Category Archives: General

gems from linux.conf.au, after the pub

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* MacPlusG3 wonders wtf is happennning with is imaps connection
<bernard_> MacPlusG3: 21:59 < cef> yup.. dropping my mtu to 1478 fixed it
<bernard_> ?
<bernard_> though I'm on burgmann wireless here and pulling mail over imaps just fine.
< -- womble has quit ("ZZZzzz...")
<MacPlusG3> THAT IS FUCKED

~/bin/stat

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What have you always wanted on the command line?

stat? i: hear; you cry! (insert more [silly] {punctuation} around ‘ere!)

I present, to you, my ~/bin/stat

#!/usr/bin/perl
use POSIX qw(strftime);

my $FORMAT="%H:%M %a, %e %b %y";

foreach(@ARGV)
{
  my ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,
      $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks)
      = stat($_);
  print $_."\n";
  print "Dev:   $dev\n";
  print "inode: $ino\n";
  print "mode:  $mode\n";
  print "nlink: $nlink\n";
  print "uid:   $uid\n";
  print "gid:   $gid\n";
  print "rdev:  $rdev\n";
  print "size:  $size\n";
  print "atime: ".strftime($FORMAT,localtime($atime))."\n";
  print "mtime: ".strftime($FORMAT,localtime($mtime))."\n";
  print "ctime: ".strftime($FORMAT,localtime($ctime))."\n";
  print "blksz: $blksize\n";
  print "blks:  $blocks\n\n";
}

it’ll make it to junkcode sometime soon.

Yahoo Mail sucks

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What Yahoo Mail does to the In-Reply-To header appears to be random. Whatever it is, it’s random and broken.

Occationally it seems to do the right thing. No bloody sense to it though.

Usually it seems to put in some random integer.

Fun.

This is why some people’s mail goes missing.

Yahoo, you should know better. Shame.

revision control

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Brian Aker has blogged about BitKeeper versus CVS

no doubt this has stemmed from somebody’s rant on the BK license. Now, this is a valid rant, but, really – it’s getting[1] old.

Personally, I quite like the GNU Arch Revision control system. Unfortunately, the UI is sort of sucky and takes a bit of getting used to. Bazaar is one to watch for improvements on this front (although I haven’t made the switch, mainly due to there not being enough hours in the day).

One thing that Arch does really well is cherry picking changesets. A simple ‘tla reply’ will do the equivilent of ‘patch -p1 < foobar’, but preserving where it came from. BRILLIANT. I wish bk did this. I once looked at branching in CVS and quickly ran away.

A smaller player, Darcs is one to take a close look at too. The UI is really sweet. I’ve only used it to test/submit fixes upstream on a small project (namely xseq – a project that is way cooler than the name suggests[2].)

In the future, bazaar-ng (back online soon) will probably be the way to go. Now is the time to bombard it with ideas though :)

At least we’re not stuck with Visual Source Safe. Full on MS people bag that pile of poo.

[1] Many would, in fact, believe i should be leaving out the word ‘getting’.
[2] I’m sure Andrew would be appreciative of funky names as well.

Update: why, oh why does this edit post thing think it must fight against the will of the correct closing tags?

Update 2: it seems that wordpress doesn’t want to save an update if you’re only fixing your markup. you have to add text. the suck.

what you don’t want to see from gdb

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/build/buildd/gdb-6.3/gdb/linux-nat.c:1208: internal-error: wait_lwp: Assertion `pid == GET_LWP (lp->ptid)' failed.
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.
Quit this debugging session? (y or n) 
/build/buildd/gdb-6.3/gdb/linux-nat.c:1208: internal-error: wait_lwp: Assertion `pid == GET_LWP (lp->ptid)' failed.
A problem internal to GDB has been detected,
further debugging may prove unreliable.
Create a core file of GDB? (y or n)

Airshow 2005

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Was at the airshow yesterday – with all the benefits of knowing people in the business :)

Mad people doing airobatics, mad guy hanging upside-down off the wing of a plane while it then barrell-rolled so he was standing up. Pretty cool to watch.

Of course, then there was the fighter jets. fast, loud, and i swear the F16 can do a u-turn in less space than half the cars on the road.

Then, of course, there’s the air force supply planes that do crazy landings, take offs and can fly a few feet above the ground while dropping supplies/releif out the back.

When the US air force guy was saying what missions some of their fighters had flown in, notably absent was Gulf War II. Hrrmm… maybe a touchy subject? Who knows.

An F111 doing a dump and burn is always pretty to see.

Install Day (Semester 1, 2005) – Monash IT Society (Clayton)

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Install Day (Semester 1, 2005) – Monash IT Society (Clayton)

So, back at uni (you know, that place you’re at when you’re a student), and back with the old computer science club (but under a different name… well… ah…urrr…because… who the fuck knows why) they’re having a linux install day next week.

i’ll probably go along for a couple of hours and hand out lots of ubuntu cds that i’ve got lying around and probably get asked a lot of mysql questions.

maybe it’d be cool to have a “MySQL CD” with all mysql stuff for all platforms on it (with lots of autorun stuff). esp if we could make them cheaply enough to give away at a bunch of events (like install days).

Maybe i’ll burn a couple of CDs to take along (windows, mac, linux binaries)

OpenOffice.org 2.0

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Well, I installed the preview packages in Ubuntu on my desktop this morning – just to play with for a few mins. Guess What? It looks like it doesn’t completely suck!

Some of the UI still feels/looks really weird – but that seems to be a legacy of the strange widget stuff that it used to use.

The “File->Send->Document as E-Mail” and “Document as PDF Attachment” are pretty funky things (assuming they link into evo properly).

The presentation module, Impress looks to have improved no-end. 1.1 was sucky (just like PowerPoint). If you’ve ever used Apple’s Keynote, you know how good presentation software can be. The new one looks to be usable and may mean I swear a lot less when preparing presentations.

Although why OO.org has it’s own package manager is totally beyond me.

I do wish the MySQL connectivity worked out of the box though… maybe it’s just this beta (or the fact that when you select OO.org in synaptic, it doesn’t load up all the Java stuff needed for JDBC connectivity, or ODBC).

Note that I still love Gnumeric and Abiword.