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04 July 2008Don ChristieA very nasty invasion of privacy
I have written in the past about how new Copyright legislation essentially turns global corporates into criminal investigators with very wide ranging powers of snoopage. Here is a very nasty example of what can happen.
Viacom, representing...
Read more @ http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/passthesource Brenda Wallace
Convoy!in honour of them truckies. 03 July 2008Reed WadeCheese PuffOh man oh man, I can't stay away from these things. (I'm not the only one.) I can feel the digits slipping off the expiration date on my birth certificate every time I eat one of these but I can't help myself.
Brenda Wallace
Girl Geek Dinners -- WE HAVE A BAND!Sarah Wiig, Wellington music geek and all round awesome person, will demo her amazing musical glove she built. Then, the Sarah Wiig band will play into the evening. Style is acoustic folk. see Sarah Wiig's MySpace profile to listen to to her music. 02 July 2008Penny Leach
I am terrified of suspend/resume
I'm super looking forward to getting the Samsung Q45, but everytime I close my macbook, I feel a little tiny bit of panic. Actually it's slightly more than tiny. I'm terrified that these are the last few days I have without filesystem corruption.
Longer term readers of this blog will remember that I've been pretty burnt in the past... my last year's LCA slides getting eaten by a fucked up suspend/fullboot/shutdown/resume sequence that turned /etc into a python file and the slides into a gnome xml config file. (I now have an irrational hatred of both python and gnome). Yeah, that was a year and a half ago and I'm sure things are better by now. Even so. The one remaining thing that fills me with warm fuzzy joy about the macbook is that macosx suspend and resume just works. Actually that's not true. iCal and iSync also fill me with warm fuzzy joy. Stay tuned for my adventures getting it working. Andrew Chilton
Cil v0.4.0 releasedThis release has a number of new things and functionality. Here's the short version of the changes, though there are quite a few since Saturday's release:
Documentation has been made a little nicer too. There are still lots more ideas to get through but I'm sure it'll slow down at some point. As always, thanks to those who provide me with inspiration and ideas, you know who you are. Have fun, let me know how it goes and happy hacking. Update: fix to packaging, patched to v0.4.1, see the main cil page for tarball details. Why I'm Passionate about PerlI saw this meme on Grant's journal (huh, who keeps a journal these days, I knew he was old fashioned). Not sure where he got it from but I thought I'd do it anyway. The person who introduced me to Perl showed me that... Erm, nothing. I was the same as Grant. I introduced myself to Perl and I'm glad I did. At the time, I was living in Germany, had a crappy old laptop, no webbernets and lots of time. I had to do something and somehow, Perl won. I first starting using Perl to... ...do my own photo gallery website. And yes, I wrote my own templating language. I love the fact that I did it and I think by doing so, my passage towards being a true Perl programmer was complete. TMTOWTDI! It's my party and I'll cry if I want to. I kept using Perl because... ...after only a few days, I was connecting to The Gimp and writing Perl-Fu modules to generate the graphics, the thumbnails and all the buttons on the site (duly swapped with I can't stop thinking about Perl... ...because it just encompasses everything I believe in. It has power, expressiveness, individuality, schizophrenia and duct tape (lots of it). It's also free and it has a great community, which are both hugely important factors. I'm still using Perl because... ...I haven't yet found anything better than it. I'm afraid it's that simple. Other scripting languages don't seem worthwhile enough (or different enough) to spend time on and it's only completely new paradigms like Erlang, which I would consider learning. Whilst a lot of Perl people are saying "Ruby until Perl 6", I'm saying "Perl until Perl 6". I get other people to use Perl by... N/A. I don't say to other people that they should do anything. Then again, there's no harm trying to convince someone to use something by showing them it's better. I mean, show them a thousand line Java file or a 10 line Perl program. Also show them ACME::EyeDrops and say "There, you do that". If they reply with "Why would I want to?", you've just won the "Which is more fun?" argument. I also program in ... and ..., but I like Perl better since... ...as stated before, I've not found a better language, though in the past I have written stuff in C, C++, Ruby, Java, Ada 83 (Ravenscar Profile) and a few other bits and pieces. To be honest, waiting for stuff to compile just bores me to tears. It used to take me a thousand hours to get an Ada program to compile and once it compiled, there was no point running it since I knew it would work! Perl is a refreshing change :-) Brenda Wallace
soldout!General Tickets have sold out, in only 2 days.. BUT! there are still 6 student tickets available for only $5 each! 01 July 2008Reed WadeZitherYou want zither? Here's some now-- Andrew Chilton
SoCNoC 2 a SuccessDespite my own failure at doing SoCNoC this year, a number of other people have and it is they I'd like to thank for making SoCNoC what it is. Throughout the year, a few of us behind the scenes in KiwiWriters do lots of work to make sure we're ready for SoCNoC during June. Sometimes it feels like a lot of work but when it starts, it's all worthwhile. And this year we have managed to break a number of records. Here's a quick run-down of some of the more memorable figures:
and lots and lots of fun in to the bargain too. Well done to everyone who completed it. Special congrats. to our organisers who not only did all the work but managed to write a novel too: Kerryn, Travis, Cassie, Pam - and hello to Jane too! Here's looking forward to a record breaking 3rd SoCNoC next year! 30 June 2008Brenda Wallace
Girl Geek Dinner tickets are on SaleTickets are on sale now and... 30% of the tickets are sold after only 3 hours -- be quick!!! Penny Leach
the way people use their computers baffles me
I just witnessed first hand the sort of computer use experience that I hear people talking about all the time but, thankfully, am mostly sheltered from.
It was a recent looking chassis running some recent looking variant of Windows. I laugh to find that I cannot actually recognise Windows releases anymore, but this one had a big green "Start" button, so I presume this means XP or Vista. The person was struggling to complete a task that really should not have been that hard, but Windows was slow and unresponsive (this of course could have been down to either the machine itself or network latency), and he responded to this by repeating the requests he was making of the operating system, on some occasions at least 3 additional times, rather than waiting for the first request to complete, while randomly hitting keys (that I couldn't see had any actual instructive use, but rather was just a way to express anger), and yelling at it, while waving his arms about. I sat in silence, knowing that any comment I could possibly have would be misunderstood or at any rate, not helpful. At one point, he actually asked me, "why is it so slow?" to which I mumbled sympathetically. It really amazes me that this is the quality of some people's interactions with their computers. It is so far from my own experiences with computers, where 99% of the time when something isn't working I know why, how to work around it, or how to fix it. In general my approach to breakages with computers resemble a challenge for me to solve, sometimes a frustrating one, but no more so than a complicated problem I'm interested in solving. Certainly the computer is not a black box that I am forced to use and loathe doing so. I am at least mostly convinced that this person's problem was because he was using Windows, although of course there are some people who just don't have an aptitude with computers, no matter what. Stuart YeatesI'm confused about hardy heron and default applications
Back in the day you told your linux system which applications you wanted to use with environmental variables things like:
export EDITOR=/usr/bin/emacsThen along came the wonderful debianness of the apt-family and the alternatives system. update-alternatives --config viNow this system too is being undermined by various systems, leaving me uncertain where to set things. What I'm trying to do is:
Brenda Wallace
keeping my brain from stack overflowI'm pretty much carbon bonded to my Palm TX - an aging palm pilot that has wifi and bluetooth and that's about it. I keep all my calendar, todos, and such in Agendus. It's nifty too becuase i can attach jpegs to just about anythjing, and link meetings and tasks to each other. I then use Agendus Mail - it pulls down my imap emails, and I can then turn an email into a Todo or a meeting or a memo. I then keep projects in an app called BrainForest - which shows a rough tree outline with progress meters. And then - keyring, a gtk app that's on fresh meat, keeps all my passwords (and yegads there are many). Quick news pulls down Rss. There's TCMP, an opensource video player for palm that plays divx etc. And there's Palm books, a free (maybe opensource, i dunno) book reader for -- umm... reading books in txt, html, rtf format. and a nifty trick - the free PDF reader named Palm PDF does presentation mode over bluetooth - so if i can find a bluetooth projector i don't need my laptop. Diddle bug, and opensource palm app, is handy for drawing quick notes, which can then be send by email or bluetooth + mms as a PNG. and finally hBlogger is a blog api client for these rants you see here. Stuart YeatesMike O'Connor at Friday drinks
I took some photos at Friday drinks, trying to do the whole wide-aperture-to-isolate-visual-elements thing. I wasn't really aware of just how much it is dependent on the relative position of the photographer, subject and background.
Some of them turned out better than others. 29 June 2008Brenda Wallace
Sound - i want it backThe sound on my laptop has been uber quiet everysince in compiled in a kernel module to make my apple airport express work (the one Geoff gave me, so i'll blame him). Ubuntu forums people have been very helpful, suggesting a multitude of ways to adjust volume from aumixer to alsamixer to kmix and back again, but they all have it set to maximum already. So -- very very quiet sound, i seem to be stuck like this. Yes I am from the future, and the future has lasersI have a new keyboard. I took it with me at lunch on Thursday, and a group of people gathered around our restaraunt table to stare, in silence, with their mouths open. It’s a bluetooth + laser virtual keyboard. It projects the keyboard onto the table in full red laser glory, and then watches for changes in the image to detect key presses. It really works. cows!Ponoko - Mooooooo by SuperVery a farm inspired bracelet made using beech. how can you not love cows.
with this you get 8 small cows on your bracelet. Standard length is 7.5 inches, however i can easily adjust the length to suit
Stuart YeatesWhat should the ohloh homepage look like?In a previous post I criticised ohloh homepage for being completely useless for current users of the site. This was somewhat unfair, since I provided no concrete constructive suggestions as to what should be on the page. This blog post, hopefully, fixes that. To my mind there are two classes of information that should be on the homepage: (a) things that lots of users are confused about and (b) things that are 'new' (think customised rss feeds) (c) combinations of both. Finding out what people are confused about is easy, just look in the forums, where people are most confused about:
The list of 'new' things is:
These (1), (3) and (5) can be filtered by the users connection to the project (contributor/user/none). So the trick now is to find combinations which help users understand what's going on and encourage users to engage with ohloh and the projects. Idea X: A feed of updated enlistments a user is a contributor or user of:
This not only tells user the status of their projects, but that enlistments are being processed, the expected time between each processing of enlistments, that some processing fails and that there's a link to find out more information. Such a feed also focuses attention on the processing of enlistments---which is the heart of ohloh and the key differentiating factor that seperates ohloh from 15 billion other open source sites. Idea Y: A mixed feed of upstream bugs that effect ohloh performance and functionality:
This lets people keep up with the status of ohloh progress on issues such as the implementation branch support for svn and support for hg. 28 June 2008Andrew Chilton
New Cil release v0.3.0Here's another release of cil for your perusal. Staying true to the "Release early, release often" mantra, I hope you have fun playing with it. I'll quickly go through all the features in this release: Filters when Listing IssuesFor example: $ cil list --label=Type-Critical $ cil list --status=New $ cil list --assigned-to=andychilton-at-gmail-dot-com (Note: --label and --status were in v0.2.1.) These can be combined too. For example, this is the command line I used to make sure there were no outstanding issues for this release of cil: $ cil list --is-open --label=Milestone-v0.3 and opposite to that, for the changelog I could figure out what had changed since the last release by doing this: $ cil list --is-closed --label=Milestone-v0.3 If I was on a big project, I'd probably cron something like this to send me an email each morning: $ cil list --is-open --assigned-to=andychilton-at-gmail-dot-com --label=Priority-Critical That's a pretty nice filter :-) Added a '.cil' Config FileTo be able to do some of the filters above (e.g. Added a 'fsck' CommandCil saves it's issues, comments and attachments in the filesystem which isn't usually a good way for (slightly) relational data. The new 'fsck' command can help you figure out missing entities though. For example, if an issue is missing its comments or attachments and whether comments or attachments have been orphaned. It also runs some validation against each issue. Validation at the moment consists of checking statuses and labels in their respective allowed list. Here is some example output you might see from this command (usually if you or someone else has not been tracking the right things): =============================================================================== --- Issue c4fa2e27 ----------------------------------------------------------- * StatusStrict is turned on but this issue has an invalid status 'InProg' * LabelStrict is turned on but this issue has an invalid label 'Something' --- Issue 1f67bc27 ----------------------------------------------------------- * comment '8dfe256c' listed in issue '1f67bc27' does not exist * comment '99b20701' is listed under issue '1f67bc27' but does not reciprocate * attachment '29afc3ef' listed in issue '1f67bc27' does not exist =============================================================================== --- Comment 99b20701 --------------------------------------------------------- * comment '99b20701' refers to issue '893f7ea6' but issue does not exist =============================================================================== --- Attachment 37873839 ------------------------------------------------------ * attachment '37873839' refers to issue '8af89d74' but issue does not exist =============================================================================== More validation checks will be in v0.4. Bash Completion of Commands, Options and Entities(Where 'entities' are issues, commands or attachments.) As stated in a previous post, there is now bash completion for cil. Working PracticesAs I said earlier, I use a few command lines to let me figure out when I can release a version. For example, the next release is going to be $ cil list --is-open --label=Milestone-v0.4 $ cil list --is-closed --label=Milestone-v0.4 For example, an issue might have been added at some stage in the past, complete with labels: $ cil add ... added issue 'cafebabe' ... I usually commit the new issue to my VCS immediately. When I start working on it, I'll mark it $ cil status cafebabe InProgress Once I've finished hacking on the issue and I'm happy with it, I set it to $ cil status cafebabe Finished $ cil comment cafebabe ... added comment 'decaf7ea' ... I use Git for my VCS so prior to check in I stage all the working file changes but also make sure Git is tracking the issue properly too. It already knew about the issue file but I need to add the comment file that goes with it: $ git add issues/c_decaf7ea.cil Finally when I commit, I commit the code, the issue and the comment all together. In the message I usually put the text ' What's NextThe next release of cil will be Happy hacking and look out for Brenda Wallace
phone book wtfjust discovered WomensPhoneBook . co . nz - cos, you know, women can't use a regular phonebook, they need a special pink one. Tried search for my favourite things: search for "beer" found me a homestay in "Beerescourt" Hamilton. 1 result for Whisky alas no results for "hired killers", though there is an advert for "timesavers for new mums". flickrippr coming soon!! promise~!!What's this? the javascript flickr "badge" on brenda's blog? the author of flickrrippr isn't using flickrrippr? Well now - i just haven't got the whole of flickrrippr working in Drupal 6 yet. the basics are there (and in drupal CVS) but not ready for production yet. despite the "badge", i still prefer to live with javascript off. Convert varchars to textI made a little drupal module, which provides a UI for converting varchar(limit) columns into text columns on postgresql - not sure it's worth putting in drupal contrib - might add to the mini modules section. It converts, but doesn't bring constaints and indexes with it. On postgresql there's not real advantage in using varchar. I hear that on mysql it gets indexed better and is much faster -- but then the drupal code doesn't enforce the limit that's stored in the schema so you see sql error when inserting long comments etc... Hence I prefer to make them text fields you can get a copy of this module here: 26 June 2008Brenda Wallace
Super Happy Dev House for JulySuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa is a monthly hackathon, combining serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere. The whole thing is about rapid development, ad-hoc collaboration and cross pollination. Hardcore coders, l33t hax0r, passionate designers, and other types that enjoy software and technology development are welcome. If this sounds like fun to you, then you're one of us. So, join us! Order some a brunch and coffee, dhcp into wifi and tag your commits with SHDH. Meet fellow geeks, scheme and come up with world changing creations, while consuming beer, milkshakes, cookies. New Super Happy Dev House: 10th July, 2008 - 1pm until we get bored The format of our talks is possibly unusual to some. Instead of slides, we all join the same ircchannel and watch there. The speaker can then post links to webpages, pastebin code snippets and etc while we all follow along. We're not too strict -- if someone wants to talk on building websites with wordpress or some kinda wiki that's okay too. More info: http://shdh.org.nz/ Co-working space in Wellington.
New blog server is very very shiny.I signed up for a new VPS, after my old host lost mine during a disk failure, with no recovery available.. It was getting slow anyways - Serving my blog on tektonic was like hammering in a nail with a banana Anyhoo. the new host is slicehost. The new server is fast. They have community based support via a channel at freenode, and a website full of opensource tips and howtos. I like them. Penny Leach
why am I suddenly scared of the internet? aka, cool nerds.
I used to be fine with pretty much everything the internet threw at me. Sure, I would close websites immediately that I wasn't interested in, but I was never really scared of any internet trends. I never got into livejournal and I was scathing about it, but it didn't freak me out.
I had my own website/journal/blog since 1999. I completely embraced twitter. I reluctantly joined facebook (because Jonathan Baudanza somehow got to me when I was drunk enough to pinky promise), I use flickr because it's incredibly convenient (this after years of maintaining my own gallery), I use last.fm... I don't know why anymore, actually. But recently I've been using these things less and less. Yesterday I had a total freakout about quality vs quantity (I could write a whole post about the propensity of people to vomit content in the general direction of the internet and hope that some sticks on a wall somewhere where someone might actually see it and pay attention to them! but I won't...) and turned off IM notifications in twitter (I cannot quite yet bring myself to delete my account), and unsubscribed from a whole bunch of rss feeds (no, not modblog yet). And then today I had another look at github, and had another freakout. Is git suddenly cool? Well yes, it is and it's not sudden. But it's cool because it's an incredibly good tool. It's not cool in that web 2.0 way that twitter and pownce and dopplr and all those sorts of things are, at least I thought... I thought I was living in this dual world. On one side I had those trendy web 2.0 things that I was a bit wary of but signed up with, used to keep in touch with people (not necessarily geeks), and on the other side I had this world where I use git and vim and ion3 and debian unstable and make scathing comments about graphical interfaces and pointy clicky ... and I could not imagine that those two would ever cross together into this sort of hybrid trendy geeky web2.0 nerdy monster. Are nerds cool? Someone said to me recently that nerdy was the new black.. and I thought at the time, I was never cool in highschool. I wasn't a nerd, I was more uncool in that rebellious smoke behind the bike sheds and wear 20 up doc boots kind of way, but I wasn't cool and I had a pretty miserable time. Now I live in a world where I'm pretty far gone in terms of geekiness and I never expected that to be cool. Github seems to me the ultimate expression of this. Take something incredibly geeky (people being passionate about their vcs), add web 2.0, stir, and you end up with cool nerds. It's no surprise to me that github seems to be so rails-focused (written in, as well as hosted project proportion). Rails people have to be the epitome of cool nerds, with their special lingo and their whiskey drinking. Brenda Wallace
Girl geek dinner updateafter doing the budgets again, i realised we were several hundred dollars short of the target for girl geek dinners. I really wanted to make the tickets less than $30, and for 70 people. So, i put out the distress call. Four very very awesome Wellington companies responded and joined our sponsors. The new sponsors are:   .thumbnail.jpg) 
They join our other sponsors:    
And our national sponsors, who help all Girl Geek Dinners in New Zealand:  
(FX rocks! they are sponsoring Auckland too!) 25 June 2008Penny Leach
london so far
I hate Sainsbury's.
The tube inspires violence. Seriously. I want to bite people all the time. And not in my typical dysfunctional way of showing affection, but more in a, I want to tear chunks out of your arm kind of way. My snot is now black. I take this to mean I now officially live in london. Hampstead heath is pretty and there's a nice pub with a courtyard nearby. Where are the asian supermarkets? I doubt I will ever get used to "fashion". Especially when it's sitting next to me on the tube and I can't do anything else except stare at it in morbid fascination. On the upside, I get to do a sudoku twice a day on the commute to work (fashion aside). The University of London Computer Centre have kindly given me an office to use while I'm here. ♥! It has a coffee place just around the corner with good coffee (their menu used the word ristretto! joy!) and free wifi. I take my laptop there for lunch. It's sort of like a date, except I don't buy it things and it doesn't put out (see previous entry about laptop rage). My flatmate's favourite wine is Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc. Brenda Wallace
OWASP Wellington EventOWASP Wellington Event 2008 Privacy Awareness Week ForumThe Office of the Privacy Commissioner will be hosting a day-long The 24 June 2008Andrew RuthvenOld Schoold Unix: finger
Back in the days when the Unix world was more trusting, we had a command called
finger. This command was used to find out information about a user. The output would look something like this:
And if you ran finger against a host it would return a list of the users logged in. But the finger daemon that was queried had a few issues. Early versions had gaping security holes, and as more bad guys started appearing it became a useful way to find out what accounts existed on a host. This was useful to know who to target. Because of these reasons the use of finger has declined, quite drastically. One thing of interest though is the "Plan" section, this displays whatever is in the .plan file in the users home directory. This used to be used to indicate what someone was up to, or their plan. Last year some of the folks at Catalyst started creating themselves Wiki pages called .plan or ToDo in their own namespace. In a moment of insanity I decided to create a finger daemon that would return those wiki pages. I also hooked it up to our internal staff directory. So it would return something like:
This was easy to do with our original wiki software - MoinMoin - because it had an output mode for plain text. But we've changed to MediaWiki, and Mediawiki doesn't have support for spitting out pages in plain text. Yesterday I decided enough was enough and wrote a filter to support this. It grabs the Printable version of the page and strips out the toolboxes and headers and footers, then passes it to the text based web browser links before printing out the plain text version. Perfect. If you are interested in this filter, you can grab it from its git repo or you can just grab the script from here. Penny Leach
per category rss feeds
Have been broken for awhile, since I moved servers and upgraded s9y. For some reason the upgrade to 1.3.1 managed to forget to add a couple database columns. Eh, I guess that's what I get when I move servers, upgrade s9y, and postgres all at once (while chewing gum too, of course).
Anyway it's fixed now, thanks to rapid s9y.org developer help. Andrew Chilton
Cil now has Bash CompletionAnother day, another feature added to cil. It's rocketing along. I've never written anything for bash completion before (someone else has always done it for me) but I had a go at it tonight. After an hour and 15 I had it working quite well. I was suitably impressed with the whole thing since even though I knew doing it for commands and/or options would be easy enough, I managed to do it for a few other things too (more later). For example: $ cil a<tab><tab> add attach $ cil s<tab><tab> show status summary $ cil --<tab><tab> --filename --help --label --path --status --version That's all happy and nice but the following feature is the killer and will make working with issues a breeze. It also completes the actual issue/comment/attachment name, giving you the choice of the correct type where necessary. Let's say your $ ls -1 issues/*.cil issues/a_85eceee9.cil issues/c_d8dd779f.cil issues/c_feb65ae7.cil issues/i_02ee35bd.cil issues/i_5c88cb30.cil issues/i_98203ce8.cil When doing the following, it completes to one of the three issue names: $ cil show <tab><tab> 02ee35bd 5c88cb30 98203ce8 as it also does for the other commands that act on issues (status, edit, comment and attach). Another example would be for extracting attachments: $ cil extract <tab><tab> completes to: $ cil extract 85eceee9 This is pretty good stuff already but I can already see that it can be used a lot more in the future... Let's say you allow the following statusus in your issues: New, InProgress, Finished and WontFix. Then, setting the status of an issue would work like: $ cil status 02ee35bd <tab><tab> InProgress Finished New WontFix Really straightforward and really fast, which are basically two of the things I wanted cil to be from the start - I just didn't realise it would be so easy :-) Seeing as I try and credit people where I can, thanks to Francois for the suggestion of adding bash completion. It's given me a chance to learn something new to me but very powerful. Note: this feature is in Git and will be in the v0.3.0 release. If It's us or Google, then it is us!OpenGeoData has a post today which talks about Google's new MapMaker. It seems the Ad Broker wants to own what you do but gives nothing back. Needless to say I'm completely disappointed in Google yet again but that's coming as no surprise these days. Head over to OpenGeoData and read the entry for yourself - Google Want to be TeleAtlas Recently, I've been looking at OpenStreetMap a lot and have tried (and tried) to get something going so that I can map both Seatoun and Mt Vic. I refuse to install Flash to use their web editor but also the version which runs on Java isn't working for me either! A short while ago, I thought that I'd like to make a nice, small and simple Gtk version but I just had a better idea. What about making a JavaScript version? That would be pretty cool. Currently I have no time but this might be one of those ideas that simmers for a while and then one day, I try it and see what happens. I fear it will be a big project but wouldn't that be just awesome! As for helping Google map the world and taking your data, thxb'nothx. 23 June 2008Andrew Chilton
Cil with New FeaturesAlready there is a lot of news on the 'cil' front just 24 hrs after releasing v0.2. I've had a number of enquiries about cil consisting of emails asking for help, emails giving advice but even better fixes from both Francois and Sam. Thanks guys. Francois has also already uploaded v0.2.1 to Debian Sid for inclusion in Lenny. Many thanks Francois, it's a pleasure being able to work with someone so passionate and involved in Free Software. We all have lots to learn from you. Release v0.2.1Anyway, I'd just like to say that v0.2.1 released earlier tonight had the dependency on Term::CallEditor removed to simplify a couple of things. Also, there really wasn't that much code in there anyway. Working towards v3.0If you get the HEAD of the cil git repo, you'll already get some new funky features such as the following: $ cil list --status=New $ cil list --label=Release-v0.2 $ cil list --label=Type-Enhancement These, of course, can be combined: $ cil list --status=InProgress --label=Milestone-v0.3 and you can also use these same filters with the From issue #85eceee9, there are also plans to have something like the following too: $ cil list --assigned-to=andychilton-at-gmail.com $ cil list --has-attachments --has-comments $ cil list --is-open $ cil list --is-closed (These last two will only happen when there is config to say which Statuses are Open/Closed.) I'm liking these filters already and with the new ones above it'll be great. Heck, I'm even thinking of cron'ing various filters so I know what I have to work on each day :-) Other IssuesI have also added an issue, #98203ce8, which describes how to add proper searching to cil. This will supplement the above filters quite nicely. BTW: I have searched and searched and searched for a nice, small and instant indexing system within the Debian repos. I've tried a couple of things which didn't quite work how I wanted it, so if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to talk to you so get in touch. e.g something like this would be fantastic: $ cil reindex $ cil search 'Project Blah refactoring' $ cil search 'screenshot table formatting' Then we'd just list the issues found. It should be very simple with no setting up (except inside cil itself.) If git can 'init' and cil can 'init' then search should be able to set up real quick too. And finally...I'm already using cil to track itself and I'll be shortly adding it to most of my other little projects too. I'm already getting quite competent at getting at the issues, adding, editing them, making sure they're in the repo and all of that jazz. It's coming together quite nicely. Brenda Wallace
[Wellington-pm] HackOff 2008 - July 15thHackOff 2008 is a fun evening for teams of hackers to compete at solving Remember when coding was fun? Before you got bogged down with UML The evening will be hosted by Wellington Perl Mongers and Catalyst IT. There are more details on the web site here: http://wellington.pm.org/hackoff/ You can download a flyer for your noticeboard from here: http://wellington.pm.org/hackoff/hackoff-flyer.pdf We are asking teams to register so we can plan seating, power, Cheers Google Code JamGoogle Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student Penny Leach
[lazyweb] laptop woes
Dear Lazyweb,
For a long time I have been using a combination of Linux and Mac OS X, I have Linux on my desktop machine at work and Mac OS X on my laptop (a macbook, previously a powerbook). I've tried in various times and various ways to run Linux on my mac laptops as well, with varying amounts of fail. These two usages are generally quite happily split. Anything involving writing code has been done in Linux, and if I needed to do anything from my laptop I have a small far less ideal setup, or just ssh to my work machine and work there. My macs have happily supported: syncing with my phone (calendars and contacts), and itunes, and skype. Now that I'm in London and back to full time work, I don't have the support of my Linux machine 17 minutes walk away from home, and I'm exclusively using my laptop, and it's driving me crazy. For the first time ever I'm starting to feel hatred for my mac. So I'm thinking about buying another laptop, probably a Samsung Q45 or Q70. I'm leaning towards the Q45. Anyway, back to switching over. I am not too worried about my ability to get skype going, that should be fairly trivial. The Q45s I have seen have an integrated webcam similar to the macbooks, although I can't see that at the specification on the above link, not sure about the Q70. Video calling is not compulsory, although I do use it to talk to people I left behind in Wellington. I'm not too worried about itunes either, I currently have a very old ipod and an ipod shuffle, but I do have all the music that was on there backed up on a usb drive. If anyone has any recommendations for good ways to deal with ipods under Linux, that would be helpful. The thing that I am worried about is syncing with my phone. In Linux I don't currently use calendars (I've been using the Mac OS Calendar for a long time happily), and I use abook for addresses, which I loathe but rarely have to touch. I have a Nokia e65. So I need: a good way to manage music with ipod-ish things (I'm guessing the answer to this is going to be amarok), a good calendar, some way to sync contacts and calendars to my phone. Help me lazweb-kenobi, you're my only hope. Edit: and any recommendations on where to buy in London (or online), preferably with the option to get a US keyboard Stuart YeatesNew ohloh look and feel
ohloh have changed their look and feel, and I've got to say I hate it.
Once you're logged in, almost nothing above the scroll cut on the front page is useful---we already know what ohloh is and don't need bandwidth-hogging ads to tell us. What we need are deep links into new stuff---projects, users and forum posts. How about logged in users see content rather than ads on the homepage? Brenda Wallace
How to never go "down for maintenance"There are very very few upgrades that really need the whole site to be taken down during. Grab yourself 3 servers: 1 loadbalancer, 2 webserver (and DB too). http requests go to Loadbalancer (which runs some kinda reverse proxy like squid, varnish, or apache -- or a keepalived). This then sends half the requests to each webserver. If you need to do an upgrade, or reboot, or some hardware change - you take that server out of the circuit. If it's a webserver, you set the LB to only request for the over server. If it's the LB that needs to come out you set the system to bypass the LB and go to one of the webserver for a while. This mean you never need to do a "we're down for upgrade" holding page. There's always something there.. and the upgrade moment is instantaneous flip overs. 22 June 2008Brenda Wallace
Smacking sequences in drupalAfter a data restore (server exploded) i had a few sequences outta whack - mostly because i decided to cherry pick which tables i restored. Here's the php I typed out in a hurry to put those sequences right.
<?php
pg_connect('dbname=.....');
$result = pg_query("SELECT c.relname AS sequencename FROM pg_class c WHERE (c.relkind = 'S')");
while($row = pg_fetch_object($result)) {
$s = $row->sequencename;
echo "$s\n";
if (! pg_query("SELECT nextval('" . $s . "')")) {
$bits = split('_', $s);
$column_point = sizeof($bits)-2;
$column = $bits[$column_point];
$table = preg_replace('!_'. $column .'_seq$!', '', $s);
echo "table = $table\n";
echo "column = $column\n";
$result = pg_query("SELECT max($column) as max from $table");
$obj = pg_fetch_object($result);
$max = $obj->max;
echo "current higest $column = $max\n";
if($max < 1) $max = 1;
echo "settings to $max\n";
pg_query("SELECT setval('". $s ."', $max)");
}
echo "---------------\n\n";
}
?>
Andrew Chilton
cil v0.2.0 releasedI'm happy to announce that cil v0.2.0 is now available for download. When I released v0.1.0 it was a test release for two reasons:
While (1) didn't happen, (2) did. I got lots of feedback even though no-one was using it. I did tell people it wasn't quite where I wanted it to be but this release changes all that. Now it has all the makings of a tool which can just get better over time. Obviously it being v0.2, there are some things it is lacking but as it is, it's perfectly usable and nicely contained. Some new features of cil v0.2 (over v0.1):
So far, most of the commands I added to $ cil status ISSUE Finished Quite neat huh? See cil for more information and also see this cil example for more of an idea about what Before I sign off I'd just like to point out one commit I did earlier today. My vision for cil is so that you can keep your bug tracking inside your repository. This means you can do things that weren't possible before. For example, closing the bug along with the commit(*). This commit for example shows you that along with the fix, the bug gained an additional comment and the issue was closed, all in the same transaction. That's pretty cool. So guys, go and have a play with this one. Thanks to Nigel, Francois and Martyn for allowing me to bounce ideas off you. And please, keep those ideas, suggestions, feedback and more importantly, patches, coming ;-) (*) Yes, I know you can link your version control with your bug tracking system - usually with sticky-tape and superglue - but when they're in the same place, it's much easier :-) Brenda Wallace
pretty pretty prettyMy favourite beauty product is Emersons pilsner. It makes everyone else look pretty. For other beauty tips, from Wellingtonians, check out pretty pretty pretty (beware, it's very purple). Buy my trademe thingies
<!--break--> 21 June 2008Brenda Wallace
Bluetooth GPSI'm in the market for a Bluetooth GPS. The usage in mind is giving positioning info out to my phone, which in turns relays it to those location services websites. There's lots out there, and they all seem to be in web2.0 style invite only beta. continue reading "Bluetooth GPS on Gaming Generation. coffee.geek.nz ASPLODEDSo, a double disk failure wiped out coffee.geek.nz. As the DNS rolls over, people will end up here at the new server. My back up was over a week old :( so things are missing. and now i'm sleepy - so will clean up a bit more tomorrow. 20 June 2008Francois MarierPreventing accidental deletion of important files using safe-rm
Some weeks ago, I accidentally deleted half of my /usr/lib. I didn't lose anything important and was able to restore everything (thanks to my Ctrl+C'ing the process in time) but that user error did strike me as too easy to make (apparently, I'm not alone). So I started thinking about how I could prevent something like that from happening again.
I realized one thing: there is no way I would ever want to delete /usr or /etc for example. I figured that "rm" should, by default, refuse to delete certain critical directories (or files). Of course, that would be a very controversial patch to "rm" itself and the chances of this approach succeeding were pretty close to zero. So instead, I decided to build a wrapper around "rm" which prevents the deletion of important files by checking each one against a blacklist. Anything you add to the blacklist will not be deletable using "rm" unless you override this protection by calling "rm.real" directly. This tool, safe-rm, ships with a default system-wide configuration file (/etc/safe-rm.conf), but each user can supplement that list of "protected" directories and files by adding lines to ~/.safe-rm. A Debian package is now in unstable. Ubuntu users can also get the package from my PPA: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fmarier/ubuntu hardy main There are of course different approaches to preventing these kinds of problems... Brenda Wallace
Audio gadgets - so many features apple never gotI still use my 1st gen ipod nano. The reason: it runs Rockbox. Rockbox is alternate firmware for a whole lotta players, like the apple ipods. There were many players for a while that had the same architecture, so a group of opensource hackers wrote rockbox to run on the lot. iRivers, Apple, Sandisk, Samsung.. Doom on my ipod nano:
continue reading "Audio gadgets - so many features apple never got on Gaming Generation. |
Last updated04 July 2008 17:45All times are UTC. 
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