Cyclopedia Square

Having a good solid day of coding to do at work, I plugged in my noise canceling headphones, turned on some tunes, and dug in. I love the groove I get in during times like this. It's really a rush to be so productive and to feel so clever about the amazing code that is just flowing from my brain and through my fingertips into my emacs buffer. Aaaaah. Amazingly enough, things occasionally do conspire to break my concentration, even in these times of extreme concentration. Usually it's when the compiler takes more than 15 seconds. OK, so maybe I'm not that focused. Yesterday, I started noticing how bored I was of my music at times like these. Fortunately, amidst the difficult logical puzzles I was solving with my fantastic firmware, I was able to solve this problem as well. I remembered The Internet Archive and its astounding collection of live concert recording . Yes, for bands that allow it, they allow fans to record their concerts with expensive and complex eq...

I installed digikam on a whim at work ( f-spot has been annoying me lately, so I thought I'd check out the kde equivalent), and then noticed that my network usage was up pretty high. I ran top and something called gam_server caught my eye. Since it had server in the name I figured it might be network related. Some quick googling around and I learned that gam_server monitors changes to files on your filesystems. Some people mentioned it causing problems with nfs mounted filesystems, which I definitely have a lot of here at work. Others mentioned it being tied in with KDE at a pretty low level, and one forum post on gam_server even mentioned digikam by name. So, on another whim, I did an aptitude remove digikam . My network activity dropped back to near zero. And then I figured I better write that tidbit of information down in case it could come in handy later. That's all. Thanks for reading.

I just read this scary story written by Jeremy Allison about a poor 11-year old and Windows Vista. Here's the poignant quote from the tale: Copy and paste were disabled. Think about the fear and paranoia that led to that decision in the product design meeting for the trial version....What this means is that if you use the trial version of Office 2007 for thirty days, all documents you create will be completely unreadable by any other software unless you buy back access to your documents by purchasing the full version of the software. No easy way to get your documents out. I'm speechless.

Another post in the continuing saga of my upgrade from Edgy to Feisty. Last time , I mentioned that my Gallery was still not working. I get this line in my apache2 error log ( /var/log/apache2/error.log ): ...gallery/.htaccess: Option Indexes not allowed here To work around it, I need to go to the automatically generated .htaccess file in my gallery directory and comment out the line: Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks If I re-run the configuration wizard, the line comes back and things top working again. I can't figure out why Options Indexes and FollowSymlinks aren't allowed. It seems they must have been with Edgy, but I can't see what changed when looking at the RCS history of my apache configuration files (yes, I keep any configuration files that I modify under RCS on this machine. I've started using mercurial and/or bazaar for the entire /etc directory on other machines). Is it something different about the newer version of apache? Google isn't...

OK, I figured out the problem with my Django powered blog . The new pg_hba.conf file had stricter permissions for local users. I had to change it from "ident sameuser" to "trust" and then my django app could connect to the database. I also had to make sure, after editing it as root, that the pg_hba.conf file was writable by the postgres user. Then I could /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.2 restart successfully, and everything works again. Oh wait, my php photo gallery is still down. Grrr!

The magic command to restore my lost database , once I got my dump file out of my backup, was: sudo su postgres -c 'psql -f /home/bryan/backups/all.dbs.out postgres' My Django website still doesn't work though. Darn you, Ubuntu! (sorry for the harsh language)

As mentioned previously, I upgraded my work machine to Feisty Fawn without much trouble, but waited on doing my home machine because I knew it would be a bit trickier. The reason is I run a family website from that machine. It's basically a blog built with Django and it uses a PostgreSQL database backend. It also has a photo gallery with tons of family photos. I would hate to lose either of those. I had a bunch of free time last night, and I had backed up important stuff to some DVDs recently, so I decided to go for it. I clicked upgrade in the Update Manager and off it went. About then a good friend of mine called. We hadn't talked for a long time, and we had a lot to catch up on. Perfect. I let the install run while we chatted. It was taking a while to progress, but I didn't think too much of it. After we hung up and said goodbye, I started reading a book. It was finally to the configuration and setup part and occasionally asked me some questions. I was e...

I got the suggestion to try rlwrap as an alternative to emacs in order to get a better shell . I've tried it, and here's my professional review: it rocks. I've showed it to a couple of colleagues and they were dully impressed as well. I think, actually, that I like it better than the emacs shell. It's quick, and it keeps its history separate from your bash history, which is very nice. It also remembers history across sessions, which doesn't happen if I close and re-open the emacs shell. You can use apt to install rlwrap on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (universe repo). It's also available with the cygwin setup.exe thinger. I had to compile it for my old redhat 8 box (don't ask), but that was super simple. Overall, a very nice little tool.