Sean Middleditch » Blogs
salimma: “once” anti-GPL?!
Are you trying to imply that Novell is anti-GPL? What in ****’s sake gives people stupid ideas like that?
Novell is one of the largest producers of GPL code in existence at the moment, employing people who work on a huge range of projects including the kernel, KDE, GNOME, various core GNU tools and libraries, RPM, GCC, Apache, Samba, and whole tons of other stuff.
Some of their products being closed-source does not mean they’re anti-GPL. It doesn’t even mean that they’re not pro-GPL. It just means that they want to keep making money in order to keep employing engineers and tons of other people so that they can eat. Not everybody gets donated tens of thousands of dollars to preach ideological bullshit like Stallman does. It’s easy for him to say, “If you can’t work on Free Software for a living, go into a different field instead of making proprietary software.” He’s never had to actually make that choice.
minor note: yes I realize that not all of the projects I listed above are under the GPL. My point was merely that Novell works on a huge range of Free Software and Open Source projects without trying to subvert them.
This is what makes me want to listen to criticism for my own things. Because criticism is a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes.
Well, I certainly hope you’ve gotten better at listening to criticism since the last time I criticized your work.
Not that I have anything bad to say about Tinymail.
ncm:
I have a SyncMaster 206BW and my roommate has the 226BW. Both of our monitors look gorgeous with the default X and GNOME settings on Ubuntu. I can’t imagine that the 205BW is that different. I’m using DVI (NVIDIA 6600) and my roommate is using VGA (Intel GMA 3000).
Looking at my old monitor, a 172T SyncMaster LCD, the screen was always beautiful, on both VGA and DVI using either NVIDIA cards or SIS integrated chipsets. I recently moved it from my home to my office, running some ancient Matrox Millenium II card over VGA, and sure enough, it looks like shit.
Moral of the story? It might not be the monitor that’s at fault if things look like crap.
Whatever happened to Seth Nickell, who worked for Redhat? His blog hasn’t been updated since May of 2005, and the last mailing list post I saw from him is from June of 2006.
His quietness is kinda saddening, especially given all the cool stuff he is/was working on.
My two final contracts are just about wrapped up. That’s a huge load off of my shoulders. Not to mention it’ll give me a little extra cash to pad out my savings so I won’t feel like I’m living quite so dangerously in the financial department.
I still, of course, have tons of school work to do, KANAR.org work to do, AweMUD work to do, friends to hang out with, and possibly a new project with a friend making a computer game/game-engine. (Yet to determine if it will be OSS, although I’d like to be, especially given that this project will largely just be a learning exervise.) At least, however, none of those other than school have any sort of deadlines attached to them, so I can slip and not worry about it. :-)
On a completely different note, I added a plugin to WordPress to let me see the search engine queries people are using to find my blog. Some of the more interesting ones:
* rampant mouse - company and website owned by a friend, now unfortunately defunct
* dovecot gssapi - this and quite a few variations on searches regarding GSSAPI and Kerberos, it’s almost like I’m the only guy blogging about trying to get that stuff working
* ghost in the shell sex scene - o_O just weird to begin with given that I didn’t write about such a thing, and whoever found this blog searching for that: shame on you!
* kanar - great, the last thing I really want is all my fellow players finding my personal blog
* the slayers manga - close to the top hit for one of my most favorite mangas ever and I only blogged about it once, how cool/weird is that?
The worst thing is, I really don’t want that kind of exposure. This blog was intended more for friends and others in the developer community, not weirdos looking for Ghost in the Shell hentai. :-/
I have moved my blog from the SourceForge account for AweMUD to my personal web server. I had not wanted this server to be public, but I just can’t stand having this thing running on SourceForge any longer. Hopefully I’ll be able to get access to a real server sometime soon and move this thing again to there.
The URL has changed, although the old one still works, and will continue to do so for some time. The new URL is http://blogs.awesomeplay.com/elanthis/. A little DNS trickery and mod_rewrite line in the .htaccess on the SourceForge server causes all attempts to access the old site automatically redirect to the new one with no troubles.
Of the advantages of switching, my posts should now start mirroring on Advogato again, and various errors from SourceForge’s overly-restrictive configuration should now disappear. Unfortunately, the speed may become an issue as the blog is server over a cable modem, and/or the site may end up getting entirely blocked by Comcast. Since this is a temporary solution, I hope there won’t be any big problems with these.
bolsh: I can send you a snapshot of Wikisome. I use it just as you describe on a personal server. It’s very simple and easy, and the authentication system was designed to plug into whatever existing system you have, including things like Apache authentication. My system at home use mod_auth_negotiate to authenticate users against the local Kerberos realm, and the Wikisome setup uses maybe 10 lines of code at most to pull my name and stuff out of /etc/passwd after checking who Apache authenticated the user as.
Also includes simple ACLs so you can let other people view your wiki, or just parts of your wiki, comment on certain parts, whatever you need.
I don’t have the code packaged up anywhere since Sourceforge rejected the project (apparantly my paragraph long description wasn’t clear enough for whoever reviewed the project), but I can send you a tarball and some simple instructions if you want.
Ah-ha. Got my diary exporting to Advogato again.
Since SourceForge blocks out-going connections, I can’t use a cron script on the SourceForge server anymore. So I added a custom XML-RPC function to my WordPress install to fetch all posts for a given date, and wrote a Python script to use that to grab all posts for a day and turn them into a single Advogato post. The script also does some checking to make sure that posts aren’t reposted; basically it’ll only post if the date of the exported entries are newer than the last post my account has in Advogato. Now I just have the script running once a night to export yesterday’s entries.
So there went an hour of my life I’ll never get back. ;-)
Been practicing my mandolin like mad lately. I have, over a year after starting playing stringed instruments, just found out arpeggios are, and have also found a very good one for mandolins. In just a few days I’ve managed to greatly increase the speed, accuracy, and strength in my fret hand. Which also helps my bass playing - a song I’ve been struggling with is now a lot easier to play, even though I’ve barely touched the bass in a week. Basically, the arpeggios give me a workout for guitar playing.
Speaking of work out, we bought a treadmill a few days. It’s not yet usable due to a couple problems. First, we failed to think about where exactly we’d put it… the stationary bike we replaced could be pushed into a corner, but the treadmill is too wide, and too damn heavy to push around much anyhow. (Especially with my back.) The second problem is that on one of the big metal bits the manufacturer managed to drill a necessary hole on the right side, but not the left. So some measurements and drillwork (all done by my dad, because I’m useless when it comes to power tools) should fix that. And some major furniture rearragenment should fix the space problem.
Elizabeth is turning 21 tomorrow. Not sure how I feel about that. I’m still kinda shocked and in denile about me being 21… Yesterday in the doctor’s office waiting room, the doctor came out and said, “you’re up, teenager.” I instinctively got up and started walking towards the door. He just looked at me, said, “Not you. You’re an old man! It’s her turn.” And the actual teenager in the room got up and went back with him. 21 years old. ::sigh::
I’d also like to note that I didn’t drink so much as a single drink on my 21st birthday. I haven’t had any alcohol except a small taste of some mead during the summer because a friend really wanted to see if I liked the taste or not. Elizabeth, puritan even compared to me, was considering having some drinks. What’s that say about me? I think it says I need to get drunk off my ass. I missed my last chance at Will’s 22nd last weekend, but the next party I go to shall see myself meeting some alcohol. Maybe I’ll be able to find out what the depressed drunk life is like, because I’m pretty sure that’s what I’m going to turn into if I make alcohol a habit - especially if the whole “drowning out life” part of being drunk actually works. ::sigh again:: That’s actually a fear I have and one of the reasons I don’t drink… I’m afraid I’ll either turn into an alcoholic trying to lock out my misery, or that I’ll end up being an angry/mean sort of drunk and end up doing something stupid.
Morals are out-dated though, at least in the US. People who don’t drink basically don’t exist, unless they’ve a religious reason, which itself is pretty rare. A teen that keeps their virginity past 16 is almost entirely non-existant. Loyalty and faithfulness aren’t nearly as popular as carnal pleasure. Alcohol, smoking, and stronger drugs are in fact cool to many teens, no matter what the D.A.R.E. ads try to tell kids. Sort of funny that right now I actually have the song “Sex, Death, and Money” (Alice Cooper) stuck in my head; rather reflects the mood I’ve had towards the world for the last 4 or 5 months or so. Winter depression probably has something to do with, certain people have a large part to do with it, and the general fact that morals are unpopular has at least a small part in it. But nobody really wants to read my ranting on this, so… next subject.
Work has been slow. We have a new supervisor elected in at the end of last year, so I’m guessing work will pick up soonish when she gets all settled in. Hopefully good stuff will happen. Our old supervisor wasn’t bad at all; no complaints there. It’s not that I feel the new supervisor will be in any way better, just that the shakedown of new management could kick some other people into gear. We’ll see, I guess.
KANAR stuff has been interesting, even during this off season. It too has new management of the game, and that management and the company management are butting heads. Unfortunately, they’re doing it publicly in front of all the players/customers, which is quite unprofessional. Currently the game is basically turned off as the person in charge of the game doesn’t like the game rules we have and the board of directors rejected his rewrite of the rules. Which is good - his new rules had a lot of good fixes and ideas in them, but they had almost no peer review, and have a lot of flaws that a number of people have been picking apart. I’m confident that the “no rules” situation will be resolved before the game starts up again (although there’s a special event this Saturday, which I won’t be attending due to schedule conflicts), but it’s still irritating to see this political bickering in public.
Hmm, I need to get Advogato exporting working again. SourceForge blocked all out-going connections so the Advogato XML-RPC API is inaccessible. Need to either find a new blog host (very unlikely) or hack up a script on my server at home to pull the posts from this blog and then export them to Advogato (more likely).
Oh, AweMUD and Scriptix work have indeed been progressing. Rather nicely, actually. Yay. ^_^
So, for the first time ever, a service I administrate has been hacked. Namely, this very blog.
I have no idea how that got in. There are no logs for me to check since this is SourceForge. I was running WordPress 1.2-beta, so it could have been the “overblown and not important” security problem in WordPress - I’ve upgraded to 1.2.1, so hopefully that won’t be a problem in the future.
The only other way they could have gotten in would be through SourceForge itself, although I doubt it, since the AweMUD.net site was fine, just the blog got defaced.