While having open-source code makes source compatibility easier to handle than binary compatibility, I've been wondering if there has been any work towards improving binary compatibility between versions of major libraries.
This is an issue with C++... since most of KDE's widgets are subclasses of Qt widgets, they are very dependant on the signature of the Qt class. When the class signature changes (for example, when a function is added or removed, or a data member is added), the derived class needs to be recompiled or the linking will be all screwed up. This isn't an issue between minor revisions of the library as the API is stabilized, but with a major jump (2.3.1 -> 3.0), the API or implementation changes and things must be recompiled.
It's impressive that TrollTech (which is a great company, btw) managed to keep source compatibility so well. I'm a professional developer and we're using Qt for our app (which is currently ~20,000 lines), and exactly *1* line of code needed to be changed when we moved from 2.3.1 to the 3.0 betas.
So what about when the next "criminal attack" destroys the building you work at?
Then that'll be another criminal attack, but still not an act of war. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for punishing those responsible for the recent attacks and doing everything we can to prevent this from happening again, up to and including punishing those governments that harbored the terrorrists.
But say, for example, that a few extremist members of the "Moral Majority" decided to blow up a couple of buildings in some country halfway around the world... do you think it would be justified for the rest of the world to go on a bombing spree in the US?
Re:Going Postal is a very good term.
on
Loki Goes Postal
·
· Score: 2
Yup I configured DRI just like they suggested it in the docs and it is 3D rendering, I can see it with the glxgears demo.
Hrm. Are you sure the game doesn't come with its own libGL.so somewhere? I've never played it myself, but I know that some Linux games do, and it may be incompatible with your particular video card.
Like I said before, I even sent e-mails to Loki support and they never answered back.
Really? That's odd... must be because of their financial difficulties. I've always gotten great tech support from Loki.
Ok! I admit I'm fairly new to linux, about a year or so
Well, I'd be happy to help you out some more if you want, but this isn't really the place for it. Feel free to email me (spong@baked.net) or IM me (see.sig).
Re:Going Postal is a very good term.
on
Loki Goes Postal
·
· Score: 2
Yes. The game starts and you can configure all your settings and when you actually try to play the game it's just like watching a cad model with 3 billion polygons on pentium 166.
Sounds like you're using software OpenGL. Are you sure you have the drivers and libraries installed and set up properly?
..of you would sign and put your lives on the line if it was requested?
If my country was invaded, I'd put my life on the line to defend it, but I'm not going to travel halfway across the world to risk my life to further the goals of a government which is hell-bent on taking away my rights anyway.
OS X has a Mach kernel. FreeBSD's kernel is based on the Mach kernel.
Wrong. Darwin is based on FreeBSD 3.2 (IIRC... I may have the version wrong), ported to Mach, with lots of optimizations to get rid of some of Mach's performance issues and some funky Apple-isms. OS X then runs on top of Darwin.
I've been trying to get MOL working on my Powerbook G3 Wallstreet (running Mandrake 8/PPC), but it isn't working.:P It locks hard when trying to load a ROM from disk, and it seems to work using newworld boot method to get the ROM from the MacOS System Folder (although the G3 Wallstreet is an old-world machine), but then it crashes after mapping the GC (no segfault or anything, just quits).
Has anybody set up MOL on a Powerbook G3 Wallstreet? Anything I need to be careful about? I pretty much just followed the directions in the docs.
Re:Favorite new feature
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
My favorite new vim feature is:hardcopy. This feature lets you save to postscript (or print) versions of your file that look just like what's on the screen, including syntax
highlighting.
I hate to sound like every other poster on this board today:P, but emacs has been able to do this for awhile, and its postscript printouts look *sweet*. Better than vim 6's.
Before I get moderated down as off-topic, let me just say that vim 6 is badass... finally lets me use #RRGGBB values for syntax highlighting in the GUI. Whee. When the betas for 6 started appearing I spent a lot of time tweaking my.vimrc file, and now I can't even use anything else. I even use vim (with mutt) for email. It rocks.
One thing I haven't been able to figure out how to do is to auto-read and -write GPG encrypted files (I know it can't do it in a perfectly secure way, the unencrypted version may get swapped out to disk, but I don't care so much about that. If somebody gets ahold of my hard drive, whatever. My secrets aren't all that interesting anyway.) I found some.vimrc stuff to do this through google, but it didn't work (and I couldn't figure out why). Anybody know how to do this?
Re:call it the S3CA for brevity
on
DivX;) Goes Legit
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
that acronym is way too unwieldy. Let's call it the S3CA. That way, it's still a four-letter word like "DMCA" and "fork"
No company can require you to provide your SIN for any purpose, including credit card companies or apartment rental companies etc. Nor can they use it to uniquely identify you.
It's severely restricted in the US as well, but nobody seems to realize this, so companies can get away with asking for it. IIRC it's restricted to banks and employers (both of whom need it for tax purposes).
But I agree with your basic point that we Americans are crazy:\
I've noticed that Mandrake 8.0 claims to be optimized for the G3 processor. Does this mean that gcc now has PowerPC optimizations?
I think so. I was running Linux on this Powerbook (292mhz G3 Wallstreet) about a year ago, and it was a dog. But I installed Mandrake 8/ppc on it a few days ago and it flies - it's almost as snappy as Classic MacOS is on here (OS X is unuseably slow though). I'm not sure if this is related to a better compiler or just that 2.4 is better on PPC than 2.2 was, but it makes a really nice Linux box now.
All the hardware (sound, modem, ethernet, display, power management) works beautifully, too.
'Scuse me, PDF is not Postscript. Try opening a PDF in a text editor. A few keywords saying that it's PDF, and awhacking great collection of binary data.
Yes it is. I don't know the specifics, but I do know that PDF is simply Postscript with some extra stuff (maybe the ability to encode it in some sort of binary format instead of plain text is one of these extra features). But I also know that the ps2pdf (and pdf2ps) script doesn't do much at all, and the resulting PDFs are plain text and look very much like a regular postscript file.
In almost all cases I prefer PostScript to PDF. Not that much for the format itself, but because ghostscript/ghostview/gv is 100x faster than Acrobat Reader. The other advantage is that you can produce Postscript from any application (in the worst case, you just need a Windows postscript printer driver) without paying Adobe a dime.
Dude, PDF is Postscript. Try opening a PDF in ghostview. It works fine.
Reading over the comments here, it seems that people don't seem to understand the benefits of using a passphrase to unlock your key over simply using a password. Well, as long as you trust that nobody but you is going to be using your workstation (from the console - other people logged in remotely is fine) until you log out, you can put something like this in your.xinitrc file:
This pops up a window which asks for your passphrase, then ssh-agent stays resident with your unlocked secret key. After 5 seconds, it spawns windowmaker (obviously, replace this with your wm of choice).
It sets an environment variable (SSH_AGENT_PID) with the process ID of ssh-agent and another one (SSH_AUTH_SOCK) which is the socket to use to communicate with ssh-agent. So when you try to ssh to somewhere, ssh checks for these variables and gets your unlocked key from ssh-agent transparently, and you ssh with no password. But without your passphrase to unlock it at the beginning of your X session, nobody else can use it (don't forget to xlock if you go anywhere:)
And since it works through environment variables, which are passed on to children but not to other processes, the only processes which will have access to the ssh-agent are wmaker (or whatever window manager you're using) and its children - namely, anything you're running in X. It's fairly secure. --
Re:Advanced Perl Programming was not mentioned!
on
Perl CD Bookshelf 2.0
·
· Score: 2
This is a grievous error! Advanced Perl Programming delves into the workings of Perl itself and is a must read for true users of Perl.
I second this. Advanced Perl Programming is fantastic, and definitely necessary to learning how Perl's guts work, which lets you do some really neat things. It also helps you optimize code, since not only does it tell you stuff like why 'my' is faster than 'local', but it explains why. It also gets down and dirty with how things are implemented at the C level, the structure of the generated bytecode, and lots of other things. Definitely a must-have for hardcore Perl users.
I'm not sure it's such a great loss that it's not on the CD though; it's the type of book where you'd want a paper copy to read, rather than to use as a reference. --
I encourage you to give it a whirl. Perhaps you could start from the "bloated" codebase you so despise and trim from there.
I like konqueror, don't get me wrong. But it still has huge issues with some things. And I'd fix it, but I don't have the self-discipline to wade through other people's code and figure out exactly what it's doing. I just don't work well that way.
Once you release your version of the browser that does as little as possible, I hope you won't mind if people bitch about it.
People bitch about things that I do all the time. I take their bitching without complaining, and if they have a valid point I make note of it and try to fix their objections. It's all part of being an open source developer. But I'm allowed to be the bitcher as opposed to the bitchee every once in awhile, aren't I?:) --
No-one said you have to use it. It's a separate plugin. Do you have to use _all_ the Netscape plugins in order to use Netscape?
I know, but how about fixing Konqueror first? Konq's getting quite good, but it still has huge issues, especially with Javascript and font handling. And hell, recent Mozilla builds even beat it in terms of speed (compared to Konq 2.1.2)!
'course I probably shouldn't talk until I try 2.2, but since I'm on dialup, I'm gonna wait until it's out of beta (or at least in FreeBSD's ports so I can just set it going and come back later) --
This sucks. Is it so much to ask for somebody to write a decent web browser and then STOP? There's no need to add all this useless cruft. I want a small, fast web browser. I don't want an application platform. I don't want to run activeX shit. I want a browser which can handle HTML and CSS well, without extra bloat, and that's ALL I want it to do. Somebody needs to just focus on making a good browser.
since when.. i've been using 2.4.5 for ages - with reiserfs - and have had no problems...
There were problems with exporting a reiserfs partition over NFS, which was quite annoying... this may have been fixed in 2.4.5, though. If so, I'm not quite sure what the problems fixed in 2.4.6 are, but probably other wierd interactions that most people don't encounter. --
So I ask, never having used Mutt, can it be configured to automatically detect a gpg-encrypted email and prompt me for my gpg passphrase like pine can?
Yep. Works flawlessly with GPG 1.0.4 here. The only annoying thing is that, while mutt creates RFC-compliant PGP/GPG sigs, some programs don't understand these and I occasionally get email from people using wierd clients who ask why my message shows up as an attachment:\
Regardless, your BOFH was right:) Learn mutt, you'll love it. --
The reason you think you've never seen photo-realistic CG is because when it's photo-realistic you can't tell that it's CG:) "Special effects" aren't the only computer graphics in movies nowadays; in a lot of movies nowadays the set that the movie is filmed on isn't actually what's seen in the movie - buildings are added (in a LOT of movies, many of which you wouldn't even think would have CG at all), people are added (for example, in the edited version of "Eyes Wide Shut", CG people were added to block out penetration and appease the US's puritan hangups. The problem was, the people were completely static and it was obvious that they weren't real), atmospheric effects are added, etc.
I don't remember what movie it was, but I read an article on the making of some movie (set in the 1800's, one of those cheesy romantic dramas, released about 2 years ago) and they showed the original filmed scene where you could see scaffolding, cameras, and lights. Then they showed the final result, which was a fully convincing 1800's-era scene. Most of the buildings and background people were created in 3D Studio MAX and rendered with Mental Ray, and you just can't tell. It was truly impressive. The buildings moved perfectly with the camera angle, the CG people walked and moved perfectly (there were no closeups of them, which removed the hardest part - facial modelling. The human eye is very good at picking up inconsistencies, especially in objects we observe every day, such as human facial emotions. It was very impressive nonetheless).
Of course, convincing facial modelling isn't impossible - look at this picture by Asier Hernaez Laviña, which was modelled and rendered in 3D Studio MAX. Not video, but it's an amazing technical achievement and is almost indistinguishable from a photograph. --
Slashdot Mirror
While having open-source code makes source compatibility easier to handle than binary compatibility, I've been wondering if there has been any work towards improving binary compatibility between versions of major libraries.
This is an issue with C++... since most of KDE's widgets are subclasses of Qt widgets, they are very dependant on the signature of the Qt class. When the class signature changes (for example, when a function is added or removed, or a data member is added), the derived class needs to be recompiled or the linking will be all screwed up. This isn't an issue between minor revisions of the library as the API is stabilized, but with a major jump (2.3.1 -> 3.0), the API or implementation changes and things must be recompiled.
It's impressive that TrollTech (which is a great company, btw) managed to keep source compatibility so well. I'm a professional developer and we're using Qt for our app (which is currently ~20,000 lines), and exactly *1* line of code needed to be changed when we moved from 2.3.1 to the 3.0 betas.
So what about when the next "criminal attack" destroys the building you work at?
Then that'll be another criminal attack, but still not an act of war. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for punishing those responsible for the recent attacks and doing everything we can to prevent this from happening again, up to and including punishing those governments that harbored the terrorrists.
But say, for example, that a few extremist members of the "Moral Majority" decided to blow up a couple of buildings in some country halfway around the world... do you think it would be justified for the rest of the world to go on a bombing spree in the US?
Yup I configured DRI just like they suggested it in the docs and it is 3D rendering, I can see it with the glxgears demo.
.sig).
Hrm. Are you sure the game doesn't come with its own libGL.so somewhere? I've never played it myself, but I know that some Linux games do, and it may be incompatible with your particular video card.
Like I said before, I even sent e-mails to Loki support and they never answered back.
Really? That's odd... must be because of their financial difficulties. I've always gotten great tech support from Loki.
Ok! I admit I'm fairly new to linux, about a year or so
Well, I'd be happy to help you out some more if you want, but this isn't really the place for it. Feel free to email me (spong@baked.net) or IM me (see
Yes. The game starts and you can configure all your settings and when you actually try to play the game it's just like watching a cad model with 3 billion polygons on pentium 166.
Sounds like you're using software OpenGL. Are you sure you have the drivers and libraries installed and set up properly?
um, your country was invaded.
thousands of your countrymen were killed.
My country was not invaded, it was the victim of a criminal attack by an independant group. It was not invaded by a sovereign nation.
If my country was invaded, I'd put my life on the line to defend it, but I'm not going to travel halfway across the world to risk my life to further the goals of a government which is hell-bent on taking away my rights anyway.
OS X has a Mach kernel. FreeBSD's kernel is based on the Mach kernel.
Wrong. Darwin is based on FreeBSD 3.2 (IIRC... I may have the version wrong), ported to Mach, with lots of optimizations to get rid of some of Mach's performance issues and some funky Apple-isms. OS X then runs on top of Darwin.
At one point my email address somehow got on a Hong Kong spammer's list.
.tw to /dev/null :P
Heh, I got on one of those. I finally resorted to just having procmail dump any email from
I've been trying to get MOL working on my Powerbook G3 Wallstreet (running Mandrake 8/PPC), but it isn't working. :P It locks hard when trying to load a ROM from disk, and it seems to work using newworld boot method to get the ROM from the MacOS System Folder (although the G3 Wallstreet is an old-world machine), but then it crashes after mapping the GC (no segfault or anything, just quits).
Has anybody set up MOL on a Powerbook G3 Wallstreet? Anything I need to be careful about? I pretty much just followed the directions in the docs.
My favorite new vim feature is :hardcopy. This feature lets you save to postscript (or print) versions of your file that look just like what's on the screen, including syntax
highlighting.
:P, but emacs has been able to do this for awhile, and its postscript printouts look *sweet*. Better than vim 6's.
.vimrc file, and now I can't even use anything else. I even use vim (with mutt) for email. It rocks.
.vimrc stuff to do this through google, but it didn't work (and I couldn't figure out why). Anybody know how to do this?
I hate to sound like every other poster on this board today
Before I get moderated down as off-topic, let me just say that vim 6 is badass... finally lets me use #RRGGBB values for syntax highlighting in the GUI. Whee. When the betas for 6 started appearing I spent a lot of time tweaking my
One thing I haven't been able to figure out how to do is to auto-read and -write GPG encrypted files (I know it can't do it in a perfectly secure way, the unencrypted version may get swapped out to disk, but I don't care so much about that. If somebody gets ahold of my hard drive, whatever. My secrets aren't all that interesting anyway.) I found some
that acronym is way too unwieldy. Let's call it the S3CA. That way, it's still a four-letter word like "DMCA" and "fork"
Eh, I prefer $$$CA.
Well I'm enjoying life. Try that!
No company can require you to provide your SIN for any purpose, including credit card companies or apartment rental companies etc. Nor can they use it to uniquely identify you.
:\
It's severely restricted in the US as well, but nobody seems to realize this, so companies can get away with asking for it. IIRC it's restricted to banks and employers (both of whom need it for tax purposes).
But I agree with your basic point that we Americans are crazy
I've noticed that Mandrake 8.0 claims to be optimized for the G3 processor. Does this mean that gcc now has PowerPC optimizations?
I think so. I was running Linux on this Powerbook (292mhz G3 Wallstreet) about a year ago, and it was a dog. But I installed Mandrake 8/ppc on it a few days ago and it flies - it's almost as snappy as Classic MacOS is on here (OS X is unuseably slow though). I'm not sure if this is related to a better compiler or just that 2.4 is better on PPC than 2.2 was, but it makes a really nice Linux box now.
All the hardware (sound, modem, ethernet, display, power management) works beautifully, too.
'Scuse me, PDF is not Postscript. Try opening a PDF in a text editor. A few keywords saying that it's PDF, and awhacking great collection of binary data.
Yes it is. I don't know the specifics, but I do know that PDF is simply Postscript with some extra stuff (maybe the ability to encode it in some sort of binary format instead of plain text is one of these extra features). But I also know that the ps2pdf (and pdf2ps) script doesn't do much at all, and the resulting PDFs are plain text and look very much like a regular postscript file.
In almost all cases I prefer PostScript to PDF. Not that much for the format itself, but because ghostscript/ghostview/gv is 100x faster than Acrobat Reader. The other advantage is that you can produce Postscript from any application (in the worst case, you just need a Windows postscript printer driver) without paying Adobe a dime.
Dude, PDF is Postscript. Try opening a PDF in ghostview. It works fine.
Sorry about the somewhat off-topic post, but while we're on the subject, is there an equivalent to ssh-agent/ssh-add for gnupg?
--
Reading over the comments here, it seems that people don't seem to understand the benefits of using a passphrase to unlock your key over simply using a password. Well, as long as you trust that nobody but you is going to be using your workstation (from the console - other people logged in remotely is fine) until you log out, you can put something like this in your .xinitrc file:
/dev/null & sleep 5 ; exec wmaker'
:)
And since it works through environment variables, which are passed on to children but not to other processes, the only processes which will have access to the ssh-agent are wmaker (or whatever window manager you're using) and its children - namely, anything you're running in X. It's fairly secure.
exec ssh-agent sh -c 'ssh-add <
This pops up a window which asks for your passphrase, then ssh-agent stays resident with your unlocked secret key. After 5 seconds, it spawns windowmaker (obviously, replace this with your wm of choice).
It sets an environment variable (SSH_AGENT_PID) with the process ID of ssh-agent and another one (SSH_AUTH_SOCK) which is the socket to use to communicate with ssh-agent. So when you try to ssh to somewhere, ssh checks for these variables and gets your unlocked key from ssh-agent transparently, and you ssh with no password. But without your passphrase to unlock it at the beginning of your X session, nobody else can use it (don't forget to xlock if you go anywhere
--
This is a grievous error! Advanced Perl Programming delves into the workings of Perl itself and is a must read for true users of Perl.
I second this. Advanced Perl Programming is fantastic, and definitely necessary to learning how Perl's guts work, which lets you do some really neat things. It also helps you optimize code, since not only does it tell you stuff like why 'my' is faster than 'local', but it explains why. It also gets down and dirty with how things are implemented at the C level, the structure of the generated bytecode, and lots of other things. Definitely a must-have for hardcore Perl users.
I'm not sure it's such a great loss that it's not on the CD though; it's the type of book where you'd want a paper copy to read, rather than to use as a reference.
--
I encourage you to give it a whirl. Perhaps you could start from the "bloated" codebase you so despise and trim from there.
:)
I like konqueror, don't get me wrong. But it still has huge issues with some things. And I'd fix it, but I don't have the self-discipline to wade through other people's code and figure out exactly what it's doing. I just don't work well that way.
Once you release your version of the browser that does as little as possible, I hope you won't mind if people bitch about it.
People bitch about things that I do all the time. I take their bitching without complaining, and if they have a valid point I make note of it and try to fix their objections. It's all part of being an open source developer. But I'm allowed to be the bitcher as opposed to the bitchee every once in awhile, aren't I?
--
No-one said you have to use it. It's a separate plugin. Do you have to use _all_ the Netscape plugins in order to use Netscape?
I know, but how about fixing Konqueror first? Konq's getting quite good, but it still has huge issues, especially with Javascript and font handling. And hell, recent Mozilla builds even beat it in terms of speed (compared to Konq 2.1.2)!
'course I probably shouldn't talk until I try 2.2, but since I'm on dialup, I'm gonna wait until it's out of beta (or at least in FreeBSD's ports so I can just set it going and come back later)
--
This sucks. Is it so much to ask for somebody to write a decent web browser and then STOP? There's no need to add all this useless cruft. I want a small, fast web browser. I don't want an application platform. I don't want to run activeX shit. I want a browser which can handle HTML and CSS well, without extra bloat, and that's ALL I want it to do. Somebody needs to just focus on making a good browser.
Dammit.
--
since when.. i've been using 2.4.5 for ages - with reiserfs - and have had no problems...
There were problems with exporting a reiserfs partition over NFS, which was quite annoying... this may have been fixed in 2.4.5, though. If so, I'm not quite sure what the problems fixed in 2.4.6 are, but probably other wierd interactions that most people don't encounter.
--
So I ask, never having used Mutt, can it be configured to automatically detect a gpg-encrypted email and prompt me for my gpg passphrase like pine can?
:\
:) Learn mutt, you'll love it.
Yep. Works flawlessly with GPG 1.0.4 here. The only annoying thing is that, while mutt creates RFC-compliant PGP/GPG sigs, some programs don't understand these and I occasionally get email from people using wierd clients who ask why my message shows up as an attachment
Regardless, your BOFH was right
--
The reason you think you've never seen photo-realistic CG is because when it's photo-realistic you can't tell that it's CG :) "Special effects" aren't the only computer graphics in movies nowadays; in a lot of movies nowadays the set that the movie is filmed on isn't actually what's seen in the movie - buildings are added (in a LOT of movies, many of which you wouldn't even think would have CG at all), people are added (for example, in the edited version of "Eyes Wide Shut", CG people were added to block out penetration and appease the US's puritan hangups. The problem was, the people were completely static and it was obvious that they weren't real), atmospheric effects are added, etc.
I don't remember what movie it was, but I read an article on the making of some movie (set in the 1800's, one of those cheesy romantic dramas, released about 2 years ago) and they showed the original filmed scene where you could see scaffolding, cameras, and lights. Then they showed the final result, which was a fully convincing 1800's-era scene. Most of the buildings and background people were created in 3D Studio MAX and rendered with Mental Ray, and you just can't tell. It was truly impressive. The buildings moved perfectly with the camera angle, the CG people walked and moved perfectly (there were no closeups of them, which removed the hardest part - facial modelling. The human eye is very good at picking up inconsistencies, especially in objects we observe every day, such as human facial emotions. It was very impressive nonetheless).
Of course, convincing facial modelling isn't impossible - look at this picture by Asier Hernaez Laviña, which was modelled and rendered in 3D Studio MAX. Not video, but it's an amazing technical achievement and is almost indistinguishable from a photograph.
--