This semester, I'm taking a class which is called "Management of Very
Large Data Volumes". The textbook, for some weird, weird reason talks a
fair amount about MS-DOS. Apart from the fact that it's about ten years
old, so all the numbers are really wrong, the book is bearable.
However, once in a while, I come across sections which I wonder if are
there just to make me cry (the textbook is in Norwegian, so any
translation errors are mine):
MSDOS' file system is a bit too simple. Among other things, the
security is not cared for well enough. The directory ought to show
who has created or owns the file as well as the time the file was
created and when it was last changed. With regards to security and
rights, a minimum requirement is the file should have an associated
password. In fact, it ought to be one password for writing and
perhaps another password for deletion and extending the file.
First, "a bit too simple" is an exaggeration, MS-DOS does barely have a
file system at all. And security? Well, it has none, so I guess saying
"not cared for well enough" is a bit of an understatement. Then a bit
of fairly reasonable requirements, but I really wonder what the author
thought about when he wrote that last part. Is he really serious that
all files should have three passwords associated with them? I would so
much rather use either normal UNIX-based user/group/other permissions or
ACLs.
Four months have passed since the last Canonical Conference, which
happened in Oxford. The December conference, nicknamed "The Matarò
Sessions" was held in Matarò, just outside of Barcelona in Spain.
The travel to the conference was uneventful. Plane from Trondheim to
Amsterdam, a bit more than an hour in Amsterdam, then plane further on
to Barcelona. I called Fabbione after I came through customs. He
arrived at a different terminal than I, so I headed over there and we
met up. Train to Matarò itself and then a short walk to the hotel. We
then went out and ate some food at a nearby Chinese place.
Karianne arrived in the early afternoon on Monday. Even though we were
only separated for a day, it was nice to see her again. Most of the day
was taken up with BOFs and we had a bunch of very productive
discussions. I also got a fair amount of work done, fixing bugs and
uploading packages.
Tuesday was not such a good day. The BOFs were a bit less interesting
and I had a hard time concentrating on my tasks. We went to the Chinese
place again and it was a disaster. Or, not a disaster, but they didn't
do a very good job. First, they used ages and ages for getting me food.
Then they took even longer getting Karianne her food. Then they gave my
food to somebody else (yes, you. The sharks at the end of the table.
You know who you are). Then Karianne got her main course. Then she got
her starter. I waited a fair bit more for my main course to arrive. It
was good when I got it, and I had gotten my starter, luckily.
Wednesday was a bit more productive again, getting a bunch of bugs
squashed and fun BOFs. Actually, this was the day some serious
crack-smoking projects started, namely Quick Boot. As part of this,
"hotplug should start all hardware-related init-scripts" came along.
(So hotplug detects you have a sound card and starts alsa-base. It
detects you have a network interface and configures, and so on.)
Daniel Stone made the X startup a lot faster as well, eliminating a fair
bunch of loops and file system overhead.
I started working on fixing some Openoffice.org bugs on Thursday. It
has a problem where it currently links the normal libtl645.so to
libgnomevfs, which is of course wrong. The patch ended up being
fairly simple, and I'm liking the build system a bit. Scary! One of
the nice things about Openoffice's build system is it saves the applied
patch. This means you can't break it by editing a patch without
removing it, unlike dpatch (for instance). We went to a very nice
resturant in the evening, where somebody stole Karianne's camera. She's
insured and all that, but it's a nuisance nonetheless.
Karianne left on Friday, just after Amaya and a bit before helix
arrived. I worked a bit more on Openoffice, including an upload, but it
didn't build due to some silliness. The problem of testing Openoffice's
build system is fairly large, even with ccache it takes a couple of
hours to build.
I didn't do much on Saturday, got up, breakfast and hung about a little
before leaving for the train station. It has been a good week and I've
gotten a lot of work done. Seeing all the crazy canonical people have
been fun as well, with lots of interesting technical and non-technical
discussions. I'm sorry I had to leave early, but my last two exams are
happening on Monday and Friday, and I should really start preparing for
those.
