Matt Molyneaux [email protected]
London
I co-founded Inboxen.org and do occasional work for evil empires.
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Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-07-29T20:46:16Z
Sigh... what can I say, we've done our best to make things as easy as we can within the framework of the languages and tools that we're working within. And yeah: it's hard. Could we do better? I'd like to.
Again, if I think you're running most non-PHP web applications, you're probably going to run into this. And hence the userops stuff and my interest in Guix.
I don't think it's as hard as an otherworldly math beast. (I'm not an otherworldly math beast... and plenty of non-math-beasts have done so.)
Anyway, I don't think installing is the hard part. I think maintaining it is. And it's hard, in the way that most of this networked freedom stuff is.
So, what can we do?
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As a maintainer, maintaining is the hard part. The trick is that new maintainers will come from the userbase, and without making an install a matter of "aptitude install mediagoblin" or "guix package -i mediagoblin" followed by a short config file edit, the userbase will remain small.
It might be a function of the languages/frameworks chosen, but without that level of engagement it will be difficult to grow (and thus encourage others to help make things easier).Kevin Everets at 2016-07-29T21:47:15Z
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Ben Sturmfels at 2016-07-20T04:46:03Z
It needn't be a totally impossible problem we assign him. I'd be happy if his dad could remove the Python global interpreter lock or reverse some cell-phone wifi chipsets.
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Karl Fogel at 2016-07-14T16:49:44Z
Now *that's* my kind of blog Comments Policy. Yee-haw. http://www.rants.org/comments_policy/
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I like it - policies should be simple and to-the-point like this.
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Gerard Ryan at 2016-07-09T22:26:13Z
I blogged about the podcasts that I'm currently following: http://blog.grdryn.me/blog/r/podcast-list-2016.html
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Pydraulics mockup
Here's a mockup of the ActivityPub implementation I'm working on's soon/eventual UI (or, what I hope it will look like...!).
Source SVG. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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Looks interesting. Is this going to be a desktop app, or web UI?
@Sean Tilley Just the boring included web UI!
Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-07-04T14:39:15Z
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Hi, I see your post in pump about ActivityPub. Was it developed in Python? It's possible that you give me the link of source code. Excuse my level of English.
Hey @carbans! Pydraulics is an ActivityPub implementation written in Python, yes. I haven't put up a public repository yet, but I probably will later today.
Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-07-04T19:42:04Z
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Karl Fogel at 2016-06-06T17:18:10Z
Yup, just found my GPG key's collision in the Evil32 cloneset. Please read http://gwolf.org/node/4070 now if you use GPG / PGP.
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page not found or server overloaded
Page is 404 but when I created my GPG key eons ago it collided with an existing key on the 32bits ID. And oh boy, how many bugs this found in various GPG GUIs...
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Benjamin Cook at 2016-06-06T02:29:33Z
KeePassX is a great alternative.
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JanKusanagi at 2016-06-03T20:05:14Z
Dis-gus-ting. ¬¬
“The Catholic Conference has argued that opening a one-year window to revive old cases could ultimately bankrupt the Church.”
Hm... so? xD
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Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-05-03T16:47:07Z
Been jumping around in 20 Java classes today to figure out how this thing works. Now I know more or less how it works, and it's still a mystery why it sometimes stops working.
But I know better what clues to look for in the log and I have my suspicions of what might be breaking when it breaks. My goals for tomorrow are clear.
I spent weeks analyzing the problem in other, more black-box, ways in order to avoid having to read the code, and now I read the code in one day. But who knows, maybe I wouldn't have been able to read it in one day, if I hadn't done those other things to understand the context better.
And hey, those other weeks I did things that I figured I should be able to do (wiretap a serial line in Java (that was a dead end with this code base -- now I know that), wiretap a serial line on the OS level, write single-threaded TTY I/O in Python). Now I have learned how to do them and I've learned how awesome socat is. That's also progress.
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Lisp game jam updates 2016-05-01
Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-05-01T15:07:32Z
Won't be too many today, because I have a family function.
I did get to the point yesterday where I could connect to the world, find out my location, and... that's it. But that means a lot of machinery is working.
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good deal
There are two approaches to sentence pattern matching in interactive fiction. The first is how lambdamoo does it: simple, prebuilt structures of "verb", "verb direct-object", or "verb direct-object preposition indirect-object". (If there's ambiguity, you can quote it.)
The second option is much, much richer. This is the route that Zork and the Z-Machine / ZIL take: every action is able to provide its own syntax structure. This allows for vastly more rich sentences in English, which I think leads to much better immersion.
I worked out a plan this morning for adding the latter to my MUD, and I was convinced that it was the right thing to do.
Sadly, a conversation with my brother has convinced me that I was wrong. (I'm glad he convinced me though!) Both of these have tradeoffs; a precise and predictable way of handling actions which is uniform across the whole game, vs a more immersive "literary" system which can accept a wide variety of inputs. I was hoping for immersion, but... as Steve pointed out to me, what do you do when one of the potential objects in your room has a "special word" in it?
For example: in a multiplayer game, how do you accurately identify what to do when one of the objects in your room has a preposition, like "goblin with sword"? You could ban "with" in names, but if actions are able to define their own syntax, you have no way to identify ahead of time what words are "special".
The advantage that single-player interactive fiction games have: the authors of the game can control the names and the grammatical structure of all objects in the world. But if objects are able to provide their own names and their own verbs (commands a player can execute on them), then there's just no way to do this safely or reliably, and there's no way of getting around this in a multiplayer game... especially one where players are able to contribute to the world. (I guess this is why the Lambdamoo people did things the way they did...)
So it's too bad. My MUD won't have the rich sentence parsing I'd like, because I have to decide on a different tradeoff.
However, there's an advantage: reliably destructuring simpler sentences into words means that it would be possible to use the same logic system to build, say, a GUI interface. Or even better: build a federated game!
And one of the interests driving me wanting to explore MUDs here is the realization that what we're doing looks an awful lot like a looser version of the Subject Predicate Object structure of ActivityStreams and ActivityPub.
"Worse is better?" Tradeoffs for sure! Sometimes the decision you make isn't the one you wish you would...
Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-05-02T01:57:22Z
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I was going to say just quickly leaf through http://mud.lysator.liu.se/www/newbie_booklet.html and login according to http://mud.lysator.liu.se/www/enter.html , but it seems the server is currently not responding. :-(
Oh. The server is responding, but only if you're in the uni network or something -- I could do it from my local lysator (uni computer club) account. 15-20 years ago you could log in from anywhere in the world, but I suppose things got rougher out there. :-(
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Jason Self at 2016-04-29T21:36:35Z
"SoftwareFreedom" is calling... :)
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Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-04-22T15:59:40Z
Originally wrote "Fred" and "Barney" as some test actor names in these 8sync actor demos; switched to "Emo" and "Proog" #freeswfreeculture
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The names sounded familiar, but I had to look them up.
EricxDu at 2016-04-25T03:46:34Z
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8sync site WIP
I don't consider myself a "graphic designer", but I think this new 8sync site design is going pretty great.
I'm using Haunt by @David Thompson which is an absolute delight to hack in.
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looks nice
I'd give the logo less air above and more air under it. Otherwise nice and clean so far
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Ooh, that looks good!
Let me know if you'd like any CSS / design help on this. :)
Sean Tilley at 2016-04-04T19:31:49Z
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X11R5 at 2016-04-03T09:38:41Z in Flanigan, Nevada
The key to deciphering @mike linksvayer 's post is problematic.Tyng-Ruey Chuang , Mike Linksvayer , Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) , Matt Molyneaux like this.
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I suspect that Jones is a robot.
Matt Molyneaux at 2016-04-03T09:41:37Z
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Sex slaves a.k.a. comfort women
Douglas Perkins at 2016-04-03T08:38:45Z
A great article on sex slaves during WW2. Also called “comfort women” cuz that doesn't sound as bad.
“The point of confronting the tragedy of comfort women is not to disgrace the people of Japan, any more than the point of commemorating the victims of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb is to disgrace the people of Germany and the United States. I want to emphasize that this is not about politics or national interests; it is about human suffering, about our shared humanitarian principles.”
She says it’s unfortunate that even now, some Japanese politicians and activists continue to present the denial of war crimes as a patriotic act to protect Japan’s honor, and regard the recognition of comfort women’s sufferings as damaging to Japan’s international image.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/04/02/commentary/japans-inescapable-comfort-women-problem/
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>> Douglas Perkins:
“[...] and regard the recognition of comfort women’s sufferings as damaging to Japan’s international image. [...]”
Which is really sad...
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Evan Prodromou at 2016-04-01T19:55:43Z
I wonder how much ad revenue Rick Astley makes on April Fool's Day.
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X11R5 at 2016-03-31T09:13:28Z in Flanigan, Nevada
The several utilizes associated with seo tools.Matt Molyneaux likes this.
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X11R5 at 2016-03-27T19:13:26Z in Flanigan, Nevada
That's why i should be apologizing to the fsf? Did they even considered that. Just sayin'...Efraim Flashner , Matt Molyneaux , Christopher Allan Webber like this.
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Gnome arrives in GuixSD
A major milestone for GuixSD as a comfortable desktop for everyday users! You can now use Gnome in GuixSD!
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npm disaster unfolding
Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-03-23T16:50:22Z
When people hear @David Thompson and I complain about what a disaster npm's packaging is, I think we get a lot of skepticism. And I can't blame people, in the sense that most users aren't seeing problems, and it's so popular, so must there really be problems?
Turns out there are really problems.
After a trademark takedown, a prominent contributor to npm took down many of his packages. (Discussion on Reddit and on HN.) But it might be a lot worse: demonstration of easy hijackability has been shown (though maybe this particular one is not so bad, the situation is certainly bad).
Kind of relatedly, it looks like Guix may get npm packaging importing this summer through GSoC; there is at least one promising proposal, so I guess we'll see.
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(it *is* relevant to the story, in the sense that if everybody inlined their small dependencies, the attack surface for a thing like this would be smaller, but it wouldn't *remove* the issue.)
In a sense, Guix also has some risk in case someone takes down a source package. Guix has a cache of packages on Hydra, so it's unlikely we'll totally lose things entirely for current packages, but for older versions of Guix, history may bitrot away.
Content addressed storage may be the right and necessary answer indeed.
Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-03-24T16:17:06Z
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Christopher, many thanks for linking Armins article. It clearly shows why we probably never will see programs like pump.io server in e.g. Debian.
