Re:Easy, plus A-A-P complete solution, overviews
on
Installing Everywhere?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hey, Easy Package Manager looks great. It's comparative table of existing installer/packager formats is a good answer to this topic. And it even has a FLTK graphical frontend (I love FLTK for its speed, lack of bloat and beautul API). However, it does not support Windows, which is raher logical from the design point of view.
But I found a nice list of existing packaging tools at the A-A-P which "makes it easy to locate, download, build and install software. It also supports browsing source code, developing programs, managing different versions and distribution of software and documentation." Definitely worth a look!
If you really feel you need to do something original, you could as well not install at all, or use Zero Install (Covered on Sweetcode recently).
But in general (if you are not running under an interpreter or emulation layer) all applications should install in a compatible way on any system, even when that is quite different from a system to another. So on Unix install in a reloctable directory tree with/usr/local/ as default (bin/, lib/, man/ etc/ etc.), and provide packages for distributions.
The usual way to do that is to prepare make targets (such as "make debian" and "make redhat" and use the defualt packaging system everywhere. Not that I would know how to do that on Windows...
You will have to distribute sources or build it yourself on each platform, and that represents the real problem. Getting the make targets right is the easy part - many free software applications contain that, and all distributions come with nice examples.
(Besides, Debian's Package Builder makes for an excellent multiarchitecture (11!) compilation cluster and should be a good reason to provide and mantain debian packages.)
They used pdf because it is the easiest format on the MacOSX, of course. The Quartz layer is running DisplayPDF, a subset of PDF (analogous to the relationship of DisplayPS of the late NeXTStep, and regular PS): that is what gives the smooth and fast look of vector graphics and permits for blazing fast GL-accelerated PDF rendering. It also means PDF is a very basic part of the system (see Quartz reference and Quartz 2D library ("Quartz 2D gives you access to powerful features such as path-based drawing, advanced color management, anti-aliasing, Bézier curves, PDF generation and playback, and transparency"). So PDF is the default MacOS format, these days.
A good slashdotter would peek in the file and notice this:
Producer: Mac OS X 10.3 Quartz PDFContext
It would have been kind of cool if the window would be rendered in vector graphics, in the reality, and directly displayed to PDF. A vector desktop still seems to be a dream, or did I get something wrong?
Everyone is assuming that Grid@Home would mean that you are just donating a bit of your computing power to the Grid. Not so.
I have been watching the developement of one such application: Gled, "a hierarchic server-proxy-client-viewer model written in C++ and offering a mixture of object oriented framework and toolkit" (says the project homepage) and I can say that it looks a lot more like a Quake window to a programmable scene made of very complex object collections, running on multiple systems (and with multiple users) with a GUI to its underlying cluster systems, than a Seti@Home screensaver.
My personal favourites are the autogenerated code, the autogenerated GUI and the object brokering facilities over the clusters.
The trend of Grid and Grid-like cluster computing is, IMHO, going in the direction of better viewing facilities, more interactive software and higher-level interfaces, where the underlying grid can be thought of as a piece of iron, a strange dynamic multiprocessor arhitecture with impossible latencies.
Did you trace _who?(Was:Re:Did you trace to that?)
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It is quite interesting that this issue has spread into a political discussion. But the individual merits of different media seem a bit off-topic as part of this slashdot-comment discussion. I would be much more interested in seeing more info on how the site is blocked (ie., is it really a DDOS attack, is it directed to the sites or to the DNS servers, could it be stopped merely by reconfiguring the DNS servers) and whether the routes are blocked too.
After we know that, we can start discussin if this is a case of international censorship and who is responsible for it. And only then can we say who is trying to abolish such things as intellectual freedom, freedom of the speech, trans-frontier communication over the Internet etc. Only then, political discussion of this issue is possible.
But if we do want to turn this into a political discussion, I found it very interesting that many local media are talking about a cyberwar in terms of attacks of pacifist hackers agains american institutions' web sites. Has anybody seen any of that? Curious.
In Europe, Dual band (900-1800) GSM phones with support are usually sold these days. This includes the older and newer European and Asian GSM frequency. Many offerings include so called "world band" GSM phones with 900, 1800, and 1900. This should be the GSM soulution for you since it works pretty much everywhere in the world where they have GSM, includin the States.
I am sure you can find this type of phones in the States too, you will see Google gives you many answers.
Opcode.pm and Safe.pm: usafe code in Perl 6
on
Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 1
I have had problems with numerous limitations of the Safe container system in Perl 5 and unfortunately there was no discussion in RFC's, apocalypses or parrot mailing lists about a possible solution.
The two major problems of the current implementation are that modules can't be used well from a Safe conatiner and that code from another container can't be called (Perl's opcode module segfaults).
What I would like to see is a system that would enable code from different users to be run in a single program, with limitations and permission checks, transparently. (A bit like lpmud game engine does for it's lpc, albeit that is a bad and limited example.)
Folowing the Google hint above, you can find useful instructions and a shell script at http://calmarc3.cchem.berkeley.edu/archives/bum/96/archive/0320.html
The ps2hpgl converter is part of the never versions of ghostscript (see homepage at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ or go for commercial Allading version if your company feels like supporting the effort a bit http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/). I did not test it myself, unfortunately, so you are on your own.
Of course, both versions of Ghostscript work nicely in Mac OS X, but there are binary distributions for Mac OS 9 too. So no problems if your linux router has spool-space or ram problems.
And a note to Mac bashers: Macs run Unix and GNU tools these days, were you living under a rock?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, Easy Package Manager looks great. It's comparative table of existing installer/packager formats is a good answer to this topic. And it even has a FLTK graphical frontend (I love FLTK for its speed, lack of bloat and beautul API). However, it does not support Windows, which is raher logical from the design point of view.
But I found a nice list of existing packaging tools at the A-A-P which "makes it easy to locate, download, build and install software. It also supports browsing source code, developing programs, managing different versions and distribution of software and documentation." Definitely worth a look!
If you really feel you need to do something original, you could as well not install at all, or use Zero Install (Covered on Sweetcode recently).
/usr/local/ as default (bin/, lib/, man/ etc/ etc.), and provide packages for distributions.
But in general (if you are not running under an interpreter or emulation layer) all applications should install in a compatible way on any system, even when that is quite different from a system to another. So on Unix install in a reloctable directory tree with
The usual way to do that is to prepare make targets (such as "make debian" and "make redhat" and use the defualt packaging system everywhere. Not that I would know how to do that on Windows...
You will have to distribute sources or build it yourself on each platform, and that represents the real problem. Getting the make targets right is the easy part - many free software applications contain that, and all distributions come with nice examples.
(Besides, Debian's Package Builder makes for an excellent multiarchitecture (11!) compilation cluster and should be a good reason to provide and mantain debian packages.)
A good slashdotter would peek in the file and notice this:
Producer: Mac OS X 10.3 Quartz PDFContext
It would have been kind of cool if the window would be rendered in vector graphics, in the reality, and directly displayed to PDF. A vector desktop still seems to be a dream, or did I get something wrong?
I have been watching the developement of one such application: Gled , "a hierarchic server-proxy-client-viewer model written in C++ and offering a mixture of object oriented framework and toolkit" (says the project homepage) and I can say that it looks a lot more like a Quake window to a programmable scene made of very complex object collections, running on multiple systems (and with multiple users) with a GUI to its underlying cluster systems, than a Seti@Home screensaver.
My personal favourites are the autogenerated code, the autogenerated GUI and the object brokering facilities over the clusters.
The trend of Grid and Grid-like cluster computing is, IMHO, going in the direction of better viewing facilities, more interactive software and higher-level interfaces, where the underlying grid can be thought of as a piece of iron, a strange dynamic multiprocessor arhitecture with impossible latencies.
Links:
It is quite interesting that this issue has spread into a political discussion. But the individual merits of different media seem a bit off-topic as part of this slashdot-comment discussion.
I would be much more interested in seeing more info on how the site is blocked (ie., is it really a DDOS attack, is it directed to the sites or to the DNS servers, could it be stopped merely by reconfiguring the DNS servers) and whether the routes are blocked too.
After we know that, we can start discussin if this is a case of international censorship and who is responsible for it.
And only then can we say who is trying to abolish such things as intellectual freedom, freedom of the speech, trans-frontier communication over the Internet etc. Only then, political discussion of this issue is possible.
But if we do want to turn this into a political discussion, I found it very interesting that many local media are talking about a cyberwar in terms of attacks of pacifist hackers agains american institutions' web sites. Has anybody seen any of that? Curious.
In Europe, Dual band (900-1800) GSM phones with support are usually sold these days. This includes the older and newer European and Asian GSM frequency. Many offerings include so called "world band" GSM phones with 900, 1800, and 1900. This should be the GSM soulution for you since it works pretty much everywhere in the world where they have GSM, includin the States.
I am sure you can find this type of phones in the States too, you will see Google gives you many answers.
I have had problems with numerous limitations of the Safe container system in Perl 5 and unfortunately there was no discussion in RFC's, apocalypses or parrot mailing lists about a possible solution.
The two major problems of the current implementation are that modules can't be used well from a Safe conatiner and that code from another container can't be called (Perl's opcode module segfaults).
What I would like to see is a system that would enable code from different users to be run in a single program, with limitations and permission checks, transparently. (A bit like lpmud game engine does for it's lpc, albeit that is a bad and limited example.)
Folowing the Google hint above, you can find useful instructions and a shell script at http://calmarc3.cchem.berkeley.edu/archives/bum/96 /archive/0320.html
The ps2hpgl converter is part of the never versions of ghostscript (see homepage at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ or go for commercial Allading version if your company feels like supporting the effort a bit http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/). I did not test it myself, unfortunately, so you are on your own.
Of course, both versions of Ghostscript work nicely in Mac OS X, but there are binary distributions for Mac OS 9 too. So no problems if your linux router has spool-space or ram problems.
And a note to Mac bashers: Macs run Unix and GNU tools these days, were you living under a rock?
It was the Mac version, to the great surprise of everyone. Id said it was easier to test on the OS that has fewer users. :-)