Ten Years of Advogato
Steven Rainwater, Advogato's maintainer, posted an article there, Happy 10th Birthday, Advogato, which provoked me to think a bit about where the site is going. I've put together a timeline, consisting of a link from each of the ten years that gives an idea of what Advogato was like that year.
Advogato is one of the older social networking sites, for free software developers, from before the days when that term was used, and it's maybe the one with the most unappreciated lessons, in both senses. I greatly admire what Raph Levien has done with the site, and am very happy to have been involved with it during most of its history.
Syndicated 2009-11-13 12:21:53 (Updated 2011-09-22 21:07:32) from Text
Recentlog
redi:
I see it now, but my, probably flawed,
recollection was that direct certifications didn't need time
to affect your recentlog filter. FWIW, I waited a few
minutes before feeling compelled to write my last diary
entry.</b>
Alas, no success. I get the confirmation page, but the rating visible to me doesn't change. A server configuration bug, or something in mod_virgule, maybe?
I only discovered this feature through a post on the new tex.stackexchange.com website, How should one use \write18 with BibTeX? I asked a follow-up question, What analysis of Texlive's restricted permissions model exists?, and the answers so far don't seem to suggest that much in the way of security modelling, however informal, has been done by the Texlive team. Joseph Wright did, however, post a link to a USENIX paper, Are Text-Only Data Formats Safe? Or, Use This LATEX Class File to Pwn Your Computer, which is something like a survey of attack vectors through Latex, with proof-of-concept implementations in the context of Miktex on Windows. They make the point that, besides class and style files, Bibtex entries, typically shared without close examination, suffice for an exploit.
I'd be grateful, and reassured, to learn of more work that has been done on this.
...I've not had a lot of appetite to contribute to Advogato in the last few months, though. I generally feel that there are too many things broken around here, and if one of the strengths of Advogato is that it can be and is run by the participants, and not the benevolent dictator, on the other hand that means that there is great inertia standing in the way of improving things.
The impetus for this post comes from a couple of mindcrime's recent posts. Kudos to mindcrime for the progress with Project Shelley, but posting diary entries with more than ten large screenshots in them is not the kind of syndication that recentlog should be receiving. I don't want to drop mindcrime's output from my view of recentlog, but equally, I don't want to have this kind of material there.
The URL isn't right, but a spammer with Journeyer all the same.
ncm, atai, explain yourselves...
Who doubts that we are talking about 22 paying clients here?
I saw a lovely photo of the newly engaged couple, though I have to say that Matthew looks like he has put on a bit of weight!
Impossible pathsI'm not very impressed by the smartness or helpfulness of answers there, so I doubt that I will get adequate responses. I should just read the standards, but I am not feeling unlazy.
Are there any legal paths in POSIX that cannot be associated with a file, regular or irregular? That is, for which test -e "$LEGITIMATEPOSIXPATHNAME" cannot succeed?
Oh, ... and a Happy New Year, Advogato!
Postscript
It turns out that /dev/tty/impossible
is impossible, since
POSIX says that /dev/tty
must be a character device file, and
I understand that paths can only be the dirname of a file if they are directories
or symlinks. The answerer I awarded my bounty on at SU didn't figure that
out, but he gave me a clue that helped me.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!