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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 109 responses total. |
cross
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response 34 of 109:
| 
Jul 23 17:50 UTC 2008 |
resp:32 Aha. Okay. It strikes me that both picospan and fronttalk
pipe conference data (read: responses) through an external pager
program; I wonder if less or most of any of those can be made to
recognize URLs and do something similar to what pine does. If that
were the case, we could just set the pager and get the same
functionality for free.
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katie
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response 35 of 109:
|
Jul 24 01:54 UTC 2008 |
The new page looks nice. A couple of typos: "frequently" needs an "l."
"Our home, Ann Arbor" needs a space.
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cross
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response 36 of 109:
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Jul 24 02:34 UTC 2008 |
Thank you! I corrected both typos; please let us know if you see any more!
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bellstar
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response 37 of 109:
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Jul 24 04:37 UTC 2008 |
Re #27:
I'm rather bewildered to hear Grex runs a SQL server. Are there any Grex
applications depdendent on it? Has it ever been load tested? Or is it just
"educational?"
As for Perl, mere availability of the interpreter is not enough. PerlCGI
modules must be added to both Perl and Apache (assuming Grex is served on
Apache) to provide the required CGI hooks. These hooks and the "possibility" of
remotely running malicious code through a misconfigured or buggy CGI interface
will make Grex vulnerable to a host of attacks. On the other hand, cgi-bin is
already there so perhaps there won't be much added vulnerability.
I've heard computer security experts have a saying that goes, "usability is
inversely proportional to security." I wonder if Grex isn't already "useful"
enough?.
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nikm
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response 38 of 109:
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Jul 24 09:23 UTC 2008 |
The front page is too cool. But the same theme is not followed in all
pages. It should be consistent in all pages as remmers mentioned. I
would like to help you in always I can. I can read/write HTML, CSS,
little PHP and Perl.
Thanks
Noorul
|
cross
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response 39 of 109:
|
Jul 24 11:16 UTC 2008 |
resp:37 I've found it's not always true that security and usability
are inversely proportional. For instance, many networks become *more*
usable when moving to, e.g., Kerberos for authentication because it
suddenly becomes transparent to most users: instead of entering a
password/passphrase for a variety of different services, the library
just pulls it out of your credentials cache on your behalf. Similarly
with SSH public-key authentication.
Btw: Grex runs MySQL for a few different, administrative types of
things. We also already run mod_perl.
resp:38 Thanks! That'd be great! All of the HTML is
in /var/www/htdocs; feel free to copy that to your directory and go to
town making changes that you see fit. I agree that the pages should
have a consistent look and feel, but haven't had time to update most
of them myself.
I *did* convert the HTML in the main directory to XHTML using tidy,
but it's being servied up by Apache as text/html instead of the
XML+XHTML combo that all the kids love. That's largely a matter of
fixing links.
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remmers
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response 40 of 109:
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Jul 24 14:14 UTC 2008 |
I seem to remember that IE6 has problems with the application/xml+xhtml
MIME type.
|
cross
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response 41 of 109:
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Jul 24 14:51 UTC 2008 |
It does.
Which is why I modified the Apache configuration to rewrite the MIME
type to text/html for .xhtml documents if it detects that it is
serving to Internet Explorer. Similarly for Lynx.
For other browsers, we still want to serve as application/xml+xhtml.
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hera
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response 42 of 109:
|
Jul 25 13:35 UTC 2008 |
I still hate the colors.
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mickeyd
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response 43 of 109:
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Jul 25 22:50 UTC 2008 |
And what happens when STeve finally logs in realizes things have
changed? Will he / can he revert back to the old and lock cross out?
Only 1/2 joking..
|
lar
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response 44 of 109:
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Jul 26 02:15 UTC 2008 |
I say we give cross root and lock steve out. It would probally be
months before he noticed anyway.
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hera
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response 45 of 109:
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Jul 26 15:17 UTC 2008 |
Change the fucking colors!! It looks like diarrhea.....like someone
hershey-squirted all over the screen.
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cross
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response 46 of 109:
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Jul 27 01:36 UTC 2008 |
resp:32 Once again, we mention the need for open source conferencing tools.
I think we need to push strongly on this; maybe we should get with the M-Net
people and collaborate on something new.
|
remmers
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response 47 of 109:
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Jul 27 18:21 UTC 2008 |
Shortest path to something useable would probably be Backtalk +
Fronttalk. Backtalk works well, and fixing up Fronttalk would be a lot
less work than developing something new.
|
cross
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response 48 of 109:
|
Jul 27 19:32 UTC 2008 |
Well, I think the absolute shortest path would be getting either Marcus
or the Thalers to open up the source for either Picospan or YAPP,
respectively. However, I'm not really sure what either partys' positions on
the matter are. At the minimum, with respect to Picospan, it sounds like it
would require a lawyer to figure out the ownership of the source code. If
Marcus were interested, I wonder if someone like Dave Cahill might be
willing to look into that on a pro-bono basis for Grex.
But, history is usually a strong indicator of the future, and it seems
extremely unlikely that either YAPP or Picospan will be open sourced any
time soon. Given that, we need to move to plan B.
And on that front, I absolutely agree that backtalk + fronttalk is the
path of shortest resistance to getting an open source replacement for
picospan on Grex. The problem now shifts to finding the resources to get
fronttalk cleaned up to the extent that it will make a credible replacement.
Fronttalk is ... not a small program. It's not *big*, but it's not
trivial by any measure. And it's not well understood except by Jan, who's
mostly not around these days. And we don't have enough people testing it.
What to do?
Well, it's open source, so if we can get some more peopple who are
decently familiar with Perl and how Backtalk works together, we can work
through the bugs easily enough. I mean, nothing here is particularly
complex; there are no deep mysteries of computer science. It's just
maintenance on a decently sized program. But where are those people going
to come from?
Another option is to try and persuade Jan to work on it again; I suspect
we'd have to pay him (as I suspect part of the reason he hasn't done it
already is that he's busy doing things that make enough money to help him
support his family). Purely to get some information, I sent him an email to
ask him if he'd be willing to do some work if we paid him. However, he
hasn't gotten back to me (or, if he did, it got flagged as spam by GMail and
I never saw it). I suspect, however, that we haven't really got enough
money to make it worth his time.
So we are back to doing the work ourselves. So who is willing to take
up the challenge of working on fronttalk to turn it into a suitable
replacement for Picospan? Note, you don't have to be staff to do this, you
just have to know some Perl.
And who is willing to help out testing it? We *really* need people
to *use* it and tell us where the problems are. And if we decided to make
this change, it's likely that people might have to change some of their
.cfonce files and maybe some minor usage patterns. Are people going to
accept this? Will they work with us to get everyone converted over to the
new software, even if it's slightly incompatible with Picospan?
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denise
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response 49 of 109:
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Jul 28 01:50 UTC 2008 |
I'd be willing to help but I'm not literate in computer technology...
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cross
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response 50 of 109:
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Jul 28 02:07 UTC 2008 |
Well, we need people to test out fronttalk; you run it by running "ft" instead
of "bbs".
However, until we can have a group of people to work on it, all we can get
is data.
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tsty
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response 51 of 109:
|
Jul 29 02:32 UTC 2008 |
from an ssh connection? ummmmmm.....
|
cross
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response 52 of 109:
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Jul 29 02:53 UTC 2008 |
Yup.
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remmers
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response 53 of 109:
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Jul 29 16:08 UTC 2008 |
Yes indeedy. Fronttalk is a web client that runs on a terminal (sorta
like lynx, but more specialized).
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tsty
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response 54 of 109:
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Jul 29 19:53 UTC 2008 |
i'll try it out ...
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tsty
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response 55 of 109:
|
Jul 30 04:13 UTC 2008 |
runin g ft now ... seems mostly the same .. las doesn't work, but
hte -X command does ( not a quibble, just an observation).
and twit filter works JustFine (tm) as well. you can tell, my typing
has improved ....
|
cross
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response 56 of 109:
|
Jul 30 12:00 UTC 2008 |
(What does the "las" command do?)
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nharmon
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response 57 of 109:
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Jul 30 12:50 UTC 2008 |
Whatever .zshrc tells it to?
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tsty
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response 58 of 109:
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Jul 30 15:23 UTC 2008 |
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