Older blog entries for mbp (starting at number 103)

(I just pressed Meta-q, meaning fill-paragraph, not kill-netscape-and-lose-my-diary-entry. Yah boo sucks. I guess I should go ahead and implement autosave of diary entries for raph.)

man pages of the future

NAME

   rdiff -- rsync-style delta generation

 SYNOPSIS:

   rdiff generate [OPTIONS] OLDFILE SIGNATUREFILE

   rdiff delta [OPTIONS] SIGNATUREFILE NEWFILE DELTAFILE

   rdiff apply [OPTIONS] OLDFILE DELTAFILE NEWFILE

This generates binary diffs, in a way somewhat similar to xdelta. Unlike xdelta, it does not require both the old and new files to be present at the same time. Instead, you just need a short signature of the old file (from "generate").

This is basically already present in the libhsync test suite, but just needs to be split out as a separate product. It opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities, such as rsync-over-email; smoother integration into other tools; use for incremental backup; ... Fun fun.

nongeek

Went out with various Eazelites in the Castro; met mjs.

semibizarre thought: I wonder if the corporate workplace perk of the future (after free beverages, massage, etc) will be makeovers for fashion-oblivious geeks? (This is not a dig at any person in particular, just something that came up in conversation.) Massage and laundry can make people more effective and give them more time at work, and perhaps personal attractiveness would have a similar effect.

When i'm on heroin, I have all the answers*.

I wish I did.

Presently in San Francisco. (Mail me if you'd like to catch up.) It feels so mild outside compared to Montr'eal or even Canberra. It's a little wierd to see people buying padded jackets and beanies.

The exchange rate (1AUD ~= 0.50USD) and high prices here are bizarre. I studied economics at highschool, but this still bends my brain. It's almost like there's superinflation in California: my money's not worth anything anymore.

I'm in the Linuxcare Townsend St office at the moment. The place has no windows, but nice industrial-ish interior decoration: high ceilings, many exposed pipes, lots of bright red plastic/paneling features. It feels like a mid-budget SF spaceship set.

The flight was completely packed; I did not have VeryGoodSeats.

ss Your hacking proweress is quite aposite to the Montr'eal cypherpunk milleu. In a way, occasional forgeries or intrusions are useful, as they help bring the perceived authentication down to a technically realistic level.

Spent today touristing around Ottawa. Visited the Kreighoff exhibition at the National Art Gallery; wandered around the outside of the Houses of Parliament.

It's cold: about -10C and windy outside all day. I can see how one would acclimatise. My cheeks feel rubbery and so I have to overarticulate my words as if I was drunk. Sunir says it's the second coldest capital after Moscow. I would have expected some of the Scandinavian countries to be worse, but I can believe it.

Sunir shares a house with two other CS students. It's eerily similar to a geek house I shared while at UQ: midnight runs to get donuts, messy bedrooms, semi-socialized conversations. For some reason I seem to have a lot of deja vu on this trip.

It seems strange to meet computer geeks who're still primarily running Windows... as if they were still cooking on a wood stove or something. Perhaps my perspective is skewed.

Semi-socialized? At least, I erase my cookies. How rude! I guess you learnt a lot at the privacy conference. ;) Hope you had a good flight, even if I snored through your departure. --ss

ObFreeSoftware: A cool open source company is interested in using/helping with rproxy/rsync-3; hopefully we can meet in SF next week.

la ville au sous-titres / the city with subtitles

Busy week. Flew to Montr'eal, which seems to be a very nice city. Rather like Melbourne in some ways, but colder, older, and in French with English subtitles. My poor French was at least enough to buy a pair of boots (c'est trop long / trop petite / tres bien!). At present in Sunir's house in Ottawa.

Feeling distinctly seedy from long days, change in timezone and weather, etc. A break from code is probably good decompression anyhow. It turns out that I'm going to San Francisco for a couple of weeks, and I'm quite sure I'll be busy enough there to make up for it.

this will go down on your permanent record

It snowed at the Ch^ateau Montebello, and all in all was just a perfect Canadian postcard: a big log cabin in the woods. Attendees and speakers were a melange of government/business/law/tech, so I feel like I understand the balance much better. People seemed to like my talks.

I used to believe the cypherpunk libertarian position that technology alone is not enough and law should just get out of the way. I now think that's too simplistic.

The prospects for the Total Surveillance Society are fairly spooky, but there seems to be technical and social movement towards something more reasonable.

There was a distinct difference between Canadian, European, and USA-ians at the conference. The US is (and I say this in the nicest possible way) such a police state -- much more conservative in their approach to human rights, or rather much more trusting in the action of the invisible hand.

The ZeroKnowledge technology and people are very cool indeed. I can see that free software is a conundrum for them: they have people who understand the political, technical and security reasons to use it, but at the same time they have an honest lead over the rest of the field as far as I can see, and it's asking a lot for them to give it up. Hm.

VISITOR 18

Arrived safe in Montreal; flight was surprisingly painless. Met dria and others in <person>.

email of the day begins Subject: [URGENT] Various. Hmm.

There's a beautiful sunset outside. Is there one for you?

rsync: tridge, rusty, dgibson and I talked about plans for rsync. I typed up a little summary of where it is and where it's going. If you've used it and not been satisfied, please respond. Working at OzLabs is very very good: people here are so bright and personable.

i have sinned: Finished my slides for PbD2000. I've been appropriately ribbed for using PowerPoint, but my weak defense remains: (a) Sun Tsu told me to know the enemy, and (b) it's actually really good. I've used MagicPoint in the past, and it's great for presenting outlines, but ppt is just excellent at supporting vector drawings and helping rearrange the show quickly as people ask questions. I tried StarOffice, which is like a poor Office clone, and KPresenter, which seemed feature-poor. Hmm.

I'm leaving for Quebec on Thursday. Yay! Twenty hours on a plane. Boo!

85HP rear wheel @ 13000rpm: ajv, I've not yet had the pleasure of doing the Great Ocean Road on a motorbike, though I've been up to Lorne in a car. I will get there one day, and I think a 600 is about right: enough torque for those corners, and not missing out on the short straights. It's a little far from Canberra, but someday I'll stop overnight in Melbourne and do it properly.

16842: I wrote two solutions in Python to ajv's question. The second is .. brutal, I think: not what your CS lecturer would like, but very straightforward:

...
def check_2(d):
    return d[0] + d[1] == d[2] - 1 and d[0] * 8 == d[2]
...
for d[0] in r10:
    for d[1] in r10:
        if check_1(d): continue
        for d[2] in r10:
            if not check_2(d): continue
            for d[3] in r10:
                if not check_3(d): continue
                for d[4] in r10:
                    if check_4(d):
                        print d
                        

I spent last weekend in Sydney, primarily to deliver an "Introduction to Linux" information packet at the Borland convention (or are they Inprise this week?)

At any rate, as Seth says, it was truly remarkable to talk to technical people not familiar with Free Unix. The questions -- from people quite expert in their particular field -- made me realize how much we take for granted. "What's X11?" "Can you explain about mount points again?" I think technically it compared quite well to the Microsoft: things like being able to run particular programs as root rather than being required to shut down the whole desktop were well appreciated. Even little details like the drag-and- middleclick rather than select-edit-copy-click-edit-paste are nice, but take some learning.

It was an excuse to ride my bike up and back: up through Bateman's Bay and the Princes' Highway, and back through Wooloongong and the Illawara Highway. Very beautiful, though a little wet and scary in places. If you like heavenly scenery flying past, you simply must see them.

I'm reading the new Iain M. Banks novel, "Look to Windward", and Richard Steven's "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment." It goes without saying that both are superlative.

You know you're going to have a bad day when you connect to a Unix machine and it greets you with a Microsoft copyright.

Stevens has proved its value once again in helping track down rsync bugs on SCO OpenServer. In particular, on some SysV kernels, explicitly setting SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN rather than letting it default means that zombies are never generated, and therefore waitpid made rsync considerably confused. Let's not even mention the existence of both SIGCHLD and SIGCLD. Anyone who thinks proprietary software is the way of the future should be chained to an OpenSwerver box for a week.

rusty complained about the apparent difficulty of running gdb on libtool-mangled binaries. The solution is to also use libtool to run gdb. This will do it, I think:

  libtool --mode=execute gdb ./myfoo

linuxcare.com.au received a bemusing email a few days ago, complaining that the little world map page used a projection of the Earth that was no longer politically correct.

Our correspondant suggested we should instead use the politically correct Peters projection, which tries to accurately present land area and therefore show countries close to the Equator as larger. These countries tend to be less-developed countries.

I found a nice summary of the Peters projection, which is demonstrated here. (Sorry, this link was wrong.) Ironically for socialists, it seems hard to locate the algorithm to draw the map, and it would be more than amusing if it turned out to be patented. If the constraint is merely that area should be preserved it should be straightforward to derive, and perhaps a patch to xplanet would be appropriate.

Even in geometry (lit: measuring land), it seems, the technical is political.

Bye, Luke.

Tweaked my .muttrc, discovered fcc-save-hook and a few other nice features.

Discussed how to dispose of the body.

Tried using a Dvorak keymapping, but found it too slow to tolerate. I think if my wrists are ever really bad I'll switch purely because it will slow down my typing. (pron. dvor-jak, I think)

Home with a cold. Did a bit of reading, including some of SGI's B1 for Linux patches and The Cuckoo's Egg.

It's very nice that they're releasing it, but I think there is a substantial gap between what the NSA need in a trusted computer system, and what would help the average linux sysadmin.

For example, the SGI people are suffering some angst over the requirement that all actions be traced back to a responsible person. Should actions done by the web server be charged against the user who installed it, or root, or the uid httpd, or the remote user? I think in a B1 system you'd have to make some strong and justifiable policy decision: either the user who owns the server if its primarily publishing, or the remote user if they log in and run apps through it. There are patches from law@sgi to add in a "login user id" and "session id" to try to keep track of them.

But on Unix has more fluid concepts of permissions, and I'm not sure the distinction is useful. Being able to hold accountable and court-martial the web server admin is way less useful than just being able to see what happened.