Disqus - Latest Comments for Seth

Re: Harish Mallipeddi's Blog - Using Axel with Flashgot in Firefox on Linux

Seth — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:23:18 -0000

sweet!

Re: getline.cs: Partying like its 1988 - Miguel de Icaza

Seth — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:53:23 -0000

Well thank you very much. That'll spare me the boring details of fidgetting with keyboard entry, control codes, terminal capabilities etc.

Quite incredible that it doesn't depend on say libreadline? I'm curious as to how portable this really behaves, but I'll give you the credit based on your track record for now

Great work

Re: Encrypted File Systems - Miguel de Icaza

Seth — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:29:53 -0000

Ok, I for one would like to see this comment being equally concrete and to-the-point as the original post :)

@MIguel: kudos for pointing out the obvious (fuse is more usable then kernel/loop) and implicit (ssh backing... nice).

@tf: just tell me *one* of these distros and I'll give it a go today.

Re: Stream.CopyStream - Miguel de Icaza

Seth — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:36:43 -0000

mmm I have always stopped short of implementing this in a framework bit (rock, part of runtime, whatever), because.... quite frankly I don't see the added value.

In my intuition it almost always comes down to deficiencies in the desing of the stream libraries/consumers that create the need to 'copy' a stream. Invariably this is more like 'relabeling' just to to the taste of a receiving party. While thinking about this it might simply be a wrong intuition (I can think of simple counterexamples like copying a socket to a file).

In all non-trivial cases, however, Copy is simply a misnomer, because a fair bit of transformation is usually involved (charsets, endianness, line ends, etc).

In my experience, C++ <iostream> is about the only library that 'gets it right' (.NET duplicating to much of the pitfalls from Java, thought fortunately less so). In c++ any (compatible, i.e. wellknown conversions or 1:1 binary equivalent) streams can simply be copied by saying smart things like:
std::cout << fstream1.rdbuf() /* << std::eos */;
Essentially: it is the separation of buffer and stream that saves the day. (Don't try std::cout << fstream1; unless you are very interested in the (hex) address of fstream1 instance).

Re: Monovation: Assembly Injection into Live Processes - Miguel de Icaza

Seth — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 05:34:40 -0000

Wow. This is exciting stuff.

I second most of the security concerns. Just pointing at similar capabilities in competing technologies doesn't mean it is secure. It just means they are all flawed for the same pragmatic reasons (productivity). I do think the truth is not so dramatic as some of the commenters make it sound, but hey: it is a concern.

Dll-injection on Win32 has proven to be the backspine of all spy-ware. Yes it is powerful. Lot's of powerful things are dangerous.

My most important fear here, is actually more on the conceptual level. Using this for debugging is ok. Using it for auditing might be ok. [provided adequate privileges are required for each task]. However, the examples lean in the direction of (oh - no - here it comes) automation.

It is just another 'interoperability' route going the promiscuous/incestuous way: we have had DDE (oh no), OLE (mmm) COM(+) Application Servers (ok-ish), Office Automation (Noooooooooooooooooooo(2)), Dll-Injection (whoaaaaa), Bonobo (mmm), DBus (ok-ish); etc. etc. etc. All quite different in many respects, but the main thing that has stood out to me is that
(a) desktop environments stop mingling together(1),
(b) there is a significant performance penalty (bonobo, DCopserver, Dbus - they all grow and have their slightly obese backends running at all times)
(c) most importantly applications get tightly bound, where there should have been no need to.

In my mind this is the 'easy' way to integrate from dev standpoint. But it is the type of lazy easy that comes with heavy costs - in the long run.

E.g. DBus has got over this new 'mono attach' design, that it is easy (necessary) to specify *exactly* what interface surface you'd like to expose. If you wanted plugins: define a plugin interface and just explicitely load these things. This was already exceedingly simple by design in .NET/Java.
In my opinion any layer on top of simple text-file/socket protocols has the obvious advantages over these strategies (decoupling, portability (try mono attach using perl; try mono attach from our AIX server - oops?), transparency (try remote attach? try attach across virtual machine boundaries?), security (reduced surface, explicit POSIX permissions, optional ACLs to name a few).

Now, I happen to really like features like this one, but I have this worry that the (Gnome) desktop will become the same muddy clutter that we have seen in all other OS-es that couldn't resist adding every feature they could think of.

My boot time is already up there with Windows 2003 running Ubuntu 8.04; I'd like to think we let Microsoft hold pole position in that area...
Starting Thunderbird is already starting to take scary amounts of time.

In the mean time: both csharp and 'mono attach' are very nice tools and valuable 'firsts' for the mono community. If handled with care, lot's of good will come of it !

Cheers

(1) no that app cannot be saved as part of the session, it doesn't speak bonobo, sorry
(2) get me right: VBA = good (the feature, not the language), office automation = bad (see: installing Outlook on servers; launching Word to inspect document contents by automation - eeeeeeeeeeeeeeck)

PS. Would it be possible to attach to a process, while creating a separate AppDomain in the target process? This could be a help in keeping things as secure as possible

Re: One Month of Email Gone - Miguel de Icaza

Seth — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:57:29 -0000

My condolances.

Though my initial response was indeed that it woule require a lot of coordination for me to accidentally delete all backups of my email at once. Ah well, I guess I don't backup my hotmail account.

Re: System.Shell.CommandLine does not belong in System.Core - Miguel de Icaza

Seth — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:28:04 -0000

Urfffgh that's so recognizable from the 'darn we have to implement this in a way that looks enterprisey to fool everyone into using it' school of design indeed.

I used to have great experiences with the command line parser I found in the (then) free te-common libs. I remember it was a lot like your fav, in accenting the succinct call site, but alas without the benefit of .NET 2+ (so inevitably less powerful/nloc)

Thanks for voicing this opinion. Does mono have any leverage on what becomes 'standard' .NET core?

Re: Gtk# 2.12.8 Installer for Windows - Miguel de Icaza

Seth — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:28:52 -0000

This is the equivalent of the greek god Prometheus giving fire to humans.

This time you might have gone just a little over top :)

Re: My Bachelor degree and the importance of the Free and Open Source Software

Seth — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:32:00 -0000

practicle “exercises” hehe

reading too much quatnum machenics are you? Well, congratulations, sure sounds like you have a CV cut-out there!

PS. Isn't 3 years a bit shortish? But then again, you didn't care much for that city

Re: Please stop this GNOME Tabs Stupidity

Seth — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:50:55 -0000

what a nice mix of languages I see there (contactenlijst?!)

Re: DVD right-click menu in openSUSE… oh my

Seth — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:45:02 -0000

hihi

now that's clever :)

Re: Sorry about the personal life “spam” on Monolgue

Seth — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:29:24 -0000

Brilliant. No need to apologize :) I was hating it a bit, so I'm glad it is fixed !

Cheers,
Seth

Re: Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code? You’re Doing It Wrong!

Seth — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:25:58 -0000

that was informative and entertaining

always know were your towel is!

Re: BazaarNG and Mercurial and Git

Seth — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:31:18 -0000

I'm stuck to using AIX 5.3 at work.

Of Darcs, Git, Cogito and the lot, Bzr (1.2 at the moment) is the only thing that I can even get working (and I'm very used to tinkering for days with configure to get things ironed out).

Much to my surprise, Python 2.5.2 was relatively straight-forward on AIX. (event though IBM's AIX Linux Toolkit offers 2.3* only!) That gives me Bazaar pretty much for free.

Bzr has come a long way: it doesn't feel sluggish to me, has awesome integration with subversion (our central repo).

GIT was absolutely horrible to try to compile/build/install. I sort of got it working, (basically doing all msgfmt and install steps manually) but then it started borking at runtime. Not a happy git :)