From time to time I lurk in various IRC channels, in the process of getting help, or to give back to those that have assisted me. In general I consider the philosophy the benefited should give back -not necessarily to the benefactor- . In the IRC paradigm I consider that people that get help from a support channel should also stick around to give support to others for lesser matters. Something like a upload/download ratio in bit-torrent terms.
So to get back to my lurking; Some months ago, I hanged out after being benefited in a gentoo related room, when a person who wishes to remain anonymous joined. It didn’t took long until he seeked for help/support, so I helped him. It was a bit unfortunate that I spent more than 3 hours in his case but after those long 3 hours he was good to go. He asked me for my mail, and reluctantly I gave it to him. At the end of December I received an even more peculiar email which can be concluded into the following “Best Wishes what’s your t-shirt size, and where do you live?”. After a couple of mails which reminded me of the exotic nature of the person’s case, and that made me confident that he is neither from Nigeria nor a scummer a I send those information.
After a while and much to my surprise a package arrived from cafepress. It contained an analog clock and a T-shirt with a Gentoo insignia, along with some other advertising stuff from cafepress. I searched the box for information about the box’ origin and all I found is a receipt containing the text “Happy new year with Gentoo :D”
I wrote this post for two reasons.
- After dealing with online communities for more than a decade in one form or another, I’ve never came across any such behavior, so I wanted to share with you. The few people that I discussed about this in the past few days, after the package delivery were also amazed and considered this an extraordinary behavior. What is actually came out of those discussions was that such actions are highly motivational, and a good example to follow in our online affairs.
- The other is to express my gratitude to M.K. that bought and sent those.
Thank you dude
What is port knocking
Port knocking is a mechanism of opening ports on a firewall. from the outside (the hotzone) by generating a connection attempt on a set of some closed ports. Once the correct sequence of connection attempts is received, the firewall rules are modified to allow the host which sent the connection attempts to connect over specific port.
Obviously this is a synthetic question,
merely mimicking the known (recently resolved) dilemma “which came first, the chicken or the egg?“. The use of present tense is on purpose in order to set the stage in the current time. Of course this is not a paradox from the Godel’s incompleteness theorem (Any formal system that is interesting enough to formulate its own consistency can prove its own consistency iff it is inconsistent), yet it could be formulated into a formal system since compilers and their output can be deterministic. A compiler can be described mathematically as a FSM, or even as a Turing machine (I am not saying it is easy to implement it though), so it would be trivial to prove that a C compiler is Turing complete (a language, a compile etc is said to be Turing complete if and only if such system can simulate any single-taped Turing machine - Some people of course argue whether this is something useful, or even good practice, but we are not interested in that… yet) if it supports the ANSI C standard. So after building a consistent formal system we can create actual, inconsistency paradoxes not like “Can we have a compiler of language X written in X” (if you have such questions read this really nice article) but like … well I just haven’t thought about it thoroughly 
but I can paraphrase a paradox we learned in CEID (unfortunately in Greek) “Is the set {Turing machines which provably halt on every input} enumerable or non-enumerable?” just replace Turing Machine with compiler in this set 
Ok boring… Just tell me which came first
Read more
This is a quick blog post in order to set things straight. Though all major results from google pointing to the contrary (that linux is uninstallable on a sparc machine) these days I came to a fully functional 480 server while using gentoo sparc autobuilds. Other linux distros (debian,redhat,centos,suse) could not even boot the machine :S
So gentoo is your friend.
If for any reason anyone is intrested on the specifics of the “operation” please write a follow up
...
configure: Using system-installed FFMpeg code
configure: WARNING:
======================================================================
WARNING: you have chosen to build gst-ffmpeg against a random
external version of ffmpeg instead of building it against the tested
internal ffmpeg snapshot that is included with gst-ffmpeg.
This is a very bad idea. So bad in fact that words cannot express
just how bad it is. Suffice to say that it is BAD.
The GStreamer developers cannot and will not support a gst-ffmpeg
built this way. Any bug reports that indicate there is an external
version of ffmpeg involved will be closed immediately without further
investigation.
The reason such a setup can't be supported is that the ffmpeg API
and ABI is in constant flux, yet there aren't any official releases
of the ffmpeg library to develop against. This makes it impossible
to guarantee that gst-ffmpeg will work reliably, or even compile,
with a randomly picked version ffmpeg. Even if gst-ffmpeg compiles
and superficially appears to work fine against your chosen external
ffmpeg version, that might just not be the case on other systems, or
even the same system at a later time, or when using decoders,
encoders, demuxers or muxers that have not been tested.
Please do not create or distribute binary packages of gst-ffmpeg
that link against an external ffmpeg. Thank you!
======================================================================
checking for sed... /bin/sed
...
LOL that’s what I call programmers with humor 
And of course build succeeds and ffmpeg packages works alright
