taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Software: sourcefrog: arch rocks: mirroring. This is incredibly cool:

Finally, GNU Arch lets you do this. Anyone can mirror a public archive. In fact, several sites such as sourcecontrol.net have set up to just mirror all the open source software they can find. Others mirror just intermittently, as a backup in case a primary archive is lost.

What’s more, because changesets are strongly GPG-signed, people using the archive can feel sure that they’re getting the changes as the original author wrote them, without any accidental or intentional modifications.

BTW, that ‘archive’ — in Arch-land, an archive is a source-code version control repository. In other words, if you want to track development work on a project, you take a private copy of the repository and sync up to every change as it is made remotely, in essence duplicating the central archive (although changes only go one way, obviously).

Then, if you have the privileges — you can merge any changes you make on that archive back up to the central one.

Very cool. I really need to take some time to get into Arch.

Tags: anyone, arch, archive, fact, gnu, mirroring, repository, software, source, sourcecontrol, sourcefrog

Good interview with Samba’s Tridge. He explains where the penguin mascot came from – I never knew the linux penguin was in fact a fairy penguin! All those trips bringing visitors to Phillip Island while I was in Melbourne were not wasted then. ;)

Some time later Linus was looking for a mascot for Linux, and apparently the incident at the National Aquarium helped influence him towards choosing a penguin. If you go there now you will see a little plaque commemorating the fateful day when Linus caught ‘penguinitis’ from one of the fairy penguins in the enclosure (the 6ft one, of course).

Tags: fact, fairy, incident, interview, linux, mascot, penguin, samba, time, tridge

a must-read: Bruce Perens posts and then demolishes the Las Vegas slideshow comprehensively, demonstrating that one of the code snippets SCO showed did in fact date from 1973, not 1979; and the other snippet was a clean-room reimplementation based on the published specification for the Berkeley Packet Filter, and the SCO code most likely came from the BSD-licensed implementation.

That raises two points: 1. the SCO ‘pattern-recognition team’ need to go back to Google school; 2. why didn’t the SCO implementation of the BPF code maintain the legal copyright attribution text it was supposed to include, so they would have noticed this when out ‘recognising’ ‘patterns’?

I’m looking forward to this getting to court eventually…

Tags: berkeley, code, date, fact, implementation, reimplementation, sco, slideshow, snippet, specification

Given that something like 8.13% of of the hosts that have sent non-spam mail to me do not have reverse DNS information recorded, the fact that AOL have just switched this on as a requirement will be interesting:

: jm ftp 1019...; dig aol.com mx
aol.com.                3559    IN      MX      15 mailin-01.mx.aol.com.
mailin-01.mx.aol.com.   92      IN      A       152.163.224.26
...
: jm ftp 1020...; telnet 152.163.224.26 25
Trying 152.163.224.26...
Connected to 152.163.224.26.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-rly-za01.mx.aol.com ESMTP mail_relay_in-za1.6; Thu, 22 May 2003
15:09:54 -0400
220-America Online (AOL) and its affiliated companies do not
220-     authorize the use of its proprietary computers and computer
220-     networks to accept, transmit, or distribute unsolicited bulk
220-     e-mail sent from the internet.  Effective immediately:  AOL 
220-     may no longer accept connections from IP addresses which 
220      have no reverse-DNS (PTR record) assigned.
^]
telnet> q
Connection closed.

Tags: aol, com, dns, fact, ftp, information, mail, requirement, something, telnet

Jason Kottke: Portal Wars II: When Search Engines Attack. He makes a great point (from Robert Morris at Etech 2002): while advances on the internet are typically heralded as tech-driven, in fact they’re more often usability-driven. Examples:

Mosaic was not an advancement in technology over TBL’s original browser. Blogger is a highly-specialized FTP client. IM is IRC++ (or IRC for Dummies, depending on your POV).

Dead right. Good tech, without the rough edges sanded down, and a degree of comprehensibility, is useless.

Aside: I wonder if Robert Morris, IBM is any relation to Robert T Morris, the 1988 internet worm guy?

Tags: attack, engines, etech, fact, internet, irc, point, portal, search, wars

The Reclaim The Streets demo last Sunday went off well, sounds like. I would have gone but I hadn’t heard (or had forgotten) about it :(

The fact that it went well is a relief, because the last one became a bloodbath when some of the Gardai got a little over-excited, removed their identification, and started swinging clubs and “arresting” attendees indiscriminately. Very nasty, or so I hear. (I wasn’t back in Dublin by that point.)

Along with some reports of massive corruption in the Donegal police force, this event turned out to be a watershed in how Irish folks are viewing their police. That kind of thing wasn’t really a problem over here in the last few years — but now it seems to have all changed. Old news for people in the UK, US, Northern Ireland and Australia — but quite new to us here.

Tags: bloodbath, demo, fact, gardai, identification, point, police, reclaim, relief, sunday

a good reply to the Nigerian scams, on Slashdot:

…unfortunately I don’t have that much money. I do have seventeen dollars and fifty-six cents. I really want you to have all of that. I hope you can overlook the fact that I’m several million short of your goal, but the key is that I try hard and I’m an excellent wind surfer.

Tags: fact, goal, key, money, nigerian, reply, seventeen, slashdot, surfer, wind