Older blog entries for cbbrowne (starting at number 22)

Please Send A Patch

Recent Debian blog entries with this title (by Lucas Nussbaum, Matt Palmer) point out assortedly that:

• Existing developers frequently know the code base so much better than newcomers that they’re likely way more effective at improving things than some callow newcomer.
• Taking those developers’ time to do your pet thing instead of something they find useful mayn’t be more effective.

Both points are quite valid, and recent PostgreSQL CommitFest activity suggests a way to at least try to evaluate things.

The PostgreSQL project has a number of committers that are unusually productive developers (-1 from me, Tom? ), and there have certainly been times when the “best” outcome has been for someone to come in suggesting ideas, and for one of the notably productive folk to implement it.

But there has been some debate surrounding the 2011-01 CommitFest, which consists of some 98 proposed patches, all of which require review. These are all, in fact, patches that came as some sort of response to Please send a patch . The trouble with this particular CommitFest is that the patches have been overwhelming the reviewers in terms of sheer volume. Developers that should be considering working on their own “pet features” have been drawn into the review process to look at others’ features instead. None of these results are inherently a bad thing, except for the aggregate that falls out, which is that there’s so much stuff outstanding that it’s tough to get them all properly reviewed.

If a project is busy and vital, it’s pretty necessary for people to do a fair bit of “scratching their own itches” (in keeping with Matt Palmer’s comment) in order to grow the community of people capable of giving real assistance to managing the code base.

“Growing community” requires that some people struggle with the code base a bit so that they become familiar enough to become effective in the future.

Syndicated 2011-02-15 16:18:00 from linuxdatabases.info

NoSQL’s next step – stored procedures

The latest discovery is that the “bad old stored procedures” of SQL… Are what NoSQL needs… http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/11/1/hot-trend-move-behavior-to-data-for-a-new-interactive-applic.html

They’re calling them coprocessors or plugins, and it’s truly not terribly surprising. The High Scalability article makes a Battlestar Galactica joke, of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal\_return. The BSG line that kept coming back over and over was: All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. There’s a rather depressing possibility that people will consider coprocessors to be the greatest thing ever, not realizing that a substantial chunk of the same issues true (for better and worse) for SQL stored procedures will also hold true for coprocessors and they may learn (or fail to learn!) from scratch.

The notion is that you colocate, along with your database, some kind of “coprocessor engine” that can run code locally, which solves a number of problems, some not new, but some somewhat unique to key/value stores:

Syndicated 2011-01-27 22:40:00 from linuxdatabases.info

Trying Out org2blog

Hmm. Let’s see how https://github.com/punchagan/org2blog works.

It requires xml-rpc.el; el-get knows about that… Splendid!

I can login to my blog… It takes a very little bit of URL surgery to figure out the apropos URL…

I think I overdid the default categories, but that’s not a huge problem.

Now, let’s see if it’ll publish the entry…

Hey, that worked fine! Cool, I can publish blog entries without looking for my web browser. Now, let’s see if I can get it to stow the password for my website in the encrypted .authinfo file that Emacs likes…

Nope, the .authinfo extension is a Gnus thing, so that possibly goes further than we can readily get. But the author’s amenable to taking a peek at it .

Syndicated 2011-01-19 17:14:00 from linuxdatabases.info

PostgreSQL 9.0 released!

A new release of the most advanced open source database is now available!

As always, as a new major release, there are great gobs of little features that have been added, most of which, individually, likely don’t matter to any particular individual. (For instance, there are a couple dozen enhancements to ECPG, and if you don’t know you’re using that, you almost certainly aren’t, and so those changes likely don’t affect you.)

But there are plenty that are liable to matter, and, indeed, to help improve behaviour of one’s streams of queries, often without even needing any changes to applications.

See also the official release notice, for “markety-speak.”

And see official release notes (that are part of the documentation tree) for deeper details of all the changes in the new release.

Syndicated 2010-09-20 15:14:36 from linuxdatabases.info

Gnus, Dovecot, OfflineIMAP

This is a followup, effectively, to Roland Mas’ article Gnus, Dovecot, OfflineIMAP, search: a HOWTO .

I went thru Roland’s HOWTO, and have a few comments on variances that I noticed:

1. I first installed OfflineIMAP; this worked pretty much fine as described. I didn’t bother adding the extra Python code for propagating Gnus expiry material, as I generally don’t use it.
2. I had a couple problems setting up Dovecot:
   1. By default, Dovecot uses Maildir++ folder handling, which isn’t consistent with how OfflineIMAP stores folders.There’s an additional option needed to cope with this:
      mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
   2. Perhaps because of the above, I couldn’t readily get Gnus to talk over a pipe to a Dovecot process.Not a big deal – I have Gnus speak to Dovecot via talking to the socket, which is the usual thing one would do with Dovecot anyways.
3. It seems to me as though Gnus should be able to talk directly to Maildir. It does, after all, have a protocol for it (nnmaildir).I couldn’t struggle my way thru the Gnus documentation to properly set up a virtual server for nnmaildir to do this.

   This would be pretty valuable in that it would eliminate the need for Dovecot altogether. Perhaps it’s a documentation problem that nobody seems to know how to do this.

Syndicated 2010-09-09 18:53:57 from linuxdatabases.info

Android Security

The Android permissions model is, to my mind, a goodly improvement over pretty well any of alternatives out there at present, in that it at least declares what capabilities any given application demands and expects you to grant.

Applications are unfortunately quite readily able to abuse this a fair bit; a (recent, as of August 2010) example being
Evernote.

Evernote, and Why You Need to Think About Permissions describes the problem:

The Evernote app requests a fair number of permissions. Some make sense, such as the INTERNET permission (kinda important for a Web service). Some are a bit dubious, such as needing both coarse and fine location data.

It definitely demands too much permission, with two cross-sections that are troublesome

• It asks for “the world” up front
• It asks for permissions it shouldn’t need For instance, it shouldn’t need access to contacts – it should merely offer to share data, which pushes data to a boundary where the user, at run time, can choose whether or not to allow the data out.

In addition, some of the permissions ought to be optional.

1. If you want to record locations on your notes, then granting access to location data may be a reasonable thing to do.
2. If you don’t want to record locations, then Evernote doesn’t need that access.

Unfortunately, at present, you don’t have any of those shadings, your options are mighty binary:

1. Grant Evernote all the capabilities requested
2. Reject the access, and don’t install it.

I suggest that there is another shading that would be useful, notably for INTERNET access (and probably also for filesystem access), which is to “tie down” what places the application can go.

• Evernote probably only needs to access evernote.com
• Twitter only needs access to twitter.com
• Shuffle (a GTD-like application) may access a domain of the user’s choice to synchronize data.
• Web Browser needs the “wide open” Internet.

I expect that filesystem access could similar be tied down:

• A file browser (such as Astro) might legitimately access “everything”
• Most applications should be restricted to their own directory

Syndicated 2010-08-12 15:47:45 from linuxdatabases.info

Farewell, Solaris, we hardly knew ye

I had long had on my low level “to do” list to consider trying out OpenSolaris, likely either in the form of Nexenta or as Debian/OpenSolaris (nearest link: OpenSolaris @ CSC).

Alas, I didn’t get around to it in time for the license change which essentially eliminates interest in it. The precis of the change: You’re free to download it, and use it for as long as 90 days, but then, you’re expected to pay Oracle for a service contract.

I guess the good news is that I didn’t waste any time on something I’d have to be “sunsetting” by the end of June 2010.

Nope, not “April Fools.”

Syndicated 2010-04-01 20:03:22 from linuxdatabases.info

Helicopters and the Budget

The city of Indianapolis recently announced that they were cancelling use of police helicopters, to save $1.4-ish millions.

Locals complained that this is terrible and demonstrates that the city does not care about public safety.

I suggest that this is not nearly as obvious as it might seem.

By all means, helicopters are “sexy”, but that certainly isn’t good enough to justify it!

Helicopters can help solve some specific problems quickly, but there are perhaps three metrics by which they mayn’t actually be worthwhile.

• Do they solve more crimes? If not, then that is a strike against choppers.
• Do they merely catch some perps more quickly. Is faster truly worth the money? Do faster catches save them from extra crimes being committed? That may be nice for would-be victims… How does it actually affect the budget?
• What would be the expected outcome from the addition or loss of the equivalent money spent on cops on the ground?

After all, it may be that a dozen extra guys (and ladies) walking or driving beats, 8 hours a day, 200-some days per year, may do more good than an aircraft sprinting around for a couple hours a day.

The answers are in the details…

Syndicated 2010-03-09 19:00:25 from linuxdatabases.info

My recent disappointment is that the 43 Folders Wiki is evidently down for extended extended maintenance. They had claimed it was down for a couple days, to be back July 6th; the "return date" seems to have gotten more nebulous :-(.

They had been suffering quite a bit from "spam," as it were; people logging in (possibly as scripts) to deface the site by adding links to link farms (e.g. - for viagra and the likes). Perhaps the intent is to do a more substantial upgrade to the MediaWiki instance, as there is rumour that modern versions can be set up to be pretty resistant to such attacks.

Regrettably, it means I don't get my "fix" of links to productivity changes for a while yet...

The self-important "we invented everything" blog people finally irritated me enough to comment on this with this "Official Google" entry that claims the nonsense that Star Trek predicted blogs

Which is a clear twisting of things, on about the level of saying that Google invented writing letters when they set up GMail.

All blogging is doing is to publicize the notion of writing a journal. Commanders of ships have been required to log ship activities for centuries. More recently, pilots of aircraft similarly have formal requirements to log flight activity. Falling square between that are the Expeditionary Records of Raymond Byrd , noted naval pilot, and explorer of the polar regions. Of Earth, that is...

The notion that Star Trek "invented" any of this when Byrd was writing such stuff in the 1920s is just so much codswallop.