thoughts on chrome

Using a separate process for each web page and each component has been something I've always wanted a web browser to do. It's so conceptually clean and has such nice properties, and processes are so cheap in linux. Hats off to the people who made that a reality.

On the other hand, I'm guessing that chrome's guts will be tied into the google backend services so tightly that you can't really tell where the one stops and the other begins. Since I'm not interested in being a sharecropper, and would prefer to see people empowered with services they control, I have worries.

It's easy to forget how much of the modern browser's er ... chrome ... is based on web services that could change, go away, or be DNS hijacked at any time. I'd like to see a web proxy that takes all traffic to *.google.com and rot-13's it, to demonstrate how many things rely on this one company.

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human nature

Have you noticed that 90% of the 30-day fscks on laptop boot happen when it's on battery power? Even if it's only on battery power 50% of the time. One of these days I need to fix it so that ctrl-c makes it cleanly abort, rather than mount the disk read-only and fail to boot.

Also, Amazon prime is super dangerous. I tried their free trial and bought a large amount more books and stuff online than I usually would. Their usual free shipping requires bundling things up over time, and delays the instant gratification by shipping slowly. That tends to discourage impulse buys very nicely. Which is a weird decision for a company to make.

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life: day 11830

Yesterday was a grim and dismal day. Highlights were stunting the growth of lots of grass, clover, and weeds, and watching the evacuation of New Orleans on streaming TV. (While remembering tuning in to an AM station late at night as Katrina was headed that way, and wondering why things seemed so calm and there was so little traffic.) Lowlights were existential blah.

Today, trucking adventure to get out to Anna's, then hauled cinderblocks up the hill to the yurt, built a fire pit and we dined on lamb kabobs and her delicious garlic fried green beans.

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vacation

This "beach trip" was unusual, as its ocracode shows:

OBX1.1 P5/6/4 L6 S12+b----c---- U10(mountains,freshwater,etc) T0 f0 b0 Rd Bb----m----n---- F+ SC----s--g0 H----f0i0.5 V+++s--m0 E-r--

Here are 4 generations of Hess's on a visit to the Bluff Mountain Preserve, which is not normally open to the public and has what is supposed to be the only fen in the southern Appalachians.

Also, I no longer have a car after that trip. I am, however, looking at various electric bicycles. As someone who hates being posessed by posessions, I'm happy that losing my car doesn't really bother me.

Oh, and Leo has kitty-laryngitis.

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cutting back

I'm going to cut down on debian-related stuff further. At least until next DebConf, I plan to reduce my involvement in the project to a minimum.

So, I'm unsubscribing from all (52!) lists now, except debian-devel-announce. Feel free to mail me privatly if you want to ask about anything. I'll still see bug reports.

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debconf day 5

Missed the morning talks.. looking forward to replays being available..

rails

Projects not bothering to release tarballs, and just publishing a git repo (hopefully with some tags!) will only become more common, I think, and it's interesting to see this is already very common with ruby gems.

Faking up an orig tarball is still a reasonable workaround now, but will probably look very retro in 5 years.

Re Debian vs Rails communities, I wonder if there's a generation gap in here somewhere..

rest

(will update throughout the day)

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awesome tags

Today I figured out why the awesome window manager's tags are so eh, awesome.

I'm attending debconf via irc and web stream, and have that on tag 9. Which I mostly think of a a desktop, since I generally view one tag at a time, and flip between them like desktops.

But often I want to browse the web, or do something else too, without losing the video and irc offscreen. So from tag 9, I can press mod+ctrl+3 to display tags 9+3 at the same time. And after I've done this, can mod+left/right to go up and down between tags, and tag 9 stays selected and visible. Awesome automatically lays everything out.

Only thing I don't like is that if I use mod+N to switch to a specific tag, it will drop tag 9.

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DebConf day 2

More notes and reactions from DebConf video.

debbugs

Hadn't realised how handy bts select is!

My CVE-XXX-XXXX tags are a fairly large percentage of the 3000+ unique user tags. 2461 to be exact. :-) It would be nice to be able to view a list of all users of usertags, and their tags, in the BTS web interface.

Yay! Don implemented the summary idea already.
(And I implemented bts summary during his talk.)

Local partial debbugs mirror: Crazy idea, but better than bts cache. :-) (And if it provides an incentive for a current and proper debbugs deb to be maintained, that's a win.)

vcs-pkg

I won't bother once again repeating my responses to tired arguments like "git's archive format will change!" Been there, done that, been ignored; stopped maintaining any non-native packages; your loss.

Topgit looks generally handy, and it was neat to have its author on irc during the talk.

video team

Hundreds of remote watchers -- impressive..

Looking forward to the remote controlled telepresence robots at debconf 10!

(Also to a lack of tango loop music.)

bugs in large packages

Bug summaries are not yet shown in the "extra information" in the bug index page.

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All Seated on the Ground

A few notes/reactions from the talks I attended today from the very, very back of the room. (AKA the skivvies and/or backyard track.)

(titular story by Connie Willis)

DPL talk

FYI, I raised my hand when Sledge asked for a show of hands. :`-(

MANCOOSI

(Is aptitude's dependency resolver deterministic?)

wiki

I doubt that trying to get the whole wiki licensed under a specific license is a good use of time. Since the wiki is not a package that we ship, but is instead a ad-hoc collection of many documents, and many conversations, I also don't see the point of a single consistent license, or any reason to be bothered by content whose license is not specified.

Be very wary of anything that makes contributing to the wiki require jumping through more legal hoops than it takes to contribute to lists.debian.org or bugs.debian.org. Chilling effects can work both ways.

method diffusion in free software projects

Most interesting talk today. Was hoping for some results, but not disappointed. (Yak shaving!)

user and NM surveys

Looked like most DDs in the audience hadn't heard of the survey?

SPI

Nice numbers and more big projects than I'd thought.

Avoided being locked in room, so still not a SPI member. ;-)

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arrived at debconf

Well, close as I'll get this year.

Making the most of it, thanks to the video team.

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august

I've been fearing August for months. That miserable hot streak in early June pumped it up to absolute dread. Not being able to escape to winter in Argentina didn't help.

Now it's August and we're going to have a whole week of weather like today's: In the upper 70's (aka mid 20's), breezy, beautiful puffy clouds.

I'm still dreading the second half of the month though. ;-)

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life, day 11801

Spent the first half of the day working on a web inteface to configure ikiwiki. The next version of ikiwiki will have that and some other neat setup features that make it really easy to set up a wiki.

Then up to Abingdon for VA highlands. I was actually reminded of Edinburgh, but not by the kilts and celtic music; instead by the post-rain damp and little alleys.

Drove Anna's golf cart around the swamp. Suprisingly capable in mud and creek ford and general rough going. (PS, if my next car has internal combusion, please shoot me.)

Another night on battery power @yurt.

Now playing: Cicadas and The Who, loudly.

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oops, I did it again

So, the good news is that I'm the only one who will be flooding planet Debian by upgrading ikiwiki. Bad news of course is that I didn't notice the bug until I was testing the new release in my own blog. :-)

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disturbing thought

So for those of you who arn't aware, as of yesterday, it's easy for any spotty teenager/script kiddie to make you see content you didn't expect to when you go to google or your bank, etc. Maybe you're lucky and someone has fixed the problem on your network. Most likely you're not so lucky.

(Confidential to Anna, Maggie, Adrianne, Errol, Barbara, Mark: You're lucky! But only when you're at home.)

At the moment, the idea that DNS can be trivially poisoned seems like a really serious problem.

Will there come to be a point when we just regard this as "DNS spam", basically accepting that it's happening all the time, indeed that a given DNS query is as likely spoofed than good, and nothing can be trusted, or indeed, fixed? If you don't think this can happen to a internet techology, just look at the average inbox now, and compare it to the average inbox circa 1993.

I can't claim to be an expert in this area, but based on what I'm reading, the current "fix" increases the time-to-exploit from 11 seconds to maybe 1 week. (BTW, is there a reason why DNS servers are caching in-baliwick responses.. would it work to entirely disable that caching? Any chance for a second round of more targeted fixes now that the cat is out of the bag?) Also, I get the impression DNSSEC will never be successfully deployed, barring a miracle. And we seem to have just run out of miracles.

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thought for the day

Nobody I know knows how to cut a watermelon.

I've seen it done by experts once: A family attacked one, sitting on a picnic table. In their hands, it became a wholly different fruit than our stodgy sliced seedless. They had a small knife. Chainsaws would not have made it more exciting.

I saw it done, but I don't know how.

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graphical annotate

I'm envisioning a graphical app that displays a file. Like a pager, the up and down arrows move through the file. But the left and right arrows move through time. As each successive change to the file is displayed, the committer's name appears in a column to the left of the lines changed in that commit. Hover the mouse over it to see the commit message. Names of old committers will fade out as time advances, but still be visible for a while. (A menu option will disable the fade out entirely.)

A nice bonus feature would be to allow opening multiple windows, with multiple files from the same repo. Moving back and forward in time would affect them all at once.

A nice, but getting harder feature would be to have a horizontal timeline at the bottom, including branches, so you could click on a specific branch to visit it. (Without this, when passing a fork or merge point, it would have to choose a branch heuristically?)

A tricky subtle feature would be to attempt to keep the current code block centered in the display as lines are added/removed from the file, adjusting scroll bar position to compensate.

There seems to be a gannotate for bzr, that may do something like this. Offline so I can't try it.

Google-and-caffine-fed update: bzr gannotate is closest to what I envisoned, though without a few of the bonuses (fade-out, smart scrolling, multiple files). qgit's "tree view" includes the same functionality, but the interface isn't as nice.

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good long day

Went swimming in the Clinch river (the real one) @ the River Farm. Failed to find sinking creek's spring. Installed debian on Anna's new laptop, which went swimmingly though the wireless is a bit odd. Best pasta in recent memory. In bed @ Yurt.

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