Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie (a patch after midnight)

...won't somebody help me chase those bad docs away.

As I recently mumbled on twitter (sorry, but 'tweet' is even naffer than the bad title of this post) I've started poking at Yum around the edges. Partially as I'm trying to find a 'Better Way' than the groupinstall we have to do for 64/32 bit package co-existence on the current middleware, but also as I'm narked off at the complete lack of manpages (on SL5) for yum-utils.

actually, thats a bit harsh - as of 1.1.16 (el5) there are minimal docs, including yaim-utils.1 but nothing for each individual utility (see also http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumUtils/RepoDiff). So, once again I'd ideally like something that can parse wiki markup and give me the output without having to keep pasting into a test page and hitting preview.

wikilint anyone?

Anyway, 1st patch sent off for approval, but my home server has dropped off the net so no more updates for the day.

[obligatory swiss status report]
Hot. :-) Sunflowers are blooming. nice n fresh in the evenings with thunderstorms. Sadly not had a chance to see if my shiny new camera can catch lightning, but I'm reasonably impressed with the highspeed capture. see sample

SVN Stats munging

As an aside I recently looked at a piece of GPL'd software and analysed the subversion stats for it.
Each datapoint represents a checkin to the tree and I assigned a numerical ID to each ssh account. shows which developes 'stick' with a package and which abandon their updates.

Bonus points for working out what the code is :-)

In search of Feduntu

I've been a happy Ubuntu user for a while on my HP Compaq 8510p laptop, but a few things recently really started annoying me.

1) regular ubuntu system upgrades don't include openafs-modules for that kernel, which means I have to recompile and install them before I can access cern.ch AFS space.

2) it *really* doesn't work well with the ATI chipset in my laptop - full screen of a video hangs the machine with fglrx (not checked launchpad for bug no)

3) since the last update it takes 2 *seconds* to minimise / maximise / alt-tab with windows. c'mon, this is a dual core machine..... (see bug #351186

4) The fingerprint reader didn't work.

5) ... neither did userfriendly xinerama.

OK, so most of these problems are caused by the video driver (closed source fglrx) but since Fedora 11 came out I thought I'd compare and see what the opposition had (especially useful since I use RHEL clones at work - scientific linux 5 or 4)

Installer -- worked wonderfully *once I'd managed to get the iso onto a USB stick -- I was using unetbootin (on Jaunty) but I hadn't formatted the stick as fat32 -- didn't work with an ext3 formatted stick. The LVM selection was a bit fiddly (I have /boot(sda1) and linuxvg(sda2) and within the VG I have homelv,rootlv and afscachelv (was ext2 as I used XFS for / and /home)

F11 wanted me to migrate from xfs to ext4 for / -- OK not an issue, but its SElinux policy seems screwy wrt the /home

I get home directory does not exist, logging in with HOME=/
but then can immeadiatly cd to $HOME. harumph.

also the Fan runs constantly, so battery life is low, Especially since it suspends as soon as *one* of the batteries goes flat (see bug 220962)

in short, Fedora 11 fixes some of my issues. looks really nice, but just doesn't do what I want (*decent* laptop distro that lets me work for a long time). So I'm afraid I shall revert to Ubuntu over the weekend - it's still buggy for me, but in less critical ways (hopefully a fresh install of 9.04 will blow away any issues of the video driver rather than the upgrades.

Maybe again in Fedora 11.1 ?
Why not windows? well, I *like* using the CLI for most of my work, Putty + gvim + development languages are good but I'd need a virtual machine to test any linux stuff out on laptop. I don't actually have a need of any windows-only software, so why pay the licence.

[OK - tomtom home is the only thing, but thats another story...]

twitter

OK, so it's been a few weeks since I started using twitter. The best uses have been suitably demonstrated by those fine folks at b3ta but I thought I'd rant my findings so far.

In it's original use as some sort of "hello, I'm on the train" - it totally fails to impress me. Why bother? I'm following a few friends, and no offence to them, but the parts of their personal lives they choose to share are um, not gripping. If I want to know what X is doing, I'd rather a) phone em up or have some other realtime converation or 2) look for a longer than 140 characters blog posting.

However where I *do* find it useful is for a day to day scratchpad of stuff I've done to gather together for my weekly report. I'm sure the public at large don't give a monkeys what I'm up to, and my use of bug #1234 no doubt screws up hashtags something rotten, but hey, for me it works.

The alternative is some sort of cgi elog thing, but the advantage of twitter is the open API that other people have already spent time working with. Twitterfox 'just works' for me.

Ho Hum, there we go, somewhat over my 140 charaters, but if you're really sad you can follow me on http://twitter.com/elwell2000, or look over on the right of the page.

Scientific Sailing

*why* can't the UK do something like this?

I remember years ago when Curly Mills kindly donated Alba Venturer to OYT Scotland we had a long discussion about how important teaching basic science / engineering was. Big plus points for the Italians for doing the Right Thing (TM).

bacula

OK, so I work in IT. I *should* do regular backups. I know what happens when disks die. Finally (after aaaages of delaying) I set up my external USB HDD to work with Bacula. Not a moment to soon, 3 days in and I get asked do I have a copy of X file from the PC at home. clickity click, restore, find file, select restore to different machine, run. and lo...

  Job:                    RestoreFiles.2009-04-30_14.27.48.19
  Restore Client:         shinybox-fd
  Start time:             30-Apr-2009 14:27:50
  End time:               30-Apr-2009 14:28:06
  Files Expected:         1
  Files Restored:         1
  Bytes Restored:         42,212
  Rate:                   2.6 KB/s
  FD Errors:              0
  FD termination status:  OK
  SD termination status:  OK
  Termination:            Restore OK

tada! scp'd and mailed. :-)

No. Just 'NO' OK!

I may be proved wrong on this, but why do a remake of *such* a classic, the Edge of Darkness. I mean, the late Bob Peck vs 'Mel Gibson ... a homicide detective for the Boston Police Department."

Ho Hum.
/OldFart