Re: Time Pedantry (was Re: [SLUG] Which bank doesn't use Linux servers?)
Of course, that brings up the issue of WHAT day it is, and the need to cleanly support non-gregorian calendars. And the next thing you know, incrementing by a day involves half a CPU second because you need to run a physical model of the orbit of the moon to work out if you are at a month boundary. Adam K On 1 April 2010 16:11, Peter Hardy pe...@hardy.dropbear.id.au wrote: None of this would be a problem if we'd just switch to decimal time in a single timezone and call it a day. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Best API/abstraction?
I second Perl's DateTime module. It is by far the best time API I've ever seen, if only because it utterly refuses to give you an answer that isn't strictly valid, and throws exceptions if you blink at it wrong. This results in a very rapid learning process where by you are forced to learn how to phrase the question you REALLY want answered instead of just asking it naively and getting garbage-in garbage-out problems later. Once you've adapted to things like always giving it timezones (because there's lots of things it won't answer with floating timezones) and understanding that it's going to answer How long from 2:30am today until 2:30am tomorrow with simultaneous answers in days, hours and seconds (all three of which won't divide into each other necessarily) you really appreciate it. I've yet to see anything else that is even close. Adam K On 7 April 2010 15:14, Daniel Pittman dan...@rimspace.net wrote: Jeff Waugh j...@perkypants.org writes: quote who=Jamie Wilkinson I for one am glad such pages exist. I wish the inventors of time_t had read it. So which language / library has a great abstraction for time and date stuff, helping you deal with the intricacies of this craziness? None of them. Even the good languages have nasty side-bits like a don't be broken switch, and even a perfect language would still have the pain of dealing with political, not technical, issues like timezone-associated dates. Oh, and the fact that date math is *not* simple, since you can't convert between various durations; a question such as how many seconds in a week can only be answered it varies... FWIW, the link I posted earlier was about time handling in Common Lisp, which gets this less wrong than most platforms ... but that document was written because the standard was imperfect. Perl, meanwhile, has good support in various non-core library modules, but many of those have things like a $Class::Date::DST_ADJUST value to determine which behaviour you want for math involving DST and/or leap-seconds. As an example of a well-documented set of complications and how they are handled, the DateTime module does well: http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/DateTime-0.55/lib/DateTime.pm#How_Datetime_Math_is_Done After you read through the 250 lines of warnings, complications, caveats, and examples of how you can have two completely correct, valid, sensible results that are absolutely in contradiction with each other... Heh. Time. Boy, does it suck. :) Daniel -- ✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ dan...@rimspace.net ☎ +61 401 155 707 ♽ made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] SLUG Membership decline
Your problem is that membership at the moment is difficult and has no benefits. If you convert it to so that it's convenient, that's a good start. If you then want to create benefits, you're really going to have to introduce some form of scarcity. But in a way that doesn't lead to information restriction entirely. Now that the videos are flowing again, perhaps a delay? Members only for the first 3-6 months, and then open it up after that perhaps? Adam K On 2 April 2010 22:20, James Polley ja...@polley.org wrote: On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:38 AM, Heracles herac...@iprimus.com.au wrote: Also, SLUG should consider producing a magazine for members filled with articles from members including tutorials, reviews of open source software and code snippets, updates on what members are working on and some basics. It could become a benefit of membership. It could be emailed as a pdf to financial members at their slug.org.au email address. Interesting idea. I see one major problem and one major ideological issue though. The problem is the same one we have with talks: you can't have content without someone taking the time to produce the content. We have enough trouble now just trying to round up two people to give a talk every month; I can't imagine getting written content would be any easier. On the other hand, a short article might be easier to produce than a 45-minute talk - and there's no public speaking required, which no doubt would make it easier for some people to participate. If we could get the content I like this idea - except for the Emailed as a PDF bit. I think there are much better ways we could present this: for instance, an area of the SLUG website only accessible by financial members; or even a simple private mailing list. The ideological issue is more serious. SLUG has never (to the best of my knowledge) been about withholding information. We run our mailing lists in public: anyone is free to read the archives, to join the list, to participate, without needing to be a financial member. We don't charge attendance fees for meetings, we don't require that people coming to meetings become members. The idea of having a private member's magazine seems antithetical to everything SLUG has ever done. There are compromises of course; I believe the SAGE-AU mailing list archives used to be members-only for 6 months and then released to the public (although now it seems the archives are completely members-only). We could perhaps investigate something similar. My gut feeling though is that, no matter how much we want to provide value to members, having private content is not the right way to go. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Australian government to censor your internets
What's more, the report says (and I'm paraphrasing a summary here) We can block a list of a few thousand URLs with 100% effectiveness and no noticable false positives, with no noticable slow down of the internet. Non-URL based filters were only around 75% effective, which is better than last time. However, any motivated technical person can evade the URL list filter. If we try to prevent evasion of the filter, we will definitely slow down the internet. Adam K 2009/12/17 Tony Sceats tony.sce...@gmail.com: simply put, they can't really do it. All of the proposed solutions are HTTP based only and have a variety of workarounds associated with them anyway. It could stop a kid I'm sure, but maybe not a determined one. On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 10:49 PM, Kevin Shackleton kev...@reachnet.com.auwrote: I'm confused. I thought the whole idea of DARPANet was that it was bomb-proof - there was always another route open. How exactly are the Thought Police going to sit on every possible route into Oz? How well does the Chinese government censorship work, in terms of bandwidth filtered? I bet it's significantly under 100%. It seems to me, like metropolitan area wireless networks instill a little bit of honesty into ISPs, to be up to sites with links to international satellite service providers to resist any control from the government and pass packets not just because they can but because they should. Kevin. On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 17:46 +1100, meryl wrote: Heracles is right. The Filtering problem is more about stifling freedoms of speech and censoring the Net than it is about blocking child porn, and it is bound to be extended into other areas so freedom of speech will become a thing of the past for us in Australia. Apart from slowing down our already sluggish Internet speeds, if it is introduced it is likely to be extended down the track to include all manner of sites; possibly even political dissenters... if they get away with this and they'll add more and more sites to the list to the point where we may one day envy the freedoms that the Chinese have! Really the child porn issue is just being used as an emotional ruse to effect censorship controls because the purveyors of such material for the most part would most likely use VPNs and other evasive methods to avoid detection, as such their heinous activities will be totally unaffected by the filter. How about the government catch these crooks and lock them up instead of punishing all of us with this net-nanny filter. By and large the Filter will be way more detrimental to the average honest Internet user and the child pornographers will just sit back and laugh at the stupidity of Australian government. for more info see: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25773857-953,00.html http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/312845/statistics_experts_label_isp_filtering_trials_unscientific?fp=16fpid=1 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/careful-big-brother-is-editing-you/story-e6frg7go-1225792964441 http://www.openforum.com.au/content/firewall-lies http://libertus.net/liberty/ http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory-isp-blocking/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8AZ21hCkIg and as always there's a Downfall video on the subject! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH35CVig3fQ cheers, Meryl -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Australian government to censor your internets
Is anyone aware of any groups taking more direct technical action against this proposal? I'm more of a builder of things than a talker, and it occurs to me that if the scope of potential blocking is as wide as it (naively, to me) appears to be (and based on comments such as 80% of the 95 million porn sites fall under this criteria from the Sex Party etc) then the theoretical maximum size of the block list is something like 100 million URLs and contains every online games shop that sells NC video games, and so on and so forth. I'm pondering the idea of automating the web trawling process to find NC content, and then just submit all 100 million NC content URLs to the people that maintain the blocklist... This is to some degree idle speculation, and I'm sure that any specific attempt to do something like this would need to be more thoroughly researched, but if anyone can recommend any technical anti-filter forums within the various groups protesting this it would be handy... Adam K 2009/12/15 Mike beatbreake...@gmail.com: I'm not sure if this belongs here, sorry if it doesn't. Well looks like the government got it's way. Our Internet will be censored next year. http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/media/media_releases/2009/115 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Australian government to censor your internets
I'm sure it wouldn't be QUITE that simple, but for 100 lines of code I'm sure you could modify that to search for beastiality or Left 4 Dead 2 US Edition, scrape the front page to validate it a bit, then submit. But like I said, doing it properly would mean a bit more co-ordination... Adam K On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 4:24 PM, David Lloyd lloy0...@adam.com.au wrote: Why would we need to bother writing something ourselves? 1. Go to google 2. Type in something likely to get bad content (eg. sex) 3. Submit EVERY SINGLE result to the list arbitrators (Reasoning: well, clearly WE don't know what's classified - if we did, why would we need the Government to write great big laws about such things?) DSL -Original Message- From: Adam Kennedy adamkennedybac...@gmail.com Reply-to: a...@ali.as To: Mike beatbreake...@gmail.com Cc: slug@slug.org.au slug@slug.org.au Subject: Re: [SLUG] Australian government to censor your internets Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:08:10 +1100 Is anyone aware of any groups taking more direct technical action against this proposal? I'm more of a builder of things than a talker, and it occurs to me that if the scope of potential blocking is as wide as it (naively, to me) appears to be (and based on comments such as 80% of the 95 million porn sites fall under this criteria from the Sex Party etc) then the theoretical maximum size of the block list is something like 100 million URLs and contains every online games shop that sells NC video games, and so on and so forth. I'm pondering the idea of automating the web trawling process to find NC content, and then just submit all 100 million NC content URLs to the people that maintain the blocklist... This is to some degree idle speculation, and I'm sure that any specific attempt to do something like this would need to be more thoroughly researched, but if anyone can recommend any technical anti-filter forums within the various groups protesting this it would be handy... Adam K 2009/12/15 Mike beatbreake...@gmail.com: I'm not sure if this belongs here, sorry if it doesn't. Well looks like the government got it's way. Our Internet will be censored next year. http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/media/media_releases/2009/115 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Australian government to censor your internets
After a quick scan through the restricted classification database on the censors site, from which it appears that detailed instructions on the production of homemade gun silencers is rated RC, I managed to find a random YouTube video showing such details, and submitted it to see what the process is like. As expected, it's a fairly trivially automatable process, with a single captcha to prevent automated submission. This should be pretty trivial to wrap in a website, so that we'd just need to build a URL list in advance, ask random interweb volunteers to look at and solve catchas, and the rest would be done more or less automatically. I know some of the filtering systems will use DNS to prefilter HTTP requests, resolving all sites present in the block list across to the proxies that do the more detailed filtering. This, by the way, is how half of the UK appeared to be arriving at Wikipedia from the same IP address earlier in the year. Assuming this test complaint gets approved, something similar should happen to all Australian traffic going to YouTube for any ISP using that kind of filter system. We'll see how it goes, and I'm sure we're rapidly getting to the point where we should move this discussion off the SLUG list... Adam K 2009/12/17 Daniel Pittman dan...@rimspace.net: The ACMA process is documented on their website and, yes, does apparently involve a human review of the details. This existing system is used as the basis for the updated mandatory component of the system. ...and you could probably overload that with a few thousand items a day, personally, since it is not designed for high volume use; they envision less than 20K to 30K items on that particular list. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Australian government to censor your internets
I'm not suggesting this be the ONLY way of dealing with the issue. If it's possibly to at least remove all the excuses that it's cheap and easy, and demonstrate an ongoing series of high profile false positives, and the resulting latency issues, and that the whole thing is ungodly expensive. Surely taking the problem we know exist and making those problems real, immediate, high profile, and tangible, would provide some benefit to the people doing the more serious political work. Adam K 2009/12/17 Robert Collins robe...@robertcollins.net: On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 16:08 +1100, Adam Kennedy wrote: Is anyone aware of any groups taking more direct technical action against this proposal? .. I'm pondering the idea of automating the web trawling process to find NC content, and then just submit all 100 million NC content URLs to the people that maintain the blocklist... Political problems need political solutions: the technology needed to do fast lookups on a 100 million plus string corpus already exists; all you'd do is push the price up (and probably centralise it to one nation wide solution). False positives, broken applications induced latency are much more concerning technical aspects than filter size. The fundamental issue though, is that Australia is already censored: the debate about whether the internet should be censored is a bit misguided IMO: a better debate is that films are already censored: there isn't a strong argument why the internet /shouldn't be/, unless you consider the film censoring a problem (I do). Really, what I think we should be pushing for is: - RC material is abolished as a catch all category - Adults are required to ensure their children are not permitted access to adult only material, but the means is left to the parents to achieve. - This would apply to movies, magazines, etc. No more special treatment for canberra :) -Rob -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Any suggestions for places to do Personal Sprints in Sydney
Hi gang Lately I've been finding that between IRC, twitter spam, and all the other communication conveniences of our modern lives, it's really hard to force yourself to devoting a whole day to learning some new technology or to hack on that Important Project or what have you. I'd like to experiment with the idea of a Personal Sprint, where you pack up a laptop and all the downloaded material and books you need into a backpack, go somewhere unusual or picturesk or otherwise undistracting and spend a 5 or 10 or 15 hour day or evening or night with absolute nothing to distract from the task. Only problem is, I'm stuck for places to do it. In the past I've had some success with shorter periods of a few hours, by just getting on a train to Penrith, or sitting our on the foodcourt balcony at Bondi Junction shopping centre, and so on. But where would people recommend as places to go for this kind of thing? Limitations. 1. Must be reasonably reachable by public transport, some use of taxis is acceptable. 2. Must have electricity, buying 10 hours of extra battery time is probably not reasonable, extension cords are allowable. Thoughts? Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Dreamweaver clone for Linux ?
2009/9/17 Kyle k...@attitia.com: he's 9. I.e. the attention span of a goldfish. Indeed. I was quite surprised at some of the answers you got. Some of the suggestions sounded like the equivalent of teaching about gravity and acceleration by starting First, lets learn about co-efficients of friction and the calculus of air resistance. It's how we do it in the real world. :) Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Nokia one-ups IBM on Linux marketing
Hi gang You may have noticed recently that Nokia has decided to pack a fairly beefy Linux setup into their new super high end phone. What I didn't notice till today is that they've also had a shot at making the shiniest ad for a Linux OS yet :) http://maemo.nokia.com/ Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] comments in scripts and source code
A quick set of three basic guidelines for comments. I find these get my through most situations. 1. The code says what you are doing, the comments say WHY you are doing it. 2. The code is there to teach people who aren't you (which includes you-in-12-months) about the code, so in general they should be before a block of code, and introduce it. 3. Comments are for humans. Don't leave commented out old code around, they just mess up the comments, and you should be using version control for that anyway. Adam K 2009/1/12 Sebastian sebastian.spi...@gmail.com: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, recently I've started getting into Python and Django programming as well as shell scripting. I was wondering is there any rule or guide on good practice on how to comment code? For me and my current knowledge state, very low I would say :-), I do a lot of commenting. sometimes more than one line comments on one line code. Now I was wondering if I should place the comments before the actual code line, after or at the end. I like commenting in line after the code as it makes the code more easy to read - for me... But I like commenting lines preceding the code line as it keeps the lines itself short... I think that most would say it comes down to personal preference but I was wondering at the same time if there are some rules I should get used to right from the start. Cheers, seb -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) Comment: http://getfiregpg.org iD8DBQFJaowNMuBzgG5z7F8RAqZoAJ9Pzw3SRaes6LOdlU4bOqCQSZPFVACghmIG NhFonZutl3aBKUneNvtlDOE= =fJ7n -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] sa/perl Compress::Zlib problems
That looks like something environment-specific, but working out what it is will probably require some back and forth to work it out. The good folks at FreeNode #perl are probably your best bet for this issue. Adam K 2008/10/30 Voytek Eymont [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I just put some new rules, and, was trying to test it, when I got[1]: what my best option, apart from ignoring ? [1]# spamassassin --lint Subroutine Compress::Zlib::isaFilehandle redefined at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/Exporter.pm line 65. at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/IO/Compress/Base/Common.pm line 11 Subroutine Compress::Zlib::isaFilename redefined at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/Exporter.pm line 65. at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/IO/Compress/Base/Common.pm line 11 Subroutine Compress::Zlib::ParseParameters redefined at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/Exporter.pm line 65. at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/IO/Compress/Base/Common.pm line 11 Prototype mismatch: sub Compress::Zlib::ParseParameters ($@) vs none at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/Exporter.pm line 65. ... more... -- Voytek -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Fortress .... err Firewall Australia
Theoretically, I believe the IP thing vs domain thing has been solved now. If we are willing to put aside the evilness of filtering for a second and limit the issue to the technical implementation, I know there are some implementations that use a two-phase filter to deal with IP issues (I think this might include China's) They take the list of block domains, and resolve a set of IPs for them. These IPs are then hijacked via some BGP trickery (although someone more clueful on that aspect would need to describe how) to the filtering servers. These filtering servers, although they receive request/response for all of the hosts that map to the IPs, only do the actual filtering on the basis of domain or URL subpaths. In other words.. If you aren't on a red IP, you never go through filtering at all. If you are a green host on a red IP, your request is slower but still works. If you are a green host with a red subsection, the request is slower but still works. I gather though (since this involves network-fu) that this isn't the sort of technology you can just drop a linux box into the network to implement. But it would seem to at least mitigate some of the computation costs to implement the filtering. Of course, this says nothing whatsoever about the accuracy of the filtering, just that your inaccurate blocking can be implemented with a lower computational cost. Adam K 2008/10/25 Robert Barnett [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I am really most concerned about all the side effects of filtering that we are yet to uncover. For example: If I hosted on a dynamic IP, although I have been assured that it is unlikely, how would I deal with the event that my IP has been blocked to other users? Could the federal government consider not blocking domestic addresses and actually enforce Australian law on our own turf? What if I ran a VPN on port 80? How do I even know that I'm on the blocked list? What about lesser known sites such as the Internet WayBack machine? Would any objectionable material result in a blanket ban? Robbie -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Fortress .... err Firewall Australia
To summarise: This router disables all transport compression, and man-in-the-middles or disables all transport encryption, then relies on the police to send the network operator a list of every single child porn url and file hash in the entire world... What could possibly go wrong? Adam K 2008/10/21 Kyle [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Has anyone seen this; http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Sections/NEWS/PDFs/081016_copyrouter.pdf SMITH GARETH wrote: I know there is no perfect solution. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Debian SSH vulnerability: act now!
For people not using debian, the ssh-vulnkey logic has been repackaged with dependencies as a CPAN distribution and should be installable anywhere that has a Perl installation, including on Windows using Strawberry Perl (http://strawberryperl.com). http://search.cpan.org/dist/Dowse-BadSSH/ The package is going through a couple of releases a day as it gets tweaked and cross-platform bugs are excised, so if you have any difficulties with it, wait 24 hours or so and try again. Adam K Peter Chubb wrote: Just in case anyone missed it, there's been a major vulnerability for any SSH keys generated on a debian system over the last two years or so ... apparently the random number generator wasn't being seeded right, so only a few distinct keys were actually generated. The AARNET mirror doesn't have the updated packages as of this morning, but the Optusnet mirror does ... I suggest that -- you install the new openssh-client package (version 1:4.7p1-9 on unstable) -- run ssh-vulnkey -a as root to find any vulnerable keys, and get your users to fix them. -- Dr Peter Chubb http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au peterc AT gelato.unsw.edu.au http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au ERTOS within National ICT Australia -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] SIM cards as cheap data storage?
This is for a developing world project... Some problems I can see. Paper needs printers, toner, printer paper and more electricity, and smudges, and isn't rewritable, and doesn't hold much information, and isn't waterproof, and can be bent, spindled or mutilated, or burned. A smart card has none of these problems, and is probably cheaper if you need to do more than about 10 writes (toner is expensive). Adam K Matthew Hannigan wrote: How about storing the data on normal paper as barcodes. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Later Versions of *grep
Heavy grep users may also be interested in ack. http://search.cpan.org/dist/ack/ack Adam K Malcolm Johnston wrote: Most of us know that, way back when, and Ken Thompson still had a black beard, that there were three basic version of grep, with prefixed or flags that turned them on a such, but not fully integrated version of this tool that would work as quickly as the three versions. This, I think, went by the board, sometime ago, what with faster processors, DFA-type algorithms and the like. Now we seem to have mostly one, copied into it's various destinations by the squanders, or symlinked by the thrifty. What the hell! It's all gotten so much bigger and faster, so why bother: the toolbox approach was alright for tradesman, who actually had toolboxes, but for the rest I discovered this, a decade or so ago, when an out-of-the-box distribution ran (very signifcantly more slowly) that equivalent pattern-matchers in awk and perl. The problem was easy enough to fix, it just involved resetting the $LANG variable in the shell to C or POSIX. The current en_US setting produces a much more attenuated problem of the one described above, and isn't worth worrying about unless, as I do (I'm a linguist) you use *grep repetetively, where it surges once more into prominence. The actual culprit is the as-shipped `fgrep', which has a very curious conception of what a word is, unless it is operating in the right locale. I haven't bothered to localize this exactly, but I know from strace that many processes do a fair bit of locale-checking on their way to execution. Given that English as a mother-tongue is the fourth-most spoken language on the planet, and as a second (and, in many case, semi-bilingual setting) is spoken by more than 1 billion people, a great many of whom do not speak or write American dialects of English, maybe the developers of *grep should take this into account. I personally solved the problem by replacing my sym-linked fgrep with a far-older (yet fully functional) version. Maybe I should forward this one as a bugs report, although it's been a bug for years. Maybe we should all talk POSIX (I have certain professional doubts about that). Search lists, the -f option, is not, I think, behaving nicely. Cheers, Malcolm Johhston -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] OpenMoko.com online
Can I add to that... even if they do work, would they be legal? I know there's certification processes for things like electrical devices, does the same exist for mobile phones? Adam K Barrie Hall wrote: For those interested, the OpenMoko.com site went live today. It's now possible to order the pre-release (still in development) version of FIC's Neo 1973, Linux-based smart phone. Do these work on the Australian phone networks? They specify that they use a quad band GSM radio, so yes, these should work fine here. Barrie -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Windows Subversion client?
I absolutely HATE shell-integration, so I avoid TortoiseSVN. I'm using RapidSVN, which is standalone, native, entirely standalone, relatively fast. It's pretty much the functional equivalent of what WinCVS was for CVS. One and a half thumbs up. The only problem with it is that it sometimes gets a bit agressive reading metadata, so some operations, like listing a directory with a lot (160 in my case) of subdirectories is a bit slow. But for people that don't like shell integration, Rapid seems to be the obvious choice. Adam K Amos Shapira wrote: Hello, I'm trying to convince the windows programmers at my workplace to adopt SubVersion instead of Source(Un)Safe (which they already hate anyway) but the best Windows GUI client I found is TortoiseSVN which the programmer doesn't like because it relays on Windows Exploder which can get stuck for minutes sometimes. Another client I'm a bit familiar with is Eclipse, but it's Java and is going to be heavy on a laptop with VisualStudio already running on it. Using the command line tools looks very unattractive to them. Can anyone recommend any other useful clients (preferably Free/OSS)? Thanks, --Amos -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Bigpond NextG on Linux (Ubuntu)?
We have something of a special relationship with Telstra in that regard, since we're going to be buying (or causing others to buy) somewhere between 100 and 1000 of those accounts. In fact, we've gotten amazingly good service from Telstra from day 1. :) Adam K Rev Simon Rumble wrote: This one time, at band camp, Adam Kennedy wrote: We will be paying somewhere in the vicinity of $200-400 a month for our NextG data nodes, for (I believe) unlimited data. You'll be wanting to check the fine print. Tel$tra haven't offered unlimited data on any service for some time. Yes, I've seen the big billboards too, but that doesn't mean you can buy an unlimited plan. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Bigpond NextG on Linux (Ubuntu)?
Best anecdote I have regarding data over NextG comes (second hand) from the Campervan and Motorhome Club annual rally earlier this year. Internet on the Road guru giving talk at rally; explains why he switched from CDMA (which used to cost him over $100 per mnth, IIRC) to NextG; then advised a thunderstruck audience of Grey Nomads that his first monthly bill for his new service was for in excess of $4,000!!! We will be paying somewhere in the vicinity of $200-400 a month for our NextG data nodes, for (I believe) unlimited data. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Blogging system recommendations
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Quoting Rev Simon Rumble [EMAIL PROTECTED]: PHP is just too much of an open invitation to write buggy code. If PERL or Python had as many novice programmers calling their programs PERLxxx or PythonXXX then I'm sure these languages would look just as bad. Both Perl and Python have various things to discourage bad programming by default. The biggest example is probably SQL placeholders, which pretty much remove any chance of SQL injections attack in one fell swoop. I know for DBI it's very difficult to do any non-trivial work without using them. Wasn't going to reply at all (risking a flamewar) but the PERL pushed me over the edge :) Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Bigpond NextG on Linux (Ubuntu)?
I'm using the CDMA as well at the moment (2 Windows machines, 1 linux machine, 6 mac-based embedded devices), and I agree, slow and semi-reliable. At the moment I have to keep a permanent ping running to prevent the connection falling off. So while Quozl's information does seem sufficient, the result (at least for me) has not inspired huge trust in a reliable solution. HOWEVER, we have some NextG cards we're currently using on Windows (can't transition the Macs yet since the drivers are still too buggy for release) and I can tell you it's a world of difference. Connects in no time flat, quite responsive, decent data rate. And from my testing, better coverage in tight urban spaces. One of our CDMA modems is deep in an inner city shopping plaza inside a building, and only phones home about 6 out of the 24 times it should daily. The connection keeps falling off. In comparison, the NextG modem I tested on the laptop seemed to connect quite effortlessly. So nothing but good things so far with the network, at least in areas where you get the good towers. Haven't tried in country areas yet. So assuming you can get the device itself working and stable, by all means make the move. But if you can do be absolutely sure you can jump through the necessary hoops to get it working before you commit to moving. I won't be transitioning the linux server to the new network though, it's moving to some other weird connection into the Telstra WAN segment we're doing our stuff on. 1.5 meg and not before time :) Adam K Sonia Hamilton wrote: I've been using Telstra's Maxon CDMA for internet access while on the road - slow, semi-reliable. The Telstra phone bunnies are telling me it's time to upgrade to NextG. I've had a google around on Whirlpool, pulled up this Quozl's guide at [1], which seems to indicate it works; I'm interested in ppl's experiences before I take the plunge and submit myself to the next round of Telstra pain... [1] http://quozl.linux.org.au/bp3-usb/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Bigpond NextG on Linux (Ubuntu)?
Robert Thorsby wrote: On 2007.04.18 00:37 Adam Kennedy wrote: So nothing but good things so far with the network, at least in areas where you get the good towers. Haven't tried in country areas yet. Up our way (Mid North Coast) the response has been universal -- NextG is crap. Most who were coerced by Telstra into converting their mobiles are trying to convert back to CDMA. I should probably add that my comments ONLY apply to the use of NextG for data with those USB NextG modems. If we're talking mobile phones on NextG, I've switched from Vodafone (paid by me) to NextG (paid by company) and the Motorola Razr whateveritis phones (that I'm told are the best of a bad lot) are horrid. It has quite possible the worst user interface I've ever seen on a mobile device. What the hell were the designers thinking. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] IBM calculate that 4Gb RAM is optimal for Vista
Voytek Eymont wrote: On Thu, February 22, 2007 12:46 pm, Jeff Waugh wrote: This leads me to ask about the equivalent for most Linux desktop setups. What is the sweet spot for RAM in a typical, say, Ubuntu desktop box? The point at which diminishing returns from improved functionality intersects with the increase in cost. 128-256MB if you just want to run the desktop (not wildly helpful to anyone). 512MB if you want to do some stuff as well (say, Firefox or OpenOffice.org). 1GB if you want to feel fairly pacey while doing some stuff (disk cache). not unlike XP, I'd guess Yep, that's pretty much the sweet spot for XP as well. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] IBM calculate that 4Gb RAM is optimal for Vista
This leads me to ask about the equivalent for most Linux desktop setups. What is the sweet spot for RAM in a typical, say, Ubuntu desktop box? The point at which diminishing returns from improved functionality intersects with the increase in cost. Adam K Howard Lowndes wrote: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasicarticleId=9011523 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Spam again
Robert Thorsby wrote: On 2007.01.10 06:19 Howard Lowndes wrote: I've just noticed that the spam level hitting my mail server has increased 4 to 4 fold overnight, most of it being dropped at the CONNECT stage. http://www.lannet.com.au/traffic/h48/index.html Has anyone else noticed similar? Yes, there has been a massive increase in spam in recent days but last night it went off the richter scale. Just a reminder to folks that if anyone would like to help me with the development of the new pooled real-time behaviour-based spam system I'd love to get an event feed of your spam. More information at http://ali.as/threatnet/ or #threatnet in freenode. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Spam - use of SPF
Amos Shapira wrote: On 10/01/07, Howard Lowndes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just out of curiosity, and because I am procrastinating about doing something else, I ran a quick analysis across my mail log file to see what the extent of the use of SPF is: pass29517 neutral 30354 softfail31082 none4783 unkown 31143 I remember seeing a mention of SPF and SenderID(?) a while ago concluding that actually spammers were the first to rush to get themselves the right records, virtually to the point that finding an SPF record could increase the probability that you are dealing with a spammer (not that I'd suggest anyone to use such a rule by itself, e.g. Gmail/Yahoo mail would fail such a rule, filtering Hotmail is probably a good idea anyway :). That was entirely not the point of SPF though. Merely HAVING an SPF record doesn't make you less of a spammer. It does however remove mail server spoofing and provide a verified identity for the mail servers. You know the people sending you mail are who they say they are. And once you know for sure that they are who they say they are, you can them use that identity to work out if they are goodies or baddies properly based on who they are. So it provides a platform for identity-based filtering. The spammers having SPF records merely forced them to come out openly about who they were. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Spam - use of SPF
Amos Shapira wrote: I'm pretty sure it's not practical to do much with this info beyond maybe being able to more tightly bind the negative reputation of a spammer to the domain/id he used to send the spam from. Correct. And it just so happens that the creator of SPF has a startup going called Karma for aggregating massive amounts of reputation data. :) Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] recommended ip phone for experimenting with Asterisk?
Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: The problem with many VoIP manufacturers is that they have an electronics and not a telephony background. Companies which have proven track records in telecommunications are far more likely to produce a product that is reliable and better tailored to suit the needs of consumers, particularly in the corporate space. I concur with Sridhar. During my days at Cisco in 2000 they did the huge we're all going VOIP internally rollout, to eat their own dogfood. Even with the entire company relying on it, even with executives badgering them, even with all the experience and talent available in Cisco's own internal network operations groups, they STILL took 6 months to really bring the phone system back to fixed-line levels of stability. The first month was utter hell. Telephony is HARD. So go with experience when you can. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] ADSL without paying for a phone line?
If it exists in your area, the best you can hope for is cable. This is pretty fast down, pretty slow up. But if you aren't running a home webserver or doing a lot of bittorrenting, it should be just fine. At least _I_ think it's just fine... compared to the 100Mb-ethernet-to-the-bedroom I had at university (the perk of being the network sysadmin at the college) all this stuff is slow anyway. Personally I don't find the difference between cable and ADSL very large, and the cable is MUCH MUCH MUCH more reliable. As in I've only ever heard of one person that has ever had trouble reliable. And I can get 1Mb a second to my server in the US, so that's everything I need ok :) Adam K Sonia Hamilton wrote: (slightly OT...) Is there a way of getting ADSL at home without paying for a landline? I use my mobile for everything, and don't use the landline but am paying for it to run ADSL on. I know there's things like wireless from http://www.unwired.com.au/, but to get decent downloads the costs would work out the same. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] introducing myself
Why would you want it to be pre-installed? Kinda narrows down your flavour of Linux. Just buy a cheap PC from a store like MSY and install your distro of choice. Or ask for directions to North Rocks Computer Markets held once a week every Sunday from 9am till 3pm. New and Used computers are sold there. For example, I bought 3 x Compaq Used PCs (10Gb Disk, 800MHZ, 256MB mem, with CDROM, no screens) in working conditions at $80 each. Three years later they're still working. Am I missing something here, or have we answered someone looking to buy a new computer with linux on it with instructions on how to buy an old computer with Windows on it? :) While I personally would install it myself, I am most certainly curious if anyone even has this as an option? Surely one of you Ubuntu Partners must have something by now where I can drop my credit card on a website and a straight forward home/work box turns up on my door in a few days. Or can anyone confirm he can turn up at the North Rocks Computer Markets, buy a new Linux box, and walk away with it? Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Google for trends
I absolutely agree that my original trends are probably unrepresentative to various degrees, though probably more accurate than comparing just osx and ubuntu when you take the general populace into account. We could stick with specifics and ignore both apple and mac... http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+osx%2C+%22os+x%22%2C+%22mac+os%22ctab=0geo=alldate=all Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Google for trends
Michael Lake wrote: Luke Kendall wrote: Did you know you could use Google to look at trends? E.g. Ubuntu *apparently* overtook MacOS/X over a year ago: http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+osxctab=0geo=alldate=all And if you type in linux, dos you will see that linux is slowly falling and dos is rising a tiny bit. From the graph it looks like dos will overtake linux about 1/2 way through 2007. The gap is narrowing :-) I agree, Denial Of Service attacks are a serious threat to Linux :) Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Html to pdf conversion with all the formatting
What were you using? There are various ways to convert, and some are better than others. The basic ones just custom-transform the HTML into PDF equivalents. They are liable to produce fairly average output in a lot of cases. I think from a thread earlier this month, the concensus was to use one based on Mozilla's Gecko engine to fully render the document, then converts to postscript (from which you convert to PDF). See the list archives for earlier in the month. Adam K [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi I am able to convert HTML to PDF document, but the colors, images styles etc do not appear on pdf document. Does anybody has any idea how to do this? Regards, Param -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] can ruby run perl/python libraries?
Taryn East wrote: Absolutely - and it's a dream to work with for web-app development. Besides-which, if you're using Rails, you at least know that most fo the Ruby community is behind Rails. Compare with the current joke that there are more web-development frameworks than keywords in Python ;) Heh, and to add to that, while there's a ridiculously large number of Perl web development frameworks, it isn't a joke. It's just considered normal because CPAN has ridiculously large number of just about _every_ type of module :) Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] can ruby run perl/python libraries?
Daniel Bush wrote: Hi Sonia, On 17/11/06, Sonia Hamilton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm thinking of learning Ruby ... Yay! Another rubyist! One thing I can say, if you like oop, you will probably like ruby. - is there an easy way of running Perl and Python code/libraries from Ruby? I've googled and browsed manuals in Dymocks Library ^H^H^H Bookshop, can't seem to find an answer. This cropped up on the ruby talk list with regards perl in late September - http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/217173. Looking at the thread I'm not sure if there was a consensus - certainly no magical wrapping utility was mentioned when I last checked. The only thing I can suggest at the moment is something that goes the other direction, one of the Inline:: modules (there was a bit of a fad relating to makeing Perl inline-embed anything a while back). http://search.cpan.org/~neilw/Inline-Ruby-0.02/lib/Inline/Ruby.pod The Inline::Ruby module would _seem_ to let you embed ruby code directly in your Perl. That _might_ be enough to get you going, but I doubt it, since I suspect what you really want is something like I want to call CPAN modules natively from Ruby That you don't get, although as was mentioned quite a number of the better and more venerable CPAN modules are gradually being cloned over to gems. To get something fairly robust I think you will need to wait for the Parrot/Perl6 stack, which _will_ allow native cross-language calls between Perl5/Perl6/Python/Ruby et al. But until that is more usable, there's no good answers I'm aware of. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Making samba DWIM
Hi gang I've been having some trouble with Samba I can't seem to work out myself, and I was hoping someone can help. The setup I have for web work is a Windows 2000 desktop (for Dreamweaver, Ultraedit, Firefox+IE+Opera, and so on) and a debian dev/test server with Apache and Perl (just simple CGI in this case, but it varies). To work on the files I mount a Samba share as a Windows drive, and just edit everything directly on the Linux box (the apps are all set to use Unix newlines etc). I can save/reload to see changes, and I generally have half a dozens shell open on the box, and various other infrastructure so that the who boxes work more like one hybrid machine than two separate ones (in a previous incarnation they were even duck-taped together). This workflow has worked really well for me for a number of years, but I always have trouble fiddling the samba setup to the right place. For some reason, saving from the Windows box seems to reset the permissions of the files. And in this particular case, that also means 644 (and thus not world-readable so nobody can do the CGI). Now, I assume that Windows is doing something funky and delete/write'ing the file instead of overwriting the file. Could someone with more samba-fu than I explain if there's a way to make these file writes behave themselves and maintain whatever permissions they currently have? Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] howto convert html to pdf?
I tried it as well, and it looks to me like it's a cross-language dependency problem. The one downside to the CPAN installer (and language-specific source repository installations in general) is that it isn't able to cross language boundaries. It looks like HTML::Tidy needs something called libtidy, and is freaking out when it can't find it. On another note though, I hadn't heard of mozilla2ps before, but I think that almost certainly the best approach. Using a full blown rendering engine is much more likely to produce good results. So you add my support to the mozilla2ps - ps2pdf approach as well, despite the slowness. Adam K Sonia Hamilton wrote: * On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 06:04:11PM +1100, Adam Kennedy wrote: I just realized that my previous response didn't make it to the list. Something like this should work for you. http://search.cpan.org/~audreyt/PDF-FromHTML-0.20/script/html2pdf.pl Should be just a case of... [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cpan -i PDF::FromHTML [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ html2pdf.pl source.html target.pdf Thanks Adam. xulrunner + mozilla2ps gave me good results, so I used that. A bit slow, but I scripted it and left it to chug away... Out of interest, 'cpan -i PDF::FromHTML' failed, due to 'cpan -i HTML::Tidy' failing, with errors below. Not sure how to fix this - any ideas? I tried googling on the error messages, installing tidy (in case it's a missing library). I don't use Perl much, so don't know where to start with these sort of problems. Errors: ... ... cp lib/HTML/Tidy.pm blib/lib/HTML/Tidy.pm /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/perl/5.8/ExtUtils/xsubpp -typemap /usr/share/perl/5.8/ExtUtils/typemap Tidy.xs Tidy.xsc mv Tidy.xsc Tidy.c Please specify prototyping behavior for Tidy.xs (see perlxs manual) cc -c -I. -I/usr/include/tidy -I/usr/local/include/tidy -I/sw/include/tidy -D_REENTRANT -D_GNU_SOURCE -DTHREADS_HAVE_PIDS -DDEBIAN -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -I/usr/local/include -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -O2 -DVERSION=\1.06\ -DXS_VERSION=\1.06\ -fPIC -I/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE Tidy.c Tidy.xs:5:18: error: tidy.h: No such file or directory Tidy.xs:6:20: error: buffio.h: No such file or directory ... ... make had returned bad status, install seems impossible -- Sonia Hamilton. GPG key A8B77238. . One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them. One OS to call them all, And in salvation bind them. In the bright land of Linux, Where the hackers play. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Postgrey/FairUCE
From reading the first few lines describing what postgrey does (reject connections and hoping that spammers won't retry) then it sounds like a doomed tactic since I've just read (on Security Fix? not sure) that spammers got over this silly hurdle and now will retry, causing even more traffic for sites which employ this method. I can confirm that this happens, esp for the penny stocks spam with .GIF, which is why I need to get FuzzyOcr working. :( I for one wouldn't bother even bother FuzzyOcr. It represents only an incremental step in the detection, and on the spammers are pretty much able to beat already. I'm already seeing animated image spam with increased levels of noise, varying fonts and other tricks. It's only a matter of time till the image spam is sophisticated enough to existing OCR software, even fuzzy OCR, is going to start getting in trouble. Frankly, I think 90% of the anti-spam techniques I here about are pretty horrendous. They generally rely on the argument Well the spammer don't $something, so we use a method that stops anything that doesn't $something. These methods all have a limited lifespan, because all that needs to happen is that the spammers start doing $something, and the anti-spam is defeated. More people need to realise that spammers can program too, and aren't stupid. (Not any more) Adam K P.S. That's not a dig at you Howard, more of a rant in general :) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] howto convert html to pdf?
I just realized that my previous response didn't make it to the list. Something like this should work for you. http://search.cpan.org/~audreyt/PDF-FromHTML-0.20/script/html2pdf.pl Should be just a case of... [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cpan -i PDF::FromHTML [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ html2pdf.pl source.html target.pdf Adam K Sonia Hamilton wrote: I (well my boss actually) want to convert several hundred html pages to pdf - what's the easiest way to do this? Any pointers, ideas? I guess I'm looking for a tool like pdf2html (but going in the reverse direction). I've found a php module called html2pdf [1] - just wondering if there's a stand alone tool callable from the shell. [1] http://directory.fsf.org/print/misc/html2pdf.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Linux UI decision
Michael Lake wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2. I have begun development using Qt, as my X/Motif/Tk book is about a decade old - there are so many IDE's, does anyone think this environment has a future in the workplace? As a user I'm finding much of the open source GUI stuff that I download and have to compile is written with wxWindows. I suspect that that is because many open source programmers dont have the full, pay for Qt libraries to develop with. wxWindows has bindings for Python, Perl and C++. It's web page http://www.wxwindows.org now seems to redirect to http://www.wxwidgets.org Using wxWindows your one app will work on Linux, MacOSX and Windows. You can add to that the fact that the bindings for Qt aren't what they used to be. The Perl bindings for Qt3 were ok, and then they went and replaced it with Qt4 and I think the maintainers of Qt3 bindings couldn't be bothered throwing away all their work and starting again. So on Perl at least, Qt is now not used at all. In comparison, WxWindows not only works and has good bindings, but WxWindows is completely integrated into CPAN. So you don't even need to install it seperately. You can just install the app, like say the sample Wx application... (which is Windows Notepad reimplemented in Perl/Wx) cpan App::GUI::Notepad And everything should Just Work. With Qt that would be been a lot harder, or at least require more work regarding redistribution (but I'm not sure on that point). And then there's the fact that you won't be able to use it commercial without paying... All in all it just seems to add up to people being drawn to Wx more, unless you are doing something in the mobile space, in which case Qt has done a ton of work on Qt for mobile devices. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: Linux UI decision
A C# compiler for Parrot was due to be written at the Hackathon yesterday, but was abandoned after someone discovered there was a valid patent hanging over C# compilers in general. So I don't know about coming after you, but there's more than one. :) Adam K James Dumay wrote: You could use GTK-Sharp - it works on Win32, Linux and Mac OS X. I wouldn't use WinForms. As far as I am aware, WinForms probably the only thing that Microsoft could come after with Lawyers in Mono. James On 11/13/06, Howard Lowndes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Have you considered the implications of Mono being owned by Novell and Novell having entered into an arrangement with Microsoft. Perhaps Mono is not as unencumbered as you might like to think. David Peterson wrote: Michael Lake wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2. I have begun development using Qt, as my X/Motif/Tk book is about a decade old - there are so many IDE's, does anyone think this environment has a future in the workplace? As a user I'm finding much of the open source GUI stuff that I download and have to compile is written with wxWindows. I suspect that that is because many open source programmers dont have the full, pay for Qt libraries to develop with. wxWindows has bindings for Python, Perl and C++. It's web page http://www.wxwindows.org now seems to redirect to http://www.wxwidgets.org Using wxWindows your one app will work on Linux, MacOSX and Windows. What about Mono? Apparently the latest version (1.2) completely implements the System.Windows.Forms API. This should mean you can write cross-platform apps that run on both Windows and Linux, right? I'm not sure about MacOSX support but if anyone is using this I would love to be enlightened! Dave -- Howard. LANNet Computing Associates - Your Linux people http://lannetlinux.com When you want a computer system that works, just choose Linux; When you want a computer system that works, just, choose Microsoft. -- Flatter government, not fatter government; abolish the Australian states. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Sydney.pm Meeting Tonight
Hi Gang Just a short note to let people know that the monthly Sydney Perlmongers meeting is on tonight. We're meeting up at 6:30pm at the Firehouse Hotel (pub) in North Sydney for a drink or two. http://www.firehousehotel.com.au/2.html Then at about 7pm once everyone is arrived, we'll be transferring over to a boardroom at Dan Steele's company at 100 Walker Street North Sydney Paul Fenwick is in town from Melbourne and will be giving a talk, which I believe will be a preview of his ODSC talk. If anyone is interested I look forward to seeing you there. If you get lost and need some assistance, you can reach me on 0416 181 595. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Intellectual property for newbie programmers (was Re: [Fwd: Re: [SLUG] Novell and Microsoft])
Phill O'Flynn wrote: As a budding software developer, I find this copyright and intellectual property topic increasingly tragic. Where does it end? Who doesn't copy ideas? Didn't Microsoft develop Windows 3.1 by borrowing the GUI idea from Apple ( and subsequently squashing them). Now they want to protect themselves from what they did to others. Or perhaps they want to continue to squash any other alternative to them ( or better put Resistance is futile Let me clarify things a little for those getting started in the programming side of things. There's three different things you need to care about, and they have completely different impacts. Since there seems to be a little confusion in your comments, let me clarify in simple points. These are extraordinarily hand-waving definitions, but hold true for the most part. 1. Copyright. - Don't cut and paste other people's code without asking them. - Don't use someone else's module/API unless you agree to their terms. Plagiarism fits mostly into here, but in the academic and media sense, it's altered somewhat to... - Cut and paste all you like but ALWAYS say where you got it from. Open Source (in the extreme broadest sense of the term) is a massive positive for you here, because it lets YOU make a legally enforcable deal where you let other people copy your work, as long as you can copy theirs back again if you want to. Free Software extends this idea further, but in the most general share-and-share-alike sense it's similar. 2. Trademark - Don't steal someone's logo in a similar industry. - Don't use someone else's name in a similar industry. - Don't sort of do either of the above in a similar industry. Basically, don't present yourself to the public in a way that the average layman might get confused and think you are them. And even more strictly, don't ever make money off the similarity. Trademarks are why the Microsoft Pillow Factory on the Princes Highway in Tempe (no really, this actually exists) is completely safe, while a notional Open Source Microsoftware company or something that used the four colours windows pattern could be in trouble. 3. Patents While copyright and trademarks are quite clear and work pretty well, patents are another story. A patent, fundamentally, goes like this. - You have an awesome idea that isn't obvious to anyone else. Imagine you are the first person to invent gold plating. - You can make a huge of money from it, as long as nobody else knows. Imagine nobody has seen gold cups and forks except for solid gold ones owned by kings and great figures, and now YOU can eat like a king for only $199.90 per fork! - So you go to huge lengths to keep it secret. You never write down the chemical solution formula, and you guard carefully the machines in sealed buildings and you make the machines so only you can operate them. - You die, and because of the extreme secrecy, your idea is lost to society. This, obviously, is very very bad. Forget gold plating, imagine losing the ability to make penicilin. So society does a deal with the devil. - Society lets you exploit your idea in the open, but do so AS IF you had kept it secret. So society enforces your secrecy (exclusivity/monopoly) and lets you make even MORE money quickly, because you don't have to go to the efforts to keep it secret. - In exchange, Society forces you to tell it in extreme detail EXACTLY what your great idea is. Now when you die (or rather, in 20 years), all of society benefits and your idea isn't lost. In fact, in any patent application the standard of documentation to this day remains something similar to, Enough detail so anyone else in your industry could copy your idea And over the course of history, this deal with the devil has worked pretty well. Much of the key technical and applied scientific knowledge of mankind is stored in the vast patent office collections, and mankind advances on a (relatively short) 20 year delay without losing the ideas. So patents themselves are not inherently bad, even in it. That's a somewhat unpopular idea in this community, but I note that Donald Knuth holds the same position. The problem for us is that the standard of judging what is obvious and what isn't in IT is dangerously bad, and when you look at the speed of the IT industry compared to, say, chemistry or engineering or biology, 20 years is just a ridiculously long period of time. In this sense, software patents are completely broken. --- So what should you do then. If you are wanting to be a programmer, you should learn how copyright law works (to the extent you reasonably can without becoming a lawyer), and learn how trademarks work (to the extent you reasonably can without becoming a lawyer) and more or less ignore how patents are SUPPOSED to work, leave campaigning for change to people like Pia and SLUG and OSIA and
Re: [SLUG] Another anti-spam idea
Or just accept that your anti-spam setup is going to get x% of the spam, and beyond that you're better off putting your efforts into something else - like learning a decent mail client that allows you to quickly get rid of any spam that got thru... Did someone say mutt? Any time a spam strategy is predictably imperfect, that is a specific type of spam gets through, you've essentially created a scenario in which you have a strong evolutionary selection towards that type of spam. And so the percentages will start to grow as more spammers use that successful technique. Being easily able to delete it is of no real relevance. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Perl/SSH Problem
Passwdless login is infinitly better than passwd infact on my system: PermitRootLogin without-password with say 1024bit key and say 10^6 tries per second lets see ... 1024 log (2) / 10^6 is say 10^300 years to crack! Much better than any 10 char passwd. The weak link is storing YOUR private key. The rest is secure. Infact I'll TELL you my root passwd and you still can't get in I always thought the problem with keys and passwordless login was that you end up with cascading exploits. If I login from box A -- box B with keys, and someone hacks box A, then they automatically have access to box B, and C, and D and anything else I use keys on. If I can hack your box, I don't even need your root passwd, I'll just login directly to the box and it will let me straight in the front door. With passwords, at least that isn't a problem (assuming you aren't a complete idiot and have the same password for everything). Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Perl/SSH Problem
1. That's what strong pass-phrases are used for - to limit the access to the private key. 2. You could say sure - so you replace the password by a pass-phrase but you'd still need the private key, which is never transferred over the net. 3. You can allow access for multiple keys into the same account - therefore you can trace which key was used to login and track it back to the origin and/or remove it if it was compromised (or do stuff like limit the commands a key authorizes, or pair keys with originating ssh clients). On the other hand you can't have multiple, traceable passwords to a UNIX account. With passwords, at least that isn't a problem (assuming you aren't a complete idiot and have the same password for everything). With passwords it's enough to know (or guess) a relatively short string in order to gain access. With keys protected by a pass-phrase you'll need a string AND the unencrypted content of a file which should never leave the local disk. Which is all fine and dandy, except the entire point of the original key argument was that the original poster wouldn't need a pass(word|phrase) and so could avoid his problem with the method SSH uses for prompts. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: perl, php
Alan Harper wrote: On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 16:16 -0800, hav wrote: ...why would you bother with PHP if you know perl? *puts on fireproof suit* Why bother with perl when you know python? :) CPAN. And significant whitespace. And there's more jobs :) Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: perl, php
Adam Kennedy wrote: Alan Harper wrote: On Thu, 2006-11-02 at 16:16 -0800, hav wrote: ...why would you bother with PHP if you know perl? *puts on fireproof suit* Why bother with perl when you know python? :) CPAN. And significant whitespace. And there's more jobs :) In retrospect the significant whitespace charge probably isn't fair, since on the CPAN there's a module that lets you use Python-style significant whitespace with Perl as well :) http://search.cpan.org/~fxn/Acme-Pythonic-0.45/lib/Acme/Pythonic.pm Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: perl, php
Rev Simon Rumble wrote: This one time, at band camp, Adam Kennedy wrote: In retrospect the significant whitespace charge probably isn't fair, since on the CPAN there's a module that lets you use Python-style significant whitespace with Perl as well :) Erm, I don't think it was being listed as a positive. But hey, why not go the whole hog? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_%28programming_language%29 Because the CPAN has had an implementation of that since long before that was invented. :) http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Acme-Bleach-1.12/lib/Acme/Bleach.pm Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: perl, php
Lindsay Holmwood wrote: On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 01:33:43PM +1100, Michael Lake wrote: Alan Harper wrote: *puts on fireproof suit* Why bother with perl when you know python? :) Try installing Python eggs compared to installing Perl modules. No wonder the Python packages are called eggs - they break easily :-) Python programmers don't know not to bother with eggs because there's Debian. :-) Indeed. In all seriousness though I've heard this a lot of times, from a number of senior Python personalities (not Guido though). I can't help but wonder if it hurts Python in the long wrong, because it makes it harder for people to play if they are in strange and unusual places (and I don't just mean Win32 here). Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Pants off, SLUGsters
No, it's where you post a link to the photos stored on some web server somewhere... like a normal geek. Adam K TongMaster wrote: On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 15:55 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: I mean, who posts images to SLUG anyway? Only fascists, spammers, Spanish absurdists and the deranged. Isn't this where I am supposed to post the photo's of my fully-extracted, water cooled, purple, silver racing striped Gentoo case mod with blue flashing LEDs and X-Files logos[1]? [1] - May not actually exist (I'm sure it does somewhere). -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Pants off, SLUGsters
I gather this is the why don't we just block EVERY post with an image approach... failing... but good idea :) Adam K Jeff Waugh wrote: If you actually get this email, Lindsay and I have screwed up. Well, mostly me. Never mind. - Jeff -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] New St George HTML based online banking interface
I can't remember EVER getting St George ones, although they've warned about them before. Adam K Matthew Hannigan wrote: On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 09:24:10AM +1000, Adam Kennedy wrote: Ditto. I for one loved the Java web banking site. I felt something of a mild sense of security in that it was the only site that couldn't be trivially screen-scraped. (although I did discover a way later on to emulate the client-server protocol). I consider the move to HTML a step back. Indeed. I wonder whether it's a coincidence I've just started getting St George phishing attempts. I get between 10 to 100 of phishing messages per week, and they're usually National, Commonwealth, occasionally ANZ, and a handful of foreign banks and ebay/paypal. Only today have I got some St George ones. I can't remember the last time I got them for St George. Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] New St George HTML based online banking interface
Ditto. I for one loved the Java web banking site. I felt something of a mild sense of security in that it was the only site that couldn't be trivially screen-scraped. (although I did discover a way later on to emulate the client-server protocol). I consider the move to HTML a step back. That said, it will mean that Linux people with Java issues won't have problems any more. Adam K Menno Schaaf wrote: Never had any issues with the java based one... The migration is a gradual one, so not all people may have access to it yet. I've only just got switched across yesterday... On 10/16/06, Simon Males [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: When logging in, you'll have the option of going to the Java based interface or the new (HTML) interface. Posting this as some time ago Sluggers were having issues with the Java interface. http://www.stgeorge.com.au/ -- Simon Males [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Technical talk volunteers for September's meeting
I have a couple of pre-written ones I can pull out for those that haven't seen them. The one I can do with the least preparation (because I must have done it 5 or 10 times) is: - Parsing, Analysing and Manipulating Perl (without perl) The best description I have is a quote. I've don't think I've ever laughed and had my brain hurt so much at the same time before. I also have: - PITA: Rediculously Large Scale Testing ... which is about the new mass automated testing architecture I'm building to replace the existing CPAN Testers. It has video in it, so it need a dark room and a sound system as well as the projector to do it properly. Also I've got: - Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong ... which is about a whole bunch of different ways that people screw up the design of large software systems, and is pretty light on A/V demands. I've done it on a laptop before. Please note that these last two, while I've done them already in the US, haven't been shown here yet except for a short version of the second one for OSIA, and I'll be doing them at OSDC in Melbourne and (hopefully) at LCA next year. So if people are planning to go to either, perhaps the Perl one would be the best? Take your pick... Adam K Lindsay Holmwood wrote: Hi all, Our technical talk speaker for tomorrow night has had to pull out due to sickness. Does anybody have a suitable talk (technical prefered) they can present on such short notice? Cheers, Lindsay -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Technical talk volunteers for September's meeting
eep, you're where? Sorry I wasn't paying attention WRT the venue change. I can get wherever but details would be handy. URL for the details? Adam K Lindsay Holmwood wrote: On 9/29/06, James Dumay [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Adam - any of these would be great - Im very interested in Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong myself. Committee, is this OK? Yeah, that would be great. Adam is a really cool guy, and it would be awesome to hear him speak at SLUG. Adam, your Perl talk would fit best into the technical slot, if that's ok with you. Also, we're at our new venue at IBM St. Leonards, so you'll want to allow for extra travelling time. Cheers, Lindsay -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Technical talk volunteers for September's meeting
Ingore me, I'm an idiot that forgot to take the 2 minutes needed to check the SLUG website. :) http://slug.org.au/node/19 Adam K Adam Kennedy wrote: eep, you're where? Sorry I wasn't paying attention WRT the venue change. I can get wherever but details would be handy. URL for the details? Adam K Lindsay Holmwood wrote: On 9/29/06, James Dumay [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Adam - any of these would be great - Im very interested in Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong myself. Committee, is this OK? Yeah, that would be great. Adam is a really cool guy, and it would be awesome to hear him speak at SLUG. Adam, your Perl talk would fit best into the technical slot, if that's ok with you. Also, we're at our new venue at IBM St. Leonards, so you'll want to allow for extra travelling time. Cheers, Lindsay -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Contracting stuff: wrap it into a company or PAYE through agency?
The remuneration structure of the industry means they work only for themselves, and the situation is set up for them to abuse both sides and use every trick they can to do so. Recruiting Firms do try to keep both parties Happy!! It is important for us to place people in jobs that : 1 - They are capable of doing!! 2 - That they enjoy doing!! 3 - In a Place they want to work For the Client we Try to Match 1 - The Skill they ask for 2 - A Reliable Person 3 - At a Remuneration Level they can afford!! (snip) (as you may have guessed I do recruiting, not in IT at present but the rules are the same no matter what industry) But that wasn't what I said Scott. The problem is that, regardless of the intent of any single person or company, the way in which the industry is structured economically does not provide any across-the-board economic incentive for the industry to act in the best interests of either the company or the staff member, which leaves the industry open to all manner of shoddy practises. As I understand it, it makes no difference to your income whether you place someone good or bad at the job, or you do it in a day or a month. So apart from long term reputation, what incentive is there to place the best person? Is that going to matter to a single employee in a large recruitment firm who themself has no interest in the long term reputation of the company? Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Contracting stuff: wrap it into a company or PAYE through agency?
To throw in my situation, I'm a Pty Ltd contractor/consultant. It costs me $2,000 (although increasing now as I do more things) a year to keep the company going, but the cleanliness of the seperation between personal and company is something I find refreshing. As I see it, there's a couple of clear situations. If you think you will end up with a product of some sort in the process of your contracting/consulting and you ever want to sell out, you need a company, as early as possible (to keep intellectual property stuff clear). If you think that you are going to end up hiring subcontractors or staff (if you move more into the consulting/development direction that just straight labour hire) you probably want a company too, just for the accounting cleanliness. Other than that, if the $2000 a year doesn't matter much, then you can go either way. If $2000 a year matters a lot, then don't go for a company. Either way, you can delay it if you want to and switch later, unless you go the product/selling-the-business route. Adam K Rev Simon Rumble wrote: Hi folks. I'm about to start contracting and it seems it's a lot more efficient to have things wrapped into a company. I've been looking around and seeing stuff about the 80/20 rule and the like, which determines whether you can apply company tax instead of personal income tax, and other stuff. So does anyone out there have any (IANAA) advice on such things? Any recommendations of accountants to get advice from? Ideally accountants who can deal with free-software ledger systems... Oh and yes, those of you wondering, I'm back in Sydney. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Contracting stuff: wrap it into a company or PAYE through agency?
If you think that you are going to end up hiring subcontractors or staff (if you move more into the consulting/development direction that just straight labour hire) you probably want a company too, just for the accounting cleanliness. Ook! That should read consulting/development direction, rather than just straight labour hire. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Contracting stuff: wrap it into a company or PAYE through agency?
What I would look out for is recruiting firms. I had one that placed me once, into a job I wasn't particularly suited to. They took 15% from the employer for that. Some time after I was chatting with them and they said oh, if we'd known you were a networking person we could have got you a lot more -- ie, they hadn't even read my CV for their 15% and they were really working for the employer, not for me. One of the Perl maintainers did an analysis of this situation a few years ago. His conclusion was that their intrinsic interests don't belong with either party. They don't work for the companies, and they don't work for the people they find jobs for. The remuneration structure of the industry means they work only for themselves, and the situation is set up for them to abuse both sides and use every trick they can to do so. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: [activities] Request For Venue: SLUG monthly meeting
I note that the list of capabilities in there does not specifically mention the ability to use a computer with the project. Overhead Project in some places can still mean the one you put clear slides on. Adam K Sara Falamaki wrote: It might not be as nice as a lecture theatre, but perhaps something like this: http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/Community/CommunityVenues/Ultimo.asp It's not free, but cheaper than $607! -S On 8/18/06, Lindsay Holmwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: G'day all, The SLUG committee were informed this afternoon that UTS will be charging us for the use of their rooms as of next meeting. They want $607 per meeting, that's with a non-profit discount. SLUG cannot afford this, at least beyond the upcoming meeting. The committee is going to try to arrange a sponsorship deal with the UTS Faculty of IT or UTS themselves, but we don't think this can be done in time for next week's meeting. I've also been in contact with IBM, however they don't think they'll be able to organise a venue in time for next week. So we're hoping that someone in the community can help us out. If you know a venue, or work for a company than can organise a venue fitting 40-100+ people, is close to public transport (trains especially), is inexpensive (preferably free), and available for next Friday's meeting, we'd love to hear from you. At Pia's community panel a few months back there was talk of a possible venue change to the University of Sydney. This would be ideal, although it is late in the peice to set in motion. We don't want this to be the end of our 12 year relationship with UTS, but unfortunately if we can't work out a deal, it looks like it will be. Lindsay -- http://slug.org.au/ http://lca2007.linux.org.au/ http://holmwood.id.au/~lindsay/ -- SLUG Activities Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] CPAN update woes
That's very unusual behaviour, an I say that as someone that actually knows (mostly) how CPAN.pm works. You should absolutely report that to the rt.cpan.org support queue for CPAN.pm. And if I may, I'd also like to reinforce that point for anyone that has problems with CPAN modules. PLEASE report install failures or bugs to the rt.cpan.org support queues. Many authors are highly responsive, and for those that aren't having your problem listed means when that module gets taken over by someone more responsive, it will be fixed then. Adam K CPAN Adminstrator Voytek Eymont wrote: as I was installing some new Perl modules, it told me there was a newer CPAN avaliable, and, suggested to update it with: - You might want to try install Bundle::CPAN reload cpan after I did 'reload cpan', nasty things started happening, with all free memory running out rather rapidly - any thought what happened ? - more importantly, what should I've attempted to do, instead of watching it and saying I think this will crash real soon now - anything I should do now to 'check things' after this mishap ? on the way down, I managed to collect these: # top 7:57am up 119 days, 9:16, 2 users, load average: 14.62, 6.65, 2.72 181 processes: 179 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 11.4% user, 7.3% system, 0.0% nice, 81.1% idle Mem: 1023120K av, 1014732K used,8388K free, 0K shrd, 24416K buff Swap: 522104K av, 522104K used, 0K free 106684K cached PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 5312 root 15 0 9828 9828 2252 D 6.7 0.9 0:00 php 1634 root 15 0 909M 581M 1600 D 4.7 58.2 0:38 perl 5 root 12 0 00 0 DW1.5 0.0 6:03 kswapd # free total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 10231201014816 8304 0 24484 96728 -/+ buffers/cache: 893604 129516 Swap: 522104 522056 48 # top 7:58am up 119 days, 9:17, 2 users, load average: 14.32, 7.47, 3.14 182 processes: 179 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 6.3% user, 9.4% system, 0.0% nice, 84.1% idle Mem: 1023120K av, 1014036K used,9084K free, 0K shrd, 10980K buff Swap: 522104K av, 522088K used, 16K free 30860K cached PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 1634 root 19 0 1052M 722M 1548 R 6.8 72.2 0:40 perl 5 root 13 0 00 0 DW2.9 0.0 6:04 kswapd 8 root 10 0 00 0 SW0.8 0.0 19:29 kscand/HighMem 10313 apache11 0 18540 15M 4140 D 0.6 1.5 1:13 httpd # free total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 10231201014908 8212 0 9328 28840 -/+ buffers/cache: 976740 46380 Swap: 522104 522104 0 # free total used free sharedbuffers cached Mem: 10231201014812 8308 0484 10692 -/+ buffers/cache:1003636 19484 Swap: 522104 522104 0 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] ask perl
And having given you two fish, let me suggest at this point that it would be well worth your while learning to fish. A great place to start is perldoc.com, which should contain just about everything you could need. How you could have found out how to do what you wanted. First, typing "split" into the search engine, sends you to http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/func/split.html which explains in detail how split works. At a stretch, you might realise that you could split on the commas, and spaces. perlre - http://perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/perlre.htmlwould help you find a split pattern to do what you require. Of course, that wouldn't QUITE do what you need. You need to "get rid of whitespace". Looking at the index for the Frequently Asked Questions, you see that perlfaq4 http://perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/perlfaq4.htmlcovers "Data Manipulation". Looking through you see "How do I strip blank space from the beginning/end of a string?", clicking on the link takes you to. http://perldoc.com/perl5.6.1/pod/perlfaq4.html#How-do-I-strip-blank-space-from-the-beginning-end-of-a-string- of which my favourite version is the simple $string =~ s/^\s+//;$string =~ s/\s+$//; So, you would do your split as normal, and then remove leading and trailing space. Once you had read a bit of perlre to see how the FAQ result worked, you would have more confidence to do something like $record =~ s/\s//g; before you do the split, once you knew that there wasn't supposed to be any spaces anywhere ( if that was true ). I hope this example will get you where you want to go faster, without having to waste time asking a linux mailing list. A great alternative if you are really stuck would be to go to what is arguably the "main" perl channel. irc://irc.rhizomatic.net/#perl ( assumes you have mozilla ). Don't ask perl questions here, ask meta-questions. "Where could I find docs about xxx". They will usually be more than happy to answer THAT sort of questions. Other perl channels will usually suffice as well, although poilcies on helping people can vary. Adam - Original Message - From: henry To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 6:58 PM Subject: [SLUG] ask perl Dear List: I use split to parse string as follows: #!/usr/bin/perl -w $record ="Pacific:ocean" my($a,$b)=split(/:/,$record); print "$a\n"; print "$b\n"; My problem is : In practical use , I usually get $record = " a : b" ; How do I take out those blanks ? BestRegards Henry
Re: [SLUG] ask perl C
Or if the return values are more substantial
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Get the first lot of results
@stdout_from_c_program = `'first-c-program`;
die Didn't get anything unless @stdout_from_c_program;
# Some processing ( or not )
@args = munge( @stdout_from_c_program );
# Hand the processed ( or not ) results to the second program ( assuming you
need to pass to the c program ).
system( second-c-program $arg[0] $arg[1] $arg[2] etc ); # Assuming you
need to get
Of course, I'm assuming the results will come back in one hit...
If you need to stream the results in over time, you would be more
interested in some of the cruftier uses of open().
Adam
- Original Message -
From: Tony Green [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: [SLUG] ask perl C
* This one time, at band camp, henry said:
Dear List:
I need to
use perl-script -- call c program -- return values to
perl-script --call c program
A
B C
At stage B , perl will get those return-values from
c-programs for next stage(C).
---that's the problem that I want to consult you,
Could someone shed some light on it?
or
by what keyword could I search internet?
#!/usr/bin/perl
if (system('first-c-program') # Check if first-c-program returns non zero
{
system('second-c-program') # if it does, run second-c-program
}
else
{
system('third-c-program') # else run third-c-program
}
Is that what you're after Henry?
Greeno
(Note: this is untested and its been a long week, use at your own risk)
--
Greeno [EMAIL PROTECTED]
GnuPG Key : 1024D/B5657C8B
Key fingerprint = 9ED8 59CC C161 B857 462E 51E6 7DFB 465B B565 7C8B
Imagine working in a secure environment and finding the string
_NSAKEY in the OS binaries without a good explanation
-Alan Cox 04/05/2001
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Re: [SLUG] NVidia software DVD Player
Or course, it mentions... NVDVD supports all of the industry standard DVD APIs, including DirectShowTM, DirectDrawTM, DirectSoundTM, and DirectX® Video Acceleration. The NVDVD architecture is uniquely scalable and tightly tailored to the DVD specification and the intricacies of the PC system environment, providing the most seamless navigation experience available. NVDVD will be available for distribution to and by OEMs and system integrators immediately. So unless Wine has advanced further than I thought... :) Adam - Original Message - From: Bill [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2002 1:35 PM Subject: [SLUG] NVidia software DVD Player Hi Guys, Saw press release re above today. Only mentions Intel based PCs, not specific OS. Should we all write asking re Linux see http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=IO_20020222_7836 Bill [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] trashing
While your using whatever CPU user upper you choose, don't forget to add a
small perl or shell script that will.
1. Pipe a gig of /dev/random to disk.
2. Delete the file.
3. Repeat.
Oh, and another perl script to allocate and deallocate 10meg random
variables works well too... or there's always
#!/usr/bin/perl
$a = 'crap';
while ( 1 ) {
$a .= $a;
}
... which is always fun for a laugh, thus filling your memory with 'crap'.
Adam
- Original Message -
From: Stuart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 6:41 PM
Subject: [SLUG] trashing
Hi y'all,
Anyone know any good software to test stability on a new machine?
ie want to work the CPU, memory and disk for a few days hours to see how
it she runs.
Tia,
Stuart Guthrie.
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Re: [SLUG] trashing
Hmm... running nicely here. It iterates your PID fairly quickly, but it doesn't do much else... Now if you changed them to #!/bin/sh ./2.sh ./2.sh and #!/bin/sh ./1.sh ./1.sh it might be a bit nastier. Adam - Original Message - From: Chris Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'SLUG' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2002 12:46 AM Subject: RE: [SLUG] trashing Yeah I got a trick to test your cpu lol Create 2 shell scripts, first one names 1.sh and the other 2.sh In 1.sh put #!/bin/sh ./2.sh in 2.sh put #!/bin/sh ./1.sh make them both executable and put them in the same directory.. see how that goes =o) -- -Original Message- From: Stuart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, 19 February 2002 6:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [SLUG] trashing Hi y'all, Anyone know any good software to test stability on a new machine? ie want to work the CPU, memory and disk for a few days hours to see how it she runs. Tia, Stuart Guthrie. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug Searching for A Better Way to a home loan ?. Call RAMS on 13 7267, or go to http://www.rams.com.au The e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential information. If you receive it in error you must not use or disclose the information. You must tell us and delete it. We do not waive any legal privilege by sending it. RAMS does not promise that the email is free from virus defect or error. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Domain delegation (slightly OT)
I'll add a note to this one. Robert Elz ( at least when I was dealings with .org.au ) had two tracks. Fast Track. Absolutely everything in your request is letter perfect, correct, and valid. A few weeks turnaround. Slow Track. If an request has problems, it goes on the problem pile, to be dealt with a few times a year ( randomly between 1 - 6 months ). So it is a very good idea to make sure requests are very correct when dealing with .org.au. Of course, it might have changed since then... Brett, how are NR's dealings with him of late? Wasn't larry going to offer to run .org.au for free at some point? Adam - Original Message - From: Brett Fenton [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 10:50 PM Subject: Re: [SLUG] Domain delegation (slightly OT) http://aunic.net/dd.html Then just hope Robert Elz is kind to you. On Wed, 9 Jan 2002 22:37, you wrote: Hi Brett, Oh dear... it's an org.au any clues? Ben -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] WinXP: You must be Admin to play games
Andyou think you've got permissions problems! From The Register WinXP: log on as admin if you want to play games, MP3s?http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/22863.html
Re: [SLUG] Go Jeff !!
Hmm... I aw a Jeff Wawugh at one point :) But in all seriousness, go Jeff! You'd have my vote if I had one... unless Natasha Stott Depoja was running against you... she looks way better in a bikini. Adam - Original Message - From: John Ryland [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 12, 2001 8:44 PM Subject: [SLUG] Go Jeff !! Anyone else see this? http://foundation.gnome.org/ballot-summary.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-November/msg00016.ht ml --- Regards John -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] Binding ftpd to limited interfaces
Morning all I have a debian machine that is used as a sort of services gateway, it runs 6 or 7 public ips, and then I use a userspace port redirector, rinetd, to redirect arbitrary ports through to the internal machines ( a variety of Win32, Mac and linux ). I've redirected http, cvs, and a range of other ports just fine. However, I'm having a problem with ftp. For some reason, the ftp daemons insist on using all the interfaces. Does anyone know of a way of reconfiguring ftpd to only bind to a single port? Thanks Adam -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] FW: Paul Thurrot - a Windows XP summary copycat OSe hey ?
I actually disagree with the security bit... At least as far as security is concerned, we inherit the benefits of UNIX... Stability doesn't really fall into the inovation catagory... Inovation as far as linux is concerned has just happenned in a range of non-central places. For example, linux has shown a lot of inovation in clusterring. Now any group, company or uni can roll their own super-computer ( for some definition of super ). If NSA Secure Linux ever goes into a mainstream distro, that would definately quality as inovation. The fully preemptible kernel might also qualify, although it's been done before. Hell, some might even consider the timezone selector in Evolution inovative :) The linux world ISN'T a desktop inovator in the way Microsoft is. As crap, unstable and bloaty as their OS is technically ( unstable being now somewhat fixed from Win2K onwards ) they do know their stuff when it comes to making lowest common denominator user interfaces. It's not what I need in an OS, but it's what Joe public does. The Open Source world will get there eventually, but when a particular way of doing things isn't your focus, you need to copy to catch up. For example, Microsoft's use of the BSD network stack... or Apple's conversion to TCP/IP. Both Microsoft and Linux can go anywhere near Mac when it comes to Graphic Designer goodies. Microsoft, Linux, and Mac all don't scale as well as Solaris... To sum up, it's not a bad thing at all to have to copy. You have to raise yourself to other's level first, before you can move ahead. Adam /ramble - Original Message - From: Stuart Guthrie [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: slug [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 5:05 PM Subject: Re: [SLUG] FW: Paul Thurrot - a Windows XP summary copycat OSe hey ? IMHO If you missed the ximian demo couple of months ago ..its waaay ahead in terms of innovation - a real outlook-killer. I'm signing up when its released, might even have to boot mozilla as my mail client. Think they need the dosh too. Thurrot is a bit of an MS stooge. Note excessive use of ! on his website home page. It's not objective reporting. Linux is to some degree playing catchup on the desktop but that's OK. I use gnome as my primary desktop and office automation (staroffice) and don't notice a problem unless someone sends me a publisher document. Everything else I can read/write and with (mostly) superior tools. So I think the answer is that we are playing catchup in some areas - particularly in getting the word out - but are way ahead in others. Stability, security for example. Booth, Christopher (Aus) - ATP wrote: The link to the article is here http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/windowsxp_osx.asp He is less kind to Linux and Linux users than Mac OS Yes Xerox did invent the GUI too. Are we just playing catch-up to Windows ? or truly innovating. Chris -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Firewall Hardware
Wow, That's about a 2 degree increase for every hour of plane flight :) -30 to +30 should be an interesting transition. Adam - Original Message - From: Bob Hubbard [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 1:26 PM Subject: [SLUG] Firewall Hardware OK chaps, many thanks for the many responses. I'll sort through them and make a hard copy to bring to OZ with me. Regards to all. Temp minus 10 Celsius. Should be minus 30 by the time we leave Dec 19. Bob Bob Hubbard St.Albert, Ab CANADA -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Domain Name Registration
Melbourne IT will get you where you want to go directly. NetRegistry and the rest provide a layer of friendlyness and advice ( which your getting from the list ) that you probably don't need. They also tend to mainly do bundling, they are in it to sell you hosting, email, e-commerce etc more than the actual domain itself. Using one of these other companies is like buying a computer from a Name Brand computer company. Great if you don't know what your doing and need help, but a waste of money if you have knowlegable friends ( like us ). Let me just note in their favour, that NetRegistry ( I worked there, don't know about the others ) are good value if you have a contentious name, or you think you might get refused the domain. They fight daily battles with Melbourne IT beurocracy, and thus they know the appeals processes inside out, so sometimes that can get something approved that would otherwise be denied. ( They got mthotham.com.au for example, which would normally be rejected as a place name, by faxing Melbourne IT the 72 page government act stating the ski company has exclusive commercial control of the entire mthotham area ). But it you are registerring a business name specifically to get the domain name, you should have no such troubles, as you can easily make sure that you tailor the business name to the domain name. One last note. Melbourne IT DO WATCH the business name register. After three years when your business name runs out ( or however long it is now ), they can and will send you a please explain letter asking why you should keep the domain now that you no longer have the credentials to back it up. I have personally seen these. Keep your business name up to date. Adam - Original Message - From: Matt - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 1:36 PM Subject: [SLUG] Domain Name Registration Hi everyone, I have recently been interested in registering a domain name for myself. I am guessing that this SLUG list has a pretty large group of people who know the ins and outs of domain registration so I was hoping I could get some experienced information. Firstly, I want it to be a .com.au domain name. Does this mean I HAVE TO register a business name with the words I want in my domain name ? So if I want to register joespizza.com.au I need to own a business name Joes Pizza Pty Ltd ? Is this the only way to do it ? Secondly, where should I go to do this at the best price ? Can you guys please distinguish the difference between NetRegistry.com.au, MelbourneIT.com.au and inww.com ? Who should I go to, are the prices fixed ? Thirdly, how long does the process take ? Thanks very much guys, any extra advice will appreciated. I'm sure some of you know some tricks that will speed up the process and/or make it easier. Thanks again ! :) _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Internet Connection
Almost as importantly... What the HELL do you need that much bandwidth for? Generally, anyone moving 300-400 meg a day is making enough money to justify paying for the bandwidth... Adam - Original Message - From: Gnuthad [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 19, 2001 2:41 AM Subject: Re: [SLUG] Internet Connection On 18 Oct 2001, at 16:30, DJ! wrote: Could it be that we have a population __less than 2%__ that of the USA? Could that, in fact, be around 5%? Aus pop is around 17mill, USA pop is around 350mill. Similarly, could it be that Australia's GDP stands at a measly USD440billion, compared to the USA's USD10trillion? After all, we're talking about supporting (read: paying for) a massive infrastructure investment of a size only relatively smaller than in the USA. We have already paid for it as taxpayers, remember? Gnuthad PGP Key Block available at: http://aussie.mine.nu/aussie/pgp_key.txt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Compltetly OT -el Presidente, perfect pitch and boids
Yes What you REALLY want to relative pitch, the ability to name any note once you have been given a starting point. Not as sexy as perfect, but just as practical. If something is off by a fraction of a semitone, you'll barely notice :) Adam - Original Message - From: Laurie Savage [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 05, 2001 8:20 AM Subject: [SLUG] Compltetly OT -el Presidente, perfect pitch and boids Conrad, Never wish for perfect pitch, one day you'll be doing an acoustic gig in a pub and the piano will be ALMOST a complete semitone out! -- Laurie Savage == If Coltrane hadn't have existed it would have been necessary for us to invent him. == -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] Webcams
I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for linux compatible webcams, or rather, webcams that you can actually write applications for. I've always been somewhat interested in real time video type stuff, and I'd like to have a go at hacking on a webcam motion tracking / telepresence type application, but I'll needa webcam that I can get access to in code, to pull the stream from. Most uses of webcams seem to just be grab a snapshot, put it in a directory type apps, I'm looking for something more than that. Thanks AdamK -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] voice transmission using linux
There's a Gnome program that implements some VoIP protocol... I think it's actually a videophone, but without web cameras it will just do normal voice. The protocol it implements I think is a protocol that Cisco did most of the heavy standards work on. Let me check my notes Linphone: http://simon.morlat.free.fr/english/linphone.html Things it uses: Sound Card Layer: ALSA, OSS Initiation: SIP ( Session Initiation Protocol ) Transport: RTP Codecs: G711-alaw, G711-mulaw, GSM, TPC10-1.5 It also says it works with Windows etc VoIP phones, which could be interesting Let us know what you think of it if you find it successfull Adam - Original Message - From: Howard Lowndes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Andre Ribeiro Moutinho [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 4:10 PM Subject: Re: [SLUG] voice transmission using linux There is something called Speak Freely that does what you appear to want. It has interfaces for both Linux and Windows, though last time I looked the Linux interface was CLI only, no GUI. You can select the codec you want to use and can also encrypt the traffic stream on the fly. On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Andre Ribeiro Moutinho wrote: I have two computers with sound cards and I wish to implement a simple phone application that collects voice in one computer and sends to another which receives and plays the voice using the sound card. I would like to know if there exists any kind of package or library that I can use to implement this easly using c++ language and gcc compiler. I just want to make them talk each other. I do not want to connect them to another machine running a different phone application with different voice over IP protocol. Best regards, Andre Moutinho -- Howard. LANNet Computing Associates - Your Linux people Contact detail at http://www.lannetlinux.com -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] Debugging Perl CGI file upload scripts
Afternoon all I'm trying to hunt down a usefull way of debugging Perl CGI scripts that deal with file uploads. Debugging normal CGIs is a simple as running perl -d cgiscript.pl from a prompt, and then entering in the script arguments to the CGI.pm console mode thingy, OR alternatively useing my $query = new CGI; $query-save( FILEHANDLE ); to save the CGI query out to a file, and then read it back in... However, this all seems to fail when you try to use a file upload field... You can't type anything into console mode, and $query-save doesn't handle them correctly, it just writes into the output file that the upload field was empty. How do people here go about doing debugging on file upload type fields. BTW, the script isn't crashing. It runs OK, and loads the temp file ( containing the uploaded file ) OK, but it's failing somewhere after that in some code somewhere, and I'm just looking for a way to debug it properly. AdamK -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] NZ proposes GST on downloaded software.[ Here next ?]
$0 + 10/12/15%? = $0 No problem see I - A different Adam - Original Message - From: Adam F. Bogacki [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Slug@Slug. Org. Au [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 12:53 AM Subject: [SLUG] NZ proposes GST on downloaded software.[ Here next ?] The NZ government Government is proposing to charge GST on software downloaded over the internet, possibly threatening the open-source model of software distribution. Adam Bogacki, [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/PA0106/S00406.htm -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Fw: Side issue about Sydney Linux User Group
I can't help but think RMS is shooting himself in the foot with the name GNU, and GNU/Linux I mean, has anyone ever tried explain to a normal person what a self-referential non-descriptive acronym IS? And what it has to do with software. Take for example, RNT.RNT's Not Telstra. That could be the name of a garbage removal service and still be correct. The problem with GNU/Linux is not about giving credit where credit is due, for example Redhat Linux ( ignoring Radhat/GNU/Linux issues for a second ), but that by having such a difficult name for his organisation, he makes the adoption of it much more difficult. People will always use a shorter name where one can be found. When people say Linux, or course they are referring to the system contributed to by GNU people, Linux people, Perl people etc, but when describing it an a single entity, it is much more useull and efficient to tag it with a one word description, and the name of the kernel is an obvious choice, just like I often refer to just Debian, rather than Linux, when it is convenient to do so. Personally, I think that the only time we should NEED to use GNU/Linux is for situations where you refer to it formally, that is, in similar situations to when you would refer to Redhat as Redhat Linux... GNU/Linux is longer, harder to type, harder and say, and a nonsensical acronym anyways, so it's common use should not really be nescesary or expected. And that's not even starting with the whole GNU/Linux/Perl/Python etc etc argument. And I don't see RMS enforcing GNU/debian, or GNU/FreeBSD... or does he. Why pick on Linux for any reason other than frustration for not being recognised? Adam - Original Message - From: Bevan Broun [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Matthew Davidson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Trevor Gunter [EMAIL PROTECTED]; SLUG [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 1:18 PM Subject: Re: [SLUG] Fw: Side issue about Sydney Linux User Group on Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 01:26:42PM +1000, Matthew Davidson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: He was responding to the Mundie comments and so forth, giving the usual history of the GNU project, etc. I found his arguments for calling the system GNU/Linux quite compelling. On the other hand, SLUG would lose it's snappy acronym and mascot if it were SGLUG. I agree. Without gcc we are all lost. How about a compromise? Everybody who uses GNU/Linux by definition uses Linux, so SLUG is still a technically correct name. However I suggest (audaciously, as a non-member) that SLUG adopt a policy of when referring to the kernel the term Linux is used, otherwise GNU/Linux, particularly in public forums, publicity material, etc. This sounds like a good proposal. Perhaps the website should have some changes. BB [who will join slug with $s at tomorrows meeting] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] Installing jdk1.3.1
Afternoon all I'm trying to install Sun JDK 1.3.1 I've downloaded the .bin, installed it, and set up the PATH But it's bitched that /usr/jdk1.3.1/bin/i386/native_threads/java: error in loading shared libraries: libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Now in my /usr/lib directory I've got libstdc++-libc6.1-2.so.3 - libstdc++-3-libc6.1-2-2.10.0.so I've created another link libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 - libstdc++-3-libc6.1-2-2.10.0.so and it seems to be working ok, but I'm I correct in this? I assume the 1-1 - 1-2 difference is a very minor release number, but what is the difference between .so.2 and .so.3 Could someone perhaps outline what all the different numbers in a library filename generally mean? In addition, I noted that the java version in the debian stable is 1.1... what does this go up to in newer versions? Adam -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Just Another ISP Question
According to their latest ads they won't bite the dust anythime soon because they are owned by AGL which has been around forever. But since you aren't on a contract you don't have too much to lose if they die. Buy yourself a domain if you are worried about losing mail whenever your ISP dies. Just because they are owned by a larger company doesn't mean they will dissapear. More likely that company/subsection of the company will just get sold off to a bigger fish, who might be able to do something profitable with it. You still lose. And yes, domains rule. Amoungst other things, they let you make yourself palindromic email addresses. :) AdamK [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Just Another ISP Question
According to their latest ads they won't bite the dust anythime soon because they are owned by AGL which has been around forever. But since you aren't on a contract you don't have too much to lose if they die. Buy yourself a domain if you are worried about losing mail whenever your ISP dies. Just because they are owned by a larger company doesn't mean they will dissapear. More likely that company/subsection of the company will just get sold off to a bigger fish, who might be able to do something profitable with it. You still lose. And yes, domains rule. Amoungst other things, they let you make yourself palindromic email addresses. :) AdamK [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Just Another ISP Question
According to their latest ads they won't bite the dust anythime soon because they are owned by AGL which has been around forever. But since you aren't on a contract you don't have too much to lose if they die. Buy yourself a domain if you are worried about losing mail whenever your ISP dies. Just because they are owned by a larger company doesn't mean they will dissapear. More likely that company/subsection of the company will just get sold off to a bigger fish, who might be able to do something profitable with it. You still lose. And yes, domains rule. Amoungst other things, they let you make yourself palindromic email addresses. :) AdamK [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] WHOIS..server.
Chris Back when I was working for a DNS company ( who shall remain nameless ) I had to look into this. Since there are very few whois servers at all in the world, there is no real whois server you can get HOWEVER While I never wrote a whois server ( we just did the web version, not the real one ), I did have to write a whois client ( in Perl ) from scratch, and I can tell you that the whois protocol is EXTREMLY trivial to implement. Really! My guess at the time was that the number of people who needed a whois server was so small, and their needs so specialised, that they probably wrote their own. I implemented the whois client in about 20 lines of Perl, and I imagine you could do a pretty decent job ( subject to load requirements ) of implementing the server in a hundred or so. Of course I still don't recommend Perl for heavily loaded servers, but unless you work for someone pretty big ( bigger than rams :) ), I doubt you need it to stand up to a huge load. Rip the pre-forking server example out of the Perl Cookbook, and whack a little protocol stuff, and maybe a SQL call in, and Bob's your second cousin. Whois server. Let me know if you need more details Adam - Original Message - From: Chris Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: SLUG (E-mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2001 5:32 PM Subject: [SLUG] WHOIS..server. Does anyone know where i can get a whois server for linux (if there is such a thing). I've looked on Freshmeat.net but i've had no luck. Any other suggestions? Chris Barnes System Operations (02)8218 6205 'One fish two fish red fish blue fish' -Dr. Seuss Searching for A Better Way to a home loan, call RAMS on 13 7267, or go to http://www.rams.com.au The e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential information. If you receive it in error you must not use or disclose the information. You must tell us and delete it. We do not waive any legal privilege by sending it. RAMS does not promise that the email is free from virus defect or error. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Apache serving .doc files
A note on MIME types and web server to remember. Many of you will know this, but I thought I should repeat it Netscape will listen to the headers for the document type. IE pretty much ignores the document type and tries to work it out on it's own, which means you should be able to download a .doc file using an IE ( or related ) browser without having to configure an MIME. The corrolary to this of course, is that doing funky stuff with CGI is somewhat harder, because IE tends to make incorrect assumptions sometimes. Adam - Original Message - From: Artur Hefczyc [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Matt Hyne [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: slug [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2001 6:22 PM Subject: Re: [SLUG] Apache serving .doc files I am trying to get my Linux based apache web server to serve some .DOC MS Word files. However I am having the following problems. 1. When I click on the link, the file starts downloading as (garbled) text into the netscape window. 2. If I shift-select the link, I can download the file but then WORD cannot read it. I've checked the file in Apache's directory and it is fine - I can ftp or scp it and read it just fine, just not when I try to fetch it from a link on a webpage. I have the following link set up in my webpage: A HREF=forms/fax_template.docFAX Coversheet/A (Word)BR Anyone got any ideas - have a got Apache configured wrongly. You should set mime-type for such documents. Artur -- Artur Hefczyc [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] Debian iso
Afternoon all Can anyone recommend a place to grab the debian iso(s) from? mirror.aarnet seems to just have an apt repository. And before you ask, the box will not be connected to the internet at the time it is installed, so I can't use the online install process Thanks Adam -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Debian iso
I think mirror.aarnet will be fine gloat ncftp .../debian-cd/2.2_r3/i386 get binary-i386-1_NONUS.iso binary-i386-1_NONUS.iso: ETA: 33:52 196.60/646.63 MB 226.84 kB/s Note the capital B HDSL is pretty cool. Not bad for a non-uni connection :) /gloat Of course, unis are better :) Adam - Original Message - From: Matthew Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Adam Kennedy [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Some Linux Users Group [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 1:39 PM Subject: Re: [SLUG] Debian iso On Thu, 31 May 2001, Adam Kennedy wrote: Can anyone recommend a place to grab the debian iso(s) from? mirror.aarnet seems to just have an apt repository. And before you ask, the box will not be connected to the internet at the time it is installed, so I can't use the online install process either of the other places suggested, or http://ieee.uow.edu.au/pub/debian-cd/i386/ which is the UoW IEEE's mirror. We've also got Sparc binaries. Whether it's faster than planetmirror or aarnet is debatable - certainly, it's less loaded (typically only internal Uni transfers) but I think we have a smaller pipe. -- --- #include disclaimer.h Matthew Palmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] Need someone to install a gateway
Hi guys My company is amalgamating two offices into on on Friday June 1st, and part of the move is a networking change. I need to get hold of someone who can install/set up a gateway box for the network. The network is about 30-50 nodes, and it will connect to the net through both an ADSL line and an ISDN line. I would normally do it myself, but I'm cramped for time as it is implementing the rest of the network, I haven't had a chance to do routing / firewalling on the 2.4 kernel yet, and above all it's a rush move ( we are swapping offices with another company on the same day ). So if you've done this before, and can do the set up quickly and reliably ( time is scheduled for the move, but we may lose productivity for the office if it takes too long )... Job will be for a couple of hours on the morning of Friday the 1st. Paid, of course, rates would be good, and you are not expected to provide support. We can run and modify the thing once it's up, just need someone to do a rapid setup. The box will be brand new, and already have the OS ( preferably debian... ) installed on it. We can have the general stuff installed and ready. Please contact me directly for more information if you are interested. Adam K -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] Purchasing stuff at SLUG meetings
Does anyone normally bring distro CDs etc to SLUG meetings? I want to get hold of Debian 2.2r3, and picking one up at SLUG would be the handiest way. Thanks AdamK -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] Apache executes as file owner
Hi guys I'm serving CGI off Apache from a mounted Win32 partition. Now, this means that the files are unchangably in mode 755. I want a CGI script to be able to change a data file, but apache executes as www-data Now, my two solutions are to either mount the entire thing as something more permission ( evil ), or have apache execute the cgis as the owner of the file. I've done this before using Zeus, and it's a really handy thing for when you have multiple virtual servers, and you don't want people to be able to read other web site's data files and scripts. Has anyone done this before, and remember what the Apache configuration options for it are. Thanks AdamK -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] E-Commerce...what do I need.
OK, this is not a plug, but I wrote an e-commerce gateway when I was working for NetRegistry ( www.netregistry.com.au ) that I considerred fairly nice. If you were coding on the server, it had a pretty nice API. Also I think it's flat fee, no transaction fees, although I did the math, and it only becomes worth it past 50 or 100 transactions a month. You can write your payment app in Perl, or there are a couple of apps they provide ( they are REALLY simple, for example, I did a Matt Wright FormMail with e-commerce capability hacked in while I was there ). They are local, it works with both St George and NAB, and unless it's been turned off since I left, there was an API that let you connect from anywhere. Of course they may have since started forcing people to use this IBM WebSphere thingy... so check it out first. Oh, and all their servers run linux. We ( when I was there ) were heaps better than CamTech I thought. Note to those with memory: I was not responsible for the .com.au dns registry spam, I'd only been there a week, what could I do :( AdamK P.S. Oh, and if the gateway is still the way I remember, I'm available to code applications for it :) - Original Message - From: Umar Goldeli [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Chris Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: SLUG (E-mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 9:32 AM Subject: Re: [SLUG] E-Commerce...what do I need. Chris, It appears that everybody has suggested the shopping bit - but you'll find that you'll also need something to talk to the bank.. this is the hard bit (as by your question, I'm assuming that you want realtime transaction approval etc..) In 99% of situations, you have to write bits of custom code using some form of middleware.. check out: www.aba.net.au for a start (as they have a free SDK etc and reasonable merchant fees..) other names to look for are Camtech and some other which I can't remember off the top of my head in the morning.. Quite simply, if you want a manual system - any Acme Shopping cart will do - and email you (encrypted) card details etc which you later process etc... but a proper one as per se, will indeed cost you time and money.. As Rick said... call me.. call me Now.. ;) //umar. Also, how does it all work together? I mean once the user has submitted their request how does the credit card information get sent or received to or from the bank...or is there a completely different way of doing this. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] FW: FTP NAT/Conntrack problems ( connection terminated )
RE: [SLUG] FW: FTP NAT/Conntrack problemsI hereby declare the flamewar over. Please redirect all future flames to the entropy pool ( much more usefull than /dev/null ) - Original Message - From: Luke McKee To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 3:17 PM Subject: RE: [SLUG] FW: FTP NAT/Conntrack problems Ah, this explains it! Another kiddy wannabe. Maybe you'll have a clue in a few more years. Ooops I forgot to say. I got my LCA 2 weeks ago - can't do my SAIR Linux and GNU Engineer until prometric do the tests. Helping SAIR (Alex Lundy) with some information on the Amanda backup elective to be included in the LCA. Again making comments about people you don't know and haven't researched has the tendency to make you look stupid. LCA doesn't cover that much but what about a Master CNE / SCO ACE certification. Just because I haven't turned up to every linux meeting like yourself doesn't mean I'm a kiddy. I have a life, things to do, and a family on the way. I'll look for Crossfire in the leaderboard on skilldrill.com in UNIX (it's so bloody simple). I'm only 15 but I should surely expect him to be up there by tomorrow morning because he is so good. We'll leave it up to you Crossfire. It's a lot more effective way of proving your superiority than bitching on public mailing lists. Luke -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
Re: [SLUG] Linuxfest Talk Announcement ( was Studying Programming )
For example, they will tell you that you need to close your tags. :) On another issue, I just thought I would give a heads up to anyone doing Perl coding who is after something to work on to come along to the fest. I will be holding a recruiting drive thinly disguised as a talk/presentation of a large Perl CGI project ( just cleared 1 meg ) I have been working on for almost a year, and will be releasing the first developer release of shortly. Probably be of interest to anyone who writes web applications, and anyone who wants a project to work on. I'd like to leave some suspense, so that's all I'll say for now. AdamK - Original Message - From: Jeff Waugh [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 12:08 PM Subject: Re: [SLUG] Studying Programming quote who=David the biggest problem with learning on your own is having no one to bounce problems off. You can look at something for a week and not see the answer, but see it immediately you try to explain it to another human being. That's why everyone should go to the Linuxfest this weekend, and more SLUG Codefests when we have them! Talk to Real Live Coders! Talk about Real Live Code! Drink Real Live Coke! Lots of opportunity to share code and bounce ideas around. - Jeff -- you misspelt 'world dominatrix' - James Wilkinson -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
[SLUG] For great victory!
Right ( cocks flamethrower with underslung advocacy gun ) Perl rocks. Why? 1. Easy to get going. You can write Perl in a style that matches what your used to. I have seen Perl like Basic, Perl like Shell Script, Perl like C, and even, god forbid, Perl like Cobol. 2. String based language. A natural for doing web development. 3. Robust module system that let's you link to just about anything ( Databases, mail, ftp, nntp, XML, and many many many others ) 4. Objects if you want them ( although admittedly the syntax is a little odd ). 5. Good seperation between code and content. Do not underestimate this one. I have a personal grudge against PHP, ASP, and JSP because they embed code inside the content, making it much more difficult. I have a better opinion of servlets, but flamesuitI still regard *SP as toy languages./flamesuit. I work at what is largely a design agency notaplug( http://amnesia.com.au )/notaplug who are only recently started to do coding, and being able to work well with designers really helps. I'm sure there must be SOMEONE in slug who is a decent designer. 6. There is a fairly good user base of Perl coders. Now, I've only done a little bit of PHP, so I think someone else would be much better qualified to tout PHPs advantages. Mason. Now Mason is a web design system. From the mason page What Is Mason? Mason is a powerful Perl-based web site development and delivery engine. With Mason you can embed Perl code in your HTML and construct pages from shared, reusable components I've only looked at it a little, but I have a feeling it may still suffer some of the same HTML/code mixing problems, but if your using mod_perl it looks pretty good. On the downside, it has a higher barrier to entry than straight Perl does. I don't know if that would be a problem or not. For those wanting more information, mason is at http://www.masonhq.com. A general introduction is at http://www.masonhq.com/docs/manual/Mason.html So, to summarise, I'm personally pre-Perl anti-*SP, and Mason neutral. Oh, and noticing Ben's mail, I hear nice things about Python, but the number of people who know it are much lower... plug type=shameless On another note, I do have some interesting so far unreleased extremely rapid design tools, and I'm willing to assist with the page. For a look a brief summary, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/appspace/ /plug AdamK - Original Message - From: David [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2001 8:12 AM Subject: [SLUG] language jihad Noted with interest about the use of mason as a potential language for the development of the SLUG site... and I need to learn a language for web development and database (postgres? mysql?) similar to the SLUG requirements. PERL, PHP, mason? what the hell is mason? There have also been other languages mentioned that I've never heard of. I don't know any current language (I was a cobol programmer in the 70's). I remember someone on list being incredibly disparaging of PHP. A language jihad might guide me (and others?) which direction to take, and avoid false prophets. What are the serious strengths and weaknesses, and which are ridiculously difficult to learn. Do they relate to other languages or are they are a blind alley. Any other thoughts? If this list is the wrong place to pose this question, where would be better? David. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
