Advogato blog for Zaitcev

16 Sep 2011

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 05:00:11 GMT

I run about 5 blogs (depending how you count), and by far the most read or visited one never had any comments - although its engine supports them. Blog comments are for the weak.

5 Feb 2010

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 19:13:21 GMT

So the "Chinese Wedge" was used for a spammer to gain a foothold. To sum, a wedge (hjclub) gained a certification from a Master (atai), who is Taiwanese, by presumably [mis]using some Chinese codeword. Then it certified normal spammer(s). The response (by chalst) was to call for ostracism, or a purge, which is the normal social response. However, suppose that there is no way to make atai to drop the cert of the wedge. What then? I think we ought to get used to the idea of imperfect protection. Raph actually said that in the book example some books will be given away improperly and that is all right. Still, there is probably some fertile field for research here...

10 Aug 2009

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:37:09 GMT

Notes from listening to Red Hat Cloud Computing Forum

- Brian Stevens, RHT CTO -
Reduce the cost of EXIT from the cloud. Sounds like "well, duh", but yeah, something to be kept in mind.

- Matt Aslett, the 451 group -
http://nebula.nasa.gov/services -- example of cloud
Japan is behind in Cloud

- Jeff Garzik talks about CLD. It's improved from the time I heard it last. More concise and makes sense.
AMQP - does it help?
http://hail.wiki.kernel.org/
Jeff is talking about distributed storage stuff to be built over Hail. I wonder. If there's no consistency/coherency underneath, it's hard to build it on top.
HyperTable, port over CLD?

- Michael DeHaan, RHT - Cobbler (mdehaan@)
http://fedorahosted.org/cobbler
Cobbler works before the system exists, Puppet works after the system exists.

- Matthew Farrellee - Condor (job scheduler)
[maybe I should use it to build Map/Reduce, unless Hadoop of course]

- Rich Wolski, Eucalyptus Systems Inc. - "Yuakaliptus", in Santa Barbara
Emulates AWS but not designed to replace AWS... Too modest.
Has S3 ("Walrus") and EBS (root filesystems etc.), APIs to attach/detach to VMs.
So, are Ubuntoids going to ship this Eucalyptus or other Eucalyptus? Yes.
* Google App Engine: emulated in UCSB by AppScale
rich@ eucalyptus
RabbitMQ - commercial (proprietary too?) SQS implementation.

- Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera
V.interesting history bg
"Hadoop provides people with a v.powerful NEW tool to do data analysis."
Hadoop sits on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed FS). Ah-ha!

- KVM skipping

- libVirt skipping

- Skipping Sunny Gosain and ERP talk

- Brian Kearney RHT "Sr. Consulting Engineer" - project Thincrust (how is it different from Cobbler?)
Thincrust.org creates a text that can be fed to Cobbler (or elsewhere).

- Chander Kent, CEO of Zmanda - backup to a cloud. A commercial Duplicity?
APIs: Amazon S3, CloudFiles, SunCloud, Microsoft Azure.
libzcloud - open library
zmanda.com/blogs wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Libzcloud

3 Jul 2009

Fri, 3 Jul 2009 15:23:51 GMT

On the topic of Tbird mangling patches (in twisti's entry), Bryan Clark made an extension to expose the knobs in the UI, Asalted:

http://hg.mozilla.org/users/clarkbw_gnome.org/asalted-patches/

Also, contrary to twisti's assertion, the mangling was very much intentional. The flamewar between programmers and those in Mozilla who think that programmers are not a relevant userbase for MUAs was... educational.

21 Oct 2008

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:37:26 GMT

Regarding the flap around Keith, I'm not as concerned about the exact value of the cutoff as with not having a mechanism to raise those who fall below it. For example, argp suddenly decided to use the common language yesterday... which is welcome, but his rating is 2.4 as seen by my account.

Follow focus nazi

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:05:37 GMT

I have a laptop with Synaptics touchpad, and one of the biggest annoyances in its implementation is how the "wheel" strips act upon the GUI element where the mouse is pointing regardless of the current focus. It took years to beat focus-follow-mouse people into a marginal submission, yet they still find every crack to seep through, like kerosene. Naturally, this behaviour is not tunable.

Another retardity in this area is the behaviour of the panel. Some genious came up with an awesome idea to flip windows if panel receives a wheel click. The problem with that is, a strip on the laptop is difficult to make to deliver just one click, so the function is useless to me. Also, it is too easy to hit the strip accidentially (which would not be a big deal if not for the enforced focus-follow). So, for one reason or the other, I would like to disable this behaviour. I don't even want to seek excuses for this wish. Just do it. But it's impossible.

So far the only group that displayed a clue in this was, strangely enough, Mozilla. They fixed bugs I filed and in general had an understanding of various input and display technologies, despite only being browser people. You'd think desktop developers would know how a touchpad differs from a wheel mouse.

UPDATE: Chris pointed out in comments that a fundamental reason exists why wheel behaves this way: the extra button events are mouse buttons, and those go where pointer points. I knew it, but it didn't click. I still think that applications should be able to work around this, although perhaps at the cost of some extra events being delivered.

Unforgivable

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 08:08:24 GMT

Here's what new pulseaudio does after update in Rawhide today:

VLC media player 0.8.6h Janus E: core-util.c: Failed to state home directory /q/zaitcev/.pulse: No such file or directory E: core-util.c: Assertion 'fn' failed at pulsecore/core-util.c:1086, function pa_lock_lockfile(). Aborting. Aborted

Talkative library functions are bad enough, but aborting and taking down whole application?! How amateurish.

Go Seth!

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:07:45 GMT

I cancelled a yum update because I suddenly remembered that it's Friday and I had to download Tower of Druaga finale. It seems like only yesterday doing so involved ^a-c and kill -9, but today two ^c were sufficient. Yay.

Jim's strategy

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:07:45 GMT

Jeremy posted a shorthand of a meeting with Jim, our CEO. I think it's pretty interesting, although it's not very new for me, because it's consistent with his internal message and I've met with him before.

Jim talks about the need to involve companies (and their member individuals) into the Open Source in general. I quite agree, although in my like of work I see it in a very narrow way. I interact with all kinds of customers. Some are used to the old, "black box" way. If a test round is needed, I send them a kernel, they run it, collect the results, I think about it, change something, send it again... etcetera. Other (for example, Stratus, Fujitsu) chose "open box" approach: they look at my patches and produce feedback on patches.

Even though I never play favourites with customer problems, "open box" people tend to come to solutions much quicker.

I used to think that there must be some downside to "open box", because they have to have some expertise in-house to deal with source, and expertise costs money. But it is more and more apparent that basic reading of the source is not black magic. Customers always have engineers who can read it. Sure, they may not have intimate understanding of it, but that's what they pay Red Hat for. The basic advantage is essentially free for them.

Another thing Jim talks about is taking a high road relatively Ubuntu. From ethical standpoint, he is right, of course. But I keep thinking... Ubuntu is popular. Not as popular as Windows, I guess, but it is a success, and you never argue with success. Fat lot of good will it do to Free Software if everyone moves to Ubuntu. Fortunately, Fedora is a success too, for now at least. But it looks like Jim just believes that truth will always prevail... I am not so sure. It is not how the world works.

Whitelist your cookies

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:09:12 GMT

I followed the suggestion at DaveJ's comments as an experiment, because I visit way too many forums and other identity driven sites, but so far it worked very well. There was not a single case of website failing to work with explicit permissions to set cookies, and the work required to add permissions was not too onerous.

It would be even better if Firefox threw up a dialog or something, to let me whitelist a website on the fly, without opening the preferences dialog with its tabs.