Advogato blog for Nelson

20 Mar 2005

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 00:35:53 GMT

msevior The GPL is not a contract, it is a license.

I think, technically, it's closer to a copyright since the user never explicitely has to agree to anything.

7 Feb 2004

Sat, 7 Feb 2004 14:46:39 GMT

Haven't written anything in a while. Currently dorking with Mono, it's more cool than I had expected. I've also been spending a lot of time with C++ and libgc, very cool, I almost don't believe it.

11 Aug 2003

Mon, 11 Aug 2003 00:53:41 GMT

Right now I have decided to throw some time after the TenDRA project and see what happens.

Doesn't SCO have claim to the copyright of TenDRA? Or some of the libraries in it? I could have sworn that a company they own did a chunk of the work. I'd never sabotage a project or wish a compiler team anything but luck (more is better in my book, I like choice) but with the current SCO situation I'd be cautious, you never know if they may wish to excercise their right as copyright holder to re-license a project. Should it ever become a GCC: GNU Compiler Collection competitor and useful I'd half exepct it from them right now. You could always fork but they seem to take a fairly liberal view of their rights. I'd think SUIF and Open64 would be safer choices if you insist on not working on GCC.

Speaking of, Pascal is included in the Mandrake GCC RPMs anymore. It warms my heart and brings back fond memories. I'm not sure if GPC is mainlining in to GCC of it Mandrake is patching their own cut. As I understand it, GPC has been a work in progress for clse to 15 years so it's nice to see it getting put in to some more popular places. Hopefully this addition will make Pascal and Ada (which has been in the main GCC tree for a while now) more popular choices for some projects.

Hacking

I've been playing with Python and ORBit a bit lately. I'm impressed. I've never seen CORBA so simple before. I've heard it talked up for the last 12 years and it looks usable now. I've dorked around with SOM but it was a nightmare compared to ORBit now. Especially with Python, 15 minutes and I can clients and servers talking to each other. Very sweet.

Other stuff

I'm still high as a kite on cycling, the season usually starts to get a little depressing after the Tour but I'm riding a lot and still loving the bike all the time.

20 May 2003

Tue, 20 May 2003 20:19:05 GMT

Simply incredible... The Tour de France organizers have chosen not to invite Mario Cipollini's team this year, again, in favor of some lame second-tier French team. This is a man who is the reigning world champion, has won 42 stages, as of his victory today, at the Giro d'Italia (a record!), the Milano-San Remo classic, Gand Wevelgem (apologies for my spelling) and numerous other races. Two thumbs down for Jean Marie LeBlanc.

Another cycling fan! I'm also ouraged by this crime.

26 Mar 2003

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 17:04:35 GMT

War

I'm not sure what to say. It's nasty, Iraq is proving many of the assertions about them to be true. They are grossly violation Geneva convention by placing bounties on the heads of their enemies and showing POWs on TV. They launched scud missles which are considered WMD and then the fake surrendering and other perfidy is disgusting. I hope it ends soon. I think there are lines that shouldn't be crossed, ever; I think it is imparitive that we never give in to terrorists or their tactics like this. I can't imagine how you possibly justify their actions. I pray for peace soon. No more from me on this.

Builds

I'm a big fan of a clean build. At IBM once I worked on a huge project that had a perl script that built the makefile and then ran make. It was insanely complex and some dirt bag coded himself some job security with it. Adding or removing files was impossible without this guys help, I added a single cpp file once and it was broke for 2 days, you simply couldn't add a file to the list of files to compile. Currently debugging the same problem I've debugged at every other job. Some jackass puts a "perl necklace" (pardon the sick humor, but it is the best description I've ever heard for a 1000+ line undocumented piece of mission critical perl) on the build and we make a few changes and the build stops working. NEVER DO THAT! EVER! I honestly haven't run into something you couldn't do with GNU make, it might take a little script but it's always possible. ant and a-a-p do some nice stuff for you too. Bottom line: don't make the build too complex, don't have too many system deps for it, and don't leave it undocumented... I think this might be my biggest pet peeve, I think you should be fired for doing stuff like that.

Open Source Sabotage

Then last night I debugged another, very interesting bug. It was an intentional one. An opensource project, that I won't name yet, intentionally pushed out sabotaged code. There website had a redirect, if you downloaded it from some computers you'd get the bad code, if you downloaded it from others you'd get clean code. I was shocked that someone would put the time and effort in to something like that. Upon closer inspection they had some embedded messages in the software that were hidden behind a simple XOR-esque encryption and made to look like data strings. When you run the software you get a little nastigram about how you've been black listed. Any comments on the best way to deal with this with in the community? I'm inclined to start a fork. Anyone know of other cases of this? They didn't drop our IPs, they didn't contact our ISP or admins about anything, they intentionally sabotaged the download.

19 Mar 2003

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 04:03:11 GMT

Anyone playing with a-a-p much? I've been dorking around with it some and it's pretty sweet. I've got nothing against GNU make but I always end up writing shell scripts with in my makefile to do some things. I really like the ability to embed Python within my build script.

Pretty cool.

12 Mar 2003

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 17:47:02 GMT

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I read the Pragmatic Programmer a couple years back, nothing terribly illuminating however it was enjoyable and I really liked the idea of trying to contain so muhc of the good common sense wisdom about programming/software engineering and trying to put it in to a tome for beginners and such. I like lists and such. Anyone know of a community effort to put together something like this? What I'd like is something like wiki that can suck the contents of it in to a book type format. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+b3JGep1sKCSDUPoRAvUdAKCXKvmcTm8o18Ao9s2iL6L2StbpDQCfYsNm gjmtpBlX0MjruD0UxexMZys= =6oxq -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

11 Mar 2003

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 21:31:51 GMT

I got to thinking. This is sort of like my own blog.. Call me stupid but it only took like 2 years for me to realize that fact. I'll start putting stuff here more regularly. Pull my GPG/PGP keys from www.keyserver.net. I'm big on signing and encrypting all email anymore. Get enigmail with mozilla or evolution and start partying with email encryption. I even put my photo in my keys so you can see my mug shot if you start encrypting your email.

I've been preoccupied with this SCO business lately. I worked at IBM for 5 years. I simply cannot imagine that company stealing another company's work. Integrity has a premium placed on it within IBM. More importantly, SCO hasn't done anything that IBM didn't do 30 years earlier. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I know they've had a speckled history, AIX for IA32 was really SCO, I always joke that they picked SCO because it has a name that is 3 letters long and that made the sed script to replace it with "IBM"that much easier. SCO has been slow to "get it" and I fear that becaose of that they feel that they have a decreasing number of chances left for them. IBM will slap them silly if they aren't careful.

29 Jan 2003

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 05:09:08 GMT

Haven't entered anything in a while... I'm busy. Doing security software. Still alive and well. Still doing free software, still making a living at it.

Having fun. It's an interesting time for our movement and out industry. I'm optimistic.

more later. peace, love, God Bless,

Nelson

7 Mar 2001

Wed, 7 Mar 2001 01:25:57 GMT

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: TIGER

Okay, I hope people read this. Send me a note at ian.nelson@echostar.com if you wish to discuss it.

Here is my question. What the hell good are SysV Queues? The Linux kernel limits them to 16. So you have a software resource that is limited to 16 instances. That just seems low. With such a small number of them they are a valuble resource, how do you decide who can and can't use them?

The logical next question is what the hell good is SysV IPC at all? Anyone? Anyone? If you want to really ponder this, what you need to do is architect a system, a complex one, and use SysV queues for IPC, only then will you have the true state of mind to enjoy this problem. Former Windows hacks think they are the logical choice for IPC. Fortunately you can bump a constant in the kernel and ramp the max up to 64 or something but that feels like a bandaid for a bullet wound.

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