Oke, that’s it. Ubuntu Jaunty up and running. After hardly two hours of installing and configuring it’s done. I have Ubuntu up and running. With zsh, Firefox 3.5, OpenOffice 3.1 (although I never use it), all the VPN connections I need, TeX Live, Mutt, ext4, XFCE 4.6, Wifi, webcam and all the things I forgot.
I didn’t need Google, hack it or whatever. Just configure it the way I want. Out of the box, no problems.
It was a long time ago that I created a Geek Code Block for myself. As I aged this block aged with we, so it was about time I updated it.
Take a look at the about page to see the new code. I also added a decoded version for those who do not like to decode stuff.
After a week of Prince2 and coming back to my old self again I started my laptop in OpenSolaris. There where some minor things that needed to be resolved. Trying to resolve these was not at all easy, because I needed some extra software not available in the OpenSolaris repository.
Searching the web (Google is certainly your friend) I found some extra repositories I could use. These can be easily installed using the package manager, so I’ll give the URL’s only.
Being a blood donor since 1982 I have been donating blood on a regular basis. Today I reached the milestone, that I’m very happy about. I donated blood 100 times. This equals 50 litres of blood in total.
I would like to urge you all: Please give. It doesn’t cost you anything but a little time and you help a lot of people. So: Give
If you live in the Netherlands goto Sanquin
The last 3 days were very hectic. I attended the course Prince2 Foundation which prepared me for the Prince2 exam. Three days of good old, hardcore studying. I really felt like an old man, not a student. I can hardly believe I did this for years non-stop and partied all the time. I even get exhausted thinking about it. Those were really good times, with very fond memories.
But all the hard work payed off. I did pass the exam (unofficially for now) and I do now have a Prince2 Foundation qualification.
My private laptop came delivered with Windows (of course), but I wanted a UNIX/Linux like OS as well. Running a lot of computers with Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, Slackware, Debian and others) I decided I wanted something else.
I came up with the idea that it should be Solaris, to experiment with the fantastic ZFS. But the real Sun Solaris lacks support for my laptop, so I thought I could run OpenSolaris, which has better hardware support.
When using the stream editor (sed) with the -i option, it does
break links. Like this:
~$ mkdir test
~$ cd test
~/test$ echo Hello > f1
~/test$ ln -s f1 f2
~/test$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:28 f1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tonk tonk 2 May 4 09:28 f2 -> f1
~/test$ sed -i.bck 's/Hello/Bello/' f2
~/test$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:28 f1
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:29 f2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tonk tonk 2 May 4 09:28 f2.bck -> f1
~/test$ rm f2 f2.bck
~/test$ ln f1 f2
~/test$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 2 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:28 f1
-rw-r--r-- 2 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:28 f2
~/test$ sed -i.bck 's/Hello/Bello/' f2
~/test$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 2 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:28 f1
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:29 f2
-rw-r--r-- 2 tonk tonk 6 May 4 09:28 f2.bckOn my laptop I’m running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 with
XFCE 4.6 and it works great. But (Isn’t there
always a but'?) every once in a while I killed my Xsession with some
type of key combination. The standard combination for this is
`Ctrl-Alt-Backspace so I switched that off in the file
/etc/X11/xorg.conf'. I added the`ServerFlags`section, like this. ~ Section "ServerFlags" Option "DontZap" "on" EndSection ~ After restarting I tried the dreadful`Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
and I thought that `Bob’s your uncle'.
Last week I saw a documentary about the German mathematician David Hilbert. This very interesting documentary had some nice mathematical problems that seem impossible to solve, but when thought through there always was a little loophole.
A very nice one is The paradox of the Grand Hotel
If you are a bit into maths, this really is stuff to read.
The prove of The Last Theorem of Fermat is my next goal… :-)
I’ve been using IceWM on and off for many years now. And because we used it in our UNIX/Linux education environment I did create some patches for IceWM. Some of these patches are now part of the mainstream version and (of course) some are not.
My patch files can be found here.
These patches are mostly focused on window management such as (This list
is not complete): ~ + win_allowRestore + win_allowMove + win_allowSize
+ win_allowMaximize + win_allowMinimize + win_allowHide
win_allowRollup + win_allowRaise + win_allowLower + win_allowLayer
win_allowMoveto ~ and some are focused on system control (reboot and
family)
I did take a lot of care to make this site W3C compliant, but a little bug entered the code. This spoiled it and W3C give me 48 errors. Of course that’s too much. A little debugging session showed the problem and now I’m W3C again.
Have a look at the W3C Validation Service
Miek pointed me to a nice plugin for Nanoblogger called the Code Plugin
Some nice examples:
#include <stdio.h>
int main( int argc, char* argv[] )
{
/* A Hello world example */
(void) printf( "Hello, World!\n" );
return 0;
}and
#!/bin/bash
# A Hello world example
echo "Hello world"
If you want to cut and paste code examples, just go into `vi` and give it a
~~~ {.vim}
:%s/^[0-9]* //A couple of days ago I posted that I was converting to git. Well, that
was not the completely truth. I already had switched to git.
But what I didn’t like was the fact that git doesn’t support
keyword-expansion and therefore there’s no way of knowing what version
of the file you are editing. I do like this in CVS and SVN, so I
implemented it in a script called
vigit.
Some time ago I decided it was time to change from subversion to git for my version control system. The advantages where obvious. git is distributed and so I can code on my laptop without being connected to my home server. When I do get home I just sync the repositories and everything’s OK.
But, how to do this. I took the easy road and created an user on my home server and made sure I could login with SSH key authentication. After that I did:
When using a MySQL database, it’s often very useful to create backups of
the databases. This can be done with the MySQL dump command, but this
does not allow for separate week, month and year backups. On the web I
found the tool
automysqlbackup and
that did almost what I wanted. I changed it a lot and my version can be
found here or here.
In my daily working routine I do create a lot of shell scripts, LaTeX source and whatever. I always try to keep things simple and consistent. This not always being easy, so I wrote a Perl program that generates a standard template for a lot of standard code. This could be e.g. Bash shell, Perl, RPM spec file, LaTeX source, C source, etc.
The only thing this program needs is Perl and a file in your home
directory called .name.info. This file should contain a tag and the
value on a single line. An example:
Last weekend I decided it was time again to completely update my eeePC. So I ran the command tantrum everybody knows:
apt-get update
apt-get upgradeand that gave me 287 new and updated packages.
After that I needed to reboot because I got a lot of new stuff.
Well, there the trouble began. No X, no network, no mouse, no USB etc. It was in a terrible state.
Digging around and repairing the odd stuff, I got X running, but still
no mouse and no network. I thought that there had to be a general
problem, because it looked impossible that everything was broken without
some major hickup. Digging further and further I suddenly noticed that I
did have a lot of files with the name ending in dpkg-new. That gave me
the clou that these where new configs and new scripts that didn’t update
the original ones. why wasn’t clear, first get the thing up and running
again.
Live’s good and the problem is simple. Having a Linux server at home
with two virtual machines running within VMware server, I would like to
have a tunnel to the host OS and forward ports for smtp, imap, rdp
and maybe some others.
I thought this could simply be solved with IPtables, but that turned out to be a big pain in the *ss. It didn’t work as I wanted, I locked myself out several times and still it didn’t do exactly as I wanted.
Searching for shell builtins to speedup Nanoblogger, we stumbled across
a very charming and nice way to implement a tail function in the
Kornshell.
This works in KSH93 and newer.
The new redirection operators, <# and ># are used to seek. For
example,
<# (( EOF-36 ))will seek to 36 bytes before the end-of-file. You can apply this along with any redirection so that
cat < file <# (( 80 ))The new kernel for the EeePC (2.6.25) has deprecated the
/proc/acpi/battery interface, so I had to write a new script for use
in my own zsh prompt.
The script will work in both 2.6.24 and 2.6.25, so without further ado, here it is. It is written as a function for easy inclusion in any prompts.
#!/bin/zsh
bat() {
PROC=/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0
SYS=/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/uevent
STATE=
# dc: design capacity, rc: remaining capacity
if [ -f $PROC/info ]
then
STATE=$PROC/state # 2.6.24
dc=$(grep 'last full' < $PROC/info | awk '{ print $4 }')
rc=$(grep 'remaining' < $PROC/state | awk '{ print $3 }')
elif [ -f $SYS ]
then
STATE=$SYS # 2.6.25
dc=$(grep '\<power_SUPPLY_CHARGE_FULL\>' < $SYS | awk -F= '{ print $2 }')
rc=$(grep '\<power_SUPPLY_CHARGE_NOW\>' < $SYS | awk -F= '{ print $2 } ')
else
exit
fi
p=$(echo 3k $rc $dc / 100 \* p | dc )
if grep -iq discharging $STATE
then
printf " %02d" "$p"
else
if [ ${p%.*} -lt 100 ]; then
printf " %02d+" "$p"
fi
fi
}
bat