Colas Nahaboo Blog

Rsync-incr has been updated to version 1.6. New in this version:

• old backup removal was not working if the destination was on NFS, fixed. Note that backuping to NFS is not a good idea as it is quite slower than local disks, this was why it was an untested case up to now.
• new --no option to only clean old backups to make room for the new ones, but not actually performing the backups
• messages on backup deletion a bit more detailed

Get the release on the Rsync-incr page!

This is the kind of hacks I really like doing: examining a problem and try to find a simple solution by reasoning by analogy with the real world. This time, it was how to help developers of foswiki to keep track of changes in twiki. The metaphor chosen was the GTD (Getting Things Done) method, with a simplistic RSS + script technology. See more in the Software.FoswikiRssFeedToTasks article!

A small enhancement: in the logs list, we only count actual text lines, no more control messages (the ones with "***" in the name field)

See IrcLogger

Example. We were listing:

• before: 2008-11-05, Wed (14 lines)
• after: 2008-11-05, Wed (13 lines)

For the logs below:

Well, it has finally happened, the dual-faced Janus what makes both the beauty of Open Source projects, and its Dark side, have come to visit the twiki Project. The Fork is here! Strangely this time, it is the project founder, Peter Thoeny who "forked out" most of the active developers of the Open Source project by locking them out of the project. Ironically he seemed to have so much dreared a fork that he finally decided to provoke a "preeemptive fork" to clear things out, and reach an often seen configuration where a private company sells a product based on an Open Source offering, with a community knowingly contributing to enhance a product belonging to a single company, but getting a better product in return. This is not a bad situation in itself, for wikis it is already the case with xwiki and deki, the problems came in TWiki case as the company came very late in the picture, and could be seen as "highjacking" the TWiki built by the community.

We will see what happens, but I would like you to read the excellent article made nearly a decade ago, WHY LINUX WON'T FORK - And why being able to fork is still A Good Thing. If all goes well, it will end up in more technical directions explored, each project incorporating the good ideas of the other one. If not, the crisis will show the bad side of many people, and will discourage contributors watching from the outside 2 communities dying from the lack of a critical mass.

As I was asked to take sides, I chose the "fork" camp, as I feel that it is where lies the heart of the community that actually made the modern TWiki. We will see how it evolves, but the beauty of open source is that both projects will be able to use the advances of the other one - if one do not end a proprietary fork. May we live in interesting times!

For more info, see:

• On the TWiki.net Company side
  • the announce
  • the site
  • The twiki irc logs at the time of the fork,
  • the meeting log of the release meeting the fork was decided
• On the Community side
  • the new site (Nextwiki is a temporary name)
  • The twiki_fork irc logs at the time of the fork
  • testimonials

In the news:

• Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki on slashdot
• TWiki.net Kicks Out All TWiki Contributors on slashdot
• TWiki's hunt for cash fractures its community on CNet
• Quarrel over TWiki - Friendly Takeover by Founder? on Linux Magazine
• reddit entry
• digg entry

On the blogs of:

• Koen Martens
• Michael Daum
• Kwang Ern Liew
• Sven Dovedoit
• Kenneth Lavrsen

Update: The definitive name is FOSWIKI

As of 18 Nov 2008, the community we decided on the new name: Foswiki - Free and Open Source Wiki. This was chosen after a vote process to chose a name with com/net/org domain names available, and not infringing on a trademark in both US and Europe (this is why we couldn't keep the temporary name nextwiki, as it was a registered trademark of NextEngine, Inc).

I stumbled upon the blog post "Is it important to write good code?" the other day, and became more and more ill at ease as I realized that I thought that I preferred the original code, that the author was trying to ridicule, over his new "improved" object-oriented version. At first I guessed this was another manifestation of the the "Worst is best" scenario - enhancements are often not worth the added complexity - but I realized that it was perhaps a more profound factor:

The original code is very good because it ... is small!. It fits on a teminal screen, so an human being can read it at once and have less items to maintain in his short term memory and also understand it easily because it follows a natural way of thinking with sentences using IF. This becomes obvious by reading the body of the blog post surrounding the code samples, where you can see that the author is using phrases such as "if I need this I do that", showing that in plain english, the if statement is the best way to make people understand what you mean. And making code that people understand is the best way to make debuggable and maintainable code.

At this moment I noticed the citation in the blog header: "Good programmers write code that humans can understand"

Indeed :-)

PS: I know I am a bit exaggerating the issues there, and that I unfairly nitpick on Fredrik Normé, but it is that it seems to me from my personal experience that the two changes I see most in my coding efficiency as I grow older is a decrease of my short term memory capacity, and that I make more and more typos where I realize I mix up totally words with totally different meanings but that sound the same, for instance writing "never" instead of "nether, making me suspect that our natural way of thinking may be much more language-based that I imagined...

I use scanbuttond v0.2.3, a nice linux daemon to trigger actions (shell scripts) on presses on scanner buttons, but after a motherboard upgrade, if failed with a "Segmentation Violation". The fix was a single line patch, that you can see (and other details) at ScanButtond

Just a mini release for IrcLogger, tweaking a bit the interface in html view of the logs.

irclogger has a new release, that bring a feature requested for a long time: in the html view, have a mode to see only the lines containing an url. This mode is carried on when going to previous and next days. "Zooming" in on the line is done as usual by clicking on the time a the right, which brings you to the line in its context.

Note that there is a manual step involved in the upgrade. You need to clear the cache that irclogger builds under the identitity of the web server.

• If you can be root, just do as root a rm -rf /tmp/.irclogger_logs_cache
• Otherwise, you must go to all BIN dirs of the install (the dirs where you find the files irclogger.conf)
  and in it do a ln -sf /usr/local/irclogger/irclogger_clearcache .
  Then call the URLs of all irclogger_clearcache you installed.