Re: [9fans] RFS alternatives (Was: Living with Plan 9)
> Thanks for the info, but the devices encumbered with ioctls are the tricky > ones and even if they can be sorted out I'm sure there are some other traps > out there. Too bad there are no RFS gurus lurking here to offer their wisdom > on remoting devices. I'm no RFS guru, thank deity, but I did RTFC once and "F" was apposite. ioctl was handled by having the client "know" exactly what each ioctl "looked like", i.e. it only worked for known cases. There was a humungous switch which knew the "right stuff" to copy in&out, how to byte swap and align any words, structs etc. After deciding what the "right stuff" was, it copied in the "right stuff" from user space, passed over the call to the server, the server then executed it and passed back the "right stuff" to the client, the client then copied out the "right stuff", then I started losing the will to live. Dave.
Re: [9fans] Mousing is faster than typing but users not believe it
On Tuesday, June 21, 2011 11:04:28 AM Jack Johnson wrote: > On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 9:42 AM, errno wrote: > > On Tuesday, June 21, 2011 10:20:27 AM Jack Johnson wrote: > >> which is why I find it hard to get hot headed over any of the > >> assertions, but tend toward trusting the research. > > > > What research? > > The rabbit hole is pretty deep, but you could start with: > > International Journal of Human-Computer Studies > http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10715819 > > ...and a teaser on variables: > > http://www.intechopen.com/source/pdfs/5711/InTech-The_effects_of_panel_loca > tion_target_size_and_gender_on_efficiency_in_simple_direct_manipulation_tas > ks.pdf > Very cool, thankyou! Something of actual substance. I'll definitely check those out with great interest. I was hoping that when you said "trusting the research", you weren't referring to the 'research' that 'Tog' vaguely alluded to in that opinion- piece article of his which was linked to earlier in this thread. Cheers
Re: [9fans] Mousing is faster than typing but users not believe it
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 9:42 AM, errno wrote: > On Tuesday, June 21, 2011 10:20:27 AM Jack Johnson wrote: >> which is why I find it hard to get hot headed over any of the assertions, >> but tend toward trusting the research. >> > What research? The rabbit hole is pretty deep, but you could start with: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10715819 ...and a teaser on variables: http://www.intechopen.com/source/pdfs/5711/InTech-The_effects_of_panel_location_target_size_and_gender_on_efficiency_in_simple_direct_manipulation_tasks.pdf -Jack
Re: [9fans] Mousing is faster than typing but users not believe it
On Tuesday, June 21, 2011 10:20:27 AM Jack Johnson wrote: > which is why I find it hard to get hot headed over any of the assertions, > but tend toward trusting the research. > What research?
Re: [9fans] RFS alternatives (Was: Living with Plan 9)
--- On Tue, 21/6/11, Eric Van Hensbergen wrote: ... >> Um, does v9fs remote Linux devices? I find it hard to >> imagine it would remote ioctls but it makes sense *nix to >> *nix. >> > > Depends on how you configure it. There is a nodevmap > option to the v9fs mount which will instruct it to just access > the remote devices directly instead of just mapping their major/minor > numbers to local devices. You are correct in your imagining that we > don't go anywhere near ioctls with a 10 foot pole. However, many things > "just work" without ioctls these days. > Thanks for the info, but the devices encumbered with ioctls are the tricky ones and even if they can be sorted out I'm sure there are some other traps out there. Too bad there are no RFS gurus lurking here to offer their wisdom on remoting devices. I have a sneaking suspicion few people would have bothered, since the few devices worth remoting back then were easily handled by rsh/rcmd. Did RFS make it beyond SVR4? > > > > That just leaves my issues with X. > > > > Actually, its a bit worse than that. The physical > network devices aren't file system accessible anymore, Actually, I'd blotted out of my mind all knowledges of STREAMs devices and the related horror of TLI programming until you reminded me. > so you'd need to remote them as a service (via Inferno or something) or > use the tap device and remote that and hope that it doesn't require ioctls > (and I think it might). > Oh, I'm not worried about remoting network interfaces. I'm fine with packet forwarding and can live with NAT for now. However, it reminds me of another point in Plan 9's favour that the introductory papers should be updated to be more explicit about - NATs are unnecessary in a pure Plan 9 deployment. Unfortunately, neither Plan 9 routers or decent alternatives to NAT such as RSIP widely available. > -eric > Andrew P.S. There's spammers subscribed to this list. Hi there, friends of Khalifa.
Re: [9fans] Mousing is faster than typing but users not believe it
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:48 AM, William Cowan wrote: > Sample tasks at random you say. What is the correct universe to sample > if we wish to substantiate the sort of categorical assertions made on > this thread? Also, familiar vs unfamiliar tasks using familiar vs unfamiliar software. The number of UI variables are mind boggling, which is why I find it hard to get hot headed over any of the assertions, but tend toward trusting the research. Beating the dead horse, -Jack
Re: [9fans] Mousing is faster than typing but users not believe it
Iruat?? Souza wrote: > On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:57 AM, Guilherme Lino wrote: >> better with it... but generally keyboard is much faster on most day tasks, >> people just don't have the patience to learn it >> > Measuring the keyboard versus mouse speed is such a trivial experiment > to repeat. > Still, as Noah pointed out, people rely on intuition. Not nearly as trivial as it looks. It is easy to find tasks on which the keyboard outperforms the mouse 10 to 1, and it's easy to find the opposite. Sample tasks at random you say. What is the correct universe to sample if we wish to substantiate the sort of categorical assertions made on this thread? Once you solve these problems you can start thinking about which mouse and keyboard to use, how many different implementations you need to be sure that you're not getting an implementation-dependent result and so on. Then you get down to the hard problems, like interactions between the universe of possible subjects and all the factors above. Doing a good experiment is difficult and time-consuming.
Re: [9fans] Indent ON for sam?
> I have been toying with the editor sam lately, is there anything like > the "Indent ON" command for acme? > > If not, how do people deal with indentation? sam -a
Re: [9fans] RFS alternatives (Was: Living with Plan 9)
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 2:26 PM, wrote: > > --- On Wed, 8/6/11, I wrote in part: > >> I am old enough to remember RFS the Remote File Sharing >> Protocol on SVR4 that offered access to remote devices, but >> I don't have that and I'm not aware of whether there are any >> distributed file protocols freely available for *nix >> that do that. > > Um, does v9fs remote Linux devices? I find it hard to imagine it would remote > ioctls but it makes sense *nix to *nix. > Depends on how you configure it. There is a nodevmap option to the v9fs mount which will instruct it to just access the remote devices directly instead of just mapping their major/minor numbers to local devices. You are correct in your imagining that we don't go anywhere near ioctls with a 10 foot pole. However, many things "just work" without ioctls these days. > > That just leaves my issues with X. > Actually, its a bit worse than that. The physical network devices aren't file system accessible anymore, so you'd need to remote them as a service (via Inferno or something) or use the tap device and remote that and hope that it doesn't require ioctls (and I think it might). -eric
[9fans] Indent ON for sam?
Dear 9fans, I have been toying with the editor sam lately, is there anything like the "Indent ON" command for acme? If not, how do people deal with indentation? Peace, aht
Re: [9fans] [RFC] fonts and unicode/utf [TeX]
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 05:53:25PM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote: > > i'm not sure what the hard part is. just front the normal input > function with one that calls chartorune and rejects anything above > codepoint 255. that can't be more than 10 lines of code. > > that way there is no possibility of latin1 nonsense breaking previously- > functional .tex files, and you don't have to change any assumptions > in the code. (it might be better later on to operate directly on utf-8 > rather than some sort of wide character format like a rune, but that > can't break existing .tex files.) Yes, "casting" to byte can do and this is almost trivial since the input is buffered and handled via libweb (in kerTeX). But this will disallow use of TeX for non ASCII, non latin1... It seems to me better to document, and let user convert his files via tcs(1) to feed TeX. Alternative solution would be to introduce some TEX_ENCODING env variable to let input/output in TeX doing the conversion. But on Plan9 this seems to me simply ugly... to reintroduce by the window what was thrown out by the door... To be noted that at the moment I do not change _anything_ in the TeX code. The "latin1" is just the "encoding" of the fontes derived from the PS core ones (the same can be made with Computer Modern via virtual fonts to allow to the use directly of accented letters). -- Thierry Laronde http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
