Advogato: Personal info for chalst

chalst is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Charles Stewart
Member since: 2000-09-19 22:55:04
Last Login: 2013-02-06 18:26:17

Homepage: http://www.textproof.com/stewart.html

Notes:

Contribute to free software? Well...

I'm a freelance copy-editor and consultant working from Berlin, working mainly for academic publishers in medicine, linguistics and mathematical sciences. Until May 2006 I was a post-doctoral theoretical computer scientist. I use and promote in my work many free software tools, such as pdftex, Gnu ghostscript and libart.

I'm in a 18 year love-hate relationship with UNIX, and I've been using GNU utilities since my very first days. I've been aware of Linux since about 1994, but only took the plunge of using it in early 1999. Today I use Debian Linux linux and FreeBSD most days, though I'm mostly using a non-free OS to provide my GUI...

I've been coding for 25 years (started on a Sinclair ZX80) but mostly for personal consumption or a few of my close colleagues. I have rather a preference for functional languages, though I use C, C++, Java and Objective C when they are appropriate, and I make a lot of use of Tcl for system admin tasks. I haven't made much in the way of substantial contributions to important free software projects.

I'm also in a pretty intense relationship with the TeX suite of document representation and typesetting software. If you are bored, you can send me an email and hear my tex* rant of the day.

My contact info is available from my website, linked to above. I post comments more often to Lambda the Ultimate than here; I don't often crosspost. I've got an OpenId account cunningly hidden as a subdomain on my website.

Projects

Contributor on librep
Documenter on latexrefman
Developer on sxdatadump2lua

Articles Posted by chalst

David Welton's Language Popularity article 25 Sep 2004 at 17:34 UTC
Today is the second anniversary... 11 Sep 2003 at 12:06 UTC
The DOJ abdicates its ethical responsibility 28 Jan 2002 at 11:59 UTC

Recent blog entries by chalst

Syndication: RSS 2.0

28 Oct 2011 (updated 28 Oct 2011 at 12:06 UTC) »

Feeding the backstabbers
mjg59 wrote about how his experience of talking about the Linux experience to the Linux community differed from someone else.

He cited an HN thread, Female FOSS dev quits tech industry due to harassment, and in particular this post from jxcole: I was going to start a rant about how this behavior is encouraged by the macho men online, but this was just one guy harassing her. "Due to harassment" reads as due to harassment from the community, but she gave in to one idiot. She let him win.

I answered as follows:

Well, I kind of agree with this in part, but it is often trotted out as a reason why it's the victim's fault. Let's see what's badly wrong with it by looking at things another way.
Standing up for what is right is not something that we weaker mortals should leave to the heroes. We have a breaking point, a point above which we can't take it. That does not mean we should not take risks to do what we find right. You should not be "disappointed" with the victim, but supportive, and we should be encouraging others to take these risks to do what is right as well. The more of us there are, the we achieve.

On a more general point, be aware that if you regard yourself as supportive of women in free software and on their side, but you are vocally undermining of said women when they face this sort of shit, be aware that you are a fair-weather friend and some sort of a backstabber.

Since I'm on the subject, let me plug Skud's long post, On being harassed: a little GF history and some current events.

Despite the event that lies behind this post, I'm more optimistic than I was a year or so ago that the free software community can sort itself out on this one, since the fair-weather friends do seem to sometimes be a bit more aware that there might be something wrong with their behaviour. Skud deserves special praise for her efforts that have made a positive difference, as does Matthew Garrett. who I suspect will not find himself unable to continue with free software.

26 Oct 2011 »

C migration strategy
wingo asked, after summarising the safety issues with C:

I still write C. I work on implementations of safe languages -- languages that don't have the same kinds of fundamental vulnerabilities that C and C++ have. Eventually the amount of C in the world will stop growing, and decline as pieces that are now written in C will be written in Python, in JavaScript, in Guile: in short, in languages that don't launch the missiles when you try to write beyond the end of an array.
C has had a great run; we should celebrate it. But its time has passed. What is your migration strategy? How are you going to stop writing C?

I think the most conservative strategy is the best. I was impressed by Cyclone. I'm not sure the language is quite right for the job, and development seems to have halted some time back, but there have been alternatives proposed. I think Cyclone has shown that C can be modestly extended in such a way that we can statically for absence of undefined behaviours and many other desirable safety and correctness properties without nuisance or violation of the spirit of C. I hope that an obviously right safeness extension to C gets proposed and acquires momentum.

I actually had a dream about this, where I was reading a paper about an extension to Lua that allowed Cyclone+Lua programs to have whole-system correctness guarantees. I don't often remember my dreams, funnily enough.

12 Sep 2011 »

Recentlog
nutella writes, of the site's recent glitches: Okay, now thanks to bad RSS feeds the Advogato front page is really messed up. The main target seems to have been the "Recent People Joining" list.

Bad RSS feeds? Really? I guess it's possible, but I assumed that StevenRainwater was backing out code that was not working, or has safety issues arising from the recent libxml2 migration.

6 Sep 2011 (updated 7 Sep 2011 at 08:22 UTC) »

Ex commands under Emacs
I've only recently noticed something rather useful for me: viper-mode's support for the ex command set, implemented in the viper-ex package as a part of the Viper vi-emulation package, is mostly orthogonal to the rest of Viper, meaning the Viper implementation of ex can be used without activating Viper mode. Hence you can bind the viper-ex function to a key in any Emacs mode and use commands like .,$s/wrong/right/g there. It is quite straightforward to use this to support vi-like macros, which are sometimes quite a bit briefer than their Elisp equivalents.

To get started, you need to import the viper-ex package, which defines the viper-ex interactive command, and which has some dependencies on the rest of Viper, ones which could be pruned without much difficulty. The ex commands are more pleasant with line numbering. The following Elisp will configure this, with viper-ex bound to C-:

(require 'viper-ex) (require 'viper-keym) (require 'viper-cmd) (require 'linum) (define-key global-map (kbd "C-:") 'viper-ex) (global-linum-mode)

Note that several modes, like Org-mode, clobber C-: and so would need their maps redefined to use this.

Advogato's new libxml2-based text handler

This is new, I think. It seems to have fewer glitches than the old code, so kudos to StevenRainwater for getting this done.

31 Aug 2011 »

Recentlog
Gesslein announces his (probable) retirement; I post a related article.

276 older entries...

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