I find both the State and Activity diagrams more useful than the class diagrams. I think class diagrams get all the emphasis because you can autogenerate source code from them. Which is a shame since the data layout of a system is seldom the trickiest part.
Re:Good for the programmers, bad for their manager
on
Extreme Telecommuting
·
· Score: 1
I think the use of non-asynchronous can be defended in much the same way 'not-unattractive' is. This common phrase is used to describe something that is not-ugly, but isn't necessarily pretty. Similarly, I'd say non-asynchronous would include both syncronous communication (voice) and the wide variety of semi-synchronous communication systems (IRC, IMs, etc.).
Re:Good for the programmers, bad for their manager
on
Extreme Telecommuting
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I work for a company that, despite our proximity, limits non-asynchronous communication (voice) to a once-a-week two hour phone call. It works wonderfully. Asyncronous communitation is usually quicker, more complete, easier to save for future reference, and less prone to topic devolution. I rue the day I have a job that mistakenly beleives meetings are good for more than drinking bad coffee.
Somehow I just can't imagine Mel Gibson in blue face paint and a kilt charging down a hill in front of hundreds of Scottish warriors yelling FLLLEEEERRRRRRBAAAGGE!!!!
I wish you could search by stuff besides keywords
on
images.google.com
·
· Score: 2
I wish you could search by something besides filename and keywords. A shape based search like Eikon ( http://f.neonap.net:8080 ) would be nice. --
Oh, and don't we wish we could. We've bought certs from Verisign and from Thawte, but Sun's WebStart's signature handling is completely hosed. The VeriSigned ones sort of work on Windows, but completely don't work on Linux. The java keytool doesn't handle either of them well.
For the Swarmcast 1.0 we'll either have invested enough time/money or dumped WebStart, but for or 0.9 you just have to trust that the file you're running came from us:(. Remember, all the signature proves is origin -- not that the code won't do mean things to your machine.
As for the 'Full Control' that WebStart says you're giving it, we Linux users know that full control only goes to root. If you run Swarmcast as a non-root user it, of course, won't have any more privilages than you give it.
If anyone has had more luck than we have getting WebStart to recognize a certificate on both Linux and Windows, please drop us a line through http://sf.net/projects/swarmcast. --
Back in 1995 a friend of mine wrote a low grade FPS for the TI-85. For feedback when shot he'd send data down the calculator's TI-Link cable, the other end of which was placed in the player's mouth. It wasn't painful, but you definately felt it. --
The Parking Lot Is Full archive's search engine (found at http://www.plif.com/archive/search.htm ) allows for search by Character, Character Type, Location, Theme, Elements, and Strip Type. It's pretty amazing. --
Selecting good suppliers is a part of business. Restauranteurs that select unreliable dairy suppliers go out of business. Companys that select bad computer consultants are in a world of hurt too. It doesn't mean that the consultant isn't wrong -- they were wrong to provide bad service, but the person who hired them is also at fault. I've hired some bad auto mechanics in my day and they were wrong to scam me, and I was wrong to retain their services. Now I check with friends more knowledgeable about auto-repair than I before giving money to a mechanic.
Yesterday I spent a few hours at a local not-for-profit group helping them to evaluate a consultant they're considering retaining. The group understood they didn't have the skill set to hire a consultant and they went out side their organization for help in doing so. --
Collective bargaining helps the workers at low and average skill level at the expense of the exceptional. Labor unions base pay on minimums and seniority. Many studies (see DeMarco and Lister) have shown that an exceptional developer can be as much as 20 times more productive than an average developer. Unless the pay scales negotiated by the union reflected that (and good luck getting the majority to go for it) exceptional developers would find themselves having a difficult time negotiating the double to triple average salaries they can find now. --
I run E on a P233 w/ 96Megs ram, a reasonably busy theme, and a $20 video card and have never had speed issues. I've tried other WMs and haven't noticed anything drawing or responding faster. What's the speed problems I'm always hearing talk of? --
In the book Peopleware DeMarco and Lister theorize that this works whereas everyone just packed in working on different shit doesn't because everyone's in the same mode at the same time. When you're designing you're all designing, and when you're rushing for a deadline and coding like mad everyone is.
I telecommute and we use IRC as our war room. It works great 'cause I can tune in and out w/o hassle. --
Spoofing to NATted boxes into talking UDP is much easier than TCP 'cause of the lack of sequence numbers and other byproducts of guaranteed delivery. There' a great page about it at http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/ ~da nk/peer-nat.html. --
The author looks at the terrible p2p implementations in napster and nutella and concludes that the p2p community in general understands the nature of the net so poorly as to make the same mistakes. If you look in the archvies for the decrentralization list on egroups you'll see that some people have addressed and are addressing the very issues he says will be a stubling block. Just because the author can't think his way through the problems of bandwidth, infrastrure, and reliability doesn't mean that people with better minds than him can't. --
because amendment 10 to the US Constitution denys the US government any power not expressly given to it in the constitution -- and that one wasn't. Frankly I'm glad for it. It will allow various states to try different methods and learn from eachother's mistakes, instead of going with the almost certain disaster of a nation-wide switchover. --
Slashdot Mirror
I use both rdiff-backup and duplicity, and I can't speak highly enough of them. Top notch software. Easy to use, well documented, and with great functionality.
We always called those Markitecture diagrams. They love it. Trust me.
gpg and pgp already have a symmetric encryption wrapper around the secret keyring. And since I leave the disk in the drive (but ejected 1/2 inch) all the time it's really no hassle for a great deal of extra security.
I keep my gpg private key on a floppy. My ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg file is a symlink to /mnt/floppy/secring.gpg. When I need to sign or decrypt something I push the floppy in, mount it, use the key, unmount, and eject.
My box has been hacked a few times, but I like knowing for certain that the key wasn't taken.
I'd rather use ethernet, but if you're trying to keep a cord free house I guess this could be useful. The networking additions for the TiVos allow you to access the mpeg video from your PC -- which makes it easy to share or archive them.
The comments to the effect of "it's called hibernation, and has done it for years" are missing the point. That hibernation is a BIOS supported dump to disk. It's a feature on most laptops and works with just about any OS -- it's worked on my Linux laptop for years.
/var/longoperation.pid`
I think the feature to be discussed is Operating System (not BIOS) level support of the hibernation of a single process. It'd be nice if I could do a:
kill -HIBERNATE `cat
and have that program get frozen to disk. Then if I could resurrect just that process later it'd be a handy feature for the long running program that you want to postpone until after you've done whatever you needed to do in single user mode.
I think part of the wide-spread disappointment with UML is the 'UML is class diagrams' mindset. Most people know UML includes other diagrams besides class diagrams, but when they sit down with the intent to use UML to design or document a system, they start chunking out class diagrams, and often at a rediculously fine level of detail.
The Squence diagrams are my favorites, but I find both the State and Activity diagrams more useful than the class diagrams. I think class diagrams get all the emphasis because you can autogenerate source code from them. Which is a shame since the data layout of a system is seldom the trickiest part.
I think the use of non-asynchronous can be defended in much the same way 'not-unattractive' is. This common phrase is used to describe something that is not-ugly, but isn't necessarily pretty. Similarly, I'd say non-asynchronous would include both syncronous communication (voice) and the wide variety of semi-synchronous communication systems (IRC, IMs, etc.).
I work for a company that, despite our proximity, limits non-asynchronous communication (voice) to a once-a-week two hour phone call. It works wonderfully. Asyncronous communitation is usually quicker, more complete, easier to save for future reference, and less prone to topic devolution. I rue the day I have a job that mistakenly beleives meetings are good for more than drinking bad coffee.
Somehow I just can't imagine Mel Gibson in blue face paint and a kilt charging down a hill in front of hundreds of Scottish warriors yelling FLLLEEEERRRRRRBAAAGGE!!!!
I wish you could search by something besides filename and keywords. A shape based search like Eikon ( http://f.neonap.net:8080 ) would be nice.
--
For the Swarmcast 1.0 we'll either have invested enough time/money or dumped WebStart, but for or 0.9 you just have to trust that the file you're running came from us :(. Remember, all the signature proves is origin -- not that the code won't do mean things to your machine.
As for the 'Full Control' that WebStart says you're giving it, we Linux users know that full control only goes to root. If you run Swarmcast as a non-root user it, of course, won't have any more privilages than you give it.
If anyone has had more luck than we have getting WebStart to recognize a certificate on both Linux and Windows, please drop us a line through http://sf.net/projects/swarmcast .
--
--
Back in 1995 a friend of mine wrote a low grade FPS for the TI-85. For feedback when shot he'd send data down the calculator's TI-Link cable, the other end of which was placed in the player's mouth. It wasn't painful, but you definately felt it.
--
The Parking Lot Is Full archive's search engine (found at http://www.plif.com/archive/search.htm ) allows for search by Character, Character Type, Location, Theme, Elements, and Strip Type. It's pretty amazing.
--
Currently I just forward notification of the call time, source, and number to my cell phone when I get a call from people on a select list.
--
Selecting good suppliers is a part of business. Restauranteurs that select unreliable dairy suppliers go out of business. Companys that select bad computer consultants are in a world of hurt too. It doesn't mean that the consultant isn't wrong -- they were wrong to provide bad service, but the person who hired them is also at fault. I've hired some bad auto mechanics in my day and they were wrong to scam me, and I was wrong to retain their services. Now I check with friends more knowledgeable about auto-repair than I before giving money to a mechanic.
Yesterday I spent a few hours at a local not-for-profit group helping them to evaluate a consultant they're considering retaining. The group understood they didn't have the skill set to hire a consultant and they went out side their organization for help in doing so.
--
Collective bargaining helps the workers at low and average skill level at the expense of the exceptional. Labor unions base pay on minimums and seniority. Many studies (see DeMarco and Lister) have shown that an exceptional developer can be as much as 20 times more productive than an average developer. Unless the pay scales negotiated by the union reflected that (and good luck getting the majority to go for it) exceptional developers would find themselves having a difficult time negotiating the double to triple average salaries they can find now.
--
I run E on a P233 w/ 96Megs ram, a reasonably busy theme, and a $20 video card and have never had speed issues. I've tried other WMs and haven't noticed anything drawing or responding faster. What's the speed problems I'm always hearing talk of?
--
The PS2 lets you plug in a USB mouse which make some games more playable.
--
I telecommute and we use IRC as our war room. It works great 'cause I can tune in and out w/o hassle.
--
Spoofing to NATted boxes into talking UDP is much easier than TCP 'cause of the lack of sequence numbers and other byproducts of guaranteed delivery. There' a great page about it at http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/ ~da nk/peer-nat.html.
--
The author looks at the terrible p2p implementations in napster and nutella and concludes that the p2p community in general understands the nature of the net so poorly as to make the same mistakes. If you look in the archvies for the decrentralization list on egroups you'll see that some people have addressed and are addressing the very issues he says will be a stubling block. Just because the author can't think his way through the problems of bandwidth, infrastrure, and reliability doesn't mean that people with better minds than him can't.
--
because amendment 10 to the US Constitution denys the US government any power not expressly given to it in the constitution -- and that one wasn't. Frankly I'm glad for it. It will allow various states to try different methods and learn from eachother's mistakes, instead of going with the almost certain disaster of a nation-wide switchover.
--