Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 166

I had this planned for over a year, but for whatever reasons, I didn’t get around to doing it until last week - Knowing that my Institute was moving to almost the opposite edge of Ciudad Universitaria, and would now be located at over 3Km from home (from around 300m that it was before), I decided to get a bike. And, after having it in my to-buy list, I bought it last Sunday (January 21), and Nadezhda got one for herself as well. I had had a bike before, over 15 years ago, and we rode a bit when we...

Bastian: I’m unable to provide the about:config key to prove it, but clicking on a link on my Iceweasel does open a Mutt mailto dialog. Maybe network.protocol-handler.external.mailto or network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto will do? They are booleans, so I cannot get much insight out of their respective true and false values… Keep peeking around ;-)

I came across this excellent video clip on what Trusted Computing means, and why we should stay away from it. CC-licensed and all, of course.

Erich: Of course that I know XML’s obstination on manually matched closing tags is intentional - That and several other points simplifying SGML were what in the end allowed SGML to succeed (and wildly). However, I still not agree. If you have a tool that generates broken files (which are expected to be read, no less, by any other arbitrary tool which does not require to be very bright), whose fault is it? The file format? No - The generator’s. Besides, if you have a configuration format that’s expected to be used by al kinds of tools, and sent over...

Russell: I don’t think so. I do think that most Free Software people, even more in settings such as Debian, will tend to be in the lower-left quadrant of the political compass. Personally, I ranked Economic Left/Right: -8.00, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.87 - No surprise for me ;-) And yes, we do have some more upper- or right- sector people, but I think our center of mass will surely fall in the lower-left quadrant. More samples needed ;-)

Several people have wondered why were Nadezhda’s and my site offline this weekend. Well, it surely raised my ego ;-) What happened? As many of you know, this blog is hosted in my home machine - A Mac Mini connected by DSL. A couple of weeks ago, my ISP announced the doubling of our connection speed (it was 512/128k, it got increased to 1024/128, so it’s not exactly doubled, specially if you are used to saturating the upstream channel… but anyway). From then on, we started suffering all kinds of connectivity problems. The connection would drop several times a day,...

Ok, at least Erich states something I agree with (and, lets be fair, its also told by Marius on a comment to my previous post): XML should not be pushed where the data to be represented is flat (or flattish - Say, a INI-style configuration is enough with a not-exactly-flat-but-still-unnested configuration). Still, I do not buy XML as adequate. Erich insists on the Apache configuration file as an example of how not to do things - And I agree wholeheartedly: It sucks and makes no sense. However, it’s just too easy to break proper XML nesting (for the love of...

In short, Erich says that XML, plus the right editor, Just Works(tm). Well, yes. But when you are over a slow link, or when you are desperate with a b0rken system, you just don’t have Eclipse at hand to edit a config file. Of course, you could use the half-existing XML support you talk about in vim (I have not tested it, cannot be sure of it), but it is still a PITA if your /usr is not working fine or if your termcap is too dumb to manage. Yes, there are each time less of those situations, but anyway…...

I came across a very nice story by Leonel Rubio (Leonel, please correct me if I’m misattributing this to you), licensed under the Creative Commons license. It’s in Spanish, but quite worth a read - Aquellos que Poseían la Biblia (Those who owned the Bible). It starts with the supposition that Disney, at the end of the ever-recurring cycle where they ask the US Congress to extend the duration of copyright (so that Mickey and Donald don’t fall into the public domain), they push boldly for a new record: Not just 20 more years, but 500. Of course, this would...

Erich wonders about a sane way to reorganize the configuration file mess we have, going in fact farther than Aigars’ previous rant on the topic: Not only it would be really desirable to do away with the dotfile-as-everything-but-more mess, it would be really, really nice to do it in a more or less standard way. Erich suggests four base configuration syntaxes - I won’t reveal too much, as his message deserves being read as well ;-) But hey, I have a question here: I know XML is well-established and well-supported, and I’m told there are a couple several hundred thousand...