Just A Reminder About My Public Key

February 23rd, 2008 by dlove

No, it’s not in one of those public auto-checkable thingies (I need to get around to doing this as well as getting it signed by others), but a public key IS available.

It’s at http://www.nighton.net/nighton_key.asc.

After you download it, go System -> Administration -> Software Sources.

Click the Authentication tab. Click Import Key File, select nighton_key.asc from wherever you downloaded it to. After that, you should stop getting any error messages about the lack of a key.

Alternatively, you can use this quick one-liner in a terminal:

wget -q http://www.nighton.net/nighton_key.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Hope that helps!

(This was brought to my attention by a blog post from Andre Gondim.)

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Mugshot 1.1.58 Builds (gutsy) For Powerpc

February 7th, 2008 by dlove

Thanks (once again) to prometoys, there are now powerpc builds for gutsy available in the repository.

As a side note, after chatting with Heikki Henriksen about the work for Mugshot on Debian, I agree completely that our first priority should be to get all of the Online Desktop packages into Debian first, and then worry about Ubuntu syncing against that. Heikki’s work has greatly simplified my life especially considering I’m new to this whole Debian / Ubuntu packaging thing. If you’re interested in tracking the progress or even better want to lend a helping hand, you can keep up to date at http://alioth.debian.org/projects/online-desktop/.

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Mugshot 1.1.58

February 4th, 2008 by dlove

The latest version of Mugshot is now available in the repositories. As always, ppc builds for gutsy and hardy are welcome. Also, as always, no guarantees that your machine won’t become self-aware and decide to wipe out the human race (and yes, I am looking forward to watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles tonight). Hopefully the hardy users will have a bit more luck with this build, but I’m not holding my breath. I need to do some more digging to see how the underlying libraries have changed in order to figure out exactly what is going on. If you have any bug reports, suggestions, etc. while using these packages, feel free to drop me a line. I’d hate to bother the Mugshot developers with something I managed to screw up.

Remember, there is “no fate but what we make.”

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Mugshot on Hardy

January 3rd, 2008 by dlove

At the reqeust of alex_mayorga, I’ve built hardy packages for both i386 and amd64. These haven’t been tested, so they may not work, break your system, etc. I did notice what appeared to be some non-fatal linker errors, but without a chroot or another install, again, I can’t really test them. Any reports of problems would be helpful. The repository line is:

deb http://www.nighton.net/ hardy main

Also, I was wondering if there’s alot of interest in having me try and build packages for all of the OnlineDesktop components. I’ve got to do some research first to make sure I’m not duplicating work, and even then I can’t make any promises. But if there is enough interest, I’ll definitely look into it.

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Mugshot 1.1.56

December 22nd, 2007 by dlove

I was able to get on svn.debian.org today, so I’ve built new packages. They’re rebased off of Heikki’s packages, yet again. Alot of great work has been done on separating out the components and simplifying things overall. I’m grateful as it’s made my life easier. If you’ve been using the firefox extension, take note: it is now in a separate package named firefox-mugshot. There is also a dev package available as well. I’ve got i386 and amd64 builds available for gutsy. If you’ve been using the repository, change feisty to gutsy in your repository list. If you have any problems with the packages, please let me know!

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A Bit of a Rant…

December 21st, 2007 by dlove

Well, I’ve finally got my pbuilder environment updated. It’s far easier than it used to be. The package ubuntu-dev-tools contains a wonderful pbuilder-dist script that handles most of the details (though I had to modify it some - removing some quotes around arguments to get it to work for me under gutsy). And I promise that guide is coming! It’ll be far shorter now, which I think is a good thing. But when trying to update the Mugshot packages, I ran into a bit of a hitch. I wanted to be sure to base them off of Heikki’s packages. Unfortunately, svn.debian.org kept timing out for me. So I did the responsible thing and logged onto the Debian IRC channel to make sure it was just me. Turns out it is - still not sure why. Contrary to many Ubuntu users’ beliefs, they were incredibly helpful and supportive. However…

There’s always the catch, isn’t there?

Of course, there was the initial “Why can’t Ubuntu users tell the difference between Debian and Ubuntu?” bit. But when I explained what I was trying to do, that went away. Other users tried, and they got in fine. In fact, I started to have a great conversation with one of the users. He (or she - it’s IRC, I don’t know) and I were discussing some of our experiences with different distros. A bit of a bonding moment (which I believe the Ubuntu and Debian communities need more of). Of course, within barely a minute we were cut off by a moderator of the channel. Now, I realize they were just doing their job. After all, a Debian support channel isn’t the appropriate forum for having a personal conversation. But what about community? There needs to be some balance. Rules and regulations are all fine and good, but with some discrimination. Especially considering the recent bad attitudes of Debian vs. Ubuntu. Next time I run into a problem with Debian, am I going to use their support channels? No. What if it effects more than just me?

As a side note, I did apologize for my breach of conduct. But with that said, I’ve never experienced that degree of rudeness with the Ubuntu community. Considering we’re the corporate whores, you would think we’d end up being the jackasses. Maybe it’s the code of conduct, maybe it’s the social contract, maybe it’s just community norms, but I can’t help but wish we could all get along better.

End rant.

If anyone wants to give feedback (especially Debian community members - please, if I’ve offended you, let me know!) feel free.

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Why I’ve Been Busy

November 6th, 2007 by dlove

My apologies to all of the Mugshot fans out there. I haven’t been keeping up with the builds lately, but for good reason. If any of you out there are in the Rochester, NY area, my thesis defense at the Rochester Institute of Technology is now scheduled. The announcement follows…

Alternate Syntax for XSLT

David Love

http://www.cs.rit.edu/~dpl1926/

November 15, 2007

2:00pm

GCCIS Room 3000

Advisor: Dr. Axel-Tobias Schreiner

Reader: Dr. James Heliotis

Observer: Dr. Stanislaw Radziszowski

Abstract:

XSLT is a transform language for XML that is defined over XML. In other words, XSLT is a language that performs transforms on XML documents, and XSLT programs are themselves XML documents. While XSLT is by nature a functional language, its definition as an XML application obfuscates this fact. Previous research projects have taken the XML-Infoset and provided an alternate syntax in the form of S-expressions, along with providing languages to perform transformations of the new representation in manners similar to that of XSLT.
For example, SXML / SXSLT performs this function by embedding said languages in Scheme.

XLove applies modern principles of object-oriented design, namely design patterns, to this problem. Xl is an alternate syntax for the XML-Infoset. It maintains a clear distinction between attributes and elements (while having a concise notation for namespaces). The syntax is built into a representation over the Document Object Model by observers responding to parsing events.
Xlt is an alternate syntax for XSLT designed to emphasize the functional nature of the language. A set of visitors transforms the input Document Object Model tree into an output tree by mapping the Xlt abstract syntax tree to XSLT. The resultant document is a valid XSLT program over the Document Object Model which can than be directly executed or output as an XML file.

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