WAFL: Write Anywhere File Layout - operating-system

I wonder if anyone knows about WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout), or a link to the topic of interest (not wikipedia), or a good bibliography online because I am investigating about operating systems, thanks to all.

The wikipedia page has links to a PDF from Network Appliance on the system as well as the patent link. If that's not going to satisfy you then you need to be more specific as to what kind of information you want.

The NetApp website has an extensive library of papers about WAFL and their file servers.
If you're interested in technical aspects of what WAFL is and how it works, the technical report linked from the Wikipedia article is a very good starting point. This article was originally published at the 1994 USENIX Conference, so it's 15 years old. Some things have changed---and a lot of features have been added---but it still provides a good description of the key innovations in WAFL.
p.s. FWIW, they stopped calling themselves "Network Appliance" a couple years ago and officially changed their name to "NetApp."

Related

What is the use of the hackers.txt file?

First
No I am not asking you to teach me hacking, I am just curious about this file and its content.
My journey
When I dived into the new HTML5 Boilerplate I came accross the humans.txt. I googled for it and I came at this site http://humanstxt.org/.
Immediately my attention went to this picture:
Do I read this correctly? Hackers.txt?
So I resumed my journey in google and stopped at this articles
When I started reading this I had the feeling that its about the difference between Hackers and Crackers. Later I got the feeling that I'm might be wrong and that this place is that this hackers.txt file is a sort of guestbook for hackers?
Also other examples about hackers.txt files I found here
Some files contain code, others have just hurtfull information.
Now I'm realy confused, guestbook, hack tutorials or just history?
Question
What is the use of this hackers.txt file?
The way I see things:
robots.txt contains information and instructions for robots (so it should be read/used by web crawlers, spiders and other kind of bots)
humans.txt contains useful information to be consumed by humans, according to http://humanstxt.org/
hackers.txt should be targeted towards hackers, so it should contain any information the site owner might want to transmit to a hacker, as Ze'ev pointed out. I don't think this should be a place for hackers to write anything, but rather to get information from the site owner (perhaps on how to report vulnerabilities, as others suggested).
Commonly known as Eduardo Vela, Eduardo A. Vela Nava (or sirdarckcat on Github and Twitter) has been a Security Engineer at Google since 2010. (He currently has the role of Product Security Response Team Lead).
As other security experts before him, he pondered the issue of effectively communicating the details of a site's vulnerability reward program to white hat hackers/pen-testers.
One specific such person is Chema Alonso (also on Twitter).
He is well-known enough to warrant a Spanish Wikipedia entry
Between 2005 and 2011 Alonso was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for Enterprise Security 6 years in a row. That should tell you something about his "skillz".
On February 3rd 2011 Alonso wrote about his frustrations regarding the topic of communication between the administrators and/or developers of a site and hackers.
He proposes a similar initiative as humans.txt but for hackers. As he mentions this hackers.txt initiative in his blog-post.
In April 2011 The humanstxt.org website got a new design which includes the image which mentions the hackers.txt file.
At this point, I must sadly submit to conjecture, but... consider:
The team behind humans.txt are all from Spain (mostly Barcelona)
At this point Alonso is already quite well known in the Spanish developer community
Would it be such a far stretch to imagine that they got to know of each other's efforts?
On May 14th 2014 Vela, already working at Google, commented on a blog-post by Alonso. It is most likely that they had further contact in a professional setting. Whether or not thay extively shared their idea's regarding anything related to hackers.txt is unknown.
On July 6th 2017 Vela posted a question to this extent on twitter:
How about we create a /hackers.txt that says whether something is in scope or not of a vulnerability reward program and where to report it?
Subsequently, an empty git repository was created for hackerstxt.org on github
and an email thread was opened at Google Groups to discuss this idea further.
On August 13 2017, Edwin Foudil (or EdOverflow on Github and Twitter) created a git repository for security.txt on Github and responded to the mailing list:
I have published a similar project to the one being discussed in this group (https://github.com/EdOverflow/security-txt) and would love to get some of your feedback and ideas.
The project is the equivalent of robots.txt, but for defining a security policy. Companies can add a security.txt to their website and define clear guidelines of what security researchers must do when they discover a security issue. security.txt also allows bug bounty programs to add their scope there. security.txt uses a similar syntax to robots.txt, which should make it easier for machines to parse.
He was, in part, inspired by an open-source project he was working on at the time called GratiPay. GratiPay had a SECURITY.txt file since 2013.
His inspiration also drew from the SECURITY.md files that more and more open-source projects were adding to their repositories.
On September 10th 2017, Foudil submitted a first draft for security.txt to the Internet Engineering Task Force.
On September 14th 2017 Alonso wrote a blog post with the title (translated from Spanish) "Security.TXT an IETF draft for my Hackers.TXT".
Beyond the title, Alonso does not allude to the fact that his 2011 idea was the origin of the draft but he does state his approval of the effort.
On February 3rd 2018, the mail group was informed to concede to security.txt and Vela tweeted that Google had already implemented one.
Further information
Details and a nifty tool to generate your own security.txt can be found at
https://securitytxt.org/
Adoptation
Even though the RFC is still in draft, the standard is already being adopted quite well by major players on the web.
Besides the security.txt at Google, there is also one on the website of:
1password
BBC
bit.ly - http://bit.ly/security.txt (can't be linked because StackOverflow blacklist the use of common link shorteners in posts)
CERT NZ
DailyMotion
Dropbox
Facebook
Github
haveibeenpwned
NodeJs
NPM
Open SSL
Shopify
(Feel free to add more from well-known sites, if you find 'm)
As with humans.txt, there also seems to be a hackers.txt site at http://www.hackerstxt.org/. I'm not sure if someone has set the site up as a joke or not, but it links to a blog post on someone's Blogger site.
The post rambles on a bit (I put it through Google Translate) about the poster's history as a 'hacker'. Anyway, towards the end the writer says:
therefore believe we should promote an initiative type hackers.txt , in which managers leave us a message to potential "aliens who are good" that makes it clear they will do managers receive a report of a vulnerability in your site. I've been circling this , the truth is that it is difficult to finish shaping, because perhaps some "alien who is not so good" , type Brainiac , take a free hand to brush a site, or the "good board administrator" , decide to change your mind and Liem, but I think we should be able to do something, I dunno, maybe having Jon Jonz , or perhaps thinking about how to write that file hackers.txt . How do you see it? Greetings Evil!
So I assume that the poster wants to start a sort of hackers.txt standard in the vein of humans.txt, but hasn't finished it off, or hasn't gotten it into the English speaking world.
Digging around, the Blogger site seems to be owned by a guy called Chema Alonso, who must be fairly reputable in the world of Spanish programmers as he has about 35k Twitter followers (https://twitter.com/chemaalonso). He seems to work for a company called ElevenPaths (http://elevenpaths.com/), which says that it's driving "radical innovation in security product development". A quick Whois check shows that the hackerstxt.org domain is registered by someone in Madrid, so I would assume it's Alonso.
The .txt file over at http://www.textfiles.com/news/hackers.txt, which has been refered to by some of the other answers in this thread, doesn't seem to have anything to do with the hackers.txt reference over at http://humanstxt.org/, and neither do most other search results for 'hackers.txt'.
It's possibly a joke, but If humans.txt is for humans to read then maybe hackers.txt is a warning for hackers.
Like the notice you get when you SSH into some more public terminals. "You are being watched... we will get you if you do anything bad..." That sort of thing.
If a hacker did compromise the site, the might notice the file, read it, realise you mean business and be scared away!
Interesting idea.
As this question is somewhat open, I think you are also expecting some assumptions, I write here (not in a comment) my opinion, but if it should be there, I'm sorry.
I think that the idea lying behind humans.txt (which I heard of before) is to make a new habit, new style or something like that. In fact, you can put a contact page, where all these data from humans.txt can be put. I think that hackers.txt could be also something like new style.
I suppose that hackers.txt was much earlier, maybe for 20 years, when www servers and popular web knowledge was poor, when using localhost Apache+PHP+MySQL was making you "a hacker", and if someone could access the file other than index.html (and linked pages from this), reading hackers.txt was some kind of prize, or maybe some kind of filter to show some information to "those who behold" (like this one perhaps).
I think hackers.txt should contain notes on how the site owner would like for data to be used... E.g. "I don't mind if you scrape the movie listings, but please don't hot link out images in your app"

Contacting Microsoft with questions on Open XML

What is the best way to reach a live Microsoft developer on the phone who can answer technical questions about standardized OpenXML formats?
I have a paid MSDN support contract. I wanted to use one of my phone tickets but only production-related questions are eligible. For various reasons, I'm not interested in online support.
If this is the wrong place to ask this question, I'd appreciate a pointer in the right direction. I've been on the phone with Microsoft already and frankly I rely on StackOverflow more than Microsoft support.
Phone support is almost always paid for. One of the only ways you're going to get free phone support is find a Microsoft-employee-friend to give you a QuickAssist card.
Other than that, forums are the way to go.
The Office Open XML File Format Implementation forum is the place to ask your questions. Forewarning though - the responses can sometimes be incredibly slow as some of the folks manning the thread are not actually experts on Open XML but instead just try to read the ECMA spec to answer your questions. If you push hard enough, you may just have some luck though. (You'll see me on there as both "otaku" and "terlo").
The other place to ask questions that is "sponsored" by Microsoft is OpenXMLDeveloper.org. The forums you'd probably be interested in are at http://openxmldeveloper.org/discussions/formats/default.aspx. They don't seem to be regularly viewed by Microsoft though, but sometimes. There are other folks who try to answer questions though and do a decent job. (You'll see me on there as "tendoors").
Finally, Stackoverflow.com has some decent folks following OPENXML and OPENXML-SDK tags. You can try in all 3 locations if you like :)
I'd suggest you ask your question here, and in the Open XML Developer forum.
The msdn forums don't offer much knowledge of Open XML.
The Open XML Developer forums (http://openxmldeveloper.org/discussions/formats/default.aspx) employ people to answer your questions so you're somewhat guaranteed a response, however YMMV.
Here, you might just be surprised what people know.

Does Apple provide an index of localized terms that it uses?

Does Apple provide developers a set of standard terms in differing languages? The reason why I ask is that I'm having portions of my application localized and want standard terminology consistently applied throughout the app. I have utilized some tactics to do this with terms like 'Loading...' by changing the language on my device and observing how Apple has interpreted those terms in other languages. This has only gotten me so far however, and a resource that I can give a translator would go a long way in creating a seamless experience with the consistent application of terminology.
It has been two and a half years since posting my radar, but Apple has finally posted its iOS glossaries:
You can download them from developer.apple.com, or use this link to quickly find them:
https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action?name=Glossaries%20-%20iOS
EDIT 29 FEB 2020: This link is still valid and the glossaries have been updated on 15 JAN 2020 with everything updated for iOS 13.3.
At WWDC this year I went to the Localization Lab to get an answer to this question, since a bona fide answer from Apple was needed.
From one of their head cheeses in localization he told me that currently there are not any publicly available resources for download for iOS or Snow Leopard. He did tell me, though, that these resources were slated for release in the coming weeks after WWDC.
This answer will be updated when the information becomes available.
UPDATE 19 JUN 2012: Wow, it has been a whole year now! Obviously Apple didn't come through for us 'in a few weeks'. I did talk to them again this year and was given a contact to follow up with via email. I explained that they made a claim to have it last year and this was the response I got:
I did check with the documentation folks and found that they're still
planning on doing this but it's fallen behind other priorities. If you
haven't already done so, would you mind filing a bug report about
this? That's one of the best ways to convey the desire to the
appropriate people. While I've relayed this feedback to some people
it's always best to have a bug report directly from folks outside of
Apple. Feel free to forward me the bug number and I'll keep an eye on
it.
Our best bet at this point is to keep filling bug reports so that this gets more attention. Just for the record, I did file a bug report last year.
Apple provides a number of translation resources that you can download which may or may not be useful. One of these is AppleGlot, a tool for replacing strings in application resources. A number of XML-based glossaries for different languages are also available, but they're specific to AppleGlot. You may be able to make AppleGlot work for you, or you might just want to extract what you can from the language glossaries. AppleGlot and the glossaries were created to support translation of MacOS applications, so the terms are related to MacOS X and not iOS. Nevertheless, I think it's worth a look.

Experience using IRC to coordinate software development?

I am part of a growing software project with at least 200 active developer in 10 locations. I would like to set up an on-line chat forum for developers because I think it would help to coordinate efforts. We have an email mailing list but I feel like some questions or announcements are too informal to send to everyone while mentioning it in a chat forum might be a useful community resource.
I have never participated in a software project that used an on-line chat forum so I would like to hear about peoples experiences. I am particularly interested in technical issues: Use of IRC vs. alternative platforms; how to manage access, eg. for developers only, allowing users to participate; the value of requiring certain announcements to be made on the chat forum eg who is resolving broken builds etc.
If I pitch the idea to the community I would like to have some good arguments why it would be a good idea and some prospective of its usefulness in other software projects.
The features you MOST want for such informal discussions are:
persistance (I have't used IRC in >decade, does it persist chats that you missed?)
Searcheability
Classification (tagging) to help sort through the stuff.
Considering those 3, I'd strongly suggest some sort of discussion software (microblog, Wiki, forum) with RSS feed.
It's a great platform for informal discussions. It's flexible, users can self-organize and its extensible. We have tied CI build results and SCM commits. Further, given the availability of multiple consumption streams (web, terminal) anyone can join with little notice.
I think the previous poster is over-stating the importance of the contents of this conversation and who the heck wants to maintain discussion software? Blergh.

How do I choose a CMS/Portal solution for a small website(s)? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
I currently maintain 3 websites all revolving around the same concept. 2 of them are WinForms applications where the website gives a few basic details, and download links. The third is a web application to query data. I also have a forum (SMF/TinyPortal) that has been serving as a tech support/news hub for the three sites. The download traffic is decent, but I don't get a lot of hits on the support forums
I want to consolidate these three entities so that I don't have to duplicate announcements, upload data library updates to multiple locations, and also provide a unified look to the sites.
Fortunately my hosting account has both .NET and PHP support, so I've been looking into Drupal, Graffiti, DotNetNuke, Joomla, Community Server, and more. However, it has been hard for me to discern between what features included, supported, or just not part of the framework whatsoever.
Does anybody have a good evaluation of these projects (and others too) and can evaluate them for features/expandability/customization/etc.? I'm not necessarily looking for a "what's your favorite" but more of a feature set / target end user type evaluation.
If you want to quickly compare features on CMS's, then take a look at CMS Matrix - has practically every cms known to man on there.
Edit
To be a little more precise, from the site
CMSMatrix is the number one content management system comparison site on the Internet. It allows users to evaluate over 950 content management systems in 135+ different categories.
Go with N2 if you want to get up and running in no time with a couple of nice features packed. Also, it is really targetted against extensibility and clean code.
http://www.n2cms.com
"Open Source cms" has tons of them, and running demos with admin logins
DotNetNuke:
very flexible
lots of community around it
community tends to be fairly technical and can be hard to find useful end-user support
can be difficult to upgrade and to keep current versions available
fairly easy to program basic modules for
100s of available modules (free and pay)
documentation can be difficult to find and sparse in detail
easy to skin so your sites can have a unified look
1000s of pre made skins available.
hopefully this is along the lines of what you are looking for.
I've found that CMS Matrix (refer:iAn) can sometimes be a bit out of date but it is definitely a good starting place. Open Source CMS is a good resource (refer:mrinject). I'd lean towards something you can tinker with - closed source could back you into a corner.
If you're looking into .NET then MojoPortal is another option, as is umbracco etc. Search here on DNN and these others. I've found Drupal to be be more intimidating to approach. Also, it's forums are pretty basic. Joomla tends to want money for add-ins, as does DNN although there are freebies for both. Apparently the freebies fro Joomla can vary in quality - I never looked into it too closely.
I think the pick of the PHP crowd is Drupal - if you can invest the headspace for learning it. Drupal tends to be more developer-friendly than end-user friendly so if you're not a developer it is harder to grasp than something like Joomla. Apparently its codebase is better than Joomla.
Have a browse through the communities - you'll spend some time there so make sure they are to your liking.
If the site is quite simple then perhaps WordPress will suffice as it has a plethora of plugins and there are lots of template available for free or
I've been meandering down this path for a while now. My advice is to set up some test installs and roughly configure them to something that has what you want and then try using and and - important - try to break it. Installing them together on the same server is a good way to test the relative speed differences too.
Test drive them - it's the only way to tell which one works for you.
DotNetNuke out of the box contains a lot of features, content management, link management, documents list modules, forum modules, and items of that nature. There is also a very good third-party module and skin market out there for getting the enhancements needed to really get a full solution implemented.
With a little bit of time DNN can serve as a great foundation for a collection of websites. It also supports a multi-portal system that allows you to host more than one site off of the same code base which is very helpful.
The best part of all is that it is Free!
As you mentioned, there are plenty of options available, most of them have all the basic features. If you are looking for a simple setup, most may even be overkill for what you are trying to achieve. Which CMS you choose, may best depend on your preference for the programming language the CMS is using.
For some websites I maintain, I have used Typo3 (http://www.typo3.com/). The reason for my choice was the flexibility of Typo3, with its many (many!) plugins for all sorts of features, and for the ability to develop plugins yourself.
HTH,
J.
Assuming you're going open source, strong considerations are:
An active and knowledgeable community. <-- You don't want to be the only person able to support this CMS in 10 years time.
regular and simple updating techniques.
Your skill sets.
As a vendor, I find CMS matrix to be daunting. Its basically a list of every CMS under the sun, with a few generic ratings and reviews. Before selecting a CMS, I'd commit to a model first, then I'd investigate the various options that are available.
Open Source...has lots of user generated support, but often requires the assistance of outside developers for software maintenance and add-on installation.
Private installed solutions...can be easier to work with, but lock you in to one vendor for maintenance.
SaaS Model...still locks in to one vendor, but all updates are included and initial costs are minimal.