So in three weeks time, two once large Unix vendors are gone — SGI on april 1st, and now Sun. SGI as a Unix vendor had been dead for years anyway, but still.

Today's announcement also kind of finalizes the answer to my wonderings last year. Sun somehow seems to have managed to send off MySQL into limbo, and it remains yet to be seen if Oracle would have any imperative to bring it back.

One thing I do find bothersome with the new situation is that at the moment I write this, the opensolaris.org website appears to be unreachable. Which might just be coincidence, but I do hope that neither Sun until the deal is finished or Oracle afterwards turn away from their current opensource backing positions.

... And so is computing.

At the beginning of last year, I finally bought a replacement for all the old junk that I was using as computer substitutes; a quad-core (Q6600) system with 4 GiB of memory.

For a couple of reasons, I set it up in a hurry, using software raid on two 160 GB harddisks, but last july I decided to redo it properly and at the same time consolidate as many as possible of the old systems I was using virtualization.
Until that time, I had been using VMware for virtualization at home, to be able to run appliances or historical VMs I had sitting around. This time I would try to move over to an opensource solution, if any could fullfill my needs.
Continue reading "The Times They Are a-Changin'"

This week brought some really nice weather. Too nice already for some people, it would seem.
While most people would likely enjoy a ride home on a sunny afternoon, for certain hotheaded ones the temperature appears to set their brains and blood boiling and remove the inhibitions for juvenile behaviour.
Driving home I encountered a truck driver hanging out of his window having a heated argument with a car driver standing straight up through his sunroof. I couldn't hear what they were arguing about, as it happened a few cars before where I stood, but in the meantime they were blocking the two lane drive. I'd almost be surprised if it wasn't one or the other accusing his adversary of doing exactly that, blocking his trajectory.
Luckily the scene didn't take too long and they drove on before others could join in on the argument.

One pattern that I've observed so far in all incidents of traffic aggression that I witnessed, is that at least one of the parties was accompanied by a female passenger. I have to wonder if female company is in fact an influencing factor…

° 16 08 2008

Last week I needed a way of converting a two-dimensional array, in perl, into a tree-like datastructure.
While seemingly trivial, the convoluted use of references when passing around arrays and hashes between perl function calls -- recursive calls, in this case -- made this a mind-boggling exercise to me. (the fact that I hadn't seriously used perl in the last eight years might have had part in that, too)

Below the jump is my implementation, debugging info left in and all. If it's useful for someone, that's great; if not, ... well, except for my mental sanity no harm was done in writing this, either :)
Continue reading "Perl hash tree helper"

Learning that the Linux Professional Institute offered a chance for taking exams at a reduced price during this year's FOSDEM, I decided to take a shot at the level 1 exams.
I was fairly occupied in the period before FOSDEM when I took that decision, but given that I've been using Linux heavily for over a decade, and after reviewing the objectives, I figured that I should be able to pass it without specific preparation.

Yesterday I received an email that indeed I did, so now I am officially a “Junior level Linux professional”.
I guess I should take a look at getting LPIC-2 sometime.
Continue reading "I'm junior now"

I've got internet at home again since yesterday. It sure makes life easier...

Last week has been a stressful one, for reasons I'll come back on later.
This week had started better, but since yesterday my Internet connection stopped working^[1] (for the same reasons). It isn't when until such thing happens that you realize how dependent you've really become on it, even for simple matters as looking up contact information.

[1] So this and the previous post were written from my with my parents-in-law.

One annoyance with the lilo bootloader that I've ran into a few times recently, is that it apparently turns any root configuration arguments into a device number. Which is then passed to the kernel at boot.
So if the kernel decides to assign a different device number to the supposed root device, your system may no longer boot.

Yesterday I once again ran into this: when I added an additional disk to a system, the LVM volumes which were on that new disk got assigned device numbers before the existing system LVM volumes.
Giving the problem a little thought, I realized that the solution — though silly — is really simple: add an “append="root=/dev/yournode"” directive to lilo.conf, and this boot-time argument will always override the root device set by lilo.

No more changing root devices for me…

I'm a bit puzzled why feedburner would be listing a blog search for Sylvia Saint as a reader of my feed earlier this week. Especially as I can't readily find my blog or feed in the search results.
(I guess this post could start bringing in search results)

Apparently she is a porn star (Wikipedia), and a prototype one at that: blonde and busty.

Ah, the things one can learn through reviewing website statistics...

For a while now I had been planning to move this blog a different server and URL; a URL that I would have full control over instead of the user directory it was deployed in.

I also had been longing for a different blog platform some time. While the primary reason for choosing Blosxom.PHP, that it did not depend on a database server, still held, I also had gotten tired of having to dig into it's code (usually in several places) for things that in my opinion should not require having to make changes all over the place.

So when the ageing server that held the old blog had temporary IO problems last weekend, I considered the time ready for making the move.
Continue reading "Blog migration"

Today I read in an online news source that the Royal National Institute for Deaf People is advising people to wear earplugs in clubs and asking for more stylish earplugs to be designed so young people would want to wear them.

This looks like a backwards way of dealing with the problem; why not campain to have the clubs' (and pubs, and concerts) sound level reduced so people don't have to wear earplugs? When gardening, you also try to eradicate the weeds' roots...

Christian, you forgot to mention the Linux kernel, where a member of the kernel team deliberately broke hardware support.
Thanks to Holger for these links, he has listed several more. I disagree with the suggestion that shipping the old firewire stack in the linux-extra-modules package is sufficient workaround; unless this is not prohibiting it from being included in the installer to support ethernet over firewire? (though in such case it will certainly have implications due to the fact that this package should be pulled in when the installer used eth1394)

So Adrian, you too may want to reconsider if Debian really does have less compatibility regressions than other distributions.

Or, as it's said, history repeats itself. Today I sold my motorcycle (wait for the “blade” photograph to pass by).
Again it wasn't really old, just 4 years; but it too had over 54000 kilometres; time again to release it.

I didn't quite get the money of it that I wished for, but then again, for a bike with that mileage you can't really be picky about what people pay for it. And in hindsight the fireblade seems to have been a bad choice; there's a lot of them on sale at least over here right now.
Note to self: try to get a less popular bike next time, it pays off when trying to sell it.

Actually I've already made the choice for a new bike (though I do not know if my choice follows the rule I just laid out). But it's been a hard choice; which is a story in itself. And that story is for another time.

Again, I must say it feels strange. While this wasn't the first bike I sold off, I feel a little melancholious about it. I guess that's just part of selling any bike. Assuming you've build a bond with the machine. But then again, any real motor rider would build such bond. IMHO.

Someone asked on the PyGTK mailinglist if it is possible to reuse certain parts of a libglade window several times within an application.
It certainly is, and it's not even hard to do!

I've quickly written a demo application to show how it's done.

The user interface designed in glade is really simple, a textbox with two toggle buttons underneath. Activating one button will display a second, disparate textbox beside the original one. Deactivating it will remove that second textarea.
The other button will display and remove a copy of the first textbox which was there from application startup.
The full widget tree of this interface is shown in the first screenshot.

The actual code to the demo application is rather brief.
Continue reading "PyGTK/glade object reuse"