Re: [9fans] Why does Plan 9 use “snarf” instead of “copy”?

[Robert Raschke]

Hi Mateusz,

as far as I remember, it was originally called "xerox". But that is
trademarked. No idea where the word "snarf" comes from.

Cheers,
Robby
On 12 Sep 2016 12:19, "Mateusz Piotrowski"  wrote:

Hello,

I've discovered Plan 9 recently and became curious about some
design decisions.

Why there is a snarf buffer and not a copy buffer?

As it might seem to be a dull question, it is not. I am very
interested in the reason behind this decision. I've browsed
numerous websites (including cat-v.org and the 9fans archives)
but I wasn't able to find anything about it.

I decided to ask this question [1] on Unix & Linux StackExchange
but its community doesn't seem to know the answer.

My guess is that "copying" is not as an atomic action.
"Copying" is in fact:

- obtaining the content you want to copy (_snarfing_)
- inserting the content where you want it to be (_pasting_)

Hence the use of snarf instead of copy.

Am I right? Is there a document / book / article where
it is explained?

Cheers!

Mateusz Piotrowski

[1]: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/308943/why-does-
plan-9-use-snarf-instead-of-copy

Re: [9fans] small VFD display

[Robert Raschke]

Typo of the name Dijkstra  :-(

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html
 On Jun 9, 2015 11:12 AM, lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote:

   -- Dijstraka, EWD898, 1984

 Huh?!

 Lucio

Re: [9fans] The Third Button

[Robert Raschke]

In acme, button-3 can cancel a button-2 execute. Say you button-2-sweep a
command, but then decide, err, no, don't want to do that, you chord-click
button-3 to cancel the execution. Not sure about other ways of doing this.


Robby


On 21 July 2014 14:08, dante subscripti...@posteo.eu wrote:

 Dear 9fans,

 Is there any situation (i.e., GUI area) where both the 2nd *and* the 3rd
 mouse button are indispensable options?
 Except for chording.

 Would it be possible to create the option of merging these two buttons for
 machines not blessed with the traditional rodent?

 I ask this because 3-button-mice (*not* 2-button-and-wheel) are almost
 impossible to find nowadays.
 Moreover, many notebooks have good touchpads to be used in situations when
 mice are impractical (on train, on the lap).
 These interfaces present pretty nice solutions for button-1 and button-3,
 but it's hard to impossible to do a button-2 click.

 In Acme, for instance, you generally need button-3 in the text area and
 button-2 in the menu area.
 I'm not sure when button-2 in the text area and button-3 in the menu area
 would be indispensable.
 In Rio, you generally need button-3 when you click outside the focused
 window and button-2 when you click inside the focused window.

 Cheers,
 Dante

Re: [9fans] long paths in acme tags

[Robert Raschke]

Whenever they are available, I use symlinks for shortening paths for
Acme. This is so far the only good use I've found for them ;-)

Robby
 On Jun 11, 2014 8:54 PM, Bakul Shah ba...@bitblocks.com wrote:

 If you are editing multiple file within the same directory
 with a very long path, the long dir paths is what takes up
 most of the tag. One idea (borrowed from zsh) is to assign a
 long path to a variable and then just show the variable
 instead. Thus for example, given long paths like these:

 /a/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/long/path/to/a/file1
 /a/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/long/path/to/a/file2

 If one can define a variable in acme
 foo=/a/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/very/long/path/to/a

  if the acme tags show
 $foo/file1
 $foo/file2
 it would be much nicer.

 Has anyone considered doing this or is there a better idea?  I
 suppose on plan9 one can use bind for this but on p9p things
 get considerably clunkier (9p, fuse...) when a variable can do
 the job more simply.

Re: [9fans] Acme: spaces in file names

[Robert Raschke]

Someone once made a little filesystem that would substitute spaces in
filenames with a different character. When placed between the normal fs and
Acme, this would make things work quite nicely.

If I remember correctly, Acme-SAC (built on top of Inferno) does that by
default.

No idea where you can find such a fs for Mac though. But this might give
you a start.

Robby
 On Dec 11, 2013 6:19 PM, Blake McBride bl...@mcbride.name wrote:

 Greetings,

 Just started using acme (and sam).  Cool.

 I am using acme on a Mac form plan9port.

 Within a file list one can right-click a listing in order to decend into
 another directory or load a file.  The problem is that neither work if a
 space is contained within the name.  Apparently, the right-click
 functionality only looks at non-white space strings.  An easy fix to this
 would be to allow the user to highlight the entire string (including
 spaces) and then right-click as normal.  The system would allow the
 highlight facility to override the just test for contigous non-space
 string current functionality.

 Any thoughts on this?

 Thanks.

 Blake McBride

Re: [9fans] acme label lengths in tags

[Robert Raschke]

On Plan 9 use bind to create yourself a nice hierarchy. Like 'bind -a
/Users/jimr /me' or similar.

Not sure how easy that is under *nix with p9p, haven't tried that yet. And
your /Users makes me think you're on Mac.

Robby



On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 2:04 PM, James A. Robinson 
j...@highwire.stanford.edu wrote:

 Do you folks have any solutions to shortening the length
 of labels in acme?  Back when I used Wily it had a nice
 feature to use environment variables if it found a match,
 e.g., one could set h=/Users/jimr and wily would show
 $h instead of /Users/jimr in the tag.  Anyone know of
 similar techniques in Acme?

 Jim

Re: [9fans] Logitech T400 mouse with Plan9 and Plan9port Acme

[Robert Raschke]

I've been using one of these:
Lenovo 3 button scrollpoint USB mouse
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/itemdetails/31P7405/460/0E80436C80A748E6AA76791FC42C9CA3

It has been very reliable and comfortable to use.

Robby
On Feb 25, 2013 7:19 PM, Ruslan Khusnullin ruslan.khusnul...@gmail.com
wrote:

 On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Alexander Kapshuk
 alexander.kaps...@gmail.com wrote:
  I stumbled upon this one a while back. Never used one though. Been
  using a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel. Does the job.
 Using a mouse with a scroll wheel about 10 hours a day results in pain
 in my hand, especially in middle finger. Also using a scroll wheel
 needs some additional accuracy and attention for just pushing it and
 not scrolling.

   http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product/sku/2545791
 I saw this mouse many times and almost bought it but decided to try
 Contour Mouse. After trying Contour I don't want to use a mouse of
 this classical form, T400 looks a little more comfortable and
 ergonomic.

 If you will be able to use T400 in real life could you please share
 your expirience?

Re: [9fans] c++

[Robert Raschke]

The only C++ book that I ever found to be worth it, is Ruminations on C++
by Andrew Koenig.

Robby
On Nov 19, 2012 10:01 AM, Steve Simon st...@quintile.net wrote:

 I need to learn c++ for work - people have strong opinions on
 languages I know, and not everyone likes c++ but its a requirment for me.

 I really want to develop a good sence of c++ style, I learnt C at the feet
 of
 KR and then the plan9 sourcecode so I learnt how to write clean elegant
 code
 (I think :-). The problem I am finding is there are many c++ styles and I
 have
 yet to find a clean and elegant one.

 anyone sugest a project that I could look at that contains well written
 code?
 failing that is there a book that teaches good style?

 I am refering to things like adding a leading m_ to class member variables
 (which looks horrid to me but I am willing to learn), and smart locks
 (mutexs
 which unlock on destruct).

 Thanks for any suggestions.

 -Steve

Re: [9fans] off-topic: why linux lost the desktop

[Robert Raschke]

A well working browser is an OS these days. A bit of a dilemma that.  ;-)
On Oct 18, 2012 3:25 PM, Pavel Klinkovsky pavel.klinkov...@gmail.com
wrote:

 Dne čtvrtek, 18. října 2012 14:23:03 UTC+2 Oleksandr Iakovliev napsal(a):
1) Lack of modern GUI and GUI development kit
...
  But that's the list of benefits, isn't? :)

 I mostly agree except the browser.
 I would appreciate a well working browser in the P9 too. ;)

 Pavel

Re: [9fans] drawterm on the nokia n900

[Robert Raschke]

I just retired my N900 as phone. So reviving it as drawterm would be cool.
But I've no idea when I could find some time to start playing.

Robby
 On Jun 21, 2012 6:29 PM, Nicolas Bercher nberc...@yahoo.fr wrote:

 Le 18/06/2012 14:21, hiro a écrit :

 Just to give someone who searches for some specific drawterm patch some
 help:

 Skip once made drawterm work on ARMv6
 https://bitbucket.org/9nut/**drawterm-arm-patchhttps://bitbucket.org/9nut/drawterm-arm-patchand
  I changed the use of
 swp to ldrex/strex which enables it to work on my ARMv7.

 Also, the latest win32 cleanup in Russ' repo did nothing but
 completely break compilation for win32, and some really old patches
 which were supposed to enable mousewheel support were apparently never
 tested. I deleted a line and moved an other one around and now it
 works. Also added pgup/pgdown and home/end keys.

 This is not a fork. I don't even know how to use hg. Sadly I couldn't
 reach Russ, so I just leave this here. It has the code for both trees
 and a working drawterm.exe:
 http://h1ro.dyndns.org/**drawterm/ http://h1ro.dyndns.org/drawterm/


 Just an info: I run Debian Lenny armel drawterm on a Nokia n900*, it
 runs very well except that it is not yet possible to use Rio without a
 hack get button-2 and button-3 (actually, the touch screen does
 button-1).  So I stick to console mode (termrc: don't run Rio if
 /mnt/term/etc/hostname contains the name of the n900), better than
 nothing.

 I plan to implement the 3 buttons hack, but I didn't managed to find the
 time yet.  By the way, if there are n900 users around here (Richard did
 you buy a new one?), I'd really appreciate suggestions about the keys
 you'd like to use as mouse clic-modifers.

 Nicolas

 --
 *the package doesn't install quite well (dependency problem?, I don't
 rememeber), but it only contains drawterm so I copied it to ~/bin.

Re: [9fans] Governance question???

[Robert Raschke]

Wrong Athens, methinks.

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Christoph Lohmann 2...@r-36.net wrote:

 Greetings.

 On Wed, 16 May 2012 15:04:45 +0200 erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.net
 wrote:
  On Tue May 15 21:44:21 EDT 2012, cinap_len...@gmx.de wrote:
   there might be more plan9 users than you think.
 
  all kidding aside, take a job in athens.  see for yourself.

 Athens is full of rioting people these days. I wouldn't go there.

 A comparison between a common tool in Athens and 9front:

 http://navpointalpha.net/9features.jpg


 Sincerely,

 Christoph Lohmann

Re: [9fans] SIP

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 1:08 AM, Tristan Plumb 9p...@imu.li wrote:

  Anyone working on or have a simple SIP router/proxy for Plan9?  As of
  today I will no longer waste days of my life dealing with the
  abomination that is Asterisk.
 I would also love to see a SIP implementation for Plan 9, I've
 contemplated it a number of times, but the sheer volume of SIP RFCs is
 not encouraging! And porting something like SER (never Asterisk) appears
 even harder.

 That said, I've thought a good bit about a sensible way to implement a
 SIP proxy, and I'll be thinking about it a good bit more now...


I guess you could port Erlang and then run Yxa (
http://www.stacken.kth.se/project/yxa/).

Robby

Re: [9fans] Scripting acme

[Robert Raschke]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 12:42 AM, Mauricio CA mauricio.antu...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi, all,

 Could you give me tips on how to script acme in plan9 from user
 space? Sorry for asking this question without at least showing some
 attempts of my own, but the fact is that I'm unable to grasp how to start.

 I would like to do things like these:

 * Automatically do something when text is mouse-selected in a specific
 window.

 * Listen to the keyboard so that after I press some key combination I
 get an action like, say, expose a specific window.

 Thanks,
 Maurício


If you've not seen them yet, then there's the acme Mail and News readers
that can serve as nice examples. They're in /acme/mail and /acme/news,
respectively. I don't think they do any listening on keyboard tho'. Not
entirely sure how you'd deal with that. The win (/acme/bin/source/win) could
maybe be instructive for that.

Robby

Re: [9fans] `mk` (from Plan9 ports) efficiency related issue

[Robert Raschke]

Terribly sorry, my email won't help you much, apart from going Wow, a 4000
link mk file! and Hmm, I wouldn't start from here if you want to go
there. Your email also doesn't explain why you cannot generate a normal
mk file.

If you want to stick with your approach, it almost looks like you may be
better off to generate a shell script that explicitly checks and runs
everything you need. (And yes, essentially make your generator be a make
in it's own right. Another one won't hurt.)

But it's cool to see someone else who uses Erlang and RabbitMQ hanging out
on this list. :-)

Robby

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 2:47 PM, Ciprian Dorin Craciun 
ciprian.crac...@gmail.com wrote:

Hello all!

Sorry for interrupting again, but I've stumbled on an `mk` issue...

I've written a little Scheme application that generates `mk`
 scripts for building Erlang applications. (See below an extract of one
 of my previous emails describing just the generator part; the thread
 had the subject: mk (from plan9ports) modification time resolution
 issue?.)

Now the problem is that the generated script (attached to this
 email) has about 2671 prerequisites (` target :: prerequisite `), and
 about 684 actual targets with recipes. (As I've explained below I'm
 not using any meta-rules, and I'm explicit about each resulting file
 and it's dependencies.)

The problem is that the time needed to run the script has
 extremely increased, and the processor is 100% eaten by `mk`.

For example:
* just running the `mk` script with the `-n` option takes about 14
 seconds.
* using the commands from the `mk -n` takes about 1 minute and 36
 seconds;
* then running `mk` takes another 14 seconds; (as it has nothing);
* but after cleaning and running `mk` (which I've left running for
 about 5 minutes and still didn't finished) it seems that between each
 target (or batch of targets?) it stays about 14 seconds;

But what is strange is that if instead to build the default target
 that builds everything I start building little by little independent
 parts, it works without that great delay...

Any ideas what could cause this?

Thanks,
Ciprian.


 --
 [[ Extract from the previous email. ]]
 --

   BTW... People might wonder how come I have 367 targets (with 1221
 prerequisites) for such a small project? :) The answers is I don't
 write the `mk` script by hand, but I've written a small Scheme
 application that just generates the `mk` script based on descriptions
 like the following. (Thus the resulting `mk` script is quite
 exhaustive with quite tight dependencies and doesn't use
 meta-rules...) :)

   So just out of curiosity are there any `mk` script generators out there?

   Ciprian.


 
 (vbs:require-erlang)

 (vbs:define-erlang-application 'rabbit
   erl: \\./(rabbitmq-server--latest/src|generated)/.*\\.erl
   hrl: \\./(rabbitmq-server--latest/include|generated)/.*\\.hrl
   additional-ebin: \\./generated/rabbit\\.app)

 (vbs:define-erlang-application 'rabbit_common
   erl:
 \\./(rabbitmq-server--latest/src|generated)/(rabbit_writer|rabbit_reader|rabbit_framing_amqp_0_8|rabbit_framing_amqp_0_9_1|rabbit_framing_channel|rabbit_basic|rabbit_binary_generator|rabbit_binary_parser|rabbit_channel|rabbit_exchange_type|rabbit_misc|rabbit_net|rabbit_heartbeat|rabbit_msg_store_index|gen_server2|priority_queue|supervisor2)\\.erl
   hrl: \\./(rabbitmq-server--latest/include|generated)/.*\\.hrl
   additional-ebin: \\./generated/rabbit_common\\.app)

 (vbs:define-erlang-application 'amqp_client
   dependencies: 'rabbit_common
   erl: \\./rabbitmq-erlang-client--latest/src/.*\\.erl
   hrl: \\./rabbitmq-erlang-client--latest/include/.*\\.hrl
   additional-ebin: \\./generated/amqp_client\\.app)
 

Re: [9fans] `mk` (from Plan9 ports) efficiency related issue

[Robert Raschke]

Err, Wow, a 4000 line mk file!

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 3:00 PM, Robert Raschke rtrli...@googlemail.comwrote:

 Terribly sorry, my email won't help you much, apart from going Wow, a 4000
 link mk file! and Hmm, I wouldn't start from here if you want to go
 there. Your email also doesn't explain why you cannot generate a normal
 mk file.

 If you want to stick with your approach, it almost looks like you may be
 better off to generate a shell script that explicitly checks and runs
 everything you need. (And yes, essentially make your generator be a make
 in it's own right. Another one won't hurt.)

 But it's cool to see someone else who uses Erlang and RabbitMQ hanging out
 on this list. :-)

 Robby


 On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 2:47 PM, Ciprian Dorin Craciun 
 ciprian.crac...@gmail.com wrote:

Hello all!

Sorry for interrupting again, but I've stumbled on an `mk` issue...

I've written a little Scheme application that generates `mk`
 scripts for building Erlang applications. (See below an extract of one
 of my previous emails describing just the generator part; the thread
 had the subject: mk (from plan9ports) modification time resolution
 issue?.)

Now the problem is that the generated script (attached to this
 email) has about 2671 prerequisites (` target :: prerequisite `), and
 about 684 actual targets with recipes. (As I've explained below I'm
 not using any meta-rules, and I'm explicit about each resulting file
 and it's dependencies.)

The problem is that the time needed to run the script has
 extremely increased, and the processor is 100% eaten by `mk`.

For example:
* just running the `mk` script with the `-n` option takes about 14
 seconds.
* using the commands from the `mk -n` takes about 1 minute and 36
 seconds;
* then running `mk` takes another 14 seconds; (as it has nothing);
* but after cleaning and running `mk` (which I've left running for
 about 5 minutes and still didn't finished) it seems that between each
 target (or batch of targets?) it stays about 14 seconds;

But what is strange is that if instead to build the default target
 that builds everything I start building little by little independent
 parts, it works without that great delay...

Any ideas what could cause this?

Thanks,
Ciprian.


 --
 [[ Extract from the previous email. ]]
 --

   BTW... People might wonder how come I have 367 targets (with 1221
 prerequisites) for such a small project? :) The answers is I don't
 write the `mk` script by hand, but I've written a small Scheme
 application that just generates the `mk` script based on descriptions
 like the following. (Thus the resulting `mk` script is quite
 exhaustive with quite tight dependencies and doesn't use
 meta-rules...) :)

   So just out of curiosity are there any `mk` script generators out there?

   Ciprian.


 
 (vbs:require-erlang)

 (vbs:define-erlang-application 'rabbit
   erl: \\./(rabbitmq-server--latest/src|generated)/.*\\.erl
   hrl: \\./(rabbitmq-server--latest/include|generated)/.*\\.hrl
   additional-ebin: \\./generated/rabbit\\.app)

 (vbs:define-erlang-application 'rabbit_common
   erl:
 \\./(rabbitmq-server--latest/src|generated)/(rabbit_writer|rabbit_reader|rabbit_framing_amqp_0_8|rabbit_framing_amqp_0_9_1|rabbit_framing_channel|rabbit_basic|rabbit_binary_generator|rabbit_binary_parser|rabbit_channel|rabbit_exchange_type|rabbit_misc|rabbit_net|rabbit_heartbeat|rabbit_msg_store_index|gen_server2|priority_queue|supervisor2)\\.erl
   hrl: \\./(rabbitmq-server--latest/include|generated)/.*\\.hrl
   additional-ebin: \\./generated/rabbit_common\\.app)

 (vbs:define-erlang-application 'amqp_client
   dependencies: 'rabbit_common
   erl: \\./rabbitmq-erlang-client--latest/src/.*\\.erl
   hrl: \\./rabbitmq-erlang-client--latest/include/.*\\.hrl
   additional-ebin: \\./generated/amqp_client\\.app)
 

Re: [9fans] `mk` (from Plan9 ports) efficiency related issue

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 3:33 PM, Ciprian Dorin Craciun 
ciprian.crac...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 17:00, Robert Raschke rtrli...@googlemail.com
 wrote:
  Your email also doesn't explain why you cannot generate a normal
  mk file.

 I'm afraid I don't understand the question. What do you mean by
 generating a normal mk file?
A) Do you mean why am I using a generator that writes the `mk`
 script instead of writing the `mk` script myself by hand? The answer
 to this is complexity: writing `mk` is Ok when you have a simple
 application to build, but as the application grows larger so does the
 make script. (And using meta rules is not always possible.)
B) Why isn't the output script a normal `mk` script? Actually is
 a very simple script (no meta-rules, no shell expansion, etc.). It's
 just big. :)


Sorry, I meant an idiomatic mk file, in the sense as they are used within
the Plan 9 distribution. Have a look at Plan 9 Mkfiles (
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/mkfiles.html) and Maintaining Files on
Plan 9 with Mk (http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/mk.html), if you
haven't already done so.

I think by listing all your dependencies one by one, step by step, you are
bypassing a lot of the strengths of a make system. I would expect your
generator to produce a mk include file with the meta rules plus the mk file
itself which lists file dependencies in a concise manner.

Robby

Re: [9fans] So, why Plan 9?

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 10:05 AM, Mark Carter alt.mcar...@gmail.com wrote:

 I was reading the suckless.org website the other day, and they seemed
 quite keen on Plan 9. I am running Linux. Is there a useful summary
 document that explains where plan9port fits in with Glendix, and why
 anyone should care about Plan 9 anyway (hope that doesn't come across
 as rude)?


Most of the people who can answer best are currently at the Plan 9 Workshop
(http://www.iwp9.org/), so they'll doubtless chip in a wee bit later.

Plan 9 is a research OS that has had a quite amazing impact on most other
Unix type OSes. For example: UTF-8, process filesystem (generalised to use
a filesystem as a well defined abstraction mechanism), recursive window
systems (ie. a full windowing system inside a window, not 100% sure who did
it first, but the Plan 9 one is amazingly consistent and so easy to use it
makes others look clunky), and full historical filesystem (remember
everything you ever did using snapshots).

Plan 9 is not a polished end user OS!

Robby

Re: [9fans] So, why Plan 9?

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Robert Raschke rtrli...@googlemail.comwrote:


 On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 10:05 AM, Mark Carter alt.mcar...@gmail.comwrote:

 I was reading the suckless.org website the other day, and they seemed
 quite keen on Plan 9. I am running Linux. Is there a useful summary
 document that explains where plan9port fits in with Glendix, and why
 anyone should care about Plan 9 anyway (hope that doesn't come across
 as rude)?


 Most of the people who can answer best are currently at the Plan 9 Workshop
 (http://www.iwp9.org/), so they'll doubtless chip in a wee bit later.

 Plan 9 is a research OS that has had a quite amazing impact on most other
 Unix type OSes. For example: UTF-8, process filesystem (generalised to use
 a filesystem as a well defined abstraction mechanism), recursive window
 systems (ie. a full windowing system inside a window, not 100% sure who did
 it first, but the Plan 9 one is amazingly consistent and so easy to use it
 makes others look clunky), and full historical filesystem (remember
 everything you ever did using snapshots).

 Plan 9 is not a polished end user OS!

 Robby


Oh, and most of the Plan 9 tools were first made available to use outside
the Plan 9 OS through Russ Cox's plan9 in user space effort (
http://swtch.com/plan9port/). And there's the virtualisation project vx32
that includes Plan 9 as an example. Not sure how they fit into a holistic
view. They're more like pragmatic ways forward when you can't (or don't want
to) run a stand alone OS.

One of the great things in Plan 9 is the readability of the code. You can
actually dive in and see how it all works without needing an augmented
brain. Although it may require adjusting your thinking to a let's try to
manage all this complexity a bit better mindframe. And that can take a bit
of time and effort. But it's well worth it.

Robby

Re: [9fans] how to lock cpu console

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 3:20 PM, bau...@gmail.com wrote:


how to lock (protect by password) the cpu console? In default
 install
 afterboot the console is logged by user bootes. Is there a way to avoid
 this?



Usually, you'll find people put it in a cupboard or room that you can
physically lock. I think someone may have made a screen lock for a cpu/file
server, but I cannot find it now. The standard thinking is that your servers
are yours, so you keep them safe. No one needs a public console to them.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Acme-sac integration with Windows NT

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:41 AM, 6o205z...@sneakemail.com wrote:

 How do you folks using acme-sac on Windows deal with the line-ending
 issue?  I've been using P9P acme on linux (at work) since Russ announced
 it, but I consider the line-ending issue a show-stopper on Windows.

 While the cr displayed at the end of every line is annoying, I could
 probably learn to live with it.  When I start editing, though, I doubt I
 have enough discipline to remember add the cr, and if I don't remember I
 would end up with files with mixed line-endings.  Some windows tools
 aren't happy if the files don't use windows line endings.

   Peter Canning


When I start editing some random file in acme-sac, I do (pretend it's a
proper c/r character below)

Edit ,x/␍/d

and if I need them back in for Windows purposes, I do

Edit ,x/\n/i/␍/

Sometimes I forget. But it's never really been an issue. I do not know of
any Windows tool that requires c/r these days. And most people, when opening
in Notepad just go Ach! and open in Wordpad instead.

Robby

Re: [9fans] du and find

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Ethan Grammatikidis eeke...@fastmail.fmwrote:

 On 3 May 2010, at 19:34, Jorden M wrote:

 I've yet to find out why this happens so much, but I think I can
 narrow it to a combination of ignorance, laziness, and perhaps that
 all-too-frequent assumption `oh, I can do this in 10 lines with perl!'
 I guess by the time you've written half a parser in line noise, it's
 too late to quit while you're behind.


 I think it's ignorance and something. I'm not sure what that something is.
 I am sure if you tried to suggest writing a parser to many of the
 open-sourcers I've talked to you would be treated as if you were suggesting
 a big job rather than a small one. Why Write a Parser,  they would ask,
 when I can just scribble a few little lines of perl?


I'd think it's simply not knowing that there are easier ways of doing it. It
is just not taught. Also, people learn about parsers in that really scary
module about compilers and never give them a second thought afterwards. And
anything else to do with strings is usually hopelessly complicated stuff
involving indices into character arrays.

Then there's the kudos of writing write-only code. Even the writer doesn't
understand it anymore, but nobody else knows that, so ...

I always found it a wee bit sad that Icon (http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon/)
never really had much of an impact in the let's take this string apart
problem domain. If I need something quick and dirty, it's my secret tool
for parsing stuff quickly. String scanning is trivial.

Robby

Re: [9fans] three sets of windows

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 2:35 AM, tammy turner tam...@windstream.net wrote:

  Hi I recently downloaded plan 9 (last thursday) and when I attempted
 install I had 3 sets of windows side by side and could not read the set up
 instructions (questions) attempting to scroll left or right would not work.
 I tried several times to install with no luck. Whats going on ? If anyone
 can shed light on this, I would like to complete my install.
   Thanks Tammyt


This sounds like your video setting is not quite correct. I am assuming you
essentially got a third of the screen triplicated across your display. I saw
something like that with installing onto VMWare a long while back.

You can try and set the video to be VESA, monitor=vesa in the plan9.ini
file, I think. Haven't looked at that in ages. But maybe someone else on the
list can point out more details.

Robby

Re: [9fans] quote o' the day

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 5:15 PM, maht maht-9f...@maht0x0r.net wrote:

 On 25/03/2010 17:11, Corey Thomasson wrote:

 Not really related, but I got a good laugh from this.
 As soon as I opened this email in gmail, the targeted ad changed to

 Editing xml is difficult.


 well that is true, the following snippets are not the same, the second has
 two more nodes

 abhi/b/a

 a
 bhi/b
 /a



And depending on what parser you're using, you might get the same tree or
not! Found out recently, that some parsers very helpfully elide empty
TEXT nodes.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Shall we fix the use of Up/Dn arrows?

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Rudolf Sykora rudolf.syk...@gmail.comwrote:

   Not sure how the concept of a line delimited by newlines relates to
 moving the cursor up one physical line on the screen.
 
  Working out where to move the cursor to

 Still I dare claim that moving a cursor up one visible line has
 nothing to do with the concept of a line delimited by newlines. For
 the movement, such delimited lines are completely irrelevant. For the
 movement there is no difference whether there is a newline on the
 previous visible line or the line was broken due to the width of the
 window.

 What I speak about is 'as if' clicking the mouse up one visible line.

 R


How would you go about doing that?

There's no cursor based addressing available in the screens. And good
riddance too, methinks.

Robby

Re: [9fans] find command reloaded

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Rudolf Sykora rudolf.syk...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hello,

 I've been wondering.
 The plan9 'replacement' for the (linux/unix-like) find command, according
 to the faq, is, in a way,

 grep foo `{du -a . | awk '{print $2}'}

 Now I want to find all files containing foo.
 Is it so that `{ ... } produces the full list first and only afterwards
 this is used?
 If so (and as I understand it really is so), the number of arguments may be
 enormous, e.g. millions of names...
 I don't feel this is the way to go...

 How do you carry out such a search?

 Thanks
 Ruda



Have you come across a situation where it doesn't work or it's too slow for
your needs?

Robby

Re: [9fans] Just one piece o' help.

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 2:02 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.netwrote:

 naturally, bitmaps are hard to read.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ASCII_art_conversion_tool
(Something along those lines at least.)

Robby

Re: [9fans] secstore account expired, how fix it using only drawterm

[Robert Raschke]

Thank you Erik.

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 7:09 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@coraid.com wrote:

  cpu% auth/secstore -g factotum
  secstore password:
  auth/secstore: error: account rtr expired at Sat Jan  2 03:59:59 GMT 2010
  secstore password:

 see secstore(8).  auth/secuser $user is what you want.  on
 the console of the auth server.


I managed to log in as bootes with drawterm and then went and edited
/adm/secstore/who/$user by hand to give it a new expiration epoch value.

I'm not sure why the auth commands hang in a vanilla drawterm (no rio). I
get the impression that setting the console to raw doesn't work with
drawterm, but I lack skill and time to figure that one out just now.

All sorted now anyway, thanks again,
Robby

Re: [9fans] What do you use plan 9 for?

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 9:49 AM, chutsu chu...@gmail.com wrote:

 So.. been looking at plan 9, am confused what plan 9 is used for? I
 mean I know its a hobbyst sort of OS, but what can you do with it
 though?
 Can you browse the internet?
 Watch videos?
 Thanks
 Chris


I use it to manage my home network (/sys/lib/local is s much easier than
any other network setup / dhcp / etc. thingie I've come across). I also use
it as my web server, wiki and private email system. Everything that I want
to keep over time (as in timemachine) is kept on my fossil/venti (bulk data
like videos, I keep elsewhere, not really sure why tho'). It runs on a VIA
fanless in a cupboard somewhere.

I play way too little with it these days.

It is not a mediacenter! Although with some time and muscle you can probably
get pretty far down that route and have a lot more fun than attempting to
grok mythtv (I gave up after 4 attempts with that monstrosity).

Robby

Re: [9fans] What do you use plan 9 for?

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Robert Raschke rtrli...@googlemail.comwrote:


 I use it to manage my home network (/sys/lib/local is s much easier
 than any other network


Err, sorry, meant /lib/ndb/local (not sure how that turned itself into
something else).

Robby

Re: [9fans] env size limit

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 9:42 AM, Andreas Zell z...@imageaccess.de wrote:

 On 28 Okt., 10:42, rtrli...@googlemail.com (Robert Raschke) wrote:
  On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 9:21 PM, roger peppe rogpe...@gmail.com wrote:
   for instance when there are a few thousand source files
   and one wants to link them all.
 
  Use libraries!
 
  Robby

 Hmm,

 ar cr libfile.a $(A_FEW_THOUSEND_OBJECT_FILES)


ROFL.

Robby

PS Hmm, you are joking, right? I'm never entirely sure in these
international discussions without signifiers like :-)

Re: [9fans] env size limit

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 9:21 PM, roger peppe rogpe...@gmail.com wrote:

 2009/10/27 erik quanstrom quans...@coraid.com:
  On Tue Oct 27 12:52:52 EDT 2009, rogpe...@gmail.com wrote:
  the environment variable size limit is set to 16300 bytes which
  seems rather small; for instance it can break mkfiles for large
 projects.
 
  might a patch specifying a larger size limit (e.g. 128K) be accepted?
 
  you need a single variable that's bigger than 16300 bytes?
 
  - erik



yes.

 for instance when there are a few thousand source files
 and one wants to link them all.


Use libraries!

Robby

Re: [9fans] nice quote

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Greg Comeau com...@panix.com wrote:

 Ok, now I'll get provocative:
 Then why do so many people have a problem understanding C?
 Please don't seriously say they don't.  In fact, these same
 arguments are used against C by those who don't care for C.
 Go figure?  I think not.


I guess you gotta actually say what particular group of the population you
are taking your many people out of. Programmers? People who work with
computers? Artists? Europeans?

I'll assume you mean active programmers. Many of those will have a problem
understanding assembly code. Funnily enough many more than those not
understanding C will have a problem understanding high level programming
languages like R, Haskell, or even Smalltalk.

What were we talking about again ...

Robby

Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Anthony Sorace ano...@gmail.com wrote:

 i've not used matt's sql module itself (i should check it out) so i
 can't comment on his implementation, but... SQL is really ugly. it's
 not hard to construct something that provides the same functionality
 in a much more palatable form. aesthetics aside, if you're dealing
 with a database-heavy app, it can make the code much easier to read.


SQL in itself is actually pretty elegant for what it is intended, querying
relational tables.

The problem with databases is more one of really bad design. A badly
designed database makes SQL use awkward. Using a more general programming
language allows you to create abstractions that hide the hideous database.
It ends up as a veneer that usually grows and grows and grows trying to
fix problems that actually exist at the database level itself.

The fact that using SQL against your database is a pain, should really
signal alarm bells and make you investigate what may be wrong with its
design.

Robby

Re: [9fans] nice quote

[Robert Raschke]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 5:38 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.netwrote:

 On Wed Sep  2 10:33:07 EDT 2009, rminn...@gmail.com wrote:
  Q: Will C continue to be important into the future?
  (Dave Kirk, Nvidia)A: No, I think C will die like Fortran has

 isn't this the same company that claims that the cpu is dead?
 it may be true, but given nvidia's propensity to make
 claims that stretch credulity a wee bit that all just so happen
 to lead one to the conclusion — that nvidia will dominate the
 computer world in the near future with massive gpus, directx,
 and a tiny cpu.

 - erik


Gamers have a lot to answer for. Not just social decline ... ;-)

Robby

Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9

[Robert Raschke]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 5:50 PM, Bakul Shah
bakul+pl...@bitblocks.combakul%2bpl...@bitblocks.com
 wrote:

 On Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:33:13 CDT Eric Van Hensbergen eri...@gmail.com
  wrote:
  On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Bakul 
  Shahbakul+pl...@bitblocks.combakul%2bpl...@bitblocks.com
 wrote:
  
   An intriguing idea that can point toward a synth fs interface
   to a dbms or search results But I don't think this would
   be a lightweight interface.
  
 
  The fact that its not immediately clear is what makes it a good
  research topic.  It will likely take several iterations to identify a
  best fit interface with the likely result that multiple
  interfaces/views are required.  I think there are precious little
  information on synthetic file system design, given its continuing
  popularity in the non-Plan-9 world, we could use more published
  wisdom/experiences from the evolution of various file-system based
  interfaces.

 Oh I don't know Shoehorning a DB interface into a FS
 interface doesn't feel right but stranger things have
 happened.


There are some folk about who are working on a distributed spreadsheet (
hypernumbers.com, there used to be a trial system up and lots of documents,
but I'm not sure where that all went, and I can't be bothereed signing up
just now, they're presenting at ICFP CUFP on Friday, so the company/project
should still be properly alive).

Anyway, the idea they've got is that every cell in a spreadsheet has a URL
and you can reference and use cells across a distributed space. Interesting
idea, but I'm not entirely sure what to do with it, being
spreadsheet-challenged myself.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Lua on Plan9

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Roman V. Shaposhnik r...@sun.com wrote:

 On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 09:27 +0100, Robert Raschke wrote:

  Last time I tried, the standard Lua compiled out of the box under the
  APE.

 That is good to know. Still, I'd rather see it run without APE.

  Great little language. I use it in my day job (together with Erlang).

 *together* with Erlang?!?! That I have to know more about. Perhaps
 off-list.

   It's implementation is indeed just as enlightening as the Plan 9
  code. An exercise in doing exactly what is required and no more. Very
  elegant in my eyes.

 Couldn't agree more!

 Thanks,
 Roman.

Re: [9fans] Using proportional fonts in Acme for Programming

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Roman V. Shaposhnik r...@sun.com wrote:

 On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 11:55 -0600, Daniel Lyons wrote:
  I'd love it if Acme or Plan 9 had good support for some kind of Lisp
  variant.

 Speaking of which (or may be not ;-)) is there anybody using Lua
 on Plan9?

 Thanks,
 Roman.

 P.S. The more I look into Lua (as a way to help C refuge start
 doing some functional stuff) the more it seems that the two have
 a lot in common when it comes to software architecture.


 Last time I tried, the standard Lua compiled out of the box under the APE.

Great little language. I use it in my day job (together with Erlang). It's
implementation is indeed just as enlightening as the Plan 9 code. An
exercise in doing exactly what is required and no more. Very elegant in my
eyes.

Robby

Re: [9fans] file server?

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 7:14 AM, Lyndon Nerenberg lyn...@orthanc.ca wrote:

 This is what we do at Sandia. We have one machine which serves
 cpu/auth/file, but the actual Venti disks are in a Coraid connected
 via GigE. The fossil disk is in the server, but if it dies we can just
 build a new one.


 Which reminds me of an often overlooked but important point:

  Save your fossil vac scores on another machine!


I have a nightly cron job that sends the latest output of the fossil console
as an email.

In cpurc of the fileserver I setup a

aux/clog /srv/fscmd /sys/log/fossil 

and my nightly batch just does this:

who = (myself fos...@some.other.place)
today = `{date}
tail -20 /sys/log/fossil |mail -s 'Fossil output of ' ^ $today $who

The last 20 lines is probably overkill, but who cares.

The venti archive starts at 2AM, and my cron job is at 4AM. So far, I've not
yet had an archive take longer than 2 hours. But that's partly due to
triggering one explicitly after a pull that's just replaced all my
executables ;-)

Robby

Re: [9fans] file server?

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:07 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.netwrote:

  The venti archive starts at 2AM, and my cron job is at 4AM. So far, I've
 not
  yet had an archive take longer than 2 hours. But that's partly due to
  triggering one explicitly after a pull that's just replaced all my
  executables ;-)

 that's surprising to me that it would take that long.
 is that typical?

 just on the back of the proverbial envelope ...
 a completely seek-bound disk with 8k blocks
 gets ~3mb/s even when diabolicly seek bound,
 lets take something way more pessimistic
 like 0.5mb/s for 1 hr = 1800mb.

 180mb dumps would still be large, so you
 must be getting on the order of 50kb/s
 dumps?

 i'm not a venti expert, but i find it hard to believe
 that venti would be that slow normally.  do you
 need to resize memory or your bloom filter?

 hope my display of ignorance here doesn't
 seem like criticism.

 - erik


I am running an old (pre bloom) venti on a 500MHz VIA with some crappy
no-name 30GB PATA drive. But, yes, I would be surprised if an archival dump
took longer than a few minutes (from looking at my logs anything from 45sec
to 4.5min is typical, but I haven't looked at the amounts of data).

Saying that, those pulls from a while ago, where pretty much the whole file
tree got replaced did lead to a dump taking almost an hour.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Using proportional fonts in Acme for Programming

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Aaron W. Hsu arcf...@sacrideo.us wrote:

 So, I was browsing around the other day looking at Acme resources, and I
 discovered an old post from 1995 wherein someone advocated the use of
 proportional fonts for programming in Acme.


 I've been programming using Wily, Acme, and Acme SAC for 15 years now, and
this has always been using proportional fonts. Very, very rarely do I need
to look at fixed font representation, and I can't remember when the last
time actually was?

I am so used to this, that I find it difficult to read code in a fixed font,
color overloaded, highlighting editor. All the flashiness detracts from the
code I'm trying to understand.

Sometimes when I have to understand a bit of foreign code, I go through the
code and re-indent to fit my view of the world. I use this as an exercise to
help me understand what the code does, not because I don't like the style.

For code that uses brackets of some persuasion for grouping code, the
double-click text selection shows me exactly the grouping. And I don't get
mislead by wrong indentation very easily.

Proportional fonts can also greatly reduce pointless discussions about
coding style.

Robby

Re: [9fans] a few Q's regarding cpu/auth server

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 8:52 AM, Corey co...@bitworthy.net wrote:


 I imagine this is probably a subject full of landmines, so I don't want to
 start a war!  I won't press the issue, just want to respond to this, and
 then I'll just leave the status quo well enough alone.

 I respect those opinions which differ from my own.

 On Wednesday 05 August 2009 23:30:38 John Floren wrote:
  On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 11:15 PM, Coreyco...@bitworthy.net wrote:
   On Wednesday 05 August 2009 19:42:54 Anthony Sorace wrote:
   philosophy. plan9, like research unix before it, recognizes that if
   you have physical access to the box, all bets are off anyway.
  
   Well, sounds like a flawed philosophy taken too far.
  
   Flawed, because all bets are not necessarily off with physical access;
   and taken too far, because... dang, what harm is there in providing
   that last means of interference to a hostile?
  
 snip
   security consists of locking your door.
  
   ... which means bootes is just a quick hacksaw or boltcutter or
   crowbar away... so why even bother with a locked door?
  

 That wasn't a rhetorical question.  Why bother locking your door?

 Any intruder worth his weight in salt can circumvent such a simple
 security mechanism with ease.


Why lock your door, when you're living in a gated community?

I think the bit you are leaving out is the fact that a proper Plan 9
installation needs terminals.

Your cpu/auth/filesystem machines can be somewhere safe, with as much
physical safety as you need (physical barriers are much easier to set up and
administer that electronic ones). If all is set up properly, you will never
have to touch those machines again. Unless the machines break and you need
to look at the hardware.

Your terminal, on the other hand is ephemeral and you have go through the
usual security checks if you want to access your cpu and filesystem servers.

Robby

Re: [9fans] security questions

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Eris Discordia
eris.discor...@gmail.com wrote:
 Very nice of you to go to lengths for describing Inferno to a non-techie.
 Thank you. Just got the Fourth Edition ISO and will try it. Maybe even learn
 some Limbo in long term.

Also note there's a new book out that includes Inferno as a major
example, essentially explaining OS principles in general, in Inferno,
and in Linux:

Principles of Operating Systems: Design and Applications
by Brian Stuart

( http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1418837695 )

I've only just started reading it, so can't really comment on how good
it is yet. Looks promising so far though.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9

[Robert Raschke]

On 4/17/09, Balwinder S Dheeman bdhee...@gmail.com wrote:
 Please set aside rare cases and let us know who except for the students,
 teachers and, or researchers uses Plan9 and, or Inferno in the offices,
 homes and, or cafes and for what?

At the risk (or maybe honour :-) of being branded as a rare case (I'm
neither student, nor teacher, nor hobbyist), I use Plan 9 in to
maintain my own network, email, web server and wiki, remote editing
facility (ftpfs) and in terms tools, I use acme a lot wherever I go. I
also use it as a handy way to store stuff centrally, for easy
worldwide access via drawterm. I would classify myself as slightly
paranoid, in that I don't really feel comfortable with letting Google
have at it willy nilly. Storing stuff at home may be more prone to
loss, but makes me feel better.

Plan 9 satisfies my curiosity in that I can understand and learn
things within it quite easily. Every time I have to use something like
Linux or MS, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it all.
That's fine if it's for work (I get paid for that, after all), but not
for my private life.

Robby

Re: [9fans] noweb and literal programming

[Robert Raschke]

On 4/10/09, Rudolf Sykora rudolf.syk...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hello,

 I've been thinking about 'well documented programs' and come across
 the 'noweb' program.
 Do you have any experience with literal programming and, particularly,
 noweb?
 (I noticed at least rsc seems to have played with it back in the year
 2000. He programmed some scripts to use the system in Plan9...)

 Thanks
 Ruda


Over the years I have used CWEB, Spiderweb (pretty-print using your
own rules), noweb, Funnelweb, and nuweb. Literate Programming suits
the way I think when solving a problem. I tend to start programming a
narrative, telling the story of the solution. These days I use mainly
nuweb (small C program, very easy to customise to your own
preferences) and html.

LP is not for everyone. It is definitely not for someone used to work
in a modern IDE. And it takes a bit of courage and conviction, if your
working with other people.

I use it mostly for smallish programs; one or two code files, 5000
lines of code. For example, scripted business logic for the
integrtions I do at work. Larger stuff involving muliple modules
usually involves more people, so the lowest common denominator wins.

Nuweb should be easy to get running on Plan 9. Noweb is harder, since
it depens on a lot of Unix scripts.

Robby

Re: [9fans] extensions of interest

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 12:06 AM, Bakul Shah bakul+pl...@bitblocks.com wrote:
 Unfortunately we don't have exact analogs in s/w.  We can
 only simplicate; we can't add lightness!

In manufacturing, I'd suppose lighter materials are harder to make and
use, kind of like using low level languages for components. Standard
optimization techique, replace measurably slow (heavy) components by
something implemented closer (lighter) to the machine.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Fwd: New Chip (SEAforth 40C18) - New Challenge

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 7:00 PM, maht mattmob...@proweb.co.uk wrote:

 SeaForth is dead already

 http://colorforth.com/vTPL.htm

 http://colorforth.com/S40.htm


These docs aren't dated. And I remember a lot of discussion about 1 -
2 years ago about the patent issues surrounding Chuck Moore's work. So
I'm wondering if this info is outdated. The Forth Usernet group seems
to indicate that these chips are fine and dandy.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Fwd: New Chip (SEAforth 40C18) - New Challenge

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 3:24 PM, maht mattmob...@proweb.co.uk wrote:

 These docs aren't dated.

 they appeared in the last week or so, before that was a page saying TPL
 pulled funding  and sacked Moore


Catching up with my online reading and the Forth group is indeed full
of this since the weekend.

It is just weird, all very deja vu. The previous generation of Moore's
designs went through a similar quagmire to nowhere.

Robby

Re: [9fans] venti conf

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 2:19 PM, hugo rivera uai...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hello,
 I am a little confused about setting up venti (on linux).
 I followed the instructions found on the wiki, and venti is up. But
 now I am lost; as far as I understood (from the man pages) I have to
 run vac every time I want to backup something and then unvac it every
 time I want to recover it, right? I heard many times, here and
 elsewhere, that you can configure venti to perform a backup of the
 whole system say at 3:00 am, then am I supposed to create some kind of
 rc script to do this (using vac, of course)? and where yesterday fits
 into this? I feel that I am missing a big part here. I want to be able
 to backup my home directory every day at 3:00 am.
 Sorry if the question has an obvious answer, but I cannot see the
 whole venti picture yet.
 --
 Hugo

Venti is just a block storage, I think you're wanting to learn about
fossil. But I have no idea if you can run fossil in p9p.

Robby

Re: [9fans] acme Put doesn't save

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Rudolf Sykora rudolf.syk...@gmail.com wrote:
 It really seems that acme-sac does save in the described way (at least
 it saves). That makes me wonder. Do plan9 acme, p9p acme and acme-sac
 have more similar differences? Are the programs separate in their
 development?

Acme-sac is based on the Inferno Acme, which is written in limbo and
has a few minor discrepancies to the P9 acme (for example, backspace
with text selected only deletes the selected text, it doesn't delete
the character prior to it).

Acme-sac is a life saver on windows. I couldn't live without it. Big
thank yous go out to caerwyn for this work.

Robby

Re: [9fans] spreding the word

[Robert Raschke]

It's got a whole chapter on alef, and the UI is still in B/W.
Definitly for an older edition of Plan 9.

'Tis a shame there's absolutley no attribution to be found. I wonder
who wrote the book? Seems to be quite readable.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Acme and spaces in file names

[Robert Raschke]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 2:26 PM, hugo rivera uai...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi guys,
 I realized that acme gets confused when handling files with spaces in
 their names, is there an easy way to handle this?
 I mean, for example, when I paint a file name with an space on it,
 using the left click, it would be nice that acme could open that file.
 Obviously removing spaces from my file names is a solution, but can
 acme handle this by its own?

There exists a 9P wrapper that you can slot between your normal fs and
Acme that will translate characters. I'm not sure what it's called, or
where it lives. Sorry.

The Acme SAC (based on Inferno) uses this automatically and maps
spaces to little space characters (␣).

Robby

Re: [9fans] inferno runs on n770 and n800/n810 (was: Re: How can I boot plan9 on my Compaq AlphaServer DS10L?)

[Robert Raschke]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 9:37 PM,  fge...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 10:21 PM, Anthony Sorace ano...@gmail.com wrote:
 i like nokia's line, and would love to see a port of Plan 9 (or
 Inferno) to the 770 or N800 (there's an even newer one, but i forget
 the model off hand and don't own one of those).

 Inferno works perfectly on the n770 and probably on the n800, n810 as
 well. It's not packaged and doesn't have full-screen mode, but it's
 quite simple to get it running, though i could not find any use for
 it. The binary is in caerwyn's inferno emulator collection at
 http://code.google.com/p/inferno-bin/
 and you can probably easily build it yoursef from the current distribution.


I use my N810 as a portable (fun) development machine, I installed all
the guff like gcc etc. And with that in place it took me an afternoon
to download inferno and compile it up. This is on the N810 itself, not
some hosted dev environment. The emu commandline works very well. I've
not yet tried running wm, that's coming over the holidays. But just to
have mk on the machine is a boon. My brain is too small for gmake.

Having a native Plan 9 on it may be interesting, but probably a lot of
work to get it to not empty the battery in 30 minutes. One thing to be
said about the Maemo platform is that it is pretty good in terms of
power consumption.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Very Off-Topic: Anybody here reads Sci-Fi? :)

[Robert Raschke]

I very much enjoy Samuel R. Delany
(http://www2.pcc.com/staff/jay/delany/); especially Babel-17, Nova,
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and Dhalgren. The latter one is
a good one for the holiday, as it's a tad longer. His short stories
are well worth seeking out as well. His stories are characterised by a
focus on people on the fringes of society without making a big deal of
it.

Also very enjoyable are books by Ken MacLeod
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_MacLeod). His first one, The Star
Fraction, is a gem. Although his later books employ a little bit too
much flashback.

And I second Ursula Le Guin. especially the books set in the Hainish
universe. Although you can give The Telling a miss, unless you like
religious epiphanies.

And finally, for good old fashioned, sillyness, Alan Dean Foster.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Gmail and upas

[Robert Raschke]

With Gmail you also have to be aware of the fact that Google does not
actually implement IMAP to the standard. There are quite a few odd
behaviours. A notable one has to do with deletion of emails, but I
can't find the exact reference just now. (I can try digging if you're
really intereested.)

Robby

Re: [9fans] Gmail and upas

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 2:14 PM, erik quanstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 by the way, i don't know of any way that gmail imap is not standard.
 perhaps this is in some esoteric corners of the protocol i'm not
 familar with.  for the basic stuff, i haven't seen any issues at all.

The two immediate issues I am aware of (via the UW-IMAP list) is that
MIME part sizes may be reported wrongly and that setting \Deleted on a
message will lead to it getting silently removed through an
auto-expunge that gmail does completely on its own (I believe this
latter behaviour can now be turned off through an experimental
setting).

Robby

Re: [9fans] An Observation

[Robert Raschke]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Andrew Simmons [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On the one hand, Too many cooks spoil the broth. On the other hand,
 Many hands make light work.

Cooks don't work, they give orders.

Re: [9fans] Help downloading Plan B using hget

[Robert Raschke]

hget -o $home/planb4e.tgz http://lsub.org/ls/export/planb4e.tgz

The man pages with Plan 9 are really good. Well worth a read.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Do we have a catalog of 9P servers?

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 6:26 AM, Enrico Weigelt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 * sqweek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Everyone has write access to the plan 9 wiki.

 hmm, perhaps I didn't look hard enough, but I didn't see anything
 like an edit button etc ... ;-o

Put in Acme Wiki.

Re: [9fans] mmap and shared libraries

[Robert Raschke]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Eris Discordia
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Man's got to know his limitations.

 Yes, _man_ has got to. That doesn't apply to deities :-P

Why do gods that walk the earth invariably act like spoilt brats? Ah,
hang on ...

Re: [9fans] Questions about plan9.

[Robert Raschke]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 9:37 AM, Nolan Hamilton
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 It dosent work unfortunatley its probally something I did, can you
 really break each step down for me?
 Sorry!

What doesn't work? You can't start upas/fs? Writing to /mail/fs/ctl
doesn't work? Or Acme Mail doesn't work?

Robby

Re: [9fans] Questions about plan9.

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 4:39 PM, Nolan Hamilton
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Can somebody give me instructions on
 1.  How can I can configure mail? ( and do not just redirect me to the
 wiki page on it.)

:-)

Do you mean reading mail or setting up a mail server? For the former,
the easiest is to use Mail inside of Acme. Not sure if this is the
latest greatest way to do it, but this is how I've done it for the
past four years and a bit.

In your lib/profile you will want to start upas/fs .

You can then open a mailbox on a remote IMAP server like this for
example (this will use factotum to prompt for your password):
  echo 'open /imap/your.imap.server/your.username local.box.name' /mail/fs/ctl

And in Acme use Mail local.box.name to start the mail reader.

 2.  How can I read newsgroups on plan9?

Hmm, can't seem to get to the contrib stuff on sources just now, so
here's how I do News for myself: http://www.tombob.com/plan9/

Robby

Re: [9fans] I want to port some program or driver

[Robert Raschke]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Siddharth Prakash Singh
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I want to port some program or driver to plan9 which has not been
 ported yet and is of high priority.
 Please suggest me !

I think support for more wireless network cards was mentioned in the past.

Or perhaps better support for graphics/network support under recent
virtual environments: VMware, Sun Virtual Box, MS Virtual Server.

Robby

Re: [9fans] invisible prompt in win

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 7:14 AM, Michael Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 1. Open a win in acme.
 2. Scroll down as far as possible.
 3. Notice that there is no $prompt visible at left.
 4. echo annoying
 5. Now scroll back up and it turns out you entered the echo command at
 a prompt after all!

Not entirely sure what other behaviour you were expecting? You
scrolled all the way down, leading to no text on your pane (it's all
up above), but your cursor is still where you left it (all the way at
the end of the text in the pane, all the way at the beginning of your
pane display).

Robby

Re: [9fans] invisible prompt in win

[Robert Raschke]

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 1:19 PM, erik quanstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  1. Open a win in acme.
  2. Scroll down as far as possible.
  3. Notice that there is no $prompt visible at left.
  4. echo annoying
  5. Now scroll back up and it turns out you entered the echo command at
  a prompt after all!

 Not entirely sure what other behaviour you were expecting? You
 scrolled all the way down, leading to no text on your pane (it's all
 up above), but your cursor is still where you left it (all the way at
 the end of the text in the pane, all the way at the beginning of your
 pane display).

 this is a bug.  you can see what you've typed but not the prompt.
 normally acme warps back to the tick when you type.  this bug is
 in acme since if you create a new window and type the prompt
 manually then continue with step 2, you get the same results.


It's because your cursor is actually showing! So, no need to warp anywhere.

New heuristic needed? Personally, I'd say no. Maybe add it to smacme?

Robby

Re: [9fans] feeding factotum on boot

[Robert Raschke]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Yaroslav [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 A question: how to feed a private (SSH host) key(s) to eve's factotum
 during the boot?
 The first what comes up to my mind is to save the key somewhere on
 fileserver, then to feed it to factotum from cpurc.
 Feel there should be other way...

I've got this in my cpurc:

auth/secstore -n -G factotum |read -m /mnt/factotum/ctl

Although I've forgotten how I set up the secstore for the cpu server.
That's the downside with systems that just work.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Does Plan 9 work under Microsoft's Hyper-V?

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 11:17 AM, Eris Discordia
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 It will eventually install but won't get past a specific step after the
 installed system is booted. I asked about the problem on 9fans. No
 solutions... yet.

 Here's the thread: http://9fans.net/archive/2008/01/547

With the iso I downloaded this week, I also get the issue that Eris points out.

Eris, if you want to give last years iso a try (20070329, it works
perfectly on MS Virtual Server R2 SP1), give me a shout and I'll put
it somewhere you can download it.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Does Plan 9 work under Microsoft's Hyper-V?

[Robert Raschke]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 2:16 PM, erik quanstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 The run from cd booted up just fine in MS Virtual Server 2005. I
 never got round to installing it fully though. If I remember
 correctly, I started an install once, but had to turn off disk dma and
 then the formatting of a small venti (~3-4GB) took more than two
 hours, so I aborted. Got a faster machine now, so maybe I'll try
 that again.


 i didn't think that dma was the default.  if it is, i would
 think that this would cause more problems than it would
 solve.  slow is better than not working at all.

Running another install into MSVirtualServer R2 SP1 just now with an
old iso had lying around (20070329) and I misremembered. Disk dma had
to be on, otherwise you get lots of i/o errors. It is the copydist
that takes forever. I'll post back once I got it all up. I may try it
with the latest iso as well.

Robby

Re: [9fans] window behaviour

[Robert Raschke]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 10:05 AM, prem [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 % window -f $font
 (this opens a window and closes it), however
 % window
 (this opens a window)

As far as I know, window doesn't take a -f option. So it's probably
trying to run the command '-f /lib/font/...' in the new window, which
fails, and since that's all you wanted it to do, the window closes
again.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Acme without Flamage

[Robert Raschke]

One of the central tenets of Plan 9 is that everything is a file. So
all file based activities are really, really easy.

Most OO programming appears to follow a more DB oriented style (at
least those with horrendous packaging/module mechanisms). That files
are used to store your programs appears to be incidental. Therefore
using a file oriented system when programming something like Java is
painful, to say the least.

Thus, acme is very probably not the right editor, unless you are in
complete control of the code. But I would say the same holds for vi or
emacs. Its just that those two have had a lot of additions poured into
them that were inspired by the IDE world.

Acme is supremely fabulous when you are in complete control or if
you're programming using a language/environment where there are no
strange rules on where your files have to go (the underlying OO DB,
essentially).

Initially, all that replacing vi/emacs with acme does is change your
habits from keyboarding to mousing. All the pain you get from the
bad code remains the same. Some of the IDE inspired features in
vi/emacs may help lessen that pain slightly. But to get a more radical
change, I'm afraid using a proper IDE is where it happens. Welcome to
objects, good-bye files.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Using the Acme Editor

[Robert Raschke]

Going by your list, I would conclude your code is something in the
vein of Java plus web stuff, maybe even J2EE, or maybe the scourge of
the editing world, Python.

If that's the case and you have to deal with other people's code, Acme
is probably not going to help you very much. In fact Acme will make
the shortcomings of any code you are looking at a lot more obvious.

For me, that's a crucial thing. Keeps my code in check purely through
the text of it.

Acme's strengths lie in navigating, writing and changing code that is
of a certain standard.

Just my thoughts,
Robby

Re: [9fans] current state of thread programming

[Robert Raschke]

I think useful parallel programming paradigms can very probably be
abstracted from really big systems like a national health system or an
army. How parallelism is employed in those systems, would be a good
starting point for a deeper investigation.

Especially a military system must have some very concrete, well tried
and tested, ways of organising things in parallel. Government is
another one, but I'm not sure if that's a good model ;-)

Robby

[9fans] P9P libthread on Debian ARM vs. makecontext et al.

[Robert Raschke]

Hi,

I recently got myself a lovely Nokia N810 internet tablet. That runs
Debian ARM and I thought I'd have a stab at compiling P9P for it.
Unfortunately, the makecontext/swapcontext calls are not supported on
that platform by Debian.

I noticed that libthread/Linux.c has implementations of those two
functions for ARM. So I thought I try compiling libthread without
pthread support. This time, it's the mcontext_t (aka sigcontext)
struct that is causing an issue. The Debian ARM sigcontext struct
looks like this:

struct sigcontext {
unsigned long trap_no;
unsigned long error_code;
unsigned long oldmask;
unsigned long arm_r0;
...
unsigned long arm_r10;
unsigned long arm_fp;
unsigned long arm_ip;
unsigned long arm_sp;
unsigned long arm_lr;
unsigned long arm_pc;
unsigned long arm_cpsr;
unsigned long fault_address;
};

The code in Linux.c that implements makecontext() for ARM expects this
struct to contain a gregs array. I'm guessing that gregs is the same
as the enumerated arm_* ones above. So, would I be correct in assuming
that gregs[13] is arm_sp and gregs[14] is arm_lr?

Thanks,
Robby

Re: [9fans] P9P libthread on Debian ARM vs. makecontext et al.

[Robert Raschke]

On 7/8/08, Michael Teichgräber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  The code in Linux.c that implements makecontext() for ARM expects this
  struct to contain a gregs array. I'm guessing that gregs is the same
  as the enumerated arm_* ones above. So, would I be correct in assuming
  that gregs[13] is arm_sp and gregs[14] is arm_lr?

 Hi, I would say yes, as SP is r13 and LR is r14 on arm.
 To run Russ' libtask on arm7 I used the Linux-arm-asm.s and
 the arm-specific makecontext implementation from Linux.c,
 as well as the following structures.

 M.
 --

 enum {
NREG = 16,
 };

 typedef
 struct Mcontext
 {
u32int  gregs[NREG];/* general registers */
 } Mcontext;

 typedef
 struct ucontext
 {
Mcontextuc_mcontext;
sigset_t uc_sigmask;
struct {
void*ss_sp;
u16int  ss_size;
} uc_stack;

 } ucontext_t;


Thanks, that's gotten me quite a bit further. I can compile the whole
lot now and run quite a few of the commands, including rc, under the
ARM qemulation. Hurrah.

Next I need to figure out why I get segfaults for some. And then try
it on real HW.

Robby

Re: [9fans] sad commentary

[Robert Raschke]

Not sure when Mr. Adams wrote this, but I think it was mid-90's.

  First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn
  numbers into letters with ASCII -- and we thought it was a typewriter.
  Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With
  the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
Douglas Adams

I do have to wonder about the whole TV on your mobile craze.
Apparently, there's now features made specifically for the xx-small
screen. Does anyone on this list actually watch stuff on those dinky
screens? My eyes (and maybe imagination) are not good enough to enjoy
that.

Robby

Re: [9fans] Eeepc

[Robert Raschke]

I don't think 9load can just boot off a usb yet.

Can the eee bios make the usb look like a disk? What were those
options in plan9.ini for letting the bios do the disk access?

Robby