Andrew Fore

Smudged Glass
by Michael Schroll

Almost thought I saw unreal, A moon so bright and clear. Was in the East and hung so low,

It seemed so very near.

I think on back long years ago, When you and I were new. Lookin’ through a nose smudged glass,

A moon just seen by two.

That night was calm as I recal, Was tender and so slow. The candles burned and music flowed,

Our love we came to know.

I miss the look, deep in your eyes, That smile you always had. Not much in this old cowboys life,

Has turned so very bad.

It’s missin’ now, that naked truth, We had it once upon. The moon we saw and wondered at,

Has darkened, and it’s gone.

Andy Fore – Mon, 2007 – 01 – 15 16:34

So, according to a story on Reuters, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is evaluating whether or not to ban Novell from didtributing future versions of their Linux OS.

“The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft,” Eben Moglen, the Foundation’s general counsel, said on Friday.

Apparently they might use their lock on the intellectual property rights to key pieces of the opern-source OS to achieve this.

My questions:

1. Exactly how are they going to achieve this, if the software is open-source?
2. Which version of the GPL are they going to claim that permits this?
3. How does this action promote the goals of the FSF which according to their About Us page include: “our worldwide mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of all free software users.”?

Has Richard Stallman lost his ever-loving mind? He wants people to use Linux. And not just as the OS they run on their servers, but as an everyday OS. He wants people to stop using DRM on their electronically available downloads, as evidenced by the campaign to stomp out DRM.

If Novell wants to enter into a business agreement that results in commercial support and interoperability with the non-free software juggernaut Microsoft, then how is this bad for Linux?

Just because RS doesn’t like Billy Gates and his commercial giant, doesn’t mean that he needs to start by using the same tactics he stands against when someone gets in bed with MS and Linux at the same time.

Shame on you RS, put your money where you values are. If you want people to use open-source then don’t use bullying tactics to keep it from happening.

UPDATE: according to a story at Linux-Watch, the Reuters story is misleading. Apparently the patent agreement is completely legal under GPL v2, but they are working on a language for the next GPL v3 draft that will make it a violation of the license. I say again: why is this MS/Novell deal bad for Linux? And as the Linux-Watch story points out, the current Linux kernel developers don’t like GPL v3 and apparently have no plans to move from GPL v2.

Andy Fore – Mon, 2007 – 02 – 05 01:32

Check out the Bizarre Boiling story on the Science@NASA site on how water boils in zero gravity. There is a really nifty QuickTime movie that shows a comparison of water boiling under 1 gravity versus micro-gravity.

Pretty cool on how the “bubble” is almost completely aggregated in micro-gravity.

Andy Fore – Wed, 2007 – 01 – 03 17:59

Chemistry – NASA – Physics – Space

At my local Linux users group meeting, someone brought up the Nerdcore HipHop music.

So if you are a nerd or a geek, then check out this Hip-Hop rhyme, called Kill Dash Nine.

I like the chorus:

KILL DASH NINE, No more CPU time. I run KILL DASH NINE, And your process is mine. I run KILL DASH NINE, ‘Cause it’s MY time to shine So don’t step outta line or else it’s

KILL DASH NINE!

Who says geek can’t be hip?

Andy Fore – Sat, 2007 – 01 – 06 20:01

At my local Linux users group meeting, someone brought up the Nerdcore HipHop music.

So if you are a nerd or a geek, then check out this Hip-Hop rhyme, called Kill Dash Nine.

I like the chorus:

KILL DASH NINE, No more CPU time. I run KILL DASH NINE, And your process is mine. I run KILL DASH NINE, ‘Cause it’s MY time to shine So don’t step outta line or else it’s

KILL DASH NINE!

Who says geek can’t be hip?

Andy Fore – Sat, 2007 – 01 – 06 20:01

Check out the Bizarre Boiling story on the Science@NASA site on how water boils in zero gravity. There is a really nifty QuickTime movie that shows a comparison of water boiling under 1 gravity versus micro-gravity.

Pretty cool on how the “bubble” is almost completely aggregated in micro-gravity.

Andy Fore – Wed, 2007 – 01 – 03 17:59

Chemistry – NASA – Physics – Space

Today is the birthday of Lord Byron, an English poet born in 1788 in Scotland. He was born George Gordon Noel.

His first success was the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage written in 1812, which is based around his journeys from England to the eastern Mediterranean.

Check out today’s daily poem for another of his more recognizable poems, She Walks in Beauty.

This particular poem is one of my favorites, and it was featured in the television series Beauty and the Beast that ran on the CBS network in the US from 1987 until 1990.

Andy Fore – Mon, 2007 – 01 – 22 13:40

After recently upgrading my MythTV system, I set to editing the metadata for my video collection.

Everything worked fine when editing through the regular interface, but when attempting to edit the data through the MythWeb interface, I noticed that entries where the title started with double-quotes, the field in the edit screen was empty.

Andy Fore – Mon, 2007 – 01 – 15 16:53

When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead,

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

ref. url: When You Are Old

Andy Fore – Mon, 2007 – 02 – 05 18:08

One of the annoyances I have found with the Contribute Client is that in the Administration interface section, when adding a user, the menu of roles is not sorted for you. The list that appears when you reassign a user or when you create a new role, is sorted for you.

Each time that a new role is added, the client updates the hub file, adding the new role to the end of the list.

In investigating this I found that the hub file is just an XML file. This file is stored in the root _mm folder of the website that you are managing. Note that this file is connection specific, so if you are managing multiple websites, the location of this control file will vary. And if you are managing a large deployment by having multiple sites with a single directory structure, you will have a different _mm folder and hub file for each site, even though they are physically on the same server they are treated differently by the logic of the software.

The XML node list structure that controls this is as follows:

... ...

The name of the role shown in the Contribute client administration interface is controlled by the value assigned to the value attribute of the individual group_list_item nodes.

The last group_item_list node is the most recent role that has been added to the system.

What I ended up doing was using a pre-compiled perl program to sort the group_list_item nodes based on the content of the value attribute.

In order to use xmlsort, you will need the following Perl modules:

XML-Filter-BufferText-1.01 XML-Filter-Sort-1.01 XML-SAX-Writer-0.50

Text-Iconv-1.4

After installing those Perl modules you will be able to use the xmlsort command. This is essentially a precompiled Perl command that eliminates you from having to write a Perl script to do a simple sort. If you need to do more complex sorting or XML processing then you will need to roll your own code.

The necessary syntax for the command is:

xmlsort -i -r=group_list/group_list_item -k=@value cthubxxx.csi > out.xml

Replace the cthubxxx.csi is the command with the actually filename for your particular hub file. At this point you should backup your hub file then rename out.xml to the hub filename. This process doesn’t require a restart of CPS or the Contribute client, but it would be safer to do this at a time when there is low usage of Contribute just in case.

arfore – Mon, 2006 – 12 – 18 01:41