Archive for December, 2004

My desktop gets more and more usable every day. In the past I reported a "bug" to the Azureus developers related to the system tray. Well there's indeed a system tray in GNOME too. You can add it to your panel by right clicking on it, choosing the "Add to Panel..." button and selecting the "Notification Area" item from the list. In the end it seems staightforward, but damn, why the hell this thing can't be named system tray?

It's really good stuff by the way. Makes my desktop less cluttered. Gaim uses it too.

LVM

I'm fascinated by LVM. I got to the point where I don't have to arrange my stuff between partitions all the time like a madman. I just use LVM and everything is fine. Maybe you should too. The obvious drawback of using several hard disks as one device kicks in when one of them dies. That's why in a situation like this it's a very good idea to archive often.

Some personal notes

It useful to do a "apt-get install less mc mozilla-firefox emacs21 gcc libc6-dev ncurses-dev g++ xlibs-dev" on a fresh Debian installation. Most software I need is packaged by Debian. Sometimes I have to use unstable packages. Other times I have no choice but to separately install them. The latter category is Azureus, Mplayer, the Nvidia video driver and the Linux kernel for example.

It's worth installing MS truetype fonts. X handles them for a long time. Looks really good.

I'm finally using Debian Testing. I installed it using the netinstall method. I'm almost using the most recent stuff. Wow!

Amarok

I've tried Amarok too. It looks really slick. It's obviously a work in progress since it has terminated many times. I don't know whether it's more a gstreamer or an Amarok issue, but you shouldn't try this thing if you want to use a reliable audio player.

Another interesting thing about Amarok is that I saw SQL quieries in its debug output. Amarok doesn't use MySQL nor PostgreSQL so I can only think there is an SQL interpreter embedded into it. It's probably the best method acquring object metadata. Another observation is that pushing an object metadata system down into the architecture could really boost our applications. But that's nothing new.

Configuration Hell

Software configuration is a nightmare on the Debian and the Linux kernel front. I've spend many hours on that. If ESR's CML2 had been evangelized more the situation probably would have been much better. Mentionining Debian, it's not the most user friendly distribution in the universe. I love its package management by the way.

Other

The CIA Open Source Notification System is a great tool. You can really get the big picture. Love it.

I finally catched up with Planet Beagle and Miguel's log. Feels good.

Ohh, and the holidays were fine too reagarding the noncyber world.

I have to study for for my exams.

J. Scott Edwards OS geek has written a nice article on OSNews about his ideal operating system. A lot of his ideas feel familiar to me (except from the 3D UI which I think is totally braindead and useless).

When he talks about the global object store as I would call it, I can really feel his pain. Let's take a short break... it's object store because it's a layer above the filesystem (ideally without a file system, but because backward compatibility it makes sense today using the Unix VFS API) that lets one define and create his/her own objects and relate them together. And it's global, because it not only stores which is accessible but it also stores which is inaccessible (off the disk - archived to CDs, DVDs, ...). So it's a 2 in 1 solution. I've been very concerned with archivation and sturctural storage problems in the last few months (years?).

Storage promised to implement this long-awaited architectural piece, but seeing how it progresses I'm not sure it's ever gonna ready.

When he talks about continuity, he thinks of orthogonal global persistence featured in the EROS OS.

I think another extremely important trait of a future OS is strong interprocess communication and code reuse. Applications are rather monolithical because of the diverse APIs and languages. Maybe language oriented programming really has a place because laguages are long term while APIs are rather short term. Ideally an OS is a set of strongly interconnected state machines with no multiplied, only reused code.

I like the philosophy of the Unununium OS. On the main page you can see Hans Reiser's quote: "The utility of an operating system is more proportional to the number of connections possible between its components than it is to the number of those components." I cannot tell in words how much I feel this statement true.

This guy even started his own project implemting this stuff in Eiffel among other languages. It seems to me like yet another idealistic never-will-be-ready project. Good luck dude! Anyone knows Eiffel by the way?

Imagemapmaker

I don't like C++. In my opinion it's a hack, an OOP layer above C. I'm not alone, of course. I've just written an application in it. It was a prerequisite for a job and I had no choice in language, that's why I've used it. The task of the application was to create image maps and the related (X)HTML document from image files contained in a set of directories. It's a CLI application. I've used gd which is a C library so the mixed C, C++ code is ugly like shit and I sucked a lot with some segfaults too as expected and stdstream bugs (less expected), but it works pretty well by this time. However several things left that I couldn't figure out completely. I wanna clean up the code and completely get it.  Here's how it looks like:

Apart from the hack feeling of C++, the separate definition (.h) - implemetation (.cpp) layout makes me mad. It's so disturbing editing dozens of these stupid files separately.

Amarok

Amarok doesn't seem to be yet another winamp clone. I like its unique features and design. Especially the song playing statistics, the CD cover preview, its fancy visualization and the advanced playlist. It's worth reading the OSNews interview with the Amarok developers. Gstreamer is probably very flexible also. If everything goes well, I'll test it within a short time.

I couldn't blog this week. This was because one of the sysadmins at the university computer science department blocked the server which hosts my home page. This server hosts thousands of other sites too which are full of warez and some students here regulary download all those shit which causes massive bandwidth consumption which costs a lot of money to the university. I came up with various alternative solutions:

1) Monitor user traffic. If the traffic exceeds a well-chosen limit per user, fall back to a lower bandwidth. The problem is that there are huge pages on the web with full of fancy shit. If someone surfs the web for some hours on these sites, (s)he can easily generate hundreds of megabytes of traffic. There are other downloading activities also which don't incorporate any warez. Moreover there are a bunch of technical difficulties implementing this idea. For example the LDAP server and the firewall don't communicate well with each other.

2) Scan FTP and HTTP URIs for multimedia file suffixes and track them per user. This would require a few dedicated hosts because of the 1 gigabit bandwidth. It's a pretty computationally and I/O intensive task. The other problem is that most warez is compressed in various different formats so the file suffix tells nothing about the content this way.

3) Kick the asses of all the warez folks. This would be the most easier and gratifying job to do. Unfortunately this option depends either on 2) or 3).

I don't know what to do in a situation like this, but this evil policy makes me mad. If nothing's gonna change I'll probably only blog on the weekends which is not that huge tragedy after all.

Homework

I've made a Mono advertisement postscript graphics for my computer graphics course of this semester. Here is how it looks like:

The source could be written in a more efficient and clear way in the loops I suppose, but I pretty much hated messing around with Postscript. On "language" above I mean the IL.

News

A few developers were talking in the past about reducing the boot time by using parallelized process execution. This is on my current wishlist so it sounds like a beautiful project.

I happily see that the situation is getting better day by day in Hungary regarding internet access. Every provider has raised the bandwith of their customers. I've had 384 kbits/s, now I happily surfing on 512 kbit/s for no additional payment. Every customers' bandwith above 384 kbit/s has been doubled, so the others had even more luck than me. The undesirable side effect of the this change was some hours downtime at my ISP so I couldn't get online last night.

News

If everything is going well, we'll be given a new filesharing protocol. Exeem sounds like a beautiful idea. The lack of centralization and the possibility of unlimited growing sounds like the death of RIAA and all those bastards. I hope the suprnova guys will make something big happen. By the way slyck.com seems to be a good place on file sharing news.

Some good stuff I found from OSNews:

• Regarding High Level Computing mentions that computing today is a usability disaster. Users think high level while computers force everybody to think low level. Companies care with their own interests rather than serving their customers and really solving their problems. I can only agree.
• Learning The Basics is yet another interesting article about how lazy we are. In my experience also most people don't or hardly want to learn any new things in their lifes if it's not necessary. This article also mentions that by adding policies that would make computers easier to use, we would loose the control of the finer grained mechanisms by these rigid policies. I was thinking about this subject for a while and I think by defining several layers of abstraction, a set of policy layers, we could make our computers adapt to us. I really think it's a possible thing to do.
• Usable GUI Design: A Quick Guide for F/OSS Developers is a really, really good article on UI design. It mentions some very basic and powerful guidelines. The links are also great.
• Smart Package Manager sounds like a long-awaited really intelligent and general solution. My personal wish would be a package manager that could store multiple versions of the same package locally in a way that I could select the version I currently want to use and it would rearrange the relations in the filesystem and its registry in a correct way.
• Sergey Dmitriev has written an article on language oriented programming. It is a fascinating idea to me. I got some questions answered by this article. I have been asking myself whether there is a better way to develop programs and was thinking about how could it be possible to preserve the sequence of the trasformations when developing programs instead of transforming our thoughts into the final code and finally unable or hardly explain how we got there despite of every comment in the souce. This paradigm can easily be the future, I think.

Nooface looks like an interesting HCI news site.

Karl fisher has written yet another nice GNOME 2.8 article.

Music

I was listening to Digitally Imported. The Vocal Trance and Hard Core channels play some good music sometimes.