/dev/dump

As a result of work I've been doing for illumos , I've recently gotten re-engaged with internationalization, and the support for this in libc and localedef (I am the original author for our localedef.) I've decided that human languages suck.  Some suck worse than others though, so I thought I'd write up a guide.  You can take this as "your language sucks if...", or perhaps a better view might be "your program sucks if you make assumptions this breaks..." (Full disclosure, I'm spoiled.  I am a native speaker of English.  English is pretty awesome for data-processing, at least at the written level.  I'm not going to concern myself with questions about deeper issues like grammar, natural language recognition, speech synthesis, or recognition, automatic translation, etc.  Instead this is focused strictly on the most basic display and simple operations like collation (sorting), case conversion, and character classification.) 1. Too many cod...

I'm going to say some things here that may be controversial.  Certainly that headline is.  But please, bear with me, and read this before you judge too harshly. As another writer said, 2014 has been a terrible year for women in tech.  (Whether in the industry, or in gaming.)  Arguably, this is not a new  thing, but rather events are reaching a head.  Women (some at any rate) are being more vocal, and awareness of women's issues is up.  On the face of it, this should be a good thing. And yet, we have incredible conflict between women and men.  And this is at the heart of my problem with "Feminism". The F-Word Don't get me wrong.  I strongly believe that women should be treated fairly and with respect; in the professional place they should receive the same level of professional respect -- and compensation! -- as their male counterparts can expect.  I believe this passionately -- as a nerd, I prefer to judge people on the merits ...

Please have a look at Sage Weil's blog post on supporting the Ada Initiative, which supports women in open source development. Sage is sponsoring an $8192 matching grant, to support women in open source development of open storage technology. You may have heard my talk recently, where I expressed that there have been no female contributions to illumos (that includes ZFS by the way!)  This is kind of a tragedy; intelligence and creativity of at least half the population are simply not represented here, and we are worser for it. If you want to try to do something about it, heres a small thing.  There's a week remaining to do so, so I encourage folks to step up.  ($3392 has already been granted.) I'm making a donation myself, if you think supporting more women in open source is a worthwhile cause, please join me!

I have just spent an all-nighter doing something I didn't expect to do. I've " modernized " less (1).  (That link is to the changeset.) First off, let me explain the motivation.  We need a pager for illumos that can meet the requirements for POSIX IEEE 2003.1-2008 more (1).  We have a suitable pager (barely), in closed source form only, delivered into /usr/xpg4/bin/more .  We have an open source /usr/bin/more , but it is incredibly limited, hearkening back to the days of printed hard copy I think.  (It even has Microsoft copyrights in it!) So closed source is kind of a no go for me. less (1) looks attractive.  It's widely used, and has been used to fill in for more(1) to achieve POSIX compliance on other systems (such as MacOS X.) So I started by unpacking it into our tree, and trying to get it to work with an illumos build system. That's when I discovered the crazy contortions autoconf was doing that basically wound up leaving it with just leg...

(Sorry for the political/religious slant this post takes... I've been trying to stay focused on technology, but sometimes events are simply too large to ignore...) The execution of John Foley is just the latest.  But for me, its the straw that broke the camel's back.  Over the past weeks, I've become extremely frustrated and angry.  The "radical Islamists" have become the single biggest threat to world peace since Hitler's Nazi's.  And they are worse than the Nazi's.  Which takes some doing.  (Nazi's "merely" exterminated Jews.  The Islamists want to exterminate everyone who does't believe exactly their own particular version of extreme religion.) I'm not a Muslim.  I'm probably not even a Christian when you get down to it.  I do believe in God, I suppose.  And I do believe that God certainly didn't intend for one group of believes to exterminate another simply because they have different beliefs. Parts of ...

A year in the making... and finally the code is pushed.  Hooray! I've just pushed 2964  into illumos , which adds support for a bunch of new libc calls for thread safe and thread-specific locales, as well as explicit locale_t objects.   Some of the interfaces added fall under the BSD/MacOS X " xlocale " class of functions. Note that not all of the xlocale functions supplied by BSD/MacOS are present.  However, all of the routines that were added by POSIX 2008 for this class are present, and should conform to the POSIX 2008 / XPG Issue 7 standards.  (Note that we are not yet compliant with POSIX 2008, this is just a first step -- albeit a rather major one.) The webrev is also available for folks who want to look at the code. The new APIs are documented in newlocale(3c), uselocale(3c), etc.   (Sadly, man pages are not indexed yet so I can't put links here.) Also, documentation for some APIs that was missing (e.g. strfmon(3c)) are now added. This ...

Recently, there has been a bit of a debate on the illumos mailing lists, beginning I suppose with an initial proposal I made concerning the output from the uname (1) command on illumos, which today, when presented with "-s -r" as options, emits "SunOS 5.11". A lot of the debate centers on various ways that software can or cannot identify the platform it is running on, and use that information to make programmatic decisions about how to operate. Most often these are decisions made at compile time, by tools such as autoconf and automake . Clearly, it would be better for software not to rely on uname for programmatic uses, and detractors of my original proposal are correct that even in the Linux community, the value from uname cannot be relied upon for such use.  There are indeed better mechanisms to use, such as sysconf (3c), or the ZFS feature flags, to determine individual capabilities.  Indeed, the GNU autotools contains many individual tests for such thin...