gmane.linux.elitists

Re: a CUA for window managers?

Rob Funk — 2013-05-14T22:46:14

Maybe this is what you're after?
  http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-latest.html
  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/wm-spec

a CUA for window managers?

Tony Godshall — 2013-05-14T22:26:50

What comes closest to a Best Practices or CUA for window managers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access

EFF and Partners Challenge Six 3D Printing PatentApplications

Eugen Leitl — 2013-04-16T11:03:01

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/eff-partners-challenge

EFF and Partners Challenge Six 3D Printing Patent Applications

If there's something that drives us crazy, it's when patents get in the way
of innovation. Unfortunately, we often don't find out about the most
dangerous patents until it's too late—once they've been used to assert
infringement. That's why we were encouraged by the new provision of the
patent law that allows third parties to easily challenge patent applications
while those applications are still pending.

But, here's the rub: it's hard to identify those dangerous applications. And,
once you do, it's even harder to find the right information to challenge
those applications during the window that the law allows. So we partnered
with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
and Ask Patents and—most importantly—you.

As of today, we've now challenged six pending patent applications that you
helped us identify as applications that, if granted, woul

Re: Fun with Git repository copying

Øyvind A. Holm — 2013-04-14T03:21:31

Why use rsync at all? We already have git fetch. Create a bare
repository on another machine, set up a remote in that bare repo that
points to the source repo (the one that should be backed up) and run
"git fetch --all --prune". In addition to that, you could recreate all
the branches locally (in the backup repo) using something like this
script:

  https://github.com/sunny256/utils/blob/master/git-allbr

Are there any advantages to using rsync instead of just fetching a
backup? By using this method, silent corruption of the main repo (like
the KDE event some weeks ago) will be caught if fetch.fsckObjects is set
to true. And there's no need to shut down anything. Also, if the source
repo is repacked with git-gc, no additional bandwith is used to download
all the repackaged objects.

Regards,
Øyvind
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Re: Fun with Git repository copying

Greg KH — 2013-04-14T03:04:12

You already said it, stop all processes that could access the repo (i.e.
sshd), back it up / snapshot it, and start it up.  Just like any other
database.

Or use a snapshot-like filesystem (trigger a btrfs snapshot on every
commit finishing), or have a git trigger that pushes the data somewhere
else at the same time (or start a pull from somewhere else), which is
git.kernel.org is moving toward.

greg k-h
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Re: Fun with Git repository copying

Don Marti — 2013-04-13T17:26:11

begin Greg KH quotation of Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 08:07:32AM -0700:


No, for a database I'd shut down the server, then
copy, then start up the server again (unless it was
critical to minimize downtime, in which case I'd put
the database files on a separate filesystem and do
a snapshot, then copy that.)

For git, though, there's no server process to shut
down (unless I want to bring down sshd).  What's the
best way to make git not modify a repository while
I'm copying it or backing it up?

Re: Fun with Git repository copying

Greg KH — 2013-04-13T15:07:32

Sometimes?  It's more common than you might think, which is why the
kernel.org admin has created grokmirror to handle mirroring of git
repos, which have the same problem of backing up / copying them on a
live system:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/114752601290767897172/posts/fVvEoMe1H6q


B because git doesn't use 'cp' but rather the syscalls directly, so the
user of the git repo itself will be just fine, who knows about the user
of the copied repo, an "evil" cp could just not copy all of the files.

Again, don't just use rsync or cp on a live git repo, you wouldn't do
that on a database, would you?

greg k-h
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Fun with Git repository copying

Don Marti — 2013-04-13T14:45:39

What happens when you're doing a copy of a Git
repository that's in the process of being pushed to
or garbage collected?

  http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/difficulties_in_backing_up_live_git_repositories/

  http://marc.info/?l=git&m=136422341014631&w=2

Sometimes, bad things.

Here's a hypothetical game.

Let's say that programmer A has the job of
implementing POSIX cp(1), but has decided to do it
in a way that will pass the "cp" test suite but order
the file copying to maximize the chances of breaking
copies of Git repositories that are being changed
during the copy.  (For example, "evil cp" might see
if there are any subdirectories directories named
"objects", copy their contents first, then pause,
then copy the rest.)

Programmer B has decided to extend Git to defend
against "evil cp" so that the copy is usable, even if
"evil cp" and a large push and repack happened at
the same time.

A has full access to the Git source code and mailing
list.  B is aware of the existence of "evil cp"
but not the details of

Fw: "The Human Hacking Field Guide" - a story about open source and open content hackerdom - What's in it for you and how you can help.

Shlomi Fish — 2013-04-08T08:11:29

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Mon, 8 Apr 2013 11:11:01 +0300
From: Shlomi Fish <shlomif< at >shlomifish.org>
To: advocacy< at >perl.org
Subject: "The Human Hacking Field Guide" - a story about open source and open
content hackerdom  - What's in it for you and how you can help.

"The Human Hacking Field Guide" - a story about open source and open content
hackerdom  - What's in it for you and how you can help.
============================================================================

<NOTE>
First of all, this story covers Perl extensively, so it is on-topic here.

If you have a good accent in English and English diction, you can help me with
recording this story. Here is my best attempt at it:
http://www.shlomifish.org/Files/files/sounds/HHFG-chapter-1-The-Things-you-do-to-Get-to-College.mp3
and it's not too good.

This story may be useful for advocating contributing to open source and open
content, so any help with it, may pay in spades with a lot of interest among
young (and older) people in contributing to it

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

Jason White — 2013-03-31T06:15:02

And what's the substitute for IRC nowadays? XMPP multi-user chat? StatusNet
(soon to become pump.io) and its proprietary counterparts?

Someone who is well versed in the mathematics of reputation systems and
machine learning algorithms should be able to write an RSS reader that quite
effectively identifies articles of interest to each user. It would be
interesting to determine whether a relevance calculation based on what
friends/colleagues/acquaintances approve would out-perform a textual
classifier, or whether a combination of the two would be more reliable.

As the volume of online communication grows ever larger, there will need to be
much more investment in filtering techniques; and I hope that free/open-source
software is at the forefront of these developments.

If I remember rightly, CRM114 has been used to classify news articles; it's a
general-purpose tool, not just a spam filter (even though many of us use it in
the latter application).


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Re: Spooky (license) action at a distance?

Aaron Burt — 2013-03-29T01:14:36

Sounds perfect to me.
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Spooky (license) action at a distance?

Don Marti — 2013-03-28T23:11:32

Q: So, what license is Hadoop under?

A: Apache v2!  It must be true, I read it on
Wikipedia!

Q: So that's a non-reciprocal license allowing for
proprietary deriviative works?

A: You know it, man!

(enter Pedantic License Guy)

PLG: Au contraire!  Google's Open Patent Non-Assertion
Pledge "does not apply to any infringement of the
Pledged Patents by hardware or by software that is
not Free or Open Source Software."

Q: So Hadoop is actually under reciprocal licensing
terms?

A: Software licensing is hard.  Let's play "Ticket
To Ride."

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

2013-03-28T18:54:03

I use venus (http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/) like the popular
planet.<project>.org sites but just as a personal aggregation (mostly)
in lieu of any desktop or mobile agg program:

http://planet.promisedlan.org

Maybe it's just me but I've never really longed for the "mark as read"
feature that is the piece obviously missing. 

While looking for the intertwingly link ( I always look for venus code
at the older planetplanet.org and wonder why I can't find the current
code ;) help jdub! ) I saw that there's some work going into giving
venus some of those features:
http://lists.planetplanet.org/archives/devel/2013-March/002265.html



Agreed. Though, maybe just due to low volume, this hasn't bothered me
much. But it's also totally possible that I'm missing gems and enjoying
the bliss of ignorance.


Sounds great.

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

Don Marti — 2013-03-27T14:56:56

begin Tony Finch quotation of Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 01:17:56PM +0000:

Thank you -- good one.

Marco Arment writes, about high-volume feeds,
"It’s not enough to interleave their posts
into a “river” or “stream” paradigm,
where only the most recent N items are shown
in one big, combined, reverse-chronological
list (much like a Twitter timeline), because
many of them would get buried in the noise of
higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets."  --
http://www.marco.org/2013/03/26/power-of-rss

Personally, I think that a scored river design has
potential.  So my thing can be polling >5000 feeds
and still show this Matthew Garrett piece fairly
close to the top:

  http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/23817.html

because that one got linked to from LWN and other
places.

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

Tony Finch — 2013-03-27T13:17:56

http://dotat.at/:/

Tony.

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

Teh Entar-Nick — 2013-03-26T09:48:10

Don Marti:

Well I took all these as the many meanings of "blog".  I kept "weblog"
around for exactly this kind of log-of-links format.  It's a log of Web
browsing, hence weblog.

I'm not that attached to it, but it's a bit absurd that someone thinks
they've invented something worth coining a new term.

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

Shlomi Fish — 2013-03-26T07:42:31

Hi Don,

On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 21:01:04 -0700
Don Marti <dmarti< at >zgp.org> wrote:


Heh, that's nice. However, you should read
http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html :

[QUOTE]
It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals seem so superior
to amateurs. There were only a few jobs as professional journalists, for
example, so competition ensured the average journalist was fairly good. Whereas
anyone can express opinions about current events in a bar. And so the average
person expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to a
journalist writing about the subject.

On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower. You don't have
to buy a drink, and they even let kids in. Millions of people are publishing
online, and the average level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is
not very good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't
present much of a threat-- that blogs are just a fad.

Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way t

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

Don Marti — 2013-03-26T04:01:04

begin Teh Entar-Nick quotation of Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 01:48:04PM +0000:

Today, different people's definitions are all over
the place...

  It's like a press release, except we can use links
  and curse words!

  It's like an column, except you sign over your
  copyright, we don't copy-edit it, and we pay you
  less!

  It's my diary except that...well, um, it's exactly
  like my diary!

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

Teh Entar-Nick — 2013-03-25T13:48:04

Don Marti:

Weird.  This is the original definition of "weblog", you realize.  Jorn
Barger was just logging all the interesting Web pages he'd gone to, with
a short comment.

Re: open linklogging, anyone?

Don Marti — 2013-03-25T12:26:35

begin Teh Entar-Nick quotation of Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 10:03:48AM +0000:

I saw it on Wikipedia, so it must be a thing:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linklog

"clickolinko, the automatic web log" definitely
qualifies.   Thank you.

ELC: SpaceX lessons learned

Eugen Leitl — 2013-03-25T11:54:08

http://lwn.net/Articles/540368/

ELC: SpaceX lessons learned

By Jake Edge

March 6, 2013

On day two of the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference, Robert Rose of SpaceX spoke
about the "Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles". In his
talk, he discussed how SpaceX develops its Linux-based software for a wide
variety of tasks needed to put spacecraft into orbit—and eventually beyond.
Linux runs everywhere at SpaceX, he said, on everything from desktops to
spacecraft.

 
Rose is the lead for the avionics flight software team at SpaceX. He is a
former video game programmer, and said that some lessons from that work were
valuable in his current job. He got his start with Linux in 1994 with
Slackware.

SpaceX as a company strongly believes in making humans into a multi-planetary
species. A Mars colony is the goal, but in order to get there, you need
rockets and spaceships, he said. It is currently expensive to launch space
vehicles, so there is a need to "drive costs down" in order to reach the
goal.