Re: [9fans] Re: Solaris thread scheaduling

Re: [9fans] Re: Solaris thread scheaduling

[rob pike]

What, we should use uncooperative threads?
Adversarial threads? Anarchic threads?

I guess I don't know the terminology.  If POSIX threads
are a good thing, perhaps I don't want to know what they're
better than.

-rob

Re: [9fans] pipefile

[rob pike]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 486 bytes --]

> When I input Japanese like below:
> 
> term% 日本語の入力の練習です。<cr>
> 
> 
> I cannot now return to rc shell.

I don't understand.  Do you want just to enter one line of Japanese text?
The idea was to switch the mode of /dev/cons permanently. I assumed
your Japanese input methods could provide both ASCII and Japanese text.
The pipefile program is a permanent fixture, not useful for just sending
one line and going back to the previous state.

-rob


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From: okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] pipefile
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:55:47 0900
Message-ID: <200008020754.DAA15253@cse.psu.edu>

>As I said in the beginning, this trick is suitable for continuous
>files such as devices

I was confused in my earlier mail, because I had no EARGF definition
on my libc.h.  Now, I got the new update, and it works now what you
intended (probably).

Then, now I'm wondering rightly☺ how I can end the input, and 
return to shell prompt, when I hit return key on rio environment.  
Yes, I have read rio sources, but it's beyond my ability.  My only 
understand on this is to send nil length font length to the frame of
the window of rio....  I know this procedure is simple, and works 
under acme, too.

When I input Japanese like below:

term% 日本語の入力の練習です。<cr>


I cannot now return to rc shell.

Kenji

Re: [9fans] pipefile

[James A. Robinson]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain; charset="x-unknown", Size: 668 bytes --]

I think he was thinking of the v2 edition where, with ktrans, you
could hit a ctrl seq and switch into different modes.  I assume that
functionality was always part of ktrans itself, in other words after it's
started it is always running and handles whether or not to do translation.


> > When I input Japanese like below:
> > 
> > term% 日本語の入力の練習です。<cr>
> > 
> > 
> > I cannot now return to rc shell.
> 
> I don't understand.  Do you want just to enter one line of Japanese text?
> The idea was to switch the mode of /dev/cons permanently. I assumed
> your Japanese input methods could provide both ASCII and Japanese text.

Re: [9fans] Re: Solaris thread scheaduling

[Tom Duff]

On Aug 18, 11:34am, rob pike wrote:
> Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: Solaris thread scheaduling
> What, we should use uncooperative threads?
> Adversarial threads? Anarchic threads?
>
> I guess I don't know the terminology.  If POSIX threads
> are a good thing, perhaps I don't want to know what they're
> better than.

Cooperative threads are just coroutines.  They're `cooperative'
because if the thread doesn't cooperate by calling the scheduler,
no other thread ever get scheduled.

-- 
Tom Duff.  FUD in optima forma.

Re: [9fans] Reliable Cray Y-MP C90 Supercomputer

[rob pike]

> 
> well you i told you not too.  and it didn't feel like water and
> it wasn't coffee.  so what was it?  i believe it came in 18x18x18"
> clear(ish) plastic containers.  does that refresh your memory?
> 

That's fluorinert all right.  But it wasn't me.

-rob

Re: [9fans] Reliable Cray Y-MP C90 Supercomputer

[James A. Robinson]

> > well you i told you not too.  and it didn't feel like water and
> > it wasn't coffee.  so what was it?  i believe it came in 18x18x18"
> > clear(ish) plastic containers.  does that refresh your memory?
> 
> That's fluorinert all right.  But it wasn't me.
> 
> -rob

I bet it was Penn and Teller...
(http://www.sincity.com/penn-n-teller/wired-penn.html)

Re: [9fans] Reliable Cray Y-MP C90 Supercomputer

[Boyd Roberts]

From: James A. Robinson <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>
> 
> I bet it was Penn and Teller...

no, but they were around.  i got this immortal quote from
lou reed, thanks to rob and penn:

    always go for overkill

rawb, you and your aussie friends...

Re: [9fans] Reliable Cray Y-MP C90 Supercomputer

[Boyd Roberts]

From: rob pike <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com>
> 
> That's fluorinert all right.  But it wasn't me.
> 
> -rob

oh yes it was, rob.  i remember. 
'round the time you were writing acme IIRC.

and yes, i remember the car ride back from ny with bob.
not one of the cleverest things i'd done...

Re: [9fans] new versions of graphics programs?

[Tom Duff]

> I worked on a couple of the tools and stumbled into original
> bugs that I didn't see how to fix, so that project has stalled.
> The shipped gif and jpg tools and the iconv program should
> address some of the lower-level needs.  Higher-level
> image processing is a project for a dedicated soul; it's a big
> job.

Obviously, I should speak up.  I'm the original author of most
of the fb code, and would be an obvious candidate to revive it
all.  There may be issues with my current employer that I have
to resolve.  I'll take a look at the issues and the code and see
what I might do.  Please speak to me if you have a specific
interest...

-- 
Tom Duff.  Simple PCs with super overcloaked pentiums.

Re: [9fans] /n/smtp

[rob pike]

> sam should have a named pipe for commands

The code is adaptable, because there are a few diehards here that don't
use plumbing. B works for them since sam checks if plumbing is
available and if not, turns on the pipe stuff.  That should be trivial
to make work on Unix, since it always did.

On Boyd's point, plumbing is of course the evolution of B.

-rob

Re: [9fans] /n/smtp

[Scott Schwartz]

Yes, if you use the old unix samterm, it continues to do what it always
did.

Re: [9fans] Crazy idea... or a new project?

[rob pike]

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That's a little simplistic.  The x86 is a lousy architecture,
and you're right about the compilers etc.  But all those
lousy drivers, VGAs, USB floppies, it goes on and on.
Are any two the same?  I doubt it.  That's the horror of
PCs, yet is a perhaps unavoidable consequence of the
history that made the PC dominant (c.f. the Mac).

The PC kernel for Plan 9 is huge because of all the drivers
it must have to run on all devices.  Sure we could have
(and perhaps should have) loadable device drivers,
but that is a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

-rob


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From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@plan9.bell-labs.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Crazy idea... or a new project?
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 19:05:08 -0500
Message-ID: <20001124000509.EF643199EE@mail.cse.psu.edu>

I don't agree about the x86.
Sure it's an ugly chip.
Sure it and its PC hosts are complicated.
But the bootstrap code and the compiler
are written.  In Plan 9, it's no different
to write applications for the x86 than it
is to write them for any other architecture.

Russ

Re: [9fans] Crazy idea... or a new project?

[Boyd Roberts]

> ... Sure we could have
> (and perhaps should have) loadable device drivers,
> but that is a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.
> 

yes, in your environment.

but like you can glue a namespace together, why not device
drivers?

Re: [9fans] Crazy idea... or a new project?

[Scott Schwartz]

| Sure we could have
| (and perhaps should have) loadable device drivers,
| but that is a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

Just to digress for a moment, I've never liked the idea of loadable
device drivers, because they seeem like such a stopgap measure.  Either a
real microkernel (ala QNX) or a conventional but pagable kernel would
address the space issue in a (IMHO) cleaner way.  Having the window
system allocate memory from unpageable ram bothers me in a similar way.

I'm sure rob's thought about these issues more than I, so I look forward
to being set straight on the topic. :-)

Re: [9fans] Crazy idea... or a new project?

[Boyd Roberts]

From: Scott Schwartz <schwartz@bio.cse.psu.edu>

> Just to digress for a moment, I've never liked the idea of loadable
> device drivers, because they seeem like such a stopgap measure.

maybe you could 'plumb' them.  after boot the kernel gets
handed up a file with rules/whatever to load device drivers
based on interrupts or other device ready 'events'.

i was thinking about digital uda-50 interfaces.  you could
just plug 'em in and ultrix would autoconf them at run
(ie. any) time.  of course, the driver was already loaded.

probably hard to generalise, but it might work out.

Re: [9fans] azerty [french] keyboard support

[rob pike]

It would be very little work to create a file, writable only by eve,
that allows you to
	cp /lib/keyboard /dev/kbdtrans
or some such and avoid the recompilation.  However, this problem
is a local one and it doesn't feel right to make it so generally
programmable.  Something more along the way timezone works
would suit me better, but I don't see the way.

-rob

Re: [9fans] azerty [french] keyboard support

[Scott Schwartz]

> cp /lib/keyboard /dev/kbdtrans

It's more a question of personalization than localization.  That mechanism
could also be used for qwerty vs dvorak, or replacing function keys with
selected non-ascii characters.

Re: [9fans] azerty [french] keyboard support

[Dan Cross]

In article <20010206171115.E303A199F8@mail.cse.psu.edu> you write:
>It would be very little work to create a file, writable only by eve,
>that allows you to
>	cp /lib/keyboard /dev/kbdtrans
>or some such and avoid the recompilation.  However, this problem
>is a local one and it doesn't feel right to make it so generally
>programmable.  Something more along the way timezone works
>would suit me better, but I don't see the way.

No, you're right; it is a local problem.  But a solution might fix a
bunch of local problems.  :-)  A filesystem to handle the keyboard is
my best guess, but that isn't gaining a lot of favor.

I agree, though, that putting the programmability into the kernel
isn't a good solution....

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] 9p2k, fsync

[rob pike]

Fsync etc. is at the wrong level.  The issue is not a system-wide
question, but a file-server question.  As a trivial example of how
to think about this problem,
	disk/kfscmd sync
strikes closer to the way the problem should be handled than
a 'sync' system call.  The details of how a file server backs up
and stabilizes its storage are specific to the server, and should
be implemented by it.  Plan 9 conventions show how to provide
such an interface; the file protocol is not the place.

-rob

Re: [9fans] 9p2k, fsync

[Scott Schwartz]

| Fsync etc. is at the wrong level.  The issue is not a system-wide
| question, but a file-server question.

So how does an application with an open fd assure that the write()s it
has issued are really on disk?  It's impossible for that program to tell
which file server you're using.  In fact, you might be using several,
if they're stacked up.

Re: [9fans] 9p2k, fsync

[Dan Cross]

In article <20010207152343.C1B91199E1@mail.cse.psu.edu> you write:
>Fsync etc. is at the wrong level.  The issue is not a system-wide
>question, but a file-server question.  As a trivial example of how
>to think about this problem,
>	disk/kfscmd sync
>strikes closer to the way the problem should be handled than
>a 'sync' system call.  The details of how a file server backs up
>and stabilizes its storage are specific to the server, and should
>be implemented by it.  Plan 9 conventions show how to provide
>such an interface; the file protocol is not the place.

Hey?  No disagreement that it's a fileserver issue, but I should also
be able to ask the file server to sync the data associated with a
particular FID.

Multics had this problem; no synchronization primitives for segments.
It was impossible to build a database on it for many years (maybe they
fixed it eventually; I don't know), because one couldn't guarantee
serialization of transactions on persistent media.  It would be a shame
to send Plan 9 down the same road for the exact same reason.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] 9p2k, fsync

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Dan Cross wrote:
> Multics had this problem; no synchronization primitives for segments.
> It was impossible to build a database on it for many years (maybe they
> fixed it eventually; I don't know), because one couldn't guarantee
> serialization of transactions on persistent media.  It would be a shame
> to send Plan 9 down the same road for the exact same reason.

I think that all that is required is consistency.
The server is the right place to enforce that,
and I'd suggest making it an explicit requirement.
How about this: To ensure that a 9P2k message has
been integrated into the server state, just wait
for an ack for the message, or if it is one-way,
send some innocuous request and wait for it to
return data.  Getting the feedback from the server
guarantees that the server (which is responsible
for maintaining consistency) has successfully
processed the previous request.  Of course, if the
service does a lousy job you have reason to demand
an improved server.

I once encountered a disk drive that apparently
wrote data to disk successfully, except it didn't
modify the sectors that it was supposed to have
written.  In the face of such phenomena it is
pointless to insist on absolute guarantees of
synchronization.  Good design calls for such
secondary matters to be handled as close to the
source of the problem as possible, rather than
intruding such low-level considerations into
higher logical levels.  If something does happen
at a lower level that necessarily affects things
at a higher level, then so be it, but if it
couldn't be solved down there it can't be solved
up here either, and up here dealing with it
distracts from the more strategic concerns.
(For similar reasons I am a fan of nested
exception handling instead of functions returning
failure codes, but that's another thread.)

Re: [9fans] isatty

[rob pike]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 184 bytes --]

Yeah. For purity and consistency, I tried to get TD to forget
about prompting in rc, just have it run commands, but he
caved in to pressure from less clean-minded people.

-rob


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From: rog@vitanuova.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] isatty
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 13:48:40 0000
Message-ID: <20010214124400.7C58819A16@mail.cse.psu.edu>

> since the idea is that what i see from
> 	ls
> should be a good guide to what grep sees in
> 	ls | grep '\.c'
> then yes, that isatty is indeed a bad idea

mind you, plan 9 isn't entirely innocent in this
respect, c.f. /sys/src/cmd/rc/exec.c:/Isatty

Re: [9fans] isatty

[Scott Schwartz]

| Yeah. For purity and consistency, I tried to get TD to forget
| about prompting in rc, just have it run commands, but he
| caved in to pressure from less clean-minded people.

Maybe the window system could do the prompting.  It could check if there
are any outstanding read requests for a window, and if so, change the
border color, or something like that.

Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward

[rob pike]

I'm nervous about this because rio can't do the same thing, and if you
get in the habit in sam place you'll be sorry in rio when you kill the
process.  I regret the different interpretations of ESC and don't want
to make another mistake like that.

-rob

Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

rob pike wrote:
> I'm nervous about this because rio can't do the same thing, and if you
> get in the habit in sam place you'll be sorry in rio when you kill the
> process.  I regret the different interpretations of ESC and don't want
> to make another mistake like that.

I appreciate the point.  It is a pity that the industry didn't agree on
standard uses for control keystrokes.  Actually DEL is RUBOUT, which
should be ignored since it is where the punched paper tape was
backspaced and overpunched to remove an erroneous character.  ESC is
supposed to introduce a *sequence* of characters.  Etc.  I'm not sure
why the early Unix use of DEL to generate an INTR signal was carried
into Plan 9, but frankly it seems like a poor choice.  ETX (^C) is a
semi-standard for this function, just as DEL deletes
forward in most text processors these days.

I doubt you want to go the X11-init-file route, but it might be
useful to employ *some* sort of functional key map, defaulting to
whatever you think is best.  Then sam, rio, and other apps could be
uniformly coded to test for the key corresponding to the function
Delete-Word-Backward, Delete-Char-Forward, Generate-Signal, etc.
instead of hard-wiring the functions.  I know that hard-wired
functions make it easier to use somebody else's environment, but I
don't think that trumps the desire to be able to switch among Plan 9
and other OSes without having to retrain one's fingers.

I just realized that while preparing this message under Solaris with
Netscape's Compose window, I used DEL for delete-forward several times.

Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward

[Boyd Roberts]

Douglas A. Gwyn <gwyn@arl.army.mil> a crit dans le message :
3ABF5D54.B549A18B@arl.army.mil...
> I appreciate the point.  It is a pity that the industry didn't agree on
> standard uses for control keystrokes.  Actually DEL is RUBOUT, which
> should be ignored since it is where the punched paper tape was
> backspaced and overpunched to remove an erroneous character.  ESC is
> supposed to introduce a *sequence* of characters.

|-------------|
| o o .     o |
|     . o   o |
|   o . o     |
|   o .     o |
| o   .       |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
| o   . o   o |
|     .   o o |
| o o . o     |
| o o .   o o |
| o o .   o   |
| o o . o o o |
|   o .   o   |
| o   .       |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
| o o .       |
|     .     o |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
|   o . o     |
|     .     o |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
| o o .     o |
|     . o   o |
| o   . o   o |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
|     . o o   |
|     .   o o |
|     .     o |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
| o o .       |
| o   .   o   |
| o   .   o   |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
| o   .   o   |
|     .   o o |
| o   . o     |
| o o . o o   |
| o   .       |
| o   . o   o |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
| o   . o o   |
| o o . o     |
|     . o o   |
|   o . o o   |
|     .     o |
|   o . o     |
|     .   o o |
|     . o o   |
| o o .       |
|   o .     o |
|   o . o     |
|     .     o |
| o   . o   o |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
|     .     o |
|     .   o o |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
|     .     o |
|     . o   o |
| o   .       |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
|   o . o o   |
|     .   o o |
|     . o o o |
|     . o o o |
| o o .       |
|     . o o   |
| o   .   o   |
| o o .   o o |
|     . o     |
| o o . o o o |
| o o .     o |
|   o . o     |
|     . o o   |
| o   .   o   |
|     .   o o |
| o o .     o |
| o o .   o o |
| o   .   o o |
|   o .       |
|-------------|

Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward

[Sam]

At the risk of asking a perhaps foolish question . . .
What the hell is this!?!

:),

sam
On Tuesday 27 March 2001 03:25, you wrote:
> Douglas A. Gwyn <gwyn@arl.army.mil> a crit dans le message :
> 3ABF5D54.B549A18B@arl.army.mil...
>
> > I appreciate the point.  It is a pity that the industry didn't agree on
> > standard uses for control keystrokes.  Actually DEL is RUBOUT, which
> > should be ignored since it is where the punched paper tape was
> > backspaced and overpunched to remove an erroneous character.  ESC is
> > supposed to introduce a *sequence* of characters.
> >
> |-------------|
> | o o .     o |
> |     . o   o |
> |   o . o     |
> |   o .     o |
> | o   .       |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> | o   . o   o |
> |     .   o o |
> | o o . o     |
> | o o .   o o |
> | o o .   o   |
> | o o . o o o |
> |   o .   o   |
> | o   .       |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> | o o .       |
> |     .     o |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> |   o . o     |
> |     .     o |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> | o o .     o |
> |     . o   o |
> | o   . o   o |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> |     . o o   |
> |     .   o o |
> |     .     o |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> | o o .       |
> | o   .   o   |
> | o   .   o   |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> | o   .   o   |
> |     .   o o |
> | o   . o     |
> | o o . o o   |
> | o   .       |
> | o   . o   o |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> | o   . o o   |
> | o o . o     |
> |     . o o   |
> |   o . o o   |
> |     .     o |
> |   o . o     |
> |     .   o o |
> |     . o o   |
> | o o .       |
> |   o .     o |
> |   o . o     |
> |     .     o |
> | o   . o   o |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> |     .     o |
> |     .   o o |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> |     .     o |
> |     . o   o |
> | o   .       |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> |   o . o o   |
> |     .   o o |
> |     . o o o |
> |     . o o o |
> | o o .       |
> |     . o o   |
> | o   .   o   |
> | o o .   o o |
> |     . o     |
> | o o . o o o |
> | o o .     o |
> |   o . o     |
> |     . o o   |
> | o   .   o   |
> |     .   o o |
> | o o .     o |
> | o o .   o o |
> | o   .   o o |
> |   o .       |
> |-------------|

-- 


Sam Hopkins
------------------------------------------------
Random QOTD:
"It now costs more to amuse a child,
	than it once did to educate his father."

Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward

[Dan Cross]

In article <01032709015600.08511@softnet> you write:
>At the risk of asking a perhaps foolish question . . .
>What the hell is this!?!

It's a paper tape image.  I'm not sure what the text says, though.
I think the first letter is ``I,'' though.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Dan Cross wrote:
> It's a paper tape image.  I'm not sure what the text says, though.

Since it has 5 levels, one assumes it uses Baudot code.
(He may have put the sprocket track in the wrong row.)
Translating:
WHILE YOU'RE AT IT WHY NOT ADD DOSKEY FUNCTIONALITY TOO THE COMMAND WINDOW?
(There were unnecessary figure/letter shifts around the spaces.)

Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward

[Boyd Roberts]

Douglas A. Gwyn <DAGwyn@null.net> a crit dans le message :
> WHILE YOU'RE AT IT WHY NOT ADD DOSKEY FUNCTIONALITY TOO THE COMMAND
WINDOW?
> (There were unnecessary figure/letter shifts around the spaces.)

While I've rarely agreed with you I know you're no fool.

Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward

[Scott Schwartz]

| I'm nervous about this because rio can't do the same thing, and if you
| get in the habit in sam place you'll be sorry in rio when you kill the
| process.  I regret the different interpretations of ESC and don't want
| to make another mistake like that.

Does rio really need to use the delete key for that?  Most keyboards
these days have some spare function keys, if not a key that's actually
labled something like "Break".

Re: [9fans] snprint(), getfields() specification

[rob pike]

Observe the error:
>     some of the printed characters were discarded.
None of the printed characters was discarded.

I understood what was being said and I am objecting to the design.
I understand the idea - that you can't find out what you need any other
way, so return that information and use strlen() to find out what really
got done - but I still think it sets a dangerous precedent.  Like the strcpy()
that returned a pointer to the end of the string (fixed by ANSI C), the
return value sacrifices a long-standing principle to short-sighted
expedience.  C99 has made many mistakes, and this is hardly the worst,
but it bothers me that people are now (or will soon be) arguing that we
should follow a broken design (c.f. malloc(0)) because it's written down
somewhere.

I suppose we should fix (read break) our snprintf() implementation, but
I can at least hold on to the fact that snprint() is not defined by C99.

I really object to this speculative return value, but it's not my decision
so pooey.  It's malloc(0) and int a[0] all over again.

Sigh.

-rob

Re: [9fans] snprint(), getfields() specification

[Scott Schwartz]

(Well, not strlen.  Just a check to see if the return value was bigger
than the limit.)

What then is the elegant solution?

Re: [9fans] snprint(), getfields() specification

[Steve Kilbane]

I'd say adopt the other UNIX convention, and return -1. The arguments
aren't "right" - insufficient space - so do nothing. It moves the
speculative behaviour onto the user.

steve

Re: [9fans] snprint(), getfields() specification

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Steve Kilbane" <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
>
> I'd say adopt the other UNIX convention, and return -1. The arguments
> aren't "right" - insufficient space - so do nothing. It moves the
> speculative behaviour onto the user.

no, return a value so you have the best possible idea of why it
didn't 'work'.  if it was a space problem, allocate more space,
loop.

i recall that netscape on windows 3 allowed you to specify how
many tcp connection it would manage at once and the i/o buffer
size.  should you try a > 16kb read/write bad things happened
to your winsock dll.  my dll, which called winsock while doing
all the socks 4 work, had a parameter in the ini file to split
the i/o's up into chunks and then return the total read/written.

should the dll get an i/o error you'd get a short i/o so you'd
continue with the bit that was left and then get an error.  err,
of course, i'm referring to a correctly written winsock application.

yeah, i suffered that sort of junk for 2 years -- ouch.

Re: [9fans] snprint(), getfields() specification

[Steve Kilbane]

Boyd:
> no, return a value so you have the best possible idea of why it
> didn't 'work'. 

i know; i was thinking about rob's comments on consistent return
values. however, he's already gone beyond this anyway.

steve

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[rob pike]

Yes, the behavior of the escape key (selecting typed text when nothing
is selected; deleting it when something is), backspace, typing when
text is selected, all this and more comes from Smalltalk, which was
the nicest thing to take ideas from when the precursors to all this
software were written, back in the early 1980s.

My primary regret is in this area is the different behavior of ESC
between sam and acme vs.  rio.  Rio's use of ESC is a great feature,
but it should have been placed on a different key.  But then, which
key on which keyboard...?

> Is it that the people who made the choices used different keyboards to
> the WinTel world?

Yes. The lack of support for Insert, Delete, the Windows key, End,
Page Up, etc.  all stem from the lack of those keys on the keyboards
this software was developed for.  (Plan 9 didn't even run on PCs in
its early days, and I bet the Windows key didn't exist before
Windows.)  Also in the early days of Plan 9 there was a variety of
machines (now, sometimes it seems PCs are the only machines in the
world) and a consequential variety of keyboards.

Are we settling in?  Does everyone agree that ^C is copy and ^V is
paste?  I doubt it.  Do we know that all keyboards will have the keys
we need?  I'm not sure.  Seems like you should decide what features
you want in your user interface, and map those to the available keys,
rather than the other way around.

There are a few decisions I made in Plan 9 that I expected to get
blasted on but that turned out not to generate much heat.  One of
those is that there is no equivalent of stty; the control codes are
fixed in the software.  My argument was that the complexity isn't
worth the convenience; you'll learn what keys do what and adapt.  Let
the other systems use stty to match Plan 9; they're all so proud of
that interface.

I wrote a paper called "Window Systems Should be Transparent".  It's
on my web page; go have a look.  (It predates Plan 9.)

> functioning cursor keys would still be a speed benefit.

This feels true but is false.  There were some fascinating experiments
done a few years ago in which people were given a long, tedious
editing task.  Some of the people were keyboard fans, some were mouse
fans.  Both folks were asked to do the task two ways, in random order,
once using the mouse to do the editing, once using cursor keys etc.
Regardless of their predilections, which was stated up front, after
the experiment everyone who did the task agreed that it was faster to
use the keyboard than the mouse to complete the task.  Everyone.

Here's the kicker: everyone was wrong.  They were being timed, and in
fact the reverse was true.  Although they thought the keyboard was
faster, doing the task using the mouse was faster for everyone, by a
substantial fraction.

The explanation, besides the obvious that arrow keys are actually
pretty slow if you're going more than a line or character, is that
people feel the mouse wastes time because you need to grab it and move
it, but it's time well spent.  The part of the brain that uses
keyboard commands to move the cursor is a higher-order function, and
thinking and planning how to use the keys to get to the destination
blocks thinking about the editing task at hand.  But using the mouse
is done by a lower-order part of the brain, which keeps the editing
part of the brain clear.  There's less task switching going on when
you use the mouse, so you work more efficiently.

If you don't believe me, the story is here:
	http://www.asktog.com/readerMail/1999-12ReaderMail.html
Thanks to some forgotten 9fan who mentioned this a while back.

I didn't know about these experiments when I said, long ago, that
using arrow keys to point at a display is like telling someone how to
go somewhere by giving directions, while using a mouse is like
pointing at a map.  In fact, I never used a screen editor until I had
a mouse, for just this reason.

Before this discussion devolves into the usual silliness, here's
something fun we've been working on.  Who last modified those ether
drivers?

	pc% ls -m ether*.c
	[sape]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys  2820 Apr 18 12:23 ether2000.c
	[sean]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 34782 May  3 10:19 ether2114x.c
	[sape]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys  4644 Apr 18 12:23 ether589.c
	[sean]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 13352 May  3 10:18 ether79c970.c
	[sape]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys  6665 Apr 18 12:24 ether8003.c
	[sean]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 25364 May 17 10:15 ether82543gc.c
	[presotto] --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 28587 Apr 23 13:52 ether82557.c
	[sape]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 17544 Apr 18 12:24 ether8390.c
	[jmk]      --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys  3745 May  2 17:02 etherec2t.c
	[sean]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 47826 May 17 10:14 etherelnk3.c
	[jmk]      --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 24348 May  2 16:59 etherga620.c
	[sape]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 15079 Apr 18 12:26 ethersmc.c
	[jmk]      --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys 28045 May  8 13:18 etherwavelan.c
	pc% 

The -m flag reports the muid (modifier uid) of the file, as reported
in the new 9P protocol.  This is the person who most recently modified
the file, instead of the person who created it.

History reports the information over time:

	pc+% history ether82557.c
	Apr 23 13:52:18 EDT 2001 ether82557.c 28587 [presotto]
	Apr 23 13:52:18 EDT 2001 /n/dump/2001/0519/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28587 [presotto]
	Apr 18 13:33:20 EDT 2001 /n/dump/2001/0423/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28510 [jmk]
	Feb 28 18:40:30 EST 2001 /n/dump/2001/0418/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28445 [jmk]
	Nov 11 10:30:56 EST 2000 /n/dump/2001/0228/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28058 [sape]
	Jun 19 00:05:20 EDT 2000 /n/dump/2000/1111/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28058 [jmk]
	...

The history command could now be renamed 'whotoblame'.  And as always,
history -D will tell you why to blame them.

-rob

Re[6]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Matt H]

Hello rob,


rp> If you don't believe me, the story is here:
rp>         http://www.asktog.com/readerMail/1999-12ReaderMail.html
rp> Thanks to some forgotten 9fan who mentioned this a while back.

thanks rob. That has satisfied my curiosity. And that story is
fascinating really.

rp> Before this discussion devolves into the usual silliness, here's
rp> something fun we've been working on.

looks great, good idea.

[9fans] ls -m

[Scott Schwartz]

> Before this discussion devolves into the usual silliness, here's
> something fun we've been working on.

Why the brackets?  It looks ok, but seems to makes it gratuitously harder
to parse the output.  

Re: [9fans] ls -m

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Scott Schwartz" <schwartz@bio.cse.psu.edu>
> Why the brackets?  It looks ok, but seems to makes it gratuitously harder
> to parse the output.  

good point.

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[James A. Robinson]

> The -m flag reports the muid (modifier uid) of the file, as reported
> in the new 9P protocol.  This is the person who most recently modified
> the file, instead of the person who created it.

That's pretty cool. I suppose it would be a waste of space to
record who deleted a file as well? One of the problems we had
to deal with twice over the years is someone accidently deleting
important files, but never coming forward. Sifting through process
logs was a not a lot of fun. =)


Jim

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Boyd Roberts]

> The -m flag reports the muid (modifier uid) of the file, as reported
> in the new 9P protocol.  This is the person who most recently modified
> the file, instead of the person who created it.

now, that looks cool.

with that and /n/dump it would obviate the need for *cs.

RE: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Richard Elberger]

>Are we settling in?  Does everyone agree that ^C is copy and ^V is
>paste?  I doubt it.  Do we know that all keyboards will have the keys
>we need?  I'm not sure.  Seems like you should decide what features
>you want in your user interface, and map those to the available keys,
>rather than the other way around.

I worked in software internationalization (in software release management)
for a few years and it just wasn't char set issues, it was hardware as well.
Our inventory of keyboards in the lab was huge.  This is why the mouse (or
other type of pointing device) is really nice.  It really reduces the
problem of having to track all the keyboard dependencies -- *if* the
pointing device is reliable and the application was built with functionality
being run by a pointing device.  I think that stuff like ^C has become a
learnt evil with the most common OS's and shouldn't be a requirement in the
next generation simply because it's habit.

-- rich

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Boyd Roberts]

> The history command could now be renamed 'whotoblame'.  And as always,
> history -D will tell you why to blame them.

nah, call it 'culprit'.

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Lucio De Re]

On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 10:14:25AM -0400, rob pike wrote:
> 
> The -m flag reports the muid (modifier uid) of the file, as reported
> in the new 9P protocol.  This is the person who most recently modified
> the file, instead of the person who created it.
> 
> History reports the information over time:
> 
Wow!
> 	pc+% history ether82557.c
> 	Apr 23 13:52:18 EDT 2001 ether82557.c 28587 [presotto]
> 	Apr 23 13:52:18 EDT 2001 /n/dump/2001/0519/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28587 [presotto]
> 	Apr 18 13:33:20 EDT 2001 /n/dump/2001/0423/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28510 [jmk]
> 	Feb 28 18:40:30 EST 2001 /n/dump/2001/0418/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28445 [jmk]
> 	Nov 11 10:30:56 EST 2000 /n/dump/2001/0228/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28058 [sape]
> 	Jun 19 00:05:20 EDT 2000 /n/dump/2000/1111/sys/src/9/pc/ether82557.c 28058 [jmk]
> 	...
> 
> The history command could now be renamed 'whotoblame'.  And as always,
> history -D will tell you why to blame them.
> 
Now you just have to have incremental diffs (yes, I know about dump,
just add file-close granularity) and file qualifiers (I forget
what the Macintosh calls them, but in CP/M it is extensions) and we
can take over the world.  Oh, people also ask for ACLs :-)

++L

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[paurea]

rob pike writes:
 > From: "rob pike" <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com>
 > Subject: Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l
 > Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 10:14:25 -0400
 > 
 > 
 > This feels true but is false.  There were some fascinating experiments
 > done a few years ago in which people were given a long, tedious
 > editing task.  Some of the people were keyboard fans, some were mouse
 > fans.  Both folks were asked to do the task two ways, in random order,
 > once using the mouse to do the editing, once using cursor keys etc.
 > Regardless of their predilections, which was stated up front, after
 > the experiment everyone who did the task agreed that it was faster to
 > use the keyboard than the mouse to complete the task.  Everyone.
 > 
 > Here's the kicker: everyone was wrong.  They were being timed, and in
 > fact the reverse was true.  Although they thought the keyboard was
 > faster, doing the task using the mouse was faster for everyone, by a
 > substantial fraction.
 > 

I've read this argument before and conducted some experiments on my
own. I agree that it is faster to use the mouse than the arrow keys on
some cases.  When I am in emacs, for long jumps I use some other
method which is faster some times. I normally type C-s and search for
a word. (typing it repeatedly looks for the next match). My
conclusions are that, for local moves of two or more characters, the
C-p C-f (the emacs equivalents to arrow keys) are faster. For long,
like modifying two paragraphs at the start and the end of the text, ,
C-s is best, specially if you can't see where you are jumping (it is
one or two pages away).  For midrange jumps, moving to somewhere you
can see on the screen, specially if you are jumping here and there,
the mouse is much faster than any other thing, even more if you are
cutting and pasting things around.

Something else which is fast and I use a lot in emacs, is C-a and C-e,
to go to the starting and end of the line.

Taking the hands away from the letter keys, even to the arrows is time
consuming. More than the act of moving them, the time it takes to
accomodate them back on the keyboard to start typing again. Another
thing which takes time is the difficulty to be precise with the mouse
(this depends on the resolution the screen is at). On the other hand,
the cursor moves itself at a more or less constant rate and that makes
it slow too. It is also very distracting because you have to keep
your attention on it to stop it on time. 
-- 
                 Saludos,
                         Gorka

"Curiosity sKilled the cat"
-- 
    /"\
    \ /    ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail 
     X                           - against ms attachments
    / \

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Boyd Roberts]

From: <paurea@dei.inf.uc3m.es>
> I've read this argument before and conducted some experiments on my
> own. I agree that it is faster to use the mouse than the arrow keys on
> some cases.  When I am in emacs, for long jumps I use some other
> method which is faster some times. I normally type C-s and search for
> a word. (typing it repeatedly looks for the next match).

any set of convoluted operations may be faster in a given circumstance.

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Boyd Roberts]

> pc% ls -m ether*.c
> [sape]     --rw-rw-r-- M 2812 sape sys  2820 Apr 18 12:23 ether2000.c

put the muid after the gid or just before the mod time.

i think i prefer after the gid:

    - the 3rd name should be obvious, given the first 2 should be
      engraved on everyone's psyche

    - puting it near the mtime is probably bad, 'cos it's not
      always an mtime.

Re: Re[4]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Randolph Fritz]

In article <20010519141427.A5005199C1@mail.cse.psu.edu>, rob pike wrote:
> 
> Are we settling in?  Does everyone agree that ^C is copy and ^V is
> paste?
>

Windows and Mac do...or more precisely, Mac uses command-C and
command-V; windows uses control-C and control-V.  (And Microsoft
changed midstream; their original choices were amazingly hard to type
and remember.)

One change it seems that could be easily made is the use of the PgDn
key for the "view" key; it is *extremely* confusing to go back and
forth to other systems that ues the downarrow key as a cursor
positioning key

IIRC, the Mac key choices were originally made on the basis of ease of
gesture by Tognazzini.

> 
> If you don't believe me, the story is here:
> 	http://www.asktog.com/readerMail/1999-12ReaderMail.html
> Thanks to some forgotten 9fan who mentioned this a while back.
> 

That was me. :-)

> I didn't know about these experiments when I said, long ago, that
> using arrow keys to point at a display is like telling someone how to
> go somewhere by giving directions, while using a mouse is like
> pointing at a map.  In fact, I never used a screen editor until I had
> a mouse, for just this reason.
> 

The last time this came up I had an off-group discussion of this; I
think some of the comments I wrote on this are relevant here.

>
> I've become frustrated with the lack of even simple cursor keys in
> Plan 9--for going one or two characters cursor keys are faster than
> mouse clicks.  (I've measured it--point and click is worth about six
> keystrokes, assuming no think time.)  On the other hand, having
> extensive cursor keys tempts one to use only cursor keys, but tests
> consistently show that that method of editing is actually slower than
> using a mouse, despite seeming faster.
[...]  
> [Keyboard shortcuts are] an accessibility need, I'd think--not
> everyone can use a mouse, and the chording is going to be difficult
> for many people with hand disabilities [including me!], quite apart
> from the RSI risks.
>
> In my personal opinion, the two-handed model of using the mouse for
> pointing, and doing operations like cut, copy, and paste from the
> keyboard has much to recommend it for users of typical physical
> ability.

Since we are discussing UI again, let me put in a plea for user
testing.  I don't even know how *I'll* respond to a new UI unless I
work with a prototype.  Arguing about UI without testing is a
high-entropy (high heat, low light) activity :-)

I have come to believe that both Unix and the Macintosh owe much of
their success to user testing, with very different groups of users.

Randolph

A few web essays on user testing, to start with.

http://www.asktog.com/columns/001closecoupledtesting.html
http://www.asktog.com/columns/037TestOrElse.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010204.html

Re[6]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Matt H]

Hello Randolph,

Wednesday, May 23, 2001, 9:24:54 AM, you wrote:

RF> In article <20010519141427.A5005199C1@mail.cse.psu.edu>, rob pike wrote:
>> 
>> Are we settling in?  Does everyone agree that ^C is copy and ^V is
>> paste?
>>

RF> Windows and Mac do...or more precisely, Mac uses command-C and
RF> command-V; windows uses control-C and control-V.  (And Microsoft
RF> changed midstream; their original choices were amazingly hard to type
RF> and remember.)

I still find myself using Shift-Delete for cut, Shift-Insert for copy
and Shift-Insert for paste

I believe ^c ^v & ^x were taken from an IBM UI guide but someone else
might correct me.

-- 
Best regards,
 Matt                            mailto:matt@proweb.co.uk

Re: Re[6]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l

[Boyd Roberts]

i'm suprised this subject hasn't degenerated into a total flamefest.

i think have things like ^c and ^v for copy and paste operations
are definitive proof that the UI is broken.  if it was easy to do
with the mouse why would you have such 'keyboard accelerators'?

i use them, but that's because it's easier than the various turgid
mouse driven GUIs and with a two button trackpad it's easier than
ctrl/tab + right button.  all these are indications of broken
interfaces or limited technology (ie. 2 button mice).

look around.  the 3 button mouse is nearly dead.  the closest seems
to be those horrible 2 1/2 button + wheel things -- ugh.

even with all that code that runs the trackpad i can't get it
to give me a middle button.  well i could [left+right], but then
i run out of fingers with which to select.

[9fans] ls -m

[rob pike]

The [muid] format was not chosen at random.  I was worried about
ls -lm producing three uids.  Just printing another uid after the gid
would be confusing: two make a couple but three are a lot to keep
straight intuitively.  I wanted ls -m to be useful without -l, but to
have a format that reminds you of its output.  (Quick: what are the
units in ls -s?)  I also considered the possibility of the muid
showing up in other places, such as history(1), in which a purely
positional mnemonic wouldn't be available.  As it stands, if you
see [muid] anywhere, you have a clue what it means.  I chose a
bracket format because it is a parenthetical remark about the file;
it contains no permission information, for example.

So I understand the objection but I still think it makes sense to
present the muid differently.

-rob

Re: [9fans] ls -m

[Boyd Roberts]

> So I understand the objection but I still think it makes sense to
> present the muid differently.

just need to find a clear but simple way to represent it.

[9fans] mouse vs key

[Scott Schwartz]

Re-reading Tog's articles, I'm struck by one thing:  The studies he cites
were done using the Mac GUI, which has specific properties that make the
mouse efficient (Fitt's law: targets along an edge are faster to access).
Most other systems lack those properties, which might effect the outcome.

Also, elsewhere he's said that mouse chords are a bad idea. 
Possibly not the best source for a defense of Acme. :-)

Re: [9fans] mouse vs key

[Dan Cross]

In article <20010520013841.25839.qmail@g.bio.cse.psu.edu> you write:
>Re-reading Tog's articles, I'm struck by one thing:  The studies he cites
>were done using the Mac GUI, which has specific properties that make the
>mouse efficient (Fitt's law: targets along an edge are faster to access).
>Most other systems lack those properties, which might effect the outcome.

That's interesting; could you elaborate on what those properties
are?

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] mouse vs key

[Matt H]

Hello Scott,

SS> (Fitt's law: targets along an edge are faster to access).
SS> Most other systems lack those properties, which might effect the outcome.
I've been looking forward to tactile feedback mice for this kind of
reason. When them mouse crosses a window boundary for instance, it
resists for a short time to help you target your mouse.

Logitech have now released one :
http://www.logitech.com/cf/products/productoverview.cfm/79?24


SS> Also, elsewhere he's said that mouse chords are a bad idea. 
SS> Possibly not the best source for a defense of Acme. :-)

hehe but they were convinced that a combination of mouse and keybard
were positive which does lend some weight to my idea of assigning
stuff to the function keys. Function keys are also present on the
world's keyboards (AFAIK). Making them programmable would be cool. In
fact if you made them a directory you could bind them in either
collectively or individually. Takes me back to my BBC Model B and is a
function I've missed in modern computers.



-- 
Best regards,
 Matt                            mailto:matt@proweb.co.uk

Re[2]: [9fans] mouse vs key - nethack

[matt]

Anyone tried playing nethack with a mouse?

Re: Re[2]: [9fans] mouse vs key - nethack

[Boyd Roberts]

> Anyone tried playing nethack with a mouse?

the death of civilisation as we know it...

Re: [9fans] mouse vs key

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Matt H" <matt@proweb.co.uk>
> 
> I've been looking forward to tactile feedback mice for this kind of
> reason. When them mouse crosses a window boundary for instance, it
> resists for a short time to help you target your mouse.
> 

iirc jim or a version of the window system that ran in the blit
used to have 'gravity' so that the cursor would 'stick' to the
scrollbar.  rob will correct me on this.

i'm not sure such features are a good thing.

Re: [9fans] src vs db

[rob pike]

> Is src still out of sync with db?  I think I've installed
> all the updates, but my db is printing the "name = 386"
> that src doesn't expect.

That was a debugging print that was left in by mistake a long
time ago.  I believe the binary in the last full distribution
doesn't have the print.  Have you tried recompiling libmach
and db?

-rob

Re: [9fans] src vs db

[Scott Schwartz]

| That was a debugging print that was left in by mistake a long
| time ago.  I believe the binary in the last full distribution
| doesn't have the print.

I just installed that, which is why I was surprised to see it.

| Have you tried recompiling libmach and db?

Not yet.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rob pike]

You can use the 1-2 chord to execute an arbitrarily long Edit command
from a scratch window.  Only the Edit word itself needs to be in the
window in which the command is to be run.

-rob

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[James A. Robinson]

> You can use the 1-2 chord to execute an arbitrarily long Edit command
> from a scratch window.  Only the Edit word itself needs to be in the
> window in which the command is to be run.

Do you mean passing a Snarfed  argument to Edit in the target window tag?
Or something else?

I know about passing an arg to Edit, and after playing around a bit just
now I realized it's easier to type, Esc, Snarf, Paste into Edit then my
previous attempt (type, select, cut, paste, paste into Edit).  Maybe I'd
just need to use it for awhile to get used to doing it this way.


Jim

Re: [9fans] User Interface

[rob pike]

> The editors, sam and acme are virtually unusable.

Many people disagree, even feel the opposite, that they are among
the easiest-to-use editors around.

> Why is it that such a simple task as editing the contents of a textfile 
> must cause so much pain?

I don't hear many yelps where I work and essentially everyone uses
either sam or acme.  I suspect you don't know how to use them.

A criticism I will accept is that there is inadequate documentation
explaining how to use them well.  Try reading the associated papers,
rather than just the man pages.  They help somewhat.

-rob

Re: [9fans] User Interface

[James A. Robinson]

> I don't hear many yelps where I work and essentially everyone uses
> either sam or acme.  I suspect you don't know how to use them.
> 
> A criticism I will accept is that there is inadequate documentation
> explaining how to use them well.  Try reading the associated papers,
> rather than just the man pages.  They help somewhat.

Actually, the documentation is far better that most I've seen. I'm am
talking about the associated papers you mention.  That's all I used for
awhile when learning to use sam.

Combine those papers with the man page and tutorial, and the docs cover
everything from concept to execution of command. I'm still working on
internalizing the nuances of addresses in ranges like -0+,+0-, but most
of the other commands (even 't' and 'm') are comfortable.


Jim

Re: [9fans] User Interface

[phaet0n]

I have to admit that reading this newsgroup is
perhaps the most amusing thing one can do on
the internet. Having followed it in silence since
release 3, I've decided to break silence.

Plan 9 is gorgeously designed. It's actually
refreshing. But I've not touched it recently.
More later.

The UI crisis can be traced to the fact that no
developer ships documentation with commerical
end-user software any more. Online help is
appauling. Moreover, developers have no
consistency of metaphor. Apple's success can be
traced to the fact that their UI guidelines were
with development documentation. I've never
encountered an Apple user who didn't have at
least minimal command of a new application,
mainly because developers tried to adhere to
those guidelines. If you expect those guidelines
to be followed by every OS, well you're an idiot.
However, if you expect the UI to be intuitive,
then you're dead right. The installer for Plan 9
is intuitive. In fact, Rio is intuitive. I felt
at ease immediately using them. The only
curiosity was the ESC feature in Rio which
required reading the man page. As you see, I don't
even know what it's called, but I use it...
intuitive. This minimal intuitiveness is all that
is required. The rest falls on the user to gain
acquaintence with the metaphor used by the OS
designer. This is where Plan 9 becomes truly
refreshing. Please read about how it treats
process namespaces, how the snarf buffer works,
how rio can be run within itself, and thus how
hardware devices are multiplexed and treated as
files. The list goes on and on. But it requires a
little work on your part so, please, read the
papers on website.

Intuitiveness is framed by personal experience.
If someone could only get this into the skulls of
the HCI people at schools. We use elevators, hand- 
guns, can openers, etc., not because they're
inherently intuitive, but because we've seen them
being used since we were very little. This is not
some kind of Freudian condition that requires
having intefaces resemble your mother in order to
be intuitive. Although it would explain why
going down is so popular in others OSes.

As for having not used p9 recently that's because
I'm not willing to work in 8bit under my Matrox
MII. I don't know how to write PCI drivers. So
for now, I'm developing a compiler for a (yes, 
another) functional language, since I hate C and
can't get GHC, or nhc to build. I'm working on
BeOS, which is very nice but dying. It works and I
get to use OCaml to develop the compiler. Now all
I have to do is to ask you kind folks where I can
find out about Plan 9's object format so I can
port the Netwide assembler and get it to emit
proper object files. Then hopefully we can all
look forward to a nice compiler in the future
which emits objects for both Plan 9 and ELF.

Thank you. And keep me laughing, or crying.
Thanks to Rob eh, and the gang at Bell Labs.
Your work is greatly appreciated.

ph
--

Re: [9fans] User Interface

[Randolph Fritz]

In article <20010814125559.826F319A3E@mail.cse.psu.edu>, rob pike wrote:
>> The editors, sam and acme are virtually unusable.
> 
> Many people disagree, even feel the opposite, that they are among
> the easiest-to-use editors around.
> 
>> Why is it that such a simple task as editing the contents of a textfile 
>> must cause so much pain?
> 
> I don't hear many yelps where I work and essentially everyone uses
> either sam or acme.  I suspect you don't know how to use them.
> 
> A criticism I will accept is that there is inadequate documentation
> explaining how to use them well.  Try reading the associated papers,
> rather than just the man pages.  They help somewhat.
> 

I think a key point has been hit, albeit glancingly: computer
scientists are willing to study a system before using it; most
people--including most software professionals, these days--are not.

The original usability goal of the Mac was 30 minutes from a newbie
sitting down to beginner-level productivity.  (Without, I think,
reference to any manuals, though with quite a lot of text on-screen.)
A much gentler learning curve, yes?

Now there is no requirement that Plan 9 be accessible without
extensive study.  However, I suspect there are good reasons to look at
these issues more closely.  If nothing else, it seems to me there are
interesting design process issues in the area, and working on it might
open up interesting research topics.  I've seen a lot of sneering at
the Mac, but, still--30 minutes to usability?  That's an impressive
design achievement, and it surprises me it doesn't engender more
respect and emulation.

It also seems to me that aiming at a gentler learning curve for
software developers might attract a broader group of software
researchers to Plan 9 and--forgive me if I have this wrong--isn't that
one of the reasons Plan 9 is being published on the internet with
source code?

It would be an interesting research topic for someone who wasn't
busily studying architecture and building science... :-)

Randolph

Re: [9fans] plumb

[rob pike]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 308 bytes --]

HelpYou would be mostly right.  HelpCertainly B grew from
the idea that one program should tell another what to do.
HelpWhether it's natural is not for me to judge; also there was
a lot of time involved and it took two versions (Inferno and
Plan 9) to get a design I was comfortable with.

-Helprob


[-- Attachment #2: Type: message/rfc822, Size: 1693 bytes --]

From: "Boyd Roberts" <boyd@fr.inter.net>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: [9fans] plumb
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001 00:57:32 +0100
Message-ID: <02a101c17ac3$f150cba0$a4b6c6d4@cybercable.fr>

HelpWould I be right in surmising that plumb was a natural
progression from B?

Or was it an independent thing?

Re: [9fans] plumb

[Scott Schwartz]

> a lot of time involved and it took two versions (Inferno and
> Plan 9) to get a design I was comfortable with.

I'm still nervous that the app and the programs that plumber launches
have unrelated namspaces.

In a full blown Actor style system, there would be closures that made
it all work, but maybe Plan 9 could pass the information around by hand.

Re: [9fans] venti

[rob pike]

Of course, but the beauty of Venti is the ease with which it provides
the hooks you need to address such issues.  Replication, mirroring,
load balancing, all those things are made trivial by the realization that
a hash is a universal address space.

-rob

Re: [9fans] venti

[George Michaelson]

> Of course, but the beauty of Venti is the ease with which it provides
> the hooks you need to address such issues.  Replication, mirroring,
> load balancing, all those things are made trivial by the realization that
> a hash is a universal address space.

Except as the paper says, get above petabytes, and the *choice* of hash
gets harder/slower because it has to be 'better'. ie, too universal makes
the hash function less nice.

I like the comments about certain operations on older data being extremely
expensive. This resonated with my memories of using archival storage on the
TOPS-10 system, where you stalled for Operators to find the tape, load the
temporary pack, copy the tape to the pack, put that content into exposed
filespace in a place you could find it, and get back to you.

ICL CAFS might have been there, except it was the usual UK R&D 20+ years
before viable market/technology. Oh, the joys of doing research to far
ahead of the game...

if they made the hash function for URI/URN compatible, passing around
a referent in the web might wind up going back to the canonical data anyway.

cheers
	-George

Re: [9fans] venti

[paurea]

rob pike writes:
 > all those things are made trivial by the realization that
 > a hash is a universal address space.

I read some time ago about a filesystem called LBFS which uses the same idea for
a network filesystem. Any opinions on it?.
--
                 Saludos,
                         Gorka

"Curiosity sKilled the cat"

Re: [9fans] venti

[Boyd Roberts]

rob pike wrote:
> ... a hash is a universal address space.

Yes the hash buys you a lot.  I really like it.

I really like the 'server lied' case :)

Re: Fwd: Re: [9fans] samuel (fwd)

[rob pike]

> What do you say rob, could you suggest how? ;)

I don't remember exactly what samuel did, and I'm not much of a fan of
syntax-directed editing anyway.  Text is text.  C is text.  Sam is a
text editor.  Voilà.

Sam's `understanding' of C as plain text has never felt like a
limitation to me.  Sometimes I run grep in another window to figure
something out.  Use grep -n in *.[ch] and plumb the result and you're
probably 90% of the way to samuel.

Semantics-directed editing, now that might be something special.

-rob

Re: Fwd: Re: [9fans] samuel (fwd)

[George Michaelson]

> Semantics-directed editing, now that might be something special.

Visual Basick IDE tries to tell you what arguments you want to put into
the function it thinks you are trying to write. 

I think thats a mis[-take | -mischievious idea | -understanding of what I want]

%PRESS TAB TO COMPLETE%

(sigh)

-George

Re: Fwd: Re: [9fans] samuel (fwd)

[Boyd Roberts]

rob pike wrote:
> Sam is atext editor.  Voilà .

Je suis complètement d'accord avec toi.

[9fans] Fourth Release of Plan 9 Now Available

[rob pike, esq.]

The Fourth Edition of Plan 9 may now be downloaded from

	http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist

As usual, this is an open source release.  The release
notes summarize the changes; a copy is attached but
they are available in other formats at:

    http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/release4.html
    http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/release4.ps
    http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/release4.pdf


====



               Plan 9 From Bell Labs
               Fourth Release Notes
                   April, 2002


      Copyright (C) 2002 Lucent Technologies Inc.
                All Rights Reserved


The fourth release of the Plan 9 operating system from Bell
Labs packages a major overhaul of the system at every level.
 From the underlying file system protocol, 9P, through the
kernel, libraries, and applications, almost everything has
been modified and, in many cases, redesigned or rewritten.

The most significant change is that 9P has been redesigned
to address a number of shortcomings, most important, its
previous inability to handle long file names.  Unfortu-
nately, squeezing long names onto the disks of existing file
servers is a messy business that we're still grappling with,
so at the moment fs(4) and kfs(4) can't yet handle long
names, although they do talk the new protocol.  (In fact,
they talk both old and new, as required, to ease transi-
tion.) In the meantime, there is a workaround - lnfs(4) -
and many of the other file servers such as ramfs(4) and
u9fs(4) work just fine with long names.  It's only the stan-
dard disk-resident file servers that don't, and as soon we
have versions that do, we'll release them.

The following is a partial list of the major changes
throughout the system.

* The file system protocol, 9P, has been reworked.  It now
has variable-length names, so it can handle long names but
also is more compact when handling short ones.  It uses a
different format that is easily parsed, eliminating the need
for the old aux/fcall utility, and delegates its authenti-
cation duties to an external agent, factotum.

* Security has been a focus of attention.  A new security
agent, factotum(4), manages passwords and other secrets
and, coupled with a new secure file store secstore(4),
enables secure single sign-on.

* Cpu, import, and exportfs all encrypt their connections
now, and since they use the new 9P they also use new network
port numbers.  A new service aan(1) is used by import to
make its network connections more reliable in the face of
network outages.  The old ports still work, through the
agency of a protocol conversion filter srvold9p(4).

* We are phasing out the IL protocol since it doesn't handle
long-distance connections well (and long-distance networks
don't handle it well, either).  IL is still used by fs(4)
(in time, that too will change) but TCP has become the stan-
dard protocol for all other services.

* The software for the new network-resident secure block
store, venti(8), is included with this distribution.  We
are in the process of reworking fs(4) to use Venti rather
than a WORM as its permanent block repository/backup medium,
but that code is only in the design stage and is not
included in this release.

* The need to handle longer file names triggered a rethink-
ing of the way the system handles strings in general.  The
kernel is now more explanatory when it gives an error mes-
sage and more consistent in how it handles strings such as
commands to devices.  The interfaces to many of the system
calls, such as errstr(2) and wait(2) all had to change as
a result, as did the library interface to read directories,
stat(2) and its relatives.

* The formatted I/O package described in print(2) and
fmtinstall(2) has been redesigned.  Although the basic
interface is unchanged, it now runs without locks and has an
internal buffer management mechanism that means print no
longer needs a large on-stack buffer.  The interface for
writing custom print verbs and custom formatted I/O routines
has also been greatly improved.

* The thread library thread(2) has been completely rewrit-
ten.  The main visible change is that, coupled with the
changes to printing, threadprint is gone; you can just use
print or fprint at will.

* Support for electronic mail has been extended in many ways
and now includes some new spam filtering tools, much better
(and more standard) handling of MIME messages, the ability
to render incoming HTML mail, and much more.

There are so many changes to the programming interfaces of
the system that they are described in a separate document,
entitled Changes to the Programming Environment in the
Fourth Release of Plan 9.  Please read it before you start
updating your own software to run under the new system.

The installation method has also changed and we're moving
towards a new method for maintaining updates.  The Plan 9
Wiki (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9) and Usenet
group (comp.os.plan9) are the places to visit to learn more
and stay current.  In particular, the installation notes are
now maintained in the Wiki; the traditional papers on
installation and start-up are gone.

There's lots more new stuff.  If you have problems, mail
9trouble@plan9.bell-labs.com or, better, check the wiki
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9 or ask the Usenet
newsgroup comp.os.plan9.

Good Luck!

Re: [9fans] Fourth Release of Plan 9 Now Available

[Scott Schwartz]

Rob announces:
> The Fourth Edition of Plan 9 may now be downloaded from

Yay!  Thanks guys!

One question, though... The supported hardware page says:
  Serial mouse support has existed in the past and will exist
  in the future, but is not currently available. Sorry.

<Scott looks at his serial mouse>
<Looks at the web page>
<Looks at mouse>

Does that really mean that mice plugged into serial ports don't work?

Re: [9fans] Fourth Release of Plan 9 Now Available

[Laura Creighton]

Congratulations and thanks everybody.
Laura Creighton

Re: [9fans] Fourth Release of Plan 9 Now Available

[Andrew]

I've been trying to install it and here's what I got so far:
<snip>
kfs...version...time

init: starting /bin/rc
dossrv: serving #s/dos
assert failed: (*t)->magic==FREE_MAGIC
vga 52: suicide: sys: trap: fault read addr=0x0 pc=0x000260e6
assert failed: (*t)->magic==FREE_MAGIC
vga 55: suicide: sys: trap: fault read addr=0x0 pc=0x000260e6
 rio: can't open display: initdisplay: /dev/draw/new: no frame buffer
init: rc exit status: rc 10: rio 67: display open

and then it shows prompt.
R3 installation was able to init display on this voodoo 3 3000 card with no
problem.
What's the problem now?

--
DISCLAIMER: <DEFAULT DISCLAIMER>

Re: [9fans] dumb question

[rob pike, esq.]

It strikes me that the arguments people are making against having
blanks in file names are the same arguments I heard against converting
Plan 9 to Unicode and UTF: too hard, too much code to change, too many
symmetries broken.  But there's no way this problem is as hard as that
conversion, and we handled that one just fine.  All that's missing is
a concerted effort to push ahead, plus the will to do so.  Neither
seems to be forthcoming, though.  Oh well.

-rob

Re: [9fans] dumb question

[Scott Schwartz]

Rob says:
| conversion, and we handled that one just fine.  All that's missing is
| a concerted effort to push ahead, plus the will to do so.  Neither
| seems to be forthcoming, though.  Oh well.

I suspect it's more the case that people need time to roll
the ideas around in their heads.  You guys wrote a nice paper
that pretty clearly showed how to do utf8 and make it work,
but still it took a while to catch on elsewhere.

Re: [9fans] new versions of graphics programs?

[rob pike]

I started on a couple of the tools.  Since the PIC format is
now largely irrelevant - the standard image format captures
much of its capabilities - it seemed worth retiring the fb
software.  Retiring it also helped keep the distribution smaller
and easier to assemble.  But clearly, some of the tools in 
fb/ are worth having.

I worked on a couple of the tools and stumbled into original
bugs that I didn't see how to fix, so that project has stalled.
The shipped gif and jpg tools and the iconv program should
address some of the lower-level needs.  Higher-level
image processing is a project for a dedicated soul; it's a big
job.

-rob

Re: [9fans] new versions of graphics programs?

[Jim Choate]

Speaking of new versions of graphics. Anyone remember NAPLPS?

    ____________________________________________________________________

                     He is able who thinks he is able.

                                           Buddha

       The Armadillo Group       ,::////;::-.          James Choate
       Austin, Tx               /:'///// ``::>/|/      ravage@ssz.com
       www.ssz.com            .',  ||||    `/( e\      512-451-7087
                           -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'-
    --------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: [9fans] new versions of graphics programs?

[Tom Duff]

> Speaking of new versions of graphics. Anyone remember NAPLPS?
Get thee behind me, Satan!


-- 
Tom Duff.  Simple PCs with super overcloaked pentiums.

Re: [9fans] new versions of graphics programs?

[Jim Choate]

On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Tom Duff wrote:

> > Speaking of new versions of graphics. Anyone remember NAPLPS?
> Get thee behind me, Satan!

You're jealous you didn't think of it sooner...

    ____________________________________________________________________

                     He is able who thinks he is able.

                                           Buddha

       The Armadillo Group       ,::////;::-.          James Choate
       Austin, Tx               /:'///// ``::>/|/      ravage@ssz.com
       www.ssz.com            .',  ||||    `/( e\      512-451-7087
                           -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'-
    --------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: [9fans] new versions of graphics programs?

[please_no_spam_to_]

Jim Choate (ravage@einstein.ssz.com) wrote:

: On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Tom Duff wrote:

: > > Speaking of new versions of graphics. Anyone remember NAPLPS?
: > Get thee behind me, Satan!

: You're jealous you didn't think of it sooner...

I was certainly jealous at the time: there were some quite nice ideas in
NAPLPS; especially the coordinate system. Since then I've realised that
if I *had* invented it I would have had to face the prospect of yet another
of my brilliant ideas being undervalued. By the way, can I interest you
in my new mousetrap...

-- 
	David Pick

Re: [9fans] new versions of graphics programs?

[Tom Duff]

Jim Choate (ravage@einstein.ssz.com) wrote:
>
> Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Tom Duff wrote:
>
> > > Speaking of new versions of graphics. Anyone remember NAPLPS?
> > Get thee behind me, Satan!
>
> You're jealous you didn't think of it sooner...

I'm sorry, I didn't understand this until
just now...

I wasn't trying to suggest that NAPLPS was
inferior to the alternatives (Prestel or
Ceefax or whatever), but that the whole idea
of transmitting cheezy little display lists
over ISDN or in your TV's vertical interval
was dopey.  (But, if you have to do that
sort of thing, Display Postscript is more
like the right way to do it.)

-- 
Tom Duff.  Superficial similarities spawn spurious statements.

Re: [9fans] could those of you who have students check this out for

[forsyth]

>>our computer science department has strong roots in algorithmics.

that might be true, but do the students, in the main, write programs
except those they are required to do for assessments and projects?

[9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[andrey mirtchovski]

unfortunately dan cross is very right in his analysis -- most of the
students care not for algorithmics. the three classes i listed are the most
hated ones (together with the "Systems Programming and Introduction to
Operating Systems", the UNIX class) simply because they actually make the
students think...

there are the occasional bad apples who explore the field, write code
and are interested in the 'science' part of 'computer science'.. the others
are happy to get their 3 year degrees and drone off to the job market.

andrey



On Sat, 9 Jun 2001 forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk wrote:

> >>our computer science department has strong roots in algorithmics.
> 
> that might be true, but do the students, in the main, write programs
> except those they are required to do for assessments and projects?
> 
> 

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Boyd Roberts]

i don't think i'd go so far to call it a science -- more like an art.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[pac]

IMHO, CS is to mathematics, as medicine is to biology; personally, I call them both "technology" :-(
Peter


--
Peter A. Cejchan
Dept. Paleobiology, Inst. Geology Acad. Sci.,
Rozvojova 135, Prague 6
CZ-16502 Czech Republic
<cej@cejchan.gli.cas.cz>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A plea:
Please, consider your support to the Public Library of Science initiative at
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Dan Cross]

In article <041601c0f10d$72dabaa0$e8b7c6d4@SOMA> you write:
>i don't think i'd go so far to call it a science -- more like an art.

Okay, this is getting way off topic for 9fans, but, let me ask
this: at the real abstract, pure level, is science any different
at all from art?  I contend that they're one and the same.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Dan Cross" <cross@math.psu.edu>
> Okay, this is getting way off topic for 9fans, but, let me ask
> this: at the real abstract, pure level, is science any different
> at all from art?  I contend that they're one and the same.

nonsense.  physics is a science.  i can predict things with it.

does computer science predict anything for me?  i'll give you that
it does have an axiom that states:

    you will be plagued by bugs in any development effort

but that doesn't really predict anything in anything that vaguely
approaches a _law_ of physics -- pick one.  eg.  the prohibition
of speeds greater than the of speed of light.

comp sci is more like an engineering discipline with very few
fundamentals.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[paurea]

Boyd Roberts writes:
 > From: "Boyd Roberts" <boyd@fr.inter.net>
 > Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science
 > Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 23:43:45 +0200
 > 
 > From: "Dan Cross" <cross@math.psu.edu>
 > > Okay, this is getting way off topic for 9fans, but, let me ask
 > > this: at the real abstract, pure level, is science any different
 > > at all from art?  I contend that they're one and the same.
 > 
 > nonsense.  physics is a science.  i can predict things with it.
 > 
 > does computer science predict anything for me?  i'll give you that
 > it does have an axiom that states:
 > 
 >     you will be plagued by bugs in any development effort
 > 
 > but that doesn't really predict anything in anything that vaguely
 > approaches a _law_ of physics -- pick one.  eg.  the prohibition
 > of speeds greater than the of speed of light.
 > 
 > comp sci is more like an engineering discipline with very few
 > fundamentals.

¿Would you say Math is a science?.
Its theoretical foundations are based on turing machines...
(I believe all physics are written in math simbols...)
-- 
                 Saludos,
                         Gorka

"Curiosity sKilled the cat"
-- 
    /"\
    \ /    ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail 
     X                           - against ms attachments
    / \

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Dan Cross]

In article <15141.18819.7956.967025@nido.hilbert.space> you write:
>Would you say Math is a science?.
>Its theoretical foundations are based on turing machines...

Woah, they are?  Mathematics, and many of its theoretical foundations,
existed for a really long time before Alan Turing was born....

>(I believe all physics are written in math simbols...)

Basically, but each discipline seems to invent its own psuedo-
mathematical notation.  Not necessarily a bad thing, but it can
get really confusing (cf. i in mathematics vs. j in engineering).

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Boyd Roberts]

> >(I believe all physics are written in math simbols...)

i think i'll have to take feynman's stance:

    physics is to math what sex is to ...

i just can't get a good reference for this 1999? quote.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Dan Cross]

In article <10df01c0f357$6fff23b0$e8b7c6d4@SOMA> you write:
>i think i'll have to take feynman's stance:
>
>    physics is to math what sex is to ...
>
>i just can't get a good reference for this 1999? quote.

Feynman was dead in 1999.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Scott Merrilees]

>unfortunately dan cross is very right in his analysis -- most of the
>students care not for algorithmics. the three classes i listed are the most
>hated ones (together with the "Systems Programming and Introduction to
>Operating Systems", the UNIX class) simply because they actually make the
>students think...
>
>there are the occasional bad apples who explore the field, write code
>and are interested in the 'science' part of 'computer science'.. the others
>are happy to get their 3 year degrees and drone off to the job market.
>
>andrey

Then you have the occasional CS dept / Computer Centre with a computer
usage policy that probihits all use of the univerity computer systems
except for specific course work.

Sm

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Boyd Roberts]

> Then you have the occasional CS dept / Computer Centre with a computer
> usage policy that probihits all use of the univerity computer systems
> except for specific course work.

yeah, but some of us got around that and the more you got around
it the more you learned -- the useful stuff.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Scott Merrilees]

>> Then you have the occasional CS dept / Computer Centre with a computer
>> usage policy that probihits all use of the univerity computer systems
>> except for specific course work.

>boyd:
>yeah, but some of us got around that and the more you got around
>it the more you learned -- the useful stuff.

Very true, but the above CS attitude encourages the production of
drones, while discouraging and even punishing those with the audacity
to try and do some self directed learning.

Sm

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Boyd Roberts]

> Very true, but the above CS attitude encourages the production of
> drones, while discouraging and even punishing those with the audacity
> to try and do some self directed learning.

i don't disagree, but when you had 2000 students and one 11/780 for
all of them (even with share/hacks giving you a maximum of 128
simultaneous student logins) i guess something had to be done.
more resources would have been nice.

on the other hand, it was always a nice clause to use on password
crackers and others nuisances.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Dan Cross]

In article <0cc301c0f2c0$78949560$e8b7c6d4@SOMA> you write:
>nonsense.  physics is a science.  i can predict things with it.

I can predict things with computer science as well: the average
and worst-case running times of an algorithm, for instance, or
the amount of memory used by activation records in a recursive
algorithm.

>does computer science predict anything for me?  i'll give you that
>it does have an axiom that states:
>
>    you will be plagued by bugs in any development effort

This is a software engineering maxim.  Speaking of which....  There
are ``laws'' of software engineering that are kind of like laws of
physics.  Add more programmers to a late project, and it gets later;
etc.

>but that doesn't really predict anything in anything that vaguely
>approaches a _law_ of physics -- pick one.  eg.  the prohibition
>of speeds greater than the of speed of light.

The Church-Turing thesis; NP-complete problems; the halting problem,
just to name a few.

>comp sci is more like an engineering discipline with very few
>fundamentals.

Maybe, but that wasn't even my point.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Matt]

My friend is on his third year (of 4) of his Computer Science Degree.
I know they've covered Assembler, Java, C++ and Databases.

I mentioned to him that Dennis Ritchie posted to 9fans thinking he might be
interested.

"Who?"

I didn't bother saying
"Those who do not understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it - poorly..."

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Boyd Roberts]

> I know they've covered Assembler, Java, C++ and Databases.

surely s/he could have picked a 5th worthless subject...

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Matt]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Boyd Roberts" <boyd@fr.inter.net>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 10:29 PM
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science


> > I know they've covered Assembler, Java, C++ and Databases.
>
> surely s/he could have picked a 5th worthless subject...

i think that's saved up for the final year

He constantly amazes us (his friends) with his computer cluelessness.

Like finding it difficult to persuade him that his overclocked celeron might
be struggling to execute the tcp/ip stack while he was trying to play
high-end games.

Or helping him install a windows based web proxy (literally double clicking
on setup.exe)


I remember they used MS Access for their database.


We had a CS graduate come for an interview. He was clearly a bit clueless.
The questions were scaled down to make him feel a bit better when he left.
"What is a hexadecimal number?"
"A combination of numbers and letters"

He had a nice suit on though.

M

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[George Michaelson]

  > We had a CS graduate come for an interview. He was clearly a bit clueless.
  > The questions were scaled down to make him feel a bit better when he left.
  > "What is a hexadecimal number?"
  > "A combination of numbers and letters"
  >

You know, there are contexts where this is the right answer. Like, if you
manipulate them as input/output objects and need to check the datastream
to see if the tokenising input should end.

And, the difference between Hex 0F and Decimal 15 is that both have exactly
the same bit-pattern in memory. Strangely, if you add 2 apples in hex
and 2 oranges in decimal OR octal, you still have 4 bits of fruit. So, you 
can do mixed-base sums after all. Why don't they teach you that at
school any more?

I had a chum who'd had a 6th finger cut off early. If they'd left it on, would
he have had any advantages doing finger arithmetic?

  > He had a nice suit on though.
  > 

Should'a employed him then. Anybody slavish enough to dress up to get a job
is probably going to work hard for the first 7 months until disallusionment
sets in.

I still writhe with embarrassment recalling an interview for the UK N.E.R.C
to get a junior progroid job onboard the antarctic ships, when asked to
write a solution to pythagoras in pascal, there, in front of the panel. Flop
sweat and memory loss and nicotine withdrawal and sheer fright combined to
make it both humiliating for me, and revealing for them. I think they made
the right decision to quietly let me go. Still, I got to see the steam loco
graveyard at barry island so it wasn't all wasted.

cheers
	-George

PS I suspect that in this niche, people aren't working as a result of a
successful interview. I think they probably know people who know people
who trust people who let them on board. If there is an interview, its
more like dogs sniffing each other, or 'do you wanna be in my gang?' than
joining the army.

--
George Michaelson       |  APNIC
Email: ggm@apnic.net    |  PO Box 2131 Milton QLD 4064
Phone: +61 7 3367 0490  |  Australia
  Fax: +61 7 3367 0482  |  http://www.apnic.net

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Boyd Roberts]

> Should'a employed him then. Anybody slavish enough to dress up to get a job
> is probably going to work hard for the first 7 months until disallusionment
> sets in.

they should come to france.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi George,

> I still writhe with embarrassment recalling an interview for the UK
> N.E.R.C

What's N.E.R.C?


Ralph.

Re: [9fans] Re: the 'science' in computer science

[Lucio De Re]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 11:03:57PM +0100, Matt wrote:
> 
> He had a nice suit on though.
> 
You don't get, it then :-)  It's the shoes, what shoes was he
wearing? Were they well polished?

++L

Re: [9fans] string to list?

[vikki]

>rc irc client? sounds reasonable :)
>i wish i could find my 80-line C irc client i wrote last year for p9 (it
was
>my first project :).. come to think of it though, rc is a much better idea
>and a funnier one to implement :) wish i had a working p9 installation, i
>could've helped!

We're having a bit of a competition at work. They've got their monolithic
perl bot running. I'm trying to impress them with the plan9 version as a
learning exercise. I plan to have it do eval `{$msg} and do whatever it's
namespace will let it. They keep adding code to the perl bot and getting
deeper and deeper. Already they've had to split it in half (on my suggestion
:-) to separate information gathering and display.

>how about awk? daemonize an awk program if RC does not five you the
>utility to do it :)

 yeah that's a good idea. I didn't fancy spawning awk for every line of irc.

I did wonder one day why plan9 has any command line utilities at all apart
from bind, mount, import, unmount , cd, echo and cat.

Re: [9fans] string to list?

[Boyd Roberts]

> They've got their monolithic perl bot running.

that's kinda funny, in a 'finally got it to run' sense.

Re: [9fans] string to list?

[Boyd Roberts]

>  yeah that's a good idea. I didn't fancy spawning awk for every line of irc.

how about gross ifs/fn/`{...} trickery?

Re: [9fans] string to list?

[Scott Schwartz]

| I plan to have it do eval `{$msg} and do whatever it's
| namespace will let it.

I really wouldn't do that.  It's just too unpredictable and dangerous.
eval considered harmful.

cmd=`{echo $msg}
if (fgrep -f okcmdlist $cmd(1)) {
	$cmd
} 

Re: [9fans] string to list?

[Matt]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Schwartz" <schwartz@bio.cse.psu.edu>


> | I plan to have it do eval `{$msg} and do whatever it's
> | namespace will let it.
>
> I really wouldn't do that.  It's just too unpredictable and dangerous.
> eval considered harmful.

being as I've not implemented it my understanding is weak but I thought that
I could dictate the namespace that a process sees. If the total namespace
the ircbot process sees is

/
/bin/opme
/bin/cat
/bin/ls
/bin/eval
/bin/echo
/slashdotheadlines

then all ircbot can do is  combinations like
echo eval 'ls /bin'
echo eval 'opme'
echo eval 'cat /slashdotheadlines'

but because it can't bind new files in or import them it can't manipulate
it's namespace via the eval

Re: [9fans] string to list?

[Scott Schwartz]

| ...I thought that I could dictate the namespace that a process sees.

Yes, unless you someone makes a mistake.  But there's more to it
than that.  eval gives the bad guys unrestricted access to the shell,
which you probably don't want.

Re: [9fans] string to list?

[Boyd Roberts]

> which you probably don't want.

s/probably/definitely/

[9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Matt]

Well it's not going too well.

I got this far but of course (I can say that now) 
the `{..} doesn't return until $netdir/data sends an eof
and then prints each line

ifs='
'
for (k in `{ cat $netdir/data }) {
    echo $k 
} 


so how do i read a line at a time before `{..} closes it's stdout?

once I've cracked that it's just about finished

M

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Scott Schwartz]

| I got this far but of course (I can say that now) 
| the `{..} doesn't return until $netdir/data sends an eof
| and then prints each line

Instead of "for cat", don't you want "while read"?

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Boyd Roberts]

> Instead of "for cat", don't you want "while read"?

well he does, but rc doesn't have 'read'.

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Boyd Roberts]

> I got this far but of course (I can say that now) 
> the `{..} doesn't return until $netdir/data sends an eof
> and then prints each line

well, obviously.  it's a file isn't it? <smirk>

> so how do i read a line at a time before `{..} closes it's stdout?

write some C program that that reads _unbuffered_ characters
and spits them until it sees 'end of line' (whatever that may be).
you should buffer the output, but _not_ the input.

can't be more than 20 lines of code.

btw: i hope you're dealing with 8 bit chars 'cos latin-1 will
     really screw up utf encoded streams that the rest of the
     system expects.  years ago i wrote (on ultrix) riso [rune
     to iso-latin-1] and isor (pronounced eye-sore) filters
     so that the unix sam could deal with the few french docs
     i had to deal with.

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Jonathan Sergent]

On Monday, June 11, 2001, at 06:00 PM, Boyd Roberts wrote:

> write some C program that that reads _unbuffered_ characters
> and spits them until it sees 'end of line' (whatever that may be).
> you should buffer the output, but _not_ the input.

You could just read the manual and use /bin/read, instead of rewriting 
it.

So you get

{
	while () {
		line=`{read}
		echo line: $line
	}
} < filename

Somehow putting the < filename after the inner } makes rc reopen it for 
each loop iteration.  (Am I misinterpreting this?)

A more convoluted way to do to the same thing would be

{ echo 0 > /srv/something.$pid } < filename
while () {
	line=`{read /srv/something.$pid}
	echo line: $line
}
rm /srv/something.$pid

but that's probably better for showing off /srv to your friends than it 
is for actually solving the problem.

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Hermann Samso]

Boyd Roberts <boyd@fr.inter.net> wrote:
>> I got this far but of course (I can say that now) 
>> the `{..} doesn't return until $netdir/data sends an eof
>> and then prints each line

> well, obviously.  it's a file isn't it? <smirk>

>> so how do i read a line at a time before `{..} closes it's stdout?

> write some C program that that reads _unbuffered_ characters
> and spits them until it sees 'end of line' (whatever that may be).
> you should buffer the output, but _not_ the input.

> can't be more than 20 lines of code.

> btw: i hope you're dealing with 8 bit chars 'cos latin-1 will
>      really screw up utf encoded streams that the rest of the
>      system expects.  years ago i wrote (on ultrix) riso [rune
>      to iso-latin-1] and isor (pronounced eye-sore) filters
>      so that the unix sam could deal with the few french docs
>      i had to deal with.

	With so many snippets of code, everyone could make use
	of, isn't there any common repository? Or will they
	allget integrated in time for next release?
	Ok, there is always Deja News, but...

	saludos,
		hermann samso

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Hermann Samso" <samso@studserv.stud.uni-hannover.de>
> With so many snippets of code, everyone could make use
> of, isn't there any common repository? Or will they
> allget integrated in time for next release?
> Ok, there is always Deja News, but...

oh, but there is.  you must have missed the 'why don't
we build a common repository' thread.  i finally cracked
(in desperation) and did this:

    http://mapage.noos.fr/~repo

but about the only thing it's done is to a) proove a
point and b) receive mail of the form 'nice page.

the first cut was done by hand, the second is automated
with a mash-mk mashfile on inferno.

the bitsy code should probably go back to 1127.
i don't mind adding it too.

matt's rc irc bot could be added if he so wishes.

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Matt]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Boyd Roberts" <boyd@fr.inter.net>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 12:53 PM
Subject: Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out


> From: "Hermann Samso" <samso@studserv.stud.uni-hannover.de>
> > With so many snippets of code, everyone could make use
> > of, isn't there any common repository? Or will they
> > allget integrated in time for next release?
> > Ok, there is always Deja News, but...
> 
> oh, but there is.  you must have missed the 'why don't
> we build a common repository' thread.  i finally cracked
> (in desperation) and did this:
> 
>     http://mapage.noos.fr/~repo
> 
> but about the only thing it's done is to a) proove a
> point and b) receive mail of the form 'nice page.
> 
> the first cut was done by hand, the second is automated
> with a mash-mk mashfile on inferno.
> 
> the bitsy code should probably go back to 1127.
> i don't mind adding it too.
> 
> matt's rc irc bot could be added if he so wishes.
> 
> 
> 

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Matt]

bugger, sorry


>but about the only thing it's done is to a) proove a
>point and b) receive mail of the form 'nice page.
no news is good news?



>matt's rc irc bot could be added if he so wishes

A basic irc bot that evals commands it's given with
the permission & namespace of whoever started it.
http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/chugly.rc

Re: [9fans] help, i'm in a wet paper bag and I can't get out

[Boyd Roberts]

> no news is good news?

well, it's better than being the middle of a firefight...
err, flamewar.

> A basic irc bot that evals commands it's given with
> the permission & namespace of whoever started it.
> http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/chugly.rc

ok, will do.

i got it down to this as a mashfile:

for (i in contrib/*)
contrib.html : $i/li.html;

*/*/li.html :~ $1/$2/url { mash tools/c2li $1/$2 > $0 };
*/*/url :~ $1/$2/desc {};
*/*/desc :~ $1/$2/from {};
*/*/from :~ $1/$2/date {};

*.html :~ $1/0/url { cat $1/*/li.html > $0 };

default: index.html {};

index.html : head.html contrib.html tail.html { cat head.html contrib.html tail.html > index.html };

----

the contrib directory has directories, named 0...n, which have these files:

     url
     desc [description]
     from
     date [rfc822/std11 date.  it's well known and can be parsed]
     li.html [this is the html <li> made out of the above files]

brucee gave me a bit of a hand, 'cos mash-mk is not mk or make.
i think he has a much better and simpler solution to the problem.

[9fans] sam vs acme

[andrey mirtchovski]

hello,

would anyone recommend using 'sam' as the editor of choice for p9? the
problem with acme is that it's not generally available for other platforms,
and if one chooses to use acme as the $EDITOR, s/he is stuck with switching
back/forth to something else for all other platforms.

i know there's wily for linux/bsd and i've already happily compiled sam on
my irix box, so before i jump into learning it i'd like to know how useful
it is for managing relatively large and numerous source files.

is sam good for medium/semi-large projects?

i myself am a 'vi' user so the 'regular expresiveness' of sam is ok with me.


thanx: andrey

ps: i guess my question is geared towards non-bell-labs people, since they
would be the ones useing other OS's

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Matt]

acme is available in inferno which can be hosted on an OS.

www.vitanuova.com/inferno



----- Original Message -----
From: "andrey mirtchovski" <aam396@mail.usask.ca>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 12:04 AM
Subject: [9fans] sam vs acme


> hello,
>
> would anyone recommend using 'sam' as the editor of choice for p9? the
> problem with acme is that it's not generally available for other
platforms,
> and if one chooses to use acme as the $EDITOR, s/he is stuck with
switching
> back/forth to something else for all other platforms.
>
> i know there's wily for linux/bsd and i've already happily compiled sam on
> my irix box, so before i jump into learning it i'd like to know how useful
> it is for managing relatively large and numerous source files.
>
> is sam good for medium/semi-large projects?
>
> i myself am a 'vi' user so the 'regular expresiveness' of sam is ok with
me.
>
>
> thanx: andrey
>
> ps: i guess my question is geared towards non-bell-labs people, since they
> would be the ones useing other OS's
>
>

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Scott Schwartz]

| would anyone recommend using 'sam' as the editor of choice for p9?

It's not bad.  Sometimes acme is better, but I don't mind using both.
(Except that plumbing can get confused.)

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Dan Cross]

In article <20010624223334.5371.qmail@g.bio.cse.psu.edu> you write:
>| would anyone recommend using 'sam' as the editor of choice for p9?
>
>It's not bad.  Sometimes acme is better, but I don't mind using both.
>(Except that plumbing can get confused.)

It would be nice to see acme's underlying fileserver architecture
decoupled from its user interface.  That would result in something
roughly analogous to the way that XEDIT worked under VM in the IBM
mainframe universe, as Scott has made comments about in the past.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

the only way to write code is with sam.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[anothy]

thanks to the Edit functions now being in Acme, there are three
things i find to be advantages in sam:
	sam -r <host>
very nice over connections with limited bandwidth. the entire file
needn't travel over the line, just whatever part you're looking at
currently. works great in plan9→unix (my method for editing files
on a solaris box i manage while at home, over my 56K modem) and in
unix→unix modes. i don't believe win32 can be on either end of
this, which is disapointing. a co-manage this solaris box with a
windows user, and i'd love for him to be able to call sam, so i
could stop getting all these stupid cr's in my files.
	text mode with sam -d
acme has no command line mode (that concept doesn't really make
much sense). in cases like editing files before vga is up on plan
9 or telnet'd into a remote box, sam -d is great. it's also an
improvement (IMHO) over ed or sed for scripts, in that it's less
tied to the idea of a line, and can better operate on arbitrary
character ranges.
	cross platform
sam's available on plan 9, win32, and posix+X. acme's only
available in plan 9 and inferno. as noted earlier, inferno runs
on most popular unixes and win32, and one could easialy set up
inferno for easy access to the underlying files. then you could
use acme most anywhere. you might think it's a bit much work for
an editor, but it's doable. it's a judgement call.

other than that, i think acme is a much superior editor, even
without all the other benefits it gives. i find it to be a much
cleaner interface for multiple files, and the chording is a huge
win (IMHO; it's not for everyone). chording's probably what i
miss most in sam. that also makes acme more consistant with rio,
a win for plan 9 users. for one-off file editing, i've finally
moved from 'sam file' to 'acme file' - my big complaint there
being that acme still pops up the empty second column, wasting
screen space.


wily is a good effort, but is far inferior. i don't like using it.
-α.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Ozan Yigit]

anothy@cosym.net writes:

> wily is a good effort, but is far inferior. i don't like using it.

in which way is it /far inferior/ please? [eg. we had edit interfaces
three or was it four years ago :)] sure we don't have a general plumb
mechanism, but we are working on it. can you be specific? i maintain
wily, and i'ld like to make sure it is not "that far inferior" to
acme...

thanks...	oz
--
www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz	 | if you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe
york u. computer science | we'll just have to make some!   -- hobbes

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[jmk]

On Sun Jun 24 18:05:29 EDT 2001, aam396@mail.usask.ca wrote:
> hello,
> 
> would anyone recommend using 'sam' as the editor of choice for p9? the
> problem with acme is that it's not generally available for other platforms,
> and if one chooses to use acme as the $EDITOR, s/he is stuck with switching
> back/forth to something else for all other platforms.
> 
> i know there's wily for linux/bsd and i've already happily compiled sam on
> my irix box, so before i jump into learning it i'd like to know how useful
> it is for managing relatively large and numerous source files.
> 
> is sam good for medium/semi-large projects?
> 
> i myself am a 'vi' user so the 'regular expresiveness' of sam is ok with me.
> 
> 
> thanx: andrey
> 
> ps: i guess my question is geared towards non-bell-labs people, since they
> would be the ones useing other OS's

Until recently, there were more people using rio+sam than acme at the Labs,
there's a limit to how many new tricks you can teach old dogs like me. The
balance has changed due to new hires tending to use acme and various forms
of attrition on the old hands.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[nigel]

The pop up button 2 menu for editing under sam is seemed such an
improvement over the tedious point-click point-click stuff necessary
to cut or paste text under, say, Windows.  Yes, I know that under
Windows 98 or better you can get a right button menu (still click
point click because it doesn't remember the last action), or generally
use the keyboard (cop out).

At first I found the lack of a button 2 menu under acme hard but now,
when I return to sam from using acme, the lack of chording makes sam
seem slow and clunky.

I've attempted to use sam as editor of choice under all circumstances,
but all circumstances for me is probably similar for others too.  Once
you enter the Windows world, there are other constraints.  You need an
editor which is kind to carriage returns, and in my case is really
unkind to tabs.  This is in the former case not to screw up some
poorly written tools everyone else is using, and the latter to conform
to coding standards. vi/elvis/vim doesn't even pass, since it preserves tabs.

I did have a version of sam which would remove crs on read, and
replace on write, and could pretend tabs weren't 8 spaces on screen,
and replace them with spaces on write, but I lost it.  Actually, it
may be on the disk of the Sparcalike in the attic but I don't have a
monitor cable for it.  Anyone know if I can get a cable to connect a
monochrome sparc to modern colour monitor?

OK that's enough drivel.  That should, in modern parlance, 'promote
discussion'.  Where's Boyd?

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Matt]

> 
> OK that's enough drivel.  That should, in modern parlance, 'promote
> discussion'.  Where's Boyd?

on walkabout in London 

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

> > OK that's enough drivel.  That should, in modern parlance, 'promote
> > discussion'.  Where's Boyd?
> 
> on walkabout in London 

correct, but i have returned to my abode.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Richard Miller]

> for one-off file editing, i've finally
> moved from 'sam file' to 'acme file' - my big complaint there
> being that acme still pops up the empty second column, wasting
> screen space.

Try 'acme -c1 file'

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[William Staniewicz]

Some of the folks on the lists:

	rescue@sunhelp.org
         -or-
	geeks@sunhelp.org

... may be able to help with that.

Subscription info is at:

	www.sunhelp.org

> may be on the disk of the Sparcalike in the attic but I don't have a
> monitor cable for it.  Anyone know if I can get a cable to connect a
> monochrome sparc to modern colour monitor?
> 

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rob pike]

I've been planning for some time to have a go at splitting
acme the way sam is split.  I didn't do it when I was writing
acme because I had so many other new things to worry
about, not because I didn't think it should be done.  No
promises, but maybe some day...

-rob

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Howard Trickey]

I've been in a (sort of) forced exile in Windows programming land for the
last couple of years, and I REALLY miss acme.  I think I may have been rob's
first real user (after him), and have been enthusiastic about it from the
start.  I hope the split acme appears.

- Howard Trickey

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[anothy]

//I've been planning for some time to have a go at
//splitting acme the way sam is split.

oo, oo! sign me up! should you need a beta user, i'm
your guy. i'm usually running acme on my cpu
server from home, over my 56k (if that) modem, and
throwing around something on the level of sam
rather than raw /dev/draw would be really, really
nice. now, if this makes it into Inferno's Acme, too, i
could use it cross-platform, and retire sam (or at
least samterm) for good.
-α.

[9fans] bitsy question

[John Packer]

I have Plan9 installed on my ipaq, but I don't have a pcmcia sleeve,
or wavelan on my network.

So I have been trying to link the bitsy to my terminal using ppp over
the 
serial port. (I made a ramdisk with ip/ppp).

PPP tries to authenticate for 30 seconds (through chap, I think) then
times out.


I've tried running ppp a few different ways, but something like
	
	ip/ppp -df -b 115200 -p /dev/eia0 -s $user:$secret 135.104.99.5

on the bitsy and something like
	
	ip/ppp -dfS -b 115200 -p /dev/eia0 135.104.99.1

on the server.

Has anyone tried this? What am I doing wrong?

Thanks, 

John

[9fans] Re: bitsy question

[Dan Cross]

In article <3B38BA06.E55B62AC@bway.net> you write:
>I have Plan9 installed on my ipaq, but I don't have a pcmcia sleeve,
>or wavelan on my network.

Ouch; that makes it much more difficult to use, as you have discovered.

>So I have been trying to link the bitsy to my terminal using ppp over
>the serial port. (I made a ramdisk with ip/ppp).
>
>PPP tries to authenticate for 30 seconds (through chap, I think) then
>times out.
>
>I've tried running ppp a few different ways, but something like
>	
>	ip/ppp -df -b 115200 -p /dev/eia0 -s $user:$secret 135.104.99.5
>
>on the bitsy and something like
>	
>	ip/ppp -dfS -b 115200 -p /dev/eia0 135.104.99.1
>
>on the server.
>
>Has anyone tried this? What am I doing wrong?

Well, at least one thing that you're probably encountering is that the
bitsy tries to use the serial port as a console device, and is
hardwired in the kernel to do so.  In order to fix that, you have to
edit the kernel sources in /sys/src/9/bitsy/ and recompile; I managed
to turn it off by changing the argument to sa1110_uartsetup() to zero
in main.c.  However, if you do ONLY that, the machine panics when it
comes up because the keyboard input queue for the console device is
nil.  Whoops!  You have to change sa1110_uartsetup() in sa1110uart.c
(the last routine in the file) to assign a valid Queue pointer to
kbdq.  I just changed the relevant section to be:

	if(console) {
		uartspecial(p, 115200, &kbdq, &printq, kbdcr2nl);
	} else {
		kbdq = qopen(4*1024, 0, 0, 0);
	}

That is, adding the ``else'' clause which calls qopen.  I'm not sure
that this is the best method; if there's a better one, I'd be
interested to know.

btw- the serial console mode can be really handy at times; it's nice to
be able to put the bitsy on it's cradle, start up con, and then type
into bitsy windows without using bitsy/keyboard.  The hand becomes much
less cramped.

Anyway, I'm assuming this is something you haven't messed with yet;
it'd most definately mess with ip/ppp, since every other character gets
redirected to /dev/cons!

Another problem you may have is that the bitsy uart driver doesn't
really do modem control; actually, it might be more accurate to say
that the StrongARM SA1100 doesn't do modem control signaling directly.
Instead, it simulates it using the GPIO pins on the 1100.  I'm not sure
what exactly, if anything, the bitsy does differently in this regard
(the driver has a comment about the RTS/CTS stuff being h3600 specific,
but nothing more); my attempts to add DTR and RTS/CTS modem control to
the serial driver didn't work the way I had expected them to (I was
trying to hack them in in order to get my Targus stowaway keyboard
working; I did get it to mostly ``do the right thing,'' but it wasn't
perfect and I got busy with other stuff.  I'll get back to it
eventually.)

I've been meaning to try out ppp on the bitsy, using my ricochet modem,
but I haven't round a serial cable for it yet (well, I haven't exactly
been looking that hard).  I definately thing it'd be pretty cool to use
my bitsy to send email from the train.

bway.net, huh?  You in New York?  Anyone else on the list in NYC?  We
ought to start a New York Plan 9 Club or something.

	- Dan C.

[9fans] Re: bitsy question

[John Packer]

Dan Cross wrote:

> You have to change sa1110_uartsetup() in sa1110uart.c
> (the last routine in the file) to assign a valid Queue pointer to
> kbdq.  I just changed the relevant section to be:
> 
>         if(console) {
>                 uartspecial(p, 115200, &kbdq, &printq, kbdcr2nl);
>         } else {
>                 kbdq = qopen(4*1024, 0, 0, 0);
>         }
> 

This is an interesting clue. I'll try this out tonight.

 
> btw- the serial console mode can be really handy at times; it's nice to
> be able to put the bitsy on it's cradle, start up con, and then type
> into bitsy windows without using bitsy/keyboard.  

I've noticed this - very useful. 

> Another problem you may have is that the bitsy uart driver doesn't
> really do modem control

I don't think I need modem control, I'm not using a modem: just a 
PPP server and client over the serial cable to my PC. 

This is, I'm guessing, how ActiveSync works, and how Linux users connect
to their Ipaqs. 

It just doesn't seem to authenticate.

This may be the wrong approach, I don't know. 


> I've been meaning to try out ppp on the bitsy, using my ricochet modem,
> but I haven't round a serial cable for it yet (well, I haven't exactly
> been looking that hard).  I definately thing it'd be pretty cool to use
> my bitsy to send email from the train.

Very.

> 
> bway.net, huh?  You in New York?  Anyone else on the list in NYC?  We
> ought to start a New York Plan 9 Club or something.

Yep.

Re: [9fans] Re: bitsy question

[Dan Cross]

In article <3B38E7BE.D4C22541@bway.net> you write:
>
>  [...]
>
>> Another problem you may have is that the bitsy uart driver doesn't
>> really do modem control
>
>I don't think I need modem control, I'm not using a modem: just a 
>PPP server and client over the serial cable to my PC. 

Oh duh; of course you said that earlier and I was too slow to catch
on.  Yes, you're right; if you're not using a modem, you don't need
modem control.  For that matter, you might not need modem control
even if you have a modem.

>This is, I'm guessing, how ActiveSync works, and how Linux users connect
>to their Ipaqs. 

Well, I think they mostly use ``normal'' serial line protocols; either
just raw text passed over the serial line, or using a data transfer
protocol like xmodem.  I'm not sure they'd bother with the overhead of
PPP in the general case (where they just wanted to sync data, or copy
a file; for making TCP connections and the like, yeah, you'd need PPP
or SLIP or a real network interface).

>It just doesn't seem to authenticate.

That's almost certainly the keyboard input queue messing you up.

>This may be the wrong approach, I don't know. 

Well, if you've got an extra thousand bucks just laying around, definately
invest in the Wavelan route.  If not, then it's a reasonable approach; it
won't zoom, though, and I've found ip/ppp pretty unreliable (using a wireless
modem, though; still, it seems to work reasonably well under FreeBSD.  I
haven't been motivated enough to track down what's wrong, though).

>  [...]
>
>> bway.net, huh?  You in New York?  Anyone else on the list in NYC?  We
>> ought to start a New York Plan 9 Club or something.
>
>Yep.

Cool.  Any other New Yorker's?

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] Re: bitsy question

[Boyd Roberts]

> Cool.  Any other New Yorker's?

stair 9 is not that far from ny.

[9fans] Two cpu servers?

[Ish Rattan]

Does it make sense to have two cpu-servers?

I have a standalone spu/auth server running. How can I add another cpu
server to have two of these?

Any pointers will be appreciated.

-ishwar

[9fans] Re: bitsy question

[John Packer]

> Do you also use that serial line as the console?  You'll get garbage
> in your packets that way.
>
>	Sape


Hmm. I'm not running a con window when I try this. 

The debugging output appears to indicate a lack of response to a CHAP 
request. 

Maybe it is not picking up the '-s $user:$secret' option from the client.

	John

Re: [9fans] Re: bitsy question

[Dan Cross]

In article <3B38EC0E.4326AA8D@bway.net> you write:
>Hmm. I'm not running a con window when I try this. 

Right, but the kernel on the bitsy is still hardwired to take data
from the serial port and place it into the keyboard input queue;
running con on the other end doesn't matter, what's running locally
on the bitsy is what's messing it up.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] Re: bitsy question

[Latchesar Ionkov]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 01:10:45PM -0400, Dan Cross said:
> 
> bway.net, huh?  You in New York?  Anyone else on the list in NYC?  We
> ought to start a New York Plan 9 Club or something.

I am in New York too.

	Lucho

Re: [9fans] Re: bitsy question

[Matt]

> On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 01:10:45PM -0400, Dan Cross said:
> > 
> > bway.net, huh?  You in New York?  Anyone else on the list in NYC?  We
> > ought to start a New York Plan 9 Club or something.
> 
> I am in New York too.
> 
> Lucho

part of my heart lives there 

Re: [9fans] Re: bitsy question

[Steve Kilbane]

Matt wrote:
> part of my heart lives there 

part, huh? might have known that a plan 9'er would be distributed
at heart.

steve

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[David Gordon Hogan]

Boyd writes:
> the only way to write code is with sam.

Ooops!  You mispelled "acme"!  :-)

Anyway, as we all know, ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR:

	http://www.red-eagle.com/jokes/ed.html

If you don't find that funny, well, here's a bit of code
from gcc 3.0:

static const char * const ia64_reg_numbers[96] =
{ "r32", "r33", "r34", "r35", "r36", "r37", "r38", "r39",
  "r40", "r41", "r42", "r43", "r44", "r45", "r46", "r47",
  "r48", "r49", "r50", "r51", "r52", "r53", "r54", "r55",
  "r56", "r57", "r58", "r59", "r60", "r61", "r62", "r63",
  "r64", "r65", "r66", "r67", "r68", "r69", "r70", "r71",
  "r72", "r73", "r74", "r75", "r76", "r77", "r78", "r79",
  "r80", "r81", "r82", "r83", "r84", "r85", "r86", "r87",
  "r88", "r89", "r90", "r91", "r92", "r93", "r94", "r95",
  "r96", "r97", "r98", "r99", "r100","r101","r102","r103",
  "r104","r105","r106","r107","r108","r109","r110","r111",
  "r112","r113","r114","r115","r116","r117","r118","r119",
  "r120","r121","r122","r123","r124","r125","r126","r127"};

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

> static const char * const ia64_reg_numbers[96] =
> { "r32", "r33", "r34", "r35", "r36", "r37", "r38", "r39",

am i cursed by the knowledge of enumeration?

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rog]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 750 bytes --]

i've not used wily, but IMHO there are some places where a unix-based
acme clone could never approach the real acme, namely those places
where acme leverages the power of plan 9 (e.g. the filesystem
interface, and the stuff you can do with a simple shell command under
plan 9 which is impossible/extremely involved under unix)

much of the power of acme comes from living in happy symbiosis with
plan 9 - acme under unix is kind of like a hacked off limb; it looks
similar to the original, but won't work so well...

> [eg. we had edit interfaces three or was it four years ago :)]

presumably by this you mean the named-pipe RPC interface, not the sam
command Edit command?  (which doesn't seem to be in wily)

  cheers,
    rog.


[-- Attachment #2: Type: message/rfc822, Size: 2001 bytes --]

To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] sam vs acme
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 09:00:48 GMT
Message-ID: <ycdbsmudxz7.fsf@tiger.cs.yorku.ca>

anothy@cosym.net writes:

> wily is a good effort, but is far inferior. i don't like using it.

in which way is it /far inferior/ please? [eg. we had edit interfaces
three or was it four years ago :)] sure we don't have a general plumb
mechanism, but we are working on it. can you be specific? i maintain
wily, and i'ld like to make sure it is not "that far inferior" to
acme...

thanks...	oz
--
www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz	 | if you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe
york u. computer science | we'll just have to make some!   -- hobbes

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Lucio De Re]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 11:32:39AM +0100, rog@vitanuova.com wrote:
>
> much of the power of acme comes from living in happy symbiosis with
> plan 9 - acme under unix is kind of like a hacked off limb; it looks
> similar to the original, but won't work so well...
>
I have used wily, although not extensively.  I think it was Nigel who
pointed out the frustration of using the cursor keys and getting an
(at the time) unexpected response.

If I could not have acme, wily would be great, but I find small
inconsistencies a greater curse than large differences.

In that respect, Unix sam is less traumatic than wily, yet I have
little doubt that wily knocks the spots off sam on Unix as regards
usefulness.

It's in fact a great pity.  If I could back up my opinions with
actions, I would recommend that wily should head just far enought away
from acme to stand on its own two feet, that is, to be sufficiently
different not to confuse and irritate the Plan 9 user, while at the
same time retaining those features that make it more than a mere
curiosity (yet another editor?).

I guess the ideal situation will arise when (wait for this :-) acme
and wily coexist on Plan 9 and Plan 9 users find it worthwhile to use
the younger version.

Is there anything in wily for acme to learn?  I never got to use it
extensively, so I can't really tell.  But there is definitely merit to
the editor as a Unix tool, unfortunately much less so for the Plan 9
user than for those who are not so privileged :-)

++L

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[David Rubin]

Lucio De Re wrote:

> [...] yet I have
> little doubt that wily knocks the spots off sam on Unix as regards
> usefulness.

This is not true at all, IMO. I've used both sam and wily, and I've found that
wily is too slow, especially when searching for text in large documents. Also,
having used Acme, wily is a lot less similar to Acme than Unix sam is like Plan9
sam. WRT "usefulness," that depends entirely on how you *use* the editor...sam
boots faster and finds text faster. Everything else seems to be approximately
equal.

	david

--
If 91 were prime, it would be a counterexample to your conjecture.
    -- Bruce Wheeler

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "David Rubin" <dlrubin@hotmail.com>
> This is not true at all, IMO. I've used both sam and wily, and I've found that
> wily is too slow, especially when searching for text in large documents.

i'd say that rob's caching code is a big win.  have you read the sam
implementation paper?

i understand the advances rob made with acme, but i can't use it.

sam is for me.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Scott Schwartz]

> i'd say that rob's caching code is a big win.

Sam rocks.  And the new version uses some of acme's internals, to good
effect.  I've been editing some moderately large files (few hundred MB)
that sam handles fine, while "vim" takes forever to do anything.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

> Sam rocks.

yup

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[George Michaelson]

I decided to try again with the FreeBSD port of sam, since I can't get
p9 to boot on my boxen.

It makes well. It still assumes /usr/tmp exists which hasn't been true on
BSD derived UNIX for some time, but is trivial to fix. Interestingly it
remains true to the spirit of the car with one warning light labelled "?"
since it dumped core, and I had to truss it to find what it was looking
for that it couldn't find.

The tutorial sam.tut.ms won'd format with the current spec nroff/groff
(first page is fine, subsequent pages are 2 columns approx 8 chars wide
on each margin with whitespace inbetween) but since there is a .ps I didn't
bother trying to fix this.

The main thing Is that in order to learn how to use this on a unix system
under a WM you have two choices:

	1) pay somebody (Boyd?) to stand behind you with a baseball bat
	   and hit you HARD every time you press the wrong button, based
	   on knowing motif derived or other X10/X11 and/or M$ influenced
	   assumptions about mouse button modality and bindings.

	2) completely re-write your existing WM to use Samlike modality
	   and bindings or shift to a 9wm or like derived WM

Its really hard to have any other set of expected behaviour and
maintain rational thought processes while re-converting to what sam wants
when the mouse is in that window.

Also, some of the scrollbar behaviour and the split window behavior inside
the sam window are (for me at least) counter intuitive: its very hard to
work out what is a command input state and an edit state, there are'nt that
many visual clues to what is being done, the scrollbar feedback is very scampy.

The choice of font is a royal pain. I know this is close to religion and
also a layering violation (form:function issues) but that the sam window
is almost illegible alongside other xterm text doesn't bode well. If you
want a simple example, look at the results of postscript with screendumps
in them  for the sam documentation: why do the Sam images format so badly
on the screen while the postscript text is so easy to read?

Of course, I'm criticising a work of beauty, and that I was able to follow
the tutorial, load the text via sam -d, convert emacs to vi and back again
was really lovely. I can see where x/../ is heading, I can see why its better
than the ed 1,$/../ model, but I'm not yet sufficiently au fait to say I've
cut over a rubicon to use it every day of my life.

I would also add that this mirrors my experience trying teco again a few
weeks back: its deliciously easy to load, and to run the tutorial but you're
left with a vague feeling its also lacking something.

And since like many other lurkers here I retain an obligation at work to
maintain systems where I will have to use ed/vi and derived editors,
I have to deal with the 1) and 2) problems ongoing. I can't afford Boyds
retainer in quality Whiskey.

So I'd say yes, its provably a better way (tm) but if you have to think
impure thoughts, a little grace can be a difficult thing to live with.

Like Augustine, I think I have to say "... but not yet lord"

cheers
	-George
--
George Michaelson       |  APNIC
Email: ggm@apnic.net    |  PO Box 2131 Milton QLD 4064
Phone: +61 7 3367 0490  |  Australia
  Fax: +61 7 3367 0482  |  http://www.apnic.net

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Scott Schwartz]

| I decided to try again with the FreeBSD port of sam, since I can't get
| p9 to boot on my boxen.

Try http://www.cse.psu.edu/~schwartz/sam-9.3.1-unix.tar.bz2
That's a unix port of the version of sam from the 3rd edition, which
uses some of acme's data structures.  You'll need an existing samterm
to talk to it, but you just installed that.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "George Michaelson" <ggm@apnic.net>
> I decided to try again with the FreeBSD port of sam, since I can't get
> p9 to boot on my boxen.

freeBSD port?  just take the:

    http://netlib.bell-labs.com/magic/netlib_find?db=0&pat=sam+pike

and do it.  i've done it a zillion times.  i think it's the
_first_ thing i do when faced with a new contract; spending time
to build an efficient environment pays off in the long term.

for the the linux zealots, after doing it for the nth time, i
put the Make.linux's at:

    http://www.planete.net/~boyd/code/sam.Make.linux.bundle

> It makes well. It still assumes /usr/tmp exists which hasn't been true on
> BSD derived UNIX for some time, but is trivial to fix.

yes it is.  who cares where /tmp is?

> Interestingly it remains true to the spirit of the car with one warning light
> labelled "?" since it dumped core, and I had to truss it to find what it was
> looking for that it couldn't find.

weird, it's been solid as a rock since i converted in 1992.  i had been
using a copy of a gnarly X11 version that various people had done good
work with to get it to go -- you know who you are.

> 1) pay somebody (Boyd?) to stand behind you with a baseball bat
>    and hit you HARD every time you press the wrong button, based
>    on knowing motif derived or other X10/X11 and/or M$ influenced
>    assumptions about mouse button modality and bindings.

nope.  anyway, i prefer 9mm automatics:

    http://home.fr.inter.net/boyd/targets/last.jpg

yeah, stuck on that 10m plateau.

just get in there and use it.  took me a while to get to
grips with 'x' (i used to cheat with 's').  hitting people is
a waste of time.  'x' got my group free beer for delivering
on time this horrible DCE/RPC ENCINA VSAM mess.  worst project
i'd even seen.

it was all ISO 9000 run.  before i could use sam i had to write a test
spec and then a test report based on the test spec.  that's before the
project leader told the great story how he had dinner, in paris, with
his wife, in a brassiere

err, no, brasserie [lit. brewery].  i nearly spat hot and sour
soup everywhere in some fit of hysteria.

> Also, some of the scrollbar behaviour and the split window behavior inside
> the sam window are (for me at least) counter intuitive: its very hard to
> work out what is a command input state and an edit state, there are'nt that
> many visual clues to what is being done, the scrollbar feedback is very scampy.

nah, the cerebellum picks that up pretty quickly.

> The choice of font is a royal pain.

i like constant width fonts, so my code lines up.  but, it's a good
thing that sam copes with fonts correctly.

> I would also add that this mirrors my experience trying teco again a few
> weeks back:

weeks?  been a long time since i used teco.  20+ years?  i got involved
in some bug fixing of a port to a unix 11/45 some years later.  i think
the 45 had sep I&D.

> I have to deal with the 1) and 2) problems ongoing. I can't afford Boyds
> retainer in quality Whiskey.

JD?  i have half a bottle lying around.

apparently the going rate for ex-legionaires, as bodyguards, is less than
yer base level sysadmin in france.  that was a bit of a shock.  sysadmin
pays real well, but it's just as boring for an ex-code cutter as being
a bodyguard is for an ex-legionaire.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[suspect]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, George Michaelson wrote:
> 	1) pay somebody (Boyd?) to stand behind you with a baseball bat
> 	   and hit you HARD every time you press the wrong button, based
> 	   on knowing motif derived or other X10/X11 and/or M$ influenced

I have been using David Hogans 9wm in conjunction with Sam for a couple of
years. Quite often the first thing I do when I install a new UNIX or am
given an account on a new system is to install 9wm, then Sam.

There is an addition to 9wm, called w9wm, which gives you 'paging', for
efficient multi-slacking.

I love Sam and 9wm/w9wm, and could not possibly live without them.
-




>
> 	2) completely re-write your existing WM to use Samlike modality
> 	   and bindings or shift to a 9wm or like derived WM
>
> Its really hard to have any other set of expected behaviour and
> maintain rational thought processes while re-converting to what sam wants
> when the mouse is in that window.
>
> Also, some of the scrollbar behaviour and the split window behavior inside
> the sam window are (for me at least) counter intuitive: its very hard to
> work out what is a command input state and an edit state, there are'nt that
> many visual clues to what is being done, the scrollbar feedback is very scampy.
>
> The choice of font is a royal pain. I know this is close to religion and
> also a layering violation (form:function issues) but that the sam window
> is almost illegible alongside other xterm text doesn't bode well. If you
> want a simple example, look at the results of postscript with screendumps
> in them  for the sam documentation: why do the Sam images format so badly
> on the screen while the postscript text is so easy to read?
>
> Of course, I'm criticising a work of beauty, and that I was able to follow
> the tutorial, load the text via sam -d, convert emacs to vi and back again
> was really lovely. I can see where x/../ is heading, I can see why its better
> than the ed 1,$/../ model, but I'm not yet sufficiently au fait to say I've
> cut over a rubicon to use it every day of my life.
>
> I would also add that this mirrors my experience trying teco again a few
> weeks back: its deliciously easy to load, and to run the tutorial but you're
> left with a vague feeling its also lacking something.
>
> And since like many other lurkers here I retain an obligation at work to
> maintain systems where I will have to use ed/vi and derived editors,
> I have to deal with the 1) and 2) problems ongoing. I can't afford Boyds
> retainer in quality Whiskey.
>
> So I'd say yes, its provably a better way (tm) but if you have to think
> impure thoughts, a little grace can be a difficult thing to live with.
>
> Like Augustine, I think I have to say "... but not yet lord"
>
> cheers
> 	-George
> --
> George Michaelson       |  APNIC
> Email: ggm@apnic.net    |  PO Box 2131 Milton QLD 4064
> Phone: +61 7 3367 0490  |  Australia
>   Fax: +61 7 3367 0482  |  http://www.apnic.net
>
>
>

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: <suspect@spy.suspicious.org>
> I have been using David Hogans 9wm ...

ol' dhog knows his stuff.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

George Michaelson wrote:
> Its really hard to have any other set of expected behaviour and
> maintain rational thought processes while re-converting to what sam wants
> when the mouse is in that window.

But sam's button-2 menu is much better than the usual WM functions.
It all depends on what you are accustomed to (habits).
I regularly use "sam" on Windows, Solaris, and Plan 9;
I haven't found a more effective text editor.
I have in the past used TECO, which offers only two advantages:
	(1) more programmability (not limited to extended r.e.s)
	(2) multiple snarf buffers (Q-registers).
In "sam" I miss (2) much more than (1).

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[George Michaelson]

> I have in the past used TECO, which offers only two advantages:
> 	(1) more programmability (not limited to extended r.e.s)
> 	(2) multiple snarf buffers (Q-registers).
> In "sam" I miss (2) much more than (1).

I think 1) is of limited use to most people, and much use to skilled people.
Structured RE probably sit in the same space, I honour Rob for being able
to both write and exploit them, I still grapple with some base concepts.

2) I can see both sides of. Newer vi have multipe undo as a stack *and*
   named/numbered snarf space *and* the u-u toggle behaviour of do/undo and
   I actually find I like both/all three.

What amused me was that trying to follow the sam -d tute, I typed in
text by snarfing it (xterm wise, not sam/9term) into the sam edit input
state. And, I scored the leading ^    (thats 4 spaces) at each line.

The tutorial didn't show me how to remove them quite how I expected, and
my simplistic use of ed s/^....// failed. But, when I went to sam on X
and not sam -d of *course* I used the mouse to do this, and it just worked.

So for all I stand confused, I could use it in seconds, and it just worked.

Boyd speaks of 'ports' -for me, making current spec sam on FreeBSD meant
copying Make.BSDi to Makefile, and changing -I/usr/include/posix to posix4
and X11 to X11R6 (and some associated X link requirements, talk about bloat:
R6 pulls in pthreads and ICE and 2 other libraries) and it just worked.

I think sam needs/deserves a bit more tute doc. Only a little more. the
ed/ex/vi style brought up to date? god, how I miss the V6/7 learn programme

-George

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "George Michaelson" <ggm@apnic.net>
> 2) I can see both sides of. Newer vi have multipe undo as a stack *and*
>    named/numbered snarf space *and* the u-u toggle behaviour of do/undo and
>    I actually find I like both/all three.

vi's 'undo' was always broken.  with sam's, which is dead easy to
implement once you've made the crucial insight, makes using 'x'
worry free.  you start with a first cut, try it and then use 'u'
and stepwise refinement until you've persuaded the file(s) to
come 'round to your way of thinking.

i use sam on unix, windows ('cept it's broken on these damn vaio's
on '2000) and plan 9 (when i can -- damn vaio's).  only way to write
html and damn useful to tame machine generated html glop.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Ozan Yigit]

boyd@fr.inter.net (Boyd Roberts) writes:

> vi's 'undo' was always broken.  with sam's, which is dead easy to
> implement once you've made the crucial insight, makes using 'x'
> worry free.  you start with a first cut, try it and then use 'u'
> and stepwise refinement until you've persuaded the file(s) to
> come 'round to your way of thinking.

sam's undo is broken on the terminal side; it never shows you
where it is undoing. this is not hard to fix, as i have done once
in the past, but those changes now lost. perhaps someone will fix
it on the common version.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Ozan Yigit" <oz@tiger.cs.yorku.ca>
> sam's undo is broken on the terminal side; it never shows you
> where it is undoing.

concur, but i avoid that problem.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Steve Kilbane]

rog wrote:
> i've not used wily, but IMHO there are some places where a unix-based
> acme clone could never approach the real acme, namely those places
> where acme leverages the power of plan 9.

All true; the RPC interface library is a nightmare to use, compared
with the ease of just echoing into appropriate files. However, that's
a given anyway.

> much of the power of acme comes from living in happy symbiosis with
> plan 9 - acme under unix is kind of like a hacked off limb; it looks
> similar to the original, but won't work so well...

Is this just from a programmer's point of view, or does it apply purely
to someone who sees both through their interface? For example, if the
mail reader manages to present mail messages as files which are opened
in windows, is one better than the other, to the user?

> > [eg. we had edit interfaces three or was it four years ago :)]
>
> presumably by this you mean the named-pipe RPC interface, not the sam
> command Edit command?  (which doesn't seem to be in wily)

There were two. There was an attempt to emulate acme's e pipelines
(a miserable failure), and a much cleaner, better and simpler | > <.
The former used the RPC library, the latter was a builtin.

There were differences. In particular, the window layout heuristics
stopped trying to be like acme, and tried to be nice, instead. By that,
I don't mean that acme's heuristics weren't nice, but that wily's
attempts to match acme weren't producing something that was pleasant
to use. A major revision produced something that wouldn't rearrange
windows unless it had to, which was a nicer user experience than wily
had previously offered. However, by this time, it didn't have cursor
warping that worked in the same manner as acme, and didn't have the
convenient warping-back that acme had.

Wily only had two fonts. iirc, the B3-on-<stdio.h> stuff didn't work as well
(or in the same manner). win, as an application, was greatly reduced under
wily, but that's more a fault of UNIX's ttys and the immense cruft they
demand, rather than wily's faults.

Wily treated tags differently from acme. afaik, the filename in acme is
just the string at the start of the tag [been a long time since i looked],
while wily maintained filenames internally, truncated them to shorter
strings with environment variables, and mused over mounted directories.

Wily was never that hot on working out whether it should save a modified
window on closing, if the window had been created by a client.

Wily didn't have the save/restore layout features, although it may do now.

In day-to-day usage, wily was very nice. The window management worked smoothly,
cursor keys worked, and it looked great. It crashed on me occasionally, but
generally less than the OS did. Where it fell down was that it was just too
much damn work to write clients for it.

steve

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Steve Kilbane" <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
> All true; the RPC interface library is a nightmare to use, compared
> with the ease of just echoing into appropriate files. However, that's
> a given anyway.

yes, i've used a bunch of RPC.  the DCE/RPC has to be _the worst_.

the NFS kernel directory XDR is pretty 'special'.

it's this complex system thinking stuff:

    we build complex things because _we can_

much like the story about the tests between the sidewinder and the
falcon air-to-air missile tests [iirc the falcon turned into the
phoenix aim-54].  the falcon people had an aircraft hanger full
of the stuff.  when asked what sort of test equipment they required
the sidewinder people replied:

    oh, a screwdriver and a flashlight

_sidewinder_ is a great book.  it may be military, but it talks
about _design_.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Steve Kilbane]

I wrote:

[ stuff saying wily's message interface isn't as easy to use as Plan 9's
writing to files ]

and Boyd wrote:

[ stuff about sidewinder missiles ]

I'm amazed. I really am.

But to respond to a specific point:

> we build complex things because _we can_

I don't think that's quite true. wily's RPC isn't nearly as nice to use
as Plan 9's writing to files, but I presume that Plan 9's library for
driving 9P isn't as nice to use as writing to the files
either; if it was, that'd be the functionality you'd see from the shell.

Wily's RPC isn't the nightmare that XDR was, for example, but then, it
was to solve a much simpler problem. I think part of the reason why we build
complex things is because we're trying to anticipate problems that are
incorrectly viewed through foresight.

steve

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Steve Kilbane" <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
> and Boyd wrote:
>
> [ stuff about sidewinder missiles ]
>
> I'm amazed. I really am.

i think you miss my point.  simple stuff works.  complex
stuff doesn't and if it does it's only because there's
an army out there to nurse it along.

bentley quotes gorden bell [Digital h/w designer]:

    the cheapest, fastest and most reliable components
    are those that aren't there.

missing components don't make mistakes, are secure and
don't need testing, documentation or maintenence.

> I don't think that's quite true. wily's RPC isn't nearly as nice to use
> as Plan 9's writing to files, but I presume that Plan 9's library for
> driving 9P isn't as nice to use as writing to the files
> either; if it was, that'd be the functionality you'd see from the shell.

i was not targeting wily or acme or sam.  i was thinking of more
complex stuff.  perl or C++ are probably good examples of things
that started out relatively simple (albeit perl was such a mess
from the beginning) and then evolved into these dreadfully complex,
horrible messes.

i was trying to express my distaste for people who design things
that are insanely complex and step back and think:

   gee, i'm clever to have build this incredibly complex thing

no, that _thing_ will bite you further down the track and it
was foolish to build it.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Steve Kilbane]

Boyd wrote:
> i think you miss my point.

Not really. Just enjoying the associations.

> simple stuff works.  complex
> stuff doesn't and if it does it's only because there's
> an army out there to nurse it along.

can't argue with that.

> i was trying to express my distaste for people who design things
> that are insanely complex and step back and think:
>
>    gee, i'm clever to have build this incredibly complex thing

that's fair enough, although i don't think that people try to
make things complex for the sake of it; i just think they don't try
hard enough to make it simple. part of that is lack of 20-20 foresight,
as mentioned before, but i suspect that most of it is lack of suitable
education.

there should be a course, duh 101.

steve

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Steve Kilbane" <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
>
> Not really. Just enjoying the associations.

the thought had crossed my mind.

> that's fair enough, although i don't think that people try to
> make things complex for the sake of it; ...

i think they do.  in the 'real world' (tm) they live to
do it.  the number of unworkable, complex, insanely
stupid designs i've seen leave me with this unswerving
opinion.

i saw a proposed DNS addressing scheme that would take
an arbitrary top level domain and use that for the
the internal machines and the registered domain with
the externally visible machines.  this was smack in
the middle of the new TLD proposals.

tried to tell 'em that they had two recipes for disaster:

    - two names for the same machine would cause confusion
    - _should_ the TLD they chose be allocated _everything_
      would break

a complete waste of breath.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Ozan Yigit]

boyd@fr.inter.net (Boyd Roberts) writes:

>				... i was thinking of more
> complex stuff.  perl or C++ are probably good examples of things
> that started out relatively simple (albeit perl was such a mess
> from the beginning) and then evolved into these dreadfully complex,
> horrible messes.

i am holding a colleague's copy of the two-inch-thick "special edition"
(party size) stroustrup book, and just noticed that preface to the first
edition quotes whorf: "language shapes the way we think, and determines
what we can think about." [which is either sad or hilarious, depending
on what one thinks of whorf and c++]

oz

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

> i am holding a colleague's copy of the two-inch-thick "special edition"
> (party size) stroustrup book, ...

i guess you could always chuck it at someone/something you didn't like :)

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[nemo]

:  while wily maintained filenames internally, truncated them to shorter
:  strings with environment variables, and mused over mounted directories.

I used to love that until the day I used a different shell and almost all
my windows were tagged $CWD/blah

Perhaps just a matter of ignoring variables like CWD.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[David Gordon Hogan]

boyd@fr.inter.net writes:
> no, that _thing_ will bite you further down the track and it
> was foolish to build it.

Sadly, that thing often bites everyone else down the track,
not just its perpetrator.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[James A. Robinson]

Random thoughts on acme, sam, and the acme clone wily...

I've never used the real acme for any length of time, but I did use wily
for many years under Linux and Solaris.  For the past year or so I've
been using sam as my main editor.  I just installed the latest Inferno
updates and have played around with the new Inferno acme (now with Edit!).

One thing that wily had in commmon with acme was the concept of a scratch
window, and it had the ability to have guides.  While I liked that,
I also very much like sam's ~~sam~~ body.  The concept of a window for
edit commands to run on the active window is very nice.  With wily,
if you execute >, <, or | commands, it runs it on the selected text in
what it thinks is the active body.  That's a nice feature, similar in
concept to the ~~sam~~ window.

The reason I like an entry window or scratch space which works on the
most recent selecteed text is that I don't have enough space to work in
the tag.  Because acme uses full file names, often I find myself with
not much space in the tag for |, >, or < commands. I know it will scroll
along, but for some reason I just don't like typing commands into the
tag when the front half gets scrolled off the left-hand edge.

I don't know if Plan 9 acme takes advantage of shell variables, but the
one in inferno doesn't appear to.  One thing nice about wily was that
you could have defined $pisa_util/JournalLister.java to reference the
file /home/jimr/proj/pisa/src/org/highwire/util/JournalLister.java.

Now that acme has the Edit command, sam's power is available but,
unless I'm missing something, it's still a bit of a disconnect using
Edit on a window.  Using the tag works, but it is kind of restrictive
in terms of space (I often use varitions of x/pat/ { nested commands }).
Using Edit commands picked up from a scratch body  (cut, paste, move to
target body's tag and paste into Edit) works well enough, but I'd really
love to see an ~~acme~~ body which just knows the last active body, and
lets me execute commands I type in or mouse2 on.  I'm curious whether
or not anyone else has the same interface tastes?

My other thought is that, if an ~~acme~~ window were created so commands
ran on a server on the other side of a wire, it would be very fast to
make edits on large files, since all the data could be processed on the
server side -- you would only pull down updates to the visible portion.
I know Rob mentioned he had thought about a client/server approach to
acme, and think that is an awesome idea.


Jim

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Steve Kilbane]

Jim mused:

> target body's tag and paste into Edit) works well enough, but I'd really
> love to see an ~~acme~~ body which just knows the last active body

this worked in sam because of click-to-type. i don't know whether it
would work in acme. it *could* work in wily, since wily remembers the
last window on which you clicked; it did so in order that | > < would
work from misc guide files.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "David Gordon Hogan" <dhog@plan9.bell-labs.com>
> Sadly, that thing often bites everyone else down the track,
> not just its perpetrator.

oh so true ...

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rob pike]

Actually I mistyped. It's a 2-1 chord.   Use button 1 to select the
command (minus the Edit word), then move the mouse to the
Edit word, push 2, click (or just press) 1, release 2.  It's easier
to do than to type.  The same method gives arguments to Look,
Put, etc., even echo, cat, and rm.

-rob

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rog]

> > You can use the 1-2 chord to execute an arbitrarily long Edit command
> Do you mean passing a Snarfed  argument to Edit in the target window tag?

i think rob meant the 2-1 chord.  the only slight problem being that
you have to reselect the argument text every time.

the Look command remembers its last chorded argument, which avoids this
to a certain extent; perhaps Edit could too?

  rog.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rob pike]

> the Look command remembers its last chorded argument
It does?

-rob

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Dan Cross]

In article <20010711203700.2C03A199E1@mail.cse.psu.edu> you write:
>> the Look command remembers its last chorded argument
>
>It does?

Won't Look always search for the last thing searched for, regardless of
wether it's argument was chorded?

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rog]

> > the Look command remembers its last chorded argument
> It does?

seems to.
e.g. in this message, double click on 'the', 2-1 chord on
"Look", then continue button-2 (only) clicking: it continues
to search for the same string.

i haven't investigated any further than that...

Re: [9fans] architectures

[forsyth]

>>i'm particularly fond of the acme interface, and i really
>>like the chording (okay, maybe it's not for everyone, but _i_
>>really like it). i'm asking about non-techie folks. for them,
>>wouldn't a single-button interface be simpler to understand?

not necessarily, since the functionality of the extra buttons
must be provided somehow, whether by menus, pop-up menus,
key-mouse combinations, keys alone, or some other way.  much might
depend on the choice of conventions for using more than one button.
that in acme all three buttons select text is a big simplification.
i usually introduce it as follows: ``button 1 selects text, button 2
selects text, and button 3 ...'' and during the following pause
nearly everyone says ``selects text?''.  i then explain
that `of course' each button does different things with
the text selected.  that seems fine.  the chording for cut/paste/copy
takes a little practice, but since it has a `feel' much like grabbing
text from the screen, that also seems fine.   outside acme,
the Blit convention (perhaps adopted from Smalltalk, i don't know)
was something like: button 1 generally selected things, button 2 provided local
operations (usually on the thing selected), and button 3 provided global operations
for the application, with a few exceptions such as paint programs.
most menus were kept fairly small.

i know at least one non- technical user of acme who sends and receives
mail, plumbing photos and other things, and editing quite happily.
other non-technical people i've shown it to wanted to use acme on
their machines for document preparation and email because the
organisation into columns and frames and the use of the buttons was
just so much more effective than their `desktop' or a clutter of
windows.  (they also like the soft use of colour.)
contrary to Tog's advice on this point: with care i suspect
you can make abstractions simple and effective enough without insisting on
drawing a tenuous likeness to something in the `real world'.

Re: [9fans] architectures

[Laura Creighton]

re: drawing tenuous likenesses to the real world.

It is possible in the days before everybody knew what a computer was,
and a computer program was, that there was some value in giving a user
a metaphor with something else on the real world.  These days it is a
major problem because quite frequently the metaphor is lousier than
what we could write if we focused on _how efficiently can we do what
we want to do_ rather than _what is something, anything, that somebody
is likely to have done before which is sort of like what we want to do_.

My favourite example is the desktop metaphor.  Now neat people can
have the experience of a messed up and cluttered desk.  You too can
lose important work and documents because you can't find them!

Laura

Re: [9fans] architectures

[Ozan Yigit]

forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk writes:

> contrary to Tog's advice on this point: with care i suspect
> you can make abstractions simple and effective enough without insisting on
> drawing a tenuous likeness to something in the `real world'.

An interesting related bit of work is "The Anti-Mac Interface" by Don
Gentner and Jakob Nielson, Communications of the ACM, 29(8), pp. 70-82
August 1996, but also found online. i wish we could have more of this kind
of de/re-construction; attempting to break all the interface design rules
and see what comes out. the results of this particular attempt are more
along the lines of raisin-bran cereal than waldorf salad but thought
provoking nevertheless.

oz
--
www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz	 | if you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe
york u. computer science | we'll just have to make some!   -- hobbes

Re: [9fans] architectures

[Matt]

> An interesting related bit of work is "The Anti-Mac Interface" by Don
> Gentner and Jakob Nielson, Communications of the ACM, 29(8), pp. 70-82
> August 1996, but also found online.

http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm

Re: [9fans] architectures

[Scott Schwartz]

> http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm

``...in designing Sun's home page we decided we needed to change it drastically
every month to keep the users' interest...''

No wonder it's so totally impossible to find anything in there!  That one
statement makes me doubt every other thing they said.  Sun's web site
has to be the worst I've ever used, especially taking into account
the obviously huge amount of effort that goes into it.  It's clearly
all about entertaining suits, and not at all about making information
available to users who don't want to waste their time.

Re: [9fans] architectures

[Martin Harriss]

Scott Schwartz wrote:
>
> > http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm
>
> ``...in designing Sun's home page we decided we needed to change it drastically
> every month to keep the users' interest...''
>
> No wonder it's so totally impossible to find anything in there!  That one
> statement makes me doubt every other thing they said.  Sun's web site
> has to be the worst I've ever used, especially taking into account
> the obviously huge amount of effort that goes into it.  It's clearly
> all about entertaining suits, and not at all about making information
> available to users who don't want to waste their time.

It's also one of the slowest web sites around.  I hate to think of the
amount of time that I've had to wait wating for their pages to load.
They used to *boast* that their web services were provided by a pair of
Ultra 1's.  Looks like they still are.

</gripe>
Martin

Re: [9fans] architectures

[Dan Cross]

In article <20010712181225.17835.qmail@g.bio.cse.psu.edu> you write:
>``...in designing Sun's home page we decided we needed to change it drastically
>every month to keep the users' interest...''

Hmm, I predict that Sun will be the DEC of the 2000's; they'll stick
to an obsolete and overburdened product line until it's too late, and
then get bought out by Dell and ultimately squashed under foot.

	- Dan ``I saw a Solarian Light'' C.

Re: [9fans] architectures

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Dan Cross wrote:
> Hmm, I predict that Sun will be the DEC of the 2000's; they'll stick
> to an obsolete and overburdened product line until it's too late, ...

That's not really what DEC's problem was; there are whole books on this.

Re: [9fans] architectures

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>
>
> That's not really what DEC's problem was; there are whole books on this.

the rot had really set in at Digital as early as '93 when i was at PRL.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rob pike]

I believe - if you think my opinion is relevant about a program I wrote
15 years ago but haven't used much for the last 7 or 8 - that sam has
two major advantages:

1) Structural regular expressions, and the command language that
	derives from them.
2) Sam -r

Advantage 1) feels cool and makes a difference when you're working
on a problem; advantage 2) is the deep, structural improvement that
trumps all else.

-rob

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

sam is a fine piece of s/w.  accept no substitute.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Rick Hohensee]

>
> I believe - if you think my opinion is relevant about a program I wrote
> 15 years ago but haven't used much for the last 7 or 8 - that sam has
> two major advantages:
>
> 1) Structural regular expressions, and the command language that
> 	derives from them.
> 2) Sam -r
>
> Advantage 1) feels cool and makes a difference when you're working
> on a problem; advantage 2) is the deep, structural improvement that
> trumps all else.
>
> -rob
>

Illiterate translation: it escapes the infuriating line-wiseness of the
ed-family text utils. Hoo Ray. Huzzah.

Quibble:
 It doesn't quite fully supplant ed for me, unfortunately. It doesn't work
(that I know of) on binary files. It elides zero-bytes. My dotted-dir
thing for Linux directory names is dependant on an ed script that converts
e.g. /bin/ to /.bi/, that I can run on _anything_ uncompressed. I have sam
(just the command language part)  in my base install stuff though , which
is under 40 meg, in addition to ed.  Please take that as high praise.

Rick Hohensee
		www.clienux.com

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Mike Haertel]

A few days ago, Rob wrote:

>I believe - if you think my opinion is relevant about a program I wrote
>15 years ago but haven't used much for the last 7 or 8 - that sam has
>two major advantages:
>
>1) Structural regular expressions, and the command language that
>	derives from them.
>2) Sam -r
>
>Advantage 1) feels cool and makes a difference when you're working
>on a problem; advantage 2) is the deep, structural improvement that
>trumps all else.

I won't dispute (1), but claim (2) gnawing at me ever since I saw it.

I personally use sam in preference to, say, vi, but I want to
play devil's advocate for a moment...

How is "sam -r" be different from running vi (or another tty based
editor of your choice) in a telnet session in a terminal emulator?
(Leaving aside the obvious differences:  mouse-based vs. keyboard
based, different command language, sam's support for multiple
buffers.)  Why is "sam -r" a "deep, structural improvement"?

* Both approaches take advantage of pre-existing remote execution
facilities.

* Both approaches avoid having to send entire file contents
over a possibly low-bandwidth link.

* Both approaches have a low-bandwidth protocol for updating
the remote display.

But:

* Many different display engines (terminal emulators) have been
written that are compatible with vi, so when you move to a new
system chances are there will be one already.  By contrast, porting
samterm is nontrivial.

* On the other hand, you can easily port the sam back end to
just about any environment, since unlike a vi port you don't
have to worry about tty modes, curses libraries, and other
strange system dependent stuff.  In fact the sam back end could
probably be written as a strictly conforming ANSI C program
with no OS-specific code at all.

So, there are differences, but there also seem to be advantages
on both sides.  What makes "sam -r" so compelling?  Or is
"sam -r" just a hack to regain functionality that was lost
in the move away from cursor-addressed character terminals?

Does this mean that every interactive display program that
does large amounts of file I/O but has low information theoretic
bandwidth to the display (e.g. editors, spreadsheets, just
about anything but pictures in fact) should be written in a
split-process style similarly to sam?  Isn't that a pretty
big burden for programmers?  Isn't there some way to solve this
problem *once* and reuse the solution?

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Mike Haertel" <mike@ducky.net>
> I personally use sam in preference to, say, vi, but I want to
> play devil's advocate for a moment...

devil's idiot.

> How is "sam -r" be different from running vi (or another tty based
> editor of your choice) in a telnet session in a terminal emulator?

the user interface stays the same, but the editor runs remotely.
this all falls out of the way stuff was implemneted on the blit.

yes, we [basser] had a bunch of them and we were using 'jim'.
sam -r fell out of that rather fortuitously;  as long as the
editor back end runs on the target m/c you could use sam
anywhere.

i'm not sure, but i suspect it was the beginning/inspiration
of 9P.

big difference.

you cannot compare that 'goto fonfon' disaster to sam.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

Mike Haertel wrote:
> ...  What makes "sam -r" so compelling?  ...

Because it works really slick with a very limited capability remote
host.  I used it that way with a pseudo-Blit connected over dialup
to a minicomputer to edit large collections of files hosted on a
supercomputer.  It beat all other available methods of editing
those files under those conditions.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[forsyth]

>>yer base level sysadmin in france.  that was a bit of a shock.  sysadmin
>>pays real well, but it's just as boring for an ex-code cutter as being
>>a bodyguard is for an ex-legionaire.

i noticed in the Shrek credits that sys admins appear to have replaced
key grip and best boy.  there were quite a few sys admins.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Theo Honohan]

On Thursday 19 July, forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk wrote ("Re: [9fans] sam vs acme "):
>
> >>yer base level sysadmin in france.  that was a bit of a shock.  sysadmin
> >>pays real well, but it's just as boring for an ex-code cutter as being
> >>a bodyguard is for an ex-legionaire.
>
> i noticed in the Shrek credits that sys admins appear to have replaced
> key grip and best boy.  there were quite a few sys admins.

For extra software-schadenfreude points[1], see Shrek in the DLP Digital
presentation.  The version I saw (Warner Village, Leicester Square) had
ugly flickering noise in areas of fine detail (e.g. wolf's fur),
presumably avoidable aliasing artifacts due to sloppy format conversion
at some stage.  Ouch.

[1] We're all collecting these, right?

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Boyd Roberts]

From: "Theo Honohan" <theo@ideaworks3d.com>
>
> For extra software-schadenfreude points[1], see Shrek in the DLP Digital
> presentation.  The version I saw (Warner Village, Leicester Square) ...

and you paid 10 quid for the _priviledge_.  that's like 130 FF -- buy
the dvd.  anyway with UGC here you can buy an _infinite_ movie card
for 108 FF/month [~7 quid] and see any movie at any time as many times
as you like as long as you sign up for a year.

you can book the ticket on the net and roll up and swipe your card.
no ugly queuing.

    http://www.ugc.fr

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Dan Cross]

In article <20010719061912.6DB8B199E8@mail.cse.psu.edu> you write:
>i noticed in the Shrek credits that sys admins appear to have replaced
>key grip and best boy.  there were quite a few sys admins.

You know, I never have been able to figure out what a `key grip' or a
`best boy' *is*.  Perhaps non-computer people can't figure out what a
sys admin is.  Sometimes I wonder myself.

	- Dan C.

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[rob pike]

> How is "sam -r" be different from running vi (or another tty based
> editor of your choice) in a telnet session in a terminal emulator?

Local echo and mouse-handling make a difference on slow and,
especially, high-latency networks.

> Does this mean that every interactive display program that
> does large amounts of file I/O but has low information theoretic
> bandwidth to the display (e.g. editors, spreadsheets, just
> about anything but pictures in fact) should be written in a
> split-process style similarly to sam?  Isn't that a pretty
> big burden for programmers?  Isn't there some way to solve this
> problem *once* and reuse the solution?

Yes, yes, and wouldn't it be nice?

-rob

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[Douglas A. Gwyn]

rob pike wrote:
> Yes, yes, and wouldn't it be nice?

if we were older
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long
And wouldn't it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong

....

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true
Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do

....

You know it seems the more we talk about it
It only makes it worse to live without it
But let's talk about it
Wouldn't it be nice

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[paurea]

Douglas A. Gwyn writes:
 > From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>
 > Subject: Re: [9fans] sam vs acme
 > Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 08:54:33 GMT
 >
 > rob pike wrote:
 > > Yes, yes, and wouldn't it be nice?
 >
 > if we were older
 > Then we wouldn't have to wait so long
 > And wouldn't it be nice to live together
 > In the kind of world where we belong
 >
 > ....
 >
 > Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true
 > Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do
 >
 > ....
 >
 > You know it seems the more we talk about it
 > It only makes it worse to live without it
 > But let's talk about it
 > Wouldn't it be nice

I was tempted,  but restrained my fingers :-).

--
                 Saludos,
                         Gorka

"Curiosity sKilled the cat"
--
    /"\
    \ /    ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
     X                           - against ms attachments
    / \

Re: [9fans] sam vs acme

[forsyth]

>>Does this mean that every interactive display program that
>>does large amounts of file I/O but has low information theoretic
>>bandwidth to the display (e.g. editors, spreadsheets, just
>>about anything but pictures in fact) should be written in a
>>split-process style similarly to sam?  Isn't that a pretty
>>big burden for programmers?  Isn't there some way to solve this
>>problem *once* and reuse the solution?

yes.  consider exporting a computable name space.

i've found it often reduces the burden on the programmer,
offers natural places to split the task, and like interconnection
with pipelines in unix, allows unusual combinations not expected
initially.

Re: [9fans] Virtual memory in BSD and Plan9

[Russ Cox]

	Could you please recommend me a reading on both architectures to
	understand differences between them. I read here that BSD paging has
	some drawbacks to AT&T one (used in Plan9). And I want to make this
	clear for myself.

The discussions here were talking about many-years-old
systems.  I don't think anyone even mentioned Plan 9's VM system,
which is just about the simplest thing you could imagine.
The BSDs have oodles more ``features.''  I'd look in
www.researchindex.com for the latest stuff, and in McKusick et al.
(Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD OS) for older stuff.
You can decide for yourself whether Plan 9 needs any of it.

Russ

Re: [9fans] Virtual memory in BSD and Plan9

[William Josephson]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 01:55:25PM -0400, Russ Cox wrote:
> The discussions here were talking about many-years-old
> systems.  I don't think anyone even mentioned Plan 9's VM system,
> which is just about the simplest thing you could imagine.
> The BSDs have oodles more ``features.''  I'd look in
> www.researchindex.com for the latest stuff, and in McKusick et al.
> (Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD OS) for older stuff.
> You can decide for yourself whether Plan 9 needs any of it.

You probably want to take a look at Charles Cranor's PHd thesis from
Washington on UVM.  If I recall correctly, some of the *BSDs (NetBSD,
FreeBSD?) have picked it up or at least borrowed ideas.

 -WJ

[9fans] acme bug/annoyance?

[Matt]

Hi,

I just started a new instance of Acme

typed some code in an empty yellow window which was a directory
listing of an empty directory, I'd put the filename in the titlebar
but not saved the file.

All was going well until I resized the column and lost all my typing.

Not the end of the world but not very user friendly either.

An instance of where DWIM would win over "you have to have the text in
a file already, stupid"

Matt

Re: [9fans] acme bug/annoyance?

[rob pike]

A nasty problem here.  When you resize a directory window, acme should recolumnate
the output, but I couldn't see how to get that right while keeping the user's text, so I
just started over.  A directory window is therefore a kind of scratch typing space, which
is actually a feature I like but is clearly a consequence of, rather than integral to, the design.

I suppose the documentation should mention this.

-rob

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Matt <matt@proweb.co.uk>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 4:09 AM
Subject: [9fans] acme bug/annoyance?


> Hi,
> 
> I just started a new instance of Acme
> 
> typed some code in an empty yellow window which was a directory
> listing of an empty directory, I'd put the filename in the titlebar
> but not saved the file.
> 
> All was going well until I resized the column and lost all my typing.
> 
> Not the end of the world but not very user friendly either.
> 
> An instance of where DWIM would win over "you have to have the text in
> a file already, stupid"
> 
> Matt
> 
> 

Re: [9fans] acme bug/annoyance?

[Scott Schwartz]

> I suppose the documentation should mention this.

For that matter, maybe such windows should be tinted differently.

Re: [9fans] Virtual memory in BSD and Plan9

[John S. Dyson]

wkj-despam@eecs.harvard.edu (William Josephson) wrote in message news:<20011025142927.B8085@honk.eecs.harvard.edu>...
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 01:55:25PM -0400, Russ Cox wrote:
> > The discussions here were talking about many-years-old
> > systems.  I don't think anyone even mentioned Plan 9's VM system,
> > which is just about the simplest thing you could imagine.
> > The BSDs have oodles more ``features.''  I'd look in
> > www.researchindex.com for the latest stuff, and in McKusick et al.
> > (Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD OS) for older stuff.
> > You can decide for yourself whether Plan 9 needs any of it.
> 
> You probably want to take a look at Charles Cranor's PHd thesis from
> Washington on UVM.  If I recall correctly, some of the *BSDs (NetBSD,
> FreeBSD?) have picked it up or at least borrowed ideas.
> 
FreeBSD and NetBSD have different VM systems.  FreeBSD's (which I
am the primary implementer), is really a corrected and filled out
MACH VM for UNIX.  It provides lots of the necessary shortcuts
fully virtualized for the process VM forking and things like that.
The original MACH VM port really wasn't meant as being production
ready (per my discussions with Hibler), but was more of a feasibility
exercise.  Even though it wasn't fully made robust in the original
implementations, it wasn't that much worse than many commercial UNIX
VM behaviors.

Probably the biggest difference doesn't occur during 'normal'
memory resident situations, but where FreeBSD has rather advanced
paging stats, and really does put off the thrashfest until the
system doesn't have enough pages to supply an adequate resident
working set.  If there is minimally enough memory, FreeBSD will
converge reasonably quickly, without undue thrashing.  In my early
experiments, it was very satisfying to hear the system 'calm down'
after experiencing thrashing due to a necessary change in working
set population.  Most other systems tended to keep on thrashing
for long periods, even when there was obviously enough memory.  The
pseudo-random pagouts and invalidations from non-FreeBSD systems
tended to really screw up the page reference information on memory
segments being used by otherwise runnable processes.   The relatively
good behavior has been especially useful when running user-mode
windowing systems, where the blocking from poorly chosen page
invalidations can really stop-up the works.

Both FreeBSD's VM and NetBSD's VM work pretty well (no real complaints
from either party), and most/all of the limitations of the original
MACH VM have been expunged.  There were even cases of limitations
that I thought to be unsolvable in the FreeBSD code eventually simply
be an 'exercise in data structures', and the last REAL limitation
due to address space/fork inheritance was remedied as a result of
competition from NetBSD's new VM stuff.

FreeBSDs and NetBSDs code is both adequately portable, and that
should not be a deciding issue.  Frankly, the most important deciding
issue is probably based upon knowledge of the VM code that the
individual who might do the port to Plan 9.  One might make a
'decision' that the VM shouldn't page anyway (except in odd situations),
and so the relative advantages of the two systems becomes less
important.

My philosophy is based upon the fact that an OS MUST NOT just be a fair
weather friend, and from my rather VM-centered viewpoint, I believe that
this includes the fact that VM shouldn't randomly thrash, when it could
more actively converge to a reasonable working set (when possible.)

If starting from scratch, it is really easy to write some code that
works.   However, there is ALOT more work to making a VM system
function under load to maximize availability of CPU cycles.  Unfortunately,
it is clear that VM system behavior is almost always a secondary
priority, because it doesn't specify/benchmark very easily.

John

[9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[Roshan James]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3665 bytes --]

Getting started in Plan9
-------------------------    
Its been a little over a week since i got my Plan9 working and 
I still seem to be in tourist mode.Lots of questions and 
a few suggestions:
(I promise I have tried to answer these for myself before
before I am ask them)

It would be great if we have a school boy style step-by-step 
getting-off-the-ground tour of plan9, maybe somewhere in the
wiki. I would be glad to do this, if i knew enough.

Graphics
-----------
- I am working with an S3 Trio 64v2 card, the install floppy
gave me 800*600 res,but after installation i am on 640*480 and
i cant seem to be able to change it
aux/vga -l 800x600x8
gives me
'Warning (BUG) : redefinition of aperture does not change 
s3screen segment.'
in a black background in the sentre of the screen and an error
message that reads 
'aux/vga: vgactlw: <size 800x600x8 m8>: vga already configured'
in the console window. it is a low end card but I believe that 
I did have a higher res through the boot disk so it should be 
possible here too. how can i change to a higher res ?

- If plan9 is booted through xosl in 640*480 res,plan9 graphics
display ends up corrupt. the bootloader does switch to text mode
before the OS is booted. anyother resolution or a text mode boot
loader does not seem to have a problem. 
The right quarter of the screen (approx) seems to be a duplicate
of the band of the screen display between in the left part. (bad
description i know). Anyway to fix this ?


Acessibility
-------------
- How can I read a couple of html docs in Plan9 ?
- Is there a place where the uses of directories the std file system
heirarchy is discussed, esp /n ? 
- /n/c: exists, how can i access the extended partitions ?
- How can i access the floppy a: ? /n/a: exists but shows no files.
- How can i access the extended windows partitions ? 
- Problem with accessing C: File operations to /n/c: causes a problem
'%mkdir /n/c:/testdir'
'mkdir: cant create /n/c:/testdir: write to hungup channel'
also a black background error message comes (is there a generic name
for these messages ?)
'dossrv 45: suicide: sys: trap fault read addr=0xb pc=0x00004757'
help ?

Shell
------ 
- How can I find/search for a file in Plan9 ? the usual find /|grep xxx 
does not exist here, what is the equivalent ?
- Why doesnt/Can rc have autocomplete and filename completion as in 
bash ? This has become so neccessary.

Keys
-----
- Why cant the left/right arrow keys+home+end keys move the cursor,
it is really difficult to edit something by placing the cursor there
with the mouse. 
- Unless is it part of a grander plan (no pun intended), can we move 
the process interrupt key from Del to something else and have the 
conventional functionality of del back ?

General
-------
- Is the option of plan9 default boot in bootsetup (during install)
safe for other OSes that exist on the system ?
- Why arent there more applications and more developers interested
in developing for plan9 ? 

Russ, I think it would kill you to keep answering all the newbie 
questions. Russ, Imel, Thanks for all the help you have been. I 
think the Plan9 faq needs updation with some of the more generic 
questions here. This is a lesson that could learned from the Win32's, 
if you want the OS to grow, you have to get people comfortable with 
it very fast. I think we can make that happen.

Rosh.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
(Lord of the Rings)

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4834 bytes --]

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[Matt H]

Hi,

here's my set of slightly flippant answers

> - How can I read a couple of html docs in Plan9 ?
install inferno and use the netscape 3 hybrid Charon
I bet you can't wait :)

Web browsing it's plan9's end user pitfall.
No browser, not even text only (unless you count downloading & stripping the html tags text only)

> - How can I find/search for a file in Plan9 ? the usual find /|grep xxx
> does not exist here, what is the equivalent ?
du I think is your best bet

it's better still to learn where everything is :)

luckily there aren't 5 different directories where programs hide (well there can be but...)
all the executables show themselves in /bin which is a union of the directories where executables live if you see what I mean. There's aren't that many, have a look through them all, you'll remember easily enough.

> - Why doesnt/Can rc have autocomplete and filename completion as in
> bash ? This has become so neccessary.
yes, well, you see plan9 is more mouse driven. eventually you'll probably end up with Acme as much your "shell" as anything, and you'll find auto complete is unneccessary.
But you're right, it is a nice feature of the bash shell but then there are soooo many goddam directories on a Linux/FreeBSD box and auto complete is Bash's way of trying to alleviate the pain. If you miss it too much I'm sure you could just write a shell script to monitor /dev/cons for tabs, and echo the stuff into /dev/cons.
Personally, I do prefer having the screen as free form is plan9's is. The shell is more than the commands you can type, it's where you can type them.

> - Why cant the left/right arrow keys+home+end keys move the cursor,
> it is really difficult to edit something by placing the cursor there
> with the mouse.
That's what I said and I still get the urge to say it out loud. They told me I'd get used to it and you know what, I haven't. I'd even settle for Ctrl-J. But when I'm sat at a different terminal I still end up saying "I wish I was using Acme".

> - Unless is it part of a grander plan (no pun intended), can we move
> the process interrupt key from Del to something else and have the
> conventional functionality of del back ?
It depends who's conventions.

> - Why arent there more applications and more developers interested
> in developing for plan9 ?
file name completion

> This is a lesson that could learned from the Win32's,
> if you want the OS to grow, you have to get people comfortable with
> it very fast. I think we can make that.
After ten years of Windows I'm not sure people are comfortable with it.
It's clunky, crashes without explanation, brittle to end user fiddling, repeatedly exposes remote root exploits, is expensive, closed source. I need not go on.

> One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
> One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
> (Lord of the Rings)
Arntcha sick of those mobiles phones yet?

Matt

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[Scott Schwartz]

| yes, well, you see plan9 is more mouse driven. eventually you'll
| probably end up with Acme as much your "shell" as anything, and you'll
| find auto complete is unneccessary.

I think that input prediction, if done well, is a beautiful feature, and
one that would fit very well with acme, or maybe as a kind of plumbing. I
used to use a unix thing called "rk"; a markov chain style thing that
continuously prompted you with a line or two of predicted input. You
used the arrow keys or tab or ctrl-m to accept the next char/word/line
of the prediction. It was uncannily good. A lot of command line stuff is
very repetative, and anyone who's seen Rob's fake usenet postings can
see how good this kind of thing is for email. One of these days I'll
get around to hacking it into acme, maybe.

| > - Unless is it part of a grander plan (no pun intended), can we move
| > the process interrupt key from Del to something else and have the
| > conventional functionality of del back ?

Especially since PC keyboards have an actual "break" key to use.

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[ozan s yigit]

schwartz@bio.cse.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes:

> used to use a unix thing called "rk"; a markov chain style thing that
> continuously prompted you with a line or two of predicted input.

it is "reactive keyboard" and i believe was a thesis work at university
of calgary, by Darragh under Witten. i'm sure a web search would still turn
up pointers. there is a book about it, not sure if still in print. the
interface was interesting in trying to accomodate disabled people to
interact with command interfaces by predictive completion.

oz
--
www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz	 | if you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe
york u. computer science | we'll just have to make some!   -- hobbes

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[Bakul Shah]

ozan s yigit wrote:
> it is "reactive keyboard" and i believe was a thesis work at university
> of calgary, by Darragh under Witten. i'm sure a web search would still turn
> up pointers. there is a book about it, not sure if still in print. the
> interface was interesting in trying to accomodate disabled people to
> interact with command interfaces by predictive completion.

See volume 20 issues 29..32 of comp.sources.unix (Oct '89) at
  ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/usenet/comp.sources.unix/volume20/reactivekbd
The most recent version seems to be at
  http://www.csoft.net/~dummy/robert/software/rk-1.6.2.tar.gz

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[Boyd Roberts]

Matt H wrote:
> > - Why doesnt/Can rc have autocomplete and filename completion as in
> > bash ? This has become so neccessary.
> yes, well, you see plan9 is more mouse driven. eventually you'll probably end up with Acme as much your "shell" as anything, and you'll find auto complete is unneccessary.
> But you're right, it is a nice feature of the bash shell but then there are soooo many goddam directories on a Linux/FreeBSD box and auto complete is Bash's way of trying to alleviate the pain. If you miss it too much I'm sure you could just write a shell script to monitor /dev/cons for tabs, and echo the stuff into /dev/cons.
> Personally, I do prefer having the screen as free form is plan9's is. The shell is more than the commands you can type, it's where you can type them.

I remember the major flamewar over whether Byron's unix implementation of rc
should do this;  I was in the 'no way' camp.  The result was that you could
conditionally compile in that readline trash.  You could probably pick it out
and stick into Plan 9's rc if you wanted to, but Plan 9 is not unix.  It has
much better ways to do things.

I guess another way to do it is to use pipefile.  One of the Kenji's (iirc)
did this for japanese input -- now there's a problem for you.

As for Latin-1: "Fco. J. Ballesteros" <nemo@plan9.escet.urjc.es> has volunteered
to clean up what I did late last year (I'm too busy).  If anyone wants it I'll
send it on or put it on a web page somewhere.  I think the only problem is the
caps-lock/ctrl key swap.

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[John Murdie]

> - Why doesnt/Can rc have autocomplete and filename completion as in
> bash ? This has become so neccessary.

If you put the command history editor in the shell, then you can only
use it in the shell; if you use another shell from time to time, then
you have to learn to use that shell's (different) history mechanism.
It's far better to use a single, general, command history mechanism
provided by your terminal emulator or Acme (which is so more than a
terminal emulator). There is a slight loss from the shell and the
command history editor being separated, I know.

Incidentally, I hate command completion predictors; they remember my
typing mistakes days, weeks or months later, either hesitating to show
me the full, correct, command because of my previous mistake or, worse,
confidently complete my command with the mistake!
--

John A. Murdie
Experimental Officer (Software)
Department of Computer Science
University of York
England

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[William S.]

I can answer this one:

step one: (at the prompt type) a:
step two: cd /n/a:

Bill
Amsterdam, NL

On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 01:32:35AM +0530, Roshan James wrote:
<<snip>>
>
>    - How can i access the floppy a: ? /n/a: exists but shows no files.
<<snip>>

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[William Josephson]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 01:32:35AM +0530, Roshan James wrote:

> - Why doesnt/Can rc have autocomplete and filename completion as in
> bash ? This has become so neccessary.

binding everything on to /bin mostly remove the need for this.
If you haven't done so already, I would suggest grabbing the
various shell scripts and C programs from Russ Cox's web
page at www.eecs.harvard.edu/~rsc.  " and "" are very useful
in conjunction with the mouse.

 -WJ

Re: [9fans] Getting started in Plan9 - help

[cej]

Rosh,

you can find some stupid scripts, including "find", at
http://cejchan.gli.cas.cz/plan9

Cheers,
--pac