From casey at geeknest.com Thu Feb 3 04:58:39 2005 From: casey at geeknest.com (Casey West) Date: Thu Feb 3 04:53:07 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] [info@pghgeeks.org: Geek Night this Thurs., Feb. 3 at the Church Brew Works] Message-ID: <20050203125839.GF355@geeknest.com> Anyone planning to go? ----- Forwarded message from Pgh Geeks Info and Announcements ----- Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 02:49:36 -0500 Message-Id: <200502030749.j137na9v030523@localhost.octllc.COM> From: Pgh Geeks Info and Announcements To: casey@geeknest.com Subject: Geek Night this Thurs., Feb. 3 at the Church Brew Works Remember, Geek Night is this Thursday, February 3, at the Church Brew Works in Lawrenceville. Show up anytime after 5:00pm, and leave whenever you like. There will be free munchies courtesy of Haley Systems (www.haley.com). If you are planning to come and have not yet done so, please let us know at rsvp@pghgeeks.org. Details, as always, are at http://www.pghgeeks.org. ----- End forwarded message ----- Casey West -- Losing a technical argument? Try this: There are, of course, various export limitations on that technology. From robertblackwell at yahoo.com Thu Feb 3 06:35:22 2005 From: robertblackwell at yahoo.com (Robert Blackwell) Date: Thu Feb 3 06:35:32 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Pittsburgh Perl Mongers | Meeting | 02.09.2005 Message-ID: <20050203143522.41101.qmail@web54203.mail.yahoo.com> The 02.09.2005 meeting of the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers being used to try to start a Pittsburgh PostgreSQL Users Group. If you are interested in Perl or PostgreSQL this meeting is for you. *Technical Gathering* *Location* Slaymaker Systems, Inc. 4914 Baum Blvd. Pittsburgh, PA 15213 02.09.2005 19:00 *Talks* *Slony - Casey West* Casey will share his critical experience with using Slony for replication. *The future of the Pittsburgh PostgreSQL Users Group - Robert Blackwell* Robert will lead a discussion of what the next steps for a Pittsburgh PostgreSQL users group should be. Thanks, Robert ===== Robert Blackwell robert@robertblackwell.com AIM: robertdblackwell Yahoo!: robertblackwell Jabber: robertblackwell@jabber.com http://www.robertblackwell.com Skype: rblackwe From chris at cwinters.com Tue Feb 8 12:39:39 2005 From: chris at cwinters.com (Chris Winters) Date: Tue Feb 8 12:31:47 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Pittsburgh Perl Mongers | Meeting | 02.09.2005 In-Reply-To: <20050203143522.41101.qmail@web54203.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20050203143522.41101.qmail@web54203.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5370.209.166.178.1.1107895179.squirrel@www.cwinters.com> Robert Blackwell said: > ... > *Technical Gathering* > > *Location* > > Slaymaker Systems, Inc. > 4914 Baum Blvd. > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 So what's parking like around there? Also, for the curious here's a link to a map of the location with google's new service: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=4914%20Baum%20Blvd%2C%20pittsburgh%2C%20pa&ll=40.455872%2C-79.946304&spn=0.014587%2C0.030256 Chris -- Chris Winters (chris@cwinters.com) Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988. From barries at slaysys.com Tue Feb 8 13:36:20 2005 From: barries at slaysys.com (Barrie Slaymaker) Date: Tue Feb 8 12:38:11 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Pittsburgh Perl Mongers | Meeting | 02.09.2005 In-Reply-To: <5370.209.166.178.1.1107895179.squirrel@www.cwinters.com> References: <20050203143522.41101.qmail@web54203.mail.yahoo.com> <5370.209.166.178.1.1107895179.squirrel@www.cwinters.com> Message-ID: <20050208213517.GC15064@slaysys.com> On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 03:39:39PM -0500, Chris Winters wrote: > Robert Blackwell said: > > ... > > *Technical Gathering* > > > > *Location* > > > > Slaymaker Systems, Inc. > > 4914 Baum Blvd. > > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 > > So what's parking like around there? Free and easy. We have a 30 some space lot in front of the building. We're back quite some distance from Baum at the end of the lot in a large green building. Turn in to the lot between the "Get Go" (Giant Eagle convenience mart) and the Einstein's bagle restaurant. The big sign out front is for Daedalus/Excel, owner and majority occupant of this building. - Barrie From barries at slaysys.com Wed Feb 9 15:43:57 2005 From: barries at slaysys.com (Barrie Slaymaker) Date: Wed Feb 9 14:45:28 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Pittsburgh Perl Mongers | Meeting | 02.09.2005 Message-ID: <20050209234311.GE4250@slaysys.com> For those still reading email, you can contact me at the number on the contact us page at http://slaysys.com/ for "guide me in" directions. The indirection is on purpose, sorry. - Barrie On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 04:36:20PM -0500, Barrie Slaymaker wrote: > On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 03:39:39PM -0500, Chris Winters wrote: > > Robert Blackwell said: > > > ... > > > *Technical Gathering* > > > > > > *Location* > > > > > > Slaymaker Systems, Inc. > > > 4914 Baum Blvd. > > > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 > > > > So what's parking like around there? > > Free and easy. We have a 30 some space lot in front of the building. > We're back quite some distance from Baum at the end of the lot in a > large green building. > > Turn in to the lot between the "Get Go" (Giant Eagle convenience mart) > and the Einstein's bagle restaurant. The big sign out front is for > Daedalus/Excel, owner and majority occupant of this building. > > - Barrie > _______________________________________________ > pgh-pm mailing list > pgh-pm@pm.org > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/pgh-pm From tom at moertel.com Thu Feb 10 11:32:54 2005 From: tom at moertel.com (Tom Moertel) Date: Thu Feb 10 11:33:17 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] PUGS = Perl6 Users Golfing System = Perl6 in Haskell Message-ID: <420BB6E6.3040603@moertel.com> Fellow Perl Mongers, Autrijus Tang is implementing a Perl6 interpreter using Haskell as the implementation language. The announcement on the perl6-compiler list is here: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.compiler/165 and the project home is here: http://autrijus.org/pugs/ (Yes, it's part of the Haskell wiki!) If you want to follow a daily journal of the progress: http://use.perl.org/~autrijus/journal/ Here is a particularly tasty tidbit found under the heading of "Compilers" in the "Perl 6 Summary for 2005-01-31 through 2004-02-8" email: > Pugs 6.0.0 > Autrijus Tang released Pugs 6.0.0. It has many cool features and was > created in only 6 days. A testament to the power of Haskel or the > caffeine intake of Autrijus. (Although to be fair he skipped more > version numbers then Java did in its jump to 5.0...) You can browse the Darcs repository that holds the source code here: http://wagner.elixus.org/~autrijus/darcs/pugs/ In particular, take a look at the src/ directory, where implementation lies. This is some really fun code. Take a look at Parser.hs. That's a pretty clean parser for any language let alone a flavor of Perl. Cool stuff. Cheers, Tom From Dan at DWright.Org Thu Feb 10 12:31:34 2005 From: Dan at DWright.Org (Daniel J. Wright) Date: Thu Feb 10 12:31:54 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] PA Open Source Association. Message-ID: <4467.216.92.130.24.1108067494.squirrel@webmail4.pair.com> Building on some of the themes discussed last night, how would people feel about a group known as the "Pennsylvania Open-Source Association"? At first I was thinking about a name that contained the word Pittsburgh, but it seems we are more diverse than that, and it doesn't hurt to aspire to be something even greater in the future. There are some good domain names available, and I think I know a place that we'd have a good chance of hitting up for free hosting if we wanted to put up a site. Any thoughts? -Dan From schwern at pobox.com Thu Feb 10 12:56:37 2005 From: schwern at pobox.com (Michael G Schwern) Date: Thu Feb 10 12:56:58 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] PA Open Source Association. In-Reply-To: <4467.216.92.130.24.1108067494.squirrel@webmail4.pair.com> References: <4467.216.92.130.24.1108067494.squirrel@webmail4.pair.com> Message-ID: <20050210205637.GC2987@windhund.schwern.org> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 03:31:34PM -0500, Daniel J. Wright wrote: > There are some good domain names available, and I think I know a place > that we'd have a good chance of hitting up for free hosting if we wanted > to put up a site. > > Any thoughts? pennosa.org is free and it even rolls off the tongue well. From robertblackwell at yahoo.com Thu Feb 10 18:52:10 2005 From: robertblackwell at yahoo.com (Robert Blackwell) Date: Thu Feb 10 18:59:08 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] PA Open Source Association. In-Reply-To: <4467.216.92.130.24.1108067494.squirrel@webmail4.pair.com> Message-ID: <20050211025210.858.qmail@web54201.mail.yahoo.com> I think idea is a fantastic idea. My only fear is that Open-Source limits us to just software. It would be great if one of the goals of this group was to advise governments, transit authorities, and ... as to the benifits to having open interfaces into their data stores that may be on proprietary systems. Sometimes they make the data available but in a really bad way. I would see this group lobbying to get systems open as well has having them use open source. Just my thoughts. --- "Daniel J. Wright" wrote: > > Building on some of the themes discussed last night, how would people feel > about a group known as the "Pennsylvania Open-Source Association"? At > first I was thinking about a name that contained the word Pittsburgh, but > it seems we are more diverse than that, and it doesn't hurt to aspire to > be something even greater in the future. > > There are some good domain names available, and I think I know a place > that we'd have a good chance of hitting up for free hosting if we wanted > to put up a site. > > Any thoughts? > > -Dan > _______________________________________________ > pgh-pm mailing list > pgh-pm@pm.org > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/pgh-pm > ===== Robert Blackwell robert@robertblackwell.com AIM: robertdblackwell Yahoo!: robertblackwell Jabber: robertblackwell@jabber.com http://www.robertblackwell.com Skype: rblackwe From schwern at pobox.com Thu Feb 10 20:31:38 2005 From: schwern at pobox.com (Michael G Schwern) Date: Thu Feb 10 20:31:54 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] PA Open Source Association. In-Reply-To: <20050211025210.858.qmail@web54201.mail.yahoo.com> References: <4467.216.92.130.24.1108067494.squirrel@webmail4.pair.com> <20050211025210.858.qmail@web54201.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20050211043138.GE3981@windhund.schwern.org> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 06:52:10PM -0800, Robert Blackwell wrote: > I think idea is a fantastic idea. My only fear is that Open-Source limits us to just software. > It would be great if one of the goals of this group was to advise governments, transit > authorities, and ... as to the benifits to having open interfaces into their data stores that may > be on proprietary systems. Sometimes they make the data available but in a really bad way. I > would see this group lobbying to get systems open as well has having them use open source. A) Don't get too far ahead of yourselves. Expanding it from "Pittsburgh" to "Pennsylvania" is already gulping down too much ground for a group that hasn't even had its first meeting. B) With the exception of "Open Source", "Open" is pretty much a non-word when it comes to technology. "Open" protocols and systems seems to mean "we'll let you look at the API documentation". OTOH "Open Source" as a whole better captures the ideal of interoperability and data-sharing being suggested above. C) Don't worry so much about the name. As much as you might try the predictions about what this group is actually going to wind up doing will be wildly wrong so just pick something decent and go with it. Names are not binding nor limiting. Why just the other day I used Perl for some completely impractical extracting and reporting! ;) From tom at moertel.com Sat Feb 12 15:01:36 2005 From: tom at moertel.com (Tom Moertel) Date: Sat Feb 12 15:01:48 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] A first look at darcs for source-code management Message-ID: <420E8AD0.9030504@moertel.com> Guys, After a meeting a few months back we had a quick discussion of the source-code management systems monotone and darcs. I recently moved LectroTest development over to darcs (from monotone) and wrote up my first impressions. In short, I like darcs. A lot. It is very simple and makes seemingly "hard" problems like distributed development easy. If you're interested, the write-up is here: http://community.moertel.com/ Cheers, Tom From jo2y at midnightlinux.com Wed Feb 16 13:31:06 2005 From: jo2y at midnightlinux.com (James O'Kane) Date: Wed Feb 16 13:42:36 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Restricting File I/O in Apache Message-ID: Hopefully I'll remember to give all the details of the scenario. I'm trying to find a way to keep one cgi script from reading the contents of any file that isn't owned by the same user. Very similar to PHP's safe_mode. There are a few oddities of our environment that have made things harder to do. One is AFS. The scripts in question are stored in AFS. I'll need to double check, but if I'm remembering correctly suexec and AFS don't play nicely so that isn't a possibility. http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/sbox/ looks like it would almost work, but it would require making a small filesystem in the user's home directory for chroot to work, and most people's home directories have a 5M quota that is outside of my control. An idea I had was to do something with Apache::PerlRun and do some setup before invoking the users' script. Ideally, I would need to write or find something that intercepted open calls and checked permissions before allowing them to happen. I'd like to avoid writing this myself because I'm sure I would miss something. Does anyone have any suggestions or notice anything I've left out? thanks -james From tom at moertel.com Wed Feb 16 15:02:08 2005 From: tom at moertel.com (Tom Moertel) Date: Wed Feb 16 15:02:20 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Restricting File I/O in Apache In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4213D0F0.7090506@moertel.com> James O'Kane wrote: > Hopefully I'll remember to give all the details of the scenario. > > I'm trying to find a way to keep one cgi script from reading the > contents of any file that isn't owned by the same user. Does this mean that if user X runs the script, it cannot read user Y's files, even if the files are otherwise readable by X (say mode 664)? If so, that's a tall order. If, on the other hand, you just want the script to be run as X, letting normal Linux permissions handle the rest, that should not be too hard (e.g., via suid wrapper or sbox). > http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/sbox/ looks like it would almost work, but > it would require making a small filesystem in the user's home directory > for chroot to work, ... Are your requirements such that you can use sbox without its chroot features? > An idea I had was to do something with Apache::PerlRun and do some setup > before invoking the users' script. Ideally, I would need to write or > find something that intercepted open calls and checked permissions > before allowing them to happen. I'd like to avoid writing this myself > because I'm sure I would miss something. Is Apache running as a user that has access to every script user's files? In other words, if Apache is running as user A, and user X wants to run the script to access a file that he owns with permissions 600, how would you do it? Unless A is root (naughty), you cannot, right? For this reason, sbox or a suid wrapper looks like the simplest approach. Cheers, Tom From jo2y at midnightlinux.com Wed Feb 16 16:38:31 2005 From: jo2y at midnightlinux.com (James O'Kane) Date: Wed Feb 16 16:50:02 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Restricting File I/O in Apache In-Reply-To: <4213D0F0.7090506@moertel.com> References: <4213D0F0.7090506@moertel.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Tom Moertel wrote: > Does this mean that if user X runs the script, it cannot read user Y's files, > even if the files are otherwise readable by X (say mode 664)? If so, that's > a tall order. If, on the other hand, you just want the script to be run as > X, letting normal Linux permissions handle the rest, that should not be too > hard (e.g., via suid wrapper or sbox). This is correct, partly. AFS permissions work differently. suid doesn't work the same, linux root cannot gain afs tokens of another user without that user's password. Currently only user X and apache A can access X's files. Y cannot. What we're trying to limit is user Y using a cgi to open a file in X's directory. This server is used for a web programming class, and we don't want students being able to read each other's work. >> http://stein.cshl.org/~lstein/sbox/ looks like it would almost work, but it >> would require making a small filesystem in the user's home directory for >> chroot to work, ... > > Are your requirements such that you can use sbox without its chroot features? I'll need to setup a test server and try things, but since suid doesn't work the same way with AFS, I'm not sure it will work. > Is Apache running as a user that has access to every script user's files? In > other words, if Apache is running as user A, and user X wants to run the > script to access a file that he owns with permissions 600, how would you do > it? Unless A is root (naughty), you cannot, right? Again, unix file permissions don't work the same way. -james From robertblackwell at yahoo.com Thu Feb 24 17:37:52 2005 From: robertblackwell at yahoo.com (Robert Blackwell) Date: Thu Feb 24 17:38:01 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Pittsburgh PostgreSQL Users Group Message-ID: <20050225013752.91948.qmail@web54202.mail.yahoo.com> Pittsburgh PostgreSQL Users Group Wake up, Southwestern Pennsylvania! We are starting up a PostgreSQL users group right here in Pittsburgh. Presently, we are in the bootstrapping phase. Please visit http://postgresql.moertel.com/ until we get a real home. But we do have a couple of mailing lists, and that is where the start-up discussions are taking place, right now. If you are at all interested, sign up: * postgresql-announce – postgresql-announce-subscribe@lists.moertel.com * postgresql-users – postgresql-users-subscribe@lists.moertel.com The announce mailing list is a low-volume list for announcements only. The users list is for general discussion. (If you subscribe to users, you do not need to subscribe to announce because the list moderators will cc: all announcements to the users list.) * Talks: We need people to give talks. Please do not be shy. Give a talk it won't hurt. * Next Meeting: Currently the meeting date is the second Wednesday of the month. This is shared with the Pittsurgh Perl Mongers (http://pgh.pm.org). As interest builds the meeting date and time might change. The next meeting will be March 9 at 19:00 at Slaymaker Systems, Inc. [http://www.slaysys.com/] in Oakland: Slaymaker Systems, Inc. 4914 Baum Blvd. Pittsburgh, PA 15213 If we don't get a talk scheduled we will just plan on going out and getting some dinner and beer while talking about whatever but will most likely include OSS topics and future plans for the Pittsburgh PostgreSQL Users Group. Note: This is message is being posted to the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers and the Western Pennsylvania's Linux Users' group as well as some individuals that have expressed interest in the group. Please invite others that you think will be interested. ===== Robert Blackwell robert@robertblackwell.com AIM: robertdblackwell Yahoo!: robertblackwell Jabber: robertblackwell@jabber.com http://www.robertblackwell.com Skype: rblackwe From barries at slaysys.com Mon Feb 28 18:48:37 2005 From: barries at slaysys.com (Barrie Slaymaker) Date: Mon Feb 28 18:48:55 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Any Win32 Perl GUI advice to be had? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4223D805.2070807@slaysys.com> A bit of advice needed and possibly some paid Perl geekery for the right chap. But first, ru-ru! Background: We just got preliminary approval to do a Win32 Perl app to download some medical data from a VxWorks-based medical device (a dialysis). That's the easy part. The hard part will be when NASA hires us to download from their two most prominent VxWorks instances. Um. No. Sorry. Actually, the hard part is that the client just added some requirements (CD burning and a report printing cabability) that start to get complicated enough to want a simple GUI. I'm defaulting to WxPerl at this point, though a Gtk2 app on Win32 might rock; probably wrapping it in a PAR .exe built from ActiveState's latest ouvre. I've wrastled with PAR, done a wee bit of GUI programming (see xkbang on my CPAN dir), but never both together, nor GUI on Win32. And it was a while ago, so I'm out of the loop on this genre (GUI Win32 Perl PAR .exe app). So: do you have any good, bad, or ugly recommendations based on recent-ish experience with a Win32 GUI app in Perl? Simplicity and stability are paramount here, this is for field techs, not the general public. If you have experience that's recent and useful enough, I'd also like to discuss funding a few hours to spin up one or three of my guys (and me, if I have the time--I'm running full out these days). Thanks, Barrie -- http://slaysys.com/ From andy at hybridized.org Mon Feb 28 19:08:20 2005 From: andy at hybridized.org (Andy Grundman) Date: Mon Feb 28 19:08:30 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Any Win32 Perl GUI advice to be had? In-Reply-To: <4223D805.2070807@slaysys.com> References: <4223D805.2070807@slaysys.com> Message-ID: <4223DCA4.8090902@hybridized.org> Barrie Slaymaker wrote: > So: do you have any good, bad, or ugly recommendations based on > recent-ish experience with a Win32 GUI app in Perl? Simplicity and > stability are paramount here, this is for field techs, not the general > public. Disclaimer: I am a die-hard Perl zealot, so don't flame me too bad for saying this. :) IMO, you should look into wxPython before making any decisions. It just seemed more mature when I compared it with wxPerl for a recent project I was working on. I believe Python also has better tools to compile to Windows binaries, if that's something you need. But maybe I was just really impressed with the massive wxPython demo app. :) wx is certainly the right choice though, and using the Perl version may be just fine, too! Both are just wrappers around the same library, so as long as they both have a complete API everything may just work exactly the same. You could compare the memory footprint of a small wxPerl app vs. a wxPython app. I know a minimal hello world app in wxPython eats up around 20MB. -- Andy Grundman www.mixdepot.net / www.hybridized.org andy@hybridized.org From barries at slaysys.com Mon Feb 28 19:18:52 2005 From: barries at slaysys.com (Barrie Slaymaker) Date: Mon Feb 28 19:19:04 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Any Win32 Perl GUI advice to be had? In-Reply-To: <4223DCA4.8090902@hybridized.org> References: <4223D805.2070807@slaysys.com> <4223DCA4.8090902@hybridized.org> Message-ID: <4223DF1C.9040908@slaysys.com> Memory is not an issue (within reason :). The immaturity of the Wx and Gtk2 wrappers is exactly what worries me; interaction with PAR is there too. PAR on Win32 works pretty well (I've used it to roll VCP binaries with reasonably good success on NT, XP and Win2K3). With a recommendation like yours, I'd be tempted to use this project as an excuse to roll around in the hay with Python for a bit but my team is pretty wed to Perl for this project for technical and organizational reasons. Why is wx the right choice compared to, say, gtk2 (on Win32 :)? - Barrie -- http://slaysys.com/ From andy at hybridized.org Mon Feb 28 19:43:24 2005 From: andy at hybridized.org (Andy Grundman) Date: Mon Feb 28 19:43:34 2005 Subject: [pgh-pm] Any Win32 Perl GUI advice to be had? In-Reply-To: <4223DF1C.9040908@slaysys.com> References: <4223D805.2070807@slaysys.com> <4223DCA4.8090902@hybridized.org> <4223DF1C.9040908@slaysys.com> Message-ID: <4223E4DC.7060005@hybridized.org> Barrie Slaymaker wrote: > Why is wx the right choice compared to, say, gtk2 (on Win32 :)? Honestly, I don't have any GTK experience. You should look at both. :) -Andy