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saljamon QLB (قلب) - Program in Arabic, display algorithms as calligraphy

While on the subject of words with Arabic etymological roots, my personal favourite is Betelgeuse. The Arabic name of the star is يد الجوزاء (yad al-Jauzā) which means "the hand of the Jauzā". But after a few medieval translation it got morphed into it's current name. Which, unfortunately, ended up sounding like, and often back translated as, ابط الجوزاء -- literally "the armpit of the Jauzā"!

saljamon [dead]

Did doj.gov ever exist? It's not resolving for me. The Department of Justice is at justice.gov.

Edit: The article says it redirects to justice.gov.

saljamon Going for a seven-year walk

That's true for me as well. When I was a student, revising (and memorising bits that needed to be memorised) was almost always a form of holding a book and walking in circles. Or around the house.

I now spend as much time walking around the office as I do cranking code or writing on my desk. Over the years, I started recognising other habitual pacers in the department. We joke about forming a society and lobbying for a pacing room.

saljamon Chromebook (Exynos 5, 2GB) Takes Top Place In Laptop Sales On Amazon

A few commenters are asking about running their favourite distro on these. I've installed a Debian chroot on mine. I've been using it as my main machine for almost 2 months now. I'm quite happy with it, but I mostly use it as a terminal to bigger machines at the university.

To get X I hacked together a Chrome App[0] VNC client, based on noVNC. It's a bit laggy sometimes, but does the job for my purposes.

Ron Minnich (of Coreboot fame) wrote a guide for doing the same with Arch[1]. And there's Crouton[2] for Ubuntu, but I'm not sure whether it does ARM or not.

[0] https://bitbucket.org/saljam/vnc

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IVABFl9TJMFPqoE_c0vWP7Yh...

[2] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

saljamon Chromebook (Exynos 5, 2GB) Takes Top Place In Laptop Sales On Amazon

The Samsung ARM Chromebook I have has 2 normally located Alt keys. The Search key replaces Caps Lock (Good riddance!)

Are you sure you weren't using one of the Intel ones? Maybe it's the British/American difference...

saljamon The Return of the Stylus

My main gripe with scribbling down using a stylus is the huge lag that seems to exist between the stroke and the curve appearing on the screen. It seems to me that that's the thing that keeps me going back to pen and paper.

saljamon Urbanization of Dubai

Really? Of all the gulf nations, the UAE seems tome to be the most prepared to survive after oil, specifically because of Dubai.

Now, it's not my favourite city, but I don't understand all the hate towards it. They've got a lot of oil money that's not going to last and they need to pivot to something else. Dubai is their attempt.

saljamon WebTCP: Making TCP Connections From Browser

Chrome (and I believe Firefox too) has a TCP socket API, but it's only exposed to Chrome apps and extensions.

saljamon Saudi Arabia implements electronic tracking system for women

Well, I'm an Arab, and I can. What's your point?

saljamon Saudi Arabia implements electronic tracking system for women

Arms deals and aid are different. However, you're right, and Alyamamah isn't the only one. The huge sums of money and fraud involved in all the arms deals between the Gulf Nations and the West is embarrassing to to both ends to say the least.

saljamon Saudi Arabia implements electronic tracking system for women

No, it's nowhere near as high tech as the article makes it sound. In contrast to how it works in the UK for example, in Saudi Arabia you have to go through passport control whenever you leave the country. This new system checks if the person leaving is a child or a woman and texts their father's or husband's phone number if they have it registered. They can find that information because it's all part of the ID system that's been implemented for decades.

saljamon Saudi Arabia implements electronic tracking system for women

I don't really see the point of this, given that women and non-adults can't cross a border anyway without a signed permit from their father or husband. I'm guessing this text message system works for children too.

saljamon Saudi Arabia implements electronic tracking system for women

Really? You think the US government cares about Saudi Arabian women? I don't think they're that benevolent.

And since when did the US send aid money to the Saudis? Last time I check their oil pumps were working.

saljamon Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

What zokier said. Unless it's some form of this bug: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20187.html

saljamon Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

I used Debian's Multistrap on another computer to make the chroot. I just copied it into it's own directory somewhere on /home and used it from there.

You'll need to enable dev-mode, and you'll probably need to remount the partition it's on without the noexec option. It's a pretty standard chroot from there on.

I can write up the process somewhere or share the filesystem if there's enough interest.

saljamon Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast

I got mine last week, and I've been using it as my main machine since then.

I put on a small Debian-based chroot and installed Guacamole[1]*, so I can use my favourite editor and X11 programs within a Chrome tab.

Compiling large C/C++ programs takes a while, but the Go compilers (what I mostly use) work really well. And I can always SSH into beefier machines (Linode/University) if I ever need to.

This replaced a Thinkpad which cost 5 times as much and broke in less than 13 months. So far I'm not missing the Thinkpad. (Well, maybe the 3 button TrackPoint)

[1] http://guac-dev.org

saljamon Evernote 5 for Mac

Unless you want something web based, why not just an editor and sshfs, or unison?

saljamon More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs

This is why more vendors should use Coreboot[1]. It's open source, so this sort of rubbish can be fixed. And it's also much more flexible.

I think the new Chromebooks use it. This is how they achieved their “instant-on” feature. I can't wait for others to follow suit.

[1] http://www.coreboot.org/

saljamon Google TV: Now faster and easier

Ha. That's a good point. I don't really have much interest in spectator sports. Which brings another point to mind; I found following TdF on the web with all the interactive stats easily accessible very enjoyable. It's a shame there wasn't much live video coverage.

Then again, I'm not really the man to talk about sports.

saljamon Google TV: Now faster and easier

When I saw that video I immediately thought of what Sussman said about Haskell a year or so ago. “Haskell is the most advanced of the obsolete programming languages!” [1] I think Google TV is the most advanced form of an obsolete medium.

I don't have a TV, and all of my friends who do rarely use theirs. Added together, I'd say I watch about an hour a fortnight of TV material. And that's mostly on my phone or computer's screen.

This might be a generation thing. With tablets and smartphones everywhere I don't feel I'm missing out. On the other hand, my father needs the constant babble of the TV. It could also be that my circles and I are outliers against the norm, but I very much doubt it.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...

saljamon Go Bloviations

Go generally compiles so quickly, incremental compilation is unnecessary.

saljamon فلسطين. top-level domain representing the Occupied Palestinian Territory

I digress, but I think this is one of the most annoying things about Unix these days. I practically live by the command line; but terminals are terrible. We're basically emulating technology that was already getting obsolete in the 70s!

Plan 9 had the courage to shed this cruft by having simple text windows which have a prompt. No curser addressing and no crazy control codes. That makes rendering it just as easy (and beautiful) as rendering text box contents. I wish the Linux desktop environments would follow suit.

saljamon فلسطين. top-level domain representing the Occupied Palestinian Territory

I don't see how cursive script makes Arabic less “modern.” It might make carving it onto stone a bit harder, but the printing press, the typewriter, and the computer all had no problems producing quality Arabic type.

Having written code which renders Arabic text, I found “joining” up the letters to be quite simple. It's just a few rules to choose which glyph to display for each character depending on context. The tricky bits, I found, is in integrating a right-to-left script with systems which were made with only left-to-right in mind.

saljamon How statically linked programs run on Linux

Ian Lance Taylor (author of the gold linker) wrote a wonderful 20 part essay to how linkers work: http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/38

I'd also recommend reading the rest of his blog, at least the programming section. It's very insightful.

saljamon Handle passwords with Keychain

I wish there was something like Plan 9's Factotum that today's programs used. It didn't just store keys for you; it handled authentication on behalf of your client.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factotum_(software)

saljamon The power of intermittent fasting

In addition to fasting on the month of Ramadan, Muslims are “recommended” (i.e. it's considered virtuous but not obligatory) to fast on Mondays and Thursdays of every week. That sounds eerily similar to the 5:2 diet in the article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawm#Days_for_voluntary_fasting

Muslims also know what's called prophet David's fasting, which is to fast every other day. However, considering that includes water, it's considerably difficult to maintain. I'm not sure I heard of anyone other than David himself do it for a long period of time! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_view_of_David

saljamon Rob Pike: the origin of dotfiles

When your goal is to "reduce clutter" then 2 layers would be the minimum. You make another 4(?) folders in my home-directory and call that reducing clutter?

I can see a clear and very useful difference between RUNTIME_DIR, CACHE_DIR, and CONFIG_DIR. Consider a scenario where $HOME is on a networked filesystem. RUNTIME_DIR has to be outside that, and local to the machine's namespace. That's because it references things inherently local to the machine. That is, pids and pipes. These wouldn't make sense on any other machine and will just make the application's job harder.

I also set CACHE_DIR to be local (/tmp/$USER.cache.) That's because caching performs terribly when it's flying over the network. Chrome is the main culprit for me. It also fills my file quota with hours of using it. However, it's still useful to keep that data in the medium term.

CONFIG_DIR and DATA_DIR, however, don't seem to be very different to me. I can't imagine a scenario where I want one but not the other. I might be using the wrong sort of applications. (For the record I have 8 files in .config, 10 dot files, and just 1 in .local/share.)

Due to the semantics you now suddenly need a cronjob or similar abomination that traverses all home-directories and picks out stuff ("MUST" be blown away).

Having RUNTIME_DIR on a tmpfs, like what most distributions do with /var/run, solves that problem. I map mine to /var/run/$user, even though I've yet to see an application actually use it. The spec BTW doesn't even specify the default value!

And what the heck is going in .local anyways? When the user saves a file then he pretty surely doesn't want it buried under some dot-directory.

I agree, the default values are silly. This, like most of Modern Unix, is an ugly hack which makes dealing with the rest of the ugly hacks a bit easier. If you want an elegant solution you'll probably have to throw away most of what was added during last 20 years. May I suggest starting with sockets?

saljamon Rob Pike: the origin of dotfiles

To be fair, that's how it works. They have default values when they're not set. These are for when you want to override them, e.g. to keep cache files local instead of over your net mounted home directory.

saljamon Rob Pike: the origin of dotfiles

A bit off topic, but is it just me or is the quality of comments on public G+ posts is absolutely terrible? Within a few hours there has been more than 100 replies. Most are inane, rude, of the useless “great post!” type, or just plain old spam. I could only manage to glean about 8 or 9 insightful replies.

Is this something intrinsic to G+? Is it a function of the author's popularity? The discussions here are normally much more sensible, but I would expect HN's readership to have a fairly similar demographic to that of Rob Pike's G+ subscribers.

saljamon UK government report calls for the end of broadcast TV

I agree, it is challenging but there are already techniques which solve most of the problem. Namely IP multicast. Maybe this would finally push ISPs to properly support it?