 Freie Software |
 p2p |
 Politik |
 Physik |
 Projekte |
 zurück |
 Rollenspiele |
 Geschichten |
 Gedichte |
 Lieder |
 Magie |
    |
||||||||||
Light
How to make companies act ethically
→ comment on Slashdot concerning Unexpected methods to promote freedom?
Was it really Apple who ended DRM? Would they have done so without the protests and evangelizing against DRM? Without protesters in front of Apple Stores? And without the many people telling their friends to just not accept DRM?
That “preaching” created a situation where Apple could reap monetary gain from doing the right thing. You see how they act when the stakes are diffecent.
Insert a scaled screenshot in emacs org-mode
@marjoleink asked on identi.ca1, if it is possible to use emacs org-mode for showing scaled screenshots inline while writing. Since I thought I’d enjoy some hacking, I decided to take the challenge.
-
Matthew Gregg: @marjoleink "way of life" thing again, but if you can invest some time, org-mode is a really powerful note keeping environment. → Marjolein Katsma: @mcg I'm sure it is - but seriously: can you embed a diagram or screenshot, scale it, and link it to itself? ↩
Sending email to many people with Emacs Wanderlust
I recently needed to send an email to many people1.
Putting all of them into the BCC field did not work (mail rejected by provider) and when I split it into 2 emails, many did not see my mail because it was flagged as potential spam (they were not in the To-Field)2.
I did not want to put them all into the To-Field, because that would have spread their email-addresses around, which many would not want3.
So I needed a different solution. Which I found in the extensibility of emacs and wanderlust4. It now carries the name wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer.
You simply write the email as usual via wl-draft, then put all email addresses you want write to into a buffer and call M-x wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer. It asks you about the buffer with email addresses, then shows you all addresses and asks for confirmation.
Then it sends one email after the other, with a randomized wait of 0-10 seconds between messages to avoid flagging as spam.
If you want to use it, just add the following to your .emacs:
(defun wl-draft-clean-mail-address (address) (replace-regexp-in-string "," "" address))
(defun wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers (addresses) (loop for address in addresses do (progn (wl-user-agent-insert-header "To" (wl-draft-clean-mail-address address)) (let ((wl-interactive-send nil)) (wl-draft-send)) (sleep-for (random 10)))))
(defun wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers-from-buffer (&optional addresses-buffer-name) "Send a mail to multiple recipients - one recipient at a time" (interactive "BBuffer with one address per line") (let ((addresses nil)) (with-current-buffer addresses-buffer-name (setq addresses (split-string (buffer-string) "\n"))) (if (y-or-n-p (concat "Send this mail to " (mapconcat 'identity addresses ", "))) (wl-draft-send-to-multiple-receivers addresses))))
Happy Hacking!
-
The email was about the birth of my second child, and I wanted to inform all people I care about (of whom I have the email address), which amounted to 220 recipients. ↩
-
Naturally this technique could be used for real spamming, but to be frank: People who send spam won’t need it. They will already have much more sophisticated methods. This little trick just reduces the inconvenience brought upon us by the measures which are necessary due to spam. Otherwise I could just send a mail with 1000 receivers in the BCC field - which is how it should be. ↩
-
It only needs one careless friend, and your connections to others get tracked in facebook and the likes. For more information on Facebook, see Stallman about Facebook. ↩
-
Sure, there are also template mails and all such, but learning to use these would consume just as much time as extending emacs - and would be much less flexible: Should I need other ways to transform my mails, I’ll be able to just reuse my code. ↩
Bootstrapping the Freenet WoT with GnuPG - and GnuPG with Freenet
Intro
When you enter the freenet Web of Trust, you first need to get some trust from people by solving captchas. And even when people trust you somehow, you have no way to prove your identity in an automatic way, so you can’t create identities which freenet can label as trusted without manual intervention from your side.
Proposal
To change this, we can use the Web of Trust used in GnuPG to infer trust relationships between freenet WoT IDs.
Practically that means:
- Write a message: “I am the WoT ID USK@
” (replace with the
Anonymous against trapwire - on camera??
An answer to a reddit-comment by tedemang to the article 1540 Anonymous vs. TrapWire: "We must, at all costs, shut this system down and render it useless".
Easily converting ris-citations to bibtex with emacs and bibutils
The problem
Nature only gives me ris-formatted citations, but I use bibtex.
Also ris is far from human readable.
The background
ris can be reformatted to bibtext, but doing that manually disturbs my workflow when getting references while taking note about a paper in emacs.
I tend to search online for references, often just using google scholar, so when I find a ris reference, the first data I get for the ris-citation is a link.
The solution
Emacs
Cross platform, Free Software, almost all features you can think of, graphical and in the shell, learn once - use for everything. » Get Emacs «
Emacs is a self-documenting, extensible editor, a development environment and a platform for lisp-programs - for example programs to make programming easier, but also for todo-lists on steroids, reading email, posting to identi.ca, and a host of other stuff (learn lisp).
It is also one of the origins of GNU and free software (Emacs History).
In Markdown-mode it looks like this:
A complete Mercurial branching strategy
This is a complete branching strategy for Mercurial with optional adaptions for maintaining multiple releases1. It shows you all the actions you may need to take, except for those already described in the guide Mercurial in workflows.
For examples it uses the command-line UI, but it can easily be used with graphical Mercurial interfaces like TortoiseHG, too.
Summary
Firstoff, any model to be used by people should boil down to simple rules. Programming is complex enough without having to worry about elaborate branching rules. This model uses 3 simple rules:
(1) you do all the work on
default2 - except for hotfixes.(2) on
stableyou only do hotfixes, merges for release3 and tagging for release. Only maintainers4 touch stable.(3) you can use arbitrary feature-branches5, as long as you don’t call them
defaultorstable. They always start at default (since you do all the work on default).
Diagram
To visualize the structure, here’s a 3-tiered diagram. To the left are the actions of developers (commits and feature branches) and in the center the tasks for maintainers (release and hotfix). The users to the right just use the stable branch.6
An overview of the branching strategy. Click the image to get the emacs org-mode ditaa-source.
Practial Actions
Now we can look at all the actions you will ever need to do in this model:7
Initialize (only needed once)
create the repo:
hg init reponame; cd reponamefirst commit:
(edit); hg ci -m "message"create the stable branch and do the first release:
hg branch stable; hg tag tagname; hg up default; hg merge stable; hg ci -m "merge stable into default: ready for more development"
Regular development
commit changes:
(edit); hg ci -m "message"continue development after a release:
hg update; (edit); hg ci -m "message"
Feature Branches
start a larger feature:
hg branch feature-x; (edit); hg ci -m "message"continue with the feature:
hg update feature-x; (edit); hg ci -m "message"merge the feature:
hg update default; hg merge feature-x; hg ci -m "merged feature x into default"close and merge the feature when you are done:
hg update feature-x; hg ci --close-branch -m "finished feature x"; hg update default; hg merge feature-x; hg ci -m "merged finished feature x into default"
Tasks for Maintainers
apply a hotfix8:
hg up stable; (edit); hg ci -m "message"; hg up default; hg merge stable; hg ci -m "merge stable into default: ready for more development"do a release9:
hg up stable; hg merge default; hg ci -m "merged default into stable for release" ; hg tag tagname; hg up default ; hg merge stable ; hg ci -m "merged stable into default: ready for more development"
-
if you need to maintain multiple very different releases simultanously, see ⁰ or 10 for adaptions ↩
-
defaultis the default branch. That’s the named branch you use when you don’t explicitely set a branch. Its alias is the empty string, so if no branch is shown in the log (hg log), you’re on the default branch. Thanks to John for asking! ↩ -
If you want to release the changes from
defaultin smaller chunks, you can also graft specific changes into a release preparation branch and merge that instead of directly merging default into stable. This can be useful to get real-life testing of the distinct parts. For details see the extension Graft changes into micro-releases. ↩ -
Maintainers are those who do releases, while they do a release. At any other time, they follow the same patterns as everyone else. If the release tasks seem a bit long, keep in mind that you only need them when you do the release. Their goal is to make regular development as easy as possible, so you can tell your non-releasing colleagues “just work on default and everything will be fine”. ↩
-
This model does not use bookmarks, because they don’t offer benefits which outweight the cost of introducing another concept, and because named branches for feature branches offer the advantage, that new programmers never get the code from a feature-branch when they clone the repository. For local work and small features, bookmarks can be used quite well, though, and since this model does not define their use, it also does not limit it.
Additionally bookmarks could be useful for feature branches, if you use many of them (in that case reusing names is a real danger and not just a rare annoyance, and if you have a recent Mercurial, you can use the@bookmark to signify the entry point for new clones) or if you use release branches:
“What are people working on right now?” →hg bookmarks
“Which lines of development do we have in the project?” →hg branches↩ -
Those users who want external verification can restrict themselves to the tagged releases - potentially GPG signed by trusted 3rd-party reviewers. GPG signatures are treated like hotfixes: reviewers sign on stable (via
hg signwithout options) and merge into default. Signing directly on stable reduces the possibility of signing the wrong revision. ↩ -
hg pullandhg pushto transfer changes andhg mergewhen you have multiple heads on one branch are implied in the actions: you can use any kind of repository structure and synchronization scheme. The practical actions only assume that you synchronize your repositories with the other contributors at some point. ↩ -
Here a hotfix is defined as a fix which must be applied quickly out-of-order, for example to fix a security hole. It prompts a bugfix-release which only contains already stable and tested changes plus the hotfix. ↩
-
If your project needs a certain release preparation phase (like translations), then you can simply assign a task branch. Instead of merging to stable, you merge to the task branch, and once the task is done, you merge the task branch to stable. An Example: Assume that you need to update translations before you release anything. (next part: init: you only need this once) When you want to do the first release which needs to be translated, you update to the revision from which you want to make the release and create the “translation” branch:
hg update default; hg branch translation; hg commit -m "prepared the translation branch". All translators now update to the translation branch and do the translations. Then you merge it into stable:hg update stable; hg merge translation; hg ci -m "merged translated source for release". After the release you merge stable back into default as usual. (regular releases) If you want to start translating the next time, you just merge the revision to release into the translation branch:hg update translation; hg merge default; hg commit -m "prepared translation branch". Afterwards you merge “translation” into stable and proceed as usual. ↩ -
If you want to adapt the model to multiple very distinct releases, simply add multiple release-branches (i.e.
release-x). Thenhg graftthe changes you want to use from default or stable into the releases and merge the releases into stable to ensure that the relationship of their changes to current changes is clear, recorded and will be applied automatically by Mercurial in future merges11. If you use multiple tagged releases, you need to merge the releases into each other in order - starting from the oldest and finishing by merging the most recent one into stable - to record the same information as with release branches. Additionally it is considered impolite to other developers to keep multiple heads in one branch, because with multiple heads other developers do not know the canonical tip of the branch which they should use to make their changes - or in case of stable, which head they should merge to for preparing the next release. That’s why you are likely better off creating a branch per release, if you want to maintain many very different releases for a long time. If you only use tags on stable for releases, you need one merge per maintained release to create a bugfix version of one old release. By adding release branches, you reduce that overhead to one single merge to stable per affected release by stating clearly, that changes to old versions should never affect new versions, except if those changes are explicitely merged into the new versions. If the bugfix affects all releases, release branches require two times as many actions as tagged releases, though: You need to graft the bugfix into every release and merge the release into stable.12 ↩ -
If for example you want to ignore that change to an old release for new releases, you simply merge the old release into stable and use
hg revert --all -r stablebefore committing the merge. ↩ -
A rule of thumb for deciding between tagged releases and release branches is: If you only have a few releases you maintain at the same time, use tagged releases. If you expect that most bugfixes will apply to all releases, starting with some old release, just use tagged releases. If bugfixes will only apply to one release and the current development, use tagged releases and merge hotfixes only to stable. If most bugfixes will only apply to one release and not to the current development, use release branches. ↩
Creating nice logs with revsets in Mercurial
In the mercurial list Stanimir Stamenkov asked how to get rid of intermediate merges in the log to simplify reading the history (and to not care about missing some of the details).
Update: Since Mercurial 2.4 you can simply use
hg log -Gr "branchpoint()"
I did some tests for that and I think the nicest representation I found is this:
hg log -Gr "(all() - merge()) or head()"
The result
What can Freenet do well already?
this just happened to me in the #freenet IRC channel at freenode.net (somewhat edited):
toad_1: what can freenet do well already? [18:38]
sharing and retrieving files asynchronously, freemail, IRC2, publishing sites without need of a central server, sharing code repositories [18:39]
-
toad alias Matthew Toseland is the main developer of freenet. He tends to see more of the remaining challenges and fewer of the achievements than me - which is a pretty good trait for someone who builds a system to which we might have to entrust our basic right of free speech if the worls goes on like this. From a PR perspective it is a pretty horrible trait, though, because he tends to forget to tell people what freenet can already do well :) ↩
