Episode: 1586
Title: HPR1586: HPR Community News for August 2014
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1586/hpr1586.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:26:57

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It's Monday 1st on September 2014.
This is an HPR episode 1586 entitled, HPR Community News for August 2014, and is part of
the series, HPR Community News.
It is hosted by HPR volunteers, and is about 72 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to admin at HACCAPublicRadio.org, or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is made and can, remove the happenings for the month.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Get your web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon, and join me this evening is Dave Morris, I don't think
who's going to be joining us tonight.
No, he said he was off-gallavanting around the Great Lakes and we're going to hit him.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, for those of you who don't know, this is a monthly show that is recorded for release
on the first Monday of the month.
Dave has gone, let's turn out to be a very complicated thing Dave didn't.
Try to compute that, it sounds so easy doesn't it, but computers have difficulty with it
apparently.
Yeah, even Google, trying to do it in Google Calendar proved a bit of a problem.
The underlying I calendar thing doesn't seem to be able to do it strangely.
Okay, anyway, anybody's welcome to join this, and indeed as with everything on HPR, anyone's
welcome to submit a show, and anyone's welcome to join in the discussions about HPR in
general, and they HPR mailing list, all this information is available on the HPR website
which is hackerpublicradio.org.
As we do, usually we start with the traditional butchering of host names, and this has been
a normal month.
I would like to welcome in Sysius, in Skius, I think he pronounces it, that's my recollection
anyway.
Excellent.
I do have a request for somebody to go out and take a web file, a generator, a flag file
of all the host names, one after the other, come back.
That will be very beneficial for me, and I have a sound board here, that's a great idea.
Yes, anyway, as you know I can pronounce all these names perfectly, I just do it to
Lord of the Barrier and she to other hosts, very big of me, I think, anyways, as we also
do, we just go through some of the shows to have a little chat about them, and continuing
in the Libra Office series, Mr. I'm driving around the lake, Ahuga, brought us episode
34 in the Libra Office series, and this month was on, this one was on more on chart editing,
and if you happen download the attachments for these two, it's very beneficial in what
he's trying to do, and as always he has full show notes available on his websites which
are linked to him, the show notes.
Yeah, I think it's really important if you want to follow this to look at Ahuga's site
and also look at whatever he's put up to download, I can't, often I can't understand
them without doing that.
Yeah, I think I was able to follow them without issue, but then again I've done quite
a bit of graphing and stuff, so I suppose it's what you're comfortable with.
Okay, the following Monday we had a HPR community news which was done by yourself and Ahuga,
or no, Ahuga was yourself, and it was just me, Pigg will popped in briefly to mention
for 5150s problems and his contribution, not his contribution, the community's contributions
for his benefit and the site thereof, which is on the website, isn't it?
Yeah, I put it on the main page there, so if you want a quick link just go to hackerpublicradio.org
and press support now.
At this point in time, there are up to $3,123 of their $10,000 goal, and if they make
that $10,000, then they fund anything campaign doesn't take as much of a cut, so this has
been no harm to just get involved.
I think they're in pretty good shape financially, but as you know, the insurance companies will
try and put everything back as it was, but you know, you're never going to be able to cover
everything.
Yeah, absolutely, so if you can help, that would be appreciated.
Okay, the following day, we'll leave that up until the fundraiser is over.
We had multi-boost partitioning with Linux, and this was an episode by Mike McGraw, who's
otherwise known as GeekDad, lead speak, and he was on about how to share his home directory,
and I was wondering where we was going with this, actually, because I was thinking, well,
if he's gone to share his home directory, how then is he going to stop overwriting all
the links and stuff?
So I actually had a very similar approach on him, I use slash data, as it's, it's, yeah,
just tear it to me.
Okay, yeah, yeah, I thought it was quite an interesting thing to do.
Years and years ago, I worked on a system called Deckerthena, which came from the Athena
project, and that worked on the principle that you would bring client systems in of various
sorts.
So it was door space PCs, suns, HPs, deck machines, et cetera, and they all had different
architectures, but they all had to share the same home directory, and it was really difficult
to set that up, and so what you're doing there really, I think, is very clever.
Yeah, well, it also helps when you switch to something like a, a mouse drive or something
for your home directory over there, because then everything's all, you know, you just
mount slash whatever, I can't remember what he, he used, but I just mount slash data,
and then wherever that happens to be, is where it happens to be.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, I'm following day we had a blather speech recognition, which I had to laugh, I'm
so, I'm not jealous, obviously, I am jealous of John, having just set up, I'm not jealous
of the fact that John requires this to be set up, but for those of you who don't know,
Jezra has put together this, this system where you can talk to your computer and it doesn't
stop, it kicks off bash scripts, this is just so funny to listen to.
Yes, I, yeah, you must have great fun with this, saying silly things too, I would have for
hours and hours and hours and hours, that's what you say.
Yeah, anyway, that's not dwell on that, then we had a, what can only be described as a brilliant
episode by Mike Gray and many to many data relationships, and it is a absolutely excellent
description of, of how many to many relationships work out, with very, very good show notes,
show notes, a bunch that have caused us immense amount of problems and more ways and more,
but that's not with Mike's fault, it's to do with the encoding of UTFE, the encoding of XML,
the parsing to archive.org, you can share some of that, Steve.
Yes, yes, it's all the less bands and greater bands and stuff that you have to encode,
and although browsers often let you get away with it, you can put an actual greater than sign
in your HTML, when you're passing it through various other things that are checking for that sort
of stuff, then they, they just remove them and that's what happens on the way to archive.org,
so it was making a mess of poor Mike's notes as I was trying to upload them, so anyway,
we've solved the problem now. Not that he was doing anything wrong,
it was just, no, he was doing fine, no, this strange pipeline that we have to poke things through.
Anyway, we're all learning, we're all learning, no doubt there will be episodes coming from all
of that. I've popped that into the database series, so as we go and do a little bit of cleaning up on
the series in the background as well. Great idea. We have GWP exploring the JFS file system,
and I think as you said last month, additional show notes we've required on this, but I'm really
enjoying the series, actually. Oh, it's great, isn't it? Yes, it's really nice to have all these
these listed out and pointed out for you. Now you can go off and hunt for more information if you
want to, which are absolutely good. I didn't even know about this one, to be honest. I didn't even
know this one existed, just so much I know. I've seen other lists, you know, when you're doing
formatting drives and stuff, I'm looking for something that's familiar and safe, and I'll just
use that. Thank you very much. Yes. Can we have the next day, Ted Cho, with Yahoo Mail for
her, and I just can't believe that this... I mean, he's met a virtual machine to automatically
slurp off his Yahoo account and put it into a 9-map account. I can't believe that Yahoo
can do a 9-map. Well, yes, I had difficulty understanding this, to be honest. I couldn't see
why he needed to bounce between two Yahoo accounts. That's something very restrictive going on there.
Do Yahoo, apparently Yahoo don't do, you have to go use their mail-up to do... Well, I don't know,
I use, I have an old Yahoo account that I keep just because sometimes it's useful to direct things
there, and I read it with... I'm from from Underbird, so not quite clear what the problem was
here, to be honest, but I'm probably missing something. You might want to leave a comment on that
episode, actually, or just do... Or here's an idea, you could do a show about it. Yeah, well,
I've always wanted to knit together a mobile account in this sort of way, but I've just not
got around to it yet, so yeah, it's a fascinating subject. I'd do something like fetch mail or
something to bring them all to some central point, and then I'm apt to look at them or something,
but yeah, anyway, I have a, my Raspberry Pi, I've got a I'm up server running,
is only available on localhost, and I secure tunnel into that, and then I copy all my mail accounts
into the various different folders, 2000 and whatever, 2014 slash, and then the month, the whole
with it, and then that is on a mail directory, and I just use Ursink as part of my backups to
copy that all for the places, so that it gets around space limitations, and it also allows me to
just grip or can set my email quite handily. Okay, yeah, that's quite good. I like to file my mail
into folders, and I was a big prop mail user back in the day, in the early days of email,
so I'd quite like to build something around prop mail again, but yeah, well, sure.
Big, big, big list. Yeah. Then we had Fedora Scientific Pharmaceutical Research and Apache
Open Climate Workbench. I like this newscast, semiotic robotics newscast. There's a lot of stuff
on the open source.com. It is, yeah, yeah, I try and go and read them when I, when I can,
from the pointers that we get from these shows, because there's some really fascinating stuff
there, as you say. The next day, we had make your own t-shirts with bleach, and I had a look at some
of the, some of the ones that they've done, and they are awesome. They're damn good, actually,
aren't they? Yes, I would never have guessed that you could do something as clever as that.
You must be able to, the template that you make must be really, really well done, I guess, though.
I'd probably screw that up. Have you seen that they just about 12 steps to make the,
how can I call it, really on? And that's, yeah, like, because you have to call out all the bits and
pieces. I'm not quite sure what freezer paper is, though. It's something. No, I've no idea.
Wax paper or something. Yeah, yeah, I wanted to find that out. It's obviously something
that's fairly easy to come by in the States, but I'm quite clear what it is. Hold on, I know
somebody here. Manon, do you know what freezer paper is? Oh, paper, I suppose it's paper,
and it doesn't stick to your father's. Do we have it here? No, it might have it. No, no, don't
think so. It's a big generic, not really. No, no, it's interesting to research a bit,
because that looks like the ideal thing to do that type of stuff with. Okay. Okay, cool, move it on.
Arts and bots, robots and programming in liberal arts class. And this was a plateau interview,
which he had in the, for over a year in the emergency queue, which proves that the emergency
queue should be removed. Well, you know, have any arguments for me? Our researchers have just
come back to us saying that it's called grease proof paper in the UK. All right. Oh, it's not,
is that what it is? Okay. Okay. Okay, grease proof paper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nose to self.
When I listen to this, it's grease proof paper, put it in the show notes.
Cool. Okay. Arts and bots brilliantly liked this links in the show notes to this, what this is all
about. Yeah, that hamming bird board that they were referring to, sounds pretty cool. If you're
going to look, look that one up, it's some amazing things you can do with that. So lucky kids
having a shot on that thing. True for you, true for you. So introduce to working with functions
in Libra introduction to working with functions in Libra offers calc via hookah released on
Friday, the 15th. And this is just a basic introduction to what a function is and where you can
find them. So laying the foundation for the next in the series. Then we have the story from
in skis. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I, and how he got into Linux and another person coming in
the Apple route. I'm not too surprised because over this side of the ocean, it's mostly, it's
mostly via, you know, PCs that people come in. I would have thought so. Yeah, yeah, I don't know
many people myself who've come that way. And it's, it's fascinating to hear. He had some
great links and it's, well, yeah, it's a whole different, completely. It's a whole different
world there. I was, it was quite interesting to hear about the national ID stuff and the,
the specific machines. I forgot what it was. No, I'd be see or something machine
that would be easy. And then yeah, that was so interesting. He seemed thrilled that having
in the personal identity number. Yeah, it's strange, isn't it? That's strange. I mean, from a
computing point of view, it's an amazing, beautiful thing. From my days working in universities,
we always said it would be fantastic if you had a unique way of identifying a person.
Because students would go and come back again and get different
matriculation numbers. So you didn't know it was the same person till they showed up, you know?
Yeah, exactly. So, but, but, but on the other hand, who wants that, you know, stamped on your
forehead or whatever? You know, we have it here in the Netherlands and I guess, I guess you have
on regards like in Ireland, there's no post codes except there is a post code and the postal
system uses it, nobody else does, you know? So it's been everybody has access to it as opposed to
nobody. I don't know. It's a, it's a, if you have thoughts on this subject, please send in the show.
So then we had introduction to Nicola and the static website and blog generation.
This is becoming a bit of a series actually, yes, static website blog generations.
Yeah, it's cool, isn't it? Yeah, these are fascinating things. I like this.
This one sounded very good. I was impressed with this. I had, I had to edit,
I can tell my notes as did you, I never have problems with them. No, no, he's not from the
making, but he sent in the notes. I butchered that I converted them to HTML kind of and then
I didn't do it right. So there you go. So it's been a lot of doing and throwing with him about,
about the life of his notes and stuff. He's happy with them now, he said. But yeah, along the way,
I read them many, many times and it's quite impressed with what I saw.
What's actually cool is that now that we do post the shows ahead of time, you know, once they come up,
they're available, you know, the show was posted, the audio was there, you can release it,
you can get it in your SS feed, if you add a few extra tags and stuff. And Chris Warwick,
one of the developers was able to come in and give us some updates and corrections on the
website. That was pretty cool. That was cool. Yeah. Yeah. I actually seem all the more up-to-date and
appropriate. Yeah, I still left them as they were because I want the show notes to reflect the audio
and then you can, you can get the notes yourself. Then we had audio book, how to succeed in
the Hebrew audio book club. That was, I didn't actually listen to the book. I don't seem to find
the time these days, but I really enjoyed the show. They were really going into a lot of depth
with the subject matter, I thought they had a discussion. I don't know, my summary was like,
I like the book, except for the fact it was basically lining up for a sequel.
It's, I'm not great on superheroes and stuff, I'd have to literally remind, I guess,
of boring old songs, but still, I thought that their enthusiasm was quite interesting to listen to.
I actually found, after listening to the show, I didn't like the book as much. I don't know,
maybe a month has passed since I listened to it and the show coming out, so I had time to reflect
on the book. I felt a bit short-changed, even though I didn't pay anything for the book, but
okay, crowdsourcing, air quality monitoring, another one of those,
tattoo interviews, well programmers, and these guys are trying to get a air quality
detection system and basically crowdsourcers, which is an ideal introductory project for anybody
into hardware and stuff, so I would, I'm very glad that tattoo agreed to release these ones from
their backup queue so that we could draw attention to them.
Yeah, it's an interesting thing that they've done there. I didn't get too much depth
myself because I needed to do more research, but seemed like it was something that anybody could
build if they knew what they were doing. And having heard recently, there was news that came out
that said, London's air quality is on a par with Beijing and Mexico City or something,
very poor, and nobody's made any particular note of this, so you feel that if you had a divorce
like this, you would know if you had to be in a city that was particularly bad, maybe you want
to get out of it. Yeah, you know, if these sort of things were dotted around the city and one
in every neighborhood or use an American term, one in every block, that you could then put it on
open street maps or something and use aggregate the data and then show areas where air quality is
degradated over time or you know at a particular time of the year, and link that in with weather
stations showing which way the wind is going, and you would be able to identify basically culprits
of where this air quality pollution is coming from. So yeah, it's definitely something that people
you know, there are a lot of hackers out there who have put up weather stations and should send
in shows, the PG64, although I can't say how the PG64 because I still have to edit that show,
I promise them. Anyway, yes, but if you're doing that, an air quality monitor would seem like a
fairly obvious thing to add to it. Yeah, yeah, that would be good I would like to own such a thing.
Okay, I think not the fast and in TFS, but the fast and TFS fall system was another one in the
series, and this actually a lot of information there that I was not aware. No, I find that quite
interesting, there was quite a bit history there that JWP mentioned and it was good to hear about
these things in the in the historical context. Absolutely, so the next one was sensible security,
the Schneider model, and this was from a hooker again, and it's in the privacy and security series.
I did enjoy this one. I thought he did this really, really well. I liked his organization
of the thing and the sort of checklist that he went through. It was some
British-niased model that he was talking about, I know, but it was still good to lay that out
in the way that he did stuff about, because I used to be a system manager and have fights with
my senior managers who wanted stuff like these password expires and you can't use the same
password again after, you know, kept a history of passwords and all that stuff. And I could never
see the sense of that. I'm so delighted that Schneider has come up with a rebuttal of all this
nonsense. Yeah, I've implemented those things myself a lot of the time thinking that they were
gold, but ever since that XKCD comic, where they the amount of entropy that you get from those
things, I've just gone to using a massive big-glung password. Well, actually, I've been using a
massive big-glung password for ages, who am I kidding? But yes, there were a few things in this,
though, that the only thing that I would disagree with, again, this is only 0.001% of the show,
just to put things that the perspective was, I would, and he did mention it in the short
end, I wouldn't have any objections to somebody writing down the password. It's provided that
that the road is down and, you know, kept it in the wallets and trees, it was like it was a 500
euro bill or a 500 pound bill. Yes. Oh, absolutely, yes. Yes, indeed. I've said the same. We did
use to keep our master passwords written down and a bit locked away in the place used to work,
and, you know, so I didn't, don't see that a huge lot of different from having it secured away
in a wallet. Yeah, we used to, we changed the domain password, so that myself, I put in half of
the password and the other admins put in each, we each put in our own parts of the domain password,
and then give that in sealed envelopes and put it into the company safe, and then we all,
you know, used elevator rights when we needed it. Yes, yes, yes, not too dissimilar from what we used
to do. Good for an also feels very cool, you know, you're given the envelope over with the piece
of the password. Yes, anyways, moving on, another open source and use break, this time testers
patent decision, 12 timages and an update to good new help project all from opensource.com.
Yes, good stuff. Can you help things sounds really good?
Then we had Ahuka, sorry, Ahuka, Akon DK? Oh, Okon, I think he pronounced Okon DK. Yes,
you will know him from such podcasts as the Rivendell podcast open source radio software,
that sort of thing. So this is something that he is, you know, has experience with. So I
haven't had a chance to look at the podcast software, but his show is Blue Driver Podcast. Have you
had a chance to listen to that yet? I haven't listened to it. No, no, I did follow up the software.
I was really impressed with it. The guy who wrote it, it designed it for an academic,
I'm not sure is an academic or a scholastic set up where I think it was in a college,
but where they had decided that they wanted you to use podcasts as a way of teaching students.
And so he built this thing to provide a means of doing that, and I thought that was fantastic idea.
And the software looks really cool, I'd quite like to dig into that.
Ok, I also like this idea of having a voice version and a live version. I really, really don't
like podcasts with music and backing music as well. The only thing is he doesn't have two separate
feeds for that. So having two different feeds would be ideal. So then I wouldn't be downloading
two different versions just to delete one. I must check out his podcast.
We'll do as well. Then we had an interview with Josh Napp from Anastos.com and they've basically
set up a new company and why it's important to also an HPR is they provide all the bandwidth,
all the servers, two servers, all the bandwidth for Hacker Public Radio and also for the Bindra
Bindra project and Josh has been very instrumental in carrying basically paying the bills
for some time. And it's, you know, hats off to him. So on the bottom of the website we have
a link there to Anastos.com and if you're thinking about hosting, you know, give them a shout.
Yes, it was an interesting show that I know you said it was a bit like a advertisement.
But that's a reasonable thing to do for a sponsor, I felt. You know, it's not too heavy.
For Anastos, you've seen first hand yourself over that we've migrated the server off and there's
been, you know, naturally a few teething issues with this, you know, IP address range is changing
and over as well as firewall scripts and C panel updates and stuff and every one of those
occasions, despite the fact that, you know, we're in a completely different time zone,
far off an email to Josh and within a half an hour, the issue's been resolved.
Absolutely. He really seems to know what he's doing there. It's very impressive, I thought.
I've found it fascinating insight into the world of running a shared hosting and
another type of things set up like that. I'm not, I don't know, maybe other people are much
more knowledgeable about how this sort of stuff works, but I've never really dealt into this.
So I found that quite interesting. It's, yeah, I've been a little bit obviously
coming from an ISP, but it's more from, you know, on the edge, having a look at it. So I really
like for Josh to, you know, document what they're doing because I'm sure everybody would be
interested in a new business starting up, let alone a new tech business starting up, and you know,
he talks about stuff there with the assumption that everybody, of course, knows that there's
that there would be, that they had these firewall tricky groups that checks for suspicious activity,
you know, and I'm just completely in the dark about these all these things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's, well, as I used to work in a university where there was a
fair amount of this, because universities are a bit like a, a little ISP for its students,
and, you know, they're very dangerous bunch as well, as far as hacking into your systems are
concerned, but what Josh is doing is on a whole different leak. So it's very interesting to hear
from my point of view. Okay, then as, yeah, just the last thing on that, I did really like the
whole concept of just paying somebody for a little WordPress blog and have them, and, you know,
Josh takes, Josh and the guys take care of updateness, and you never have to worry about security
flaws, you never have to worry about your, your family member, you know, getting slashed out of
there's something, it's just, it's just there for a reasonable price. I don't know how I was,
a five-year or something, five dollars a month, you know, just, because you know yourself, as soon
as you go on holiday, the phone rings, my website can do. Oh yeah, now that it's good to be able to
outsource all of that stuff. Yeah, ideal Christmas gift, folks. I tell you not, a year, a year
thinking with 15% discount. I mean, you heard it here, folks. Speaking of loan payments,
the following day, we had LibreOffice Calc, and he was working out a car loan, and I never thought
to do this, actually, very good. It's not an area of spreadsheets I've ever dealt into, to be honest,
because you know, I never needed to. So I thought it was pretty good. I didn't realize that
they were built in functions to do this type of stuff. Yeah, there's loads, this one I'd never
come across before, I'd miss a day of you to written a pro script. I'd have sold it from the ground up,
yeah. Yeah, I'm a bunch of fly flutter over the hard disks, so they changed the bits.
Okay, that was that, wasn't it? Okay, do you want to go through the comments?
Sure, are the comments the wrong way around? Well, that's a good question, actually, because
we debated how to do this, and the comments on, if you look at the whole comments on the website,
they are in reverse chronological order, aren't they? Yeah, so I did it the same way,
assuming that that was going to be the most appropriate thing to do, but I must admit,
last week when I was reading through these, I started from the bottom and worked out,
seems a little bit bizarre. Yeah, I know, I think it's because we have, with the other ones,
we also do is we have the top ones as they oldest, and they'll work away down to the newest.
Oh yeah, we can, we can, we can, we can, we can change the video.
Anyways, Mike Ray, or T, relating to T, old time, old time, there again, that was, that was 2013,
gone back. Yes. Somebody commented on this fairly recently, and I think it came up in the,
in the comments. Was it something I mentioned last week? I can't remember, so maybe
brought it to people's attention, which means that reading the comments is a good thing,
because it just sort of means that, you know, people don't have to read them. So I guess
that's it. Yeah, just one sec. Yep, so, old time radio, pretty cool.
Then the following, we had Mike Ray, about, replying to your, no, it was the,
last journey comments on the next podcast. Oh, which one am I, which one am I on?
This is, yeah, see that this summary of the comments like this in the note are a little bit hard
to follow. I found myself floundering slightly trying to, to do this last, last, because I'm also
looking at the comments page, they, the review, and I don't see the one, journey, comments,
and the next audio book. 15, 15, 54. Yeah, it's the last, the last comment after the show there.
And it's, yeah, a low team fabulous choice. It starts. You know, see that. Okay, but it's,
I would just think with the other one, why isn't this sort of the same way as the other one?
Okay, anyway, let's deal with this issue of offline. It's, it's, well, just to finish that
thread is because the, the listing is, is picking them out, the software's picking them out by
the fact that they have been sent in during the, the month that we're dealing with.
Ah, right, right, right. So, so that, that, yeah, it looks a little strange, just looking at this,
but I mean, it, it represents reality. And that would be the way you would see it if you looked at
the, the comments page or indeed the, the, the, the comments page and they don't match up.
That's the point. You're looking at the full listing of the comments. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay.
Well, we need to, as you say, when you take this, this, this is, it's going to bore everybody.
But it's, it's a, it's an oddity because there are broken bits in the comments stuff.
The comments are not being displayed probably by the, the, the, the HPR software. We need to get,
get on that one. Yeah, okay. Let's, let's deal with that. More fun, more fun, more fun.
Okay. Ah, what do we want to do? So, 1566 was Steve Bickle coming back to me after the,
last, last week show saying how slash ETC is, is pronounced because I'd said I was pronounced,
etc. And he was putting out that I was wrong and it's, it should be Etsy. But, um, and then,
then followed an interesting discussion. Yeah, and apparently you seem to get some support
on that that it was, um, it was actually a reverse. I think Mike, uh, yeah, Mike, oh, I,
I see what's going on with the comments. You're sorting every number and then sorting the comments
underneath that number. In, in, in, in, in, in the next perfect sense. We might need a horizontal
line or something in between. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. I got it now. Ding.
You see, folks, if you, Dave's usually doing something that my brain just kind of comprehend
and then finally, and probably, sometimes I can't comprehend it either. So, anyway, so,
how this would start would be Steve Bickle says how ETC is pronounced, uh, or his comments,
saying that Lee, it should be, um, uh, not, etc. But should be, what was it?
ETC is, is what people say because it's, it's, it's, um, it's an acronym for its extended
text configuration. Yeah, extended text configuration. So Etsy instead of, etc. But then again,
all four bees like yourself were saying, no, that that's a, that's a universe engineering.
Oh, so much of the foggy, huh? Um, youngster says he started to fill it.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, uh, it's really, it's really not a thing to, uh, to get to work
out of it. But it's just an interesting, interesting discussion of it. Okay. Cool. So the other
comment was, so let's, if we put in a horizontal line that we make a lot more sense, actually.
So between, yeah, yeah, between the comments episodes of 1568, uh, we had a comment from
Tlatu, which this was about the John's conversation with a computer, a bladder engine. And, uh, he's
really, and he's not interested in voice-driven computers, but it's, uh, it was really nice. I
kind of have to agree with him. Oh, yes. The remaining comments was on 1569, a bit of a
flare more started. Uh, is the fan of comments. So the 1569 was the many, too many database
relationships, which, um, Dave, you commented on, um, he's essentially saying good show, um,
difficult to convey in podcast. And the show notes help, which they do. But I was able to follow
it in the podcast. I didn't listen to it twice just to prove that he was wrong. I'm sorry, prove
that he was right. Um, he feels, however, that, um, I should be convinced by his arguments. And
while it was a brilliant explanation of how many, too many database works, he, I felt,
feels to explain to me why it was that a many, too many relationships was necessary. And why
a simpler comma-separated table wouldn't work. To which you replied, it was scalability. And to
which I replied, I could fit a 10,000 comma-separated host in before I'd have to worry about it. To
which you replied, as, uh, main February programmers took the same report back in the 1990s,
and look what happened. To which I replied, uh, um, I basically did some maths. And, uh, yeah,
it would be a problem of, uh, problem in 2319. And even if everybody lived to 370, it would still
take five hours to introduce everybody onto the host. So more than likely, we just put them on
the various hosts, hold some forget about it. So to which he replied, going, uh, he's now going to
set up a host name with a comment to which I'm now replying saying, far ahead, because I'll assign
your number 207, like everybody else. Yes, I get though. I guess that it's more elegant to do this
way. But the whole point is if you're looking at, uh, moving to something like a, a system that
isn't database driven, you know, that's file-based driven or that's, uh, template driven or that's
bash script driven, then we should try and creep it as flat as possible.
Well, it's, if you've got a database, then it's not a database, yes, but if you have one,
and which you have, then use its features would be my argument. If you're going to then convert it
to an XML database, the features of the database will be very useful in doing that conversion.
Because otherwise you're gonna, you're gonna lose stuff. Um, as, as has happened in the past,
we've had issues where certain, uh, rules of database design were overlooked. And, uh, we had shows,
we had hosts that, that seemed to exist as two different people in various places in the database.
That's a different issue, I know, but, uh, you know, rules of database design were there
because they help you to keep it under control and, uh, and produce an efficient, um, end result.
I know that efficiency is not a big deal. It's a teeny tiny database, in fact, but I really appreciate
that, but, uh, but still, these, these, these things, if you don't do it, they come back and bite you,
is, is what pragmatic experience would say. Absolutely. And now I'm in complete and total agreement
with you, right? But if you're, if you're maintaining a, uh, is a, I don't know, I'm struggling for
an analogy here with, but the point is we're not maintaining a database, we're maintaining metadata
related to tools. That is distributed in an XML file that's collapsed into an XML file,
which theoretically you could use the XML file to regenerate the database. Every, every piece of
information that we have in the XML file can be used to regenerate the database. The database,
following good structures for the tools that we're using is fine, but I don't want to be religious
if you can take a hack and use that code time and time again. If you go look at the HTML5
standards page, which is, there's an excellent page, they remind myself to add it to the show notes,
dive into HTML5. If you read that website, he makes the comments that loads and loads of people
suggested things, elegant ways of implementing things, and what actually won at the end of the day
was the code that shipped, and the shipped because it was easier to make a faster to maintain and
simpler. Yes, yes. Because HTML is, it has been a, a cause of huge amounts of, of pain and
an effort over the, over the years, hasn't it? Because, because it has been, um, a standard,
which has been very, very sloppy, you know, the early, early HTML was, was, was, was bad, and then
it was badly spec'd, and people implemented it badly, and Microsoft came in on the act and
screwed things up royally as they want to do, et cetera, et cetera. Well, defending them a little,
they, you know, is it screwing up that you fix somebody's page that displays correctly?
Yeah, okay, you know, you're right, the screwed things up royally with the, with the, uh, active
X components and stuff like that, just so. Well, I mean, all, all these years of people having to
write huge amounts of, of Java script and whatever in there, in, in, in their pages in order to say,
if it's this browser, then do this, if it's that browser, do the other, um, I'm not an HTML expert,
but I've looked at them and had to maintain them on occasion. Um, and, you know, it's, it's been
a nightmare because of lack of standardization and rigorous, uh, control of this, this type of stuff.
Yeah, and to be honest with you, um, I don't know which part of me, uh, I'm, as I say at the end of
that, I, I'm struggling, you know, not to answer like because it's more elegant to do it properly. So,
there was, there was one argument. I would still like a good argument for why
come a separate value in our case, doesn't, uh, doesn't work out properly. And I'll leave that up to you
or Mike and I will ignore the fact that I intend to implement not only, so not only what he suggests
for the host table, but also for the series table because it's come to my attention now that we could
very well have, uh, you know, a, an accessibility interview. Uh, this is a topic on accessibility,
which happens to be also an interview, which happens to be also something that is something else.
So we might want to link multiple series as well to a particular show.
Cast that from your mind. I still want to show on why, what I'm trying to do is wrong.
Yes, yes. I did at one point start trying to design a database, put together a database design
using the comma thing. Um, and, uh, I, I sort of got lost doing something else, but, uh, but yeah,
I think somebody will, will do this, I'm sure. And I'm sure also people are bored census about
this comma discussion. Um, but I don't know. I don't know. I'm doing the argument against my,
my reasoning for do this is while the comma thing is fine for bringing out the shows. If you are
on the website and you want to click on an author, uh, or on a host and find out what shows that
they have been on, then the comma thing won't help you at all because you'll have to search
for that string in every, in every episode. So that will, that will be a bit clergy.
Indeed. And, and if you want to count the number of shows that are given persons done and,
and all of that sort of stuff, um, then it's, it's, how the hell are you going to make indexes that
will do that nice and quickly? Yes, but there's only 250 machines got giga quads of memory.
Yeah, I know it goes against everything that I believe as well. It goes back to the day like
where somebody refused to do an efficient database because they had so much RAM in the machine
that is was only like a 500 megs of a database. So they put everything into RAM and they didn't
have to worry about it. And I just went home and had a shower. Oh, yes, yes, we've, we've met
this sort of stuff I've worked with with those sorts of people. And I often manage it actually,
but there you go. This is a developer. Okay, but only they were developing in Java. So anyways, JWP
saying JFS works fine for me from Latu. So then we had guitar man with the commons on 1571,
uh, sorry, 1577, which was the static side generation. That's his show. He's replying to
X1101. Yes, who said? Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, trying to find the comment.
He said, oh, yes, he said he was about to build something like this himself. I thought, uh,
Nicola was, was, was great. So cool. But by the way, I told you his name was, his handle was
X1101 and I was wrong. It's X1101. He likes to be called. So it gets that, get that straight now.
X1101. Yes. Okay, let's look at the meal list, which is essentially Hitchperer's Parliament, I guess.
And going back, going back in time, back in time, back in time to what month? Where are we? August,
you want August. Next to Hollywood clubs by X1101. And then we had feelings about flatter by DeepGeek,
which was a discussion about, um, flattering for HPR contribution in host or HPR being
flushable itself to defer the cost and, um, uh, George from, um, who is?
Hey, well, uh, from Celebri, Celebri Rift, yes, it's, uh, San Chaser. Sorry, San Chaser, yes, yes, yes.
And thank you very much. He had something to say about that. So if you want to comment on that,
you can find the thread and tattoo punched in there and they, uh, with some other comments as
all. Um, so if you have some feedback on that, give us a add to that. And he thoughts yourself.
I am still trying to find my way around the,
since our last week, I actually summarized all the mail into the, into the notes, but I didn't do
that this time. Um, so I get, I get a bit, I get a bit lost in, uh, in the, the mail.
And I've got it all nicely organized and threaded. I have a difficulty following it.
You know, I, uh, I bring all that I subscribe to this feed in, uh, in Thunderbird. And it's just
there as, uh, as a newsreader, which, uh, right copy in the RSS. Yeah, the RS, yeah, from G main,
you mean, yeah, from G, yeah. No, no, no, subscribe to the news on G, not the RSS,
but the news service itself. Oh, the, okay. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Use net use net news. That's the one
use net use yet. Oh, okay. Okay. I don't, uh, it puts that one out of favor. I used to use,
use net use all the time back in the, in the pre-internet days. Um, but, uh, which was the internet?
Yeah, it was indeed. Yeah. Yeah. We, uh, yeah. I, um, I found a book recently, um,
free book, it's an ebook that was written by the, the UK, uh, networking authority whose name is Janet.
And they were talking about the history of Janet. And, uh, it's very, very early days. Um, and, uh,
it was, it's quite fascinating, really, because I was around and involved.
And indeed coding bits of it in those days. Um, but yeah. And it was all about, it was all use net,
people throwing fast quantities of use net news between one another. It's a much,
it's a protocol that could be resurrected. I think, uh, um, ex colleague of mine had some really
cool ideas about how to use it as a basis for other things as well. It's a massively distributed
messaging system. Um, it's also unfetterated. So, you know, things just go through.
So pretty, pretty interesting thing. We had, uh, local news groups at the
university I worked at. So we used to use, use net news a big time. Um, so yeah, there was,
it was a local communications method as well as, you know, comp OS, this, that, and the others,
and, and all of those things. And you, you learn how to do flaming and how to, how to do,
replies to people properly. And if you did, yes, you did. Format it wrongly, then you would be
torrents. And it was terrible. Yeah, I should do a show about this, the history of all these
jolly things. Uh, don't, don't top post. Ah, I said, deadly thing to do. Unless you're, uh,
unless it makes the accessibility very difficult for you.
That's, that's a whole different, yes, a whole different issue. Yes, I do appreciate that.
But, uh, back in those days, that was not a consideration.
Okay, moving on. There is a new German podcast. It is Linux, uh, Unichast.
.net. And I was shocked to find out that I could pick up 90% of us. So I've, uh,
started listening to that as a way to improve my German. So give it a, give it a go. Let the
guys flow over you. And if nothing else, it makes you aware that they're not all podcasters
for Germany, or motorbikes, and refuse to do shows and hack a public radio.
Not pointing at me talking about it in particular. No, no.
Yeah. Anyways, Star Drifter RSS had some issues and, uh, got fixed. Yes. Last in Bronx was
having difficulties with this, with his feeds. Ah, that wasn't, I think probably the,
the server was down that day or something. It was hiccuping or something, but there had been
some problems with, with, um, the feeds on that site earlier on in the month.
Yeah. And then we had Josh telling us the move was finished. And, uh, yeah, it's everything is
new and shiny and fast. And now that I'm not blocked anymore for doing suspicious activity,
like having 15 different sessions open, then stuff I can, uh, get it.
And then the last was just the announcement of the community news. And that I'm afraid is that,
oh, there's, uh, some apologies due to guitar man for messing up A, his attribution and B,
the show notes. And, uh, semiotic robotic for mixing up the shows when I was editing some of the
shows I got is, I had to go back and read it all the shows. So, uh, I got some of them mixed up.
Warning to everybody that they, um, to check for the new intro and outro. It's actually better if
you don't put the intro and outro on now just because then we can do, uh, leveling a lot better,
um, on the incoming site we do leveling of your audio on then we level that with the intro and
outro and then with the, uh, another thing, uh, which is the text to speech summary. Dave, have
you heard any of the text to speech summary shows yet? I have no, no. What, which ones have they been?
Your show, the, uh, HPR community news was the first one. All right, right. So what I do is, uh,
I have a, well, actually, if you go to HPR, uh, hackupubliquady.org forward slash say.php,
question mark, id equals and the show number, you'll get a text file, which is compiled by the, um,
by the website and I parse that and then, uh, do the text to speech on it. So, for example, for this
show, so for this show, this summary will have been its Monday, the first of September 2014,
this is HPR episode 1586 entitled HPR news, community news for August 14th and as part of the series,
HPR community news is used by HPR volunteers and is about zero minutes long, which I'll fix as soon
as I put that in. And feedback can be sent to admin at hackupubliquady.org or leave in comments
on the episode. The summary is dash dash dash, which is what it is at the moment, but we'll be
filled in later on. So that actually means that shows need to get posted to as on to the database first
and then, um, when I'm doing a coding, I can just pull everything down from that. So this takes care
of the tags, it takes care of the text to speech at the beginning and that also allows us to, um,
you know, add in, um, things, I guess, remind you of the principles. Yeah. Yeah.
Very cool. What's happening to shows that are going up to archive.walk?
The way different, um, yeah. So what happens is I download this and then we have the, um,
uh, so this has played first. That way, anybody listening to the shows can decide whether they want,
you know, it's of interest to them, whether it's something better for listening in the car.
Actually, something I need to put in here as well is they, uh, if it's not a creative,
our normal creative commons license, I need to put that in. And if the flag for, um,
for, um, if it's safe for work or not, that might be something to put in there. Possibly. Possibly
not. I need to think about that. Or actually, I don't, people need to send in comments about whether
that's, you know, what exactly should be in that introduction thing.
Uh, so anyway, you have the text to speak in introduction. Then you've got the, uh,
mention of the sponsor, which for the stuff on, on honesttools.com, which is on hackupublicradio.org.
Those ones will be obviously mentioning in honesttools.com. And currently mentioning the discount code
and later on if, uh, Josh or the guys want to announce any other things there that will be, uh,
added and then, you know, our shows come in. They will naturally pick up the new ad.
And the ones going to archive.org get the archive.org one. And then the intro and outro goes in,
then the show itself. So the intro goes in, the show itself, and then the outro goes in. So,
very good. It's very impressive now. So if people want to record their own stuff, they can do that,
and they can signal those in the show notes. But then if you're doing that and you need to know
about levels, make sure everything is nice and leveled the whole way across. And also you,
so if you're not worried about that, just send in the show without an intro and outro that's
probably as handy for everybody. Um, people who want to, um, do HPR int, HPR intro is just the HPR
intro. Um, that there was a discussion before and there was a lot of, um, people did not want that
to change in, um, anyway, so we're leaving that as it is, uh, until there's, you know, overwhelming
discussion on the male list to tell us to do otherwise. But the outro can be, uh, HPR inspired music.
So if, if there are musicians out there who want to do a HPR, uh, bedding music and they want to put
in the, uh, the audio track of, um, man on my wife, who did that or you want to do an audio track
yourself or whether you want to do mixed both of them, then that's all available. You can do that
and that's up on the websites, uh, on the website with link in the, on the contribute page.
Cool. So other things that has happened on the website is, uh, started tidying off the, um,
some of the series, which is why, um, don't tell Mike or anything. I'm thinking of putting in a
linked table so that you get a multiple series and I still want to get another episode out of him.
Um, and so I put in a new series called Accessibility of a Shocked that we didn't have that already,
um, some of the other series that are in there that are, um, that only have two, uh, you know,
I have less than three episodes in them will be added to the tags. That's an ongoing thing. I'm
just going to do it as I do it. We today switched everything, uh, end to end on the database to
UTF-8. So be aware that there might be some UTF-8 issues. I didn't, none of them jumped out with me
so far. I think, no, I think, I think it's looking good. I've not really sampled it in
huge amount of detail. But I went and looked at a few shows that had some, had had quite a lot of
UTF-8 stuff, unicode stuff in and they look absolutely perfect. So, yeah. Has it finished there?
Hopefully everything's good. Yeah, so that's cool. Um, if anybody notices anything weird,
give us a shout obviously. Um, there is, uh, one thing that I put in today to fix something that
we will need to keep track on and that's, uh, escaped, uh, escaped quotations and single quotes
and stuff. So it may look funny on some of the feeds, but we'll keep an eye on that one.
It's a whole load of weird escaped quotes in the comments. Um, I mean, nobody will have seen
this probably because it's visible in the database, but, um, not, but the comment system seems to
put them in on the way in and take them out on the way out. I know what the hell that's all about.
Yeah, and I think we may have the same thing now on, so we'll keep an eye on it. It's just
something you just, so you know that if you're expecting some major change to come along,
that hasn't happened. Uh, yes, and you're wondering why the, uh, our limited amount of volunteer
time to work on this volunteer effort is, uh, is spent doing other stuff. Uh, today we added the
downloads to against my management to the episode tables so that might start appearing shortly.
I have met the unilateral decision to only show, um, the hits from a month ago because, uh,
first start, they're only collected, they're only, uh, uh, uh, given out every month. So the
processing for this month hasn't finished yet. So that's reason number one. I've also taken
the unilateral decision that if anything has got, uh, an order of 10 times more hits than any
of the other shows, it gets truncated down, uh, until I can figure out what it is. I'm saying right
here and right now that that's upload and download thing will, um, the number of downloads that you
have may increase or decrease depending on the, if we discover that the filtering is, uh, if sites
have been hit by robots or been hit by, uh, spammers or has been hit by whatever. So absolutely no
guarantee as to what that is. And to be honest, I have better things to be doing, which is vis-vis
the upload thing which I was almost finished with. And then I had an epiphany in the basement where
I decided it was all done wrong. Oh no. Yeah. Well, I was writing the, uh, I was writing, I was
updating the, um, how to, or the contribute page to describe everything. And then I was going,
this just makes no, so why would I be asking this at this point? So I completely simplify that.
So now you will go to the calendar page or if you want to, you can go to the calendar page and
click on, you know, um, where it says is available will be a link to, uh, record, reserve now. So you
click that and then it will just ask you for your email address, you know, the show, show name and
the email address and nothing else, uh, the show number and email address and nothing else. And then
you get an email and then you have 30 minutes to, um, to come back with a, with, you know, a validation
that you have that, uh, that's about to work an email address and as you have a valid lock,
and in that time it will be reserved for 30 minutes. And if you don't come back in 30 minutes,
it'll be locked to you, you can't, uh, add another show. And if you go to five other IP addresses,
then the whole upload system stops until we can figure out what's going on. So, uh, call me paranoid.
So then once you get the lock, you have 24 hours to, uh, are you of some longer amount of time,
which might be anything from, I don't know, half an hour to 24 hours to actually fill in the thing
and you do your upload and there you'll be able to edit your, uh, show notes and you'll be able to
edit your photo and your bio and all that sort of stuff as well. So I'm kind of thinking there
that if, you know, you're giving this key then with the key, if you keep it safe, you can then go
back and edit your own show notes later on. Good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then with the
catch it, that you're not going to be adding anything to the database. All of this is just
dumped onto a text file in a directory that you can't execute anything on. And then let's pull
off to another server, which might be my own laptop. And then we do the checks on it. And we're
also added a PGP key thing to, um, the profiles, which shall be coming up in your, uh, host, uh, host
details. And the idea there is that if you sign your, if you're a known host as a new
sub-interests show before and then you put your key in, um, that that will add a level of weight
to the, um, to the process, not saying that it'll be automatic, but it might be more, so if,
if the show comes in with Dave and we know this is Dave key and we can assume that Dave,
you know, the level of trust and Dave's key is high that that will automatically get posted without
anybody needing to approve it. Sounds okay? Yeah. Cool. Very cool. Because that reduces the
amount of work that you have to do to, um, I don't know if it's fantastic. I'll say it again.
I'll say it again. I'll say it again. I have my entire purpose of, uh, coming on here was to get
HVR, uh, was to get HVR so that it wasn't dying. And I think we can look at the queue. It's nice
and healthy. You need to keep sending in shows, folks. You must keep sending in shows, but it's
nice and healthy at the moment. We're coming into the autumn, uh, in, or the fall in the northern
hemisphere. So we expect lots of, uh, lots of shows from snowbound individuals. And, uh, but my,
my overall motto has to replace myself with a script as soon as possible. And that is, uh,
that's, that's been the plan all along. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. So quite significant, uh, advances
being made here. I'm impressed. Yeah. And I've also been thinking, um, that we should have a
Wikipedia page. So I would like to, yeah, expand out the about page. Well, I mean, I don't know
whether we should or we shouldn't. The point of it is that we're never going to have a Wikipedia
page because anybody who shows any interest in HVR should be recording a show for me. And at
that point, if they're recording a show, then they, um, are obviously, uh, not allowed to edit
Wikipedia pages because they're part of HVR. Yeah. But I have looked at some of the, um, some of
the websites and what Wikipedia has as a, um, as a, uh, site of interest or whatever is, is very
vague. I mean, some, some sites have got, uh, have got, you know, the systems noteworthy enough
and then other, other sites, slash shows and you think, okay, why have they got, uh, why,
why is their site up there? But it is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. It seems a little, little arbitrary. And,
uh, it's somewhat nuanced, nuanced by, uh, by, by certain opinions. And, uh, as you say, it is,
as it is. One thing, yeah, one thing we should do, though, is, uh, on the above page, which we do
do, um, is we have, uh, links to stuff that's in the press, but I'd also like to, um, put in,
because that's like, verifiable links to places that we are mentioned and reviewed and stuff. So,
there's, uh, six different articles there now. Um, so if we're in any print magazines or stuff
like that, then, you know, that they seem to like physical, real-world presence. I would also like
to go back and see, you know, collect underneath there in the press or, um, have another section on
the above page, uh, relating to the number of, uh, places where we have been, uh, you know, events
that we have attended or there has been a HPR representation at, for example, log camp, all the
log camps that we've been, uh, all the Northeast Linux Fest, all the Southeast Linux Fest, um, uh,
FostM last year, FostM this year. All right, well, next year. FostM this year, FostM next year,
that sort of, that sort of thing. So we can get a, we've been physically on the ground covering
these, uh, covering these events. Uh-huh. Campus city maker fair, that sort of thing, you know,
it should all be in the archives. I should be able to pull that up myself actually.
And again, if you have any comments, uh, they mailing list is there for that sort of thing.
And as in minutes, uh, in our 14, I think we should stop. Okay, that's good to me.
Okay, Joy, uh, take us out with the, um, pre-soft for a song. That, that is just not going to happen,
can I have right now? What we need is somebody playing that on the bagpipes,
no, with Debian killed on, uh, stand on Edinburgh castle, looking down, playing,
well, when I meet somebody who's, uh, he's up for that. I'll, I'll let you know.
I know you happened to know a few musicians, my friend. I do actually, yes, indeed, I'm sure.
Yes, and, uh, some of the musicians listening, we want HBR theme music. Thank you very much.
Join us now and share the software. Oh, God.
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