McEs, A Hacker Life
Language wars
The news about
Apache Harmony project that brought a lot of traffic to the net, reminded me of the
GNU Harmony project which is part of history now. Will Apache Harmony succeed to force Sun to adapt to Apache's license too, like GNU did with Qt?
ESR's
Let Java Go letter from early 2004 is interesting. A few years ago, I was asked by a friend to implement the Iranian calendar for Java. I had a look at the Calendar and GregorianCalendar classes, and it turned out, the whole Calendar class is using a timestamp member variable which is key to the functionality of the class, but unfortunately the timestamp is not
protected. It was in the default (package) scope, which meant that for my IranianCalendar class to work, it needed to be in the same package. I wrote the code that worked this way, but then the Calendar class is in the java.util package, and the Sun JVM does not let you put your classes in the java.util package. I was simply stuck. I handed in the code and told them to duplicate the Calendar class in a package of their own.
On the Mono front, I must confess Lluis's
Mono is not mono-language post made it all too concise and clear that Mono is unavoidable. I just don't like to learn yet another module library. And also hoping that Fedora can ship Mono soon...
As for the GNOME 3 discussion, seems like GNOME wants to get out of the 2.x syndrome finally. Linux is stuck in 2.6 for now, and Python is making 3 more of a dream. I think GNOME 3 should simply be 2.x with Cairo and XCompose integrated, language wars settled, Evince finished, and Beagle landed.
Homonyms
Found this
Alan Cooper's Homonym List interesting. Name a GNOME hacker with first and last names both homonyms.
In the blogs
Thanks to
Miguel I found Ulrich Drepper's
blog too. Found the long paper in
this post of him about how to write shared libraries useful. If you want to get an in depth tour on how shared libraries are implemented in ELF, that's for you.
In
another post, Ulrich talks about how many people do not know about what a firewall is, or that their computer can be remotely controlled by an attacker, and other security (or lack thereof) stuff. Which reminded me that I had a similar yet different problem: Installed Fedora Core 3 on a friend's laptop few months ago. She's a graduate student in Computer Science too, and coming from a Windows background. I updated the FC3 after installation, turned off unneeded services, and tuned up for multimedia. After a few days, she had a question: What is the security features of her system? I didn't really know what to answer, something like: Well, it's secure as long as you keep it updated and don't do silly things. She followed up with questions about how to install the firewall, what about the antivirus, ad blocker, blah blah. I explained to her that there's not much of a virus for Linux, and although firewalls exist and heavily used, it's not quite necessary when you only have the ssh port open, and that she's already behind the firewall that is the router, etc. Being a freaked Windows user before, she insisted on me setting up a firewall for her AND to check that her machine is not already compromised. Set up iptables easily thanks to Fedora Security Level tool, but had no idea how to persuade her that she's all clean. Almost told her that there's almost no way to ensure 100% that you are not compromised. She couldn't see that, just wanted to make sure. So to make her happy, I found a way to make her feel better by asking rpm to verify all the installed files (fortunately prelink was not run yet and all binaries passed verification). Now that was something to her, 'cause it took a long time with huge disk activity, and looked quite like what antivirus software does: Slowing down your machine for a while. In the meantime she inquired about what does this rpm -V do, and then on how to make sure the installed packages are the right ones? I answered with the GPG signature on packages, which led us to the fact that gpgcheck is off in her yum.conf (and keys are not installed). Holy sh*t, all my trick was in the water now. So she claimed everybody in the world could have been altering packages she downloaded. I answering no, only the Rogers and AT&T and other guys providing the route between Red Hat and you could, and that you should trust me that they are busier than altering your RPM packages and just yours. It came to the point that she was saying "hacking is easy, every teenager can do that, just because you are saying my machine is clean, doesn't mean it's clean.", which IIRC, I simply replied "Go grab your old Windows if you like, I ain't install the whole thing again." :( She's been using the Fedora 24/7 since then, with no real problem. :)
Another
social problem I have had with Windows users: I'm sharing an apartment with a friend, Amir. We share a Rogers cable high-speed. He does P2P and has set a limit on bandwidth, so I don't have any problem with that. Once I found that I cannot download above 4kb/s from kernel.org, where I usually used to do at 70kb/s for the least. Turned out Amir has reinstalled Windows again, and have installed
Gozilla to speed up downloading lots of applications he's got to install one more time. It took quite a while to make him understand how Gozilla is not going to make more bandwidth out of our cable, but simply eating my lunch by opening 20 connections instead of one. And the damn router doesn't have any traffic shaping capabilities. :( It's amazing how living without Windows makes words like "download accelerator", "spyware", "shareware", "antivirus", ... meaningless and unimportant.
Richard Stallman writes in the
FSF blog about his recent visit to Alhambra, Spain. Man, if you like that, you gotta visit the
Persian gardens in Isfahan, Shiraz, and a few other cities. Traveling to Iran is a lot easier now (see
here)
Isfahan the Movie is an stunning short modeling of a mosque in Isfahan, in case you've not seen it before. I like the way RMS writes about his girlfriend too. That's what I like about RMS in general, he's always as young as he was in 1982.
Conferences
GUADEC 6 is a few hours and thousands of miles away. I missed it again for the third year. Every year I decide to make it
this year and either somebody forgets to tell me about travel plans in time, or he thinks I'm not interested or busy or something... I'm acceping the first job offer that guarantees to send me to GUADEC 7 ;). Have a good time girls and guys, that should be quite a lot of fun. My old friend
Siamak is staffing too.
Instead,
DDC'05 and
OLS'05 in two months in Ottawa and I'm going to be there for the third year. I tend to like the week-long conference atmosphere. The three day GUADEC looks to short to me, but I've not been there, so you know. I like Ottawa the city too. Last year I take two hours off from the keyboard in the middle of the day and went for a visit to a couple museums. I particularly liked the
Royal Canadian Mint. I collect Canadian quarter coins since.
YAPC'05 (Yet Another Perl Conference) is next month here in downtown Toronto too. Some hundred bucks to register though. I may try to become a staff.
Michelle dropped the idea of going there with Python tshirts.
Galleries
This is just the time of the year in Toronto that art exhibitions rally from gallery to gallery. Been to these three in the past two weeks:
May rants
Unlike common belief, I'm still alive and just here. Lets see:
US trip was pretty good. Met lots of old and new friends, and Noah Levitt too.
News:With the reopening of the Imam Khomeini airport in Tehran, finally the Iranian government decided to issue one-week visas to transit passengers in the airport. The details will be worked out soon. Good news for traveling monkeys that like Lebanon I guess. Unfortunately the news was not as controversial as
the catastrophe that was the previous hit about this airport, so I cannot find an English article on it.
Since
Miguel moved and filled
planet with all his posts ever, I go on and fill it with my new posts for a few minutes. Excuse me in advance.
