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is4
1 month ago
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Ghostwheel: Hassle-free clojure.spec, side effect detection and evaluation tracing
I assume the name is a reference to the construct/character in Zelazny’s Amber series: http://princeofamber.wikia.com/wiki/Ghostwheel
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Spicy take: I always got the feeling OLPC was a FSF-adjacent scheme to embezzle UN money and put it into eye-in-the-sky perennial Linux desktop dreams. The machines felt overdesigned and Sugar dog slow on them. Things like Open Firmware on x86 or the mesh networking were masturbatory and served little purpose. Promises like the pen-on-trackpad or Sugar’s ease of live application modification were never met. There never was any sort of curriculum; HW was shipped with no plan.
I will admit that the screen on them is excellent though. Pixel Qi should have taken off.
What they should have done, IME, is acquire whatever cheap used high-end business laptop hardware was at the time, (fairly reliable, faster than the anemic Geode in XO-1, and cheap too) and design a curriculum with it so teachers have something to do with the machines, rather than be thrown overboard into it.
edit: Something else I did find interesting: The Mac OS X offer. That seems clearly to me, to be Jobs wanting to create iPad, using OLPC as its vehicle.
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I have one of these sitting on a shelf in my closet, given to me several years ago by a friend who bought it during the “Give One Get One” program. I remember following this project but was a broke student at the time so I was interested in trying it out and seeing what they got right and where it went wrong.
As you detailed, there’s a lot of interesting ideas in this unit (with questionable motives for their inclusion in the design). There was too much groupthink around doing something new and cool, and using specific technologies that weren’t ready for prime time. This led the project away from it’s goal of actually shipping something successful to kids (at least out of the box). I remember when I first read that they were developing Sugar in Python and wondering why anybody would do that. Python at the time was super slow compared with how it is now and there were much better choices for developing a full desktop environment. In addition, the RedHat distro it was based on had too much bloat. These were not fast machines and every clock cycle counts.
When I was a kid in the 80’s, I could turn on my Commodore 64 and get a Ready prompt right away, and start typing Basic programs. Commercial games and programs loading from cartridge were fairly instant as well. I feel like the rugged industrial design of OLPC was the right direction and they totally missed the boat on software. The night I got the OLPC from my friend, I checked out, built, and flashed the latest version of the OLPC image. I cannot overstate how disappointed I was with how long Sugar took to boot up.
Honestly, I’m not even sure computers would’ve kept my interest as a kid had my Commodore taken that long to boot to be usable. Even programs loading from 5¼” floppy disk or cassette tape were faster. Sugar had a lot of neat functions, but the delay to get to a very slow desktop and then to switch to each task rendered the device useless as shipped. This was a project I wanted to believe in, but it really went off the rails.
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I always got the feeling OLPC was a FSF-adjacent scheme The FSF HATED OLPC once the microsoft deal was announced.
Open Firmware on x86 This was mainly because they had weird custom hardware, and were trying to be free/open.
mesh networking Looked like it was going to work at first, but they were plagued by problems with the wifi daughter board not having a good or consistent interface. This was well well before there were devices like the ESP8266 or common WIFI-on-a-chip boards. I believe they ended up using the same wifi board as the first xbox wifi adapter.
Sugar’s ease of live application modification were never met That was met by early 2009, implemented by Chris Ball I believe. View-source was a regularly used and well distributed feature. Perhaps you were only using the earlier G1G1 Sugar releases?
acquire whatever cheap used high-end business laptop hardware was at the time Have you tried to reflash and rehabilitate a laptop? It takes a while. It takes much much longer if you don’t have exactly the same hardware. Unpacking and installing on arbitrary machines would have taken a lot longer than you think, and wouldn’t have worked in many of the enviroments the machines were shipped to.
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I am delighted for you! I really enjoy following your projects. You’ve been communicating about your upcoming work and goals really well, and then delivering on those promises. It’s been making me feel like setting up a blog and writing about it to structure my projects. Go have fun this summer! I’ll be excitedly waiting your posts!
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Thanks a lot! Yes you should definitely write about your projects :-) It takes some pushing to get started, but after a dozen or more posts the ball starts rolling downhill. At least, that was my experience. I sometimes feel I spend too much time writing vs. coding, but the effort is almost always rewarded (i.e. people reading what I wrote).
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Call me a skeptic, but I expected this when they shut down development on Light Table.
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The OLPC produced laptop (the XO) had a forth bootloader that had a mini-clone of emacs in it as well. I’m constantly impressed with what those folks accomplished with that hardware.
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On a related note: Apparently the last stage of FreeBSD’s boot loader is scriptable in Forth.
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The OLPC produced laptop (the XO) had a forth bootloader that had a mini-clone of emacs in it as well. I’m constantly impressed with what those folks accomplished with that hardware.
lt’s regular old Open Firmware. It’s also incredibly annoying coming from someone who has an XO-1 - it’s a major piece of NIH when they could have used a normal BIOS (for the time) or UEFI, (the hot newness) as trying to boot anything beyond Sugar is very painful.
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It’s not regular old Open Firmware (unless OF got patches during the XO-1 development, quite possible!)
And it’s not NiH when you invented the hardware. That forth has native access to the onboard webcam, the wifi, it has read/write access to the NAND… It’s a dream machine for a hobbyist child.
I inherited my aunt’s C64, and look at me now! My son is getting that forth-in-a-box. Unfortunately, my C64 came with a book[0] and the XO-1 does not… :(
0: http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-manuals/commodore-64-programmers-reference-guide/
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I also realized there is nothing in the PyPI package description that actually indicates what version of Python is being targeted
These might be poorly exposed, but there is a long list of classifers for projects which contain the python versions.
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I’m running Debian Testing (stretch ATM) with Gnome-shell 3.20.2. I’m not ecstatic about it, but it serves my purposes and mostly stays out of my way.
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:(){ :|:& };:<– will fill up the process counter on any unix machine and make it non responsive. From inside docker it will freeze the host system toodocker run busybox “:(){ :|:& };:”-
Forkbombs are trivially mitigated by user process limits. And in any case, the severity of the problem is not the issue (it’s at worst a partial DoS from local code execution, a position from which you can do much more interesting, dangerous things); it’s the reflection of the attitude of the SystemD developers that “eh, I’m sure I know what I’m doing” despite all evidence to the contrary that’s concerning.
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All of the images in the medium post are blurs of light gray with faded splotches of color. Oh nevermind, after refreshing 3 times it turns out they are slides and don’t give any additional information or screenshots.
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I think this is a great idea. Heck, it would encourage me to post about more weird corners of unicode, like Issac Newton’s personal alchemy symbols which made it in somehow.
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Definitely looking forward to reading an article on that, tag or not. :)
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is4
2 years ago
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Poll: what are your thoughts on programmer/technologist professionalization?
I am positive that a certification as you describe will be bad for society and developers. One, it will make it all the more hard for those aspiring young developers to become actual developers. Professional certifications and tests would remove even more developers who come from disadvantaged classes.
Also, if you think that you are disrespected given the amount of effort you have put into your profession, talk to your average pharmacist. Developers have it pretty good compared to other professions.
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Professional certifications and tests would remove even more developers who come from disadvantaged classes.
There’ll be financial aid available, obviously.
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And maybe that is a problem. We need to be more rigorous.
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Wow. Such erasure.
Open Source is explicitly commercial. It is the corporate-friendly response to free software. You can have a discussion about if the GPL is anti-corporate or anti-commercial (I think it is anti-corporate but not anti-commercial, YMMV).
I will use the terms “free” — as in “free software” — and “open source” interchangeably here
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In reality, the code is technically owned by no one.
Absolutely not. The code’s copyright belongs to Azeem. It is available to anyone else under the specific terms he releases it under and only those terms.
Further there is an implicit namespace in Azeem’s curation and ongoing management of the software. When I download left-pad, I am downloading the one based on my trust in Azeem.Post open-source world
Yes, only 15% of projects on github have licenses, but almost all of the software that gets reused by other developers or that gets contributions has a license.
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For work:
- Continuing to (carefully!) adjust Khan Academy’s content store without breaking backcompat, but while enabling all the new features we want for the new designs/for mobile
- Helping the internationalization initiative figure out how to sanely make it feasible to have different content collections for different languages
- Putting together project proposals to take our security from about 30% of where I think we should be to more like 70% of where I think we should be
For Factor:
- Finish up my TOML module and add it to core
- Migrate away from having separate pseudo-plain-text files for vocabularies (libraries) to having a single TOML-formatting vocab descriptoin
- Maybe start an ACME implementation so Factor can have turnkey HTTPS support
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Lack of extensibility is great. Semantic markup is very rarely the right tool for the job. I want to like reStructuredText but it’s nowhere near as nice to write; ditto asciidoc.
Markdown is definitely one of those “not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away” things. I would generally try to avoid flavours; I definitely wouldn’t switch to an extensible format over markdown.
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This project seems to be long abandoned, created in 02012 and last updated in 02013 :-(
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http://www.openstenoproject.org/ probably not a bad time to link to this since others might be interested.
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I’ve looked into this years ago. Wondered about it, but ultimately concluded that I would never type anything at 200wpm. It also doesn’t work very well for code, and is specific to English. It’s essentially just shorthand. We already have this with code templates (func<TAB> translate to function(<CURSOR HERE>){<CURSOR AFTER ENTER PRESSED>}).
On the flip side, I could see people who write papers and stories absolutely love this. I just don’t do enough of that.
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At home, I’m cleaning up the web presence a research collective I was part of several years ago. So far I’ve started a Github org, pushed a website mirror, and a copy of our research snapshot of Encycloedia Dramatica from 2011. Working on a static version of the site that should be considerably more future proof and less maintenance.
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I’m pushing many new Project Gutenberg books to github on GITenberg and rewriting my python scripts to do the same.
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That is really interesting! https://github.com/GITenberg https://gitenberg.github.io/
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It would be really great if you had an index json blob with links to the repos. :)
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This leads to worse things. Consider the case of a unicode string. HFS+ tries to decode unicode strings and will do so ambiguously. This, as far as I have been able to tell, is the reason that github doesn’t allow unicode in repository names. :-(
I have a Truly Ergonomic mechanical that I don’t end up using because I prefer pointing stick mice.