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10 types
by Rick Moen 16 Oct '19

16 Oct '19

At yesterday's BALUG meeting, someone hauled out an old chestnut: There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't. -- Unknown I mentioned that there were a couple of responses to that, that I had converted to .signature files. The first was by a poster named Ron Fabre on the Linux Users of Victoria (Melbourne) mailing list (whose comment I .sigged): -- Cheers, There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who Rick … [View More]

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Richard M. Stallman has resigned from FSF and from MIT CSAIL
by Rick Moen 20 Sep '19

20 Sep '19

tl;dr: https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns In the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, controvery arose about dealings between him and the (also now-late) MIT AI scientist Marvin Minsky, and about MIT administration actions related to Epstein. Richard M. Stallman is intimately associated with not just the Free Software Foundation (that he created) but with MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) operation. Fairly recently, there was a discussion … [View More]on one of CSAIL's unadvertised and privately archived mailing lists, csail-related, where Stallman posted comments.[1] Those comments (mostly about matters peripheral to the late Dr. Minsky) became known to MIT alumna, grad student, and mechanical engineer Selam Jie Gano, who is said to have been sent them by a subscriber. Ms. Gano was very incensed by Stallman's views that she asserted were, among other things, 'defending Epstein'. She publishes an essay on Medium entitled 'Remove Richard Stallman. And everyone else horrible in tech': https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794 She also provided what is asserted to be the entire thread to Vice.com's regular 'Motherboard' feature, which published a rather inaccurate piece based largely on her allegations, though providing a curated copy of the mailing list thread with all participant names except Stallman's blacked out. Article: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-… Direct link to Vice.com/Motherboard's curated thread copy: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-09132019142056-0001.html?em… Quite a number of other outfits have picked up the story in various ways. Stallman responded by objecting (with perfect justification, as far as I can see) that in no way was he defending Epstein; that this is just not at all what he said. The persons now running Software Freedom Conservancy took advantage of this squalor by 'calling for' Richard to retire from the free software organisation & movement he created (unsigned because they have _that_ little moral backbone). https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/sep/16/rms-does-not-speak-for-us/ There was also pressure for Richard to resign from his position at CSAIL (where ISTR he's been Visiting Professor). He has now done so, citing 'pressure on MIT' -- along with resigning as President and Board of Directors member at Free Software Foundation. IMO, this affair (e.g., things like the unsigned editorial from the jackals at Software Freedom Conservancy) has opportunism written all over it. One of the less-sucky bits of news/analysis (apparently just before things came to a head) was here: https://fudzilla.com/news/49393-stallman-defends-himself-over-epstein-comme… https://lwn.net/ have not yet caught up with events, and can be expected as usual to be guarded to a fault when they do. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/ has some discussion, but likewise has not caught up with events. [1] None of what I'm writing here imply endorsement of Richard's assertions in the mailing list thread, by the way. In fact, I very much do not concur with some, and would have, among other things, politely corrected his factually incorrect understanding of the legal concept of 'assault'. -- Cheers, Views expressed are my own. Rick Moen rick(a)linuxmafia.com McQ! (4x80) [View Less]

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Re: [BALUG-Talk] 10 types
by aaronco36 20 Sep '19

20 Sep '19

Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote: There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand hexadecimal and f the rest. Also saw the following variant: There are 10 kinds of people in the world: the 1 who understands hexadecimal and f the rest. aaronco36(a)sdf.org ---

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Re: [BALUG-Talk] [BALUG-Announce] Re: BALUG: meeting: Tu 2019-09-17 & other BALUG News
by aaronco36 17 Sep '19

17 Sep '19

Another trending topic that tonight's BALUG meeting attendees might consider discussing in-person is that of o RMS's controversial resignation from FSF and from MIT CSAIL. See at least these earlier BALUG-Talk posts before this one, today, at ... - https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-talk/2019-September/000174.html - https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-talk/2019-September/000175.html - https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-talk/2019-September/000176.html aaronco36(a)sdf.org ---… [View More]

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Re: [BALUG-Talk] [BALUG-Announce] Reminder: TODAY!: BALUG: meeting: Tu 2019-07-16 Debian! ... & other BALUG News
by Rick Moen 16 Jul '19

16 Jul '19

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli(a)cal.berkeley.edu): >o At this meeting - we'll have a someone with 20 years experience using > and doing systems administration of Debian. Hey, I've been administering Debian since 2.1 'slink', as well, so that makes two decades for me, too. (The Official Debian installer was rather dreadful, then, and the replacement d-i installer introduced with 'sarge' (3.1) is miles better. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller > >o Debian Birthday (… [View More]

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BerkeleyLUG meetup Sunday 2018-11-11
by Rick Moen 12 Nov '18

12 Nov '18

A posting quoted below has just been retroactively removed from BerkeleyLUG's Google Group archive by LUG original founder Jack Deslippe, who was kind enough to so inform me of that action (for which my genuine thanks). His cited reason: 'I think it uses unnecessary language in places when describing the individual'. I of course respect Jack's right to make decisions for that Google Group. In my view, this account of events today used _absolutely necessary_ language describing the … [View More]individual and his actions (and in alluding to similar actions at many prior meetings). I posted it in public _specifically_ because repeated attempts to privately fix this problem failed and instead it worsened -- and specifically to create a public record. Thus this re-post: to un-disappear my comments. (Views expressed are my own.) ----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick(a)linuxmafia.com> ----- Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2018 14:28:34 -0800 From: Rick Moen <rick(a)linuxmafia.com> To: BerkeleyLUG <berkeleylug(a)googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: AC Power, Wi-Fi but not from venue itself: Re: BerkeleyLUG meetup this Sunday 2018-11-11 12Noon STANDARD Time at 85C Bakery Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli(a)cal.berkeley.edu): > Have had 4 of us here so far ... But also, now, two fewer, following the latest round of John Regan aka Giovanni aka whatever-it-is-this-week misconduct right there, today, at the BerkeleyLUG table. I've had a near-contemporaneous account of what happened. Sadly, I had a conflicting obligation in Milpitas, otherwise I most certainly would have brought a screeching halt to this nonsense. Honestly, hasn't John wrecked enough BerkeleyLUG meetings already, or do y'all intend to keep just sitting there and only reacting long after the fact, and with little or no consequence? What I heard happening was: John Regan walked in and saw three women sitting at the table BerkeleyLUG traditionally uses. He started hassling the women and telling them they had to move because this is a reserved table. Michael Paoli reminded John that no, this is not a reserved table and never is one, nor are any of the others downstairs. John ignored Michael, continued to give the women a hard time, and advised them that he was finding them another table. Kim Davalos spoke up to reiterate what Michael P. said, that _no_, this is not a reserved table. John told the women that they should ignore Kim because she arrived late. After being thus browbeaten, the women finally got up and moved elsewhere. After the fact, 85c Bakery management confirmed exactly what Michael and Kim had said, and were informed of the repeatedly and continually misbehaving person who evidently needs stronger social control so he can no longer run amok at BerkeleyLUG. Arrangements were made with the manager in the future for them to step in sooner the next time this person cannot behave in a civilised fashion to require him to immediately leave. Today's incident, like many of the others John has inflicted on BerkeleyLUG this year, are in my view simply disgraceful and should be curbed instantly rather than indulged. Already, the _immediate_ result of today's incident was that two regulars, disgusted with the failure to enforce obvious standards of acceptable behaviour, walked out and went elsewhere. I've privately warned after past incidents that permitting this clown to run amok at BerkeleyLUG is quite likely to destroy the group if proper corrective action is not taken. Today, I'm reiterating that warning publicly. You already know what to do. End this. Next time, stop sitting on your tochises, get up, and do it. Seriously, people, this isn't even difficult to figure out. (See also .signature.) -- Cheers, "I am a member of a civilization (IAAMOAC). Step back Rick Moen from anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet rick(a)linuxmafia.com they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating McQ! (4x80) the civilization you inherited." -- David Brin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BerkeleyLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to berkeleylug+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to berkeleylug(a)googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/berkeleylug. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. ----- End forwarded message ----- [View Less]

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Fwd: [HackerEarth] Partnership RISC-V Linux Hackathon - RISC-V Summit
by Michael Paoli 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

----- Forwarded message from suhail(a)hackerearth.com ----- Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2018 15:34:05 +0530 From: "Suhail Ameen" <suhail(a)hackerearth.com> Subject: [HackerEarth] Partnership RISC-V Linux Hackathon - RISC-V Summit To: balug-contact(a)balug.org Hey there, My name is Suhail and I lead the community efforts at HackerEarth <http://hackerearth.com/>, one of the fastest growing developer communities in the world with over 2+ million developers. I am reaching … [View More]

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/proc and /sys filessytems
by Michael Paoli 21 Sep '18

21 Sep '18

/proc and /sys filesystems ... Some bits from yesterday's BALUG meeting. There was some response and more information that also came up on the SF-LUG list: http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q3/013428.html http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2018q3/013430.html And (mostly) from the BALUG meeting ... mostly lots of folks various favorite bits and other things /proc and /sys discussed: Is it virtual? Don't have dmidecode(8) or similar? $ cat /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_name … [View More]Can even work that into use in a script, e.g. #!/bin/sh #... case ... 'Bochs'|'HVM domU'|'VMware'*|'VirtualBox') The above would respectively match virtual machines of (at least some of) the varieties: QEMU/KVM Xen VMware VirtualBox I have /dev/sda and /dev/sdb as internal drives, I insert two USB flash drives at about the same time, giving me now also /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd. One's about 2 GB in size, and the other about 32 GB. Which is which? $ grep . /sys/block/sd[cd]/size /sys/block/sdc/size:4089856 /sys/block/sdd/size:62530624 $ What are their exact sizes? ... Oh, we also have that above - in the number of 512 byte blocks I'm done with /dev/sdc, I pull it out. $ ls -d /dev/sd[c-z] /dev/sdd $ At present I'm not using /dev/sdd (nothing having it open or mounted from it, etc.), I'd really like it as /dev/sdc rather than sdb, but I don't feel like taking my fingers away from the keyboard or adding the wear and tear to the USB connectors. This removes it: # echo 1 > /sys/block/sdd/device/delete # $ ls -d /dev/sd[c-z] 2>>/dev/null $ This scans for drives: # (>>/dev/null 2>&1 ls -d /sys/class/scsi_host/host*/scan && for tmp in /sys/class/scsi_host/host*/scan; do echo '- - -' > "$tmp"; done) # $ ls -d /dev/sd[c-z] && grep . /sys/block/sd[c-z]/size /dev/sdc 62530624 $ I plug in an additional USB flash device: $ ls -d /dev/sd[c-z] /dev/sdc /dev/sdd $ What if their sizes weren't all that different, but I wanted to know which was which? ls -d /sys/block/sd[cd]/device/* $ (cd /sys/block && grep . sd[c-z]/device/vendor sd[c-z]/device/model) | sort sdc/device/model:Cruzer Blade sdc/device/vendor:SanDisk sdd/device/model:USB 2.0 sdd/device/vendor: $ /proc/[0-9]* - PIDs (and that much will match not only Linux, but also as far as I'm aware, any other *nix flavor (notably Unix) that also has a mounted /proc filesystem) /proc/[!0-9]* - lots of other interesting/useful non-PID stuff /proc/PID/fd/* - open file descriptors for the PID - these are represented as symbolic links to the physical pathname of the file (at least for filesystem files), if the file is unlinked, it will have " (deleted)" on the end; 0 is stdin, 1 stdout, 2 stderr. I have some PID of some something I'm unfamiliar with - maybe it's undocumented ... maybe I want to know if it's writing some log information ... may be quite useful to look at /proc/PID/fd/[12] - it may possibly be there, ... or possibly some other file(s) it has open (especially if it's not using syslog). File unlinked, but need to save/retrieve the data (it's still open by the PID)?: $ cat /proc/PID/fd/file_descriptor_number > file_to_save_data_in /proc/PID/environ - what's in the environment (each ASCII null terminated) /proc/PID/exe - the binary executable /proc/PID/cwd - Current Working Directory When exactly did that process start? $ stat -c '%z' /proc/PID Grew (or shrunk) the size of a device (e.g. LUN), want the kernel to know about it? E.g.: # echo 1 > /sys/block/sdb/device/rescan /proc/cpuinfo - lots of useful information about the CPU(s), flags may be of particular note (e.g. is your CPU 64 or 32 bit - how old of which kernel/distribution can it still run ... or run without additional kernel parameters to enable use of some CPU feature present on the CPU but which the CPU doesn't "advertise"). What CPU hardware bugs are worked around (or partially so) via kernel software? How many cores? ... /proc/cmdline - what arguments were given to the kernel at boot? /proc/version - kernel version /proc/sys - a precursor to the /sys filesystem, also much kernel information and tunable parameters there - see also sysctl(8) /proc/mounts - kernel's idea of what's mounted and how - this is especially useful when /etc/mtab doesn't fully or well provide that information. Note that for many distributions, /etc/mtab may be a symbolic link to /proc/mounts. Especially the /proc filesystem, and also /sys filesystem are relatively essential in Linux. E.g. without /proc filesystem mounted, many common utilities, e.g. ps(1), won't work. Backup /proc and /sys filesystems? You generally would *not* want to do that. They're pseudo (/"virtual") filesystems, most notably reflecting lots of state information of the current running system. But they're ephemeral/volatile - prior contents don't really matter at all after a reboot. [View Less]

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Fwd: Raw Bandwidth and other competitive Internet access providers need your help at the FCC today!
by Michael Paoli 29 Aug '18

29 Aug '18

If one cares about competitiveness among ISPs, choice, and generally having quality options, this is one to pay attention to and take action on. If you prefer negligible choices, and ISP services to only be provided by the large monopoly/oligopoly players, and generally with poor quality, higher prices, and most or all other players squeezed out, then feel free to completely and totally ignore this. ----- Forwarded message from mdurkin(a)rawbw.com ----- Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:03:31 -… [View More]0700 (PDT) From: "Mike Durkin" <mdurkin(a)rawbw.com> Subject: Raw Bandwidth and other competitive Internet access providers need your help at the FCC today! To: michael.paoli(a)cal.berkeley.edu Dear Raw Bandwidth Customer or former customer: It's a rarity that I email all of our customers (and some former customers), but we are at a critical moment for competitive Internet access, so I hope you'll excuse the intrusion. In early May, USTelecom, a lobbying group headed by large incumbent monopoly phone companies AT&T and Verizon, filed a petition at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to "forbear", that is to no longer enforce, provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which are critical to many independent Internet access providers like Raw Bandwidth reaching its customers with service. The Telecom Act rewrite in 1996 requires the incumbent phone companies to unbundle and rent discrete network elements to competitors at regulated rates--especially elements such as the pairs of copper wire running through the streets that they have a monopoly over and have no competition for--so that competitive providers can also use the elements in their services. I am writing to ask you to take action by filing comments at the FCC in support of independent Internet access providers (we'll help you do it), to tell the FCC what it means to you to have choice in your Internet provider, and to urge them to deny the petition. (The petition would also affect competition for voice phone service.) Here is a good article that summarizes a lot of what's at stake: https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/11/small-internet-providers-face-a-fight-f… (Note this article says the FCC would vote on the petition on August 6th, but that's incorrect; August 6th was a filing deadline for opening comments, and September 5th is the next deadline for reply comments. The FCC won't vote on the petition until late this year at the earliest, but informal comments need to be filed now.) Explaining what's at stake takes a lot of words, so I've made a web page that explains what the petition is all about, and also contains links to help you easily file comments at the FCC (all done online) to support competitive Internet access. Please take a look at the web page and instructions here http://www.rawbandwidth.com/clec/forbearancepetition.html The short version is that if the FCC grants the petition as requested, independent DSL and Ethernet over Copper providers like Raw Bandwidth will see cost increases (due to removal of rate regulation from monopoly network elements only available from incumbent monopoly providers like AT&T--a single provider of the element to any particular location) that will result in an increase in retail rates, and some coverage areas are likely to be lost over time. The petition should not be granted under the standards it is supposed to be judged on, and providers like Raw Bandwidth are filing detailed rebuttals to the petition, but the current FCC and political climate is one for gutting regulations, so despite that it should be denied, there is a significant risk that it may be granted. Please take the time to weigh in with the FCC and tell them how important it is to you to have competitive choices at competitive prices, and urge them to deny the petition. Your comments submitted to the FCC by September 5th are important! I don't intend to send any followups to this email by email so as not to be any more intrusive. Instead I will post updates to the status of the petition at the same web page http://www.rawbandwidth.com/clec/forbearancepetition.html including links to the FCC's decision once available and an explanation of how the result affects our business and service to customers. As always, thanks for your business and support! Mike Durkin Raw Bandwidth mdurkin(a)rawbw.com ----- End forwarded message ----- [View Less]

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(forw) BALUG-Talk unsubscribe notification
by Rick Moen 10 Aug '18

10 Aug '18

(This happened automatically because the address has not been deliverable for a long time.) In case people had not heard, longtime Bay Area Linux activist Darlene Wallach died of cancer on July 12, 2017. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-fund-darlene-wallach-s-cancer-cure-… ----- Forwarded message from mailman-bounces(a)lists.balug.org ----- Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2018 09:00:02 -0700 From: mailman-bounces(a)lists.balug.org To: balug-talk-owner(a)lists.balug.org Subject: BALUG-Talk … [View More]

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