iNode: Nota Bene

A while ago I had the pleasure to go on a Sun training course for Solaris 10, covering the new features. I had a mixed experience to the content of Sol10 (or perhaps that might have been "the content of the course"?), and with the excuse of keeping notes about what we covered, I bloged about it.

It may be fair to describe blogging as ranting :-) but that's probably true of virtually everything on the web that wasn't directly paid for. And even some of that, too!

The article probably wasn't very widely spread, but did find its way onto the OpenSolaris discussion list. Here's the discussion

There are valuable and interesting technical clarifications and refutations in that discussion, so it's worth reading. I'm adding a link to the discussion onto the end of the article as well.

I noticed that the State Services Commission have re-issued their Open Source Legal Issues Guide … this time with the comment "produced with the assistance of the New Zealand Open Source Society".

http://www.e.govt.nz/policy/open-source/open-source-legal2/

Now we have licenses that “propogate” their terms, instead of “infecting” … this seems to be significantly less emotive and less pro-MS than the earlier version.

I really like being able to find words/phrases in foreign languages when talking to people, and it's getting easier every day with the Internet's resources.

Here's a decent Thai dictionary … the entry for spam

The ngata dictionary for Maori is pretty good too … although it doesn't seem to have quite as much slang in it.

Freedict covers Latin and a few others, but it doesn't seem to be a very in-depth treatment, unfortunately.

And for English itself, we have the excellent Wordnet – which is often seen in Google search results, and is available as a local application for most OSs as well as an online resource. Go meronym, go hypernym, holonym and gloss :-)

It's a simple question; it's your project, written in Rails. Who owns it?

David Heinemeier Hansson, that's who.

Well, him, the core Rails team, and "hundreds of open-source contributors". And you own a bit of it too …

This has nothing to do with the license of Rails, and everything to do with copyright law. The GNU Project has already addressed this; the GNU FAQ has a couple of sections about the problem, especially in the context of Bison.

''Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical reasons … the copied text in the output is covered by the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the part of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits the copyright status of the input.''

This implies that all the Rails code in your application that has been created with the rails and script/generate command is not yours. It only becomes yours after you have modified enough of it to claim copyright ownership – I don't know if this is ≥50% or ≥75% or what … and I'm sure your local jurisdiction will have an opinion.

I started a thread about this on the Rails mailing list – have a look at the forum bridge for the current situation.

However, don't panic – it's clear that the intention of all these authors is that you should be able to use their code for your own work. This whole situation seems to be a minor bug … explicit comments in the various README or license files should be enough to clear it up. But in the meantime …

All your code are belong to us …

Another old paper (and extracted from the middle of a slashdot discussion), but it seems to be well worth reading. People are the factor that causes software projects to succeed or fail, not methodologies.

Problem 1. The people on the projects were not interested in learning our system.

Problem 2. They were successfully able to ignore us, and were still delivering software, anyway

So, rush off and read Characterizing People as Non-Linear, First-Order Components in Software Development

Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!

Thus finishes the Manifesto of the Cloud Appreciation Society, who are pledged to re-awaken our sense of wonderment at clouds, Nature's Poetry.

They have galleries of cloud types (but they don't have the Death Valley rolling cloud in there, I saw some pics of that a couple of years ago …), clouds that look like things (see the Dove in a Hole for an example), and of course you can buy the book (UK at the moment, US release soon)

So, you also have a stack of vinyl music that you can't listen to.

And you're not interested in getting a turntable plus a pre-amp, and hooking it all up to your sound card?

How about hooking a turntable directly to the USB?

http://ion-audio.com/products/turntables/iTTUSB.html

No price given, no purchase form; their products are carried by outlets such as Best Buy (site of the "Improv Everywhere hack). Links from the Digg article indicate that it's about US$150, and Urban Outfitters are known to carry it.

It's said to be definately “good enough” – especially considering that if you don't already have the audiophile gear to do this, you don't care enough about the quality to be disappointed! After all, if you're listening to it via MP3, you've already compressed all the juicy goodness out of it anyway …

OK, that's not quite supportable, but it's definately one of the youngest rocks in the world … and definately one of the biggest young rocks …

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05⁄05/mountsthelens.ap/index.html

In the crater of Mt. St. Helens' there is a 300 foot tall rock slab, growing at a rate of 4 to 5 feet per day …

Update :-

There's a better picture here at the APOD site, as well as a link to a tile lapse AVI movie!

Just finished setting up a new Trac+Subversion development environment, and I decided that as I'd just got the minimum working “correct” config, I'd spend a little time writing it up for reference.

So, if you wanted to know how to do it all in one shot, here we are :- Trac and Subversion under Apache

If you're using Ruby on Rails for anything, it looks like the price is to have to follow the existing community all the time, waiting for snippets.

A while ago, the complaint was "oh, but the only documentation is in a book that you have to buy". Well, I bought both the Rails and the Ruby book, and I thought they were both worth the money. Now I hear that there's a Rails in a Nutshell book on the way too …

But look more carefully; the existing books are already out-of-date. We're told that the instance variable params is now supposed to be treated as a method instead. http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2006⁄04/25/use-params-not-params

About the third comment says, basically, "OK, that's fine; but shouldn't the advice be to just use getter methods instead of instance variables all the time?"

The framework is still in flux, just being at version 1.1.2 hasn't necessarily changed that.

But hey, who cares? It works, and works well … :-)