Lundi prochain, nous aurons 3 ateliers :

•  à 10H30, Kevin animera un débat sur comment améliorer la vie au bureau,
•  à 11H30, Bastien nous parlera de Japanimation,
•  à 12H30, Louis nous parlera du 25C3, une conférence de hackers organisée par le Chaos Computer Club.

Sinon, les slides de ma présentation d’hier sont disponibles : Code Reviews (PDF).

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Magnetic tape isn't just dead, but it is also deteriorating. 

It is breaking down, falling apart, and what was once thought to be nearly permanent is proving to be extraordinarily fragile. 

Audio tape was used for decades as a way to disseminate music, seminars, audio histories, speeches, news, by folklorist, in short--our culture.  Hydrolysis, the breakdown of the glue that holds the little magnetic bits to the tape, is becoming more prevalent.  The life span of tapes, under the best circumstances, is up to 15 years before things start getting sticky.  In other words anything created before 1994 has almost certainly started to lose its fidelity.

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Bonjour à tous,

après une année 2008 où j'ai pu apprécier le dynamisme de la communauté Drupal France, je suis certain comme beaucoup d'entre nous que 2009 va voir une accélération de Drupal en France.

Je fais ma petite part d'évangélisation, et ça marche. Drupal "hook" vraiment bien les devs, les directeurs techniques comme les chefs de projets !

Mais maintenant que j'ai promis les merveilles de Drupal aux boites que je connais, je me heurte à un soucis vraiment rageant -- et qui discrédite un peu la communauté :

Il y a très peu de dev connaissant bien Drupal disponibles en freelance ou pour un CDD/CDI... :-(

Hors, si les prestataires sont importants pour l'écosystème, l'absence de freelance dénote un certain manque de richesse et de maturité -- et de souplesse aussi.

Comment faire pour accélérer le mouvement côté freelances, jeunes dev (étudiants...), etc ? Où se cache les futurs devs freelance Drupal ?

Des idées ? Est-ce que j'exagère sur ce point ? Et-ce que d'autres que moi ressentent ce problème ?

France

The 2008 Hugo award nominations have opened -- if you were a member of the 2008 WorldCon in Denver, or have bought a membership to the 2009 WorldCon in Montreal, you're eligible to nominate. I'll be sending in my nominations this week, and just in case you were wondering, here's the stuff I wrote that's eligible for this year's ballot:

* Best novel: Little Brother, Tor, 2008
* Best related book: Content, Tachyon, 2008
* Best novella: True Names (with Benjamin Rosenbaum), published in Fast Forward, Pyr Books, 2008, edited by Lou Anders * Best novelette: The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, Tor.com, July 2008

No matter what you plan on nominate, I urge you to send in your form! Hugo participation seems to dwindle every year. The present form's just a PDF, but they're promising a web-based one shortly (I'll post again when it's live).

Hugos

Redbeard sez, "With all of the recent postings on cephalopod oriented erotica (or tentacle porn, as it is coarsely called), I had wondered if you had not stumbled on this musing on why those fixated on tentacles really lack imagination, and how other invertebrate oriented erotica can be really really hot. Invertebrates are amazingly kinky, as pointed out in some lovely marine science blog The Oyster's Garter as it looks at the sex lives of tunicates, slugs, and more. So really, why can't we get beyond the tentacle, I ask?" Taking a step to the side, let us briefly consider phylum Mollusca class Bivalvia. Yes, bivalves at first seem boring - little sessile clam-like things that they are. However, bivalves engage in the one behavior that heretofore I think sounds like the most delightful sexual activity ever. Free spawning. I mean, seriously, think of it, you catch a sudden whif of the right scent, the right temperature, or a little shake, and then EXPLODE in pleasurable gamete release. I, myself, have had this happen right in my face in an orgy of mussel bukkake, but picture the potential for some nubile nymphet subjected to the experiments of a dastardly doctor in fusing the sexual needs of a scallop with the body of his scientific muse.

This is of course not to mention the abilities for bivalves to form threadlike attachments with their byssal gland, and the ever shape-changing, muscular, pulsing, turgid, bivalve foot. Or, the bizarre, soft, delicate anatomy of free swimming shell-less bivalves who, if airborne, could wreak erotic havoc on an entire countryside if presented by the proper author or animator. A Brief Essay on the Sad Lack of Imagination in Invertebrate Oriented Erotica with Brief Notes on the Lascivious Nature of Both the Lophotrochozoa and Ecdysozoa, or, Getting Beyond "Hur hur! That Squid Tentacle Looks like Penis!" Previously:

• Fight for your right to tentacle porn - Boing Boing
• Octopussy - Boing Boing
• Cephalerotica - Boing Boing

Liu Jianhua recreated the Shanghai skyline from dice and poker-chips -- the gigantic piece was displayed at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy. The close-up detail view (shot by Flickr user cinghialino and licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike) is spectacular.

Liu Jianhua - Unreal Scene (2008), Liu Jianhua - Unreal Scene (2008) (detail view) (via Neatorama)

Thomas sez, "China's People's Liberation Army has made Sex education part of the detox methods for getting people over Internet addiction. They claim it works, but one woman under their care has acquired 68 virtual husbands." Here, in addition to military-style discipline, some 60-odd patients at his center undergo a three-month regimen of counseling, confidence-building activities, sex education, and in about 60 percent of the cases, medication. The treatment is designed to address underlying family and psychological problems, and boost their self-confidence.

There are a handful of young women here, going "cold turkey" from "Audition" and similar games, where players engage in dance battles, decorate virtual homes, and have virtual husbands and babies. (One female patient had amassed 68 "husbands," says Tao, with a sigh).
In an increasingly wired China, rehab for Internet addicts

My pals Rita King and Josh Fouts have just completed an ambitious public diplomacy report on using virtual worlds to create understanding between Islamic and western societies. The book itself is presented in Understanding-Comics-style graphic novel format. They're holding a public launch in New York this month and I expect the report will hit the web around the same time.
After a year of research spanning four continents and interviews with dozens of people across the virtual world of the Internet Dancing Ink Productions is pleased to announce the release of our findings from the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project on Thursday, January 29 at 6 PM Eastern at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Space is limited so please RSVP to attend the event.

The report will include a trilogy of deliverables, including formal public diplomacy policy recommendations for the Obama Administration; a broadcast-quality short machinima documentary; and a graphic book chronicling the people, places and findings of the project. Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds report to release January 29

JetBlue and the TSA have settled a lawsuit brought by a man who was refused boarding on an airplane because he was wearing a shirt with Arabic writing on it (the TSA said that this was like "wearing a T-shirt at a bank stating, 'I am a robber.'"). They've paid him $240,000.

Only 14 days until we get a change in administration. Maybe the new guys will appoint someone who understands that Arabic writing doesn't ake airplanes fall out of the sky. Kudos to the ACLU for kicking ass and taking names on this one. The lawsuit claimed Jarrar, 30, invoked the First Amendment but acquiesced after it became clear to him that he would not be allowed to fly if he did not cover his shirt with one given to him by JetBlue officials.

"All people in this country have the right to be free of discrimination and to express their own opinions," Jarrar wrote on his blog. "With this outcome, I am hopeful that TSA and airlines officials will think twice before practicing illegal discrimination and that other travelers will be spared the treatment I endured." TSA, JetBlue Pay $240,000 to Settle Discrimination Suit

Previously:

• T-shirt: "I am not a terrorist," in Arabic - Boing Boing

Here is an absolutely stupendous video of Screamin' Jay Hawkins in full witch doctor regalia performing "I Put A Spell On You". (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

There are a few filetypes that you likely don't want to add into any subversion repository, such as .pyc, .log, and .bak files. Not only do they not need to be in the repo, but you also probably don't appreciate them sullying the output of things like svn status either. Deleting all such files before each commit isn't a good option either. SVN allows you to ignore certain file patterns in the current directory (assuming it's under version control) and in all children via a command such as:

1. svn propset -R svn:ignore "*.pyc" MYDIR

But if you then try to add another pattern, such as "*.log", the initial value of the svn:ignore property is overwritten! To overcome this, create a file containing the patterns you want to ignore, one per line. I created a .svnignore file and added it into my personal SVN, symlinked from my home directory. That way I can use it on each box I work on, on various repos as needed, since the patterns are pretty universal.

Say you have made a file called .svnignore containing:

*.pyc
*.log

Then you would run:

1. svn propset -R svn:ignore -F .svnignore MYDIR

And the two patterns in the file would be ignored in MYDIR and all its children. If you want to add or remove a pattern later, just change the .svnignore file and re-run the same command.

You can also setup such ignores globally for a given SVN repo, but I tend to shy away from that sort of change, since I might just decide that I want some logfile checked in at one point or another. Setting the patterns per repo allows for a bit more flexibility.

One annoying note: When you add new directories to your repo, you have to run the command again. Otherwise the svn options for the new folder won't contain your ignore patterns.

Related posts:

1. File renaming made simpler Some people have difficulty renaming lots of files at once...
2. An awesome xargs option and cleaning up SVN accidents I started using a wonderfully helpful option for xargs recently,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Today on Offworld we saw Rock Band's vocal pitch recognition get trumped by some ace theremin playing on Portal theme song Still Alive, and downloaded a new unofficial theme for the PlayStation 3 featuring gorgeous HD paintings of cult Genesis shooter Gunstar Heroes. We then got more musical and listened to an album composed on DS synth Korg DS-10, as well as a one-man gadget orchestra featuring two DSs, an iPod Touch, an iPhone and a Kaossilator, and watched LittleBigPlanet creator Alex Evans go back in time to its early prototype days from a recent Wired store event. Finally, we took a look behind the design of indie adventure Aquaria, tried to decipher the code behind Subversion, an as yet un-detailed game that hopes to generatively model everything from entire cities down to a pen lying on each office desk, saw one man's new wrap-around Patapon tattoo and a beautiful motion graphics piece on the history of games, and timed how long it would take for an autonomous Katamari to clean your living quarters, Roomba style.

Joshua Bearman wrote about the 2009 Nibbler Championship at the LA Weekly Blog. He says: Why is this so awesome? Nibbler, as I mentioned in a brief aside in my Harper's piece on Billy Mitchell, was an arcade game made by the jukebox company Rock-Ola in the early 1980s. Nibbler is mostly forgotten other than its historical appeal as the sole arcade machine whose counter had enough digits to display 999,999,999 and therefore turn over at 000,000,000, or one billion points.

The game itself sucked -— “playing the thing is joyless,” says Dwayne Richard, the number two Nibbler contender of all time—but as the highest of all potential scores, the “billion on Nibbler” was a universal goal in the early 80s. Many tried and failed. Eventually, on January 15, 1984, Tim McVey from Oskaloosa came to Walter’s arcade and finally reached a billion after playing forty-four hours—except that instead of turning over to zeros, the counter kept going. Tim gave up at 1,000,042,270 when he realized the true milestone was ten billion points, another order of magnitude away, and sadly, well out of reach for him and all humanity. (Rock-Ola gave Tim a Nibbler machine, which he promptly traded to Walter Day's rival arcade down the street -- for $200! In tokens!)

Tim is back, playing against Dwayne Richard. I put up a fairly detailed post about, talking about how Nibbler represents how obsessive classic game competition is, for the players, just another facet of human achievement. Like climbing Everest. Or enumerating Pi. And to that end, I posted the first opening to my Harper's piece, which fell by the way side for editing reasons. But it tells the story of Robert Mruczek's marathon session on Star Wars at Fascination Arcade in New York in 1984, and sets the stage for the idea of this whole pursuit as part of the epic story of man versus machine, but more importantly, man versus self.

How do we debug and profile a cloud full of processors and threads? It's a problem more will be seeing as we code big scary programs that run on even bigger scarier clouds. Logging gets you far, but sometimes finding the root cause of problem requires delving deep into a program's execution. I don't know about you, but setting up 200,000+ gdb instances doesn't sound all that appealing. Tools like STAT (Stack Trace Analysis Tool) are being developed to help with this huge task. STAT "gathers and merges stack traces from a parallel application’s processes." So STAT isn't a low level debugger, but it will help you find the needle in a million haystacks.

Abstract:

Petascale systems will present several new challenges to performance and correctness tools. Such machines may contain millions of cores, requiring that tools use scalable data structures and analysis algorithms to collect and to process application data. In addition, at such scales, each tool itself will become a large parallel application – already, debugging the full BlueGene/L (BG/L) installation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory requires employing 1664 tool daemons. To reach such sizes and beyond, tools must use a scalable communication infrastructure and manage their own tool processes efficiently. Some system resources, such as the file system, may also become tool bottlenecks.

In this paper, we present challenges to petascale tool development, using the Stack Trace Analysis Tool (STAT) as a case study. STAT is a lightweight tool that gathers and merges stack traces from a parallel application to identify process equivalence classes. We use results gathered at thousands of tasks on an Infiniband cluster and results up to 208K processes on BG/L to identify current scalability issues as well as challenges that will be faced at the petascale. We then present implemented solutions to these challenges and show the resulting performance improvements. We also discuss future plans to meet the debugging demands of petascale machines.

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I really enjoyed this interview with 97-year-old Chikabo Kumada, a botanical artist in Japan. His philosophy about life is every bit as lovely as his paintings. Here’s a snip:

Mr. Kumada, when did you start drawing illustrations of plants and insects?

I started to do it for work when I was twenty-six. I quit the graphic design company I’d been working at and switched careers without talking to my wife about it first. At that time, all the books had been burned in the war, and bunches of shoddy picture books had started coming in from the Kansai area and I thought, “This won’t do! I’ve got to draw some good picture books.” I love children. That’s why I started doing it. That was where my years of impoverishment began. (laughs)

Sadly, the PingMagMAKE site where the interview was posted seems to have gone on an extended hiatus. I was sorry to read this, as I've enjoyed perusing their articles.

--Shawn

97 Year Old Botanical Art Maestro

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew says: I received several old issues of Cracked magazine over the holidays and noticed this article predicting life in the 21st Century had become surprisingly accurate.

"Today's Swinger is Tomorrow's Square," illustrated by John Severin, appeared in the 1974 annual Super Cracked (It was most likely a reprint from a 1970 issue). In it, the writer predicts that young people will embrace the "skinhead" look, home computers ("Electronic Home Teacher") and even the ipod: as "electronic brain stimulators" and a "musical computers" that young people are hooked on. I've attached one image from it... but check the whole piece at Cartoon Brew.

Senator Al Franken zings the everloving crap out of Ann Coulter in this sweet little clip. Funniest 1:22 I've seen all day.

Ann Coulter and Al Franken at The Connecticut Forum (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

An inspiring how-to for turning an ugly plastic clock into a nice-looking wood-cased object. Inspiring!

Turn a generic plastic gadget in to something a little more beautiful (Via MAKE blog)

I've been an infrequent yet admiring user of Metasploit for about four years, but I've never tried it on Windows. It strikes me as being something I "just shouldn't do," like running Nmap on Windows or (shudder) Snort on Windows. However, while preparing labs for my upcoming class, I thought I would give version 3.2 a try. It worked very well, at least for the simple test I ran.

After installing the .exe and launching the new app, I saw this window:



I decided to try exploiting a vulnerable Samba server:



When I set the parameters I ran the exploit:



When I got my session I interacted with a root shell on the victim.



By identifying the process started on the victim (PID 2216) and running lsof, you can see the vulnerable service which Metasploit attacked.

Incidentally, my take on why having these sorts of tools available is In Defense of HD Moore, from three years ago.

Great work Metasploit team!

Richard Bejtlich is teaching new classes in DC and Europe in 2009. Register by 1 Jan and 1 Feb, respectively, for the best rates.Copyright 2003-2008 Richard Bejtlich and TaoSecurity (taosecurity.blogspot.com and www.taosecurity.com)

If you aren't in the mood for McDnoald's, how about Pizza Huh?

Fake brands shopping center set to open in China (Via Michael Dolan)