[07:55] <doctormo> paultag: Hey again
[14:08] <paultag> heyya doctormo
[14:08] <paultag> doctormo: did you ever work out that session?
[14:11] <pleia2> virtualization one?
[14:12] <paultag> pleia2: doctormo was working on a Visualization session. I gave him a small chunk and I was wondering if he ever presented it. Or finished it
[14:12] <paultag> Either or, really
[14:12] <pleia2> http://doctormo.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/systems-administration-virtualisation/
[14:12] <paultag> Ah, outstanding
[14:12] <doctormo> paultag: I did teach it, wasn't a very good lesson to be honest
[14:12] <paultag> doctormo: Euch. That's always the worst
[14:13] <doctormo> paultag: If I had the money, I'd personally pay you to finish it for me, but instead my plan is to finish it in the editing process.
[14:13] <paultag> +1
[14:14] <paultag> Community driven always comes out great
[14:15] <doctormo> pleia2: Did you get the question from me about the PXE boot stuff being useful to you?
[14:15] <pleia2> doctormo: yeah, we've done some things like that with our loco team, but I can't remember exactly what we were using
[14:16]  * pleia2 has dropped blog link to loco team
[14:16] <doctormo> pleia2: Would be good to confer
[14:16] <paultag> doctormo: I just read that post. Bravo. I did something similar for a cluster :)
[14:16] <pleia2> yeah, I emailed the main guy involved yesterday
[14:16] <paultag> doctormo: PXE is kickass
[14:17] <doctormo> paultag: You have know how all over the place, I'm impressed
[14:17] <pleia2> the lack of support on really old desktop-class machines was an issue (as you say, many hide it, but a lot don't have it at all)
[14:17] <doctormo> pleia2: We have a FDD PXE booter
[14:17] <paultag> doctormo: I've been hacking with Linux since I was 13. When you have no focus, you tend to learn a little about a lot.
[14:18] <pleia2> doctormo: oh, neat
[14:18] <doctormo> paultag: Sucks to be me, I was stuck with windows until I was 17. I was a master at Visual Basic and Reg editing though :-P
[14:18] <paultag> doctormo: kickass, I bet you loved perl off the bat :)
[14:18] <paultag> Oh wait
[14:18] <doctormo> Of course
[14:18] <paultag> shit, I read that as Regexp
[14:19] <paultag> doctormo: GConf, then :)
[14:19] <doctormo> paultag: Actually I dislike gconf and things like it
[14:19] <paultag> Really?
[14:19] <paultag> doctormo: Is it the way it stores data ( XML ), or the concept of a registry?
[14:20] <doctormo> paultag: I've come to realise that it's important to modualise and use the base destinction effectivly. On POSIX operating systems this is the 'file' and 'directory' memes. Thus configs should be files, data elements should be files, it just should be files.
[14:21] <doctormo> I'm against hiding files from users, I don't think that it's an effective stratedgy. I'm a big fan of XDG and of hitting developpers over the head until they use it.
[14:21] <paultag> doctormo: what say you to data that should be maintained encrypted in the conf file, such as an XMPP login, or AIM Login password?
[14:23] <doctormo> paultag: No passwords should ever be stored in config files, auth details, keys, usernames, passwords and such are not configuration. They should go into the authentication and authorisation sub system
[14:23] <paultag> Very true. I agree doctormo.
[14:24] <paultag> doctormo: The only reason I like gconf, is a centralized, normalized data structure with all of your configuration options present
[14:24] <paultag> ( bonus is it's human readable, and hackable :) )
[14:25] <doctormo> Anyway, since I believe in the mathamatical proof for configuration data structurisation, I believe it's possible to convert any configuration format to any verified structural data format such as xml, and back again.
[14:26] <paultag> doctormo: sure, but in practice you would have a lot of special cases handling config files with different syntax
[14:26] <doctormo> It's not the varifyable nature, the idea of defaults (see XSD default attribute) or structurisation. It's the centralisation that betrays the modualisation of the applications that use it.
[14:27] <paultag> doctormo: I'd like to see the ~/.* files and folders gone. There should be a central ~/.config/ and normalized configuration structure
[14:27] <doctormo> paultag: You would very quickly have a situation that encouraged developers not to develop non standard syntaxes and handlers for edge cases.
[14:27] <doctormo> I agree with ~/.config ~/.cache etc, it's the XDG standard after all.
[14:28] <paultag> I am not up to par on XDG. Let me look it up, hold one.
[14:28] <paultag> on*
[14:28] <doctormo> paultag: But I believe that the verification and base line formatting of these configurations should be held and managed by the deb package. Not by gconf.
[14:30] <paultag> OK.
[14:30] <paultag> This looks sane, and thought out
[14:31] <paultag> I'll have to think it over for a bit doctormo
[14:32] <paultag> doctormo: not sure where I stand
[14:34] <pleia2> doctormo: ah ok, we do the boot floppy thing for PXE-less machines too
[14:34] <doctormo> pleia2: See, nothing too different :-D
[14:34]  * pleia2 nods
[14:35] <doctormo> pleia2: Is your guy in the know online?
[14:35] <pleia2> doctormo: jedijf in #ubuntu-us-pa is one of them, he's at work though so his availability is limited
[14:36] <doctormo> paultag: My other problem with GConf is that you can't really use it on servers or gtk-less deployments, making it quite crap for the kind of infrastructural projects that should be replacing most kinds of data organisation in the coming years.
[14:37] <paultag> doctormo: Yeah. I
[14:38] <paultag> doctormo: Yeah. I'll have to think about what I find logical. Never spent much time on it, I'd rather make an intelligent comment later, rather then a dumb one now
[14:38] <doctormo> paultag: Of course, I'm just blabbing because I'm tired
[14:38] <pleia2> yeah, we bumped into that at work where we deployed a dozen or so ubuntu machines, it was annoying
[14:38] <paultag> doctormo: no no, I appreciate it
[14:38] <pleia2> had to do sneaky work-arounds for things to avoid using gconf so we could deploy flat txt configs
[14:40] <doctormo> pleia2: It's bloody annoying because it should be a simple mattter of fashioning a set of base libraries for accessing standard xml forms and validating them.
[14:41] <doctormo> Plus it's the reason my wallchanger project didn't work for the entire intrepid release, it proper way to update the gnome wallpaper is via gconf, but that requires access to XAuthentication and that got blocked from the crontab after intrepid.
[14:42] <doctormo> So now I have to use a symbolic link and ask the user to select the right background manually.
[14:42] <paultag> Ah, I did the same doctormo, but mine was local userspace
[14:42] <paultag> doctormo: and it was in the autostart for after you start your session
[14:43] <paultag> doctormo: I had a set of 12 photos I took of outside -- all throughout the day. Each hour, it would swap to the one for the current hour
[14:46] <paultag> Alright. I'm off -- Class for the day. See ya'll in a few hours
[14:50] <doctormo> paultag: Have a good day
[15:59] <paultag> Ah. I love college.
[15:59] <paultag> Day's over. Kickass.
[16:03] <pjarnahom> how to configure cannon gp210 pcl 5e printer in ubuntu ultimate
[16:05] <paultag> pjarnahom: Don't spam.
[16:08] <pleia2> pjarnahom: might want to try #ubuntu :)