Older blog entries for Malx (starting at number 7)

10 Jul 2001 (updated 11 Jul 2001 at 00:07 UTC) »
Advogato become vulnerable....

Protection of it is trust metrics, but it works for articles only...
Now more popular is to post Diary and then read all list of diaries to answer to questions and make comments. But so - any user could alter this part (list of recent diaries) and put any Spam he want.
So we have protection no more... only good behaviour of members saves all :)

As for certifications.... Look at list of people who have certified me.... And still I am Observer ;-))))
Just realized - I can't modify a project I'm Lead developer to ;)

dyork: Certs - Just remember the process of certifiing...
1st calculates all Apprentices (including J and M). If you have strength of 1000 (flow value) give 10 Apprentice certs to people, then you give to every one 1/10 of your strength (=100).
Now - 2nd is J (including you) - you certify only 2 persons - this means that your power to certify J's is 1000/2 = 500 - so every of them get 500 points.
You see why it is easy to push to higher level ? :-)))
Becouse you are already give more certs of lower level than you able to handle with your strengs.
It's pity... but you can't display value of this strength :(

5 Jul 2001 (updated 5 Jul 2001 at 22:58 UTC) »
Phoon: Xmove will never work if you have color depth more then 16bit AFAIK.
Now I have:
xmove.04.eps
xmove.2.0beta2.tar.gz
xmove.thesis.ps
xmove_performance_slides2.ps
I got them from authour - do not know are they avaliable on original FTP.
Some parts from mail:
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 17:28:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Ethan Solomita <ethan@cs.columbia.edu>

I'm afraid that I've not been working on xmove in quite a while. ........ Sorry that I don't have better news! I'd be very happy to help explain the source code to someone, if you or someone else wants to look into it.

It's bad to publish others e-mails... I'll remove it if someone will object

negative certs Is very bad thing - it is censorship of information... it shows bad fillings about someone....
Internet etics states to ignore instead of taking actions against someone....

lkcl: No... I know XMLvl will handle this :)
I'm talking about creating real site - so have you hosting for it and is it good idea for you? :)

4 Jul 2001 (updated 4 Jul 2001 at 23:26 UTC) »
josh: [rpm] Please do not forget about those poor people, who lives behind firewall and have only HTTP proxy (with basic pass authentication) avaliable :(

josh,lkcl: How about creating site (with XMLvl) to store good ideas for which you have no time.
Master will be person with best (and clear) imagination , not coder (like here) ;-)

Phoon, Tv, alisdair: Xmove is the only such software, but it is not good enough. It have problems with big color depths. And you can't switch windows between screens with differend color depth and resolution.
AFAIK - not this software is not supported any more (this is year old answer from author) - so you could get sorces for development. And it support per-client handling
What I whoud really be interested in - Geting ability to attach/reattach window, but with ability to set it's zoom (for example to map window, but set it's size to twice as normal, or in opposite - to shrink it's size). You will need to solve this anyway to handle 2 screen with different resolution.

RyanMuldoon,jamesh: Free CA is a good idea.
. I'll propose several levels of certificates (0 -for all and 1). And to get a trusted cert there (say level 1), you need to be with any level here on advogato.
How to make this? Just show md5 string to user, and ask him to add this string to his diary or about. Next press "ok" - it'll be checked.

It whould be best for person cert's and for sites, which represents projects of Advogato.

As for ROOT dns zone.... better to use certain domain in search list. Wedo so in our University. And there is no limitation to length of it. You could even ask for *.web.gnu.org or thmth.
then add in /etc/resolv.conf a "seach" for last statement and it will convert bsd.web.gnu.org -> bsd
It's easy :) and still accessible by all. (btu you need to forbid registration of all TLD there!!!!!)

Hmm....
I'm really amazed with TrustMetrics...
Is my current state of Observer means that I have sertified too much people?!
Still, I thinks, It must only depent on the InFlow of trust? Am I wrong?
I'll test - just unsertify last one on my list.
Note - I have 2 Junior certs and lot's of Aprentice (Thanks for trust!!!)

Why I have long list of certificates? Just to store links to persons I am interested in (they are working on topics interesting to me)

.......................................................................

14 Nov 2000 (updated 2 Dec 2000 at 10:59 UTC) »
13 Nov 2000 (updated 13 Nov 2000 at 22:25 UTC) »

I was not interested in diary filling resently....
Still need to write here something.. :)

A month ago started talk with lkcl about new design of advogato.
Strange , but some of my ideas already was known as KeyNotes (see lkcl diaries).
But with no real output....

XML

What i'm thinking about it....
Ok it's just a language. It describes tree data structure. No less, no more.
All other things, which are commonly described in articles about XML, are features of XML parcers.
Still you need to design all properties. Still you need some hacks to write some other structure over XML - best example is <tag:obj> naming. It helps to describe classes of tags - but it is overrides all XML idea! It is tree structure no more. It is mesh. But..... you could hardly find other language for this.

Also I dislike XML for it's waste of space... < > </name> - all this require space on disk (and especially network bandwidth).
Better to have it as description language, but store data in compressed form:

|id=article
|author
||name=AAA
||info
|||URL=http://
|||e-mail=aa@bb.com
|author
||name=BBB
...........
This is tree structure also. It is nicer then XML form to look through. Eats less space , but it is not same as XML. Just one case of usage.

Ok.... If you know Russian - go to ITC online and search for "Gold fever of XML".............

A! I'm also looking into IRC-NG projects. It would be interesting to incorporate Advogato ideas in IRC protocol.

Really I do not know what is diary ...
Ok... I am not able to answer to CS with CP article , so..

Lot's time was spent to read all thoughts there....
They are telling about lots of CP but much less of CS people. Really. But the nearest example from real life - all of us accustomet to communicate, but only some percent is a real writers :)

Have we any need in CS education? Really... if it is a hobby to you - certainly, but for normal life (soft engeneering) you just need ability to read algorithms and to search for ones you need for your task (mem/cpu/etc limits). So we need it. But ... it really means that CS specialists coudn't tell us what they done in other language!! We can't use their knowlege.... if we are not from their nation only:). Really it is a problem of:

knowlege presentation. Here we have same problem - contents with interface. Ok - for example you have written usefull library, but you really can't guess which format is my data stored in - so your API would be really pain to implement in my program.Same with algorithm descriptions and other text based documentation - it is for human processing only (more - it is for English speaking human ;). And you couldn't manipulate this knowlege with computer help :-/ ... you need some light inside black box. But to have full light (full CS education) would be useless waste of time.

What you would achive via knowlage base/language creation? You could create links to lots of algorithms (with API you need) and they would be tested automatically for your local enviroment to choose best (time or space or other type of optimization) just have knowlage that all of them are sorting algorithms (for ex.).

And advogato development... You need more then plaing list of levels. Ok. Let's say your real work in projects would be X , and the CS (and ideas/algorothms development) would be Y. I could hardly imagine one to be Master on both X and Y ;) Really it is not the only parametr.....

18 minutes. 1 reviews. 5 paragraphs.

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