Older blog entries for chalst (starting at number 273)

Recentspam
I do derive some perverse entertainment from some of the spam accounts that have a fleeting existence here, but my favourites are always the SEO "experts". Hi! I'm either incompetent or a criminal, probably both, they tell us, Let me help you!

Today, let me introduce SEM Media, India offering to "Clue your Wounded Website", and whose graphic design skills are as weak as their brand self-awareness is feeble. For but a taster of their site, I provide a snapshot below.

Recentlog
Musouka said [I] (had like 2 or 3 years of [programming java] HS oriented so mostly Object based programming) and i wanted to know if any of you guys had any hints or tricks to getting to know and remember the language?

I'm not sure what HS-oriented Java is: high-school course in programming? You might find these resources useful:

• You can download Bruce Eckel's ageing-but-popular book from his Thinking in Java site;
• Work through a problem set that tests programming skills that you want to solve. If you are at all mathematically oriented, then the Project Euler questions will provide a good workout with core parts of the language like collections. There are other puzzles out there that will test your ability to get Java to solve problems like extracting information from XML, handling UI, or interacting with a server;
• Look at free-software projects: a question on Stack Overflow, well written java open source projects (for learning)?, had some answers that might be interesting for you.

Be patient and realistic. Set yourself goals that you can solve: it takes time before you will have the skills to write software that other people will be excited about.

About your user page: there are quite a few people, myself included, who don't think that Facebook makes a good homepage for Advogato. Creating a page for yourself on a public code repository, say, Github or Bitbucket, makes for a better homepage. You could post your coding efforts there

Recentlog
karlberry mentioned the Firefox It's All Text add-on, which allows you to edit TEXTAREA forms in Emacs. Worth mentioning Alex Bennee's Edit with Emacs plugin for Chrom{ium,e}.

Recentlog
karlberry wondered where he'd seen the question about Pdftex's \pdfnormaldeviate primitive. I guess it has to be TH's post Random numbers in TeX, where he wonders what the old Pdftex manual meant by the primitive generating a distribution with a "unit" of 65 536.

Recentlog
fzort wrote Not sure if StevenRainwater is still accepting patches.

Last time I asked, he was planning a substantial change to the core of mod_virgule, and was discouraging patches to avoid the conversion problem.

Now I come to think about it, this is the problem DVCS' were invented to solve.

Recentspam
Sometimes it seems like my involvement with Advogato consists of reporting spammers.

Account echo http:==www.advogato.org=person=alanove=|tr = / is a spam account that is nearly two weeks old. You know what to do with it.

I think the spammer changed the URL contents from something plausible looking to something spammy — but not yet actually useful for a spammer, I think.

It might help watch for this kind of bait-and-switch tactic, which ncm raised as a worry some time back, if the list under www.advogato.org/person/ were ordered by most recent edit and not trust.

A New Hope
I'm exceedingly happy to see karlberry's recent posts. There aren't a whole lot of high-profile hackers making regular, unsyndicated posts to recentlog.

Ten Years of Advogato

Steven Rainwater, Advogato's maintainer, posted an article there, Happy 10th Birthday, Advogato, which provoked me to think a bit about where the site is going. I've put together a timeline, consisting of a link from each of the ten years that gives an idea of what Advogato was like that year.

• 2008 — GNU and FSF News for January 2008
• 2007 — Advogato and Hateful/Divisive Posts
• 2006 — Articles 871-900 — Thirty consecutive articles, up to Raph Levien's decision to abandon, and Steven's decision to rescue, the site.
• 2005 — Article:advogato.org and advogato.com renewed.
• 2004 — A diary post by Graydon Hoare, which shows how the action back then had moved to recentlog.
• 2003 — Article: Is the active user-base of Advogato incompetent?; note moshez' response, on the advantages of managing where your content is posted.
• 2002 — Articles Mixins for PHP and Thoughts on voting machine fraud
• 2001 — Article The Rules of Open-Source Programming, to which Raph replied with Some more "rules".
• 2000 — Alan Cox wrote two articles about patent law and practice, both widely cited: one, two.
• 1999 — This year's anniversary article, Happy 10th Birthday, Advogato, gives a feel for the first days; my post there has some links from that time.

Advogato is one of the older social networking sites, for free software developers, from before the days when that term was used, and it's maybe the one with the most unappreciated lessons, in both senses. I greatly admire what Raph Levien has done with the site, and am very happy to have been involved with it during most of its history.

Syndicated 2009-11-13 12:21:53 (Updated 2011-09-22 21:07:32) from Text

Texlive 2010's security model
Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard, Texlive's texdoc maintainer, posted a response to my question about Texlive's restricted execution model, explaining why the feature was yanked from Texlive 2009, and saying that the change is that details have been sorted out.

Recentlog
redi: I see it now, but my, probably flawed, recollection was that direct certifications didn't need time to affect your recentlog filter. FWIW, I waited a few minutes before feeling compelled to write my last diary entry.</b>

Advogato glitch
marnanel is visible on my ratings report at 2.2, so I have tried twice to bump his rating up to something that clears my preferred recentlog threshold.

Alas, no success. I get the confirmation page, but the rating visible to me doesn't change. A server configuration bug, or something in mod_virgule, maybe?