Re: old book on learning question

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/13/2010 02:37 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:
> Probably nobody knows what I'm talking about but...
> 
> Many moons ago a mentor gave me a book to read on how to teach yourself.
>  It wasn't on any specific topic.  The author may have been a
> mathematician.  Maybe written in the 1960's.  Not much to go on.
> 
> The other book the same fellow gave me was 'Calculus Made Easy' by
> Silvanus P. Thompson.  That book rocked.  What one fool can do, another can.
> 
> Thanks for any tips!

Perhaps "how to solve it" by George Pólya?

Matt
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Re: Upgrade a CVS server to something else?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/13/2010 10:03 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> From: discuss-boun...@blu.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@blu.org] On Behalf
>> Of Tom Metro
>>
>> Someone else has addressed this. SVN provides some raw functionality by
>> which developers can implement tagging by convention. The big down side
>> to SVN tags is that the VCS doesn't prohibit you from turning a tag into
>> a branch - or in other words, making modifications to a tagged revision.
>> Doing so would generally be considered bad practice, however I've never
>> seen a developer violate the conventions in the 10 years I've been using
>> SVN.
> 
> More correctly, "doesn't automatically make the tagged directory read-only."
> 
> 
> I know, in organizations that I support on svn, we have a release process.
> All the engineers sync up, somebody runs regressions, and if all the tests
> pass, then we tag that release.  I make the tagged directory read-only.
> 
> Later, if we ever need to respin, then we fork a branch from the tag.  Thus
> leaving the tag read-only, and continuing to modify the branch.  Which will
> later produce another tag.

With subversion and it's repository-wide revision numbers, you also have the
option of creating 'tags' by just noting a particular revision number on
your team wiki, perhaps with the full checkout command:
 - Demo'd version Dec 12, 2010
  svn co foo.bar://svn/proj/tr...@21023

You can do most anything you want to do with just that revision number (e.g.
create a branch from that revision).  The advantage is that you don't have
to rely on convention to get the read-only status ;-)

Matt
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Re: FCC internet access rules

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/21/2010 10:45 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> As usual all media outlets are not to be trusted.  But unlike usual, I don't
> know where to read between the lines and discern where the real truth is.  I
> start reading 12-page long detailed articles about blah blah, and reach the
> conclusion, "We probably lost."  "What the hell, I might as well cave in and
> buy a stupid consumer-raping smartphone now."
> 
> You know I want one.  I'm only objecting for philosophical reasons, as a
> consumer who is not a clueless idiot distracted by shiny objects, I find
> myself washing the dishes after dinner tonight, thinking "Cave in.  Cave in.
> Cave in.  It's Christmas."

If you're never out of range of wifi, grab a color Nook and root it.
Much nicer and cheaper ($250) than a smartphone.  Android runs great on
it, you can watch movies on it, play angry birds, whatever you might use
a smartphone for (except making calls).

I saw one (a rooted color nook) recently and wanted one even though I
have no use for it (I already have an android smartphone).

Matt
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Re: Gmail no longer loads on Firefox

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/01/2011 11:04 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 01/01/2011 10:54 AM, Jack Coats wrote:
>> On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 9:09 AM, Jerry Feldman  wrote:
>>> This morning, I tried to load gmail on Firefox (firefox.x86_64
>>> 3.6.13-1.fc14)
>>> I ended up loading in on Chrome. The message is:
>>> This is taking longer than usual. *Try reloading the page*
>>> .
>>>
>>> I was able to load gmail using the Basic HTML setting, but I could not
>>> use that to make a phone call. I get the same thing with both my gmail
>>> accounts. With Chrome, it comes up fine. I'm wondering if there is some
>>> issue with Firefox or gmail. Since it was working yesterday and I have
>>> not performed an update I'm thinking that they may have made some change
>>> to gmail.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jerry Feldman 
>>
>> No problem for me this morning, but I am using 32bit.
>>
> Really strange because I use it every day, and the last update I had was
> on Thursday (and I don't remember if there was a Firefox update). Looks
> to me like Google may have made some changes. Strange.

Works for me:
 firefox-3.6.13-1.fc14.x86_64

Have you restarted firefox lately?  Sometimes if you update firefox and
don't restart it, it gets quirky.  Like it mostly works, but it you try to
use a text box it starts acting weird.

Matt
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Re: Gmail no longer loads on Firefox solved

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/03/2011 10:43 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 01/03/2011 09:46 AM, Richard Pieri wrote:
>> On Jan 3, 2011, at 7:42 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>>> I removed a few plugins and cleared the cache. It now appears to work fine.
>> I was going to suggest that but you already figured it out.
>>
>> That's good general advice: if your browser, any browser, is acting 
>> strangely then clear the cache and restart.
>>
> Agreed. Cookies are nefarious too. I took a methodical approach because
> I wanted to track down the problem whether it is due to some cookie,
> some addon, or cache. Cache is easy, cd .../Cache; rm -rf * :-)

Tools->Clear Recent History
has a bunch of options for selectively doing those things as well.

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Re: Desktop searching in Ubuntu

[Matthew Gillen]

Beagle used to be the answer, but it's no longer being developed.
Modern distros include Strigi (frontends include NEPOMUK if you're using
KDE, Deskbar if you're using Gnome).  Deskbar is included with Ubuntu's
Gnome desktop.  Some google-fu should show you how to turn on the
indexing engine if it is off by default.

Matt

On 01/14/2011 12:30 PM, Chris O'Connell wrote:
> There are two that I recommend:
> if you are just searching for files from the command line you can use the
> LOCATE command.  Envoke "updatedb" to update the file index and then "locate
> filename" to get a list.
> 
> Alternately, google desktop makes an indexing software for ubuntu that will
> search file contents, much like Windows search or Mac's Spotlight.
> 
> On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Tim Callaghan wrote:
> 
>> I'm running 10.04 on my desktop and cannot find how to enable "indexed"
>> searching.  Under the places dropdown I can "Search for Files", but its
>> checking the filesystem each time.
>>
>> Is there a built-in (or better) option?
>>
>> -Tim
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Re: wireless keyboards

[Matthew Gillen]

>> On 1/19/2011 6:15 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
>>> Tom Martinson wrote:
 ...and it has to have a cord, no wireless.
>>>
>>> What's the consensus on wireless vs. wired keyboards?

I can't bring myself to use a wireless keyboard.  I just don't like the 
idea of broadcasting my passwords out to anyone within listening 
distance.  Wireless mice don't bother me so much; there is only one site 
I use that uses a clicky password, and even then you have the option of 
using the keyboard or clicking on the numbers.

I can see a use case for wireless keyboards as a MythTV remote, but 
that's a particular use case where passwords are not typically needed.

Matt
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Re: Neither Speakeasy speed test nor Comcast Speed test work on Fedora 14

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/22/2011 10:09 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Neither Speakeasy speed test nor Comcast Speed test work on Fedora 14
> I have made sure I have a good version of the Java plugin (1.6.0_21,
> Java 6 version 21 - the latest is 23) as well as Flash:10.2 d161
> Firefox 3.6.13-1.fc14
> Chrome 8.0.552.237
> 
> With the Speakeasy Speed test, the locations do not show up, and with
> Comcast there is a blank window in the page. I tend to recall that both
> are flash based.

For at least the speakeasy one, if you right click in the blank window, then
select "play" from the context menu, then do that a few more times, it will
cycle through the steps, but it doesn't work right (ie reported speeds are
0).  I chalk it up to flash brain-damage...

Matt
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Re: Neither Speakeasy speed test nor Comcast Speed test work on Fedora 14

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/22/2011 10:53 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 01/22/2011 10:24 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
>> On 01/22/2011 10:09 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>>> Neither Speakeasy speed test nor Comcast Speed test work on Fedora 14
>>> I have made sure I have a good version of the Java plugin (1.6.0_21,
>>> Java 6 version 21 - the latest is 23) as well as Flash:10.2 d161
>>> Firefox 3.6.13-1.fc14
>>> Chrome 8.0.552.237
>>>
>>> With the Speakeasy Speed test, the locations do not show up, and with
>>> Comcast there is a blank window in the page. I tend to recall that both
>>> are flash based.
>> For at least the speakeasy one, if you right click in the blank window, then
>> select "play" from the context menu, then do that a few more times, it will
>> cycle through the steps, but it doesn't work right (ie reported speeds are
>> 0).  I chalk it up to flash brain-damage...
> Certainly :-).

Actually, now that I think about it, it might be from a flashblocker addon
for firefox.  That extension has some very odd effects on certain flash
sites.  You might try disabling that (supposing you have it) and try again...

Matt
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Re: homelinux.net accounts

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/11/2011 08:38 AM, Myrle Francis wrote:
> hello all, and thanks in advance
> 
> I remember some time ago that I set up a mafmanet.homelinux.net domain.  and
> for the life of my I cant google the website I need to be to manige this
> acct. and I know some of you are have a homelinux.net domain

$whois homelinux.net
[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[Redirected to whois.dyndns.com]
[Querying whois.dyndns.com]
[whois.dyndns.com]
Registrant:
 Hostmaster, DynDNS  hostmas...@dyndns.com
 Dynamic Network Services, Inc.


HTH,
Matt
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Re: 30% Apple

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/17/2011 09:06 AM, Chris O'Connell wrote:
> This cost is simply going to be handed down to the consumer.
> 
> Unfortunately, Apple is a very greedy company.  They already have HUGE mark
> ups on all of their hardware.  Remember right before the IPAD was released
> one of the higher ups at Apple said "We are prepared to be nimble with our
> pricing if the IPAD doesn't sell."  Well, that right there should say
> something about the markup on the IPAD.  Their laptops are much the same
> (which is sad since I love the Macbook Pro line).
> 
> I personally think 30% is way to high.  Perhaps 10-15% would be more
> reasonable, but Apple is huge and most companies are probably just going to
> along with this.

Personally I love that they are charging 30%.  I dislike the
stranglehold they keep on their platform, so if they want to shoot
themselves in the foot, I'm all for it.

Apple isn't as big as Amazon, and I think there is going to be some
major pushback from the large content providers.  And as android becomes
a viable contender (doing to apple /exactly/ what microsoft did to apple
in the 80s), I think Apple is going to find their bargaining position
isn't as strong as it was even a year ago.

Yes, Apple is greedy.  But fortunately for us Amazon is greedy too.  So
is Google.  Companies can't stand third-parties getting a cut from their
core products.  Case in point: American Airlines has been de-listed from
Expedia because AA was looking at how Southwest sells all their tickets
themselves, and told Expedia that they didn't want to pay their
surcharge anymore.

So I say just sit back and enjoy the fireworks while these big guys duke
it out.  Will 'we the consumers' be worse off if you can no longer buy
stuff from  amazon on your Apple products?  Depends on your point of
view.  IMO, anything that makes proprietary platforms weaker is good for
consumers in the long run.  Do I think it will actually play out that
way?  Hard to say.   There is a delicate balance, since Amazon has it's
own walled garden it's trying to promote around it's proprietary-format
ebooks.  I hope they both lose, at least from the point of view of their
walled gardens succeeding in vendor-lock-in and open source lock-out...

Matt
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Re: Sandboxing & System 76 Laptops

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/17/2011 09:11 AM, Chris O'Connell wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> My question is sort of cross platform.
> 
> I have an 86 year old user here at my work.  He's very bright, but no matter
> how many times I tell him not to click weird email links or strange websites
> he does.  The result is a weekly visit into his office to run a 45 minute
> sweep for spyware, viruses and malware.

Others have answered about sandboxing, but there are some things you can
do besides that:
Make sure his user account has the minimal amount of permissions (ie
can't install things without admin assistance, etc).  Lock down IE at
it's highest security settings (add exceptions for the handful of
known-good sites he's supposed to be accessing for his job if necessary).

Firefox and modern IE both have URL checkers built in (run by Google and
M$ respectively) that send every URL you visit to the checker to see if
it's a known malware site.  Make sure that is on for him, even if you
normally turn that off.

Force him to use an email client that won't execute things, and doesn't
know how to fire off the browser to open a link (and doesn't render
html, doesn't execute javascript itself, etc).  It won't stop a
determined malicious user from opening links, but it will at least make
him spend some effort doing it, and it seems as if the problem is that
he just doesn't think about it.

HTH,
Matt
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Re: 30% Apple

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/17/2011 10:13 AM, Dan O'Donovan wrote:
>  It's also worth noting that Apple seldom make choices that result in a loss 
> of experience for ... their customers 

Really?  Does iTunes/iPod support open formats like Ogg or Flac?  No.
Sure, you can replace the firmware on your ipod with rockbox or the
like, but that's not exactly the Apple experience, is it?

I would argue that the very existence of projects like rockbox (at least
it's i-device ports) and the various IPhone jailbreaking efforts point
to the fact that Apple /does/ sacrifice user-experience for the sake of
their own business interests.  I'm not saying Apple is any worse than
any other company, I'm just saying they aren't really any different from
any other company.

> It's also nice to read that Apple are refusing to pass subscriber's personal 
> info on to publishers - those are valuable freebees for the publisher that 
> aren't often used to the advantage of the subscriber. 

Sorry to be cynical again, but Facebook and Google have similar policies
(facebook just sucks at actually enforcing the policy).  Why? Not
because they are being benevolent dictators.  It's because they are
realizing how valuable that information is; all of these companies are
getting into the content-delivery business, and they don't want to share
this valuable info with their competition (i.e. other content
providers).  They just word it in their press-releases as if they are
doing consumers a favor.

It has far more to do with maintaining their walled garden than it does
about consumer rights...

Matt
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Re: 30% Apple

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/17/2011 12:51 PM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> On Feb 17, 2011, at 10:56 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> 
>> On 02/17/2011 10:13 AM, Dan O'Donovan wrote:
>>> It's also worth noting that Apple seldom make choices that result in a loss 
>>> of experience for ... their customers 
>>
>> Really?  Does iTunes/iPod support open formats like Ogg or Flac?  No.
> 
> Do most (non-lug-subscribing) users care that relatively esoteric
> formats aren't supported? I'm going to go with "No".

10 years ago you could have said the same thing about how most people
don't care if their connection to a given website is secured with SSL.
Just because "most non-lug-subscribers" don't know enough to care
doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

My point was that in the long term, having patent-encumbered formats as
consumers' only option is harmful to the consumer.  It increases costs
for content producers, which has all sorts of negative effects.  As a
Fedora guy, I'm kind of surprised you're making this argument.  Don't
you get sick of people complaining that they can't listen to their music
collection with an out-of-the-box Fedora install?

>> Sure, you can replace the firmware on your ipod with rockbox or the
>> like, but that's not exactly the Apple experience, is it?
> 
> Does Ogg or Flac playback decode in hardware or software? If its in
> software, well, that's a compelling reason for not supporting it right
> there -- it'll slaughter battery life.

But they already support multiple formats (MP3, AAC, WAV, etc).  So I
don't buy that it was too technically difficult to support it with
hardware, or that they have mp3-specific decoding hardware.  The ipod
Touch uses a 'custom' ARM processor.  I would guess that the 'custom'
part there has more to do with the integrated graphics and I/O than with
special decoding instructions...

> Is supporting more things badly really better for most (non-lug-subscribing)
> users than doing less things very well?

Depends on how narrow your point of view is.  If you don't care about
future content creation, and are happy supporting MPEG-LA with every DVD
you buy, then I guess it is better.

Matt
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Re: 30% Apple

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/17/2011 02:47 PM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> 
> On Feb 17, 2011, at 1:58 PM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
>> My point was that in the long term, having patent-encumbered formats as
>> consumers' only option is harmful to the consumer.
> 
> Unfortunately, we're kinda already screwed.
> ...
> Outside of internet video, its pretty much a hopeless, lost cause. Call
> me bitter or defeated or whatever, but that's how I see it.

No argument here.  But a large part of why we're already screwed is the
vicious circle coming from a complete lack of support in dedicated
hardware (like TVs, portable music players, etc).  Apple is complicit in
that problem, and while they are by no means the only ones, my point was
that they aren't exactly saintly defenders of what's best for consumers.

I'm not going to claim that Google is any less self interested, but the
thing it does have going for it is that at least a couple of its
interests do line up a little better with consumer (including
open-source) interests: all android devices (that I know of) support
open formats like ogg natively.  A small step to be sure, but a step in
the right direction.  It does mean that it's much less painful (read: no
complaints from the wife) for me in my own little enclave to keep my
house standardized on ogg (at least for music that I buy in CD form and
have to transcode myself).

> ...
> Honestly, I really don't think alternative (and often inferior) codecs
> are the answer here anyway. Revamping of the crapstorm that is the US
> Patent system is, to the point where MPEG-LA has no legal legs to stand
> on anymore.

Amen.  Unfortunately I think that has about as much chance of happening
as ogg does becoming a format supported natively by mainstream
(non-android) devices.  What's really scary to me is how MPEG-LA has put
out a call to collect patents that apply to Theora, so they can start
collecting on that too...

As an interesting aside:  I've noticed that almost all the games I've
bought in the last few years (for win32) use ogg for all their sound and
in-game music files.  So at least some non-linux developers see value in
the format.  Perhaps the seeds of the revolution have been planted after
all and they just need time to grow... ;-)

Matt
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Re: Tor

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/18/2011 01:27 PM, John Boland wrote:
> i can see that this is very handy for folks wishing to anonymize their web
> activities.  whether to avoid government interference or something more
> nefarious.
> how does this effectively differ from the ipredator service (
> https://www.ipredator.se/?lang=en) offered by the pirate bay?  this service
> creates a vpn tunnel from your machine to their servers and then nat's your
> activities.

Because with Tor you don't have to trust any given third party (pirate
bay in your example).  The idea in Tor is that no one in the network
knows who a particular packet is destined for except the intended
receiver.  If pirate bay got served a warrant (let's ignore the
international issues for the moment so I can illustrate the technical
differences) to reveal the identity of the receiver or originator of
some packet, they could be forced to identify you (and they do know who
you are).  If someone in your Tor network got served a warrant, they
couldn't give you up even if they wanted to, since they can't know who
the ultimate receiver was.

>From what I understand there is a theoretical weakness to Tor in that
the anonymity can be compromised if a large number of the nodes in the
Tor network are owned by a single snooper (say, the gov't).  But I don't
follow Tor that closely

Matt
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Re: Tor

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/18/2011 01:45 PM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> On 02/18/2011 01:27 PM, John Boland wrote:
>> i can see that this is very handy for folks wishing to anonymize their web
>> activities.  whether to avoid government interference or something more
>> nefarious.
>> how does this effectively differ from the ipredator service (
>> https://www.ipredator.se/?lang=en) offered by the pirate bay?  this service
>> creates a vpn tunnel from your machine to their servers and then nat's your
>> activities.

There's also the fact that a VPN-based solution is far easier (for say,
an ISP) to block (e.g. firewall-block a single destination IP) than Tor:
blocking Tor would require deep-packet inspection, since the nodes
involved in the network are not static.

Matt
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Re: Diagnosing connection issue

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/21/2011 12:47 PM, edwa...@linuxmail.org wrote:
> The issue has been resolved by not using Mozilla-derived software on 
> both operating systems.

A little late now, but someone earlier pointed out that IPv6 DNS can
cause issues because of incomplete support for it.

With mozilla-based products you can set a configuration parameter (in
firefox, type 'about:config' in the url bar):
 network.dns.disableIPv6

set it to true and see if that fixes the problem for you.  I had to set
that to true a long time ago because one particular site (that I was
taking internet-based training on) was excruciatingly slow (several
minutes to load every page).  After I set that to true, everything was
zippy again.

HTH,
Matt
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Re: dual monitors

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/21/2011 01:14 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> This weekend I attached a 2nd monitor to my laptop and designated it the
> "primary display" in the "NVIDIA X Server Settings" applet. I have it
> running in "TwinView" mode where the two monitors share a contiguous
> desktop.
> 
> I've ran across plenty of mentions of issues with multiple monitors in
> X, and sure enough it didn't take long to spot them. I could see the
> occasional, obscure app. not handling it well (like DockBarX, or Bless
> Hex editor, both of which have problems) but I'm seeing issues with some
> main stream apps like OpenOffice. OOo puts up its splash screen centered
> across both displays. Then opens its window on on the laptop's screen,
> rather than the primary display. Even after manually moving the window
> to the correct display, every time it opens a dialog it goes back to the
> laptop's display.
> 
> It probably doesn't help that the primary display ended up being to the
> right of the laptop. I have a feeling poorly coded defaults would tend
> to work better if things were the other way around, but this ordering
> fits the physical setup better.
> 
> So I'm wondering, is there an X configuration (for GNOME 2.28.1
> w/nvidia-glx-185) that is the "path of least resistance" for getting
> dual monitors to work with the fewest problems?

Sounds like it thinks you have one large display instead of two
independent ones.  Are you using nvidia's tool to set up twinview?  In
their tool, "X Server Display Configuration", does it show two monitors?
 You can use that tool to set which is the primary, and how they are
oriented.  Are the monitors of the same resolution?

For reference, I have twinview enabled, and am using two monitors with
identical resolution.  Splash screens show up in the center of one
screen (instead of split across the middle of both like you describe).

HTH,
Matt
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Re: dual monitors

[Matthew Gillen]

On 2/21/2011 6:15 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Matthew Gillen wrote:
>> Are the monitors of the same resolution?
> 
> No.

I think this might be part of the issue.  I had a co-worker who had this
same issue you describe (with ubuntu), I have a msg out to see if/how he
fixed it.

>> For reference, I have twinview enabled...
> 
> Which version of GNOME? NVIDIA driver?

gnome: 2.32 (fedora 14)
nvidia: 260.19.36

> Is your primary screen on the right or left?

Left.  And the gnome panels are only on the left monitor.  Interestingly
enough, the gdm login prompt randomly appears on one screen or the
other.  But the gnome panels are always on the primary.

>> Splash screens show up in the center of one screen (instead of split
>> across the middle of both like you describe).
> 
> Most applications handle it correctly. I was expecting the less used
> ones to have issues, but I was surprised to see something as mainstream
> as OOo not handling it correctly.

When you maximize a window, does it stick to one screen or does it go
across the whole desktop?

Matt
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Re: X crashes with SSID Broadcast turned off

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/26/2011 08:11 AM, edwa...@linuxmail.org wrote:
> My laptop has Xubuntu 10.10 installed (Ubuntu with XFCE desktop).  With the 
> SSID Broadcast turned off at the router (the Netgear I recently purchased), 
> once logged into the desktop, it (X?) crashes and returns to the login 
> screen.  Before the actual crash occurred each time, the network-manager icon 
> did not appear on the XFCE taskbar.
> 
> Once SSID is turned back on and logged in, everything is fine.  Why would 
> having this turned off, cause the desktop to crash, unless there is an 
> obvious issue (bug) in network-manager?  On the surface, it would seem that 
> in order to prevent such a crash, Ubuntu and its variants would require SSID 
> be turned on.

An NM bug wouldn't be able to crash the system, it's got to be either a
flakey driver or faulty hardware.  The latter is hard to determine,
although sometimes you can collect evidence via another OS (i.e. if
Windows/BSD/other flavor-of-linux doesn't crash, then it is unlikely the
hardware's fault).

Don't rule out other flavors of linux for your experimentation.  When it
comes to wireless network drivers there are some big differences in
distro-specific kernel patches.  Usually that works out in ubuntu's
favor (they support more cards out of the box), but when you live on the
edge...

HTH,
Matt
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Re: Sendmail: Make doesn't make sendmail.cf from sendmail.mc

[Matthew Gillen]

On 03/17/2011 10:58 PM, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> So it's just calling the script at /etc/mail/make:
> 
> $ ls -l /etc/mail/make 
> -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 2700 Sep 14  2010 /etc/mail/make
> 
> 'make' has a debug mode, so you could, e.g.:
> 
> cd /etc/mail && sudo make -d
> 
> And that should print gobs of difficult to read but possible useful info on
> why your aliases database is not being rebuilt.


Along those same lines, you could just call from the command line what
that make script is ultimately calling:
   m4 sendmail.mc > sendmail.cf


> success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiam.
>   

Great quote :-)

Matt
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Re: Fun with Gnome/KDE and NIS/NFS

[Matthew Gillen]

On 3/24/2011 7:10 PM, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> I have an isolated LAN consisting of a Fedora NIS/NFS server and a
> handful of CentOS and Fedora workstations.It has been a while
> since I last added a node, but I recently needed to.   NIS and NFS
> work fine - I can ssh into the new node with no problem.
>
> But, for console login, whether I use KDE or GNOME, I get the infamous
> login, then immediate log out with the warning that I've been logged
> in for less than 10 seconds...
>
> I've had this problem before, but it was a while back and I cannot
> recall how I fixed it.
>
> Disk space is plentiful, and my account is fine because I can ssh into
> the box - console login is the problem.
>
> I have no problem with console with any other node on this network to
> my account - just this new box.
>
> /tmp has 1777 permissions.
>
> How did I fix this the last time...???

If the nfslockd on the server is dead (or it's not started on the 
client), Gnome will be very unhappy (I'm guessing KDE would be too).  It 
only affects file locking, so logging in to a shell via ssh wouldn't be 
affected.

HTH,
Matt
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Re: SVN log history woes

[Matthew Gillen]

On 04/15/2011 08:46 AM, theBlueSage wrote:
> However, if I then merge foo.txt back into trunk and do svn log foo.txt
> I will only see 3 commits. the two I did before the branching, and the
> commit message from the merge back into trunk. I need to find a way to
> see all the history.

Interesting problem.  What version of svn are you using?  1.6+ keeps
much better information about merges, and there is a flag to "svn log"
now that shows additional info from the merge history (-g /
--use-merge-history).  I don't have a 1.6 repo with properly done merges
handy, so I can't tell you exactly what that adds.

If that doesn't do what you want, you could do a few things:
- If you formatted your merge messages in a particular way (to include
the path to the branch that is being merged, etc), then it should
theoretically be possible to wrap the svn log in a script that
recursively calls svn log on the merged branches (using --stop-on-copy).

- You could write a script (or if you want to get fancy, do it as a
pre-commit hook, which is allowed to modify the log) to generate a
commit message for the /merge commit/ that includes all the constituent
commit messages from the branch.

I think doing the second option is probably better, and done in a
non-automatic way (ie don't do the pre-commit hook).  The reason is the
same as the reason why subversion doesn't do this automatically:  the
nature of a merge /may/ include human intervention and/or more manual
changes.  These manual changes may invalidate/undo some of the changes
from the branch.

So unless you have a policy where merges may only contain results of
"svn merge" and no manual edits (which in turn would require the branch
maintainer to keep making commits to the branch until it would merge
cleanly), then it's not safe to do anything automatic.

HTH,
Matt
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Re: display question

[Matthew Gillen]

On 05/04/2011 11:48 AM, dan moylan wrote:
> 
> when some user owns the gnome desktop, another user
> opereating in a terminal window seems unable to open
> an application that needs the display.  how does one
> allow this?

The user that owns the display needs to run:
 xhost +

Then the console user can set their $DISPLAY to 0:0 and it will work.

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Re: networking and sendmail

[Matthew Gillen]

On 05/04/2011 12:39 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> At work I have a number of VMs. When these VMs were configured with
> dynamic IP addresses, they booted very quickly, but now they tend to
> wait on sendmail and sm_client to time out. Everything else is fine. I
> can even ssh into the VM while it is waiting for sendmail. Sendmail is
> not configured.
> 
> Why would sendmail (and sm_client) timeout on a static IP but not with a
> dynamic IP.

Because sendmail is obnoxious in it's use of dns/name-resolution on
startup.  I've had this problem with sendmail going back as long as I've
been using it where if it can't look up the local hostname (or if the
hostname is misconfigured), then it just hangs on startup.

So I'm guessing you were using network manager when you used the DHCP
addresses, and NM rewrites the /etc/hosts file when it gets an address.

If you're still using NM with your static addresses, be aware that NM
has (until very recently) had some obnoxious behavior w.r.t. /etc/hosts
and static ip configurations (e.g. re-writing /etc/hosts such that the
hostname always pointed to 127.0.0.1 instead of the public IP).

In short, I think it's a DNS/name resolution issue.  Setting /etc/hosts
correctly should fix it, but watch out for NM rewriting it (and
re-breaking it in many cases).

HTH,
Matt
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Re: display question

[Matthew Gillen]

On 05/04/2011 01:01 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 12:57:48PM -0400, Matthew Gillen wrote:
>> On 05/04/2011 11:48 AM, dan moylan wrote:
>>>
>>> when some user owns the gnome desktop, another user
>>> opereating in a terminal window seems unable to open
>>> an application that needs the display.  how does one
>>> allow this?
>>
>> The user that owns the display needs to run:
>>  xhost +
>>
>> Then the console user can set their $DISPLAY to 0:0 and it will work.
> 
> 
> Major security risk, do not do this on a networked system, a multiuser
> system or one in which you don't completely understand the X
> authentication system.

Okay, if you don't trust your firewall then you can run:
 xhost localhost
instead.

Matt
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oracle v google (android patent case)

[Matthew Gillen]

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011050505150858

132 claims by Oracle will be reduced to 3.  And those 129 not chosen are
forever surrendered (well, except with reference to new products).

Sort of an interesting process whereby oracle self selects down to 40
claims, then google (through their own self-selection) reduces its prior
art evidence down to 120 references, then oracle self-selects down to 20
claims, then google to 60 prior art references, and finally the
reduction to the final numbers (3 claims and 8 prior art refs).

Sounds like a lot of overtime for the lawyers...

The trial (if it happens) won't happen before Oct.

Matt
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Re: Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity

[Matthew Gillen]

On 05/10/2011 11:17 AM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> Another pro to consider: menus aren't duplicated needlessly
> across multiple instances of the same program. Part of this has
> to do with how processes are launch in, say, gnome, vs. in Mac
> OS X. Two gnome terminal windows == two different applications,
> each with its own menu[*]. Two Terminal terminal windows on OS X
> is two windows of the same application. One menu bar instead of
> two. Now add a bunch more terminal windows and consider which
> one makes better use of screen real estate.

That would be more compelling if the major terminal programs
(gnome-terminal, konsole) hadn't taken a tip from Powershell and started
supporting tabbed instances.  I only ever start one instance of
gnome-terminal, then ctrl-shift-t until have my workspace.  Or just turn
off the menu bar (since I never use it on terminals anyway).

> Regardless of desktop OS and menu location, keyboard shortcuts and
> contextual menus ftw. At least in my case, I rarely ever have to
> go to the menu bar on any OS.

Whole-heartedly agree for terminal-like applications.  Some apps (gimp?)
lend themselves to much heavier menu use.  Maybe I'm just not very
proficient in gimp, but I imagine it (or any other full-featured
image-manipulation program) would be a PITA to use with MacOS-style menus...

Matt
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[Discuss] firefox 4 is a memory hog

[Matthew Gillen]

I've noticed lately that when I unlock my gnome3 session after being
gone for a while (several hours), it takes forever to get me back to a
useable desktop.  I initially was blaming gnome-shell, but it appears
the problem is actually firefox forcing the whole system into swap.

Firefox was using 60% of memory.  Killing it and reloading the same set
of tabs makes it use 6.3% of memory (as reported by 'top').  I don't
think it's a particular web page that is going screwy, because it
happens at work and at home, and my set of tabs are completely different
(okay, fine, I use google.com in both environments...)

Is anyone else seeing this kind of runaway memory usage?

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Webcam Woes

[Matthew Gillen]

On 05/29/2011 01:18 AM, David Kramer wrote:
> I've tried a bunch of programs (cheese, luvcview, kamoso, etc) with
> various failure modes.  Although all of them show the webcam output to
> the screen perfectly, they all fail to capture the output to a file
> correctly.  

Try mplayer.  I've used that successfully with an earlier generation of
Logitech HD webcams.

HTH,
Matt
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Re: [Discuss] firefox 4 is a memory hog

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/01/2011 07:28 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> From: discuss-boun...@blu.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@blu.org] On Behalf
>> Of Matthew Gillen
>>
>> I've noticed lately that when I unlock my gnome3 session after being
>> gone for a while (several hours), it takes forever to get me back to a
>> useable desktop.  I initially was blaming gnome-shell, but it appears
>> the problem is actually firefox forcing the whole system into swap.
>>
>> Firefox was using 60% of memory.  Killing it and reloading the same set
>> of tabs makes it use 6.3% of memory (as reported by 'top').  I don't
>> think it's a particular web page that is going screwy, because it
>> happens at work and at home, and my set of tabs are completely different
>> (okay, fine, I use google.com in both environments...)
>>
>> Is anyone else seeing this kind of runaway memory usage?
> 
> 60% of what?  1G?  4G?  8G?
> 
> FF is a memory hog.  So is everything else.  Upgrade memory.  4G if all you
> do is web browsing and email.  8G or more if you run a myriad office
> applications and a VM inside it too.

It doesn't really matter how much memory I have (4G) , my point is that
the memory usage was a factor of *10* higher than it should have been,
and that the bloat happened while I wasn't even interacting with it.
Adding more memory to deal with a process that just eats all available
memory (which is what appears to be happening; my large swap partition
was fully in use before I kill FF) doesn't solve anything.

With the 3.x series I used to leave a firefox session up for a month at
a time.  Now it appears I have to restart it every day.  I'm
uncomfortable with the slide towards Window-95-style "oh, just reboot
every day"...

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] firefox 4 is a memory hog

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/02/2011 09:24 AM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
>> With the 3.x series I used to leave a firefox session up for a month at
>> a time.  Now it appears I have to restart it every day.  I'm
>> uncomfortable with the slide towards Window-95-style "oh, just reboot
>> every day"...
> 
> Interesting.  I have the same problem with 3.6, as I did with at least
> 3.5 previously (I don't remember 3.0).  This is with only 20-30 tabs
> open.  I find I have to restart FF at least daily; once it grows to 2
> GB, it gets very slow.  My laptop (Inspiron 9400) only has 3.3 GB of
> usable memory, but I'd be hard pressed to find one now with a WUXGA
> display and an ATI/AMD chipset (last time I tried, the open source
> nVidia drivers weren't very good even for ordinary 2D stuff and I
> flatly refuse to run the proprietary ones).  1920x1080 is not a
> substitute for 1920x1200, although I'd prefer even higher resolution
> if I could find it.
> 
> I figure it could be one or more of my extensions, but root causing it
> by binary chop will be painfully tedious.

That was actually one of the things that should make this easier: only a
couple of my extensions are actually compatible with FF-4.  Good thought
though.  I'll disable everything except flashblock and see if that helps.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] firefox 4 is a memory hog

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/02/2011 09:24 AM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
> Interesting.  I have the same problem with 3.6, as I did with at least
> 3.5 previously (I don't remember 3.0).  This is with only 20-30 tabs
> open. 

Somewhat off topic, but as someone else who likes lots of tabs, you
might appreciate this feature that has been in FF since at least v3: if
you put the cursor up in the tab-selection area, and then use your mouse
wheel, it will scroll the tabs around.

When I tried to tell people at work about this, they all looked at me
like I was crazy (I had to tell them to open 20 more tabs, and they
wondered out load "who has that many tabs?").

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] firefox 4 is a memory hog

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/02/2011 10:28 AM, Kyle Leslie wrote:
> You could try Memory Fox.  Its an addon for Firefox.  I have had decent
> success with it.
>  
> HowToGeek.com had an interesting article on Firefox and its memory usage
> on windows systems.
> http://www.howtogeek.com/62301/htg-explains-do-firefox-memory-cleaners-actually-work/
>  
> Perhaps you could have the same success.

I'm confused: you recommend this addon, then point me to an article that
goes in great detail about how this addon does nothing useful at best,
and at worst makes the system even slower.  For those that don't bother
with the article, here's the punchline:
> Since we have shown that memory cleaning add-ons do not really do 
> anything useful, what can you do about the large amount of memory 
> Firefox uses? Here are a few suggestions:
> Remove add-ons you don’t need (especially any memory cleaning ones).
> Keep the number of tabs you have open to a minimum.
> Periodically close Firefox and relaunch it.
> Add more memory to your system.
> Don’t worry about it.

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[SPAM] [Discuss] [SPAM] Re: un-bastardized android

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/03/2011 07:28 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> I know the Nexus One was un-bastardized for the short period that it was
> sold.  But it's really unclear now, how to find an un-bastardized phone if
> you want one.
> 
> Anyone have any advice on how to find/get un-bastardized phones?

HTC recently announced that going forward they would no longer lock
their bootloaders:
 http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19736_7-20066896-251.html

I'm curious to see if this policy survives negotiations with Verizon et
al, but I appreciate the sentiment.  It at least takes one variable out
of the equation (that the manufacturer will pull an Apple and try to
brick your device if you root it).

The major advice I'd have to buy the older gen phones.  They are often
very well documented on how to root.  I got my droid-1s about two weeks
before they started shipping droid2s, but I wanted the droid1 because it
was so well known and popular in the rooting community.

> you can't uninstall without root.  Having rooted my phone, this implies I'll
> never apply any updates, and although I haven't been hit by any malware or
> blatant instability, I like to believe that updates are improvements...

If you use a ROM that is maintained, you'll get any updates at least
several months (or a year+) before the carriers would push an update.  I
got droids for my wife and myself, and I rooted mine, left hers stock.
I think she's only gotten two updates pushed from Vz in the last year
(one of which was a major upgrade from android 2.1->2.2, which of course
was several months after I had 2.2).  I get updates (to the core OS)
once a month on average.

It's certainly more work in terms of researching ROMs and such (not
unlike researching linux distros back when there started to be a huge
number of one-off distros), and some are much better than others in
terms of making regular releases and making those releases accessible
(not unlike non-mainstream linux distros...).

HTH,
Matt
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[SPAM] [Discuss] [SPAM] Re: [SPAM] [SPAM] Re: un-bastardized android

[Matthew Gillen]

Ok, I don't feel so bad now that dsr got marked as SPAM too.  I thought
it was something I was doing wrong...

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Re: [Discuss] Relevance of PGP?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/09/2011 01:27 PM, Doug wrote:
> Every September, I have skipped the meeting.  Since I am just a nerd
> with a few public web sites and an open source project, I don't feel a
> need to encrypt anything.  I would be interested to hear why people in
> BLU uses encryption.

I make sure to use it when my wife sends me email to my work email
address.  My employer doesn't need to be reading my personal email
(there are laws against employers reading personal mail, but why trust
people to abide by the law when you don't have to?).  I also
opportunistically use it whenever I can with other people, not out of
need but more to establish the habit (like wearing a seat-belt).

Other than the aforementioned personal correspondence, I'm generally far
more interested in signing than I am in encryption.

Although I have to say, I've been impressed lately by my insurance agent
and my mortgage broker in that they've graduated to sending me things in
encrypted zip files (when what they're sending includes sensitive
personal data of mine), and they don't balk at all when I send them
encrypted zips.  They're inching closer to the right solution...

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Re: [Discuss] Relevance of PGP?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/09/2011 02:48 PM, Doug wrote:
>> I make sure to use it when my wife sends me email to my work email
>> address.  My employer doesn't need to be reading my personal email
>> (there are laws against employers reading personal mail, but why trust
>> people to abide by the law when you don't have to?).  I also
>> opportunistically use it whenever I can with other people, not out of
>> need but more to establish the habit (like wearing a seat-belt).
> 
> No way I could get my wife to use new fangled technology :-) I am having 
> enough

Don't get me wrong, I had to set everything up w/ thunderbird (get
enigmail extention, install gpg binaries, set up per-recipient rules so
that when she writes email to me it defaults to signed+encrypted).  All
she had to do is know her passphrase, and everything else happens
automatically.

>> Although I have to say, I've been impressed lately by my insurance agent
>> and my mortgage broker in that they've graduated to sending me things in
>> encrypted zip files (when what they're sending includes sensitive
>> personal data of mine), and they don't balk at all when I send them
>> encrypted zips.  They're inching closer to the right solution...
> 
> This makes some sense to me: lawyers, guns and money people should be
> using encryption. How do you get the key from them? I doubt they
> attend the BLU meeting :-)

Oh, it's not /that/ secure.  Generally they will send me the password
via a separate email, or if they are really savvy, through a secondary
channel (like a phone call).

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Re: [Discuss] Relevance of PGP?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/09/2011 02:52 PM, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 02:27:29PM -0400, Matthew Gillen wrote:
>> On 06/09/2011 01:27 PM, Doug wrote:
>>> Every September, I have skipped the meeting.  Since I am just a nerd
>>> with a few public web sites and an open source project, I don't feel a
>>> need to encrypt anything.  I would be interested to hear why people in
>>> BLU uses encryption.
>>
>> I make sure to use it when my wife sends me email to my work email
>> address.  My employer doesn't need to be reading my personal email
>> (there are laws against employers reading personal mail, but why trust
> 
> I think you mean:
> 
> s/laws/no laws/
> 
> If you get a personal email to your _work_ email address, that email is the
> property of your employer, since it's using company resources.

Actually, that depends on the particulars of your company's IT policies:
http://www.laborlawyers.com/shownews.aspx?Are-Employees-Personal-Emails-On-Work-Computers-Private-Sometimes-Rules-N-J-Supreme-Court&Ref=list&Type=1122&Show=12796

(in that case, explicit permission was granted in the IT policy such
that, among other things, "occasional personal use is permitted", so the
court found that the employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy
when communicating with her lawyer, even when using company resources)

But yes, that becomes even more reason to just use GPG: so that I don't
have to keep up on the latest interpretation of privacy laws.

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Re: [Discuss] Relevance of PGP?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/10/2011 12:44 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> I am very surprised to hear people using the term "PGP" as if it were
>> synonymous with "Email signing/encryption."  As far as I'm concerned, S/MIME
>> has already won the war on email signing/encryption.
> 
> I wish that were true, but can you name any organization that routinely
> uses S/MIME when sending mail to recipients outside their organization?

US DoD.  Of course, they have their own CAs that you have to add to your
trusted CA list before you can validate anything (well, more precisely
before most email clients will validate).  They are big enough that they
can get away with that though...

> Phishing could be all but wiped out if these organizations adopted
> S/MIME. 

True, but only to the extent that people could be trained recognize
their email-client's notifications about "this message was signed"/"this
message was *not* signed".  Much like the various tricks web browsers do
to make it more obvious when https is being used.

But even then, it's still not foolproof: I could get a trusted CA to
sign a cert for a similar looking email address, and the email client
will happily proclaim "this message was signed by it's sender!".

Yes, there are other clues one could look for in the message (e.g. that
email address isn't one I've seen before, etc).  But that just goes to
my point: there isn't one thing you can do to wipe out phishing.
Reckless application of crypto only leads to the illusion of security...

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Re: [Discuss] Relevance of PGP?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/14/2011 09:37 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> From: Derek Martin [mailto:inva...@pizzashack.org]
>> Sent: Monday, June 13, 2011 3:35 PM
>>
>> If you don't take the time to actually verify BOTH the identity of the
>> person sending you messages, and the secret they've given you, then
>> you're right, there's no difference.  Both are worthless, beyond
>> keeping casual prying eyes from seeing your conversation... you
>> never really know for sure that you're communicating with the person
>> you think you are at the time.
> 
> You're saying, that because the OS "trusts" a list of root CA's, then
> anybody who can infiltrate or circumvent security measures of any of those
> CA's can forge communications on behalf of anyone.
> 
> True.  You can only trust S/MIME signing/encryption as much as you trust the
> procedures of the root CA's.

Right, and there are two problems with that:
 1) the list of root CA's that are trusted by default (e.g. by firefox),
is quite long
 2) /Any/ root CA getting compromised leads to the potential for /all/
communications to be compromised via man-in-the-middle attacks.

#2 isn't a problem with the S/MIME methodology in general, it's a
problem with how applications do their CA checking.  No application that
I know of allows you to say "trust this CA only for these domains".
This IMHO would make a lot of sense for email certificates, but it would
be very problematic for normal webserver certificates (to much burden on
the end-user).

> For the KGB or CIA, certainly SSL CA trust would not be acceptable.

If you frame the problem a little differently, it isn't true that SSL
isn't good enough for the gov't. US DoD is a huge user of X509
certificates.  Here's the rub: they have their own CAs.  If you use your
own CAs and don't use the 'standard' root CAs that get distributed w/
firefox et al, then SSL and S/MIME can be as trustworthy as your own CAs.

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Re: [Discuss] CentOS 6.0 finally passes QA testing

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/17/2011 02:35 PM, Matt Shields wrote:
> CentOS 6 is coming soon, but so is Christmas :)
> 
> I've been a loong-time supporter of CentOS but the recent things that
> have been happening with them has made me question if I want to continue to
> use them.  It's sad because I think they have a great service they provide
> to the Linux community.

I haven't really been following organizational issues.  Can you
elaborate as to what's been going on that's worrisome?

Thanks,
Matt
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Re: [Discuss] CentOS 6.0 finally passes QA testing

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/17/2011 11:37 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>> Meanwhile, Red Hat has already released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, so
>> they're still more than six months behind, and won't be getting most of
>> the the key security fixes that do go into the 6.1 errata update kernels.
> 
> I'm confused by this statement.  I realize that Red Hat is no longer 
> distributing kernel source in such a way as to allow someone to easily
> determine what each patch does. I don't, however, see how this matters if
> all one wants to do is run the 'same' kernel as Red Hat.   The monolithic
> source for the entire Red Hat kernel should still be available. Is Red
> Hat actually going to distribute binary kernel objects for which source
> code is not available?  This seems like an obvious GPL violation to me.

No, nothing like that. You can still get the exact sources used to build the
kernel.  Redhat has stopped separating the stock kernel and their patches.
The intent (as far as I can tell) is to make it so derivative distributions
(esp. Oracle) don't get Redhat's QA for free (at least for the kernel
package; it appears that the kernel package is the only package affected by
this new policy).

This has some more detailed info:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04/red_hat_twarts_oracle_and_novell_with_change_to_source_code_packaging/

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] CentOS 6.0 finally passes QA testing

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/18/2011 07:44 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> This has some more detailed info:
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04/red_hat_twarts_oracle_and_novell_with_change_to_source_code_packaging/

Specifically, this part:
> This won't hamper CentOS, [Red Hat chief technology officer Brian
> Stevens] says, because CentOS isn't in the support business. "The code is
> still available. It's just more difficult to support the distro as a
> commercial entity. CentOS is not in the support business."

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] strange behaviour

[Matthew Gillen]

On 07/01/2011 11:23 AM, dan moylan wrote:
> 
> last night, running ubuntu 11.04 on acer d255e, i got a
> pop-up window advising me that i was running out of disk
> space.  sure enough, df told me that i was at 98% with less
> that 1GB out of 40 available on /home.  so i went to /home,
> but du -s showed only 21GB in use. ???  i shut down and went
> to bed puzzled.
> 
> today, i fired up and df shows 21GB in use.

Yep, I got some help on this list for that very issue.  The old archives
would have been here:
 http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/2009-November/034551.html

But the long and short of it is next time, try this:
 lsof | grep deleted

Deleted files (or tmp files) that still have some process holding a file
descriptor take up space (but won't show up in a 'du' analysis).  So
likely you had some runaway process that was logging a boatload of stuff
to a file that got deleted after the process started writing to it.

Your shutdown killed the process, and thus freed the last fd referencing
the file, so the space was finally reclaimed.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] strange behaviour

[Matthew Gillen]

On 07/01/2011 12:07 PM, dan moylan wrote:
> apprapos, however, while messing around, i did notice a
> strange file in /root.  note the following:
> 
> root ~[220] \ls -lFhd .gvfs
> dr-x-- 2 root root 0 2011-07-01 10:14 .gvfs/

That's a special device file created by Gnome.
http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.22/#sect:gvfs-gio

> root ~[232] rmdir .gvfs
> rmdir: failed to remove `.gvfs': Device or resource busy
> 
> moylan 2011[545] lsof | grep deleted
> lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /root/.gvfs
>   Output information may be incomplete.
> 
> what's all that about?  can i make it go away?

Only if you log out of gnome.

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Re: [Discuss] doxygen

[Matthew Gillen]

The bigger issue with respect to doxygen is that the two comment styles 
have different purposes (at least the last time I read the doxygen 
documentation, which admittedly was many years ago).

The line oriented comments are used for short descriptions (e.g. for the 
compact table of functions and classes).  The block comments are used 
for the 'detailed' description.


Matt

On 7/13/2011 10:54 PM, John Abreau wrote:
> The // comments are line-oriented, not block-oriented.
> It's not that they don't nest, it's that the very concept
> of nesting is meaningless in their context.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Jerry Feldman  wrote:
>> This is a well known feature  C and C++. It is not a bug, it is well
>> defined in the C and C++ standards.
>> The // comments do not nest either.
>>
>> On 07/13/2011 03:18 PM, John Abreau wrote:
>>> One common gotcha with the /* blaaa */ style comments is that
>>> they don't nest. So if you have a block
>>>
>>>  foo() {
>>> int i;
>>> printf("Hello world!\n");
>>> i = 27; /* need to initialize this */
>>> printf("%d\n", i);
>>> printf("All done!\n");
>>>  }
>>>
>>>
>>> and you comment out a chunk
>>>
>>>
>>>  foo() {
>>> int i;
>>> printf("Hello world!\n");
>>> /*
>>> i = 27; /* need to initialize this */
>>> printf("%d\n", i);
>>> */
>>> printf("All done!\n");
>>>  }
>>>
>>> The first instance of */ closes the comment, and the "printf("%d\n", i);"
>>> that you thought you had commented out is actually not commented out,
>>> and chaos ensues.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 9:30 AM, Stephen Adler  
>>> wrote:
>>>> Thanks for the reply Matt. And as software goes, the devil is in the
>>>> details
>>>>
>>>> In doxygen, you have a couple of syntax forms you can use
>>>>
>>>> /// blaaa
>>>> //! blaaa
>>>>
>>>> /** blaaa */
>>>> /*! blaaa */
>>>>
>>>> I hate it when I'm given options to choose from because I don't know
>>>> which one to choose other than flip a coin. Is there any advantages or
>>>> disadvantages to using either form?
>>>>
>>>> thanks. Steve.
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 2011-07-06 at 09:32 -0400, Matthew Gillen wrote:
>>>>> On 07/05/2011 09:27 PM, Stephen Adler wrote:
>>>>>> Guys,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I want to use an automated web'izing documentation tool like doxygen for
>>>>>> a software project I'm working on. I'm wondering what's the use case for
>>>>>> this is. What I mean by use case is the way one adds the html generation
>>>>>> into the software development cycle. This question may be too simplistic
>>>>>> but maybe there are some general rules which would make life easy for me
>>>>>> that I wouldn't think of when I start using a tool like doxygen. For
>>>>>> example, does one only generate html documentation output when one
>>>>>> prepares the code for a release or version tag? Does one include a
>>>>>> documentation target in the make file so one can type 'make
>>>>>> documentation' How often do you generate the documentation? After each
>>>>>> make? etc. etc. If there is a web resource I should read through, I'd
>>>>>> greatly appreciate the url and any comments you guys may have.
>>>>> Typically what is done in my projects is that our make system has a
>>>>> 'doc' target that runs doxygen.  If we have an autobuild, we will go
>>>>> ahead and include the documentation in that and have the results hosted
>>>>> in an accessible location (intranet web server).  Don't include the
>>>>> 'doc' target in the default build, since most developers won't need a
>>>>> local copy; the nightly version of the API docs from the autobuild are
>>>>> always sufficient.
>>>>>
>>>>> The doc target helps with devs being able to test their in-line
>>>>> documentation, and if you've got developers outside a firewall or are
>>>>> otherwise difficult w.r.t. the intranet server.
>>>>>
>>>>> HTH,
>>>>> Matt
>>>>> ___
>>>>> Discuss mailing list
>>>>> Discuss@blu.org
>>>>> This message was delivered to ad...@stephenadler.com
>>>>> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ___
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>>>> This message was delivered to j...@blu.org
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jerry Feldman
>> Boston Linux and Unix
>> PGP key id: 537C5846
>> PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846
>>
>>
>>
>> ___
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>> This message was delivered to abre...@gmail.com
>> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>
>
>
>

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Re: [Discuss] 30% Apple

[Matthew Gillen]

On 08/11/2011 09:38 AM, Ian Stokes-Rees wrote:
> Having just, unexpectedly, received an iPad, I've gone somewhat App
> crazy and spent more on software in the past week than I have in 5 years
> (in $0.99 increments).  It has made me painfully aware of how many apps
> don't need to be a standalone app (especially the ones that really only
> work with a network connection).  They can just be device-specific HTML
> content with JS+CSS3+HTML5+LocalStorage.  I'm sure an advantage of the
> "app" model is the device-locked nature.

I came to a similar realization regarding Android apps recently.  It is
true for many apps that are merely better interfaces to a website than
the website normally has.  However, there are some things that would be
a PITA to do in HTML5 that would work across browsers (and by that I
mean the ipad's built-in browser vs. android's built-in browser vs the
various third-party browsers).  For instance, NPR's news app has a nice
interface for scrolling between stories (swiping from side to side).
Not to mention every app developer's predilection for wanting to know
your location so they can deliver locale-specific data...

> Anyway, my prediction is that give it a year or two and everyone will
> realize how painful it is to write a different app version for every
> device and if they can manage it they will go for "responsive web
> design" (http://ethanmarcotte.com/ and
> http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design), and you'll
> access most of todays apps through the browser.

I totally see your point, but I disagree that it's a foregone
conclusion. On the one hand you have this burgeoning
embedded-device-developer group, versus more "traditional"
web-developers.  Given that the device-developers have a nice foothold
now, they probably have a year or two to prove their worth above and
beyond what the web-developers could do.  There are a lot of input and
data sources on these devices that would just be difficult to make use
of via a browser+HTML5 (you run into the same problem web developers
always run into: someone else controls the browser and all it's
associated bugs/features).

It may be the case that IE6 and all its brokenness burned so many web
developers and IT dept. heads that they are enthusiastic about having
more control (ie not relying on a browser), because it turns out to be
cheaper for them (to not have to work-around brokenness, or to at least
have control over the brokenness).

> For my own interest, here is the list of apps I've downloaded (and
> possibly paid for) that I think would be an easy transition to the
> web-based model:

Another complicating factor is that there are several artificial market
distortions that may drive this one way or the other regardless of the
technical merits.  For instance, the rule Apple is trying to enforce
about taxing in-app purchases could significantly push certain
content-makers to prefer the HTML5+browser approach.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] 30% Apple

[Matthew Gillen]

On 08/11/2011 10:06 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> Another complicating factor is that there are several artificial market
> distortions that may drive this one way or the other regardless of the
> technical merits.  For instance, the rule Apple is trying to enforce
> about taxing in-app purchases could significantly push certain
> content-makers to prefer the HTML5+browser approach.

To wit:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14473893
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Re: [Discuss] Is MythTV dead?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/04/2011 12:30 PM, James Kramer wrote:
> I am  beginning to get back it to MythTV.  I stopped after the
> networks switch to HD.  Would you recommend the HDDR over the new
> Hauppauge WinTV-DCR-2650?
> 
> http://www.silicondust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10133
> 
> I know that the HDDR supports an Ethernet connection which does sound
> nice, if solely for the cost of the cable.  What are some other
> advantages.  I  am using FIOS, do you know if Verizon blocks many of
> the copy-freely channels?

Vz legally has to offer OTA channels unencrypted.  What I found though was
that they found a way to make it completely unusable: they don't include
channel identification metadata (so a quick auto-scan doesn't help you find
NBC), and then they shuffle the unencrypted channels around often to boot
(e.g. NBC isn't on a consistent channel).

It's possible that this isn't really a policy, and I was just testing at a
time of turmoil in their head-end, but I got so fed up with it that I got a
little home-made digital antenna and hooked up my HDDR to it.  So I get my
OTA channels actually over the air.  The HD quality OTA is better than the
unencrypted FIOS channels anyway...

The nice thing about the HDDR is that it has two inputs, so you can hook up
one to an antenna and one to the FIOS feed.

BTW, I have no experience with the Hauppauge, but I love my HDDR...

HTH,
Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Is MythTV dead?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/12/2011 03:11 PM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 02:27:48PM -0400, Rich Braun wrote:
>> In order to have a user-friendly front end, it has to be able to pull online
>> content from a variety of sources (Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, plus whatever else
>> got invented in the past 15 minutes) and convert it into a unified look and
>> feel to match the familar PVR and DVD/BluRay content that most people have. 
>> The back-end should be set up to bookmark and archive anything you might want
>> later, without making its presence particularly apparent except when it wants
>> you to add more storage.  (And I'd actually like to be able to have 2 or more
>> back-end machines with complete fail-over capability, perhaps even set up as 
>> a
>> shared grid between multiple people's homes.)
>>
>> Suppose I wanted to go off and write such a thing from the ground up.  What
>> would stand in the way of creating a new open-source project to accomplish
>> exactly that?
> 
> Hulu and Netflix put encryption in your way; Youtube has terms
> of service. DVD is solved, but Blu-Ray isn't, really.

DMCA is something you'd need to be careful about.  Not a showstopper
(there are fair use exceptions that cover making backup copies of your
own media), but when it comes to local storage of Hulu/Netflix it's less
clear that you can legally break the encryption like you can for DVDs
(even if it were as technically easy as DVD encryption).

But beyond encryption, distributing the video codecs isn't legal if
you're in the US (unless you have an appropriate license from MPEG-LA).
 Practically speaking everyone today says "getting ffmpeg on your system
is your problem", and goes from there.  I wasn't sure how 'turn-key' you
intended your solution to be...

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Is MythTV dead?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/14/2011 03:17 PM, Brendan Kidwell wrote:
> (But for the time being, because of my wife's omnivorous tastes, my
> household will keep our Netflix subscription.)

Ditto.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] best dual core Linux box

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/18/2011 11:29 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
> 
> We are in the midst of licensing the SAS software product for a server.
> This is an extremely expensive product, and the charge for a quad-core
> machine is tens of thousands of dollars more than for a dual-core
> machine. If you are unfamiliar with SAS, it does lots of sequential I/O
> and is rarely CPU bound. So we are looking to put together a high
> performance machine that uses only a dual-core processor. I know that
> dual-core is now usually very low-end (or laptop) but creative
> suggestions are welcome. Ideally we would like PCI-e slots for SAS or
> SATA controllers so that we can have a lot of fast local storage.

Would it be out of the question performance-wise to just get a good
modern quad-core, and run SAS in a single-core bare-bones VM?  I haven't
done any benchmarking of disk-IO intensive loads within VMs, so I don't
really know what the overhead is (everyone seems to care much more about
the CPU-usage overhead).

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] The America Invents Act

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/28/2011 02:47 PM, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote:
>> If we can't
>> get people who actually understand software to agree that they are bad
>> for us (and in fact everyone), we'll never convince people who
>> understand software much less well.
> 
> I had rather hoped that when Google started to be challenged on the
> patent front, that they would use their deep pockets to challenge the
> patents and the patent system in general. Instead they decided to buy
> into it by purchasing a bunch of patents. Probably a lower risk course
> of action, but also lower reward. So much for not being evil.

Not to be a google-lover, but I wouldn't give up on them yet.  It could
be just good business sense.  You can fight to change the rules of the
game, but until then, you have to play by the rules of the game.  And
Apple and M$ have been on the warpath against Android.  Patent reform
will take an unpredictable amount of time.  Google can't afford to just
stand there and say "we know we're right!" while the companies willing
to play the patent-war game eat their lunch.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] The America Invents Act

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/28/2011 03:05 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
>> Martin Luther King Jr. was a lawyer and he ended segregation in the
>> United States.  There are countless number of lawyers who have
>> contributed to the advances of this country...
> 
> Sorry, but I don't see any way a patent lawyer will ever fall into
> that category, unless they have a change of heart and fight to abolish
> this abomination.

I'm sure there are some patent lawyers that work for Redhat (for
example) that are highly motivated to change the system for the better
(i.e., in a F/OSS-friendly direction).

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] The America Invents Act

[Matthew Gillen]

On 09/28/2011 03:10 PM, Hsuan-Yeh Chang wrote:
> I also think you miss my point.  By filing a patent application and
> getting it published, your Examiner friend would have citations to
> reject late comer's claims.  Should the open source community started
> to file patent applications in the few decades, there would have
> sufficient number of references to knock out those what you called
> "obvious" patents.  Unfortunately, the open source community has been
> playing ostrich and willfully disregarded the facts that, today, they
> can get a patent application published and serve for prior art
> purposes for less than $200 of official fee (if less than 100
> pages)...  If the open source developer is rich enough to pursue a
> patent, then he/she is free to grant or donate a non-exclusive
> license of his/her patent right to the community.  Without having any
> patent rights handy, the open source community will forever be a
> victim.

http://www.richardspatentlaw.com/faq/how-much-does-a-patent-cost/
Avg. cost of filing a patent: $8,548
 for complex computer patent: $13,684

(there are more references like that:
 http://www.inventionstatistics.com/Patent_Cost.html
)

No one should have to file for a patent simply to establish prior art.
It was my understanding that prior art could come from any source; it
didn't have to be from documents the patent office manages.  If the
patent office only considers previous patent applications when looking
at prior art, then I think the system is even more broken than I
originally suspected...

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[Matthew Gillen]

On 10/06/2011 09:23 AM, Dan O'Donovan wrote:

My next cell phone will be an openmoko


I remember saying that five years ago - kinda glad I got an iPhone now...


I will never buy one of those.  The way they treat jailbreakers (sue 
them for copyright infringement, brick their phones) says a lot to me 
about what they think of their customers.  For one, I don't want to 
contribute to financing that kind of activity.  For another, if they are 
spending more money and effort on lawsuits than they are on moving 
forward technologically, well, pretty soon you aren't going to be 
getting a good value for your money (i.e., a large percentage of the 
cost of your iPhone will be going toward paying lawyers).



Steve Jobs confirmed that you can change the world - I think this is a good 
thing.


Bill Gates changed the world too... Steve's contributions were certainly 
more aesthetically pleasing though ;-)


Matt
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Re: [Discuss] (OT) Steve Jobs 1955-2011

[Matthew Gillen]

On 10/06/2011 11:07 AM, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:

On Thu, Oct 06, 2011 at 10:19:49AM -0400, Matthew Gillen wrote:

On 10/06/2011 09:23 AM, Dan O'Donovan wrote:

My next cell phone will be an openmoko


I remember saying that five years ago - kinda glad I got an iPhone now...


I will never buy one of those.  The way they treat jailbreakers (sue
them for copyright infringement, brick their phones)


I call bullshit. A cursory Google doesn't return any hits for Apple suing
people who jailbreak their phones, and I doubt you'll find _any_ reliable
reference saying that they are deliberately bricking jailbroken phones with
their updates.

So, references please.


Bricking iPhones:
http://www.applegazette.com/iphone/apple-says-it-may-brick-unlocked-iphones-with-next-software-update/
http://gizmodo.com/303171/apple-says-unlocked-iphones-will-brick-after-software-update-+-what-does-it-mean
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9039479/Update_Apple_plays_hardball_Upgrade_bricks_unlocked_iPhones

It's hard to "prove" intent without getting court orders to uncover 
internal emails and memos and such (sorry, I just don't have the 
resources to up against Apple's legal dept.), but the statement from 
Apple in the first link is clearly a warning.  It doesn't take Columbo 
to make the connection.


Suing jailbreakers: first google hit:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking-illegal

They didn't actually file any lawsuits, but made claims that they would, 
until the Copyright Office slapped their hand (thanks to the EFF!):

 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20011661-38.html

Even if they didn't get around to filing any suits (during the short 
time they could before the Copyright Office completely nullified Apple's 
claims), it doesn't sit well with me that they were even making the 
threats.  Seems awfully petty to me...


On 10/06/2011 11:49 PM, David Kramer wrote:

Anyone who is surprised when their Apple device isn't as flexible as
its competitors or becomes obsolete in months is not paying
attention.  But if that mindset doesn't work for you, don't buy an
Apple.


On 10/07/2011 12:37 AM, Jon Masters wrote:

if I didn't care about hackability, I'd totally say it's a great
choice, which it is for end consumers who just don't care. Consumers
don't care about whether your phone is blessed by Stallman, but they
do care if they can make telephone calls with it reliably (antenna
notwithstanding).


As David and Jon point out, my real beef is with hackability.  I'm not 
saying my phone has to blessed by Stallman, but the hostility to the 
jailbreak community really turns me off, because of the implications 
about control and (non-)hackability.


Google has been pretty agnostic as far as I can tell about rooting, and 
at least one major android phone manufacturer (HTC) has said they will 
no longer use locked bootloaders (so as to be more hacker-friendly):

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/26/htc-officially-dissolves-locked-bootlader-policy/
http://hothardware.com/News/HTC-Kills-Bootloader-Lock-Policy/

So in my book, android gets a win for a more diverse community (Android 
has many hardware manufacturers, therefore it is more likely that there 
are some that have a clue / are hacker-friendly).  It's also harder to 
control (i.e., by google), which gives the anti-authoritarian in me warm 
fuzzies (I fully anticipate a fork of Android in the future, a la Oracle 
spinning off their own brand of RHEL, although hopefully a fork of 
android would be more productive for the community than Oracle is with 
their RHEL ripoff).


To those that say "well, at least Apple doesn't collect all my 
information", I have one word for you: iCloud.   ;-)


Finally, just so people don't belabor the point, yes, I fully 
acknowledge that I'm not a "typical" customer, and that for people who 
just want something that looks pretty and "just works" (for the set of 
activities that Apple has approved of), I'm sure the iPhone is a 
perfectly viable choice.


Matt
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Re: [Discuss] disk space analysis tools

[Matthew Gillen]

On 10/07/2011 11:47 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

Since my background is a software engineer not a system administrator, I
have generally used DU to manage my own disk space, or possibly to look
at disk space usage on the BLU servers. But, recently I'm seeing
significant increase in my work's backup server (a WD MyBook). While du
works fine (using the appropriate options), it does take some time to
analyze the results. One issue I have is whether the increase in space
is due to someone moving things around (such as in a client space) that
will break the hard links, but eventually the storage will go down as
the older dailies are removed. I only keep a few weeks because out New
York office backs us up also.

So, what I am looking for is either some decent tools I can use that are
less time consuming than looking at du output.



Ever tried filelight?  It's a pretty cool visualization of disk usage. 
There's a gnome-equivalent, I can't think of the name...


There's also 'agedu'.  From the man page:
agedu - correlate disk usage with last-access times to identify large 
and disused data


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Re: [Discuss] disk space analysis tools

[Matthew Gillen]

On 10/07/2011 11:51 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:

Ever tried filelight? It's a pretty cool visualization of disk usage.
There's a gnome-equivalent, I can't think of the name...


David Miller knew the gnome version :-)

On 10/07/2011 11:50 AM, David Miller wrote:

Have a look at Baobab. Its a graphical disk space analyzer that works
on local and remote disks.


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Re: [Discuss] disk space analysis tools

[Matthew Gillen]

On 10/07/2011 11:51 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:

There's also 'agedu'. From the man page:
agedu - correlate disk usage with last-access times to identify large
and disused data


This is a cool one: ncdu
It's like filelight, but ncurses-based :-)

I love ncurses programs.

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Re: [Discuss] GMail doesn't recognize mailing lists

[Matthew Gillen]

On 11/07/2011 05:20 PM, Ricker, William wrote:

Yeah, it would be nice if I had a third button to not sent Greg and Jerry an extra copy (as I 
likely will "forget" to take the time to drag&drop Discuss from Cc to To, and 
drop Jerry and Greg direct, as I would do if I had old school email manners).


Reply-all is fine as long as you're using mailman (mailman is smart 
enough to not send two copies to Greg and Jerry; majordart and other 
inferior mailing-list managers are not).


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Re: [Discuss] an "Enterprise" Linux for desktop

[Matthew Gillen]

On 11/23/2011 04:44 PM, Gregory Boyce wrote:

On Nov 23, 2011 4:41 PM,  wrote:


I think I've decided to move away from Ubuntu. Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but
I'm not liking the changes.

CentOS? OpenSuSE? Fedora?




Which changes?  Gnome 3 well hit them all eventually, although THROw based
distros like Centos or Scientific Linux should be safe for a while.


Right.  Fedora will likely not be your cup of tea, because while it goes in 
a slightly different directions than ubuntu, it charges ahead away from the 
old and familiar just like ubuntu.


RHEL/CentOS won't adopt gnome3 until it's significantly more usable / 
configurable.


Note that if you're just mad about gnome3, fedora still installs gnome2 for 
those that don't have sufficiently advanced video cards.  That will likely 
be case for a long time, since the video card requirements for gnome3 aren't 
likely to go away.


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Re: [Discuss] an "Enterprise" Linux for desktop

[Matthew Gillen]

On 11/27/2011 11:28 AM, ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote:

From: ma...@mohawksoft.com [mailto:ma...@mohawksoft.com]

Changing existing paradigms is usually a bad
practice unless there is sufficient evidence a new paradigm is better.


The same is true of everything that is being developed by anyone anywhere.

>> ...

I'm all for experimentation, it is, in the end, how we learn.
However, "serious" work creates knowledge. Knowledge lasts and
contributes to the whole. Haphazard work doesn't last and doesn't
contribute, its a distraction.


There is a point worth considering here regarding exploring new 
directions.  Sometimes when you're trying something new you need time to 
develop it before it can really be judged on its merits the same way you 
might do with 'legacy' systems.  So I don't think it's fair to judge 
gnome3 on whether its paradigm is superior quite yet, even though I have 
no shortage of gripes about it myself (IMHO, the alt-tab behavior is 
atrocious for apps that use multiple windows like my mail-client, 
compounded by the lack of pager).



Think about the QWERTY keyboard. The Dvorák proponents made their case and
lost. QWERTY is no better or worse than Dvorák and thus, the prevailing
paradigm won. Rightly so. That's the competition of ideas.


True, but you can buy dvorak keyboards, and every linux distro I've seen 
supports that layout even on standard QWERTY keyboards.  So QWERTY 
'won', but dvorak didn't die.



With user interface, we are not getting a "vote" or a choice. They are
changing it and we have to learn a new one. We are not letting the
competition of ideas win, we are being forced to accept new paradigms by
fiat. IMHO this is not how open source and free software should be
working.


Except that no one is forcing you to go with gnome-shell or kde4.  I 
guarantee you that some group of people will be disgruntled enough with 
gnome3 that they will maintain gnome2 for years to come.  And every 
distro supports lots of other desktop options (the alternate desktop 
spins are the most popular variations of fedora).


The other point is that forks are crucial part of F/OSS; they are in 
essence your voting mechanism.  Don't like the cabal that is ruining 
your favorite project?  Take the good parts and start your own project.


There was a long standing feature request in openoffice that was enough 
to make me not use it or advocate using it 
(https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=43937; my comment is 
#14).  The people in charge didn't like the feature, so they refused to 
implement it.  When LibreOffice forked, implementing this feature was 
one of the first things I noticed different (besides the splash screen). 
 So sometimes forking is the best way to get progress...


(I will fully concede that it was not I that implemented the feature, so 
I'm not saying the typical 'fix it yourself'; rather I'm making the 
argument that you're likely not alone in things that irritate you and 
there will likely be someone motivated enough to do it, so do not 
despair :-) )


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Re: [Discuss] an "Enterprise" Linux for desktop

[Matthew Gillen]

On 11/27/2011 05:56 PM, John Abreau wrote:

I didn't realize that my preference for focus-follows-mouse...


FYI, I just figured out how to use focus-follows-mouse in gnome-shell. 
Install 'gnome-tweak-tool' and select "Windows", then "Window focus mode".


Why all this stuff has to be buried in obscure apps separate from the 
"Settings" app is beyond me...


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Re: [Discuss] Justify your existence

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/16/2011 07:46 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

On 12/15/2011 10:56 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking with
some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert
cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations or
typical organizations, etc.  Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or
"secondary" referring to support roles.  But you're an IT person - You're a
support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely
you're overhead.



With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the
value that your role adds to the organization?  How do you justify your own
existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social
situation?

Having been both in management and in overhead positions. In many
businesses there are cost centers and revenue centers. IT is usually a
cost center providing essential services. But, IT is a cost that in many
cases cannot be tied directly to revenue.


Perhaps. Even when IT isn't the "business of the business" as another 
poster described, IT in my opinion has the most potential for impacting 
things directly related to revenue: employee efficiency, marketing, 
research, etc.  IT pervades everything a company does.  IT in many cases 
is what sets good/great companies apart from their competitors.


So the biggest thing you need to do IMHO is not let people conflate 
"overhead" with "non-essential".  All senior management is overhead. 
That doesn't mean they are non-essential.  Great IT, just like great 
senior management, give the company a competitive edge.  I think you 
could make a strong argument that great IT gives /more/ of an edge than 
pretty much anything else (where "great" IT means being cost-efficient 
as well as capability-rich).



At Digital, years ago, we moved the entire Unix commands group the
Bangalore, and my group (compilers, development environment) moved
the assembler support to India.


Ouch. You can't be successful in business by outsourcing your core 
technical competency.  Unfortunately, many businesses didn't figure this 
out until after they'd tried and failed.


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Re: [Discuss] Justify your existence

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/16/2011 09:44 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:

So the biggest thing you need to do IMHO is not let people conflate
"overhead" with "non-essential".


Just to beat this horse a little more: "overhead" is a technical term 
for accountants; "non-essential" is a judgment call about value to the 
company and the core business.  There is no implicit linkage between the 
two terms, unless the person you're talking to is an idiot.


In which case you should have a few more cocktails before continuing the 
conversation ;-)


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Re: [Discuss] Justify your existence

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/16/2011 10:39 AM, Rich Braun wrote:

You wrote:

Justify your existence


Over the years, I've learned that the answer to this question is:  you can't.

If someone asks it in those words or similar, then if they had their druthers
they'd call Amazon EC2 or some place in Bangalore and say, "I'll have two of
those, how much do they cost?" just before shutting you and everyone you care
about down.

Even if the answer from India is "more than you thought you'd have to pay",
they'd still rather send the money outside the firm.  Because that way they
have someone else to blame when things go awry.


I pity the corporate culture where this happens.  Because at the end of 
the day, customers and investors alike don't give a crap if you have a 
good excuse, they want results.  A company that tolerates managers with 
the attitude you describe is one that is broken and likely headed down 
hill...


Someone whose primary goal is blame avoidance is someone I would run 
away from as fast as I could.  They aren't going to go anywhere, and if 
they somehow do manage to climb the corporate ladder in spite of their 
pile of failures, it won't be in a way that will be in any way 
beneficial to you (i.e., you're likely the one he threw under the bus to 
get himself a promotion).


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Re: [Discuss] Backing up LVM partitions using snapshots

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/16/2011 11:24 AM, Derek Martin wrote:

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 07:39:22AM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:

The bottom line is that there is no backup medium that is safe.. All
media degrade over time.


Stone tablet is still the most reliable.  It's just hell to store and
transport.  =8^)


Write speeds are very low as well :-P


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Re: [Discuss] Justify your existence

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/16/2011 11:26 AM, john saylor wrote:

while i am sometimes delighted by someone taking unexpected altruistic
action [even just 'telling the truth'], i am rarely disappointed when i
expect people to act in the most selfishly destructive manner possible.
especially among the 'powerful' in industry or politics.


 http://onefte.com/2011/10/09/are-you-ready-for-a-corporate-life/

(a co-worker turned me on to this comic, and while it's got a harder 
edge than dilbert, there are quite a few gems)


Also, somewhat related:
 http://onefte.com/2011/11/21/youre-not-the-boss-of-me/

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Re: [Discuss] Email Encryption

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/16/2011 5:08 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

On 12/16/2011 09:03 AM, aldo albanese wrote:

Hi,
I'm looking into an email encryption for both my company and for personal use.  
For personal use I would like to be able to encrypt Gmail accounts using Droid, 
Outlook and possible via the web portal.  I noticed that some of you have 
already some kind of encryption like PGP.  Looking at some products, it seems 
that now Symantec owns PGP, any other product that you would suggest that just 
do what I'm looking for?

We generally use OpenPGP (or GnuPG) for our email. This is supported by
many email clients either directly or via plugin. PGP is a company that
sells and licenses their technology. There are both OpenSource ad well
as commercial products that add PGP encryption to Outlook. However, I am
not aware of an encryption product for any web-based email. I certainly
can sign or encrypt Gmail using Thunderbird. There is a product called
OpenPGP Manager for Android (http://pgpmanager.blogspot.com/). I have
not used this, although it is now a project for this weekend. Maybe
someone could add to this.


Maybe someone could resurrect FireGPG:
http://getfiregpg.org/s/home

Was such a good idea...

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Re: [Discuss] Help with Ubuntu audio (newcomer)

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/18/2011 09:53 PM, Daniel Barrett wrote:

 Right now I have no sound at all. I posted full details in the
Ubuntu forums:

   http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10438294

but never got any responses.  Sometimes I can get sound by deleting
~/.pulse and ~/.pulse-cookie, logging out, and logging back in. But the
solution doesn't last. Other times I run Amarok and, lo and behold, sound
starts working everywhere. Temporarily.


I feel your pain.

Also, typically the ordering I use is:
 logout from graphical desktop
 log into console (either root or normal user)
 make sure all processes from normalUser's desktop session are dead 
(gconf-related, etc)

 delete ~normaluser/.pulse-cookie|.pulse
 log in to normalUser w/ desktop sesson (and cross fingers)

When it starts working temporarily, what does the system log say?

You might try this sequence:
 log in as normaluser to desktop
 make sure pulseaudio is dead
 open a terminal and start pulseaudio WITHOUT "--start" (we don't want 
it to detach from the terminal because we want to see the output)

 try to watch a video w/ mplayer or something.

Watch to see what happens to pulseaudio.  Does it crash?  Is it spewing 
errors?


Hope that helps,
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Re: [Discuss] SOPA

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/19/2011 02:50 PM, Rich Braun wrote:

Ackkk, the politicians are turning their attention to the Internet again.
First came the America Invents Act of 2011.  Now comes SOPA, the Stop Online
Piracy Act, which gives the same corporate clowns control over who gets to say
what online.  Appropriate for bureaucrats in China or North Korea, perhaps,
but here I say hands off my Internet.

Read more at:
  
http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/12/16/dear-congress-it-s-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-the-internet-works

Congressman Capuano already has a letter from me in his in-box.  Write yours...


I wrote Sen. Brown about this and got an acknowledgment letter back 
within a couple hours.  Nothing stating an opinion on the legislation, 
but enough of a reply to make me believe that someone in his office at 
least read my letter.


I never got a response when I wrote Sen. Kerry about a different issue.

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Re: [Discuss] keeping an eye on congress

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/20/2011 08:28 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

Dan Ritter wrote:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/megavote/

There you go. Everything except a different name.


The description:

   Track your Senators' and Representative's votes by e-mail
   Each week (that Congress is in session) you will receive:
   o Key votes by your two Senators and U.S. Representative.
   o Links to send e-mail to your members of Congress using pre-addressed
 forms.
   o Upcoming votes for your review and a chance to offer e-mail input
 before they vote.
   Use this weekly vote monitor to track the decisions made by your
   elected officials on key issues.


...sounds spot on. Just filling in your zip code and email. (Note that
the site accepts an email address containing a "+" character, but
doesn't escape it correctly if you hit the edit link. I reported the bug.)

I signed up. We'll see how it goes.


There's also opencongress.org.  They have a "money trail" for many bills 
that shows the supporting/adversarial organizations for a bill, and how 
much money representatives received from those organizations, and how 
the rep. voted (this example is the patent reform act from earlier this 
year):

 http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h1249/show
The money doesn't tell the whole story though; for that bill, the "Top 
recipients for ALL supporting interest groups" almost unanimously voted 
"aye", while the "Top recipients for ALL opposing interest groups" has 
the top 4 senators and top 2 representatives voting "aye" as well.  So 
that is likely a case where political and other pressure outweighed raw 
campaign contributions.



While researching H.R. 1249 I found a site that had the republican and 
democratic caucus' memos about that bill (summary of the bill, 
party-line reasons to vote for it / against it).  Can't seem to be able 
to find it now though...too bad, because it was interesting.


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Re: [Discuss] Upgraded fedora 15 to 16 unable to boot

[Matthew Gillen]

On 12/31/2011 6:05 PM, Jerry Natowitz wrote:

I have run into some very strange problems with BIOS disk enumeration.
Is it possible that the USB drive is being enumerated before the disk
drive?


No, the fedora installer really doesn't like /boot on RAID.  Must be a 
wicked problem, because people have complained loudly for a while now 
about this bug.


The nice thing about software RAID1 is that you can let grub read 
/dev/sda1 as if it were a normal partition (instead of a member of the 
raid group), since all the raid metadata is at the end of the device. 
Then once you boot, you can re-sync (if needed).


Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Upgraded fedora 15 to 16 unable to boot

[Matthew Gillen]

On 1/1/2012 6:12 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:

Once I was able to boot, then I was not able to log in on Gnome3, but
that was probably the customizations I added,


There was a problem with the caribou package (it was noarch in F15, in 
F16 the x86_64 installer would update to the i686 version).  The 
solution is to log in on the console, and "yum erase caribou", then 
re-install (if you want; it's not really needed for most environments). 
 A simple "yum update" might work as well, since I think they figured 
out what the problem was.  But the solution I described first worked for 
me on several machines.


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Re: [Discuss] box.net

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/04/2012 09:22 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

Two weeks ago, I signed up for box.net (also now box.com) using
box...@nedharvey.com.  I haven't given that email address out to anybody
else, and I started receiving enlargement email on that address today.

So...

The only other "reputable" company who has done this before was citizens
bank, just so you know.


It's possible that your email address was unintentionally leaked, 
although in the case of the bank, that is much scarier than the other 
explanation (that the bank sold your info to spammers).


Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Full disk encryption

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/03/2012 05:03 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

Daniel Feenberg wrote:

The built-in Fedora encryption is no trouble to establish...


What tool do they use? Any other distributions that provide an
integrated solution?


Fedora allows you to do whole partition/volume encryption with the 
installer very easily.  The last time I tried Ubuntu (a couple years 
ago), there was an option for "private" home directories.  It would 
create an encrypted volume for your home directory that was keyed to 
your password.  It would then get unlocked and mounted when you logged 
in.  Fedora does something closer to WDE.


Matt

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Re: [Discuss] Full disk encryption

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/03/2012 08:50 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:

The built-in Fedora encryption is no trouble to establish (just check
the box during installation) and maintain and on a multi-core desktop
does not affect performance. An update from Fedora 13 to 16 did damage
the boot record and make the disk unreadable, so I wouldn't try doing an
update again. For a non-networked machine there isn't much need for
updates, anyway.


FWIW, I've upgraded multiple Fedora boxes where everything but the /boot 
partition was encrypted several times.  I never had any issues.


There are two potential problems I can think of that you might have 
tripped over.  First, you skipped too many releases; they generally only 
support skipping 1 release on upgrades I think (so 14->16 is ok, but 
13->16 is not tested at all).


The other issue that I ran into on an F16 upgrade recently was 
completely unrelated to encryption (ie this box did not use encrypted 
anything).  Grub2 refused to install, giving a message:

/sbin/grub2-setup: warn: Your embedding area is unusually small.  core.img 
won't fit in it..
/sbin/grub2-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible.  GRUB can only be installed 
in this setup by using blocklists.  However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and 
their use is discouraged..
/sbin/grub2-setup: error: will not proceed with blocklists.


Turns out (luckily) this error didn't corrupt anything, and in fact left 
the old grub1 install in-tact in the MBR.  So i just had to copy the 
kernel boot lines to the old grub.conf and I was good to go.


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Re: [Discuss] Full disk encryption

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/03/2012 11:46 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:

gpg, virtualbox and /home encryption. only santa knows what i'm doing
and he doesn't care.


...because you're permanently on the naughty list? :-P
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Re: [Discuss] Full disk encryption

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/04/2012 04:23 PM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:


On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, Matthew Gillen wrote:


On 01/03/2012 05:03 PM, Tom Metro wrote:

Daniel Feenberg wrote:

The built-in Fedora encryption is no trouble to establish...


What tool do they use? Any other distributions that provide an
integrated solution?


Fedora allows you to do whole partition/volume encryption with the
installer very easily. The last time I tried Ubuntu (a couple years
ago), there was an option for "private" home directories. It would
create an encrypted volume for your home directory that was keyed to
your password. It would then get unlocked and mounted when you logged
in. Fedora does something closer to WDE.


Does this work with UEFI BIOS motherboards? Does anything?


It's sort of orthogonal to UEFI I think; the secure boot mode of UEFI 
really just controls launching of the bootloader.  It doesn't 
encrypt/decrypt anything, it's just check-summing and then executing.


Am I wrong?

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] email virus

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/11/2012 08:31 AM, ma...@mohawksoft.com wrote:

I won't post it, because I'm not sure who would be vulnerable, but I just
received this great email virus.

It basically uses google code javascript decryption to deploy the package
sent as an encrypted text stream. Nice.

How will the mail filters deal with this? Can they? The decrypt is written
in javascript and comes from the google code url, so it is probably viewed
by filters as safe. The text stream looks merely like random text with no
obvious patterns also, your javascript stream gets blacklisted? Change the
encrypt key, done.


I make it a habit to turn off javascript in anything that doesn't need 
it (a list 'according to me'; pdf viewers, mail clients, etc). 
Javascript is a cesspool of vulnerabilities (nearly every adobe acrobat 
exploit over the last few years has been javascript related, most 
web-browser vulnerabilities are js related...).


I even turn js off on my android web browser, but I periodically have to 
turn it back on (e.g., wikipedia's mobile version is great, except that 
it needs javascript to be useful).


That said, signature based detection could still nail it, unless they 
encrypt it differently for each recipient (less likely in the general 
phishing case because the computational requirements are too high, but 
very likely in a spear-phishing attempt).


I've seen a perhaps slightly different kind of spam where it's just a 
single link to google docs (presumably to a doc that has malicious 
javascript).  That would be very hard for the email signature-based 
stuff to detect, because creating a bunch of unique urls puts load on 
google's infrastructure, not the spam-bot-net.


Interesting aside: you know what they call spear-phishing for C-level 
executives?  Whaling.  (can't remember where I heard that from; 
apologies if it was from this list)


Matt
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Re: [Discuss] email virus

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/11/2012 09:18 AM, Scott Ehrlich wrote:

I'm an active user of noscript for both chrome and firefox.


But if you're a google docs user, you've likely turned on a blanket 
exception for the google docs domain, right?  (I'm not a google docs 
user, but I've used noscript enough to know how painful it can be for 
certain sites).


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Re: [Discuss] OT: Computer Professionals Update Act

[Matthew Gillen]

On 01/13/2012 12:37 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> In any case, IMHO, employees who work extra
> hours because the work cannot be accomplished during the scheduled work
> day. should be compensated. In contrast a programmer who works some
> overtime to meet a schedule should not be compensated in the general case.

What justification do you have for that?  If I'm a programmer and a
deadline is forcing me to work off hours, how is that fundamentally
different from the server upgrade that has to be done over the weekend?

Unless you're implicitly /blaming/ the software dev for needing to work
overtime (i.e., the deadline crunch was his fault).  I think that is a
gross simplification of what generally happens in software development,
and more to the point, the manager usually shares (at least) equal
responsibility for the schedule crunches (whether it's keeping the
requirements in flux, not being realistic about the initial schedule, etc).

Regardless, personally (as a software developer) I'm currently perhaps
lucky that I get compensated (usually with comp. time) if I put in more
hours.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Programming vs Engineering

[Matthew Gillen]

On 1/21/2012 4:37 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> The title "Engineer" has a specific, legal meaning.  Professional use
> of the Engineer title requires rigorous education, testing,
> internship and licensure.

Says who?  People who are PEs?  Look up the word engineer on dict.org.
None of the definitions say *anything* about licensure.

> engineer
>   n 1: a person who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical
>problems

That describes my job better than pretty much any other word.  But it
seems "Engineer" is a reserved term and I can't use it for my job title...

> None of these exist for professional programmers.  Therefore, there
> are no Professional Software Engineers, regardless of what is on our
> business cards[1].  All of this also applies to the "Architect"
> title.  Architects have similar education and testing requirements to
> Engineers, and like Engineers they must be licensed to practice
> professionally.  Use of the Engineer and Architect titles for
> computer specialists is nothing more than aggrandizement.

You're making essentially the same argument as this: someone who has a
PhD is aggrandizing themselves if they call themselves 'Doctor', because
they don't take all the tests that a MD does.

I'm sorry, I just don't accept the made-up rule (I will note that this
isn't the first time I've been lectured on not being a PE) that says the
word "Engineer" is off limits unless you've passed a PE test.  Go ahead,
be mad about it.  Get indignant about it.  I don't really care.  I'm a
Software Engineer.  Most of the world agrees with me.

You want to say that PEs have rigorous standards?  Fine, I won't argue.
 I don't put "Professional Engineer" on my business cards.  I know what
it means.  But you have to realize that you've just taken two common
language words that describe me, and said "you can't use those
together".  How should I describe myself and my job without those words?
 Does that mean I'm an amateur?  I'm an engineer for my day job,
therefore I am a professional engineer.  There, I didn't make it in to a
proper noun.  Does that make you happy?

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Re: [Discuss] Fwd: Re: Programming vs Engineering

[Matthew Gillen]

On 1/21/2012 10:41 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> I have to disagree with you here and while I do see your point about
> licenses, I truly think computing is too immature to establish the
> requirements on which you could establish a licensing process. For
> instance, we don't even have a standard set of measurements nor do we
> have a standard language in which to express computing engineering
> concepts.
> 
> Programming languages and methodologies are still in flux and under
> development. How could a bureaucratic organization in charge or any such
> licensing process not become a useless albatross?

I concur.  Things are so bad in software engineering in terms of broad
agreement of best practices and such that many organizations are happy
to have CMMI compliance. The funny part (not ha-ha funny) of course is
that CMMI is about /managing/ software projects, not /doing/ them.

I would go much farther than Mark did.  Yes, from the perspective of
being able to duplicate successes, software engineering is very
immature.  But from another point of view, software as a whole is
probably the most varied and complex field there is right now.  Computer
science topics are creeping into virtually every field of study.
Software is doing things today that most people hadn't dreamed of 10
years ago.  The key point is that the 'hard problem' that software is
trying to solve is too much of a moving target.

The kinds of things you need to think about when you're reading a few MB
off a local hard drive are radically different from what you need to
worry about when you've got terabytes of data on a SAN/NAS.

Licensing is about having well-established / well-known ways of solving
problems. The problem-space for software is still expanding.  I don't
see how you could come up with licensing until your problem set is
stable (unless you take a very small subset: e.g., JBoss development, or
Win32 driver development).

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Re: [Discuss] Comcast gets rid of the remaining analog channels

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/09/2012 03:29 AM, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote:
> On 2/9/2012 2:37 AM, Tom Metro wrote:
>>
>> In the end it is likely a mix of things already mentioned, like more HD
>> channels (clinging to the old model of overpriced channel packages),
>> higher Internet speeds, and simply cost savings by getting rid of
>> maintenance overhead for their analog plant.
> 
> Dropping analog has a lot of justifications, and I think they're
> actually correct to do it. Dropping ClearQAM for basic channels does
> not; it's no more difficult to digitally encode without encryption than
> with it. I suppose it makes their support problem slightly simpler (no
> guiding people through setting up their TV sets) but that's unlikely to
> be a big enough deal to matter.

My understanding is that the encryption isn't really a business goal of
the cable companies, but rather a requirement that is being forced on
them by the content producers.  The content producers can say "you need
to pay us X to carry our content if you encrypt, or pay us 10x if you
don't encrypt, to compensate us for the additional risk of piracy".

Look at it this way: the move to encryption forced them to give away a
lot of decryptor devices to existing customers to keep them from
screaming bloody murder.  That's a big up-front investment.  You might
say that they will make it back over the long run by charging a fee on
top of their costs for the future customers' set-top-boxes, but that's a
risky bet.  The FCC could swing back and outlaw encryption (b/c it
renders FCC-mandated controls like the V-Chip useless), consumers could
find another venue to spend their money, etc.

It's my opinion that the content producers (following the MPAA/RIAA
example) are grossly over-estimating the "piracy problem" (esp. in terms
of how much money they are "losing"), and therefore grossly
over-reacting in terms of the political pressure they are applying, and
the additional costs they are bundling into their products.

It's gotten to the point where I've /almost/ convinced my wife that we
should dump our cable service, and just do mythv OTA.

In the long run, I'm confident that they are just creating more room for
novel 'content providers', who are novel in their content distribution
models as much as their content, to step in and eat their lunch (e.g.
look up Lewis C.K.'s recent foray into self-publishing video of his
stand-up routine: bottom line was that he made a boatload more money
than he ever did doing deals with HBO Specials, and he did it with no
DRM).  More to the point, my wife and kids (who watch all the tv in our
house) watch as much off the internet as they do off our cable service.

So I'm sort of torn.  On the one hand my instinct is to fight their
political pressure to bend rules in ways that break my MythTV.  On the
other, the more success they have (from their point of view) at
protecting the business model they had in the pre-VCR days, the faster
they will become irrelevant...

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Re: [Discuss] Comcast gets rid of the remaining analog channels

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/09/2012 09:56 AM, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote:
> On 2/9/2012 8:45 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote:
> 
>> My understanding is that the encryption isn't really a business goal of
>> the cable companies, but rather a requirement that is being forced on
>> them by the content producers.  The content producers can say "you need
>> to pay us X to carry our content if you encrypt, or pay us 10x if you
>> don't encrypt, to compensate us for the additional risk of piracy".
> 
> By "basic channels" I meant "the ones that are available as part of
> basic service" (the cheapest cable service) which are mostly available
> over the air, not the cable company definition of "basic channels"
> meaning "ones that you don't pay individual subscription fees for" (ie,
> not HBO etc). How can piracy be a consideration for channels that are
> already available at higher quality (the versions carried on cable are
> re-encoded at lower bitrates than the broadcasts) for free?

You and I can see that; this is the MPAA/RIAA content industry you're
talking about.  Common sense is uncommon in their little bubble...

Matt
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[Discuss] usb thumb drive

[Matthew Gillen]

I got a new thumb drive, and I decided to check it out on my linux box
before using it.  Fdisk shows this:

   Device Boot  Start End  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *80643129343915642688c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)

I thought the start block being so high we sort of odd.  I know that the
version of fdisk with Fedora 16 seems to be showing more than it used to
(i.e., the start block is usually now 2048 instead of 0, I'm assuming
that means it is representing the MBR where it did not in the past).

So I created a new partition, just hit return for all defaults, and got
this:

/dev/sdb2204880633008   83  Linux

So the 2048 start block is what I expect.  If my calculations are
correct, this drive has 1909 blocks / MB, so there appears to be about
3MB of unused space before the first partition.

Using dd to copy this sdb2 device to a file then opening it in a
hex-editor shows that the partition is all zeros.

Is there a legitimate reason for what I'm seeing?  Are they just leaving
some space for re-mapping bad sectors?  Why not do that at the end of
the drive?

Thanks,
Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Light Linux Distro for VM usage

[Matthew Gillen]

On 03/07/2012 11:34 AM, aldo albanese wrote:
> In addition, Linux is a great product but it seems that you need to
> learn every singles OS. As of an example, Crome did not want to
> install on Mint...

Yes, there are a million of these "small" (but frustrating) differences
between distributions.  The general advice is usually to pick one and
stick with it for a while.  Once you get indoctrinated into a particular
distro's way of doing things, the learning curve flattens out a bit.

Trying to learn multiple distros at once before you're experienced with
linux in general is probably too much for anyone who values their time.
 I'm very experienced with linux, and I /still/ hate switching distros...

HTH,
Matt
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Re: [Discuss] The next Linux desktop: Ubuntu 12.04

[Matthew Gillen]

On 3/10/2012 7:23 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On 3/10/2012 12:29 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>> Consider the following two lists:
>>
>> Cooking:   Oven, Stove Top, Microwave, Toaster,  Toaster oven, Rice
>> Cooker, CrockPot/Slow cooker, Electric waffle iron, Electric griddle,
>> Electric drip coffee maker, Bread machine
>>
>> "Personal" Computing:  Smartphone, tablet, laptop/netbook, desktop PC,
>> smart TV, Internet video devices (ROKU, etc.), cable set top box,
>> gaming consoles (portable and fixed), e-book reader
> 
> I got flamed to no end on another mailing list for calling iPhone and
> iPad appliances and comparing them to kitchen appliances like microwave
> ovens and toasters :).  But truth be told, I think that you're right.
> 

I think you're safe here ;-)

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Re: [Discuss] [OT]Discuss - Software Engineering union

[Matthew Gillen]

On 4/19/2012 7:28 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> I think, in our society, business has been bashing unions for decades
> and their message has taken hold. Yes, I grant you there are many
> examples of absurdity where the unions aren't helping themselves. On the
> whole, however, the amount of good that unions do far outweigh the few
> Monty pythonesque moments.

Just because unions don't always commit egregious stupidity doesn't mean
that there aren't serious costs associated with them.  At their core,
unions are another layer of bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy's foremost goal is
always self-preservation.  That necessarily stands in the way of innovation.

I would argue that in IT, more impediments to innovation are a bad
thing.  Our profession is going through a revolutionary period.  Perhaps
unions wouldn't be as harmful to innovation as our patent system is, but
it would be right up there.

> The IT industry is fairly well paid slave labor. 

I really don't feel that what I do is anything approaching slave labor.
I honestly can't think of a single thing a union would do for me to make
my life better. I value flexibility in my schedule.  My employer is
happy to work with me on that.  I understand the value I provide to the
business, and make sure that I'm doing things that help the business
even if it's not strictly in my job description.

I feel that often unions create an adversarial relationship where
employees no longer feel that the health of the business is their
problem (the automotive unions are the conical example of this).  That
would be detrimental to IT at a time when businesses are completely
re-tooling and re-organizing themselves around IT functions.

> The treatment of IT people is pretty terrible as well.
> 
> I worked at "Business and Professional Software" on Binney Street, 
> ...
> I worked at "Sytron" corporation, they went on a hiring spree...
> 
> At "TPS" in Cambridge, ... 
>
> I think we need a union. Looking back on all the crap that I've seen, I
> hate to think of new people going into this industry without protection.

This might sound callous, but it sounds like you need to be a little
more selective in who you work for.  Voluntary employment is voluntary
on both sides.  If people left a job and got screwed on day one of their
"new job", whose fault is that?  A bird in the hand... More to the
point, how would a union have helped in that case?  As an aside, I've
known far more people that ended up crawling back to their old employers
after doing (short) stints at startups than I've known people who were
successful at startups.

Back to my point though: I interviewed at Progressive Insurance when I
was fresh out of school.  I asked questions about what it was like
working there.  They were gearing up for a big re-write of their
mission-critical software that was written in COBOL and whose lineage
was measured in decades.  They were planning to do it all in C# (.Net
was still in beta at the time).  I'd done some research, and found a
list (from M$) of 10 "key" differences between Java and C#, and they
were all syntactic sugar.  So I asked them why they were using what
appeared to me to be a platform-specific Java for this major project (I
think I refrained from mentioning the "unproven" aspect of .Net, or old
adage that M$ doesn't get anything into a usable state until at least
version 3).

No one could give me a decent answer.  One of them actually admitted
that he was pure manager and had no technical background. But their
reactions told me all I needed to know about working there.  Programmers
would be treated as cogs in a machine.  They would have no input into
any meaningful decisions.  They weren't interested enough in me to make
me and offer, but that was okay, because I was pretty sure I'd hate my
life if I worked there.

By contrast, where I ended up working (had to migrate East for better
opportunities; the job market for IT really sucked at that time in the
mid west) a department manager was asking deeper technical questions
than I think I would have asked at that point.  The first time I met my
current manager, I was running a demo I had designed specifically to
make his product look bad.  Two months later I was working for him.

tl;dr My point is that being selective in who you work for will do far
more for you than a union ever could, and without the bureaucracy.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Discuss - Software Engineering union, now officially OT

[Matthew Gillen]

On 04/20/2012 10:43 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> A few years ago Wal*Mart tried to get all retailers to use RFID tags.
> With RFID, you could conceivably check out without removing the items
> from your cart. I wonder what would happen in the RFID era if a woman
> brings her child who has an RFID identifier :-)

You mean like a new US Passport / Passport Card? ;-)

For years I wondered what the register said in the intro sequence to the
Simpsons when they scan Maggie at the grocery checkout.  I was so
disappointed when I got the season 1 dvd and watched it frame by frame
only to see it say "Error"...

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] can you copyright an API?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 04/23/2012 08:58 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> I loves me some android, so I don't want to see any harm come to it, but in
> this case, I think google f**ked up.  There were lots of ways they could
> have avoided all this mess... For one, they could have started with the GPL
> openjdk.  Even if they threw out and rewrote 99% of the code in there, as
> long as it started with code that Sun released under GPL, and they continue
> to develop all their modifications under GPL, then oracle wouldn't have a
> case against google...  But google didn't decide to do that.  

No, that actually wouldn't have solved the problem.  Sun granted
automatic royalty-free patent licenses only for java implementations
that met the full java specification.  The partial java implementations
(sun's own "micro edition" is one) are not included in that license waiver.

Starting with GPL code doesn't inherently protect you from patent
infringement (or copyright infringement, as the case may be).

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] can you copyright an API?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 04/24/2012 05:11 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 04:19:04PM -0400, Matthew Gillen wrote:
>> On 04/23/2012 08:58 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>>> I loves me some android, so I don't want to see any harm come to it, but in
>>> this case, I think google f**ked up.  There were lots of ways they could
>>> have avoided all this mess... For one, they could have started with the GPL
>>> openjdk.  Even if they threw out and rewrote 99% of the code in there, as
>>> long as it started with code that Sun released under GPL, and they continue
>>> to develop all their modifications under GPL, then oracle wouldn't have a
>>> case against google...  But google didn't decide to do that.  
>>
>> No, that actually wouldn't have solved the problem.  Sun granted
>> automatic royalty-free patent licenses only for java implementations
>> that met the full java specification.  
> 
> The GPL explicitly grants you the right to modify and distribute any
> code distributed under it as you see fit, provided you distribute the
> modified source.  How could starting with the GPL-licensed code *not*
> solve the problem?

Because with patents it doesn't matter if you did a clean room
implementation. Using the technique described in the patent requires a
license from the patent holder.  Sun granted those licenses to openjdk,
but there were terms.  You can't start with openjdk, gut it, and still
claim compliance with the terms of the license.

Clean room implementations might protect you from copyright
infringement, but only if the API isn't copyright-able.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] can you copyright an API?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 04/25/2012 03:43 PM, j...@trillian.mit.edu wrote:
> 
> One thing I wonder is whether there is an actua legal  definition  of
> an "API".  The software industry plays fast and loose with this term.
> I've seen things labelled "API" whose only content is a  header  file
> that looks like:
> 
> int func(int arg1, int arg2);
> 
> To some software managers' minds, that's all you need to create a new
> "API". If it can be copyrighted, then everyone who has ever written a
> function that takes two integer args and returns an integer result is
> in violation of the copyright.
> 
> So if I wanted to avoid being the victim of a lawsuit like this  one,
> how  would  I know that my "API" is original enough to qualify for my
> own copyright?  As far as I know, there  is  no  legal  definiton  of
> "API", but of course I could be wrong.

Collections of phone numbers are not copyrightable, but
non-trivial/creative organizations of those phone numbers can be (e.g.
alphabetical by name is considered a trivial organization).  So if you
equate each function signature to a phone number, then individual
functions might not be copyright-able, but collections of functions
might be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
> For example, a recipe is a process, and not copyrightable, but the
> words used to describe it are; see idea-expression divide and
> Publications International v Meredith Corp. (1996).[2] Therefore, you
> can rewrite a recipe in your own words and publish it without
> infringing copyrights. But, if you rewrote every recipe from a
> particular cookbook, you might still be found to have infringed the
> author's copyright in the choice of recipes and their "coordination"
> and "presentation", even if you used different words; however, the
> West decisions below suggest that this is unlikely unless there is
> some significant creativity carried over from the original
> presentation.

I can sort of see both sides: having used horrible APIs, I know the
value of a good one. On the other hand, I'm an open source advocate, and
I understand how much /more/ valuable a good open-source API is.  If you
believe that the intent of copyright (and patents) is to promote the
public good (i.e. to encourage works that would not be produced
otherwise; as opposed to some inherent 'right' of inventors/creators),
then I don't see how you can justify making an API copyright-able, since
the public is much better served by free-to-use (or free-to-implement,
as the case may be) APIs.

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Class action against "Secure Boot"

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/22/2012 10:12 AM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> I was thinking, if Microsoft gets its way, it will use what's left of
> its monopoly power to restrict access to the PC boot infrastructure. In
> principal I have no problem with a secure boot system, as long as I have
> control over what *I* allow to boot. The problem is when *I* have to ask
> or pay someone else to use *my* property the way that I want.
> 
> If this roles out and is sufficiently troublesome to freedom, do you
> think we can sue?

My hope is that linux is widespread enough now that people will vote
with their dollars (i.e. only buy machines that are not locked down).
The "protection" it offers for end-users is negligible, and enough
people are savvy enough with linux to understand the cost/benefit is not
in their favor.

If this had been rolled out 10 years ago, it would have been a serious
detriment to linux adoption.  Nowadays...I think there's a decent chance
no lawyers are needed.

Any time companies try this, an active community dedicated to thwarting
stupidity and arbitrary restrictions springs up (witness the number of
sites dedicated to cracking open Android bootloaders).

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Class action against "Secure Boot"

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/22/2012 01:43 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> On 6/22/2012 11:19 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
>> I agree it stinks, but if you refuse to use products like this, you're
>> confining yourself to a fringe, and you can rest assured there won't be
>> enough people in your group to sway the product offerings of MS & Apple &
>> etc.
> 
> No, actually, I don't think it stinks at all.  What you're talking about
> and what Microsoft, et.al., are selling aren't the same thing.
> 
> I've said it here before but it bears repeating: when you buy an Apple
> product you don't buy a computer.  You buy the Apple Experience.  The
> shiny box is just that: a box.  It's the delivery platform for that
> experience.  Have a Kindle?  Same thing: it's a delivery platform for
> Amazon.  Android?  Third verse same as the first.  Microsoft is doing
> the same with Windows Phone and Surface.  The shiny box isn't the
> product.  It's the a delivery platform for the experience inside.  The
> experience is the product.
> 
> Put bluntly: if you want a computer then buy a computer.  Don't buy an
> appliance with the expectation of getting a general purpose computer
> because you'll be sadly disappointed.

I disagree strongly with your last point.  Yes, what Apple or Amazon
/want/ to sell you is "an experience".  What there are actually selling
you is a general purpose computer.  You just have to do a little work to
unlock it (and in many cases, such as modding an XBox, unlocking the
device so you can run your own OS necessarily cuts you off from "the
experience", XBoxLive in the case of XBox).

Apple especially has tried to make it "illegal" in various ways to
unlock their devices.  But they've failed every time.  Likewise with
Amazon's kindle, B&N's nook, etc.

Sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth (rooting my nook tablet so
that I can run the kindle app on it is an example where I spent way too
much time on it relative to the money I saved from buying a 'normal'
tablet).  But that's a personal decision that changes with circumstances...

Matt
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Re: [Discuss] Gnome Shell

[Matthew Gillen]

On 06/28/2012 07:40 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> In my own case, that means If I want to keep using these extensions, I
> will either have to maintain them myself or maybe switch to KDE.

Yeah, I recently switched back to KDE after a long hiatus.  I stopped
using KDE for a long time just because at first it was the red-headed
step child in Fedora.  But Gnome is too painful nowadays.  You need
plugins to make it usable, and maintaining plugins (in the end-user
sense of updating them all the time or finding new equivalents, not even
in a software development sense) is too obnoxious.

Here's a really old feature of KDE (been there for at least 12 years)
that was one of the primary reasons I kept it on my machines (I'm
sharing this as motivation to ditch gnome):  Konqueror
(the KDE webkit-based browser) is a man and info page viewer.

Put "man:pthread" or "man:signal" or "info:bash" in the address bar.
Far and away the only tolerable way I've found to navigate info pages.
But it also does nice stuff for man pages, in the the "see also" pages
are hyperlinks, it generates it's own disambiguation pages (try the
'signal' example), etc.

Matt
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