[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Git promises to be a distributed software management tool, where a repository can be distributed. Yet, the mechanisms used to date to actually "distribute", such as rsync, http and ssh, are very much "single path" and centralised.
GitTorrent makes Git truly distributed. The initial plans are for reducing mirror loading, however the full plans include totally distributed development: no central mirrors whatsoever. PGP signing and other web-of-trust-based mechanisms will take over from protocols on ports (e.g. ssh) as the access control "clearing house".
The implications of a truly distributed revision control system are truly staggering: unrestricted software freedom; the playing field is levelled in so many ways, as "the web site" no longer becomes the central choke-point of control. This article will explain more fully some of these implications, not only from a technical perspective but also including the political implications for Software Freedom.
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When HTML first came out, browsers could have been called "Application Thin Clients", if the buzzword had been in use at the time. The introduction of javascript made it possible to execute code on the client, and this turned browsers into something much more than just a "display" mechanism.
Before Javascript, Web application development was simple: everything was done server-side. The concept of MVC - Model View Controller - was easy: the HTML was generated, and that was the view. With Javascript being a full-blown programming language, the lines are being blurred between which code is responsible for the View, the Controller and even the Model. The resultant split of responsibility across client and server in wildly diverse programming languages is driving many developers to alternative technologies such as Flash, and causing headaches for those Web developers who remain.
The key components of the solution - to allow the developer to create MVC applications in a single programming language, where at least the "View" source is extracted and compiled to Javascript and HTML - actually exist and are used in production environments, thanks to Google Web Toolkit and Pyjamas. RubyJS is well on the way, too.
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Abstract: Many programmers of Open-Source software would like to dabble or specialize in artificial intelligence but are concerned about how to obtain AI Funding. The author of http://code.google.com/p/mind forth/ offers a few ideas.
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If you think a polemic about a symbol
devised to represent people
who mockingly declare themselves
unworthy of displaying some other symbol
designed to represent them
[*breathe*]
is much ado about nothing,
we have something in common.
It may be one
of a very few things we have in common.
Indeed,
we are probably quite different,
and I am sure I have not done enough
to earn the privilege
of being counted as one of you
—
regardless of who you
are.
That's because,
as it turns out,
one cannot earn
membership in hackerdom.
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Dear Mr. Stallman,
I am writing to express my disappointment with the Free Software Foundation regarding the recent release of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.3.
The new version 1.3 adds a new clause, section 11, which, according to the FAQ, allows wiki sites to relicense specific content from GFDL 1.3 to CC-BY-SA 3.0, for content added before November 1, 2008. They have this relicensing option until August 1, 2009.
This, in my view, is a serious moral mistake and breach of trust. Even if this new clause does no harm, it is still the wrong thing to do.
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People have embraced the internet so much that even in a country like ours, Honorable Finance Minister (Dr. Baburam Bhattarai of CPN-Maoist) has a Facebook profile (looks genuine so far). He (or whoever maintains the profile on his behalf) regularly updates his status. Sometime back, while I was busy with work and couldn't catch up with news, his status updates served as a good substitute. He also posts pictures from events he attends. The most followed part, in my opinion, are the notes he posts to his profile- interviews, articles published in newspapers, political notes, and other pieces. The problem, as stated by many of his "friends" (well, facebook friends) is that he never replies (or interacts with) their queries and comments. There is a feature called "Facebook Page" that he could have used to update his "fans" (just another facebook word), without engendering expectations of interaction in them. There are other ways of avoiding interaction on the internet too. While I appreciate Dr. Bhattarai's efforts to make use of technology at a time when most Nepalese leaders struggle to use even the basic tools, I disagree with his mode of operation.
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The Knight Foundation deadline for preliminary applications for $USD 5m grants ends Midnight, PST, 1st Nov 2008. Applications must include an actual real-world geographical location where the free-software-based hardware and/or software solution is deployed. I have an urgent request to make: FIND SOMEWHERE. FAST.
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Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past,
a hacker I know blogged about
using object-oriented C
to implement
a lightweight imitation of some of C++'s features
for his latest project;
almost immediately,
somebody saw fit to reward this charming piece
of acceptably self-congratulatory writing
with a stern and quite public deconstruction.
Does this scene seem familiar?
Why does this keep happening?
And what, if anything, can we do about it?
We can hardly hope to appease
all of hackerdom's malcontent
—
but we can at least try to avoid
stepping on each other's toes.
Accordingly,
this article will waste no time
on a platitudinous condemnation
of the surf-by put-down;
rather,
I wish to take a moment to reflect
on what the hacker did to earn it,
and to consider what he might have done
(or, rather, not done)
instead.
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I'm missing steven's little news posts, so I thought I'd make one up. Things happening recently: Bruce Perens on a landmark appeals decision which strengthens the legitimacy of Free Software Licenses; Venezuela orders 1 million Intel Classmate PCs; SGI relicenses OpenGL; The FSF launches a campaign to highlight the high-priority list, and KDE 4.1.2 codenamed "Codename" is released.
Also coming up: Pyworks will be held at the same time as PHPworks in Atlanta, Nov 12th-11th; FSCon, the Nordic Summit, will be on October 24th - 26th at the IT-University Gothenburg; UKUUG Developer Conference 2008 will be in Manchester, Nov 7th-9th.
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pyv8 is an experimental project to combine two-way python bindings to v8 with the python-to-javascript compiler from pyjamas. a simple test has shown a ten times performance increase of python code converted and executed as javascript, when compared to running the same program as python. (to be fair, cython gives a 100 times performance increase).
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